Thursday Reads: “And Now His Voice Is Everywhere.”
Posted: August 24, 2017 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Andy Hemming, Bernie Bros, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, Jim Justice, Rick Dearborn, Roger Cohen, Vladimir Putin 36 Comments
Eastman Johnson (American genre painter, 1824-1906)
Good Morning!!
I’m going to begin today by quoting a NYT newsletter that arrives in my email every day even though I never requested it. This one is from Times columnist Roger Cohen:
You grow numb. You grow weary. I recall discovering a few weeks back that President Trump had lied about two phone calls, one from the president of Mexico and one from the head of the Boy Scouts. The calls, supposedly to congratulate him, did not exist. They never happened. They were pure inventions. Asked if Trump had lied, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said, “I wouldn’t say it was a lie.”
I actually remember shrugging. The shrug was terrifying. This is how autocrats — or would-be autocrats — cement their power. They wear you down with their lies. They distract you. They want you to believe that 2+2=5. They want you to forget that freedom withers when the distinction between truth and falsehood dies. In a dictatorship there is a single font of “truth”: the voice of the dictator. Remember Trump at the Republican National Convention a little over a year ago: “I am your voice.” And now his voice is everywhere.
There’s the scripted Trump voice, which is fake. There’s the unscripted voice, which is genuine. The two tend to alternate; call this the choreography of disorientation. It’s confusing, like having a president who isn’t really a president but instead acts like the leader of a rabble-rousing movement. The Oval Office is a useful prop, no more than that. He’s held eight rallies since becoming president in January. The latest was in Phoenix, where he called the media “very dishonest people.” He led the crowd in a chant of “CNN sucks.” He attacked the “failing New York Times.”
It’s familiar. That familiarity is menacing. It led me to think of my half-repressed shrug at the beginning of this month. Trump has one fundamental talent: a ruthless ability to mess with people’s minds and turn their anger into the engine of his ambition. A dishonest president calls the media that report on his dishonesty dishonest for doing so. This is where we are. This is the danger that Trump represents.
Harold Knight. (English artist, 1874 – 1961) Morning Sun
He said of the Charlottesville violence: “There is blame on both sides.” He equated neo-Nazi bigots with blood on their hands and leftist protesters. For this president, they stand on the same moral place. But when the press reminds him of that, he lashes out. Phoenix was a reminder of that. Don’t shrug.
“And now his voice is everywhere.” That is chilling and of course Orwellian. I never shrug off Trump’s words or deeds, and I suppose that’s why I get so tired. But we must stay conscious and aware of what is happening. Trump is a buffoon, but he still has dedicated followers and he is actively attempting to push the U.S. toward tyranny. He would love to be the American Putin.
And guess who helped put Trump in the White House? Newsweek: Bernie Sanders Voters Helped Trump Win and Here’s Proof.
Bernie Sanders supporters switched their allegiance to Donald Trump in large enough numbers last November to sway the election for the real estate billionaire, according to an analysis of voter data released Tuesday by the blog Political Wire. Since Trump’s shock victory over Hillary Clinton, much discussion has focused on the degree to which passionate Sanders supporters’ refusal to embrace Clinton led to the Republican winding up in the White House.
According to the analysis of the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, fewer than 80 percent of those who voted for Sanders, an independent, in the Democratic primary did the same for Clinton when she faced off against Trump a few months later. What’s more, 12 percent of those who backed Sanders actually cast a vote for Trump….
The impact of those votes was significant. In each of the three states that ultimately swung the election for Trump—Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—Trump’s margin of victory over Clinton was smaller than the number of Sanders voters who gave him their vote.
Francesco Nétti (Italian artist, 1832- 1894)
Please go check it out. It’s an interesting piece. Of course the Hillary-hating media will continue to blame her for everything under the sun, but we know the truth.
CNN broke an important Trump Russia story last night: Exclusive: Top Trump aide’s email draws new scrutiny in Russia inquiry.
Congressional investigators have unearthed an email from a top Trump aide that referenced a previously unreported effort to arrange a meeting last year between Trump campaign officials and Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to sources with direct knowledge of the matter.
The aide, Rick Dearborn, who is now President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff, sent a brief email to campaign officials last year relaying information about an individual who was seeking to connect top Trump officials with Putin, the sources said.
The person was only identified in the email as being from “WV,” which one source said was a reference to West Virginia. It’s unclear who the individual is, what he or she was seeking, or whether Dearborn even acted on the request. One source said that the individual was believed to have had political connections in West Virginia, but details about the request and who initiated it remain vague.
Probably Jim Justice, the Governor of West Virginia–the guy who switched parties briefly and then re-registered as a Republican and then appeared at a WV rally with Trump. In 2009 Justice “sold the family’s coal operations in West Virginia to Mechel, a Russian company, and in 2015 bought the operations back for about a penny on the dollar,”
Returning to the CNN story:
Sources said the email occurred in June 2016 around the time of the recently revealed Trump Tower meeting where Russians with Kremlin ties met with the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner as well as then-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.
While many details around the Dearborn email are unclear, its existence suggests the Russians may have been looking for another entry point into the Trump campaign to see if there were any willing partners as part of their effort to discredit — and ultimately defeat — Hillary Clinton.
Bo von Zweigbergk, 1921. (Swedish painter, 1897 – 1940) Woman in Cafe 1921
Guess who Dearborn worked for before he went to the White House?
Dearborn’s name has not been mentioned much as part of the Russia probe. But he served as then-Sen. Jeff Sessions’ chief of staff, as well as a top policy aide on the campaign. And investigators have questions about whether he played a role in potentially arranging two meetings that occurred between the then-Russia ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak, and Sessions, who has downplayed the significance of those encounters.
Dearborn was involved in helping to arrange an April 2016 event at the Mayflower Hotel where Trump delivered a major foreign policy address, sources said. Kislyak attended the event and a reception beforehand, but it’s unclear whether he interacted with Sessions there.
Interesting . . .
Another casualty of the White House purge, according Politico:
W.H. RAPID RESPONSE DIRECTOR IS OUT — ANDY HEMMING left his job on Monday as the White House director of rapid response, according to multiple sources. A source familiar with the move told us it was a “mutually agreed upon” separation, and Hemming now plans to take a vacation (in which golf may play a big part) and then explore future opportunities. Right before his departure, he was profiled by Annie Karni (http://politi.co/2g79s6m) as the staffer the White House pays “$89,000 a year to spot and distribute positive stories from the mainstream media.”
HEMMING WAS SENIOR ADVISER for research at the RNC in the 2016 cycle and director of research on the Trump campaign. At the White House, he worked from 5:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. every weekday and was a regular in reporters’ inboxes, blasting out stories favorable to the administration. Hemming declined to comment. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told us that it was a “[m]utual decision that he could best help promote the president’s agenda on the outside. Andy is smart and very talented and we wish him all the best.”
So who will put those favorable stories on Trump’s desk every day now that Hemming is gone?
I came across an excellent article on Twitter–posted by Republican never-Trumpers. David Roth at The Baffler: The President of Blank Sucking Nullity. The main point of the piece is that Trump’s behavior can be explained by the fact that he’s an asshole. I can’t do it justice with an excerpt, so I hope you’ll go read the whole thing if you haven’t already.
Malcolm T. Liepke American artist, b 1953
It is not quite fair to say that Donald Trump lacks core beliefs, but to the extent that we can take apart these beliefs they amount to Give Donald Trump Your Money and Donald Trump Should Really Be on Television More. The only comprehensible throughline to his politics is that everything Trump says is something he’s said previously, with additional very’s and more-and-more’s appended over time; his worldview amounts to the sum of the dumb shit he saw on the cover of the New York Post in 1985, subjected to a few decades of rancid compounding interest and deteriorating mental aptitude. He watches a lot of cable news, but he struggles to follow even stories that have been custom built for people like him—old, uninformed, amorphously if deeply aggrieved.
There’s a reason for this. Trump doesn’t know anything or really believe anything about any topic beyond himself, because he has no interest in any topic beyond himself; his evident cognitive decline and hyperactive laziness and towering monomania ensure that he will never again learn a new thing in his life. He has no friends and no real allies; his inner circle is divided between ostensibly scandalized cynics and theatrically shameless ones, all of whom hold him in low regard and see him as a potential means to their individuated ends. There is no help on the way; his outer orbit is a rotation of replacement-level rage-grandpas and defective, perpetually clammy operators.
Trump now “executes” by way of the The Junior Soprano Method. When he senses that his staff is trying to get him to do one thing, Trump defiantly does the opposite; otherwise he bathes in the commodified reactionary grievance of partisan media, looking for stories about himself. It takes days for his oafish and overmatched handlers to coax him into even a coded and qualified criticism of neo-Nazis, and an instant for him to willfully undo it. Of course he brings more vigor to the latter than the former; he doesn’t really understand why he had to do the first thing, but he innately and deeply understands why he did the second. The first is invariably about someone else—some woman, there was a car accident, like during or maybe after that thing—and therefore, as an asshole, he does not and cannot really care about it. The second is about him and therefore, as an asshole, he really, really does.
To understand Trump is also to understand his appeal as an aspirational brand to the worst people in the United States. What his intransigent admirers like most about him—the thing they aspire to, in their online cosplay sessions and their desperately thirsty performances for a media they loathe and to which they are so helplessly addicted—is his freedom to be unconcerned with anything but himself. This is not because he is rich or brave or astute; it’s because he is an asshole, and so authentically unconcerned.
That’s all I have for you today. What else is happening? What stories are you following?
Tuesday Reads: Having Trump as “President” is Exhausting
Posted: August 22, 2017 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics 40 Comments
Woman in Black reading the newspaper, Derek Lubangakene
Good Morning!!
Sigh . . . Having Trump as “president” is so exhausting. His speech last night was essentially meaningless, most likely made in an effort to distract from Trump’s racist response to Charlottesville; but some in the media ate it up. Philip Rucker will probably regret this tweet soon.
We saw an ignorant moron read a speech written by someone else about a vague policy someone else designed, but suddenly he’s so “presidential.”
And this one:
Killing terrorists is a “doctrine?” Fred Kaplan at Slate: Killing Terrorists Is Not a Strategy.
President Donald Trump’s speech Monday night on Afghanistan—his first prime-time address since his speech to Congress in March—contained a few good lines but no real substance. He billed it as the outline of “our path forward in Afghanistan and South Asia,” “a new strategy,” and “a plan for victory”—but, in fact, it was none of the above….
Strategy is the application of force to achieve political aims. The first threetenets of Trump’s definition (“attacking … obliterating … crushing”) amount to pounding an area with firepower. The next two (halting the Taliban and stopping terrorist attacks) are political aims. But nowhere in the speech did Trump lay out how the pounding might lead to the winning of the war and the settling of the peace.
Behind the News, Karin Jurick
We have already been doing a lot of pounding in Afghanistan these past 16 years. Trump blamed the failures up until now on excessive micromanagement in Washington—too many rules about when, where, and how force can be used. He said he would lift those restrictions, let the commanders and the fighters in the field do what they think necessary. With this new freedom, victory will flow as freely as the lava from a freshly blown volcano.
There are several problems with this notion. First, Trump didn’t say how many more U.S. troops he would be sending (on the rationale that he won’t let the enemy know what’s coming), but officials have been talking about another 3,000 to 5,000 on top of the 8,000 who are stationed there now. At the peak of the fight in 2011, there were 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. A few thousand more soldiers and Marines in full fury can’t wreak more damage than a restrained force 10 times larger (and, at times, that larger force fought with little restraint). So, on one level, his “plan” is impractical.
Read the rest at Slate. It’s the best piece I’ve read so far on Trump’s useless speech. If you want more background on how Trump made his “decision,” check out these two articles.
The New York Times: Angry Trump Grilled His Generals About Troop Increase, Then Gave In.
The Washington Post: ‘It’s a hard problem’: Inside Trump’s decision to send more troops to Afghanistan.
Oh, and the number of troops Trump will send and when is a secret. How weird is that?
Of course he will likely obliterate whatever positive reaction he got from the speech tonight at his campaign rally in Phoenix. As of this morning, he’s still going even though they don’t want him there.
Buzzfeed: Trump Has Always Spoken His Mind In Arizona. That Could Be Risky After Charlottesville.
Tuesday’s border facility tour in Yuma and campaign rally in Phoenix — announced in the wake of his angry and defensive response to the white supremacist-fueled violence in Charlottesville, Virginia — brings the president back to the city he twice used to stabilize and grow his support during the tumultuous presidential campaign, and where he unveiled his campaign’s most articulated immigration policy rollout.
Le Journal du Matin, Hans Hassenteufel
Just a month after he announced his candidacy in June, 2015, Trump revved up 5,000 people over immigration in Phoenix, telling the largest crowd of his campaign up to that point that he would make sure they take their country back and that “Chinese leaders are much smarter than Obama and his bunch of clowns” on trade.
A year later, after sending mixed messages on his stance on legalizing undocumented immigrants, Trump returned to Phoenix just two weeks after bringing Bannon onto his campaign for what became known as his illegal immigration speech, where he listed “victims of the Obama-Clinton open borders policies” and said there would be “zero tolerance for criminal aliens.”
Trump now returns to Arizona to show who he is without Bannon behind the curtain. For his supporters who rallied to his cause over immigration in particular, it will be a revealing moment. For those worried after last week’s maligned Charlottesville response that the president is dwelling too much on his base to the exclusion of others, it is anxiety-inducing.
Read the rest at the link.
The Washington Post: Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton: Now is not the time for Trump to visit my city.
Nearly 50 years ago, moments after learning that an avowed racist had gunned down Martin Luther King Jr., a young presidential candidate took the stage in Indianapolis to break the news to a largely African American crowd.
“What we need in the United States is not division,” Sen. Robert F. Kennedy implored. “What we need in the United States is not hatred. What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom and compassion toward one another.”
The War News, Karl Witkowski
It was exactly what the grief-stricken crowd needed to hear. There were riots in many cities that night, but not in Indianapolis.
President Trump’s response to Charlottesville reminds us that the words and actions of our political leaders in the wake of tragic events matter.
America is hurting. And it is hurting largely because Trump has doused racial tensions with gasoline. With his planned visit to Phoenix on Tuesday, I fear the president may be looking to light a match.That’s why I asked the president to delay his visit. It’s time to let cooler heads prevail and begin the healing process.
But there’s no sign that Trump gives a sh*t about dividing the nation with his racist rants.
On an even more serious note, why have so many U.S. ships been involved in collisions?
NBC News: USS John S. McCain: Remains Found of Some U.S. Sailors Missing in Warship Crash.
The remains of “some” American sailors have been found in sealed compartments aboard the USS John S. McCain, Adm. Scott Swift of the U.S. Pacific Command said Tuesday.
Swift said the Malaysian Navy, which has been involved in the search, has also located “potential” remains and they are working to confirm and identify those discovered.
The Navy vessel suffered significant damage to its hull when it was hit by the Alnic MC, a 30,000-ton chemical and oil tanker sailing under the Liberian flag.
The latest news, Carl Zewy
Ten sailors have been missing since the incident which occurred Monday. Swift did not identify who or how many people the remains belonged to.
“Its premature to say how many and what the status recovery of those bodies is,” he told reporters.
Trump has said nothing in reaction to this tragedy other (or previous ones) than a tweet of “thoughts and prayers.”
The Washington Post Editorial Board: Navy ships keep getting into accidents. Time to find out why.
FOR A state-of-the-art U.S. Navy destroyer to collide with a slow-moving tanker ship, there must be multiple failures of operations and personnel, from the enlisted seamen manning lookout posts to the captain of the ship. That it has happened twice in two months to the Asia-based 7th Fleet, with the tragic loss of up to 17 lives, suggests broader and deeper maladies in the fleet and perhaps in the Navy more generally.
About the only good thing that can be said following Monday’s crash of the USS John S. McCain with an oil tanker near Singapore, which left 10 sailors missing, is that senior commanders appear to recognize the severity of their problem. Navy Adm. John Richardson, the chief of naval operations, quickly ordered an “operational pause” and a fleetwide study of “operational tempo, performance, maintenance, equipment and personnel.” That review must be unsparing — and Congress should study its results when it considers defense spending plans.
An initial review by the Navy of the collision of the destroyer USS Fitzgerald off the coast of Japan in June suggested multiple personnel failures. To its credit, the service moved quickly to discipline a dozen sailors, including the two top officers and the top enlisted sailor, even while the investigation of the incident continues. Among other things, the Fitzgerald’s commander was not on the bridge when the crash occurred, though protocol requires the captain’s presence when other ships are passing nearby.
Like the Fitzgerald, the McCain was traveling in a heavily trafficked sea lane in darkness when the collision occurred, making human error more likely. But there is also reason to question whether the 7th Fleet has systemic problems. It has now recorded four major accidents this year, including the grounding of the cruiser USS Antietam on Jan. 31 in Tokyo Bay and the May 9 collision of the San Diego-based cruiser USS Lake Champlain with a fishing boat off the Korean Peninsula.
Could the collisions have been caused by computer hacking?
McClatchy: US Navy collisions stoke cyber threat concerns.
Girl reading, Georgios Jakobides
The Pentagon won’t yet say how the USS John S. McCain was rammed by an oil tanker near Singapore, but red flags are flying as the Navy’s decades-old reliance on electronic guidance systems increasing looks like another target of cyberattack.
The incident – the fourth involving a Seventh Fleet warship this year – occurred near the Strait of Malacca, a crowded 1.7-mile-wide waterway that connects the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea and accounts for roughly 25 percent of global shipping.
“When you are going through the Strait of Malacca, you can’t tell me that a Navy destroyer doesn’t have a full navigation team going with full lookouts on every wing and extra people on radar,” said Jeff Stutzman, chief intelligence officer at Wapack Labs, a New Boston, New Hampshire, cyber intelligence service.
“There’s something more than just human error going on because there would have been a lot of humans to be checks and balances,” said Stutzman, a former information warfare specialist in the Navy.
Read the rest at the link.
What else is happening? Please post your thoughts and links in the comment thread below.
Monday Reads: It’s a new Dawn. It’s a new Day. It’s a Total Eclipse of the Sun.
Posted: August 21, 2017 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: eclipse mythology, gratuitous Nina Simone, Solar Eclipse 2017 20 Comments
Good Morning Sky Dancers!
I’m having fun today realizing how many bad pop song lyrics have to do with the dawning of something or another. Be sure to check out the “Dawning of the Age of Aquarius” in Crosswalk the Musical (below). It’s a hoot!
Today, part of the United States will witness a Total Eclipse of the Sun. It’s usually seen as a dawn of something new and has been and is quite scary to those who have no understanding of the science behind it. After the last six months, we definitely could use something new. I’m seeing today as the moment we see The ReBirth of a Nation; one with a vision that includes every one.
I’m going to attempt humor today despite what’s been going on because we have an insane man in the Oval Office. This President is so unsuited for office that I have a hard time watching the news and an even harder time seeing that there are people that are so invested in him that nothing will change their minds. According to CNN: “6 in 10 people who approve of Trump say they’ll never, ever, ever stop approving.”
Most people who are on the Trump train say they are definitely, absolutely never getting off — no matter what.
Six in 10 people who approve of President Donald Trump (61%) say they can’t think of anything Trump could do that would make them disapprove of his job as President, according to a Monmouth University poll released this week.
Almost an identical number (57%) who disapprove of Trump say they are never going to change their minds on the President’s job performance either. This means a majority of Americans (53%) admit they have their opinion of Trump completely, totally and irreversibly baked in.
Yesterday, another US Navy Ship collided with a merchant ship. The best that Kremlin Caligula could do in response was say “that’s too bad”. Five sailors are injured and another 10 are missing. His comments were inexcusable and unmoored. So we’ve had seven US navy vessel collisions since 2000 There have been four in the last seven months, WTF?
We also learned that because of Trump’s excessive vacationing and that of his extended family, the Secret Service has depleted funds and cannot pay agents. Congress must shut this man down. Can they look at the sky today and see what we need is a drastic and heroic act? Are we doomed to more years of the actions of people whose greed and lust for power eclipses decency, reason, and constitutionality.
So, today we have a distraction and we need it. Here’s the link to the live streaming from NASA. Yes, we still have government scientists doing real science for the moment. I was teaching high school during the 1979 Solar eclipse over the US. We took our students out to the parking lot to view it by looking at paper with the eclipse behind us.
The last time a total solar eclipse swept through the United States was on Feb. 26, 1979, and reporters and eclipse watchers were giddy with excitement.
ABC News covered the event live from Oregon, Montana and Washington, where they climbed a mountain and dispatched a plane over Portland to cover the spectacle.
Anchored by Frank Reynolds, the special broadcast described the event with colorful language.
Jules Bergman from Goldendale, Wash., characterized the approaching eclipse as “eerie.”
“People are hushed in what almost seems like a ritual thing that mankind has been silenced by in awe since the beginning of civilization,” Bergman said.
Today I will be using ‘selfie’ mode instead of paper. The old pinhole method that we used back in 1979 still works. You basically will be making a cardboard projector. That was about the extent of our technology budget back then.
Many of my friends have hit the road–especially those with kids–to find a place where they can see the full eclipse. Eclipses have been a source of myth and religious story for a very long time. Some of the stories are creative and restorative and some are frightening. That’s because religions frequently have elements of both wonder and damnation.
A lot of people thought that nothing good came of eclipses and spent a lot of energy trying to get rid of them.
A dragon did it, according to stories from China, India, Armenia, Tibet, Persia and other parts of the world. Traditional tales from other cultures blamed a demon, a jaguar, a frog or toad, a wolf, a group of snakes, a werewolf.
The indigenous Pomo of Northern California envisioned a great cranky bear ambling through the heavens and biting the sun when it refused to move out of the way.
According to an elaborate tale in the ancient Sanskrit poem “Mahabharata,” a demon stole an immortality potion and tried to drink it, but the sun and moon reported him to the god Vishnu. Vishnu lopped off the demon’s head before the liquid passed his throat, so his immortal head travels around the heavens chasing the sun and moon for revenge. Occasionally it catches one or the other and eats it, but the orb falls out of his throat.
The Tatars of western Siberia said that a vampire tried to swallow the sun, but he spat it out when it burned his tongue. Same for the “fire dogs” of Bolivian and Korean tradition, which were sent by an evil king to steal the sun but couldn’t hold it in their mouths for very long.
Still, early astronomers and scientists sought different explanations and they’ve won over the majority of the world on that account. Well, except for a few like this Washington Pastor.
Suggestions that the Great American Eclipse is a sign of God’s judgment on the United States continue to emerge, with one pastor saying it means Christians should be repenting, given when it falls on the Jewish calendar.
On a recent episode of the “Jim Bakker Show,” Mark Blitz, pastor of El Shaddai Ministries in Bonney Lake, Washington, noted that solar eclipses are often seen in the Jewish world as a sign of God’s judgment on the Gentiles. As CP reported last week, Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of world renowned evangelist Billy Graham, said something very similar in a blog post. Conversely, the nation of Israel operates by a lunar calendar, and lunar eclipses represent coming judgment for them.
“What I thought was fascinating,” Blitz explained, was that “the exact path of the solar eclipse across the United States, voted 95 percent for Trump,” referring to the celestial event to take place on Aug. 21 that is being called “The Great American Eclipse.”
“And the fascinating thing for me is, God is not interested in the heathen to repent as much as he wants the Church to repent. Judgment always begins with the House of God,” he said.
The more you know. Sigh.
So, sit back and enjoy the eclipse which is beginning in places right now.
And think about some of the things our country still does that represents good and ironic.
Minnesota has a Confederate symbol in its possession. It has long caused controversy. And Minnesota is not moving it.
The Confederate icon — a scarred Virginia battle flag — was captured by the First Minnesota Pvt. Marshall Sherman at the bloody and brutal Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. Many of the First Minnesota Regiment, a volunteer force, died in the Union battle against the South, and Sherman was awarded the Medal of Honor for his role.
“We just rushed in like wild beasts. Men swore and cursed and struggled and fought, grappled in hand-to-hand fight, threw stones, clubbed their muskets, kicked, yelled, and hurrahed,” said Minnesota soldier William Harmon, according to a Minnesota Historical Society account of the battle.
“The scene brought before the imagination that great day when men shall call upon the mountains and the rock to fall upon and hide them,” Sgt. James Wright, a Minnesota soldier, said in another account of the battle, reported much later by the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
Virginia has asked for return of the flag for more than 100 years — and each time Minnesota has refused to return the hard-won symbol of victory. A president demanded return of Confederate flags, Congress passed a resolution ordering return of the flags, Virginians even threatened suit to get their flag back. And the answer has been the same: No.
Minnesota stays firm:
A decade later — and 150 years after 80 percent of the First Minnesota Regiment died or was wounded at Gettysburg — Virginia’s governor asked to borrow the flag, Gov. Mark Dayton said. Again, the same refrain came from Minnesota.
“We declined that invitation. … It was taken in a battle with the cost of the blood of all these Minnesotans. It would be a sacrilege to return it to them. It’s something that was earned through the incredible courage and valor of the men who gave their lives and risked their lives to obtain it,” Dayton said. “As far as I’m concerned it is a closed subject.”
The flag, still bloodstained according to some reports, is housed at the Minnesota Historical Society. If Minnesota’s history predicts its future, there it will remain.
Spend the day with the gifts you’re given. We still have the legacy of Nina Simone, the paintings of Van Gogh, and the curious, excited looks of children watching an eclipse. We need to take days to remember this because each one of us may be called to put our bodies on the line for justice in these days when white supremacists are enabled by a President and threaten our brothers and sisters. Listen to Valerie Kuar (above) talk about about how perceived darkness may not be the end of life but the darkness of the womb before new life sees the light. I think she’s got it right. This can be the Rebirth of our Nation. NAZIS and White Supremacists and ChristoFascists will not still the light of the future from any of our children if we put ourselves on the line for what is right and what should be the future of these United States.
You can find hope in all the right places and in all the wrong places if you try.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today ?
Lazy Saturday Reads
Posted: August 19, 2017 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics 18 Comments
Good Morning!!
I’m completely exhausted–mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually. I’m sure I’m not alone. Trump in the White House is utterly toxic. The poison he spews every day is so draining. How will it end? Will he ever go away and leave us alone?
He’s certainly isolated now. All but one of his original top advisers in the photo at the top of this post is now gone. Only Pence remains. Domenico Montenaro at NPR: What Trump’s Increasing Isolation Could Mean For His Presidency.
There has been a pattern — that if anyone gets too much attention for being influential, they become a target. Remember when U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley was getting lots of positive attention for how she spoke out on Syria?
“Does everybody like Nikki, because if you don’t—,” Trump said. “Otherwise she can easily be replaced, right?”
And there was Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, who stood awkwardly behind the president when he spoke at the Boy Scouts Jamboree last month, when Trump said: “By the way, are you going to get the votes? He better get them. He better get them. Oh, he better. Otherwise I’ll say, ‘Tom, you’re fired.’ I’ll get somebody.”
(Nevermind that Price had relatively little influence in getting those votes.)
Two days later, the health care bill failed. Price is still on the job, but in an effort to separate himself from Congress and hold onto his base, Trump began to lash out at congressional Republicans, especially Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell.
Translation: Trump is all about Trump.
The ousters at the White House, taken together, amount to a Trump purge. It’s the president asserting himself and saying no one is above No. 1.
A little more:
Top officials who are gone, via NYT
What’s left in the White House is Trump’s family, “globalists,” like former Goldman Sachs executive Gary Cohn, and the generals, including Chief of Staff John Kelly, who has orchestrated much of the shakeup. The latter two are arguably part of “the swamp” his base so detests.
But that’s not to say any of them become ascendant for an extended period. Kelly has already been on the cover of Time, hailed as “Trump’s Last Best Hope.” What happens if the magazine credits him for righting the ship, or the narrative becomes that the Pentagon is dictating policy?
The narrative that really seems to irk President Trump is one of the “adults” leading him around like he’s a “child.” ….
Anything’s possible. Nothing is normal. So don’t be surprised if in another seven months, the country is looking at a completely new White House again — though Trump is running out of people who will take jobs in his administration.
Trump is runs the White House like an alcoholic father terrorizes his family. I can’t even begin to imagine what having him as a parent must have been like. No wonder his children are so soulless.
Two points of view on Bannon’s banishment:
The New York Times: Steve Bannon, Back on the Outside, Prepares His Enemies List.
Stephen K. Bannon has always been more comfortable when he was trying to tear down institutions — not work inside them.
With his return to Breitbart News, Mr. Bannon will be free to lead the kind of ferocious assault on the political establishment that he relishes, even if sometimes that means turning his wrath on the White House itself.
Hours after his ouster from the West Wing, he was named to his former position of executive chairman at the hard-charging right-wing website and led its evening editorial meeting. And Mr. Bannon appeared eager to move onto his next fight.
“In many ways, I think I can be more effective fighting from the outside for the agenda President Trump ran on,” he said Friday. “And anyone who stands in our way, we will go to war with.”
Among those already in Mr. Bannon’s sights: Speaker Paul D. Ryan; Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader; the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law, Jared Kushner; and Gary D. Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs who now directs the White House’s National Economic Council.
“The president was buoyed to election by capturing the hearts and minds of a populist, nationalist movement,” Alex Marlow, Breitbart’s editor in chief, said Friday evening. “A lot of it was anti-Wall Street, anti-corporatist, anti-establishment. And now we’re seeing that a lot of these guys remaining inside the White House are exactly the opposite of what we told you you were going to get.”
Sarah Kendzior at Fast Company: Steve Bannon May Be A Bigger Asset to Trump Outside The White House Than In It.
In 2016, Bannon described himself as a Leninist. When a Daily Beastreporter asked what that meant, Bannon replied: “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
That was Bannon’s goal before he became a federal employee, funded by U.S. tax dollars. But Bannon’s views did not change when he became Trump’s chief strategist. In his February speech to CPAC, Bannon said his objective was to “deconstruct the administrative state” and that many of the injurious incompetents who fill Trump’s cabinet–the EPA head who opposes environmental protections, the HUD secretary who opposes public housing–”were selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction.”
Bannon sought to destroy the United States as we know it from both from within the White House as Trump’s advisor, and from outside it, back when he was the editor of white supremacist outlet Breitbart. Bannon sought to build a movement, not serve our government. In many ways, he succeeded: his white nationalist views became sanctioned at the executive level, and the US government is chaotic, understaffed, and weaker on the global stagethan at any point this century.
What is essential to realize is that, despite reports of a feud, Trump shares much of Bannon’s dark outlook. Trump spent his business career eagerly anticipating both social and economic disasters. “I sort of hope that happens because then people like me would go in and buy,” Trump said of the housing crash in 2006. Before that, Trump spent decades exploiting the damaged economies of towns like Gary, Indiana and Atlantic City, leaving them as bad or worse off than when he arrived. In 2014, Trump openly longed for the U.S. to “go to total hell” and cited riots as necessary for true American greatness–words that should worry all of us as we head into this tense weekend. Over the past two years, Trump has rarely condemned his white supremacist supporters who attack ethnic and religious minorities; at one point, he offered to pay legal fees for violent fans.
Click on the link to read the rest.
There is a so-called “free speech” rally in Boston today. I hope it won’t be too ugly.
Wesley Lowery at the Washington Post: Thousands expected at Boston ‘free speech’ rally and counter-protest.
BOSTON – City officials expect a gathering of thousands of participants and counter-protesters on Boston Common on Saturday afternoon for a “free speech” rally set to include speeches from several far-right political figures – prompting fears that the event could turn violent.
More than 500 police officers will be on hand for the rally, slated from noon until 2 p.m., according to a permit granted earlier this week. The gathering comes just one week after a chaotic rally of far-right political groups including neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and Klan members in Charlottesville, Va. left dozens injured and one woman dead after a neo-Nazi plowed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters.
Organizers in Boston said today’s gathering is not in solidarity with white nationalists, but police have installed new surveillance cameras around Boston Common and have put restrictions on the rally – such as a ban on backpacks, sticks and other potential weapons – in hopes of preventing violence. Local activist groups have planned a massive counter-protest and march.
“We don’t want a repeat of what happened in Charlottesville,” Boston Police Commissioner William Evans said at a news conference on Friday. “Boston is too united. We have a city that doesn’t tolerate hatred and bigotry.”
Boston Herald: Ku Klux Klan to attend Boston rally.
Massachusetts members of the Ku Klux Klan reportedly are headed to Boston Common for the so-called Boston Free Speech Rally this Saturday, but a rally organizer said he doesn’t want the event “hijacked” by white supremacists.
“I know some of our members from the Springfield area are going,” said Thomas Robb, national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. “I’m assuming members in the Boston area are going.”
Robb did not provide details on who or how many members would attend the rally, but said they would be inconspicuous while supporting the rally.
“I don’t think they’re going to cause a disturbance,” Robb said, adding that Knights from different areas went to the Charlottesville rally. “Our members don’t stand out, they don’t walk around giving Nazi salutes, they might be your next door neighbor or Cub Scout leader.”
Now there’s a scary thought.
I saved tons of links for today, so I’ll give you the rest as headlines only.
The New Yorker: Carl Icahn’s Failed Raid on Washington.
Foreign Policy: Inside Trump’s Tortured Search for a Winning Strategy in Afghanistan.
Vanity Fair: Please God, Save Gary Cohn from Himself.
The Washington Post: Trump, first lady to skip Kennedy Center Honors over concerns of ‘political distraction.’
CNN: Sebastian Gorka’s PhD adviser: “I would not call him an expert in terrorism.”
The Washington Post: Here is the official résumé of the person Trump put in charge of federal housing in New York.
Palm Beach Post: Five more charities pull out of Mar-a-Lago events.
Buzzfeed: How Women In The KKK Were Instrumental To Its Rise.
CNN: The striking similarities between the KKK and Islamist jihadis.
Julia Ioffe at The Atlantic: The Road to Radicalism in Charlottesville.
This guy is speaking in Boston today. Berkeleyside: Kyle ‘Based Stickman’ Chapman charged with felony in connection to Berkeley rally.
Time: Student Who Attended Charlottesville White Supremacist Rally Leaves Boston University After Backlash.
Raw Story: ‘My life is over’: 21-year-old Charlottesville marcher whines over ‘outing’ by anti-fascist group.
Axios: When Confederate statues were erected throughout history.
What stories are you following today?
Friday Reads: Redecorating the Oval Office and America with that Bordello Mentality
Posted: August 18, 2017 Filed under: Mitt Romney, morning reads 41 Comments
Good Morning Sky Dancers!
I have one of those summer colds now. I can barely talk since my Thursday night lecture and my entire head feels like something is using ice picks to get out of it. The other headache I now have is what to do with the roof over the newer edition to the house. It has to be replaced and there is structural damage to some of the beams that support the roof. I have an old school style roof which means no plywood. It means sold pine beams. Needless to say, little old semi-retired lady is not in the position to deal with all of this.
But, I still feel like I’m in better shape than our country right now. I really can’t imagine what the Oval Office is going to look like when Kremlin Caligula returns to it. I’m thinking he’ll bring that Persian Whore House motif with him and that all the soldiers that enter the door will think they’ve entered one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces. Same ethos. I’ve found what other people think the redecoration job will look like.
Let’s face it. Trump has no idea what it means to be President or American. He only knows what it means to be Donald Trump and that is a very dark, shallow, and insane person. It’s time for him to go.
The Economist has an op ed up to that end. They explain that “U-turns, self-regard and equivocation are not what it takes.” I think that’s way too kind but then, they’re British aren’t they?
Start with the ineptness. In last year’s presidential election Mr Trump campaigned against the political class to devastating effect. Yet this week he has bungled the simplest of political tests: finding a way to condemn Nazis. Having equivocated at his first press conference on Saturday, Mr Trump said what was needed on Monday and then undid all his good work on Tuesday—briefly uniting Fox News and Mother Jones in their criticism, surely a first. As business leaders started to resign en masse from his advisory panels (see article), the White House disbanded them. Mr Trump did, however, earn the endorsement of David Duke, a former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
The extreme right will stage more protests across America. Mr Trump has complicated the task of containing their marches and keeping the peace. The harm will spill over into the rest of his agenda, too. His latest press conference was supposed to be about his plans to improve America’s infrastructure, which will require the support of Democrats. He needlessly set back those efforts, as he has so often in the past. “Infrastructure week” in June was drowned out by an investigation into Russian meddling in the election—an investigation Mr Trump helped bring about by firing the director of the FBI in a fit of pique. Likewise, repealing Obamacare collapsed partly because he lacked the knowledge and charisma to win over rebel Republicans. He reacted to that setback by belittling the leader of the Senate Republicans, whose help he needs to pass legislation. So much for getting things done.
Mr Trump’s inept politics stem from a moral failure. Some counter-demonstrators were indeed violent, and Mr Trump could have included harsh words against them somewhere in his remarks. But to equate the protest and the counter-protest reveals his shallowness. Video footage shows marchers carrying fascist banners, waving torches, brandishing sticks and shields, chanting “Jews will not replace us”. Footage of the counter-demonstration mostly shows average citizens shouting down their opponents. And they were right to do so: white supremacists and neo-Nazis yearn for a society based on race, which America fought a world war to prevent. Mr Trump’s seemingly heartfelt defence of those marching to defend Confederate statues spoke to the degree to which white grievance and angry, sour nostalgia is part of his world view.
Trump’s infrastructure council has melted into nothing. His Arts Commission resigned en masse. After all, who wants to be associated with a NAZI apologist?
The remaining members of a presidential arts and humanities panel resigned on Friday in yet another sign of growing national protest of President Trump’s recent comments on the violence in Charlottesville.
Members of the President’s Committee are drawn from Broadway, Hollywood, and the broader arts and entertainment community and said in a letter to Trump that “Your words and actions push us all further away from the freedoms we are guaranteed.”
“Reproach and censure in the strongest possible terms are necessary following your support of the hate groups and terrorists who killed and injured fellow Americans in Charlottesville,” the commissioners wrote in a letter sent to the White House on Friday morning. “The false equivalencies you push cannot stand. The Administration’s refusal to quickly and unequivocally condemn the cancer of hatred only further emboldens those who wish America ill. We cannot sit idly by, the way that your West Wing advisors have, without speaking out against your words and actions.”
“Supremacy, discrimination, and vitriol are not American values,” they added. “Your values are not American values. We must be better than this. We are better than this. If this is not clear to you, then we call on you to resign your office, too.”
Republicans are beginning to get verbal about Trump’s lack of veracity and morality. Tennessee Senator Bob Corker’s response was muted but unusual in that he has been a Trump ally.
Sen. Bob Corker slammed President Donald Trump’s handling of the racially motivated protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, charging that the President “has not demonstrated he understands the character of this nation.”
The Tennessee Republican told reporters in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Thursday that he thinks there must be “radical changes” within the White House.
“The President has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful,” Corker said, according to a video posted by local news website Nooga.com.
“He has not demonstrated that he understands what has made this nation great and what it is today, and he’s got to demonstrate the characteristics of a president who understands that,” Corker added.
Corker is the latest Republican senator to criticize Trump’s handling of the Charlottesville protests. Trump attacked two other Republican senators — Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Jeff Flake of Arizona — on Twitter on Thursday morning over their criticisms of him
South Carolina Senator Scott–a Republican African American—gave an interview and spoke strongly against Trump’s words and actions.
In an interview with VICE News on Thursday, he condemned the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville and questioned the president’s moral authority following the tragedy. “I’m not going to defend the indefensible…[Trump’s] comments on Monday were strong. His comments on Tuesday started erasing the comments that were strong. What we want to see from our president is clarity and moral authority. And that moral authority is compromised when Tuesday happened. There’s no question about that.” Scott added that the president hasn’t reached out to him to discuss Charlottesville.
The potential consequences are severe in the extreme. Accordingly, the president must take remedial action in the extreme. He should address the American people, acknowledge that he was wrong, apologize. State forcefully and unequivocally that racists are 100% to blame for the murder and violence in Charlottesville. Testify that there is no conceivable comparison or moral equivalency between the Nazis–who brutally murdered millions of Jews and who hundreds of thousands of Americans gave their lives to defeat–and the counter-protestors who were outraged to see fools parading the Nazi flag, Nazi armband and Nazi salute. And once and for all, he must definitively repudiate the support of David Duke and his ilk and call for every American to banish racists and haters from any and every association.
Trump’s white supremacist supporters are likely to start acts of desperation as city as states rush to remove Confederate Monuments and public buildings and roads named after Confederate traitors. Calls are being made in Arlington, VA to rename Washington-Lee High School. Native-American lawmakers in Montana have asked for removal a a fountain in Helena memorializing the Lost Cause. WTF is Montana doing with a Confederate memorial? I can understand the the role the lost cause has in the south as it led to Jim Crow and forced segregation but MONTANA? There’s very little historical or educational use of a fountain in Helena. Pull the damn thing down!
A Confederate fountain in Helena, Mont., is set for removal from a city park after Native American lawmakers petitioned the city council, according to a report on Thursday.
The Helena City Commission directed City Manager Ron Alles to remove the granite fountain from a downtown park on Tuesday, although no official vote was held on the matter, the Independence Record reported.
Helena Mayor Jim Smith was previously opposed to removing the century-old memorial, until violence during a white supremacist rally protesting the removal of a Confederate statue in Virginia on Saturday claimed the life of a 32-year-old woman.
“I believe the time has come for the removal of the fountain,” Smith said, the Record reported.
The decision follows a number of other cities choosing to remove Confederate statues following the deadly Charlottesville rally, which was organized by white nationalist and white supremacist groups.
The ACLU has historically defended the right of all Americans to exercise Free Speech. They have now added a caveat. They will not defend any one that protests carrying firearms.
The American Civil Liberties Union took a new stance on firearms Thursday, announcing a change in policy that it would not represent hate groups who demonstrate with firearms.
ACLU executive director Anthony Romero told The Wall Street Journal that the group would have stricter screenings and take legal requests from white supremacist groups on a case-by-case basis.
“The events of Charlottesville require any judge, any police chief and any legal group to look at the facts of any white-supremacy protests with a much finer comb,” Romero told the Journal. “If a protest group insists, ‘No, we want to be able to carry loaded firearms,’ well, we don’t have to represent them. They can find someone else.”
The ACLU has come under fire after it filed a lawsuit in defense of the organizers who planned the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., after city officials denied them a permit to hold the rally around a statue of Robert E. Lee, which is set to be removed.
Everybody is still watching Bannon and his position in the White House. The news yesterday was about Bannon basically drunk dialing the press. He was probably among the many surprised to read himself in print. We’re still on Bannon Death Watch.
A decision is imminent from White House chief of staff John Kelly on whether Steve Bannon will keep his job, according to administration officials with knowledge of the situation:
- Bannon, who has run afoul of Trump in the past, is now suspected by the president of leaking about his West Wing colleagues. And Trump resents the publicity Bannon has been getting as mastermind of the campaign.
- Many West Wing officials are now asking “when,” not “if,” Bannon goes.
- Chief of Staff General John Kelly has been reviewing Bannon’s position.
- A recent deluge of media coverage of Bannon — including Bannon’s explosive conversation with the American Prospect — have not escaped either the president’s or Kelly’s attention.
One White House source twists the knife: “His departure may seem turbulent in the media, but inside it will be very smooth. He has no projects or responsibilities to hand off.”
It seems Kelly isn’t plugging the leaks. He’s not stopping the President from doing and saying vile things spontaneously in front of the press and–as always–on Twitter. How long before we get this hot mess moved out of the White House with his little sidekick Governor Enabler?
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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