Finally Friday Reads: We Shall Overcome

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

I never wanted a week to end so much in my life as this one. I’m not one for TV viewing because reality shows are not my thing.  There are very few movies and series that grab my attention, too.  This time of year, it’s good to have the weather channel.  You already know I’m a news junkie, but the news is more like a staged reality show than about actual events that matter. It also is getting too far into the Beltway gossip zone to be of any real use.  The media is on a few stories like flies on rice.  I searched for something beyond the Beltway jive talk today.

Today, Majority Leader Hakeem Jeffries put to rest a story at the Washington Post yesterday.   I would like to think this will stop all the headlines out there speculating when and if President Biden will give up his bid for his second term.

The other big story was the Republican National Convention, which looked more like a North Shore Klan rally than a convention.  The self-proclaimed ‘David Duke without the Baggage,’ Congressman Steven Scalise, even got a speaking spot. I questioned my affiliation with the Republican Party after the 1992 speech by Pat Buchannan.  After that, I registered as an Independent for quite a while.

[17] Mr. Clinton, however, has a different agenda.

[18] At its top is unrestricted abortion on demand. When the Irish-Catholic governor of Pennsylvania, Robert Casey, asked to say a few words on behalf of the 25 million unborn children destroyed since Roe v. Wade, Bob Casey was told there was no place for him at the podium at Bill Clinton’s convention, no room at the inn.

[19] Yet a militant leader of the homosexual rights movement could rise at that same convention and say: “Bill Clinton and Al Gore represent the most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket in history.” And so they do.

[20] Bill Clinton says he supports school choice – but only for state-run schools. Parents who send their children to Christian schools, or private schools, or Jewish schools, or Catholic schools need not apply.

[21] Elect me, and you get two for the price of one, Mr. Clinton says of his lawyer-spouse. And what does Hillary believe? Well, Hillary believes that 12-year-olds should have the right to sue their parents, and Hillary has compared marriage and the family as institutions to slavery and life on an Indian reservation.

[22] Well, speak for yourself, Hillary.

[23] This, my friends, is radical feminism. The agenda that Clinton & Clinton would impose on America – abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units – that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America needs. It is not the kind of change America wants. And it is not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s country.

[24] The President of the United States is also America’s commander-in-chief. He’s the man we authorize to send fathers and sons and brothers and friends into battle.

[25] George Bush was 17-years-old when they bombed Pearl Harbor. He left his high school graduation, he walked down to the recruiting office, and he signed up to become the youngest fighter pilot in the Pacific war. And Mr. Clinton? And Bill Clinton? When Bill Clinton’s time came in Vietnam, he sat up in a dormitory room in Oxford, England, and figured out how to dodge the draft.

That time I got to see both President HW Bush and President Bill Clinton together presenting aid to the city’s Universities on the Campus at UNO. I was sitting nearly up front and even had a nice chat with a secret service woman. Where did those days go? (December 7,2005)

Needless to say, I voted for Bill Clinton even though I had previously supported Bush against Reagan when he pulled that stunt about Welfare Queens.  If you haven’t read Josh Levin’s book  ‘The Queen’, you should.  Here’s an interview with him from PBS by Hari Sreenivasan from June 2019.  Reagan used a criminal who was an outlier to slur an entire group of women, as detailed in “The True Story Behind the ‘Welfare Queen’ Stereotype.”

• Hari Sreenivasan:

  Josh there’s this “welfare queen” moniker that’s been used really to demonize entire groups of people. You go through this entire book and take a dive not just into that phrase but really that it’s based on a real person. She was an outlier while at the same time becoming an icon for a whole category.

• Josh Levin:

  Yeah that’s exactly right. Her name was Linda Taylor and she was identified by the Chicago Tribune in 1974 as a person who had committed welfare fraud while driving fancy cars, including a Cadillac. And very quickly after that she was given the nickname the welfare queen. And it was a nickname and a stereotype that really very quickly blew up.

• Hari Sreenivasan:

  You know it was a Chicago paper that gave her that nickname but it’s really Ronald Reagan on the campaign trail that makes that phrase such a household idea. How did it get from the Chicago paper into his speeches?

• Josh Levin:

  One of his advisers had found a wire story about it and Reagan was looking for kind of outrageous stories about welfare because welfare reform had been one of his big accomplishments as governor of California. And it was also something that voters were outraged about in the mid 1970s increased welfare spending at a time when the economy was really poor. And this idea that there were welfare cheats out there was something that created outrage.

  Ronald Reagan Campaign Speech, 1976: In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record. She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veterans husbands. Her tax-free cash income, alone, has been running $150,000 a year.

• Josh Levin:

  He didn’t say the phrase “welfare queen” in his speeches he would talk about how there was this woman in Chicago who’d stolen as much as one hundred fifty thousand dollars in welfare money in a single year, which was an exaggerated sum. But there was such baggage attached to welfare at that point that I think the electorate really understood what he was saying and really knew what he was talking about. Welfare has been an effective talking point for a whole generation of politicians.

Me and the nuns at Congo Square protesting the caging of children and Donald’s family separation policy. (July 2,2017)

Now we have promises to deport and look up and one that is painted with the brush of  ‘illegal immigrant with brown skin.’  They’re also developing a scheme of citizenship that would deprive citizenship for all kinds of folks that would actually include Melania if the law passed.  This is from the page of  America’s Voice.

Selected immigration components of Project 2025 are below:

Mass Detention and Family Separation: Project 2025 paves the way for mass family separation by eliminating important benefits for unaccompanied children and transfers the care of unaccompanied minors from Health and Human Services to DHS to allow for large scale detention of young children. The proposal recommends weakening standards for migrant detention, calling for mass detention in temporary structures such as tents.

Attacks on Dreamers and Parents of US Citizens: Project 2025 calls for the elimination of family-based immigration and DACA.

Raid Schools Hospitals and Religious Zones: Project 2025 removes prohibitions on ICE acting in ‘sensitive zones’ thus allowing raids on schools, hospitals, and religious institutions.

Suspending Due Process: Project 2025 removes legal processes allowing immigrants a day in court by expanding the use of expedited deportations to the ‘fullest extent’ throughout the country. It also gives DHS the authority to declare a ‘mass migration event’ and enact anything to avert it (e.g. scrapping all Title 8 requirements and automatically expelling migrants). The proposal further undermines due legal processes by allowing immediate expulsion of migrants in the case of ‘loss of operational control’ or USCIS backlogs which is caused by consistent underfunding from Republican officials. Project 2025 would create a show-me-your-papers style mandate and require ICE to remove, arrest, and detain immigration violators anywhere in the country and without warrant, if possible. The plan authorizes local law enforcement to participate in border security actions and penalizes jurisdictions that do not comply. The project also plans to remove oversight authorities from ICE and classify all USCIS operations.

Use of the Military: Project 2025 encourages the use of the US military to crack down on peaceful migrants arriving at the border. The proposal also considers engaging in war with drug cartels in Mexico.

Attacks Legal Immigration: Project 2025 seeks to restrict legal immigration by barring certain groups or nationalities from accessing work and student visas, eliminates DACA, family-based immigration, TPS, and visas for victims of crime, reduces asylum and discounts gang and domestic violence as grounds.

Yup, I am photobombing my friends at the Women’s March (Jan.23, 2013). All the Donald Cult probably thinks I doth protest too much.

These kinds of things happen when White Christian Nationalists take over a party and embrace a criminal, narcissistic,  lying, and authoritarian leader.  We’ve gone from a B-movie Actor to a Reality Show Actor who sure does a good job at Crisis Acting, too.  I’ll rely on JJ to outline the absolute misogyny demanded by Project 2025.  My point is that the RNC this year was basically the showboat for Project 2025.  It was a festival of the Donald Cult wreaking racism, misogyny, and white Christian nationalism.  Plus, the Vice Presidential nominee is a self-loathing hillbilly.  His book is all about blaming poor people in Appalachia for the systemic problems they face.  This is from Aja Romano, who is writing for VOX. “Revisiting Hillbilly Elegy, the book that made J.D. Vance. The bestseller proves Trump’s VP pick has abiding disdain for absolutely everyone.”

Yet years on, Vance has undergone a transformation of a different sort, remolding himself from a fairly moderate professed conservative who once compared Trump to Hitler and wrote with disdain about the outer edges of the party into a would-be authoritarian.

That’s not to say Vance doesn’t have some nuanced and even appealing positions. His populist economic instincts are a running theme of Elegy, and today he makes deals across the aisle with Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren. But to understand his larger worldview, you have to look past his economic ideas to his social ideas — and to what Vance actually displays about himself throughout the book.

Perhaps readers in 2016 were eager to look past the book’s highly loaded subtext and overt classism, as the promise of a sympathetic conservative who could unlock Trumplandia for liberals was just too appealing. It also seems likely that readers loved the book because it confirmed all of the negative stereotypes they already held about country hicks. As a read on Vance himself, though, in the context of his subsequent embrace of Trump and far-right ideology, Hillbilly Elegy paints a portrait of a man obsessed with status — and brimming with contempt for just about everyone he meets.

Another one about J.D. This is from the Independent. “I’m from the same place as JD Vance, and there’s nothing to celebrate now that he’s Trump’s VP.  We are both Appalachians, with eerily similar working-class backgrounds which JD Vance wrote about in his bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy. Yet, says Skylar Baker-Jordan, our views — and our reactions to this attempted assassination — couldn’t be more different.”

Like so many millions of my fellow citizens, I watched in horror on Saturday as a would-be assassin came perilously close to murdering former president Donald Trump. This was not just an attack on him and those innocent people simply exercising their First Amendment right to attend a political rally. It was not just an attack on the Republican Party.

It was an attack on the very fabric of American democracy.

Political violence has become a norm in our divided and beleaguered nation. From the 2011 attack on Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords to the 2017 shooting of Republican Steve Scalise to the attack last year on Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, to this weekend’s horrific attack which left one of our fellow citizens dead, we are increasingly solving our differences not with ballots and votes, but bullets and violence.

Neither side in this cold civil war, now cataclysmically close to boiling point, can claim the moral high ground. Would that someone told my fellow Appalachian, JD Vance.

“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” the junior senator from Ohio tweeted last night following the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.

So the man they’re hailing as being just a good old boy is really just another elite enthralled by bigger elites. That’s what reality television has done with political reality.  It’s made an entire group of people believe that a staged, scripted, false narrative wrapped up in a box with reality printed on it must be true. Let me show you some data rather than speculation.  This is from Newsweek. This was published two days ago.  The data comes before that awful RNC ho-down.  “Donald Trump’s Chances of Winning Election Are Declining.”  This comes from who once was a candidate and has worked campaign since High School.  Don’t trust polls too far away from Election Day!

According to the tracker, Biden is favored to win in 534 out of 1,000 of FiveThirtyEight’s simulations of how the election could go, while Trump wins in 462. The poll also shows that the simulations indicate that Biden is on track for a three-point win.

The polling website said its forecast is based on a combination of polls and campaign “fundamentals,” such as economic conditions, state partisanship and incumbency.

It comes after a Presidential Voting Intention poll of 3,601 swing state voters by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, found that Trump’s margins over President Joe Biden have narrowed since June in two key states: Florida and North Carolina.

Trump previously defeated Biden in both states in 2020, while he held a six-point lead over Biden in Florida in a Redfield & Wilton Strategies poll from that June.

This craziness at The Daily Beast has me seething.  It’s written by Jake Lahut. “Trump’s Plan to Slam Dems for Their ‘Coup’ Against Biden: Campaign. No matter who may replace Biden, the Trump camp plans to attack Democrats for an unruly ouster of their nominee.”

However, he now only leads the current president by four points in Florida. The poll shows that 45 percent of participants plan to vote for Trump, compared to Biden’s 41 percent.

It is not the only recent poll to give Trump only a four-point lead in Florida. A June Fox News survey gave Trump 50 percent of the vote, compared to 46 percent for Biden.

You would think a few folks would be reading them just to notice the trend. But, nope. Not with a big dose of Potomac Fever going on.  So this one from The Daily Beast has me seething. It’s written by Jake Lahut.  “Trump’s Plan to Slam Dems for Their ‘Coup’ Against Biden: Campaign,  No matter who may replace Biden, the Trump camp plans to attack Democrats for an unruly ouster of their nominee.”  Notice how we get two for one here.

Donald Trump‘s campaign will attack the Democrats for conducting a “coup” if Joe Biden quits the presidential race, the GOP campaign co-chair told The Daily Beast on Thursday.

The former president’s campaign for president will try to throw the charge leveled at him over the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection back in Democrats’ faces, Chris LaCivita told The Daily Beast in an exclusive interview at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

“Here’s what’s fascinating about it,” LaCivita said as he mingled on the convention floor in Milwaukee. “You are watching a coup. Literally. In front of your eyes.”

LaCivita, the architect with Susie Wiles of Trump’s 2024 campaign, offered the first insight into how Republicans will deal with a new Democratic candidate as Biden appeared increasingly likely to accede to calls to step aside.

The attack as a “coup plotter” will be matched with a playbook that continues to attack Biden’s record especially if Biden is succeeded by his vice president, Kamala Harris.

The campaign will run the same strategy if Harris takes over, he said. Biden has already given Republicans too much fodder, he acknowledged. They will also demand that Biden step down as president if he won’t run. That would give them extra ammunition to attack Harris as a sitting president who benefited from a “coup.”

“It’s Joe Biden,” he added, even if the nominee will not, in fact, be Joe Biden, should he step aside.

And AOC says the quiet part out loud.  We knew this.  “AOC goes live on Instagram saying many who want Joe Biden to drop out of race also want to remove Kamala. ‘A lot of them are not just interested in removing the president. They are interested in removing the whole ticket,’ congresswoman says.” This is from the Independent.

New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on Instagram Live early on Friday morning to share her thoughts on Joe Biden’s floundering re-election campaign – and warning that many of those who want the President to drop out of the race, also want Vice President Kamala Harris off the ticket too.

“If you think that there is consensus among the people who want Joe Biden to leave … that they will support, Vice President Harris, you would be mistaken,” she told viewers.

She slammed her colleagues for giving anonymous quotes to the press, calling it “bull****” and urged those resigned to a loss to Donald Trump to give up their seats.

“My community does not have the option to lose,” she said.

“If they’re going to come out and say all their little things on background, off the record, but they’re not going to be fully honest, I’m going to be honest for them. I’m in these rooms. I see what they say in conversations,” the congresswoman said.

One last story that really shows what the ramping up of Wipipo privilege has done to our society.  This is from CNN. “‘Treated like a convict’: NFL legend Terrell Davis describes getting handcuffed on a plane near his kids after asking for ice.” This story is reported by Holly Yan.

Terrell Davis and his family were looking forward to vacationing in California when pro football Hall of Famer was handcuffed and removed from a United Airlines plane – for no apparent reason.

“I was stripped of my dignity. I was powerless. I couldn’t do anything,” the two-time Super Bowl champion told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday.

The incident happened Saturday at the end of a flight from Denver to Orange County, California. Davis, 51, was flying with his wife, two sons and daughter when one of the sons asked for a cup of ice during beverage service, Davis wrote on Instagram. A flight attendant “either didn’t hear or ignored his request and continued past our row,” the post read.

Terrell Davis and his family were looking forward to vacationing in California when pro football Hall of Famer was handcuffed and removed from a United Airlines plane – for no apparent reason.

“I was stripped of my dignity. I was powerless. I couldn’t do anything,” the two-time Super Bowl champion told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday.

The incident happened Saturday at the end of a flight from Denver to Orange County, California. Davis, 51, was flying with his wife, two sons and daughter when one of the sons asked for a cup of ice during beverage service, Davis wrote on Instagram. A flight attendant “either didn’t hear or ignored his request and continued past our row,” the post read.

We should really be careful. It is getting ugly out there.  But, if there is a protest of anything here in Orleans Parish, I will be there.  I will also vote.  I will also drag my neighbors to the voting booth if I have to.

We shall overcome.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Nothing reminds me of the worst stuff to come out of the 80s than Disco.  Nothing says cultural appropriation like three white guys from the Isle of Man morphing funk and black slang into a song that’s all about themselves!!!!!!  But it’s a good message to the pols and media that won’t settle down and do their damned jobs!