Posted: August 22, 2017 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics |
Woman in Black reading the newspaper, Derek Lubangakene
Good Morning!!
Sigh . . . Having Trump as “president” is so exhausting. His speech last night was essentially meaningless, most likely made in an effort to distract from Trump’s racist response to Charlottesville; but some in the media ate it up. Philip Rucker will probably regret this tweet soon.
We saw an ignorant moron read a speech written by someone else about a vague policy someone else designed, but suddenly he’s so “presidential.”
And this one:
Killing terrorists is a “doctrine?” Fred Kaplan at Slate: Killing Terrorists Is Not a Strategy.
President Donald Trump’s speech Monday night on Afghanistan—his first prime-time address since his speech to Congress in March—contained a few good lines but no real substance. He billed it as the outline of “our path forward in Afghanistan and South Asia,” “a new strategy,” and “a plan for victory”—but, in fact, it was none of the above….
Strategy is the application of force to achieve political aims. The first threetenets of Trump’s definition (“attacking … obliterating … crushing”) amount to pounding an area with firepower. The next two (halting the Taliban and stopping terrorist attacks) are political aims. But nowhere in the speech did Trump lay out how the pounding might lead to the winning of the war and the settling of the peace.
Behind the News, Karin Jurick
We have already been doing a lot of pounding in Afghanistan these past 16 years. Trump blamed the failures up until now on excessive micromanagement in Washington—too many rules about when, where, and how force can be used. He said he would lift those restrictions, let the commanders and the fighters in the field do what they think necessary. With this new freedom, victory will flow as freely as the lava from a freshly blown volcano.
There are several problems with this notion. First, Trump didn’t say how many more U.S. troops he would be sending (on the rationale that he won’t let the enemy know what’s coming), but officials have been talking about another 3,000 to 5,000 on top of the 8,000 who are stationed there now. At the peak of the fight in 2011, there were 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. A few thousand more soldiers and Marines in full fury can’t wreak more damage than a restrained force 10 times larger (and, at times, that larger force fought with little restraint). So, on one level, his “plan” is impractical.
Read the rest at Slate. It’s the best piece I’ve read so far on Trump’s useless speech. If you want more background on how Trump made his “decision,” check out these two articles.
The New York Times: Angry Trump Grilled His Generals About Troop Increase, Then Gave In.
The Washington Post: ‘It’s a hard problem’: Inside Trump’s decision to send more troops to Afghanistan.
Oh, and the number of troops Trump will send and when is a secret. How weird is that?
Of course he will likely obliterate whatever positive reaction he got from the speech tonight at his campaign rally in Phoenix. As of this morning, he’s still going even though they don’t want him there.
Buzzfeed: Trump Has Always Spoken His Mind In Arizona. That Could Be Risky After Charlottesville.
Tuesday’s border facility tour in Yuma and campaign rally in Phoenix — announced in the wake of his angry and defensive response to the white supremacist-fueled violence in Charlottesville, Virginia — brings the president back to the city he twice used to stabilize and grow his support during the tumultuous presidential campaign, and where he unveiled his campaign’s most articulated immigration policy rollout.
Le Journal du Matin, Hans Hassenteufel
Just a month after he announced his candidacy in June, 2015, Trump revved up 5,000 people over immigration in Phoenix, telling the largest crowd of his campaign up to that point that he would make sure they take their country back and that “Chinese leaders are much smarter than Obama and his bunch of clowns” on trade.
A year later, after sending mixed messages on his stance on legalizing undocumented immigrants, Trump returned to Phoenix just two weeks after bringing Bannon onto his campaign for what became known as his illegal immigration speech, where he listed “victims of the Obama-Clinton open borders policies” and said there would be “zero tolerance for criminal aliens.”
Trump now returns to Arizona to show who he is without Bannon behind the curtain. For his supporters who rallied to his cause over immigration in particular, it will be a revealing moment. For those worried after last week’s maligned Charlottesville response that the president is dwelling too much on his base to the exclusion of others, it is anxiety-inducing.
Read the rest at the link.
The Washington Post: Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton: Now is not the time for Trump to visit my city.
Nearly 50 years ago, moments after learning that an avowed racist had gunned down Martin Luther King Jr., a young presidential candidate took the stage in Indianapolis to break the news to a largely African American crowd.
“What we need in the United States is not division,” Sen. Robert F. Kennedy implored. “What we need in the United States is not hatred. What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom and compassion toward one another.”
The War News, Karl Witkowski
It was exactly what the grief-stricken crowd needed to hear. There were riots in many cities that night, but not in Indianapolis.
President Trump’s response to Charlottesville reminds us that the words and actions of our political leaders in the wake of tragic events matter.
America is hurting. And it is hurting largely because Trump has doused racial tensions with gasoline. With his planned visit to Phoenix on Tuesday, I fear the president may be looking to light a match.
That’s why I asked the president to delay his visit. It’s time to let cooler heads prevail and begin the healing process.
But there’s no sign that Trump gives a sh*t about dividing the nation with his racist rants.
On an even more serious note, why have so many U.S. ships been involved in collisions?
NBC News: USS John S. McCain: Remains Found of Some U.S. Sailors Missing in Warship Crash.
The remains of “some” American sailors have been found in sealed compartments aboard the USS John S. McCain, Adm. Scott Swift of the U.S. Pacific Command said Tuesday.
Swift said the Malaysian Navy, which has been involved in the search, has also located “potential” remains and they are working to confirm and identify those discovered.
The Navy vessel suffered significant damage to its hull when it was hit by the Alnic MC, a 30,000-ton chemical and oil tanker sailing under the Liberian flag.
The latest news, Carl Zewy
Ten sailors have been missing since the incident which occurred Monday. Swift did not identify who or how many people the remains belonged to.
“Its premature to say how many and what the status recovery of those bodies is,” he told reporters.
Trump has said nothing in reaction to this tragedy other (or previous ones) than a tweet of “thoughts and prayers.”
The Washington Post Editorial Board: Navy ships keep getting into accidents. Time to find out why.
FOR A state-of-the-art U.S. Navy destroyer to collide with a slow-moving tanker ship, there must be multiple failures of operations and personnel, from the enlisted seamen manning lookout posts to the captain of the ship. That it has happened twice in two months to the Asia-based 7th Fleet, with the tragic loss of up to 17 lives, suggests broader and deeper maladies in the fleet and perhaps in the Navy more generally.
About the only good thing that can be said following Monday’s crash of the USS John S. McCain with an oil tanker near Singapore, which left 10 sailors missing, is that senior commanders appear to recognize the severity of their problem. Navy Adm. John Richardson, the chief of naval operations, quickly ordered an “operational pause” and a fleetwide study of “operational tempo, performance, maintenance, equipment and personnel.” That review must be unsparing — and Congress should study its results when it considers defense spending plans.
An initial review by the Navy of the collision of the destroyer USS Fitzgerald off the coast of Japan in June suggested multiple personnel failures. To its credit, the service moved quickly to discipline a dozen sailors, including the two top officers and the top enlisted sailor, even while the investigation of the incident continues. Among other things, the Fitzgerald’s commander was not on the bridge when the crash occurred, though protocol requires the captain’s presence when other ships are passing nearby.
Like the Fitzgerald, the McCain was traveling in a heavily trafficked sea lane in darkness when the collision occurred, making human error more likely. But there is also reason to question whether the 7th Fleet has systemic problems. It has now recorded four major accidents this year, including the grounding of the cruiser USS Antietam on Jan. 31 in Tokyo Bay and the May 9 collision of the San Diego-based cruiser USS Lake Champlain with a fishing boat off the Korean Peninsula.
Could the collisions have been caused by computer hacking?
McClatchy: US Navy collisions stoke cyber threat concerns.
Girl reading, Georgios Jakobides
The Pentagon won’t yet say how the USS John S. McCain was rammed by an oil tanker near Singapore, but red flags are flying as the Navy’s decades-old reliance on electronic guidance systems increasing looks like another target of cyberattack.
The incident – the fourth involving a Seventh Fleet warship this year – occurred near the Strait of Malacca, a crowded 1.7-mile-wide waterway that connects the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea and accounts for roughly 25 percent of global shipping.
“When you are going through the Strait of Malacca, you can’t tell me that a Navy destroyer doesn’t have a full navigation team going with full lookouts on every wing and extra people on radar,” said Jeff Stutzman, chief intelligence officer at Wapack Labs, a New Boston, New Hampshire, cyber intelligence service.
“There’s something more than just human error going on because there would have been a lot of humans to be checks and balances,” said Stutzman, a former information warfare specialist in the Navy.
Read the rest at the link.
What else is happening? Please post your thoughts and links in the comment thread below.
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Posted: August 19, 2017 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics |
Good Morning!!
I’m completely exhausted–mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually. I’m sure I’m not alone. Trump in the White House is utterly toxic. The poison he spews every day is so draining. How will it end? Will he ever go away and leave us alone?
He’s certainly isolated now. All but one of his original top advisers in the photo at the top of this post is now gone. Only Pence remains. Domenico Montenaro at NPR: What Trump’s Increasing Isolation Could Mean For His Presidency.
There has been a pattern — that if anyone gets too much attention for being influential, they become a target. Remember when U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley was getting lots of positive attention for how she spoke out on Syria?
“Does everybody like Nikki, because if you don’t—,” Trump said. “Otherwise she can easily be replaced, right?”
And there was Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, who stood awkwardly behind the president when he spoke at the Boy Scouts Jamboree last month, when Trump said: “By the way, are you going to get the votes? He better get them. He better get them. Oh, he better. Otherwise I’ll say, ‘Tom, you’re fired.’ I’ll get somebody.”
(Nevermind that Price had relatively little influence in getting those votes.)
Two days later, the health care bill failed. Price is still on the job, but in an effort to separate himself from Congress and hold onto his base, Trump began to lash out at congressional Republicans, especially Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell.
Translation: Trump is all about Trump.
The ousters at the White House, taken together, amount to a Trump purge. It’s the president asserting himself and saying no one is above No. 1.
A little more:
Top officials who are gone, via NYT
What’s left in the White House is Trump’s family, “globalists,” like former Goldman Sachs executive Gary Cohn, and the generals, including Chief of Staff John Kelly, who has orchestrated much of the shakeup. The latter two are arguably part of “the swamp” his base so detests.
But that’s not to say any of them become ascendant for an extended period. Kelly has already been on the cover of Time, hailed as “Trump’s Last Best Hope.” What happens if the magazine credits him for righting the ship, or the narrative becomes that the Pentagon is dictating policy?
The narrative that really seems to irk President Trump is one of the “adults” leading him around like he’s a “child.” ….
Anything’s possible. Nothing is normal. So don’t be surprised if in another seven months, the country is looking at a completely new White House again — though Trump is running out of people who will take jobs in his administration.
Trump is runs the White House like an alcoholic father terrorizes his family. I can’t even begin to imagine what having him as a parent must have been like. No wonder his children are so soulless.
Two points of view on Bannon’s banishment:
The New York Times: Steve Bannon, Back on the Outside, Prepares His Enemies List.
Stephen K. Bannon has always been more comfortable when he was trying to tear down institutions — not work inside them.
With his return to Breitbart News, Mr. Bannon will be free to lead the kind of ferocious assault on the political establishment that he relishes, even if sometimes that means turning his wrath on the White House itself.
Hours after his ouster from the West Wing, he was named to his former position of executive chairman at the hard-charging right-wing website and led its evening editorial meeting. And Mr. Bannon appeared eager to move onto his next fight.
“In many ways, I think I can be more effective fighting from the outside for the agenda President Trump ran on,” he said Friday. “And anyone who stands in our way, we will go to war with.”
Among those already in Mr. Bannon’s sights: Speaker Paul D. Ryan; Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader; the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law, Jared Kushner; and Gary D. Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs who now directs the White House’s National Economic Council.
“The president was buoyed to election by capturing the hearts and minds of a populist, nationalist movement,” Alex Marlow, Breitbart’s editor in chief, said Friday evening. “A lot of it was anti-Wall Street, anti-corporatist, anti-establishment. And now we’re seeing that a lot of these guys remaining inside the White House are exactly the opposite of what we told you you were going to get.”
Sarah Kendzior at Fast Company: Steve Bannon May Be A Bigger Asset to Trump Outside The White House Than In It.
In 2016, Bannon described himself as a Leninist. When a Daily Beastreporter asked what that meant, Bannon replied: “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
That was Bannon’s goal before he became a federal employee, funded by U.S. tax dollars. But Bannon’s views did not change when he became Trump’s chief strategist. In his February speech to CPAC, Bannon said his objective was to “deconstruct the administrative state” and that many of the injurious incompetents who fill Trump’s cabinet–the EPA head who opposes environmental protections, the HUD secretary who opposes public housing–”were selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction.”
Bannon sought to destroy the United States as we know it from both from within the White House as Trump’s advisor, and from outside it, back when he was the editor of white supremacist outlet Breitbart. Bannon sought to build a movement, not serve our government. In many ways, he succeeded: his white nationalist views became sanctioned at the executive level, and the US government is chaotic, understaffed, and weaker on the global stagethan at any point this century.
What is essential to realize is that, despite reports of a feud, Trump shares much of Bannon’s dark outlook. Trump spent his business career eagerly anticipating both social and economic disasters. “I sort of hope that happens because then people like me would go in and buy,” Trump said of the housing crash in 2006. Before that, Trump spent decades exploiting the damaged economies of towns like Gary, Indiana and Atlantic City, leaving them as bad or worse off than when he arrived. In 2014, Trump openly longed for the U.S. to “go to total hell” and cited riots as necessary for true American greatness–words that should worry all of us as we head into this tense weekend. Over the past two years, Trump has rarely condemned his white supremacist supporters who attack ethnic and religious minorities; at one point, he offered to pay legal fees for violent fans.
Click on the link to read the rest.
There is a so-called “free speech” rally in Boston today. I hope it won’t be too ugly.
Wesley Lowery at the Washington Post: Thousands expected at Boston ‘free speech’ rally and counter-protest.
BOSTON – City officials expect a gathering of thousands of participants and counter-protesters on Boston Common on Saturday afternoon for a “free speech” rally set to include speeches from several far-right political figures – prompting fears that the event could turn violent.
More than 500 police officers will be on hand for the rally, slated from noon until 2 p.m., according to a permit granted earlier this week. The gathering comes just one week after a chaotic rally of far-right political groups including neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and Klan members in Charlottesville, Va. left dozens injured and one woman dead after a neo-Nazi plowed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters.
Organizers in Boston said today’s gathering is not in solidarity with white nationalists, but police have installed new surveillance cameras around Boston Common and have put restrictions on the rally – such as a ban on backpacks, sticks and other potential weapons – in hopes of preventing violence. Local activist groups have planned a massive counter-protest and march.
“We don’t want a repeat of what happened in Charlottesville,” Boston Police Commissioner William Evans said at a news conference on Friday. “Boston is too united. We have a city that doesn’t tolerate hatred and bigotry.”
Boston Herald: Ku Klux Klan to attend Boston rally.
Massachusetts members of the Ku Klux Klan reportedly are headed to Boston Common for the so-called Boston Free Speech Rally this Saturday, but a rally organizer said he doesn’t want the event “hijacked” by white supremacists.
“I know some of our members from the Springfield area are going,” said Thomas Robb, national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. “I’m assuming members in the Boston area are going.”
Robb did not provide details on who or how many members would attend the rally, but said they would be inconspicuous while supporting the rally.
“I don’t think they’re going to cause a disturbance,” Robb said, adding that Knights from different areas went to the Charlottesville rally. “Our members don’t stand out, they don’t walk around giving Nazi salutes, they might be your next door neighbor or Cub Scout leader.”
Now there’s a scary thought.
I saved tons of links for today, so I’ll give you the rest as headlines only.
The New Yorker: Carl Icahn’s Failed Raid on Washington.
Foreign Policy: Inside Trump’s Tortured Search for a Winning Strategy in Afghanistan.
Vanity Fair: Please God, Save Gary Cohn from Himself.
The Washington Post: Trump, first lady to skip Kennedy Center Honors over concerns of ‘political distraction.’
CNN: Sebastian Gorka’s PhD adviser: “I would not call him an expert in terrorism.”
The Washington Post: Here is the official résumé of the person Trump put in charge of federal housing in New York.
Palm Beach Post: Five more charities pull out of Mar-a-Lago events.
Buzzfeed: How Women In The KKK Were Instrumental To Its Rise.
CNN: The striking similarities between the KKK and Islamist jihadis.
Julia Ioffe at The Atlantic: The Road to Radicalism in Charlottesville.
This guy is speaking in Boston today. Berkeleyside: Kyle ‘Based Stickman’ Chapman charged with felony in connection to Berkeley rally.
Time: Student Who Attended Charlottesville White Supremacist Rally Leaves Boston University After Backlash.
Raw Story: ‘My life is over’: 21-year-old Charlottesville marcher whines over ‘outing’ by anti-fascist group.
Axios: When Confederate statues were erected throughout history.
What stories are you following today?
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Posted: August 17, 2017 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Bells TN, Bethlehem PA, deplorables, Donald Trump, Mike Pence, police brutality, rape, Texas, Tony Schwartz |
July 31, 2017 – A vehicle travels east on Front St. in Bells, TN on Monday afternoon. Bells is one of five small towns that comprises Crockett County, Tennessee. (Yalonda M. James for Mother Jones)
Good Morning!!
Ever wonder what is it like to be a person of color in a Trump-supporting state? Read some personal testimony at Mother Jones: “We Just Feel Like We Don’t Belong Here Anymore,” by Becca Andrews. Andrews returned to her hometown of Bells, Tennessee to find out.
I remember high-school Madyson Turner as a vibrant young black woman with a sense of humor that could dissipate tension in any room. (Turner’s name has been changed here to protect her privacy.) But when we meet up in a Subway sandwich shop in Alamo, there’s a new weight to her shoulders, and her infectious laugh doesn’t come quite so easily.
When she first began to see reports about the violence in Charlottesville, Turner thought it was a tasteless joke. Then she saw videos of the clash on Saturday, and her phone rang—her boyfriend was calling to check on her and process what was happening. He sounded upset. What he said tore at her: “I would rather the world end instead of us having to keep dealing with this stuff.” What hurt her more was the realization that she agreed with him.
“With the way it’s going now, I’m actually scared that I won’t make it,” she said to me in a text message.
Turner tells me that over the past year, life for her family has changed. She hints that her parents have been in West Tennessee long enough to know which families fought against civil rights “back in the day.” Since Trump’s election, they’ve warned her to steer clear of a list of people that is too long for comfort.
The day after the November presidential election, Turner went with her mother to the store, and they both kept their heads down. “We just feel like we don’t belong here anymore,” she says.
Turner’s mom, who cleans houses in town for a living, went to work a couple of days after that, and her employer, an older white woman, brought up the results of the recent election. The two had talked politics before—Turner’s mom is a Democrat, and her employer is a Republican. “Well, you might as well come and live with me now,” the employer said. “You gonna be mine eventually.”
She called her daughter in tears. Turner immediately got in her car and picked her mother up to bring her home.
Last year before the election, a young woman Turner described as one of her best friends casually mentioned she hoped for a Trump victory so that he might “do away with some of these African American people.” She quickly clarified that she wasn’t referring to Turner’s “type,” but when Turner sharply asked her what she meant, she couldn’t answer. Another friend assured her that it would be okay if Trump won the election because she would convince her parents to purchase Turner’s family as their new slaves. In a place where a few large plantation-style houses remain scattered through the county, the “joke” feels a lot like a threat.
The stories are heartbreaking. Please go read the rest if you haven’t already.
The Guardian reports what happened to an African American woman in Texas: Dashcam video shows police sexually assaulted Texas woman, lawyer says.
Charnesia Corley
The attorney for a black woman subjected to an invasive and lengthy roadside strip search by Texas police has released a dashcam video of the incident that he says shows her treatment was a form of rape.
“When you stick your fingers in somebody without their effective consent, that’s rape in any state that I know of,” said Sam Cammack, an attorney for Charnesia Corley.
Cammack made the video public after two Harris County deputies, Ronaldine Pierre and William Strong, were cleared of official oppression by a grand jury earlier this month. They are still with the sheriff’s department. Cammack wants an independent prosecutor to look into the case; a federal civil rights trial is set for January.
Corley was pulled over for allegedly running a stop sign and failing to use turn signals. In the video, she is made to stand, handcuffed, outside her car while two officers look inside. She is then searched with the rear passenger-side door open, partially obscuring the camera’s view of her body.
Corley is then put on the ground, naked below the waist, and examined for about 11 minutes by a female officer using a flashlight. The incident happened in the parking lot of a Texaco garage in Houston late on a June evening in 2015, when she was a 20-year-old student.
The federal lawsuit against Harris County alleges: “When one of the Deputies tried to insert her fingers into Ms CorTheley’s vagina, Ms Corley protested. At that point, the Deputies forcibly threw Ms Corley to the ground, while she was still handcuffed, pinned her down with her legs spread apart, threatened to break her legs and without consent penetrated her vagina in a purported search for marijuana.”
The Guardian is on the ground in Pennsylvania: ‘Trump’s delivering exactly what they wanted: white male supremacy.’
Leaning over a table stacked with “Resist!” buttons and “Impeach Trump” stickers, Kathy Harrington pointed to the offending spot. “It’s probably still there somewhere,” she said. Harrington, 56, was inviting attendees of the annual Musikfest bash in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to sign up to support progressive causes – and to protest against Donald Trump. And then there was one guy who “just looked at us and spit”, said Sandra Davis, 58, a colleague of Harrington, who pointed out the evidence still evaporating from the pavement.
Kathy Harrington joins fellow political activists during Musikfest in Bethlehem. Mark Makela for the Guardian
“They feel empowered,” Davis said of Trump supporters since the election. “They’re given voice. The louder and the more vulgar, the better.”
Images from the night before of white supremacists carrying torches in Charlottesville, Virginia, were deeply disturbing but not surprising, said another activist, Ginny Atwell.
“I think his core base are the true deplorables,” Atwell, 72, said of Trump. “The white supremacists. He’s delivering exactly what they wanted. White male supremacy.”
Trump is never too busy defending white supremacists to find new ways to reverse things President Obama did. The Washingtonian: Trump Removed the White House’s Capital Bikeshare Station.
As Capital Bikeshare grew bigger and more widespread over the past seven years, there was always one station the vast majority of users could never access: a nine-slot dock inside the White House’s security perimeter. For more info about online security services, Check this out. The station, located at 17th Street and State Place, was visible to the eye when it was installed in 2010, but did not appear on any system map, making Capital Bikeshare’s smallest station an unofficial “secret” location.
The spot where the WH Capital bikeshare station used to be.
But on Tuesday, Twitter user Gregory Matlesky passed by the White House and noticed the station not there.
Turns out Matlesky’s intuition was correct. The station was removed earlier this week at the Trump Administration’s request, District Department of Transportation spokesperson Terry Owens tells Washingtonian.
Owens adds that the station was installed in 2010 at the request of the Obama Administration, which had a favorable record with the cycling community. The Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery—or TIGER—grant program in the 2009 stimulus act funded bike-infrastructure programs throughout the United States, including the installation of several bike lanes and cycling paths around Washington. Before former President Barack Obama left office in January, his Transportation Department signed off on new regulations redefining traffic as people who move on roads, rather than strictly vehicles—a change considered a coup for cyclists and pedestrians.
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Posted: August 15, 2017 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics |
Good Morning!!
This morning I’m feeling an overwhelming sadness at what is happening to our country. I’m not at all knowledgeable about Civil War history, and now I feel I should learn more about it. It feels to me as if that long ago conflict is still going on and may never end.
Trump is only a symptom of the festering evil of racism that has haunted the U.S. since before it existed. Our “republic” was built on a foundation of slavery and the slaughter of Native Americans. How can we ever cleanse that evil from the nbational bloodstream?
Josh Marshall has a fine piece on this tortured history and how it relates to the confederate statues that are just beginning to be taken down: Thoughts on Public Memory. He begins be discussing the mixed history of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence and at the same time owned slaves, one of whom was forced to bear his children. But what about Robert E. Lee? What public acts could mitigate his role in trying to protect slavery?
Lee is known for one thing: being the key military leader in a violent rebellion against the United States and leading that rebellion to protect slavery. That’s it. Absent his decision to participate in the rebellion he’d be all but unknown to history. He outlived the war by only five years. There’s simply no positive side of the ledger to make it a tough call. The only logic to honoring Lee is to honor treason and treason in the worst possible cause.
Lincoln and his war cabinet had little question what Lee deserved. Look at Arlington National Cemetery. That’s Lee’s plantation. The federal government confiscated it and dedicated it as a final resting place for those who died defending the United States. It is a solemn, poetically rich, final and ultimately righteous verdict on his role in our national life. The entire project was very much by design: to punish Lee and shame him in public memory for betraying the United States. (During the Civil War, a Freedman’s Village was also established on the estate for ex-slaves making their transition to freedom.) The generals, particularly Union Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs who spearheaded the effort, wanted to be certain the Lees would never be able to reclaim their estate. Making it into a hallowed national cemetery was a good way to accomplish that.
I didn’t even know that.
What is little discussed today is that the North and the South made a tacit bargain in the years after the Civil War to valorize Southern generals as a way to salve the sting of Southern defeat and provide a cultural and political basis for uniting the country with more than military force. That meant the abandonment of free blacks in the South after the mid-1870s. It is important to see this not only as the abandonment of the ex-slaves of the South. It is difficult to pull away the subsequent history to realize that it was entirely possible in the aftermath of the Civil War that the US would be condemned to perpetual warfare, insurrection and foreign intervention. But if the opposite, the United States that went on to become a global superpower, is what was gained it was gained at a terrible price and a price paid more or less solely by black citizens.
However one judges that past, knowing its full history leaves no reason or rationale for continue the valorization of Lee. He was a traitor and a traitor in a terrible cause. That is his only mark on American history. Whether he was a personal gentle man, nice to his pets or a decent field general hardly matters.
Even this though leaves the full squalidness of Lee’s legacy not quite told. There is the Lee of the Civil War and then the mythic Lee of later decades. Today the battle over Lee’s legacy is mainly played out over the various statues of Lee which still stand across the South. The notional focus on this weekend’s tragic events in Charlottesville was a protest over plans to remove a Lee statue. But those statues don’t date to the Civil War, the years just after the Civil War. In most cases they date to decades later.
I can’t do Marshall’s article justice with excerpts. Please go read the whole thing at Talking Points Memo.
At the New Yorker, Robin Write asks: Is American Headed for a New Kind of Civil War?
A day after the brawling and racist brutality and deaths in Virginia, Governor Terry McAuliffe asked, “How did we get to this place?” The more relevant question after Charlottesville—and other deadly episodes in Ferguson, Charleston, Dallas, Saint Paul, Baltimore, Baton Rouge, and Alexandria—is where the United States is headed. How fragile is the union, our republic, and a country that has long been considered the world’s most stable democracy? The dangers are now bigger than the collective episodes of violence. “The radical right was more successful in entering the political mainstream last year than in half a century,” the Southern Poverty Law Center reported in February. The organization documents more than nine hundred active (and growing) hate groups in the United States.
America’s stability is increasingly an undercurrent in political discourse. Earlier this year, I began a conversation with Keith Mines about America’s turmoil. Mines has spent his career—in the U.S. Army Special Forces, the United Nations, and now the State Department—navigating civil wars in other countries, including Afghanistan, Colombia, El Salvador, Iraq, Somalia, and Sudan. He returned to Washington after sixteen years to find conditions that he had seen nurture conflict abroad now visible at home. It haunts him. In March, Mines was one of several national-security experts whom Foreign Policyaskedto evaluate the risks of a second civil war—with percentages. Mines concluded that the United States faces a sixty-per-cent chance of civil war over the next ten to fifteen years. Other experts’ predictions ranged from five per cent to ninety-five per cent. The sobering consensus was thirty-five per cent. And that was five months before Charlottesville.
“We keep saying, ‘It can’t happen here,’ but then, holy smokes, it can,” Mines told me after we talked, on Sunday, about Charlottesville. The pattern of civil strife has evolved worldwide over the past sixty years. Today, few civil wars involve pitched battles from trenches along neat geographic front lines. Many are low-intensity conflicts with episodic violence in constantly moving locales. Mines’s definition of a civil war is large-scale violence that includes a rejection of traditional political authority and requires the National Guard to deal with it. On Saturday, McAuliffe put the National Guard on alert and declared a state of emergency.
Based on his experience in civil wars on three continents, Mines cited five conditions that support his prediction: entrenched national polarization, with no obvious meeting place for resolution; increasingly divisive press coverage and information flows; weakened institutions, notably Congress and the judiciary; a sellout or abandonment of responsibility by political leadership; and the legitimization of violence as the “in” way to either conduct discourse or solve disputes.
President Trump “modeled violence as a way to advance politically and validated bullying during and after the campaign,” Mines wrote in Foreign Policy. “Judging from recent events the left is now fully on board with this,” he continued, citing anarchists in anti-globalization riots as one of several flashpoints. “It is like 1859, everyone is mad about something and everyone has a gun.”
Again, I hope you’ll continue reading at the New Yorker link.
Can racism ever be defeated or can it only be suppressed?
Catherine Rampell at The Washington Post: Trump’s lasting legacy is to embolden an entirely new generation of racists.
If there was one silver lining to President Trump’s election, it was supposed to be this: Those who voted for Trump because of, rather than despite, his demonization of Muslims and Hispanics; who fear a “majority minority” America; and who wax nostalgic for the Jim Crow era were mostly old white people.
Which meant they and their abhorrent prejudices would soon pass on — and be replaced by generations of younger, more racially enlightened Americans.
The white nationalist rally this past weekend in Charlottesville clearly proves this to be a myth. Racist grandpas may be dying out, but their bigotry is regenerating in today’s youths.
Yes, there were swastika-tattooed, Ku Klux Klan-hooded 50-somethings on the streets of Charlottesville. The most chilling photos, however, show hordes of torch-bearing, fresh-faced, “fashy”-coiffed white men in their teens and 20s….
The public faces of the white supremacist “alt-right” movement are likewise skewing younger. David Duke is still around, but as a charismatic figurehead he has mostly been displaced by the likes of 39-year-old Richard Spencer, 26-year-old Matthew Heimbach and 29-year-old Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet.
These are not people whose backwardness we can write off as an unfortunate product of their time.
That is, we’re not talking about young white Americans whose happy formative years took place in a world with (de jure) school segregation, redlining, anti-miscegenation laws and phrenology.
If any had family who fought for the Confederacy, they’ve been dead for at least a century. No one is telling them about the good ol’ days on the plantation.
One more from the Washington Post before I have to rush off to a doctor’s appointment: Why are people still racist? What science says about America’s race problem.
Torch-bearing white supremacists shouting racist and anti-Semitic slogans. Protesters and counter protesters colliding with violence and chaos. A car driven by a known Nazi sympathizer mowing down a crowd of activists.
Many Americans responded to this weekend’s violence in Charlottesville with disbelieving horror. How could this happen in America, in 2017? “This is not who we are,” said Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine (D).
And yet, this is who we are.
Amid our modern clashes, researchers in psychology, sociology and neurology have been studying the roots of racism. We draw on that research and asked two scientists to explain why people feel and act this way toward each other.
Read what science shows at the link.
The illustrations in this post are from the rallies in Charlottesville.
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Posted: August 12, 2017 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Afternoon Reads, Foreign Affairs, U.S. Politics | Tags: Charlottesville VA, Donald Trump, North Korea, Venezuela, Wag the Dog, white nationalists, White supremacists |
neo-Nazi white supremacists in Charlottesville, VA last night
Good Afternoon!!
White “nationalists” are involved in a violent demonstration in the streets of an American city today. There has so far been no reaction from the “president,” who of course has a number of these crazies working for him in the people’s house.
According to reports on MSNBC, the rally–supposedly a protest of the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee–has now been declared an “unlawful assembly.” Interestingly,there are lots of Confederate flags on display in the crowd, but I have yet to see an American flag. Until recently, there hasn’t been much attempt by police to control the “protesters” either. It’s certainly a different scene from the police crackdowns we have seen at demonstrations organized by Black Lives Matter.
Boston.com: Hundreds face off ahead of white nationalist rally.
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) — Hundreds of people are facing off in Charlottesville ahead of a white nationalist rally planned in the Virginia city’s downtown.
Rally supporters and counter-protesters screamed, chanted, threw punches, hurled water bottles and unleashed chemical sprays on each other Saturday morning.
Men dressed in militia uniforms were carrying shields and openly carrying long guns.
From Twitter earlier today:
NBC News: Protesters Clash at White Nationalists March in Virginia, Local Emergency Declared.
Altercations erupted Saturday morning and at least two people were hurt as white nationalists and counter-protesters violently clashed in Charlottesville, Virginia, where local police and the governor declared a state of emergency.
Supporters of the “Unite the Right” rally descended again on the city’s downtown in opposition to clergy members and other groups, who stood in a line singing, “This Little Light of Mine,” to drown out the profanity and slurs.
“Love has already won. We have already won,” the counter-protesters responded.
But as the violence intensified with shoving and punching, demonstrators covered their mouths after what appeared to be tear gas was released into the crowd.
The city and Albemarle County both issued a “declaration of local emergency” for the two jurisdictions to request additional resources. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe also declared a state of emergency to allow for a response to quell the violence.
The rally hasn’t even started yet, but it has been called off. We’ll have to wait and see what happens next.
Yesterday White House employee Sebastian Gorka defended white supremacists. Think Progress: White House adviser says people should stop criticizing white supremacists so much.
On Wednesday, Gorka lashed out at “at [New York Times reporter] Maggie Haberman and her acolytes in the fake news media, who immediately have a conniption fit” and brought up McVeigh. He added that “white men” and “white supremacists” are not “the problem.”
It’s this constant, “Oh, it’s the white man. It’s the white supremacists. That’s the problem.” No, it isn’t, Maggie Haberman. Go to Sinjar. Go to the Middle East, and tell me what the real problem is today. Go to Manchester.
Gorka noted that the Oklahoma City bombing was 22 years ago, which is true. But since 9/11, right-wing extremists — almost always white men and frequently white supremacists — have been far more deadly domestically than Muslim extremists. A study found that in the first 13.5 years after 9/11, Muslim extremists were responsible for 50 deaths in the United States. Meanwhile, “right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities.”
I wonder if he went to the rally in Charlottesville?
Meanwhile, Trump has apparently been threatening a nuclear holocaust in an effort to change the subject from the Russia investigation, because there’s no sign of the U.S. military gearing up for war or of the government moving to evacuate U.S. citizens from South Korea and other areas that could be threatened by strikes on North Korea.
US Naval Base in Guam
Defense News: If the US is going to war in North Korea, nobody told the US military.
If you watch cable news or follow the president’s Twitter feed, you might be under the impression that the U.S. is heading to war with North Korea. But somebody, it seems, forgot to loop in the U.S. military.
North Korea is threatening to launch missiles toward Guam; U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted Friday morning that military options were “locked and loaded;” NBC News ran a story Wednesday claiming the U.S. had ”prepared a plan” to strike North Korean missile sites with B-1 bombers.
But while the rhetoric is nearing a fever pitch in D.C., out in the Pacific you’d never know the world was on the brink of nuclear war.
In Yokosuka, Japan, the U.S. Navy’s forward-deployed ready aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan sits peacefully pier-side, along with the U.S. 7th Fleet command ship Blue Ridge. On the Korean Peninsula, the State Department has not advised American citizens to leave the country and U.S. military family members are not being evacuated. No Marines are being loaded on amphibious ships; no sailors have been recalled off leave to prepare for emergency operations; and no ballistic missile defense ships have been sortied to North Korea, the waters off Japan or to Guam, three sources said.
The frenzied rhetoric being propelled by the president’s words and fed back by the news cycle is, for the second time this year, failing to match what’s actually happening, sources told Defense News.
Continue reading at the link.
Eddie Baza Calvo Govornor of Guam
I guess Trump wasn’t satisfied with the panic he has caused around the world, because yesterday he seemed to threaten military intervention in Venezuela. But more evidence that this is nothing but a “wag the dog” strategy came in a phone call Trump made to the governor of Guam late last night. The New York Times: Trump to Guam Governor: North Korea Threats Will Boost Tourism ‘Tenfold.’
If there’s one thing that Guam does not have to worry about while the tiny island is in the nuclear cross hairs of North Korea, it’s tourism, President Trump told the island’s governor in a phone call made public on Saturday.
The threat by North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, to create “an enveloping fire” around the tiny United States territory in the Western Pacific will boost Guam tourism “tenfold,” Mr. Trump is heard saying in the recorded conversation with Gov. Eddie Calvo.
The recording was put on the Republican governor’s Facebook page and other social media accounts.
Mr. Trump said: “I have to tell you, you have become extremely famous all over the world. They are talking about Guam; and they’re talking about you.” And when it comes to tourism, he added, “I can say this: You’re going to go up, like, tenfold with the expenditure of no money.”
Trump is another P.T. Barnum, and he’s turned our government into a three-ring circus. It appears he is actually enjoying his ability to strike terror into millions of people around the globe. He’s getting off on it. I’m beginning to wonder if Trump suffers from bi-polar disorder. He is acting as if he’s in a manic phase and about to spiral out of control.
Journalist Daniel Dale tweeted a comparison of the White House readout of the Guam call vs. an actual transcript.
The New York Times and The Atlantic each have lengthy articles up asking why Trump can’t ever criticize Putin. Neither author suggests what is likely the real reason–Trump is a Russian asset.
The New York Times: Combative Trump Pulls His Punches for One Man: Putin.
TheAtlantic: Why Does Trump Still Refuse to Criticize Putin?
A couple more interesting stories I came across this morning, and then I’m going to retire to my bed to nurse a throbbing headache caused by reading about all this insanity.
The Hill: Former Mueller deputy on Trump: ‘Government is going to kill this guy.’
CNN counterterrorism analyst Phil Mudd warned that President Trump is agitating the government, saying during a Thursday afternoon interview with CNN anchor Jake Tapper that the U.S. government “is going to kill this guy.”
Mudd, who served as deputy director to former FBI Director Robert Mueller, said Trump’s defense of Russian President Vladimir Putin has compelled federal employees “at Langley, Foggy Bottom, CIA and State” to try to take Trump down.
“Let me give you one bottom line as a former government official. Government is going to kill this guy,” Mudd, a staunch critic of Trump, said on “The Lead.”
“He defends Vladimir Putin. There are State Department and CIA officers coming home, and at Langley and Foggy Bottom, CIA and State, they’re saying, ‘This is how you defend us?’ ” he continued.
Read the rest of Mudd’s rant at the link.
Nina Burleigh at Newsweek: Melania, Ivanka and Ivana Trump Wear High Heels, a Symbol of Everything that is Beautiful and Horrifying about Them.
The vertiginous spike-heel shoe is not currently in fashion, but for Ivana, Ivanka, Melania and the Trump daughters-in-law, Carrie Bradshaw’s shoe of choice never went out of style. In fact, the female consorts of the Leader of the Free World do not set foot in public without first molding their arches into the supranatural curve that Mattel toy designers once devised for Barbie’s plastic feet.
Providing the best quality for a product, being flexible, but still stronger than even the steel, Romeorim guarantees for this material and offers you a possibility to find out more by checking the designed guide.
Six months in, and the Trump women are well on their way to normalizing the footwear of the beauty pageant. The Cinderella shoe fitted on the feet of all the Miss Teen USA’s and Miss Universes who ever beamed under the Trumpian gaze in contests of yore also is the shoe that average women can bear for only a few hours at weddings or proms, before casting them off, moaning and rubbing their soles.Former Vogue editor Andre Leon Talley, a longtime friend of Melania Trump’s, believes that, other than the White House Easter Egg hunt on the lawn, Melania has not been photographed as first lady without her feet arched into one of two brands of towering high-heeled shoes that she favors, Manolo Blahniks or the 4.5-inch-heeled Oh So Kate by Christian Louboutin. (Talley says Melania picked up 22 pairs of Manolos in various colors before decamping to the White House last month.)
In their old age, these women will need serious health care for their feet.
The stiletto is a podiatrist’s dream, or nightmare, depending on your point of view, because devoted wearers ultimately require medical attention. “As you get older in these shoes, your feet are going to have problems,” Talley says. “I am not gonna say Melania is gonna have them soon, but sooner or later she is going have to come down off that high arch.”
The internet and YouTube are rife with tutorials on how to bear the pain (bandages, gel inserts, baby powder) and walk gracefully in them. Michelle Phan’s “How to Master the High Heel” tutorial has received millions of views. Her nuggets of advice include: “Your first assignment when walking in heels is to find a straight line and follow it,” and “For every step you take, you need to have a general awareness of where your heel is being placed.”
Stiletto pumps demand a critical level of attention to pebbles, cobbles, sidewalk cracks, mud, grass, curbs and stairs—all while keeping head erect and shoulders back—that has sometimes eluded even the greatest public females. Remember Naomi Campbell’s famous runway spill. Or Jennifer Lawrence tripping up the steps to receive her Oscar.
But not the Trump women. Read the rest at the link.
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