It’s Just Another Manic Monday Reads!!!
Posted: July 22, 2019 Filed under: just because | Tags: Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Mueller Testimony 25 Comments
Good Afternoon Sky Dancers!
There’s a lot going on! We’re gearing up for the Mueller Testimony right in the middle of the usual wear and tear on the country caused by having Temper Tantrum Trumpie occupy the White House for another week. If you get a chance, you might want to gear up for the Wednesday Testimony by watching this one hour documentary on the primary findings of the Mueller Report that aired last night. “Understanding the Mueller Report With Ari Melber Sunday July 21, 2019”
Meanwhile, there’s some other interesting news and suggestions we should look at. I was really glad that I attended Essence Fest 2019 and was enrapt by the speeches and presence of both Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris. It’s exciting to see so many women running for the Democratic Party’s nomination for President given we watched Hillary Clinton become the first in 2016. Now there’s a few things we can dream about including this proffered by Harper’s Bazaar and Jennifer Wright.. “Why We Need a Two Woman Presidential Ticket! Two women? On a ticket together? Radical! How many old white men would hyperventilate over this?
It simply can’t be done! Two women?On a ticket together? It’s too radical!
To which I’m going to respectfully say: To hell with that thinking. Put two women on the Democratic Party ticket. Specifically, Senators Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren..
Bothered by it? No one has been troubled by the fact that presidential political party tickets have been composed of two men since the beginning of time.
If you want the best people, then some variation on Warren/Harris should at least be considered. According to a Change.org poll in California, the two are leading the pack of candidates in that state’s primary with Harris at 23 percent and Warren at 22 percent.
News outlets seem in agreement that the June debates belonged to Warren and Harris.
It’s entirely possible that one of these women will win the race for Democratic presidential candidate, and when she does, it’s already assumed that she will select one of the male candidates as her running mate.
But what if she doesn’t take this conventional route? What if we see an all-female ticket? It could be great.
Both candidates have strong ground games and even stronger policy chops! Today, Team Warren put out an article that has the talking heads talking. It’s about what I’ve been saying for about a year now. The next crash is right there on the horizon. “The Coming Economic Crash — And How to Stop It.”
When I look at the economy today, I see a lot to worry about again. I see a manufacturing sector in recession. I see a precarious economy that is built on debt — both household debt and corporate debt — and that is vulnerable to shocks. And I see a number of serious shocks on the horizon that could cause our economy’s shaky foundation to crumble.
…
The administration may breach the debt ceiling in September, leading to economic turmoil that top economists say would be “more catastrophic” than the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. Trump’s trade war with China threatens American manufacturing and has already hurt American companies that investors think of as “industry bellwethers,” while feedingan all-time economic slowdown in China that could have dramatic ripple effects on the American economy. And Trump is goading the U.K. toward a no-deal Brexit, which even his own administration acknowledges would have “immediate and significant spillover effects” to our economy.
The financial markets agree that there is a serious risk of downturn in the near future. The U.S. Treasury yield curve — a barometer for market confidence — normally slopes upwards because investors demand higher yields for bonds with longer maturities. But this March, it inverted for the first time since 2007, signaling that investors are so worried that things are going to get worse that they’d rather lock in lower rates for the future today than risk long-term rates going even lower. The curve has inverted before each and every recession in the past half century — with only one false signal.
And experts agree. In a recent survey of nearly 300 business economists, three-quarters expect a recession by the end of 2021 — with more than halfthinking it’ll come by the end of 2020.
Other women are running for POTUS this year. One of the reasons that Kristen Gillibrand might not be finding high ground could be the subject of this investigation by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker: “The Case of Al Franken.A close look at the accusations against the former senator.”
At his house, Franken said he understood that, in such an atmosphere, the public might not be eager to hear his grievances. Holding his head in his hands, he said, “I don’t think people who have been sexually assaulted, and those kinds of things, want to hear from people who have been #MeToo’d that they’re victims.” Yet, he added, being on the losing side of the #MeToo movement, which he fervently supports, has led him to spend time thinking about such matters as due process, proportionality of punishment, and the consequences of Internet-fuelled outrage. He told me that his therapist had likened his experience to “what happens when primates are shunned and humiliated by the rest of the other primates.” Their reaction, Franken said, with a mirthless laugh, “is ‘I’m going to die alone in the jungle.’ ”
Now sixty-eight, Franken is short and sturdily built, with bristly gray hair, tortoiseshell glasses, and a wide, froglike mouth from which he tends to talk out of one corner. Despite his current isolation, Franken is recognized nearly everywhere he goes, and he often gets stopped on the street. “I can’t go anywhere without people reminding me of this, usually with some version of ‘You shouldn’t have resigned,’ ” Franken said. He appreciates the support, but such comments torment him about his departure from the Senate. He tends to respond curtly, “Yup.”
When I asked him if he truly regretted his decision to resign, he said, “Oh, yeah. Absolutely.” He wishes that he had appeared before a Senate Ethics Committee hearing, as he had requested, allowing him to marshal facts that countered the narrative aired in the press. It is extremely rare for a senator to resign under pressure. No senator has been expelled since the Civil War, and in modern times only three have resigned under the threat of expulsion: Harrison Williams, in 1982, Bob Packwood, in 1995, and John Ensign, in 2011. Williams resigned after he was convicted of bribery and conspiracy; Packwood faced numerous sexual-assault accusations; Ensign was accused of making illegal payoffs to hide an affair.
What follows is a detailed investigation of the complaints most of which still smell a bit fishy to me. Especially, this woman who appears to be have sent up to the deed by the usual cast of “conservative” henchmen.
Tweeden may well have felt harassed, and even violated, by Franken, but he insisted to me that her version of events is “just not true.” He confirmed that he had rehearsed the skit with her, noting, “You always rehearse.” The script, he recalled, called for a man to “surprise” a woman with a kiss, in a “sort of sudden” way, and though Tweeden had read the script, it’s possible that in the moment he startled her. Tweeden wasn’t an actress—before going into broadcasting, she had been a Frederick’s of Hollywood model—so she may have been unfamiliar with rehearsals. But Franken said, of Tweeden, “I don’t remember her being taken aback.” He adamantly denied having stuck his tongue in her mouth.
Franken’s longtime fund-raiser, A. J. Goodman, a former criminal-defense lawyer, told me that it was “easy to see how it could have grossed Tweeden out” to be kissed by Franken. At the time, Franken was fifty-five, and his clothes tended toward mom jeans and garish windbreakers. “He was like your uncle Morty,” Goodman recalled. “He wasn’t Cary Grant. But tongue down the throat? No. I’ve done hundreds of events with this guy. I’ve been on the road and on his book tours with him.” She said that Franken was “five hundred per cent devoted” to Bryson, his wife, whom he met during his freshman year at Harvard. “He can be a jerk, but he’s all about his family,” Goodman said. (Franken and Bryson have a daughter, a son, and four grandchildren.)
In Hollywood, Franken’s reputation had been far from wild. According to Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad’s book, “Saturday Night,” when Franken worked on “S.N.L.” he was seen as a stickler and a “self-appointed hallway monitor” figure. James Downey, who spent decades writing for the show, told me, of Franken, “He’s lots of things, some delightful, some annoying. He can be very aggressive interpersonally. He can say mean things, or use other people as props. He can seem more confident that the audience will find him adorable than he ought to. His estimate of his charm can be overconfident. But I’ve known him for forty-seven years and he’s the very last person who would be a sexual harasser.”
It’s a long read but worth revisiting the evidence.
Down here in New Orleans there’s an East Bank and a West Bank of the Mississippi even the the actually directions of the locations are north of the river and south of the river. The West Bank has always been the forgotten of the two banks because it’s original purpose was that of the Slave Trade Markets which New Orleans wanted kept out of their faces even though it was a part of the city’s history as well as the region. Gretna is one of the places that sprung up when immigrants from countries like Italy showed up and it still has an ethnic feel to it including a Spanish revival Catholic Orphanage called Hope Haven built in 1925, The place has been in the headlines recently in a less than favorable light: “New lawsuit filed against Catholic Church in N.O. details alleged sexual abuse at orphanage.”
A little more recently Gretna achieved infamy with this awful headline directly after Katrina hit the area via NPR: “Evacuees Were Turned Away at Gretna, La.”
Three days after Hurricane Katrina struck, authorities blocked the road that connects the city of Gretna to New Orleans. Thousands of evacuees say they were prevented from escaping the flooding and chaos, and that shots were fired over their heads.
Believe me, there’s not much wealth over there to protect in Gretna during a good time so there were much sinister forces stopping people from the East going to the West bank where they likely could’ve been reached by buses. Color all of us unsurprised when the local news came up with a headline that has now gone quite viral and national via WAPO: “Officer suggests Ocasio-Cortez should be shot, after he read fake news on Facebook”. Yes, said officer is from Gretna, LA land of shooting at survivors of the worst disaster in the country to stop them from coming near the burbs.
It was not clear from his Facebook post whether police officer Charlie Rispoli knew he was responding to fake news when he suggested Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) should be shot.
“This vile idiot needs a round……..and I don’t mean the kind she used to serve,” Rispoli, a 14-year veteran of the Gretna Police Department in Louisiana, said Thursday, referring to a gunshot and the lawmaker’s earlier career as a bartender, the Times-Picayune/the New Orleans Advocate reported.
The post, which appears to have been deleted along with Rispoli’s Facebook account, comes amid a reckoning with racist and violent social media posts by police and federal law enforcement officers. As posts have been made public, firings and investigations have followed across multiple departments.
We’re all assuming what happens in Gretna gets covered up and buried in Gretna. Just like everything else, nothing will happen.
Texan Wendy Davis is running for US Congress. Let’s hope she can win it. I still have my pink Wendy Shoes. This is via the Texas Tribune: “Wendy Davis announces bid for Congress, will challenge U.S. Rep. Chip Roy. The former state senator is running for office for the first time since her unsuccessful campaign for Texas governor.”
Former Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis is running for Congress.
Early Monday morning, Davis announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination in Central Texas’ 21st District. She is challenging U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, a freshman Republican from Austin.
She made her intentions known in a biographical video, narrated in part with archival footage from her late father, Jerry Russell.
“I’m running for Congress because people’s voices are still being silenced,” she said. “I’m running for our children and grandchildren, so they can live and love and fight for change themselves.”
So the voices of women with much needed diversity will hopefully block out the trauma of yet another Trumpf Hate Fest in Cincinnati this week undoubtedly timed to draw attention away from the Mueller Testimony. That Hatefest is scheduled for August 1st. The second set of Democratic debates are set for July 30 and 31.
The Mueller Testimony is on Wednesday. Are you up for all of that?
Robert Mueller’s Capitol Hill testimony
- Date: Wednesday, July 24, 2019
- Times: 8:30 a.m. – House Judiciary Committee hearing, 12:00 p.m. – House Intelligence Committee hearing
- Location: Washington, D.C.
How to watch Mueller’s testimony
- Free online stream: Watch CBSN for live coverage of Mueller’s testimony on Capitol Hill. CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell hosts a CBS News network special report starting at 8:30 a.m.
Schedule of Mueller’s testimony
- It will be split across two committee appearances with three hours allotted for the Judiciary Committee and two hours for the Intelligence Committee.
- There will be a 30-minute break in between the two hearings, and the former special counsel will have the opportunity to ask for breaks during each appearance.
- Neither committee is expecting Mueller to give lengthy or extensive answers to lawmakers’ questions. Democratic staff members of the committees say they anticipate “yes” or “no” answers from the former special counsel or very short sentences. But in the end, they believe that the two hearings will help Americans better understand the Mueller report.
Well, that should keep us busy for a few days!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Lazy Caturday Reads: Heat Wave
Posted: July 20, 2019 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Climate change, climate change denial, heat wave 38 Comments
Good Afternoon!!
Here in Boston, today could be the hottest day of the year so far and tomorrow will likely be about the same. We may hit 100 degrees and it will feel even hotter. The Boston Globe published some “heat hacks” to help people cool down. Here are a couple of examples:
If you’re tossing and turning in bed and having trouble falling asleep in the blistering heat,Consumer Reports offers this interesting trick: Put your sheets and pillowcases in a sealable plastic bag and stash them in the freezer so they’ll be nice and cold when you hit the hay….
New York State Office for the Aging suggests…“Fill three plastic soda bottles full of water, freeze them but in a manner to not damage them (liquid expands on freezing), then place them in a large bowl,” the agency’s website states. “Position a fan to blow on them.. … The water in the bottles can be refrozen and used repeatedly.” [….]
Seattle City Light suggests putting lotion and moisturizers in your fridge to cool down your skin.
I might try that last one. This reminds me of the scene in The Seven-Year Itch when Marilyn Monroe explains how she keeps her panties and potato chips in the fridge next to the champagne.
USA Today: Searing heat across nation, reaching 100 degrees in some spots, takes its toll on events and roads.
A relentless heat wave gripped the country from the central states to the East Coast Saturday, prompting cancellation of the New York City Triathlon and producing cracked and buckled roads in some Plains states. Some East Coast cities braced for temperatures in the triple digits.
As the stifling heat — expected to affect 200 million people — settled in for at least a fifth day, the National Weather Service issued an Excessive Heat Warnings and Heat Advisory from parts of the Texas Panhandle to the Ohio Valley, around the Great Lakes, parts of the Mid-Atlantic and in the Northeast.
An Excessive Heat Warning is issued when the combination of heat and humidity is expected to make it feel like it is 105 degrees or greater.
Daytime temperatures in the mid to upper 90s or higher plus high humidity will result in heat indices as high as 115 for some, forecasters said.
Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York and Boston were bracing for weekend temperatures in the triple digits. New York City and Baltimore were under a Code Red Extreme Heat Alert that is expected to continue through Sunday.
“It’s been since July of 2012 that Chicago and Philadelphia both hit 100 degrees, and Washington, D.C., hasn’t hit 100 since August of 2016,” says AccuWeather Meteorologist Danielle Knittle.
In addition, forecasters warned that overnight temperatures were not likely to fall far enough to bring relief, pariticularly in larger cities, like Chicago, St. Louis and New York City.
CBS News is posting live updates: Massive heat wave blamed for at least 6 deaths.
Dr. Christopher Rodriguez, the district’s director of Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency, said officials will be monitoring the dangerous temperatures from an operations center.
“This is going to be one of the most severe heat events that we’ve had in the last several years,” Rodriguez said.
While midwestern cities like Milwaukee and Chicago will be affected, the East Coast is expected to take the brunt of it. Temperatures are expected to range from the mid 90’s to the triple digits, with the heat index making it feel as hot as 100 to 115 degrees.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned the heat can be a silent killer. Doctors are warning to watch out for signs of heat illness. Symptoms can include headache, muscle cramps, nausea. another sign is a lack of sweating.
Vox: The worst part of a heat wave is when it doesn’t cool off at night.
Extreme heat is one of the deadliest weather phenomena in the world. There are direct health effects like heat stroke, which occurs when body temperature rises to 104 degrees Fahrenheit, leading to organ failure, and heat exhaustion.
But high temperatures can also worsen conditions like high blood pressure and can limit the effectiveness of certain medications. Heat can also exacerbate air pollution, which in turn can send people to the emergency room due to breathing problems….
While it may cool off after the sun sets during a heat wave, it may not cool off enough for people who have been exposed to high temperatures all day. That leads to a higher cumulative exposure to heat.
One study examining the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed upward of 70,000 people found that nighttime temperatures were a key indicator of the health risk from high temperatures. There’s also research that shows high nighttime temperatures disrupt sleep. Without relief from the heat, the stresses on the body mount.
Over the weekend, forecasters expect evening temperatures will stay above 80 degrees Fahrenheit, with the heat index remaining above 90 degrees, in some areas along the East Coast. That will make it hard for some to cool off. Health officials advise staying hydrated, wearing light clothing, and avoiding the outdoors.
It’s worse if you live in a city.
Part of the reason temperatures stay high after sunset in many parts of the country is because of the urban heat island effect. Dense cities with their concrete, steel, glass, and asphalt soak up more heat than their rural surroundings, causing temperatures to rise further than they would have otherwise during the day. In the evening, those artificial surfaces continue to dissipate their accumulated heat, keeping denizens from keeping cool.
Our efforts to keep cool can also paradoxically make cities heat up. Air conditioners venting hot air outside can contribute to urban warming, and if the electricity that powers them comes from fossil fuels, they can increase the amount of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.
At The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer writes that “July 2019 is likely to be the hottest month ever measured.”
For the next several days, a vast blanket of oppressive heat will smother the eastern two-thirds of the United States, subjecting tens of millions of people to searingly hot days and forbidding, unrelenting nights. From the southern Plains to New England, inescapable humidity will meet broiling air to produce heat indexes in excess of 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
We are not simply talking about a series of sweltering afternoons. Even hours after the sun sets, air temperatures could hang well above 90, dipping below the 80-degree mark only in the moments before dawn. The heat index in some big cities—including New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.—may sit above the mid-80s for 72 hours straight.
“July is shaping up to be the warmest July on record—and probably the warmest month ever measured, since July is the hottest month of the year,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, told me. “Obviously, we still have half the month to go. But so far, it’s on track.” (Since most of the planet’s land surface is north of the equator, and since land heats up faster than the ocean, the Northern Hemisphere’s summers are the hottest months of the year for the whole planet.)
If that mark is realized, then two months in a row will be the hottest of their type ever measured, since last month was the hottest June ever recorded. And the odds are good that 2019 will be the second-warmest year on record, Hausfather told me. Either way, it’s a near-certainty that the past six years, including this one, will be the hottest six years ever measured.
And yet the Republican Party refuses to acknowledge the causes and effects of climate change.
Today might be a good time to refer back to David Wallace Wells’ 2017 article at New York Magazine. The Uninhabitable Earth: Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think.
It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.
Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and 70 degrees warmer than normal baked the North Pole, melting the permafrost that encased Norway’s Svalbard seed vault — a global food bank nicknamed “Doomsday,” designed to ensure that our agriculture survives any catastrophe, and which appeared to have been flooded by climate change less than ten years after being built….
But no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough. Over the past decades, our culture has gone apocalyptic with zombie movies and Mad Max dystopias, perhaps the collective result of displaced climate anxiety, and yet when it comes to contemplating real-world warming dangers, we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination. The reasons for that are many: the timid language of scientific probabilities, which the climatologist James Hansen once called “scientific reticence” in a paper chastising scientists for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was; the fact that the country is dominated by a group of technocrats who believe any problem can be solved and an opposing culture that doesn’t even see warming as a problem worth addressing; the way that climate denialism has made scientists even more cautious in offering speculative warnings; the simple speed of change and, also, its slowness, such that we are only seeing effects now of warming from decades past; our uncertainty about uncertainty, which the climate writer Naomi Oreskes in particular has suggested stops us from preparing as though anything worse than a median outcome were even possible; the way we assume climate change will hit hardest elsewhere, not everywhere; the smallness (two degrees) and largeness (1.8 trillion tons) and abstractness (400 parts per million) of the numbers; the discomfort of considering a problem that is very difficult, if not impossible, to solve; the altogether incomprehensible scale of that problem, which amounts to the prospect of our own annihilation; simple fear. But aversion arising from fear is a form of denial, too.
Wells has expanded this article into a book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. You might also want to check out his article archive at New York Magazine.
So I wrote a whole post without talking about the monster in the White House. If you really want to read some politics stories, check these out:
Alex Shepard at The New Republic: It’s Not Strategy, It’s Racism.
Jamelle Bouie at The New York Times: The Joy of Hatred. Trump and “his people” reach deep into the violent history of public spectacle in America.
CNN: Judge halts Democrats’ subpoenas of Trump Org docs in emoluments case.
The New York Times: Mueller Hearings on Wednesday Present Make-or-Break Moment for Democrats.
NBC News: Mueller hearings to highlight ‘shocking evidence of criminal misconduct’ by Trump, Democrats say.
NBC News: U.S. spy chief creates a new head of election security for intelligence agencies.
HuffPost: Trump Puts More GOP Money In His Own Pocket During Another Million-Dollar Golf Trip.
The Washington Post: Trump tells aides to look for big spending cuts in second term, sowing confusion about budget priorities.
The Washington Post: Iran seizes British tanker in Strait of Hormuz; denies Trump’s claim that drone was brought down.
The New York Times: U.K. Warns Iran of ‘Serious Consequences’ for Seizing Oil Tanker.
What stories are you following today?
Fresh Hell Friday Reads: Full on KKK Rallies and Hair Furor Facism
Posted: July 19, 2019 Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: welcome home ilhan 24 Comments
I’m old enough to remember George Wallace speeches and rallies and I don’t even think his racist segregationist ass was as bad as it’s getting at the Trumpfuckistan Hate Fests these days. The happy news from yesterday is that Minnesota District 5 is having none of it! Their duly elected Congresswoman Illhan Omar was welcomed home by a full on brigade of Minnesota Nice. I fear for her and the other 3 members of her squad as I feared for Hillary Clinton on that stage with that orange monster stalking her. As my mom used to tell me, we can disagree without be disagreeable. Trumpf and his cult are definitely Disagreeable Deplorables.
Ever notice that the resentful, angry wipipo at these rallies only chant threats at women? This is from Ellena Plott writing for The Atlantic: “Trump Supporters Don’t Make Chants About Men.
Where the president’s fans once called for a female opponent’s imprisonment, now they are longing for another woman to be literally banished from the country.”
Lawmakers and presidential candidates know to expect a particular set of reactions after criticizing Donald Trump. He might call them a loser, or give them their own unique nickname—the provenance of which might depend on how often he thinks they lie, whether they look sleepy, or how pencil-like he finds their neck. He might go so far as to endorse their primary challengers, or even the critics themselves, if he thinks his stamp of approval might hurt them.
Only for women, though, do Trump and his supporters deploy their most sinister lines of attack. In 2016, it was not enough to call Hillary Clinton “Crooked Hillary” or criticize her vision for the country. Rather, it was necessary to call for her physical removal from public life, and her sentencing to a place where she wouldn’t be heard from again. “Lock her up!” is as identifiable with Trumpism as “Build the wall!,” and the chant continues at rallies to this day, even as Clinton, true to Trump’s wishes, has faded into the background.
There was a troubling sense of déjà vu, then, when the crowd at Trump’s rally in Greenville, North Carolina, on Wednesday trained their eyes on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, chanting “Send her back!” in a play on Trump’s own words from a few days before. It was an evolution, an even darker version of the invective against Clinton—where the president’s supporters once called for a female opponent’s imprisonment, now they are longing for another to be literally banished from the country. The episode prompts urgent questions not only about what Omar can expect as Trump’s 2020 campaign ramps up, but also about what Trump’s eventual challenger, if it’s a woman, can anticipate as well.
I’m old enough to remember the “love it or leave it” Nixonian Days. The silent majority was represented at the airport and would never be present at the Trumpfian Hate Fests that represent the worst among us. The deal is though, we have to get out there and vote him out if Congress isn’t ready to put him out.
This has become the “me too” moment for black and brown Americans with many sharing their own stories of when they first heard an angry, hateful white person say that to them. The NYT’s Editorial board discusses the reality of this vitriolic, racist, xenophobic shriek.
What the hell, indeed?
Mr. Trump appears to see the presidency as a giant megaphone for stoking racial and ethnic animus. It is not just that he pursues policies aimed at exacerbating divisions, like banning migrants from majority-Muslim nations or building a wall on the United States-Mexico border. He seeks to demonize those who oppose his policies as dangerous extremists out to destroy America. In cases where his critics are not white — whether congresswomen of color or a judge of Mexican heritage — Mr. Trump is eager to spotlight that fact.
The president is looking to divide Americans along color lines, to conjure a zero-sum vision of America in which whites must contend against nonwhites for jobs, wealth, safety and citizenship. He thinks this approach will win him another four years in the White House. At this point, does it much matter if he is acting purely out of political cynicism, with no element of personal prejudice? The rage he is nurturing and the pain he is causing are all too real. The damage he is doing will take years to undo.
So, enjoy the pictures of Minnesota Nice White People and others with much better intent and understanding of what it is to be an American and a decent human being. And we continue to hear the silence of the politically complicit louder than we hear the shouts of bigots. This is from the editorial board of the St. Louis Dispatch: “Congressional Republicans shame themselves with their silence on Trump’s racism.”
You don’t hear whites — say, Irish Americans or Italian Americans — in 2019 being told to go “back where they came from.” Today, that particular expression is intended to deprive people of their Americanness based on skin color and ethnicity. It’s racist to its core, and those who don’t call it out enable it.
Yet of the almost dozen Republican members of Congress who represent Missouri and southern Illinois, precious few have made any public statements at all about it, clearly fearful of upsetting Trump’s base.
Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., meanwhile, lunged to Trump’s defense with an obtuse tweet chiding critics who “interpret” racism in Trump’s remarks. Read them again, congressman; no interpretation is necessary.
From most of the region’s GOP delegation, though, as with most congressional Republicans in the country, the response has been a cowardly, mute void. This includes, notably, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., the freshman senator who has had no problem speaking his mind on pretty much every other issue out there.
The ninety-five votes that were cast on Wednesday in support of Green’s most recent resolution represented about forty per cent of all Democratic representatives. Another way to look at it is that the forces demanding a rapid move to impeachment fell just twenty-three votes short of achieving majority status in the Democratic caucus. (To get there, they would need a hundred and eighteen votes.)
Moreover, it’s clear that the level of support for Green’s resolution understated the support for impeachment. Among the Democrats who voted to table Green’s motion were a number of prominent impeachment supporters who, following Tuesday’s unanimous vote by House Democrats to condemn Trump’s racist comments, didn’t think this was the most opportune moment to move ahead. “We’re trying to keep the caucus together as we respond to the most lawless administration of our lifetimes,” Representative Jamie Raskin, of Maryland, told the Washington Post. “I’m enough of a political pragmatist to believe that you call votes when you think you can win them, not when you think you can lose them.”
It’s also worth looking at who among the Democrats voted nay on Wednesday. Not so long ago, support for moving rapidly to impeachment was a position adopted, mainly, by those on the left of the Party. Now it has gone mainstream. An article at The Hill noted that a number of powerful committee chairs broke with the Party leadership. They included Nita Lowey (Appropriations), Bennie Thompson (Energy and Commerce), Raúl Grijalva (Homeland Security), Jerry Nadler (Judiciary), Jim McGovern (Rules), and Nydia Velázquez (Small Business).
What explained the votes of such Party stalwarts? Certainly, they are disgusted by Trump. In many districts, they are also facing intense pressure from constituents and activists. As Thompson said on Wednesday, “My district wants me to vote for the immediate impeachment of Donald Trump.”
To be sure, Thompson represents a deep blue area of western Mississippi. It is sometimes said that Democrats, when facing competitive races in 2020, will never support impeaching Trump, but that isn’t necessarily true. Citing her responsibility to uphold the law, Representative Ann Kirkpatrick, who represents Arizona’s Second District, said, “I’ve come to the conclusion that the House of Representatives must open an impeachment inquiry.” Kirkpatrick was following the example of several other Democrats in competitive districts, including Tom Malinowski, of New Jersey, and Katie Porter, of California.
How do you write about a week like this in America? There have been many breaking points in the Trump Presidency; everybody has his or her own triggers. But here it is, 2019, and we are debating racist Presidential tweets, and who is a real American, and whether “concentration camps” is the right phrase for what is happening at the southern border. On Friday, Vice-President Mike Pence saw with his own eyes hundreds of men kept in inhuman and inhumane conditions in Texas, men forced to exist in such squalor that their armed guards wore masks to stave off the stench of so many unwashed bodies. It was terrible. And then Trump and Pence denied that it was any such thing at all. It couldn’t be a “concentration camp,” Trump even said at Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting, because it was very well run.
Republicans, meanwhile, are not only sticking with Trump as the country’s division and discord deepens, they approve of it. Many are even cheering him on. On Capitol Hill, just four Republican representatives joined with Democrats on a symbolic resolution condemning the tweets. Half of the country is appalled but not really sure how to combat him; the other half is cheering, or at least averting its gaze. This is what a political civil war looks like, with words, for now, as weapons. As if to underscore the point, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary account tweeted this during Trump’s rally: “Tonight’s top searches, in order: racism, socialism, fascism, concentration camp, xenophobia, bigot.” Whatever you call what is happening in America right now, Trump is convinced it is working for him, which is why we are in for many more such weeks, all the way through 2020. “I do think I’m winning the political fight. I think I’m winning it by a lot,” Trump told reporters before he boarded Marine One for the North Carolina rally, at which he would call the Squad “hate-filled extremists” intent on the “destruction of our country” all over again. “I’ll never change.”
Trump’s unwavering belief that race-baiting and immigrant-hating work to his electoral benefit is already the subject of raging debate in political circles. Many Democrats spent the five days and counting of this tweet controversy worrying that they were both required to call out Trump’s words and also doomed to see their condemnation of his racism play right into his hands. The Party is divided about how to counter Trump, and it shows: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has remained firmly against impeachment as the numbers inside her caucus favoring it grow. (Wednesday’s vote on an impeachment resolution by a defiant Democratic backbencher got ninety-five votes, including those of two key committee chairmen.)
A number of Republicans on Capitol Hill, for their part, showed how ridiculous they are willing to make themselves look by condemning the racist chanting of Trump’s North Carolina rally fans while steadfastly refusing to condemn the racist tweets of the President those fans were echoing. “Send her back” is “nativist, terrible” and “also electoral suicide,” the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt tweeted, pointing out that there are more than four hundred thousand naturalized residents in Pennsylvania and two hundred thousand in Michigan, two key states without which Trump would not have won the Presidency in 2016. By midday Thursday, Trump himself was taking this position, when it became clear that the “Send her back” chant had even Republicans worried. “I was not happy with it,” the President claimed. “I disagreed with it.” He did not, however, disavow his own words that led to the chant in the first place.
We’re a long and far ways from this style of leadership.
There’s a lot of other news out there and I wish I could find more that would lift us up. The only thing that I can say is that if you read the majority of it, you’ll realize again, there are a lot more of us out there and there are communities that understand this kind of hatred: From ABC “Rabbi in Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s district compares Trump rally to ‘Nazi Germany’ .
Faith leaders in Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home district are standing firmly behind her in the face of attacks from President Trump, despite disagreeing with some of her comments on Israel.
Rabbi Avi Olitzky of Beth El Synagogue in Minneapolis, Minnesota, called chants of “send her home” at the president’s rally Wednesday night in Greenville, North Carolina, “terrifying.”
In an interview on ABC News Live’s “The Briefing Room,” Rabbi Olitzky told MaryAlice Parks he can’t “sit or stand silently while our sitting president issues such racist rhetoric.”
Olitzky went on to compare what he saw at the North Carolina rally to some of history’s darkest hours.
“This is a very eerie wave of similar situations in history, be that Nazi Germany or elsewhere,” he said, adding that people don’t seem afraid to be “publicly hateful and publicly loud.”
The rabbi called on all political leaders to stop using “the Jewish community as a political football.”
In an op-ed in the Times of Israel titled “Enough with the Noise and the Vitriol,” Olitzky wrote, “We cannot fall victim to the political tricks that rely on racism, and the meme of antisemitism, to bolster both sides, while still doing immense communal harm.”
The question is how and when does the descent in to Trumpfian Hell stop? I’m pretty certain that just speaking out isn’t going to do it. But, it’s a start.
and this from USA Today: “Michelle Obama beats out Angelina Jolie, Oprah Winfrey as most admired woman, poll says.”
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Thursday Reads
Posted: July 18, 2019 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Bill Barr, Donald Trump, fascism, Ilhan Omar, impeachment, Jeffrey Epstein, Judge William H. Pauley, Michael Cohen, Nancy Pelosi, Rachel Maddow, Trump Nazi/KKK rally 29 CommentsGood Morning!!
It appears that Cover-Up General Bill Barr has struck again. He apparently ordered the Southern District of New York to end their investigation of campaign finance violations by Michael Cohen and Individual 1 (AKA Donald Trump).
The Washington Post: Prosecutors have ‘concluded’ Michael Cohen campaign finance probe, judge says.
Federal prosecutors have concluded the campaign finance investigation centered on President Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen, or at least key aspects of it, a federal judge overseeing the case wrote Wednesday, suggesting prosecutors will not charge executives in the Trump Organization or any others who have been linked to the matter.
The good news is that Judge William H. Pauley ordered the public release of search warrants and other documents related to the case. Prosecutors asked Pauley to allow some redactions of the materials, but the judge said no dice. The materials should be available sometime this morning.
He [Pauley] wrote that the government disclosed in a secret filing Monday that it had “concluded the aspects of its investigation that justified the continued sealing of the portions of the Materials relating to Cohen’s campaign finance violations.” He rejected their request to file the materials with redactions to protect “third-party privacy interests,” because, by his telling, the case is over and the public deserves to see everything.
“The campaign finance violations discussed in the Materials are a matter of national importance,” Pauley wrote. “Now that the Government’s investigation into those violations has concluded, it is time that every American has an opportunity to scrutinize the Materials.”
So Barr has made sure that the Trump Organization will no longer be in danger of prosecution. Will the investigations into Trump’s inauguration be axed next?
Rachel Maddow talked about this last night.
Folks, this is getting scarier with every passing day. Trump now controls the Department of Justice and apparently can order investigations stopped or opened. Republicans control the Senate, so nothing the Democrats pass will even be considered there, including impeachment. The only protection we have left is the courts, and Trump and the GOP are working overtime to stock them with Trump judges.
Last night Trump held another Nazi/KKK rally in North Carolina, during which he attacked has latest target Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar and encouraged the crowd as they screamed “send her back!”
And in case you thought Trump was ad libbing, here’s the proof that the attack was orchestrated.
From The Charlotte Observer editorial board: ’Send her back’: A dark reminder of who we are.
It happened in the first half of Wednesday’s speech. Donald Trump, our president, began to talk about Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democratic from Minnesota who was among the four women of color he had attacked Sunday in a racist tweet. Everyone knew Trump would speak about the women at some point to the Greenville, North Carolina crowd. Did we know what would come next?
“Send her back.”
The chant rose quickly from a handful of voices to a chorus of bigotry. It was a chilling moment. It was “lock her up” in a white hood. It was despicable.
It could have happened at any Donald Trump rally. It might have happened in any state, north or south. But it happened in Greenville, in our state, and it was one of North Carolina’s darkest moments.
“Send her back.”
Or perhaps not. Maybe the chant will be absorbed in the vortex that is Donald Trump. In a presidency of so many shameful moments, of so many new lows, the singularly awful ones tend to lose their significance. It’s possible that North Carolina might be forgotten when the chant inevitably spreads to the next rally. But North Carolina shouldn’t forget.
The Associated Press: Trump leans on issue of race in bid for a 2nd term in 2020.
President Donald Trump has placed racial animus at the center of his reelection campaign, and even some of his critics believe it could deliver him a second term.
Every successful modern presidential campaign has been built on the notion of addition, winning over voters beyond core supporters. But Trump has chosen division on the belief that the polarized country he leads will simply choose sides over issues like race.
He intensified his attacks on Wednesday, blasting four young congresswomen of color during a rally in Greenville, North Carolina . The crowd responded by chanting, “Send her back!” echoing Trump’s weekend tweet in which he said the lawmakers, all American citizens, should “go back” to the countries from which they came.
“I do think I am winning the political fight,” Trump declared at the White House. “I think I am winning it by a lot.”
Not since George Wallace’s campaign in 1968 has a presidential candidate — and certainly not an incumbent president — put racial polarization at the center of his call to voters. Though Trump’s comments generated outrage and even a resolution of condemnation in the House, the president and his campaign believe the strategy carries far more benefits than risks.
The Irish Times: Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow.
To grasp what is going on in the world right now, we need to reflect on two things. One is that we are in a phase of trial runs. The other is that what is being trialled is fascism – a word that should be used carefully but not shirked when it is so clearly on the horizon. Forget “post-fascist” – what we are living with is pre-fascism.
It is easy to dismiss Donald Trump as an ignoramus, not least because he is. But he has an acute understanding of one thing: test marketing. He created himself in the gossip pages of the New York tabloids, where celebrity is manufactured by planting outrageous stories that you can later confirm or deny depending on how they go down. And he recreated himself in reality TV where the storylines can be adjusted according to the ratings. Put something out there, pull it back, adjust, go again.
Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.
One of the basic tools of fascism is the rigging of elections – we’ve seen that trialled in the election of Trump, in the Brexit referendum and (less successfully) in the French presidential elections. Another is the generation of tribal identities, the division of society into mutually exclusive polarities. Fascism does not need a majority – it typically comes to power with about 40 per cent support and then uses control and intimidation to consolidate that power. So it doesn’t matter if most people hate you, as long as your 40 per cent is fanatically committed. That’s been tested out too. And fascism of course needs a propaganda machine so effective that it creates for its followers a universe of “alternative facts” impervious to unwanted realities. Again, the testing for this is very far advanced.
Read the rest at the link above.
Last night Trump also celebrated a meaningless vote in the house about impeachment. Politico suggests that he might actually think the vote has ended the threat.
IT BARELY TOOK THE PRESIDENT ANY TIME before he said this Wednesday evening at his campaign rally in Greenville, N.C.: “I just heard that the United States House of Representatives has overwhelmingly voted to kill the most ridiculous project I’ve ever been involved in: the resolution — how stupid is that — on impeachment. I want to thank those Democrats because many of them voted for us, the vote was a totally lopsided 332-95-1.” … Upon arriving in North Carolina, President Donald Trump said the same thing: “We have just received an overwhelming vote against impeachment. And that’s the end of it. Let the Democrats now go back to work….
a few smart, seasoned people in the White House wondered to us Wednesday night if TRUMP actually believes this vote ended impeachment. Of course, it didn’t. This was a procedural vote that means nothing in the grand scheme of things. There are still nearly 90 Democrats who are now on record supporting an impeachment inquiry, and ROBERT MUELLER is coming to the Hill next week. There are Democrats who believe the impeachment caucus will swell as soon as he opens his mouth.
At Bloomberg, Jonathan Bernstein writes: That Strange Impeachment Vote? It May Be a Big Deal.
Inflaming the base: July 16, 2019
Representative Al Green, a Democrat from Texas, has regularly introduced articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. Usually, when a regular bill or resolution has been introduced, it’s then referred to committee. If the majority party doesn’t want to consider the bill, it will die with no further action. Under House rules, however, any member can force an impeachment resolution onto the floor as pending business. That’s what Green did Wednesday.
This maneuver doesn’t mean that impeachment gets a final vote, or even debate. What it does get is a “motion to table,” which means that lawmakers can vote to either keep the resolution as pending business or kill it off. When Green did this in 2017, 58 Democrats voted to keep the impeachment measure alive. In 2018, 66 did so. This time, it was up to 95.
Of course, there are more Democrats in the current Congress than in the previous one. And we can’t assume that all the votes to table were necessarily votes against impeachment (pro-impeachment independent Justin Amash voted to table, for instance). Some legislators may have objected to bringing the resolution straight to the floor on procedural grounds, or thought that Green’s articles were poorly drafted. Still, the vote offers a decent proxy for where impeachment sentiment stands in the House: It divides Democrats and unites Republicans in opposition. For now.
What I found interesting was that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has said she opposes impeachment, apparently didn’t whip the vote. If that’s the case, what does it say about her real position? One interpretation is that she simply wanted to mollify pro-impeachment Democrats by giving them an easy opportunity to express their views. Another is that Pelosi isn’t as opposed to impeachment as she has let on, and was using this vote to gauge sentiment within the caucus – or even to demonstrate that support for ousting the president is growing.
(Emphasis added.)
I’ll end with this breaking news from The Miami Herald: Judge keeps Jeffrey Epstein in N.Y. jail as prosecutors build on sex trafficking case.
Wealthy sex offender Jeffrey Epstein will have to wait out a sex trafficking trial from a jail cell after a federal judge in New York ruled Thursday against his request for release on bail.
Epstein, 66, had offered to put up any collateral the judge wished from his self-estimated $559 million fortune. He said he would live in isolation in his Manhattan mansion, and pay for private security to ensure he remains inside and that no one enters unless authorized by the courts.
But with prosecutors warning that Epstein could easily flee or attempt to interfere with their witnesses, Senior U.S. District Judge Richard Berman has ordered that Epstein remain at the Manhattan Correctional Institute as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York seeks his conviction on child sex trafficking and conspiracy charges. Berman, according to reporters covering the hearing in New York, cited concerns that Epstein is a “danger” to others.
Berman’s ruling is a major victory for Epstein’s accusers, who have grown by the dozens since he was first investigated on trafficking allegations in South Florida more than a dozen years ago. The wealthy financier was first arrested in Palm Beach County in the mid-2000s after police began to suspect that he was abusing underage girls.
I’ll post anything I find about the release of Cohen materials from SDNY. What stories are you following today?
Tuesday Reads: Angry Women Unite!
Posted: July 16, 2019 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: angry women, Donald Trump, misogyny, Racism, rape culture rape kits 51 Comments
Jean Léon Gérôme, Truth Coming Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind, 1896
Good Morning!!
For months now, I’ve been feeling depressed and discouraged by the damage Trump is doing to our politics and our country. This morning I woke up and realized what I really am is angry, enraged, and pissed off! This has to end. Angry women must rise up and take back our country from the racist white supremacist in the White House, his GOP enablers, and his Russian troll army, and the white male-controlled media that is too fearful to call out his lies and racism.
Two angry women fighting back with intellect and direct action:
An angry woman in Montana stood up to on-line racist trolls and won. Buzzfeed News: A Judge Ruled A Neo-Nazi Blogger Should Pay $14 Million To A Woman Targeted In A Racist “Troll Storm.”
A federal judge ruled more than $14 million should be awarded to a woman who was barraged with anti-Semitic and threatening messages online after a neo-Nazi blogger instructed his followers to target her and her family with a “troll storm.”
The ruling was handed down Monday against Andrew Anglin, a white supremacist and publisher of the website The Daily Stormer.
In his decision, judge Jeremiah Lynch found that Anglin “acted with actual malice” when he told followers: “Let’s Hit Em Up. Are y’all ready for an old fashioned Troll Storm? Because AYO – it’s time, fam.”
Elisabetta Sirani, Timoclea Killing Her Rapist, 1659
What followed were a series of racist and sometimes threatening messages to Montana real estate agent Tanya Gersh, her co-workers, and her family, including her 12-year-old son.
The recommended ruling against Anglin included more than $200,000 for lost earnings and medical expenses incurred by Gersh, $821,000 for future lost earnings, and $3 million for past and future pain and suffering.
The bulk of the judgment, however, was the state maximum of $10 million in punitive damages against the white supremacist for what the judge called “particularly egregious and reprehensible” behavior and to “punish Anglin and deter him from engaging in such conduct in the future.”
I’m so angry today, because we have been battered by days of racist tweets and racist language spewed by the monster who is occupying the people’s White House. He is not my president and I will never call him that. I so agree with what Rep. Ayanna Pressley said about him:
“I never use the word you used — president — to describe him,” she said. “I refer to him as ‘the occupant.’ He simply occupies the space. He embodies zero of the qualities and the principles, the responsibility, the grace, the integrity, the compassion, of someone who would truly embody that office. It’s just another day in the world under this administration.”
At The Atlantic, Adam Serwer addresses Trump’s racism: Trump Tells America What Kind of Nationalist He Is.
On Sunday morning, the president told four members of Congress to “go back” to the countries “from which they came.” The remark, a racist taunt with a historic pedigree, inspired a flurry of fact-checking from mainstream journalists who were quick to note that Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Ilhan Omar are American citizens, and that only Omar was born abroad, in Somalia. It was a rather remarkable exercise in missing the point.
Angry Bee Girl, Karin Bolstad
When Trump told these women to “go back,” he was not making a factual claim about where they were born. He was stating his ideological belief that American citizenship is fundamentally racial, that only white people can truly be citizens, and that people of color, immigrants in particular, are only conditionally American. This is a cornerstone of white nationalism, and one of the president’s few closely held ideological beliefs. It is a moral conviction, not a statement of fact. If these women could all trace their family line back to 1776, it would not make them more American than Trump, a descendant of German immigrants whose ancestors arrived relatively recently, because he is white and they are not.
After telling minority members of Congress to go back to where they “came from,” Trump today accused the women of “foul language & racist hatred.” White nationalists in the United States have always asserted that they are, in fact, the true victims of racial hatred, even as they’ve demanded the exclusion of nonwhites from the polity. When the Confederacy was shattered, its partisans launched a propaganda campaign rewriting the origin of their rebellion as the defense of individual freedom rather than property in man. The Redeemers who overthrew Reconstruction with terrorism and violence portrayed themselves as the victims of Negro tyranny, and as the historian Jonathan Sokol has written, when de jure segregation unraveled in the South in the 1960s, white southerners “began to picture the American government as the fascist, and the white southerner as the victim.”
Read the rest at The Atlantic.
Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Beheading Holofernes (ca. 1620)
As a reminder, here is The New York Times’ recently updated compilation of Trump’s long racist history: Donald Trump’s Racism: The Definitive List, Updated, by David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick.
More reads on Trump’s racism:
George Conway at The Washington Post: Trump is a racist president.
David Remnick at The New Yorker: A Racist in the White House.
Michael Luo at The New Yorker: Trump’s Racist Tweets, and the Question of Who Belongs in America.
Paul Krugman at The New York Times: Racism Comes Out of the Closet. The dog whistle days are apparently over.
Trump’s racism enrages me, but you know what makes me just as angry? Rape culture. And Trump in the White House is a visible symbol of America’s misogynist history.
Barbara Bradley Haggerty at The Atlantic: An Epidemic of Disbelief. What new research reveals about sexual predators, and why police fail to catch them.
Robert Spada walked into the decrepit warehouse in Detroit and surveyed the chaos: Thousands of cardboard boxes and large plastic bags were piled haphazardly throughout the cavernous space. The air inside was hot and musty. Spada, an assistant prosecutor, saw that some of the windows were open, others broken, exposing the room to the summer heat. Above the boxes, birds glided in slow, swooping circles.
It was August 17, 2009, and this brick fortress of a building housed evidence that had been collected by the Detroit Police Department. Spada’s visit had been prompted by a question: Why were police sometimes unable to locate crucial evidence? The answer lay in the disarray before him.
As Spada wandered through the warehouse, he made another discovery, one that would help uncover a decades-long scandal, not just in Detroit but across the country. He noticed rows of steel shelving lined with white cardboard boxes, 10 inches tall and a foot wide, stacked six feet high. What are those? he asked a Detroit police officer who was accompanying him. Rape kits, the officer said.
Collage by Yasmin Diaz
“I’m assuming they’ve been tested?” Spada said.
“Oh, they’ve all been tested.”
Spada pulled out a box and peered inside. The containers were still sealed, indicating that the evidence had never been sent to a lab. He opened four more boxes: the same.
“I tried to do a quick calculation,” he later told me. “I came up with approximately 10,000.”
Spada’s estimate was conservative. Eventually 11,341 untested rape kits were found, some dating back more than 30 years—each one a hermetically sealed testament to the most terrifying minutes of a woman’s life, each one holding evidence that had been swabbed or plucked from the most private parts of her body. And in all likelihood, some microscopic part of her assailant—his DNA, his identity—sat in that kit as well.
Or kits.
That’s thousands of rapists whose DNA was on file, yet police never even tried to catch them. Many, went on to rape more women. Why? Because police still don’t believe women. Please go read this important article.
An angry woman academic and author speaks up at The Lily (h/t Delphyne): A female historian wrote a book. Two male historians went on NPR to talk about it. They never mentioned her name. It’s Sarah Milov.
Sarah Milov was sitting at her kitchen table, nursing her baby, when she saw the tweet.
“It took substantial government support to create Americans’ dependency on tobacco,” wroteNathan Daniel Beau Connolly, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. “@edward_l_ayres and I talk with @jeremyhobson about the regulation of tobacco on this week’s @hereandnow.” Connolly ended the tweet with a “shout out” to Milov, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia whose forthcoming book, “The Cigarette: A Political History,” provided virtually all the material for the segment, which aired on Thursday.
Unfortunately, “Here & Now” — a radio show co-produced by NPR and WBUR in Boston, which is syndicated to approximately 5 million listeners — did not grant Milov the same courtesy. The three men on the segment, two historians and an NPR host, never mentioned Milov’s name or the name of her book.
“Every single word they said was from my book,” said Milov in an interview with The Lily. While the historians did not quote directly from “The Cigarette,” she said, every cited fact was taken from its pages. “Then I got to the end of a nearly 10-minute segment and did not hear myself credited at all.”
Read the rest at the link.
I’m so angry today. I know this post doesn’t make much sense, but it reflects my current state of mind. What’s going on with you today, Sky Dancers?
Mostly Monday Reads: Come Hell and High Water
Posted: July 15, 2019 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Asylum seekers, civil liberties, Civil Rights, Climate change diaspora, Honduras, Isle de Jean Charles, people of color, Racism, Rule of Law 32 Comments
Good Morning Sky Dancers!
I think I might see a bit of sunlight today after days of drizzle from what’s left of Hurricane Barry which is basically a low moving through the middle of the country. Fortunately, the storm hit a big patch of dry air and didn’t fire up as much as possible. It also was slow moving so surge and the river cresting wasn’t quite as widespread as was feared. Climate change is a huge problem down here around the Gulf.
A dozen people stranded on a remote Louisiana island by Tropical Storm Barry are being rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard.
The rescue was carried out on Isle de Jean Charles, a Terrebonne Parish community that was cut off by rising water from the storm. Isle de Jean Charles is about two hours south of New Orleans.
Petty Officer Lexie Preston told the Associated Press that some people were on rooftops and that four people and a cat had already been taken from the island on a helicopter. She said a boat is also heading to the area to help get the rest of the people off the island.
The Coast Guard reported that none of the rescued strandees, including four who were elderly, were injured, WWL-TV reported.
Isle de Jean Charles is a sacred indigenous place and nearly all of its residents have become part of the Climate Change Diaspora.
Isle de Jean Charles is a narrow island in the bayous of South Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. A place of immense physical beauty and great biodiversity, it is most importantly home to the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe.
For our Island people, it is more than simply a place to live. It is the epicenter of our Tribe and traditions. It is where our ancestors survived after being displaced by Indian Removal Act-era policies and where we cultivated what has become a unique part of Louisiana culture. Today, the land that has sustained us for generations is vanishing before our eyes. Our tribal lands are plagued by a host of environmental problems — coastal erosion and salt-water intrusion, caused by canals dredged through our surrounding marshland by oil and gas companies, land sinking due to a lack of soil renewal or “crevasse,” because of the construction of levees that separated us from the river, and rising seas. These environmental changes have led to increasing flood risk and changes in our life ways. For example, our Island needed a levee, but the small levee that protects our Island during high tide has also led our bayou to become stagnant, killing the ecosystem we once had. The need for reliable access to jobs and services up the bayou have forced many of our people to nearby areas, including Pointe-aux-Chenes, Bourg, Montegut, Chauvin, along Bayou Grand Caillou, and Houma. For over fifteen years we have been planning a Tribal Resettlement in order to bring our people back together, rejuvenate our ways of life, and secure a future for our Tribe.
You can read more about their plight here: “On the Louisiana Coast, A Native Community Sinks Slowly into the Sea” from Yale Environment 360.
The Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians of southern Louisiana have been called America’s first climate refugees. But two years after receiving federal funding to move to higher ground, the tribe is stuck in limbo, waiting for new homes as the water inches closer to their doors.
…
Of the 35 residential structures left on the island, many stand empty, slowly rotting back into the landscape. Due to unprecedented soil subsidence, sea level rise, and the thousands of oil and gas canals that have allowed saltwater intrusion and erosion, the once-wooded landscape is slowly disappearing beneath the sea.
Since 1930, Louisiana’s coastal plain has lost more than 2,000 square miles of land – about the size of Delaware, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Isle de Jean Charles, the historical homeland of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians, is the most desperate example of the state’s vanishing coast.
Climate Change also is playing a role in the migration north from South America. Food Shortages–simultaneously due to lack of normal rain along with incredible record breaking heat and storms–will cause an environmental diaspora to grow. We have started seen the farmers of Honduras come to our borders.
Some people here know about climate change, about the vast, complex forces of cambio climatico roiling the weather. Global warming has heated the air and driven away seasonal rains. It may have boosted the spread of bark-munching beetles, which ravaged pine forests surrounding El Rosario that had already been depleted by logging. The loss of the forests, in turn, diminished freshwater streams and sent temperatures in the village soaring still higher, residents say.
Migration to the United States from Honduras and its neighboring “northern triangle” countries — El Salvador and Guatemala — has climbed in recent years. The reasons are complex, including poverty, unemployment and violence. But the increase in migration also coincides with the drought, which began in 2014, and those living in Central America’s so-called dry corridor, which is adjacent to El Rosario, say lack of food is the primary reason people leave, according to a United Nations report.
Last summer, the Honduran government declared an emergency because of food shortages, joining governments in El Salvador and Guatemala, which issued similar alerts. Almost 100,000 families in Honduras and 2 million people across the region lacked adequate food. Making matters worse, a pathogen that scientists believe is worsened by climate change has ravaged the country’s coffee plantations, which means that migrant farm laborers who count on the coffee harvest for income can’t find work.
Researchers and international aid workers say that for Honduran family farmers, like those in El Rosario, to survive, they need support to adjust to the climate’s rapid changes, including instruction in planting drought-resistant crops and help conserving water.
What is our Racist in Chief doing to address this issue?
The U.S. sends hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Central America every year, but most of it gets directed to security, drug control or violence prevention programs, rather than agricultural or environmental support. Under the Obama administration, Congress doubled the fundingto the region from $338 million in 2014 to $754 million in 2016 and began directing more funding to climate and agriculture programs. The Trump administration has tried to cut funding dramatically — proposals Congress has rejected. Under the current budget, almost $530 million is directed toward Central America.
In March, President Donald Trump said his administration would cut aid to Central American countries to punish them for failing to stop migration flows. The administration made the cuts official in June, saying it would withhold some of the funds allocated by Congress for 2017 and would suspend all funds Congress approved for 2018. Critics have said this will only stoke more migration.
Well, today he upped the death and destruction that finds root in his racist, white nationalist demons. This is via the A/P and is breaking news: “Trump moves to end asylum protections for Central Americans”. This move comes after a weekend of some of the most vitriolic racist tweets this evil, evil man has ever tweeted. Yet the Republicans stand for this and with this.
The Trump administration on Monday moved to end asylum protections for most Central American migrants in a major escalation of the president’s battle to tamp down the number of people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
According to a new rule published in the Federal Register , asylum seekers who pass through another country first will be ineligible for asylum at the U.S. southern border. The rule, expected to go into effect Tuesday, also applies to children who have crossed the border alone.
The rule applies to anyone arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border. Sometimes asylum seekers from Africa and other continents arrive there, but most migrants arriving there are Central Americans.
There are some exceptions: If someone has been trafficked, if the country the migrant passed through did not sign one of the major international treaties that govern how refugees are managed (though most Western countries have signed them) or if an asylum-seeker sought protection in a country but was denied, then a migrant could still apply for U.S. asylum.
But the move by President Donald Trump’s administration was meant to essentially end asylum protections as they now are on the southern border, reversing decades of U.S. policy on how refugees are treated and coming as the government continues to clamp down on migrants and as the treatment of those who made it to the country is heavily criticized as inhumane.
Attorney General William Barr said that the United States is “a generous country but is being completely overwhelmed” by the burdens associated with apprehending and processing hundreds of thousands of migrants at the southern border.
“This rule will decrease forum shopping by economic migrants and those who seek to exploit our asylum system to obtain entry to the United States,” Barr said in a statement.
The policy is almost certain to face a legal challenge. U.S. law allows refugees to request asylum when they arrive at the U.S. regardless of how they did so, but there is an exception for those who have come through a country considered to be “safe.” But the Immigration and Nationality Act, which governs asylum law, is vague on how a country is determined “safe”; it says “pursuant to a bilateral or multilateral agreement.”
Right now, the U.S. has such an agreement, known as a “safe third country,” only with Canada. Under a recent agreement with Mexico, Central American countries were considering a regional compact on the issue, but nothing has been decided. Guatemalan officials were expected in Washington on Monday, but apparently a meeting between Trump and Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales was canceled amid a court challenge in Guatemala over whether the country could agree to a safe third with the U.S.
American Civil Liberties Union attorney Lee Gelernt, who has litigated some of the major challenges to the Trump administration’s immigration policies, said the rule was unlawful.
This rule basically says if any one passed through another country on the way to the US and didn’t ask for asylum there cannot ask for asylum in the US. This man has two immigrant wives. His mother was an immigrant. All but one of his children could actually be categorized as anchor babies via his rhetoric that’s applied to brown and black people in his demented mind. Melania Trump got documented on false pretenses. There is no explanation for what he does other than racism.
His tweet uproar started with attack on American Women serving in Congress this weekend. It was beyond appalling. Republicans are off somewhere in their cones of silence.
“Republicans Silent On Trump’s Racist Remarks To Congresswomen”, The president had urged the Democratic congresswomen to “go back” to the countries they came from
Presidents Donald Trump’s urging of Democratic congresswomen to “go back” to the countries they came from on Sunday has drawn widespread condemnation, with congressional Democrats declaring his rhetoric racist, xenophobic and bigoted.
There was just one thing immediately missing (beyond an apology): a rebuke from their Republican counterparts.
The deafening silence came after Trump went on a Twitter rant against “‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen” who, in his words, came from “countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world.”
Though he didn’t identify his targets by name, they appeared to be Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. The four have been in the news lately amid increased tension between them and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
All four women of color have been outspoken critics of Trump’s handling of the immigration crisis along the U.S.-Mexico border. However, only Omar was born outside of the U.S., having immigrated as a child from Africa.
“When @realDonaldTrump tells four American Congresswomen to go back to their countries, he reaffirms his plan to ‘Make America Great Again’ has always been about making America white again,” Pelosi responded to Trump on Twitter shortly after. “Our diversity is our strength and our unity is our power.”
Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, who recently left the Republican Party to be an independent, also called Trump’s comments “racist and disgusting.”
Here are some other reactions:
Los Angeles Times: Trump is truly America’s Bigot-in-Chief
Goldie Taylor / The Daily Beast: Trump Is a Racist. If You Still Support Him, So Are You.
Charles M. Blow / New York Times: Trump’s Tweets Prove That He Is a Raging Racist
Peter Baker / New York Times: Trump Fans the Flames of a Racial Fire
Greg Sargent / Washington Post: Trump just denied his attacks are racist. He only confirmed the worst.
Ever since President Trump launched his candidacy by declaring Mexicans to be “rapists,” Trump’s public racism has often included two additional important elements: an adamant refusal to apologize for it in the face of outrage, and an equally adamant denial that the offending language was racist in any way.
Central to Trump’s racism — and more broadly to Trumpism writ large — is not just the content of the racism itself. It’s also that he’s asserting the right to engage in public displays of racism without it being called out for what it is. A crucial ingredient here is Trump’s declaration of the ability to flaunt his racism with impunity.
Trump’s racist attack on nonwhite progressive lawmakers is following this pattern, and indeed, it’s worth looking at what has come next, which is also revealing and important.
As you’ve heard, Trump tweeted on Sunday that four outspoken Democratic congresswomen “originally came from countries” that are “corrupt” and a “catastrophe,” and that they should “go back” to them. Three of his targets (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley) were born in the United States, and the fourth (Ilhan Omar) is a Somali refugee.
The remarks drew widespread condemnation, largely with the exception of Republicans. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi denounced Trump for wanting to make “America white again,” and, while some news organizations danced around what Trump had done, others explicitly labeled the comments “racist.”
Frankly, any one who is silent or supports Trump has no excuse to claim they’re not a racist.
The criticism is even coming from our allies abroad. Bloomberg reports that: U.K. Leader Says Trump’s Tweets on Democrats Are ‘Completely Unacceptable’
U.S. President Donald Trump used “completely unacceptable” language to describe four female Democratic lawmakers, Prime Minister Theresa May’s spokesman told reporters on London in Monday, potentially exacerbating the recent tensions with Washington.
Trump posted a series of tweets on Sunday suggesting that four U.S. lawmakers, led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, should return to the “broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
May thinks “the language used to refer to these women was completely unacceptable,” her spokesman, James Slack, told reporters on Monday.
Responses are coming from other members of Congress as well as the four women.
From Adrian Walker writing for the Boston Globe : “Ayanna Pressley brushes off Trump’s tweets — but not his treatment of refugees”.
Donald J. Trump — a man who clearly has too much time on his hands in the morning — began Sunday with a characteristically xenophobic Twitter rant against a group of progressive female members of Congress.
“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly . . . and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run,” he wrote. “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how . . . it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough.”
Which is how I came to ask congresswoman Ayanna Pressley what she thought of being a target of the president of the United States.
“I never use the word you used — president — to describe him,” she said. “I refer to him as ‘the occupant.’ He simply occupies the space. He embodies zero of the qualities and the principles, the responsibility, the grace, the integrity, the compassion, of someone who would truly embody that office. It’s just another day in the world under this administration.”
Earlier, Pressley had tweeted a screenshot of Trump’s comments, along with her response: “THIS is what racism looks like. WE are what democracy looks like. And we’re not going anywhere. Except back to DC to fight for the families you marginalize and vilify everyday.”
Maybe he’s in a grumpy mood because he didn’t get a bloodbath during his ICE raids? Who knows? From Bobby Allyn and NPR: ” Trump’s Nationwide Immigration Raids Fail To Materialize”.
President Trump’s threatened roundup of undocumented immigrant families this weekend that set migrants in many communities on edge showed few signs of materializing on Sunday, the second time rumors of a large-scale immigration enforcement operation failed to come to fruition.
Instead, in the cities where rumors of mass raids swirled, many immigrants stayed inside their homes, as jitters turned typically vibrant migrant markets and commercial corridors eerily quiet.
Immigrant advocates across the country, meanwhile, took to the streets to protest the promised roundup.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement would not confirm any arrests, nor would immigrant rights activists.
“The ACLU has not heard reports of any raids today,” Ruthie Epstein, the American Civil Liberties Union’s deputy director for immigration policy, told NPR.
Before Sunday, there were weekend reports of attempted arrests by ICE in New York, New Jersey and Chicago, where The New York Times reportedthat a mother and her daughters were apprehended, though the family was immediately released. But those actions appeared to be part of routine enforcement, not connected to a massive raid.
Still, fears of ICE catching migrants by surprise sent many into hiding on Sunday.
It’s time for all people that come from basic goodness, compassion, and desire for justice to speak out on all of this. It is time to deal with the pernicious institutional racism in this country and the blatant hateful racism promoted by the would be dickator of Trumpfuckistan, the elected Republicans that either fully support or enable it, and the icky deplorables that include those overly self-righteous but not righteous at all evangelicals.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Sima
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
grayslady
Minkoff Minx
mablue2
NW Luna
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
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