Lazy Caturday Reads: Tinderbox America
Posted: May 30, 2020 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Boogaloo movement, caturday, Covid-19, Donald Trump, George Floyd, Minneapolis, pandemic, police brutality, street cats, unemployment, violent protests, Wu Hongli 19 Comments
Good Morning!!
The photos in today’s post are by Chinese photographer Wu Hongli, who has photographed street cats across China and several other countries. Read more about him and his project at National Geographic.
This week the U.S. added 1968-style violent protests to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, and the growing madness of the monster in the White House who is doing his very best to make both of these crises so much worse.
Michelle Goldberg: America Is a Tinderbox. Scenes from a country in free fall.
The last two and a half months in America have felt like the opening montage in a dystopian film about a nation come undone. First the pandemic hit and hospitals in New York City were overwhelmed. The national economy froze and unemployment soared; one in four American workers has applied for unemployment benefits since March. Lines of cars stretched for miles at food banks. Heavily armed lockdown protesters demonstrated across the country; in Michigan, they forced the Capitol to close and legislators to cancel their session. Nationwide, at least 100,000 people died of a disease almost no one had heard of last year.
Then, this week, a Minneapolis police officer was filmed kneeling on the neck of a black man named George Floyd. As the life went out of him, Floyd pleaded that he couldn’t breathe, echoing the last words of Eric Garner, whose 2014 death at the hands of New York policemen helped catalyze the Black Lives Matter movement. Floyd’s death came only days after three Georgia men were arrested on charges of pursuing and killing a young black man, Ahmaud Arbery, whom they saw out running. A prosecutor had initially declined to charge the men on the grounds that their actions were legal under the state’s self-defense laws.
In Minneapolis protesters poured into the streets, where they met a far harsher police response than anything faced by the country’s gun-toting anti-lockdown activists. On Wednesday night, peaceful demonstrations turned into riots, and on Thursday Minnesota’s governor called in the National Guard.
For a moment, it seemed as if the blithe brutality of Floyd’s death might check the worst impulses of the president and his Blue Lives Matter supporters. The authorities were forced to act: All four of the policemen involved were fired, police chiefs across the country condemned them and William Barr’s Justice Department promised a federal investigation that would be a “top priority.” Even Donald Trump, who has encouraged police brutality in the past, described what happened to Floyd as a “very, very bad thing.”
But Trump can never allow himself to support human beings against authoritarian power.
But on Thursday night, after a county prosecutor said his office was still determining if the four policemen had committed a crime, the uprising in Minneapolis was reignited, and furious people burned a police precinct. (One of the officers was arrested and charged with third-degree murder on Friday.) On Twitter, an addled Trump threatened military violence against those he called “THUGS,” writing, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
Whether Trump knew it or not, he was quoting a racist phrase from the 1960s used by George Wallace, among others. The president later tried to tamp down outrage by saying he was just warning of danger — the Trump campaign has hoped, after all, to peel off some black voters from the Democrats — but his meaning was obvious enough. This is the same president who on Thursday tweeted out a video of a supporter saying, “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.”
The Trump presidency has been marked by shocking spasms of right-wing violence: the white nationalist riot in Charlottesville, Va., the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, the mass shooting targeting Latinos in El Paso. But even as the country has simmered and seethed, there hasn’t been widespread disorder. Now, though, we might be at the start of a long, hot summer of civil unrest.
It certainly looks that way.
Julie Pace at the Associated Press: Analysis: Trump fuels new tensions in moment of crisis.
Over 48 hours in America, the official death toll from the coronavirus pandemic topped 100,000, the number of people who filed for unemployment during the crisis soared past 40 million, and the streets of a major city erupted in flames after a handcuffed black man was killed by a white police officer.
It’s the kind of frenetic, fractured moment when national leaders are looked to for solutions and solace. President Donald Trump instead threw a rhetorical match into the tinderbox. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he declared ominously in a late-night tweet.
Trump’s words were so jarring that Twitter attached a warning to his post — as well as to an identical message from an official White House account — saying that the president of the United States was “glorifying violence.” It’s the first time the social media giant has taken such a step with any world leader, prompting new claims of bias from Trump and some of his conservative allies.
The episode encapsulated Trump’s approach to the presidency and to this time of national crisis, which has upended nearly every aspect of American life and put his November reelection prospects at risk. He’s latched on to personal grievances and cast himself as a victim, while making only occasional references to the staggering loss of life across the country. He’s willingly stoked partisan divisions over public health, and now racial divisions in the face of a death, rather than seeking opportunities to pull the nation together.
Read the rest at AP.
Matt Zapotosky and Isaac Stanley-Becker at The Washington Post: Gripped by disease, unemployment and outrage at the police, America plunges into crisis.
America’s persistent political dysfunction and racial inequality were laid bare this week, as the coronavirus death toll hit a tragic new milestone and as the country was served yet another reminder of how black people are killed by law enforcement in disproportionately high numbers. Together, the events present a grim tableau of a nation in crisis — one seared by violence against its citizens, plagued by a deadly disease that remains uncontained and rattled by a devastating blow to its economy.
“The threads of our civic life could start unraveling, because everybody’s living in a tinderbox,” said historian and Rice University professor Douglas Brinkley.
Barbara Ransby, a historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a longtime political activist, said the toll of the coronavirus outbreak made long-standing racial inequities newly stark. Then, images of police violence made those same disparities visceral.
“People are seething about all kinds of things,” said Ransby, the author of “Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century.” “There are major turning points and ruptures in history. . . . This is one of these moments, but we’ve not seen how it will fully play out.”
Read more at the WaPo.
This seems really ominous from James LaPorta at the Associated Press: Pentagon puts military police on alert to go to Minneapolis.
As unrest spread across dozens of American cities on Friday, the Pentagon took the rare step of ordering the Army to put several active-duty U.S. military police units on the ready to deploy to Minneapolis, where the police killing of George Floyd sparked the widespread protests.
Soldiers from Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Drum in New York have been ordered to be ready to deploy within four hours if called, according to three people with direct knowledge of the orders. Soldiers in Fort Carson, in Colorado, and Fort Riley in Kansas have been told to be ready within 24 hours. The people did not want their names used because they were not authorized to discuss the preparations.
The get-ready orders were sent verbally on Friday, after President Donald Trump asked Defense Secretary Mark Esper for military options to help quell the unrest in Minneapolis after protests descended into looting and arson in some parts of the city.
Trump made the request on a phone call from the Oval Office on Thursday night that included Esper, National Security Advisor Robert O’ Brien and several others. The president asked Esper for rapid deployment options if the Minneapolis protests continued to spiral out of control, according to one of the people, a senior Pentagon official who was on the call.
I’m not a lawyer, but I thought it was illegal for the U.S. military to police American citizens. More from the AP story:
The person said the military units would be deployed under the Insurrection Act of 1807, which was last used in 1992 during the riots in Los Angeles that followed the Rodney King trial.
“If this is where the president is headed response-wise, it would represent a significant escalation and a determination that the various state and local authorities are not up to the task of responding to the growing unrest,” said Brad Moss, a Washington D.C.-based attorney, who specializes in national security.
Members of the police units were on a 30-minute recall alert early Saturday, meaning they would have to return to their bases inside that time limit in preparation for deployment to Minneapolis inside of four hours. Units at Fort Drum are slated to head to Minneapolis first, according to the three people, including two Defense Department officials. Roughly 800 U.S. soldiers would deploy to the city if called.
One more and I’ll end this catalog of horrors. I read this post at bellingcat a couple of days ago, and Michelle Goldberg discusses it in her NYT op-ed quoted up top: The Boogaloo Movement Is Not What You Think.
As Minneapolis exploded over the death of a another black man at the hands of police, members of a weird political subculture weighed a response.
On the internet, meanwhile, a largely white, and far right movement publicly contended over what risks its members should take to support a black man killed by police.
Wu Hongli and his rescued cat
On the Facebook page, Big Igloo Bois, which at the time of writing had 30,637 followers, an administrator wrote of the protests, “If there was ever a time for bois to stand in solidarity with ALL free men and women in this country, it is now”.
They added, “This is not a race issue. For far too long we have allowed them to murder us in our homes, and in the streets. We need to stand with the people of Minneapolis. We need to support them in this protest against a system that allows police brutality to go unchecked.”
One commenter added, “I’m looking for fellow Minneapolis residents to join me in forming a private, Constitutionally-authorized militia to protect people from the MPD, which has killed too many people within the last two years.”
These exchanges offer a window into an extremely online update of the militia movement, which is gearing up for the northern summer. The “Boogaloo Bois” expect, even hope, that the warmer weather will bring armed confrontations with law enforcement, and will build momentum towards a new civil war in the United States.
Mostly, they’re not even hiding it. And for the last several months, their platform of choice has been Facebook.
Like many other novel extremist movements, the loose network of pro-gun shitposters trace their origins to 4chan. What coherence the movement has comes from their reverence for their newly-minted martyrs and a constellation of in-jokes and memes
The article describes how this subculture has used Facebook to advance its agenda. Facebook is aiding numerous violent right wing movements and actively enabling the campaign of Donald Trump. Read more at these links:
Zeynep Tufekci at The Atlantic: Trump Is Doing All of This for Zuckerberg.
John Stanton at The Daily Beast: Mark Zuckerberg Profits from Rage as Much as Donald Trump Does.
Donnie O’Sullivan at CNN Business: Mark Zuckerberg silent as Trump uses Facebook and Instagram to threaten ‘looting’ will lead to ‘shooting.’
That’s it for me. What do you think? What stories are you following today?
Friday Reads: Tin Soldiers and Trumperz Coming
Posted: May 29, 2020 Filed under: Black Lives Matter | Tags: Black Lives Matter 12 Comments
Good Day Sky Dancers!
Last night I watched Ali Velshi reporting from South Minneapolis where a fire was just beginning to take out a car and spread to a pawn shop. It eventually turned in to this: “Minneapolis police station torched amid George Floyd protest. I lived in Minneapolis awhile and I know the area well. It’s been shocking but not surprising which is the biggest theme of the Trumpist Regime to date.
I was 12 in 1968 when the family station wagon drove around The Paseo Avenue neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri, to get to my Grandfather’s rest home during the Holy Week Uprising. It was a bit of unique response because it didn’t happen the day that Chicago and LA lit up. It was a few days later. We had to skirt and skate that part of town.
The first signs of disorder in the streets of Kansas City was a stable student march, in response to the government failing to close schools across the city on April 9, the day of King’s funeral. This was seen as a lack of respect for King by the students.[1] The riot was sparked when Kansas City Police Department deployed tear gas to the student protesters when they staged their performance outside City Hall.[1][2]
The deployment of tear gas dispersed the protesters from the area, but other citizens of the city began to riot as a result of the Police action on the student protesters during a meeting with Mayor Ilus W. Davis. The resulting effects of the riot resulted in the arrest of over one hundred adults, and left five dead and at least twenty admitted to hospitals.[3]
I remember watching protest against the treatment of Black Americans on TV since the Early 1960s. I keep seeing that we continually take to the streets over the same damn thing including the clueless people that don’t understand how after decades of seeing nothing much happen, the protests eventually turn angry.
The protests in Ferguson seemed relatively tame in comparison but they were just another sign that we treat Black Americans horribly different in this country still. The Orange Snot Blob made a campaign theme of any one protesting taking the knee in a quiet silent protest. Well, now Derrick Chauvin took his knee to murder a Black Man in plain sight of cameras and citizens and Trumperz has the audacity to threaten the city and the state like that’s his role in this.
BB was in Harvard Square for protests against the war that later turned into riots at the same time. I also remember the riots in LA for the police beatings of Rodney King in 1992 but like most of us, I watched that from the safety of a couch in front of a TV . So, when BB described the morning news as a mix of 1968 and 1918 it seemed quite apropos.
I don’t know about you but I’ve just had enough of this …
“… some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses”
So, here’s some of the headlines today that seem a lot like history repeating itself …
A CNN crew has been arrested while covering Minneapolis protests, and the governor has apologized — Minnesota police arrest CNN team on live television — (CNN)A CNN crew was arrested by Minnesota state police Friday morning while giving a live television report in Minneapolis
The reporters were released this morning.
Jimenez could be seen holding his CNN badge while reporting, identifying himself as a reporter, and telling the officers the crew would move wherever officers needed them to.An officer gripped his arm as Jimenez talked, then put him in handcuffs.“We can move back to where you like. We are live on the air here. … Put us back where you want us. We are getting out of your way — wherever you want us (we’ll) get out of your way,” Jimenez said to police before he was led away.“We were just getting out of your way when you were advancing through the intersection,” Jimenez continued.
Fortunately, the Governor of Minnesota took umbrage with this and they were released. (Any one remember Dan Rather and Mike Wallace been roughed up on air during the 1968 Convention by Security Guards?)
So, the (via AP) “Governor acknowledges ‘abject failure’ in protest response” from Minnesota State Police backed up by Minnesota National Guard. (Hmmm, what memory does that drudge up sister and brother Old people?)
With smoke drifting over Minneapolis, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Friday acknowledged the “abject failure” of the response to this week’s violent protests and called for swift justice for police involved in the death of George Floyd, a handcuffed black man who pleaded for air as a white officer knelt on his neck.
Walz said the state would take over the response and that it’s time to show respect and dignity to those who are suffering.
“Minneapolis and St. Paul are on fire. The fire is still smoldering in our streets. The ashes are symbolic of decades and generations of pain, of anguish unheard,” Walz said, adding. “Now generations of pain is manifesting itself in front of the world — and the world is watching.”
Meanwhile, over in Louisville, Kentucky “7 shot in downtown Louisville at Breonna Taylor protest. Here’s what we know” from the Louisville Courier/Journal.
At least seven people were shot as hundreds of protesters in downtown Louisville gathered Thursday night to demand justice for Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old ER tech who was shot and killed by Louisville Metro Police in March.
Some shots were heard on scene just before 11:30 p.m., and a police spokeswoman confirmed the injuries at 1 a.m. in a statement. Two victims required surgery.
“There have been some arrests, but at this time we are not able to tell you how many as the situation is ongoing,” spokeswoman Alicia Smiley said in a statement.
Police officers did not fire their guns, Smiley said.
That city is also burning.
Courier Journal reporter Cameron Teague Robinson was on the scene at Jefferson and Sixth streets Thursday night when shots were fired at the protest over the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor in her home.
He said he was looking over to the police barricade before turning to find one of his fellow reporters when the shots started. He said he ran behind Metro Hall where some cops were stationed with guns.
“They weren’t trying to shoot anybody,” Teague Robinson said. “I think they knew people were running away, but they just (had) guns aimed, aimed up, yelling at people to leave and get out of there. So once I kind of ran into a cop with a gun, I kind of just kept running.”
His path took him beyond Fifth Street.
Here’s the latest on officer Derek Chauvin who is officer who suffocated George Floyd by keeping his knee on his throate even Floyd was subdued and clearly telling the office he was in distress. Chauvin has been taken into custody.
There is more information coming out on Chauvin and his victim daily. This is from The Grio: “George Floyd and officer Derek Chauvin worked together at nightclub in 2019.”
Maya Santamaria, the former owner of the El Nuevo Rodeo Club, says that she knows both men at the center of Minneapolis’ recent protests. How? She hired them both at her club in 2019, but she cannot recall if the two actually knew each other, according to KSTP-TB, an ABC local affiliate.
“Chauvin was our off-duty police for almost the entirety of the 17 years that we were open,” says Santamaria. “They were working together at the same time, it’s just that Chauvin worked outside and the security guards were inside.”
Chauvin’s earlier excessive abuse charges were handled by Amy Klobucher. This is also from The Grio.
George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis by the hands of a cop has created a furor and protests over police brutality. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar is now under scrutiny for failing to pursue charges against the officer involved when she was chief prosecutor.
Ex-Minneapolis police officer Derick Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes as he struggled to breathe on Monday. He and three other officers have since been fired but the incident with Floyd was not the first controversial one in his police jacket. Chauvin has at least 10 complaints of misconduct against him according to the database that registers complaints against police.
Klobuchar, Minnesota’s Democratic senator—and a possible vice presidential running mate to presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden has demanded a “complete and thorough” investigation into Floyd’s death.
Well, I’d say that’s all over.
Meanwhile, the Russian Potted Plant in the Oval office and Racist-in-Chief did exactly what you’d think he’d do. He race baited and stood with the Ku Klux Blue.
President Trump called the Minneapolis protesters “thugs” and implied looting demonstrators could be shot in two tweets posted early Friday morning, which Twitter later said violated its rules against promoting violence.
“I can’t stand back & watch this happen to a great American City,” the president wrote, adding that Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, must “get his act together and bring the City under control, or I will send in the National Guard & get the job done right.”
It was unclear if the president intended to send additional troops after Gov. Tim Walz activated the Minnesota National Guard to help restore order in the Twin Cities. But the president said he was prepared to have the federal government “assume control.”
“These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd,” Mr. Trump wrote of the demonstrators, “and I won’t let that happen.” He added, “Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
The tweet containing that quote was placed behind what Twitter called a “public interest notice,” which warned users that it “violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence” and required readers to take an extra step to read the president’s full comment.
Well… this is good by seeing that he’s actually tweeted 52.1 K tweets over time make me wonder if twitter troll is his full time job because he certainly is not presidenting.
So, I’m with Andrea Brown of the Houston Chronicle: “ Opinion: After George Floyd, I will not watch another video and witness another atrocity”.
The amount of death that I’ve seen is unnatural for a person my age. It would be easy to pass this statement off as a hazard of my job. I’m an educator in an area of town that’s been plagued by violence for years. I’ve wept at the loss of life of at least one student for six years straight. It’s much worse for the students I serve in the Third Ward. Death has turned many of them cold because they haven’t had the privilege of being shielded from the pain of violence in its many forms.
This is the same community that was home to George Floyd, a black man who was killed while in the custody of Minneapolis police. He was beloved by his community. Now, images of his lifeless body have traveled the world, sparking protests, tears, outrage and empty apologies. This is a cycle that continues to repeat itself. Each time it happens, it feels like a bandage being ripped off of a gaping wound. It never heals.
Enough! I’ve watched this play out since the early 1960s on the news … it’s way too much and we’ve done way too little to stop it.
The institutions of the United States of America should protect and serve all Americans equally and treat them all with respect and with the view of equality under the law. Police need to stop KILLING our Black Brothers and Sisters! NOW!!!!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Thursday Reads: Pink Houses For You And Me (Ain’t That America?)
Posted: May 28, 2020 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: 000 dead, 100, coronavirus, Covid-19, Donald Trump, first amendment, Pink Houses, social media, Twitter 23 Comments
By Richard Ernst Eurich
Good Morning!!
The fake “president” claims to love the Second Amendment, but he’s not so fond of the First Amendment–or, for that matter, the Constitution itself.
Trump is trying to take steps to shut down free speech.
Reuters: Trump executive order takes aim at social media firms: draft.
U.S. President Donald Trump is expected to order a review of a law that has long protected Twitter, Facebook and Alphabet’s Google from being responsible for the material posted by their users, according to a draft executive order and a source familiar with the situation.
News of the order comes after Trump threatened to shut down websites he accused of stifling conservative voices. It follows a dispute with Twitter after the company decided to tag Trump’s tweets about unsubstantiated claims of fraud in mail-in voting with a warning prompting readers to fact-check the posts.
The order, a draft copy of which was seen by Reuters, could change before it is finalized. On Wednesday, officials said Trump will sign an executive order on social media companies on Thursday. It was not, however, listed on Trump’s official schedule for Thursday released by the White House.
What’s in the draft order?
The executive order would call for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to propose and clarify regulations under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a federal law largely exempting online platforms from legal liability for the material their users post. Such changes could expose tech companies to more lawsuits.
The pink house, Newburyport, MA, by Melissa Abbott
The order asks the FCC to examine whether actions related to the editing of content by social media companies should potentially lead to the firms forfeiting their protections under section 230.
It requires the agency to look at whether a social media platform uses deceptive policies to moderate content and if its policies are inconsistent with its terms of service.
The draft order also states that the White House Office of Digital Strategy will re-establish a tool to help citizens report cases of online censorship. The tool will collect complaints of online censorship and submit them to the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
It requires the FTC to look into whether complaints violate the law, develop a report describing such complaints and make the report publicly available….
The draft order also requires the attorney general to establish a working group including state attorneys general that will examine the enforcement of state laws that prohibit online platforms from engaging in unfair and deceptive acts.
Congressional Republicans are helping out. The Hill: Republicans working on legislation to strip Twitter of federal liability protections.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) on Wednesday separately announced they were both working on legislation to strip Twitter of federal protections that ensure the company is not held liable for what is posted on its platform.
The lawmakers began work on legislation following Twitter’s decision to add warnings to two tweets by President Trump this week in which he railed against California’s decision to expand mail-in voting. Trump tweeted without evidence that mail-in voting could increase voter fraud.
Plum Island Pink, by Heather Karp
Both Hawley and Gaetz argued that Twitter’s decision to flag the tweets called its legal liability protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act into question. Section 230 protects social media platforms from facing lawsuits over what users post.
Hawley sent a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on Wednesday questioning why the platform should be given Section 230 protections and tweeted that he would soon introduce legislation to end “government giveaways” under the legal shield.
“If @Twitter wants to editorialize & comment on users’ posts, it should be divested of its special status under federal law (Section 230) & forced to play by same rules as all other publishers,” Hawley tweeted. “Fair is fair.”
Hawley questioned Dorsey on whether Twitter’s “fact check” was part of an effort to “target the President for political reasons” and raised concerns that Twitter fact-checkers were biased against Trump.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted yesterday that Twitter will continue to correct false information about elections that is posted to his platform.
From the Associated Press: Trump continues to claim broad powers he doesn’t have.
Threatening to shut down Twitter for flagging false content. Claiming he can “override” governors who dare to keep churches closed to congregants. Asserting the “absolute authority” to force states to reopen, even when local leaders say it’s too soon.
As he battles the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump has been claiming extraordinarily sweeping powers that legal scholars say the president simply doesn’t have. And he has repeatedly refused to spell out the legal basis for those powers….
First it was Trump’s assertion that he could force governors to reopen their economies before they felt ready. “When somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total,” he claimed.
Pink House, by Julia Kamenskikh
Trump soon dropped the threat, saying he would instead leave such decisions to the states. But he has revived the idea in recent days as he has tried to pressure governors to allow churches and other places of worship to hold in-person services, even where stay-at-home orders and other limits on large gatherings remain in effect.
Asked Tuesday what authority he had to enforce such a mandate, Trump was cagey.
“I can absolutely do it if I want to,” he said. “We have many different ways where I can override them and if I have to, I’ll do that.”
Trump simply doesn’t care about any constitutional limits on his powers. He will continue to push the limits and get away with more than any past president.
Trump “certainly does not have the power under any reasonable reading of the Constitution or federalism to order places of worship to open,” said Matthew Dallek, a historian at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management who specializes in the use of presidential power.
But Dallek said that just because Trump doesn’t have the authority to do most of the things he’s threatened, doesn’t mean he won’t, for instance, try to sign executive orders taking such action anyway — even if they are later struck down by the courts.
“What has limited Trump previously? Not very much. So I think he will do whatever seems to be in his best interest at any particular moment,” Dallek said.
Trump, he said, also could try to abuse his powers to leverage other instruments of government, from the Department of Justice to the IRS, to push for investigations or launch regulatory crackdowns to punish states, cities or companies. Trump also has showed he’s willing to exercise powers that modern presidents have largely avoided, including his recent purging of inspectors general.
Brian Klaas at The Washington Post: Why does Trump get away with everything?
In January 2016, Donald Trump said something unintentionally profound: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” We’ll hopefully never find out whether Trump really could get away with murder. But we now know he can at least falsely accuse someone of murder without triggering a political exodus.
Pink House, by Carol Bouville
This “Fifth Avenue problem” is a central puzzle of the Trump presidency. Somehow, Trump can tweet something that would destroy any other politician when he wakes up, and it’s forgotten by lunchtime.
Don’t believe me? In the last week, Trump didn’t just make a false accusation of murder. He also praised one of the United States’ most virulent anti-Semites as a man who bestowed “good bloodlines” on his descendants. He retweeted a man who called Hillary Clinton, the first woman to be a major-party candidate for president, a “skank.” Trump shared an image with Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to serve as House speaker, with duct tape over her mouth and then mocked her physical appearance. And he repeatedly fabricated lies about voter fraud.
If Joe Biden behaved like that, it would destroy his career. But when Trump does it, it has no significant impact on his support. His depravity is now just widely assumed. It’s baked in.
That presents a paradox: The last three years have felt like we’re collectively strapped into the world’s worst roller coaster — of endless scandals, tweets in search of reality and new lows for presidential conduct. Yet for all those disorienting twists and turns,and the seemingly endless plunge of presidential standards, Trump’s approval rating has remained pretty much the same.
Read the rest at the WaPo.
We passed a terrible milestone yesterday, and that is likely the reason for Trump’s attempts to distracts us with his wannabe dictator claims.
Meghan O’Rourke at The Atlantic: Grappling With a Terrible Milestone: One Hundred Thousand Dead.
That number—100,000 dead from the coronavirus—is hard to grasp. For those who have lost someone, the pandemic’s scope is not just a statistic; within the abstraction lies an intimately life-changing event. For the rest of us, it is a fact we must try to wrestle into perspective. One hundred thousand people is nearly the population of the city I now live in; it is a neighborhood’s worth of people in Brooklyn, my longtime home; it is perhaps 10 times the total number of people most of us will cross paths with in our entire lives. It is graveyard upon graveyard upon graveyard. It is mass burials at Hart Island, bodies stacked in refrigerated trucks outside hospitals and nursing homes. It is PTSD for the nurses and doctors in the hardest-hit areas. Mostly, it is the shocking echo that follows the loss of even one person: zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. A lament: O, O, O, O, O.
Please go read the whole essay at The Atlantic.
Melinda Saminski The Pink House in Cape May
Ed Pilkington at The Guardian: As 100,000 die, the virus lays bare America’s brutal fault lines – race, gender, poverty and broken politics.
A country that prides itself on its exceptionalism can now without ambiguity claim that title for its experience of the virus. The United States stands head and shoulders at the top of the world league table of confirmed cases, as well as the total number of deaths.
There will be much to analyse in coming years about how the US responded to this contagion, including how many lives have been lost needlessly as a result of Trump’s maverick response.
Already one lesson of the pandemic is clear: America’s deep and brutal fault lines – of race, partisanship, gender, poverty and misinformation – rendered the country ill-prepared to meet the challenges of this disease. The ravages of Covid-19 have revealed the deep cracks in the glittering facade of the richest and most powerful nation on Earth.
Head over to the Guardian and read the rest.
More stories to check out, links only:
The Washington Post: For a numbers-obsessed Trump, there’s one he has tried to ignore: 100,000 dead.
Tony Schwartz at Medium: The Psychopath in Chief.
NBC News: George Floyd protest turns deadly; Minneapolis mayor requests National Guard.
MPR News: Photos: Fires, looting devastate Minneapolis after George Floyd’s death.
The Washington Post: ‘This invokes a history of terror’: Central Park incident between white woman and black man is part of a fraught legacy.
The New York Times: Trump’s ‘Horrifying Lies’ About Lori Klausutis May Cross a Legal Line.
NBC News: Asymptomatic COVID-19 cases may be more common than suspected.
So . . . what else is happening? What stories are you following today?
Tuesday Reads
Posted: May 26, 2020 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: coronavirus, Covid-19, Donald Trump, Lake of the Ozarks, Massachusetts coronavirus response, Memorial Day crowds, second wave, Trump losing older voters 25 Comments
Good Morning!!
Massachusetts, along with other states, is slowly reopening its economy. The numbers of deaths from and positive tests for Covid-19 have been dropping here in recent days, but it’s not at all clear that we are safe from a second wave of the virus. From The Boston Globe: With reopening comes the threat of a second wave of COVID-19, scientists warn.
It could start in a half-empty restaurant or a Sunday morning church service, with a stray cough or a joyful hymn. Public health experts warn that without a vaccine or a heavy dose of caution, Massachusetts could easily be hit by a second wave of COVID-19 infections that rivals the first.
Such a wave could come in the fall or sooner, as restrictions ease and people return to traveling and spending time in crowded, closed-in spaces. And, experts say, if the state’s tools for tracking the virus’s spread are not up to snuff by then, a second wave could go undetected until it’s too late.
The state began reopening some stores and offices on Monday, the latest step in the long journey back to something resembling pre-pandemic life. But the road to normalcy may prove to be a two-way street.
Built into Governor Charlie Baker’s reopening plan is something epidemiologists caution is not just possible but perhaps even likely: a return to the severe lockdowns of April and most of May.
The state opened a nine-lane COVID-19 drive-thru testing center in Lawrence last week.JOHN TLUMACKI/GLOBE STAFF
What experts say:
“The virus may be with us for a good part of the next year,” said Barry Bloom, a professor and former dean of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “The public has to be prepared that there will be continuous monitoring of the numbers.”
Bloom said that reopening may not be a straight path toward a new normal. Rather, restrictions may ease in fits and starts — or even backtrack, with all or parts of the state periodically relapsing into total lockdown.
“If [the number of cases] gets to the point where they threaten again to be a giant peak and even overwhelm the hospitals,” he said, “the state and the cities are going to have to have some re-installation or re-imposition of constraints.”
From the very start of the coronavirus outbreak, those inside and outside of the scientific community have feared a second wave. History shows that several pandemics have returned with a vengeance after months of seeming calm. The Spanish flu of 1918 lasted two years. Its second peak was its deadliest.
Now, as Massachusetts reopens before it has fully left the first wave of infection behind, epidemiologists say fears of a second are well-founded.
“The chances are pretty high that we’re going to see the number of cases come back up” as the economy reopens, said Samuel Scarpino, a Northeastern University professor who specializes in infectious disease.
The question, Scarpino said, is just how much those case counts will rise.
Read more at the Globe.
Meanwhile, lots of Americans are acting as if there is no pandemic.
The Washington Post: ‘An international example of bad judgment’: Local officials stunned by raucous Memorial Day festivities.
At a flashy club in Houston, dozens splashed around the pool and sipped on drinks on the patio. In rural North Carolina, thousands packed the stands shoulder to shoulder at Ace Speedway on its opening night, where face masks were the exception. And in Daytona Beach, Fla., even after an event called “Orlando Invades Daytona” was canceled, hundreds still danced in the street and on top of cars near the boardwalk.
Lake of the Ozarks on Memorial Day
“It looks like there are two people out the sunroof throwing money,” the seemingly perplexed pilot of a police helicopter said over his radio, flying over the wild scene near the beach to get a closer look. “They’re clearly throwing cash at the crowd.”
The raucous events across the country over the holiday weekend led some local officials to sound the alarm Monday, warning that consequences could be dire if such behavior continued unchecked.
Some, like Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner (D), vowed to crack down on businesses failing to enforce capacity restrictions. Turner chastised the clubbers who may end up exposing responsible people “who chose to do the right thing” by staying home. In Missouri, viral images of pool parties at waterfront bars and yacht clubs in the Lake of the Ozarks even led St. Louis County officials to issue a travel advisory, calling the scenes an “international example of bad judgment.”
One Ozarks pool party at Backwater Jack’s featured live music under the theme “Zero Ducks Given,” while photos at another yacht club showed dozens of people crammed together beneath a sign that said, “Please practice social distancing.” On Monday, St. Louis County Executive Sam Page, who is also a physician, urged employers to question workers about their recent travels, and recommended a 14-day quarantine for anyone who flouted social distancing.
“This reckless behavior endangers countless people and risks setting us back substantially from the progress we have made in slowing the spread of COVID-19,” Page said in a statement announcing the travel advisory.
Not surprisingly, these “bad examples” happened in red states.
More from the WaPo: Memorial Day weekend parties and crowds spark warnings from public health officials.
Beaches, parks, restaurants and churches were open for recreational use in many states over the holiday weekend – with restrictions for social distancing that were not always followed.
As coronavirus cases in the United States crossed 1.6 million, people mobbed boardwalks and oceanfronts in Maryland, Georgia and Florida. Crowds were sometimes dense from Newport Beach, Calif., to the Tampa, Fla., area, where law enforcement started turning away beachgoers and closed full parking lots.
Flocks of people sans face coverings packed the beach at Indiana Dunes National Park. And “more than 100 partygoers packed into a swimming pool area at a club in Midtown Houston Saturday and flouted social distancing orders to maintain space or wear masks a day after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) eased restrictions on bars and restaurants,” our colleagues report.
Videos of a packed pool party in Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri went viral online.
Read more and see photos at the link above.
Slightly different behavior at a Rhode Island beach.
Trump spent the long weekend playing golf and sending out vile tweets, and there has been some pushback in the media, as Dakinikat reported yesterday. Now the husband of a long-dead woman Trump tweeted about is fighting back and asking Twitter for some common decency.
Kara Swisher at The New York Times: Twitter Must Cleanse the Trump Stain.
“Please delete those tweets,” the widower begged in a letter last week to Twitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey. “My wife deserves better.”
Yes, Twitter, Lori Klausutis certainly does deserve better, nearly two decades after she died in a tragic accident that has morphed into a macabre and continuing nightmare for her husband, Timothy Klausutis.
The boogeyman plunging him and the family of his late wife into the very worst of memory holes is a conspiracy-theory-loving, twitchy-fingered and often shameless tweeter who also happens to be the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump.
“President Trump on Tuesday tweeted to his nearly 80 million followers alluding to the repeatedly debunked falsehood that my wife was murdered by her boss, former U.S. Rep. Joe Scarborough. The son of the president followed and more directly attacked my wife by tweeting to his followers as the means of spreading this vicious lie,” wrote Mr. Klausutis, in a letter sent to Mr. Dorsey on Thursday that I obtained over the weekend.
“I’m asking you to intervene in this instance because the president of the United States has taken something that does not belong to him — the memory of my dead wife — and perverted it for perceived political gain.” (You can read the letter in full here.)
Mr. Klausutis deserves an answer from Mr. Dorsey, who has the unenviable task of sorting out what is perhaps unsortable, which is to say, the ugly heart of Twitter’s most famous customer. While sources close to the company said executives had been trying to figure out what to do over the weekend, the company has at this writing been silent about this latest controversy involving Mr. Trump’s appalling and rule-breaking Twitter habit.
Trump tweeted about this conspiracy theory again this morning. You can go to his timeline to see the tweets if you’re interested.
It’s beginning to look like Trump is losing older voters because of his catastrophic failure to deal with the pandemic.
The Washington Post: Trump’s poor handling of the crisis may lose him the GOP’s most reliable voters.
One of the most durable political assets that Republicans have enjoyed throughout the 21st century is their edge among Americans 65 and older, who tend to turn out at the polls more reliably than any other group.
But with President Trump’s inept and erratic handling of the novel coronavirus pandemic, he is rapidly losing support among the age group most vulnerable to its ravages — which is a big warning sign to Republicans as they look to the fall. Trump has also been showing slippage in support among the next-oldest cohort, those 55 and older.
The shift has been showing up in a string of recent polls, reportedly including those that have been conducted by Trump’s own campaign. One of the most striking is a survey of 44 battleground House districts done by Democratic pollster Geoff Garin during the second week of May.
In those districts, voters over 65 said they had supported Trump in 2016 by a 22-point margin — 58 percent to 36 percent.
But this year, those same respondents are practically evenly divided, with 47 percent saying they are planning to vote for the president and 43 percent expressing an intention to cast their ballots for former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee. That is an enormous net swing of 18 percentage points.
“They’re in real trouble if they can’t count on a strong showing with seniors,” said Garin, who did the survey for a client he declined to name. “Trump is blowing what had become an important Republican advantage.”
Also from the WaPo: In crucial Florida, some senior voters cast a skeptical eye toward Trump’s reelection.
Allen Lehner
Allen Lehner was a Republican until Donald Trump became his party’s nominee in 2016. The 74-year-old retiree says he couldn’t bring himself to vote for someone who lied, belittled others, walked out on his bills and mistreated women — but he also couldn’t bring himself to vote for Hillary Clinton. So he didn’t vote.
Trump has done nothing since to entice Lehner back.
Lehner, who now considers himself an independent, says he is frightened by the president’s lack of leadership and maturity amid the nation’s health and economic crisis. Several people in his gated community in Delray Beach, Fla., have gotten sick; at least one has died. He worries about his own health — he has an autoimmune disease — and also about his adult children, including a daughter who has gone back to work and a son whose pay has been cut.
He plans to vote for Joe Biden in November.
“Regardless of what they say about his senior moments, I think he would be good and take good care of the country,” said Lehner, who owned furniture and fireplace-supply stores in central Pennsylvania before retiring to Florida.
How did you spend your Memorial Day? What stories are you following today?
Memorial Day Reads: Unfit for Duty
Posted: May 25, 2020 Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: Memorial Day 2020 22 Comments
Washington State’s National Cemetery (This is where my parents are buried. Dad served in WW2) This national cemetary is in Kent, King County, Washington, USA
Blessings to you on this Memorial Day!
We used to picnic at the gravesites of our greats while cleaning the area and planting flowers when I was a kid. Most of them were in Kansas and some in Missouri and some of them had paid the ultimate sacrifice to make all peoples free and our country whole. One of my favorite ones was in a very small town in Kansas and had a rather stunted version of a marble Egyptian obelisk and looked a bit like someone had the idea of copying the Washington Monument. It was stunted because some time between its erection and the time we showed up to rake the leaves and twigs from around it a tornado had torn it in half and a shorter version was the result. It was on a raised bit of land that was just right for small feet to circumambulate it many times.
I always like to meditate a bit on those who gave the ultimate sacrifice because it seems like a noble, and brave, and somewhat reckless thing to do. But, if you’ve ever visited Arlington or any of the national cemeteries you can see the many headstones of those who do make that ultimate sacrifice as well as others–like my Dad–that signed on and survived–and are proud to be buried alongside their many comrades. One of the members of his flight crew is also buried in the same place as Dad and my mom.
This brings me to Cadet Bonespurs who is undoubtedly out golfing again in Virginia. You know, the Russian Potted Plant in the White House that tweets insane, ugly, mad things from atop his loo who some figured would make a great president. This headline is all too poignant today on the day we recognize those who made that ultimate sacrifice so we could keep our republic.
From WAPO and the Plum Line: “Can we stop pretending Trump is fit to be president?” Yes please!!! Can we just stop this now? Paul Waldman writes what I’ve been thinking for years now.
- With the death toll from covid-19 about to top 100,000, Trump has offered almost nothing in the way of tributes to the dead, sympathy for their families, or acknowledgement of our national mourning. By all accounts he is barely bothering to manage his administration’s response to the pandemic, preferring to focus on cheerleading for an economic recovery he says is on its way, even as he feeds conspiracy theories about the death toll being inflated. This weekend, he went golfing.
- In a Twitter spasm on Saturday and Sunday, Trump retweeted mockery of former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s weight and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) looks, along with a tweet calling Hillary Clinton a “skank.”
- Eager to start a new culture war flare-up, he urged churches to open and gather parishioners in a room to breathe the same air, threatening that he would “override” governors whose shutdown orders still forbade such gatherings. The president has no such power.
- He all but accused talk show host Joe Scarborough of murdering a young woman who died in 2001 in the then-congressman’s district office, bringing untold torture to her family from the conspiracy theorists who will respond to his accusation.
- He has repeatedly insisted that the upcoming election is being “rigged” because states run by both Republicans and Democrats are making it easier to vote by mail, seeking to delegitimize a vote that has yet to occur, despite the substantial evidence that mail voting advantages neither party.
The truth is that Trump is not much more despicable of a human being than he has always been; it’s just that standard Trumpian behavior becomes more horrifying when it occurs during an ongoing national crisis. It is reality that changed around him, and he was incapable of responding to it.
Just go read it all. The death toll from this Pandemic has surpassed the number of dead from the Vietnam War. Please, can we get some one competent in before it surpasses that of many more of our wars.
Also from WAPO and Anne Gearin: “On weekend dedicated to war dead, Trump tweets insults, promotes baseless claims and plays golf”.
As the death toll in the coronavirus pandemic neared 100,000 Americans this Memorial Day weekend, President Trump derided and insulted perceived enemies and promoted a baseless conspiracy theory, in between rounds of golf.
In a flurry of tweets and retweets Saturday and Sunday, Trump mocked former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s weight, ridiculed the looks of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and called former Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton a “skank.”
He revived long-debunked speculation that a television host with whom Trump has feuded may have killed a woman and asserted without evidence that mail-in voting routinely produces ballot stuffing. He made little mention of the sacrifice Americans honor on Memorial Day or the grim toll of the virus.
In fact, Trump’s barrage of social media attacks stood in sharp contrast to a sober reality on a weekend for mourning military dead — the number of Americans whose lives have been claimed by the novel coronavirus has eclipsed the combined total of U.S. deaths from wars in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery.
Yes, there’s more today on this than maybe any day I can remember and BB and I discuss this frequently. Why the fuck do so many in the media still try to normalize this madman?
Annie Karni / New York Times:
Trump Promotes Posts From Racist and Sexist Twitter Feed
Peter Baker / New York Times:
Tom Nichols of The Atlantic writes this: “Donald Trump, the Most Unmanly President ” which seems a bit of an odd thing to write about on a day like today.
Not every working-class male voted for Trump, and not all of them have these traits, of course. And I do not present these beliefs and attitudes as uniformly virtuous in themselves. Some of these traditional masculine virtues have a dark side: Toughness and dominance become bullying and abuse; self-reliance becomes isolation; silence becomes internalized rage. Rather, I am noting that courage, honesty, respect, an economy of words, a bit of modesty, and a willingness to take responsibility are all virtues prized by the self-identified class of hard-working men, the stand-up guys, among whom I was raised.
And yet, many of these same men expect none of those characteristics from Trump, who is a vain, cowardly, lying, vulgar, jabbering blowhard. Put another way, as a question I have asked many of the men I know: Is Trump a man your father and grandfather would have respected?
Young visitors to Arlington
Frankly, Trump is a man from which I would hide both daughters and silverware . This essay that explores the white male psyche is just odd all over but go read it and let me know what you think. It has the classic trope of the white working class man that Joe Biden carries with him so choke back the scream and read it knowing that at least its criticism and maybe it will hit the audience who needs to see this in another man in order to stop voting for Trump. But, again, I’m just tired of idea of the noble working class man.
One was a 94-year-old veteran of World War II who was the first of his 11 brothers to enlist in the military. One was a Vietnam veteran who lost his leg overseas and was always touched when people thanked him for his service. Another was drafted into the military at 18 and was awarded a Purple Heart.
They are among the untold number of veterans who served and survived during times of war only to die in recent weeks from the coronavirus.
This year’s Memorial Day will pay tribute not only to those who died on the battlefield but more recent fallen soldiers. And in a reminder of the way coronavirus has transformed American lives and traditions, many of the usual Memorial Day gatherings have been either canceled or curtailed — mindful of the pandemic that has already killed more than 90,000 people in the U.S.
It’s making the situation even more painful for the relatives of those veterans who have died from the virus.
Robert Hopp was one of at least 79 residents of a veterans home in Paramus, New Jersey, to die from COVID-19, making the state-run facility one of the nation’s worst hot spots for the virus.
He served two and a half tours during the Vietnam War and received a Purple Heart after he was hit with enemy fire while in a helicopter. Everyone else on board the chopper died, but Hopp managed to climb into the pilot’s seat and fly to safety.
After being hospitalized recently for diabetic complications, his health deteriorated quickly and he died in April. He was 70 years old.
His family is at a loss about how they will mark the occasion.
I am thankful for all of those who gave their lives in battle to make our a country a more perfect union. I am saddened by the presence of a man in the white house so unfit for duty that he cannot take time away from twitter, politics, self aggrandizement, and golf to walk in one of the Virginia National Cemeteries and salute the sacrifice these folks made for our country. He doesn’t see how much he disgraces their memory and our lives every single day he breathes.
“Strict rules in place for visitors to national cemeteries for Memorial Day “in Hampton Virginia.
Families visiting Hampton National Cemetery and national cemeteries across the U.S. are asked to follow CDC, state, and local health and safety guidelines.
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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