Thursday Reads: Hurricane Devastates Florida, Georgia, as Trump Holds Another Hitler-Style Rally
Posted: October 11, 2018 Filed under: just because 61 Comments
Carl Brandien, Hurricane at Tarpon Bend, September 15, 1945
Good Morning!!
Hurricane Michael has weakened to a tropical storm and is moving up the coast after devastating parts of Florida and Georgia. We’re already getting rain from it and it looks like we’ll be getting several inches over today and tomorrow. It has been raining steadily here for weeks.
My mom heard from her brother in Tallahassee this morning. He has no power, but otherwise things are ok there except for tree damage. I just hope J.J. is okay. I emailed her this morning, but she might not have power either.
The Washington Post: Hurricane Michael live updates: Deadly Category 4 storm pummels Florida, moves north.
Hurricane Michael roared ashore Wednesday near the Florida Panhandle, one of the most intense hurricanes to ever hit the United States. With winds as high as 155 mph, the Category 4 storm slammed coastal towns in the area, leveling buildings and structures, flooding streets and leaving a trail of destruction. One veteran storm chaser said that Panama City was so badly damaged it looked like it had been struck by a bomb.
The storm had moved toward Georgia and Alabama by the evening, the first Category 3 hurricane to hit Georgia since 1898. Though its strength had decreased, the risk of damage from high winds and heavy rains remained across wide swaths of the Southeast….
Images of the destruction in coastal Florida towns circulated widely Wednesday night, shocking even seasoned storm chasers and weather watchers. Smith, the sheriff of Franklin County, a coastal patch south of Tallahassee, told CNN that the county was nearly isolated after most of the main roads were rendered impassable from flooding and downed trees.
“It’s bad,” he said. “We’ve been through hurricanes but never where we were completely cut off like this.”
Linda Albrecht, a councilwoman in Mexico Beach, spoke to the network about leaving her home with only a few essential objects.
“It feels like a nightmare,” she said.“ Looking at the pictures, I’m thinking there is not a house left in that town.”
Click over to the WaPo to see stunning photos and videos.
While Michael was kicking Florida’s ass, Trump was at one of his Hitler-style rallies in Erie, Pennsylvania. CBS News:
President Trump met with supporters and held a “Make America Great Again” rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Wednesday, hours after Hurricane Michael made landfall on the Florida Panhandle. This was Mr. Trump’s second rally this week, as he fulfills his promise to campaign for Republicans around the country ahead of the Nov. 6 midterm elections.
Mr. Trump had considered postponing his trip due to the hurricane, but told reporters that thousands were probably already lined up for the event in Pennsylvania, so he would go.
I’m sure no one would have minded much. I don’t know how those people aren’t bored out of their minds with Trump’s endless gloating over the 2016 election.
The president also recounted his 2016 in vivid detail, going through his wins state by state, including Pennsylvania. He said that Pennsylvania was like the “person who got away” for Republicans before he won the state.
Even Fox News is bored with the Hitler rallies. Politico: Trump, no longer ratings gold, loses his prime-time spot on Fox News.
President Donald Trump loves to brag about ratings, but he’s not getting them anymore.
As he’s ramped up his rally schedule ahead of the midterms, viewership numbers for the raucous prime-time events have been roughly similar to — sometimes dipping below — Fox News’ regular programming, and the network has recently stopped airing most evening events in full.
During three Trump rallies last week, Fox News showed clips and highlights from his speeches but stuck largely with its normal weekday prime-time programming. On Saturday, when “Fox Report Weekend” and “Justice with Judge Jeanine” would ordinarily air, the network showed Trump’s speech from Topeka, Kan., in full. But on Tuesday, a rally in Council Bluffs, Iowa, was particularly hard to find — it was not aired live on any major network, and even C-SPAN cut away for other news. And on Wednesday night, as Trump took the stage in Erie, Pa., at 7 p.m., Fox News stuck with its coverage of Hurricane Michael.
An op-ed in The New York Times reports on a new study of Trump’s voters and discovers they didn’t support him out of economic anxiety. Surprise surprise!
The 2016 election is almost two years behind us, but arguments over why Donald Trump won haven’t stopped. Because Mr. Trump drew support from white voters with less formal education — the “white working class” — many attributed his victory to Americans’ economic anxiety.
But this narrative has obscured the true nature of Mr. Trump’s coalition. On the whole, Trump voters were never extraordinarily economically distressed. And now the economically distressed are actually less likely to approve of Mr. Trump’s performance as president.
Traditional ways of measuring people’s views of the economy often suffer from partisan bias: People are more likely to say that the economy is doing better when their party controls the White House. For example, immediately after Mr. Trump’s election, and well before he could do anything to affect the economy, the percentage of Republicans who said the economy was getting better increased from 15 percent in October 2016 to 80 percent in February 2017, according to Gallup polls. Over the same time period, Democrats became less favorable about the economy.
To avoid this issue, we asked a set of different questions in the May 2018 Views of the Electorate Research Survey, a project of the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group. A sample of 6,000 Americans told us whether they had experienced a variety of negative financial events over the last year — including a drop in income, a job loss, or difficulty paying monthly bills. They also reported whether they had savings and felt financially prepared for the unexpected, as well as their overall feelings about their finances, job, income, savings and debt. Answers to these questions were only weakly associated with people’s identity as Democrats or Republicans and therefore better captured their true economic situation.
The results showed that minorities of Americans reported an acute economic struggle in the previous year. Eight percent said they or their spouse had lost a job. The percentage who had difficulty making a payment for their mortgage or other major expenses ranged between 7 and 14 percent.
Guess who reported the most “economic anxiety?”
In reality, it is people of color who report the most distress — a fact that is not surprising but stands out clearly in the new data. Hispanic-Americans without a college degree averaged 37 on this index and African-Americans without a college degree averaged 32. In fact, African-Americans with a college degree reported slightly more distress (30, on average) than whites without a college degree.
Read more at the link. I know no one here is surprised.
The biggest political story right now is the disappearance of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi after he entered the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, Turkey. Last night, the Washington Post reported that U.S. intelligence sources had picked up conversations between Saudi officials discussing a plan by Jared Kushner’s best buddy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to eliminate Khashoggi.
The crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, ordered an operation to lure Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia from his home in Virginia and then detain him, according to U.S. intelligence intercepts of Saudi officials discussing the plan.
The intelligence, described by U.S. officials familiar with it, is another piece of evidence implicating the Saudi regime in Khashoggi’s disappearance last week after he entered the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Turkish officials say that a Saudi security team lay in wait for the journalist and killed him.
Khashoggi was a prominent critic of the Saudi government and Mohammed in particular.
Why wasn’t Khashoggi warned? Did Trump and Kushner prevent such a warning?
A bipartisan group of Senators is pressuring Trump to take action against Saudi Arabia. CBS News:
The letter, written by Republican Sens. Bob Corker and Lindsey Graham and Democratic Sens. Bob Menendez and Patrick Leahy, called for Mr. Trump to investigate Khashoggi’s disappearance under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, which allows the president to impose sanctions on a person or country that has engaged in a human rights violation. The investigation is triggered by a letter to the president from the chair and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Corker and Menendez, respectively.
Once Mr. Trump has determined “whether a foreign person is responsible for an extrajudicial killing, torture, or other gross violation of internationally recognized human rights against an individual exercising freedom of expression,” according to the letter, he must report to the committee within 120 days with a decision on the imposition of retaliatory sanctions.
Corker spoke with reporters after the letter was released, and he emphasized that senators “specifically said it included the highest members of the regime” and could “absolutely” lead to U.S. sanctions targeting the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud.
According to James Hohmann at The Washington Post, Trump doesn’t want to restrict arms sales to the Saudis.
Trump suggested that he would oppose any push from Capitol Hill to restrict future arms sales to the longtime U.S. ally on the grounds it could cost Americans their jobs. “Well, I think that would be hurting us,” he told Fox. “We have jobs. We have a lot of things happening in this country. … Part of that is what we are doing with our defense systems and everybody is wanting them and, frankly, I think that would be a very, very tough pill to swallow for our country. … And, you know, they are always quick to jump that way.”
The president finished his answer by hedging, saying he wants to gather all the facts first. “The very talented people are involved. And we will get to the bottom of it,” Trump said. “I do hate to commit to what recourse we’d take … It’s just too early.”
— The exchange underscored the difficult balancing act facing Trump, as he struggles to navigate the fraught geopolitics of the Middle East while appearing responsive to growing bipartisan outrage about the possible murder of a 59-year-old dissident who has been living in Virginia on the eve of his planned wedding. Saudi Arabia is the largest oil exporter in the world, the biggest buyer of American weapons and the main counterweight to Iran. The Trump administration has built its entire strategy for the region, including a bid for peace between Israel and the Palestinians, around fostering close ties with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman.
We may not live in a dictatorship yet, but the “president” is acting like a tyrant anyway. Let’s hope the Democrats can at least take the House in the upcoming midterms so there will be some check on executive power.
What stories are you following today?
Tuesday Reads
Posted: October 9, 2018 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics 35 Comments
Reading in the Valley of Arconville, Theodore Robinson, c. 1887
Good Morning!!
Can’t we ever have a day without Trump drama? Axios: Scoop: Trump has accepted Nikki Haley’s resignation.
President Trump has accepted Nikki Haley’s resignation as UN Ambassador, according to two sources briefed on their conversation. The timing of her departure is still unclear, the president promised a “big announcement” with her at 10:30 a.m.
What we’re hearing: Haley discussed her resignation with Trump last week when she visited him at the White House, these sources said. Her news shocked a number of senior foreign policy officials in the Trump administration.
The “big announcement” will come while I’m working on this post. Is he going to move her to another post? Surely it can’t be for corruption. Trump doesn’t care about that does he?
https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1049617680104390657
Charleston Post and Courier: Watchdog wants investigation of Nikki Haley’s private jet flights to SC.
COLUMBIA — A federal government watchdog asked the State Department on Monday to investigate whether U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley broke any regulations by accepting seven flights on private jets from three South Carolina executives last year.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, also questioned how Haley values the flights on “luxury private aircraft,” most of which also included her husband, Michael.
By Dee Nickerson
The former South Carolina governor based the cost on first-class commercial airline tickets for the flights from New York to three South Carolina cities. Her total was $3,219.
But the four flights Haley took on a plane belonging to Jimmy Gibbs, chief executive of Gibbs International in Spartanburg, were alone worth up to $24,000 based on publicly reported operating costs of a private jet, CREW said.
“Ambassador Haley should have been conscious of the appearance concerns surrounding her acceptance of gifts of private luxury air travel at a time when her colleagues in the administration were making news with their own lavish air travel,” CREW wrote.
Commentators on MSNBC are saying she could be out because of conflicts with National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Hey, maybe she plans to primary Lindsey Graham. Graham has announced that he’s running in 2020 and has “zero interest” in being Attorney General.
So after the spectacle of Rod Rosenstein flying to Florida on Air Force One yesterday, and after the fake FBI background investigation of Brett Kavanaugh, and Rosenstein’s presence at the political rally Trump held for Kavanaugh last night, some of us are getting nervous about which side Rosenstein and FBI Director Chris Wray are really on in terms of the Russia investigation. Former FBI special agent Asha Rangappa wants us to calm down.
The New York Times: The Mueller Investigation Is Bigger Than Rod Rosenstein.
On Monday, President Trump said he has no plans to fire [Rosenstein], and many Americans may have breathed a sigh of relief. But while it’s true that his departure would have been cause for worry for those who seek to protect the independence and integrity of Mr. Mueller’s investigation, at this stage of the inquiry, even a replacement dead set on shutting it down would find such a maneuver nearly impossible to accomplish — and with each day that goes by, it becomes even harder.
Claire Atwood, 1943
To begin with, there is no such thing as a single “Russia investigation.” The F.B.I. pursues cases against individuals and organizations, not topics — this allows each case to have the flexibility to go in the direction the evidence leads, regardless of what happens with other, related cases. After the Sept. 11 attacks, for example, “Pentbomb” was the umbrella name for hundreds of discrete cases on the hijackers, their networks and Al Qaeda.
Further, existing cases spawn new cases. This is especially true of counterintelligence and conspiracy investigations, where every newly discovered contact or association of a subject already under investigation could form the basis of a new case. That’s why the current Russia investigation, originally referred to in the F.B.I. as “Crossfire Hurricane,” isn’t just a single case on Russian election meddling. Rather, at this stage it is a spider web of tens or dozens of cases on intelligence officers, their agents and individuals and organizations helping Russia that are investigated independently, cross-referencing pertinent information to other cases as necessary.
Nor is an investigation of this magnitude limited to a single office. Each case generates leads — threads of inquiry, like an interview or surveillance of an intelligence officer who might be traveling to another state — that span the country. When this happens, F.B.I. agents don’t hop on a plane. Rather, the “home” office for the case (called the “office of origin”) will send a lead to the field office with jurisdiction over that area.
Lady with a Cat – Nikolai Yaroshenko
Mr. Mueller’s investigation is more closely held than most, but its tentacles have already clearly spread to other field offices — consider the investigation against President Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, run out of the Southern District of New York office, or the plea deal of a California man, Richard Pinedo, who assisted Russia in executing its disinformation campaign on social media. Field offices are evaluated in part based on their success in following through on leads and making cases that result in arrests and convictions. No case agent worth their salt would remain quiet if their cases were closed in the face of a continuing threat. To “shut down” the investigation at this point would require not just a face-off with Mr. Mueller but also with special agents in charge of multiple field offices with a vested interest in seeing their responsibilities through, and possibly even a battle with the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray.
Read the rest at the NYT.
Well that nasty old Hillary Clinton has dared to speak up again, and the menfolks are in an uproar. This morning Lawrence Tribe tweeted that Clinton should “button it up” for the next month, and was surprised to get a backlash from people who love Hillary–didn’t he notice that she won the popular vote in 2016? I can’t post the tweet, because Tribe has now deleted it and others that criticized Clinton.
The Washington Post: Hillary Clinton says Trump turned Kavanaugh ceremony into a ‘political rally.’
“What was done last night in the White House was a political rally,” the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee said in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. “It further undermined the image and the integrity of the court, and that troubles me greatly. It saddens me because our judicial system has been viewed as one of the main pillars of our constitutional government.”
Clinton’s comments referred to a boisterous event in the East Room on Monday night that began with Trump apologizing to Kavanaugh “for the terrible pain and suffering” he said they were forced to endure during a chaotic confirmation process.
Trump later praised Kavanaugh’s fortitude while facing allegations of decades-old sexual misconduct and profusely thanked Republican senators who advocated for him, culminating in a 50-to-48 confirmation vote largely along party lines on Saturday.
Among those Trump recognized was Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who received resounding applause after the president asked him to stand up.
It was a disgusting partisan display, and Kavanaugh himself joined in with an embarrassing speech in which he thanked specific Republicans for putting him on the Court.
At the Guardian, Ian Samuel recommends fighting back by packing the Court: Kavanaugh will be on the US supreme court for life. Here’s how we fight back.
Brett Kavanaugh has been confirmed, and he will serve as a justice on the supreme court for the rest of his life. This event assures rightwing dominance of the court for a generation – or so we are told. After all, at 53, he is not even the youngest conservative: Justice Neil Gorsuch is 51. The chief justice, who has been there for more than a decade, is only 63. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, by contrast, is 85, and Justice Stephen Breyer is 80. We are in, it seems, for decades of misery for labor unions, voting rights, regulation of businesses and all the rest….
The ray of hope, if there is one, lies in contradiction of the first of those premises. Nothing in the constitution fixes the number of supreme court seats at nine. The size of the court is set by legislation, and has varied over time. We started with six. We’ve gone as high as 10 (when Abraham Lincoln was president, and Congress worried about a reactionary supreme court invalidating his wartime measures). Only recently, Republicans held the court to eight members for a year in the wake of Antonin Scalia’s death.
By Stan Moeller
So, then, the next time the left has some political power, why not just expand the size of the supreme court and add another handful of justices? Make Brett Kavanaugh a gifted and energetic member of a 10-to-5 minority. Don’t get mad, in other words: get even.
This is called “court-packing”. And although it enjoys a long and distinguished history in America, anyone who suggests it today will be met – swiftly – by serious and sober realists, all of whom who are eager to explain the reasons that this cannot possibly work.
Read the rest at The Guardian.
As Daknikat wrote yesterday, we’ve been seeing human rights violations increasing around the world lately, and the Trump administration seems unconcerned. Most recently, Saudi Arabia disappeared a journalist in Turkey and reportedly murdered him and dismembered the body; and China arrested the head of Interpol. Michelle Goldberg at The New York Times: Trump Gives Dictators the Green Light.
In September 2017, the prominent Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who had gone into exile, wrote a column in The Washington Post headlined, “Saudi Arabia Wasn’t Always This Repressive. Now It’s Unbearable.”
As of this writing, Khashoggi is thought to be dead. Last Tuesday, he went to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to pick up a document certifying his divorce so that he could remarry. He hasn’t been seen since. The Turkish government claims he was murdered inside.
“If the reports of Khashoggi’s murder are true, it’s so brazen, it’s so outlandish,” Sarah Margon, Washington director of Human Rights Watch, told me. Saudi Arabia has killed people before, and put dissidents and bloggers in prison. “But this is at a whole different level,” she said.
Ohan Krouthen, Three reading women in a summer landscape, 1908
It’s not surprising, however, that the Saudi government would think it could get away with it. The United States has long maintained a close strategic relationship with Saudi Arabia despite the kingdom’s abysmal human rights record, and tacit American support for its brutal war in Yemen began during Barack Obama’s administration. But there’s never been an American president as enthusiastically pro-Saudi as Trump.
Sure, he sees the country as an ally against Iran. But it’s more than that: Trump seems to feel a real affinity for the gaudy kleptocratic opulence of the country’s leaders. And his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, appears to view M.B.S. as a kindred spirit; both, after all, are rich millennials making world-altering decisions thanks to extreme nepotism.
Read the rest at the link. Be warned though, Goldberg sees Bernie Sanders as part of the solution.
One more before I turn the floor over to you: a mom tries to support Trump/Kavanaugh and in the process humiliates her son before the world. The Washington Post: ‘This is MY son’: Navy vet horrified as mom’s tweet miscasts him as #HimToo poster boy — and goes viral.
Pieter Hanson was in the middle of a marketing exam when his phone started blowing up, buzzing and buzzing until he was convinced something terrible had happened. Too anxious to focus, he whizzed through the rest of his test, handed it in to his University of Central Florida professor and bolted into the hallway to pull out his cellphone and find out what was going on.
Reading outdoors with cat above, by Marcus Stone, 1840-1921
Sure enough, something terrible had happened indeed: His mom accidentally turned him into a viral Twitter meme.
“This is MY son,” began his mom’s viral post, which featured a photograph of Hanson posing in his Navy uniform. “He graduated #1 in boot camp. He was awarded the USO award. He was #1 in A school. He is a gentleman who respects women. He won’t go on solo dates due to the current climate of false sexual accusations by radical feminists with an axe to grind. I VOTE. #HimToo.”
“Hey, Pieter, we want you to know that this is going on,” one friend texted him.
“We know this isn’t you,” said another.
It was all rather disorienting. The tweet, since deleted, had been widely shared, immediately casting Hanson as the poster boy for the #HimToo movement. The movement has more recently been seen by some as the antithesis of the #MeToo movement, suggesting in the wake of the Brett M. Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings that men are frequently victims of false sexual assault accusations and that many accusers are liars.
The problem: Hanson, a 32-year-old Navy veteran, doesn’t support this movement, considering himself an ally of the #MeToo movement, he told The Washington Post. Nor is he fearful of “solo dates.”
Wow. I wonder what Thanksgiving dinner will be like in that family?
So . . . what stories are you following today?
Monday Reads: Losing Ground but Finding Strength
Posted: October 8, 2018 Filed under: 2018 elections, abortion rights, Afternoon Reads, birth control, Black Lives Matter, black women's reproductive health, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Congress | Tags: Climate change 38 Comments
Coyote Buttes South. Photo: John Fowler
I keep fighting back the urge to sing “It’s the end of the world as we know it” even though it seems like that way on so many fronts. The most dreadful of all gaslighting tricks fills the airwaves. Brett Kavanaugh and his republican enablers are pretending that they are the victims of women’s hysteria while Dr. Ford can’t return to her home because of actual threats. Then, there are the rest of us. The people that aren’t white males or white male enablers. How many more rights can they strip?
We’re looking to a future of having our voting rights stripped, our right to self determine our access to health care removed, and the enabling of police to shoot unarmed black men while white men complain they can’t watch their football without seeing folks bending a knee to remind them of the injustice. We’re looking to a future of likely seeing a President put above the law even though his obstruction of justice, theft of public property, and cooperation with Russian agents is there for nearly all to see. We’re going to continue to watch children and babies thrown into tents in the middle of deserts and jail cells after being ripped away from their parents. We’re going to see the folks that need protection from our bad foreign policy flee to our borders only to be incarcerated for asking for refuge. We’re looking to losing spouses, jobs, and rights because of who we love and wish to marry. In each of us, there is all of us.
We have to take one of the Houses of Congress away from the Republicans to turn this around.
There are other things we have to turn around too and I fully admit that I’ve thrown myself at the wall a few too many times to rise again. And yet, like every one else, I must. We must.
Buffalo in Yellowstone National Park
The world stands on the brink of failure when it comes to holding global warming to moderate levels, and nations will need to take “unprecedented” actions to cut their carbon emissions over the next decade, according to a landmark report by the top scientific body studying climate change.
With global emissions showing few signs of slowing and the United States — the world’s second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide — rolling back a suite of Obama-era climate measures, the prospects for meeting the most ambitious goals of the 2015 Paris agreement look increasingly slim. To avoid racing past warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over preindustrial levels would require a “rapid and far-reaching” transformation of human civilization at a magnitude that has never happened before, the group found.
Gros Morne National Park
NYT: “Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040″
The report, issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to guide world leaders, describes a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040 — a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population.
The report “is quite a shock, and quite concerning,” said Bill Hare, an author of previous I.P.C.C. reports and a physicist with Climate Analytics, a nonprofit organization. “We were not aware of this just a few years ago.” The report was the first to be commissioned by world leaders under the Paris agreement, the 2015 pact by nations to fight global warming.
The authors found that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, the atmosphere will warm up by as much as 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above preindustrial levels by 2040, inundating coastlines and intensifying droughts and poverty. Previous work had focused on estimating the damage if average temperatures were to rise by a larger number, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), because that was the threshold scientists previously considered for the most severe effects of climate change.
The new report, however, shows that many of those effects will come much sooner, at the 2.7-degree mark.
Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming
The Guardian: “We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN”
At 2C extremely hot days, such as those experienced in the northern hemisphere this summer, would become more severe and common, increasing heat-related deaths and causing more forest fires.
But the greatest difference would be to nature. Insects, which are vital for pollination of crops, and plants are almost twice as likely to lose half their habitat at 2C compared with 1.5C. Corals would be 99% lost at the higher of the two temperatures, but more than 10% have a chance of surviving if the lower target is reached.
Sea-level rise would affect 10 million more people by 2100 if the half-degree extra warming brought a forecast 10cm additional pressure on coastlines. The number affected would increase substantially in the following centuries due to locked-in ice melt.
Oceans are already suffering from elevated acidity and lower levels of oxygen as a result of climate change. One model shows marine fisheries would lose 3m tonnes at 2C, twice the decline at 1.5C.
Sea ice-free summers in the Arctic, which is warming two to three times fast than the world average, would come once every 100 years at 1.5C, but every 10 years with half a degree more of global warming.
l Capitan looms over the Merced River in California’s Yosemite National Park.
Back to Judge Bad News and Worse Temperament … Sarah Kendzior writes this for Canada’s Globe and Mail: “Kavanaugh’s appointment isn’t a step backward. It’s a head-first plunge into an ugly past”.
The confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh was, at heart, a referendum on the integrity of U.S. institutions and of the impunity of elites – and the U.S. failed. Senators who purport to believe in rule of law vouched for a judge who sees himself as above it. Senators who purport to believe in democracy honoured a man who degrades it, and did so in deference to a man seemingly attempting to destroy it – President Trump.
Checks and balances are nearly gone. The executive branch was long ago corrupted; the independent legislature neutered by a GOP majority nakedly seeking one-party rule. Until now, the judiciary had been the strongest bulwark against autocracy, having struck down many of Mr. Trump’s unconstitutional executive orders during his first year. The Trump administration responded by packing the courts, appointing right-wing judgesto lifetime appointments and purging attorneys they view as opponents. Justice Kavanaugh is the final nail in that coffin.
This is now Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court of the United States, run on white male entitlement and alternative facts. Justice Kavanaugh is expected to act as Mr. Trump’s legal lackey, exonerating him regardless of the charge or the evidence. His appointment may not only end the efficacy of the Robert Mueller probe, but curtail other attempts to prosecute Mr. Trump or his aides on state charges, due to a case, Gamble v. The United States, that the Supreme Court is set to hear this term.
Autocrats rewrite the law so they are no longer breaking it, and they hire and fire accordingly. This is why I have been warning for years that Donald Trump, whose seemingly autocratic consolidation grows stronger every day, was akin to a criminal able to someday select his own judge or delay his own trial – and now he has. This is why a purge of the FBI was followed by a sham FBI investigation into Justice Kavanaugh, reminiscent of those of authoritarian states, with key witnesses and evidence ignored.
For the President, the confirmation of this judge is a hand-picked gift, but for ordinary Americans, he marks the end of truths we deemed self-evident. Justice Kavanaugh marks the imposition of a corrosive new reality. The Supreme Court is likely to roll back decades of hard-earned rights, particularly voting rights, civil rights and women’s rights.
Also, a lot of Trump’s thug buddies in thuggish countries are disappearing journalists and others.
The silence is showing exactly what kind of country we’ve become. We’re just another one of those ugly countries where the ruling class can’t possibly be bothered with human rights and hates the idea of a free press.
That’s all I can stomach today.
I’m trying to stay focused on the city around me because it’s kinda where I am right now and it appears the housing market has shifted against me in the last six months. It’s one of those signs that tells me that the economy is likely to get pretty ugly pretty fast. So, hug the ones around you, be thankful for what you have, and drag at least 10 people with you to the voting both in November.
It’s a matter of life and death for all of us.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Lazy Saturday Reads: I Have No Words
Posted: October 6, 2018 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics, Women's Rights | Tags: Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump, rape, sexual abuse 39 Comments
Judith Slaying Holofernes, Artemisia Gentileschi
Good Morning!!
I have no words today.
Thanks to Delphyne for this article at The Guardian: More savage than Caravaggio: the woman who took revenge in oil.
Two women are holding a man down on a bed. One presses her fist against his head, so he can’t raise it from the mattress, while her companion pins his torso in place. They are well-built with powerful arms but even so it takes their combined strength to keep their victim immobilised as one of them cuts through his throat with a gleaming sword. Blood spurts from deep red geysers as she saws. She won’t stop until his head is fully severed. Her victim’s eyes are wide open. He knows exactly what is happening to him.
The dying man is Holofernes, an enemy of the Israelites in the Old Testament, and the young woman beheading him is Judith, his divinely appointed assassin. Yet at the same time he is also an Italian painter called Agostino Tassi, while the woman with the sword is Artemisia Gentileschi, who painted this. It is, effectively, a self-portrait.
Susanna and the Elders, artemisia gentileschi
Two big, blood-drenched paintings of Judith and Holofernes by Gentileschi survive, one in the Capodimonte in Naples, the other in the Uffizi in Florence. They are almost identical except for small details – in Naples Judith’s dress is blue, in Florence yellow – as if this image was a nightmare she kept having, the final act to a tragedy endlessly replaying in her head.
“This is the ring you gave me and these are your promises!” yelled Gentileschi as she was tortured in a Rome courtroom in 1612. Ropes were wrapped around her fingers and pulled tight. The judge had advised moderate use of the sibille, as this torture was called, for she was after all 18. Across the court sat the man who had raped her. No one thought of torturing him. Defiantly, Gentileschi told him her thumbscrews were the wedding ring he’d promised. Again and again, she repeated that her testimony about the rape was reliable: “It is true, it is true, it is true, it is true.
Tassi was hired by Gentileschi’s father to give her painting lessons.
Tassi tricked his way into her room and started making unwanted offers of sex, she testified. “He then threw me on to the edge of the bed, pushing me with a hand on my breast, and he put a knee between my thighs to prevent me from closing them. Lifting my clothes, he placed a hand with a handkerchief on my mouth to keep me from screaming.”
She fought back. “I scratched his face,” she told the court, “and pulled his hair and, before he penetrated me again, I grasped his penis so tight that I even removed a piece of flesh.” But she couldn’t stop him. Afterwards, she rushed to a drawer and got out a knife. “I’d like to kill you with this knife because you have dishonoured me,” she shouted. He opened his coat and said: “Here I am.” Gentileschi threw the knife but he shielded himself. “Otherwise,” she said, “I might have killed him.”
1498 self portrait, artemisia gentileschi
Read the rest at The Guardian. It’s a story that still rings true today. Gentileschi’s rapist was found guilty but wasn’t punished, and she was tortured. It’s a story as old as time and as modern as today when a Senate dominated by old, white Republican will elevate an attempted rapist, sexual abuser, and right wing political activist to the highest court in the land.
Centuries after Gentileschi was tortured by the legal system of her day, women are still routinely raped, sexually abused, and even murdered in the name of male supremacy. And when they dare to speak about what was done to them, they are abused again by the “justice” system and betrayed by colluding women like Maine Senator Susan Collins.
What is wrong with these men, beginning with Donald Trump, pretender to the presidency? Because I’m feeling mean, I’m going to post this Twitter thread.
I’m not sure I agree with this analysis, but I have always seen Trump as effeminate. His vanity, his hair, his odd hand gestures, he’s so far from masculine. Is that why he hates and abuses women? Because he feels weak and inadequate? That’s what I suspect.
Here’s piece by Jaco at The St. Louis American: Brett Kavanaugh and Republican white maledom.
Like most 68-year-old white males, I’m disgusted that an ideologue and perjurer accused of sexual assault is about to become a U.S. Supreme Court Justice.
That sentence, of course is a lie. And the lie is in the first seven words. Most 68-year-old white males want Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. The respected Quinnipiac University poll shows 48 percent of Americans polled oppose Kavanaugh, while 42 percent support him. But 59 percent of white men want Kavanaugh, along with 45 percent of white women.
African Americans oppose Kavanaugh by 81 percent, while Hispanics dislike him by a 65 percent margin. In fact, the poll finds Kavanaugh is unpopular among every demographic group except white people over age 50, where the majority support him. Not co-incidentally, white people over age 50 vote in huge numbers and control the big money donations to the GOP.
Self-Portrait as a Lute Player, Artemisia Gentileschi
The entire Kavanaugh process has been one of the most blatant examples of minority rule since apartheid fell. Kavanaugh raged in self-pity during testimony. The White House limited the FBI “investigation” into sexual assault charges. Trump mocked Kavanaugh’s accuser. Majority Leader U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell sniffed that the GOP “won’t be intimidated” by sexual assault survivors. In every case, conservative white men snarled about how they, not Prof. Christine Blasey Ford or the rule of law, were the victims.
Charlie Cook, founder of the often-indispensable Cook Political Report, crunched the numbers and found that conservative Republican white males make up 18 percent of the American population. And yet they make up 100 percent of the GOP on the Senate Judiciary Committee, 100 percent of Republican leadership in the Senate, and 84 percent of the GOP Senate majority.
They’re determined to put a man with the judicial temperament of Bart Simpson on the bench for one simple reason. They want him as the fifth Supreme Court vote to erase every “liberal” decision of the last 60 years that has given expanded rights to blacks, Hispanics, women, gays, consumers, workers, and anyone else not part of conservative white maledom.
Click on the link to read the rest.
More recommended reads:
Yahoo News: Christine Blasey Ford’s Attorneys Reveal Statement From Corroborating Witness.
Statement from Debbie Ramirez (PDF)
The New York Times Editorial Board: The High Court Brought Low. Don’t let Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh have the last word about American justice.
Michael Tomasky at The New York Times: The Supreme Court’s Legitimacy Crisis.
Dahlia Lithwick and Susan Matthews: Investigation at Yale Law School.
Yahoo News: Lawsuits point to large trove of unreleased Kavanaugh White House documents.
The New York Times: House Democrat Promises Kavanaugh Investigation if Party Wins Control.
The Intercept: Sen. Susan Collins and Brett Kavanaugh are both in the Bush family inner circle. That helps explain her vote.
The New Yorker: The Tears of Brett Kavanaugh.
That’s all I have for now. Please take care of yourselves this weekend.
Friday Reads: In Other news, POS sticks to toilet paper and 30% of the population votes for 70% of the Senate
Posted: October 5, 2018 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: We're all just toilet paper under Trump's shoe 49 Comments
I’ve been blogging over 10 years and we’re up to another birthday for sky dancing. I’m looking at the bill from word press for the blog gee gaws and I keep thinking I’d go nuts without this community of good people. But as for adulting and blogging, I just cant today.
The state of our Nation is summed up by the piece of toilet paper stuck to the Russian’ Potted Plant’s shoe. He’s busy unraveling everything done by Obama and yet, he rides the crest of an economy left to him. He’ll own our economy next year and watch what happens.
He gleefully led his vindictive and cruel bunch of white ragers in another chant made to bully another woman. Mississippi Goddam. I expect more attacks on women, immigrant children, and the voting rights of POC as he drags his knuckles and more toilet paper from sea to shining sea in search of a group of scared angry, hyperreligious white people who will wave signs, adore him, and vote for his agenda of greed and disruption.
As per usual, he’s oblivious to his trail of shit and garbage.
In a week consumed by a fraught Supreme Court confirmation battle, you could probably use a little levity. To that end, on Thursday, a video of Trump boarding Air Force One with toilet paper apparently stuck to his shoe surfaced. And it’s everything you imagined.
Nothing to see here. A “hanging will not” always sticks to TP. But … here’s the Trump future …
Still the vile hubris and the gut choking debris …
The cloture vote passed but the confirmation vote is out there. It’s important to recognize that there were some folks that voted for the right thing.
Fifty-one senators voted for cloture, and 49 against. Among the notable votes, Republican Jeff Flake of Arizona voted yes, while Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, voted no. Only one Democrat, West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, voted for cloture.
The final vote on Kavanaugh is expected Saturday afternoon, assuming there are no snags, but it’s still unclear how a few key senators will vote
Heidi Heitkamp voted no and called it one of the most difficult votes she’d had ever cast. As BB mentioned yesterday, this could cost her the seat. She’s going to see it through.
Heitkamp added that she did think of the people of North Dakota when making her decision, “Countless North Dakotans and others close to me have since reached out and told me their stories of being raped or sexually assaulted—and expressed the same anguish and fear. I’m in awe of their courage, too,” she said. “Some of them reported their abuse at the time, but others said nothing until now. Survivors should be respected for having the strength to share what happened to them — even if a generation has since passed. They still feel the scars and suffer the trauma of abuse.”
Heitkamp also made sure to say that she was willing to cooperate and work with the president on any other Supreme Court candidate he nominates. “There are many extremely qualified candidates to serve on the Court. I’m ready to work with the President to confirm a nominee who is suited for the honor and distinction of serving this lifetime appointment,” she said.
Sources involved with Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation were nervous going into today’s 10:30 a.m. test vote, Jonathan Swan reports:
- Four senators are undecideds: Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).
A senior source involved in the process told Swan fairly late last night:
- “We’re going into this vote and we don’t have 50 right now.”
- “There’s been a lot of work that was done today, by members wading through this material. I don’t want to put my thumb on the scale. Things keep moving — so much, it feels like we’re walking on quicksand. So I don’t even want to say confidence or not confidence.”
“Sometimes you just have to vote,” the source added. “But what if … something f—g happens in the morning? This whole process has just been … so much drama, so many balls coming out at the last minute.”
At 7:30 last night, Kavanaugh gave his final argument in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, “I Am an Independent, Impartial Judge: Yes, I was emotional last Thursday. I hope everyone can understand I was there as a son, husband and dad.”
- “I might have been too emotional at times. I know that my tone was sharp, and I said a few things I should not have said.”
- Be smart: The piece looks wildly desperate. It’s a sign of how worried Team Kavanaugh is that a Supreme Court nominee felt he had to publish a last-minute op-ed to promise he’s not going to be emotional, but rather an independent, impartial Supreme Court justice.
As long as it can be prolonged, even if its for a Senator I’ve never heard of going back to the outback for his daughter’s wedding, more lawyers come out against him and we see more of this like today in WAPO: “We were Brett Kavanaugh’s drinking buddies. We don’t think he should be confirmed.”
We were college classmates and drinking buddies with Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh. In the past week, all three of us decided separately to respond to questions from the media regarding Brett’s honesty, or lack thereof. In each of our cases, it was his public statements during a Fox News TV interview and his sworn testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that prompted us to speak out.
We each asserted that Brett lied to the Senate by stating, under oath, that he never drank to the point of forgetting what he was doing. We said, unequivocally, that each of us, on numerous occasions, had seen Brett stumbling drunk to the point that it would be impossible for him to state with any degree of certainty that he remembered everything that he did when drunk.
and a few senators that keep trying to do the right thing but can’t seem to find it in them … with the exception of Heidi from North Dakota who decided that it’s was the only thing she could do to face herself in the mirror each day. Lisa Murkowski evidently listened to her heart and constituents and voted no also. This man would be disastrous for indigenous Alaskans.
For a moment we hoped that Colorado’s Cory Gardiner would man up. Gardiner’s office is one of the few senators still accepting phone calls though so it’s worth a shot.
The senator wants to finish reading the FBI report before making a decision, spokesman Casey Contres said. Gardner said he’d vote yes on Kavanaugh’s confirmation after meeting with the judge in July. However, that was before several women accused him of sexual misconduct.
Later Thursday, Politico reporter Burgess Everett tweeted that Gardner was sticking with Kavanaugh: “New statement: ‘Senator Gardner has been supportive of Judge Kavanaugh throughout the nomination. He had the opportunity to review the FBI report tonight. Nothing in the report changed his mind and he remains supportive of Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination.’”
Gardner’s office didn’t respond to a request to confirm whether the tweet was accurate.
Most of them are like silly Ben Sasse from Nebraska who talks a good game but goosesteps right down the path to plutocracy. Don’t even get me started on Flaky Jeff. Then, there is my Senator Kennedy who should just eat shit and die. The nonsense spewing from his mouth is downright embarrassing unless you’re a duckbilly from Monroe.
It kept getting worse: “With FBI report on Kavanaugh, John Kennedy says ‘put down the bong’ if you think concern is genuine”
It’s tough living in a state full of religious whackos and racists. I was born in one (Oklahoma), raised in two (Iowa and Nebraska), and the only thing I found that’s possible for me to do down here in Louisiana is stay in Orleans Parish or fear the white plague. The rest of the state is full of a few good people and a lot of really fucked up ones.
Sen. Kennedy: Kavanaugh ‘just didn’t do it’ Louisiana’s other U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, also a Republican, said he came to the same conclusion following a review of the FBI report.
White men do not seem to understand modern sexual assault laws passed in the 1970s. They have no apparent knowledge that outcry witnesses count more than any “he said”. They frighten us into silence no more. Any one lays a hand on me today. I out cry to my two friends and head to the police.
I’m done for the day. I’ll pop in to see what you say because we’re a safe space. I’m afraid the rest of the country isn’t. If you see a white man, run for your life unless he identifies himself as a friend of woman and people of color or announces he is or knows what it is to be a friend of Dorothy clearly. Hide your daughters, your mothers, your cousins, and your aunties away from the likes of Brent Kavanaugh and my Senator Kennedy. Women’s lives are increasing endangered.
We must continue to stand with each other and with the other targets of white patriarchy. We must value the lives and rights of all oppressed peoples more and learn to leave whatever whiteness buys us in the dust. We cannot enable this. We must fight along women of all colors and disenfranchised men for an equal presence and voice in our country and we must work to see if our white identities prevent us from doing so. We must listen more to women of color and establish their unique positions in the struggle for women’s equality.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Be excellent to each other.
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Mama Lopez
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