Friday Reads: So much Outrage so little Time
Posted: September 18, 2020 Filed under: 2016 elections, 2020 Elections, abortion rights, Afternoon Reads, Psychopaths in charge, public corruption | Tags: Donald Trump and fascism 29 Comments
Georg Tappert. Carnival, 1930
Good Day Sky Dancers!
The headlines today are so outrageous that I had trouble reading even one of them for awhile. We have to get rid of Mitch McConnell. This greeted me from Salon and I had to go lie down in bed for awhile to pet the dog. Petting my cats and dogs is getting to be such a comfort ritual for me they all take turns jumping up to see if I’m okay.
The Republican-led Senate confirmed six of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees to lifetime appointments over two days this week, even though it has delayed crucial coronavirus relief since May.
The Senate filled four federal vacancies in California and two in Illinois, Bloomberg Law reported. It is also expected to confirm two additional Illinois judges in short order.
“The Senate has confirmed six of Trump’s judicial nominees in the past 30 hours,” tweeted Vanita Gupta, the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “These are lifetime appointments that McConnell’s pushing through instead of the HEROES Act & other crucial legislation.”
Three of the judges were appointed to seats covering Los Angeles, while another was appointed to a seat covering San Diego. There are 11 additional nominees to California courts awaiting Senate confirmation.
The Senate additionally confirmed David Dugan and Stephen McGlynn to the Eastern District of Illinois while ending the debate on the nominations of Iain Johnston to the Northern District. The upper chamber is also expected to end debate on the nomination of Franklin Ulyses Valderrama to the Northern District of Illinois.
Three of the judges were appointed to seats covering Los Angeles, while another was appointed to a seat covering San Diego. There are 11 additional nominees to California courts awaiting Senate confirmation.
The Senate additionally confirmed David Dugan and Stephen McGlynn to the Eastern District of Illinois while ending the debate on the nominations of Iain Johnston to the Northern District. The upper chamber is also expected to end debate on the nomination of Franklin Ulyses Valderrama to the Northern District of Illinois.
Advocacy groups sounded the alarm over the confirmations of Dugan and McGlynn, who received support from anti-abortion organizations and signaled their opposition to abortion rights.
“Today’s vote should never have even happened. People are calling on their senators to provide relief from the COVID-19 pandemic, economic recession and the rampant anti-Black violence occurring around the country,” Anisha Singh, the director of judiciary affairs at Planned Parenthood, said in a statement. “And yet, the Senate majority continues to prioritize confirming judges for lifetime appointments — many with hostile records on reproductive and civil rights, including abortion.”
Singh called on the Senate to “immediately halt” upcoming votes, noting that the two judges’ “records demonstrate they are more likely to be threats to people’s health, rights and bodily autonomy.”
Georg Tappert. Creole, 1911
Today’s Republican Party is a pantheon of anti-democratic values. These judges they appoint are the same kinds of goose steppers you’d expect to find in any Banana Republic. From Vox and Ian Millhiser: “Chief Justice Roberts’s lifelong crusade against voting rights, explained. He has fought to undermine voting rights his entire career.”
John Roberts was 26 years old, and he was outraged that he’d just been outmaneuvered by older and much more experienced political hands.
It was 1981. Roberts had just completed a prestigious clerkship with Justice William Rehnquist — then the most conservative judge to serve on the Supreme Court in decades — and, as an aide to Attorney General William French Smith, Roberts was tasked with making the case against one of the most consequential voting rights laws in the nation’s history.
The House had recently passed legislation extending the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — a seminal civil rights bill that dismantled much of Jim Crow — and shoring up one of its key provisions after a 1980 Supreme Court decision had severely weakened the law. Meanwhile, a filibuster-proof majority of the Senate had co-sponsored the same bill.
Roberts was distraught.
“Something must be done to educate the Senators on the seriousness of this problem,” Roberts wrote his boss, Smith, just a few days before Christmas. In a subsequent memo, he argued that the rapidly advancing bill — which now forms much of the backbone of American voting rights law — was “not only constitutionally suspect, but also contrary to the most fundamental tenants [sic]of the legislative process on which the laws of this country are based.”
Roberts’s early crusade against voting rights ended in failure. Though President Reagan preferred a weaker voting rights law — he once described the Voting Rights Act as “humiliating to the South” — the conservative president eventually bowed to political pressure and signed the legislation Roberts deemed contrary to many of our nation’s “most fundamental” tenets.
But time was on Roberts’s side. He rose within government and within the legal profession until President George W. Bush made him chief justice of the United States in 2005. Roberts is now the most powerful judge in the country. As Congress has grown more and more dysfunctional, the Supreme Court is increasingly the locus of policymaking within the United States.
Georg Tappert. Fest, 1925
What follows in this long read is a good explanation of what Conservative (sic) Republicans have against voting rights even though the last time it passed it had overwhelming bipartisan support and was signed into law by Dubya. But, then came Shelby.
Justice Antonin Scalia gave voice to this frustration during oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Roberts Court case that quashed preclearance. The Voting Rights Act, Scalia claimed, was a “perpetuation of racial entitlement,” and “whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.”
“I don’t think there is anything to be gained by any Senator to vote against continuation of this act,” Scalia continued. “And I am fairly confident it will be reenacted in perpetuity unless — unless a court can say it does not comport with the Constitution.”
Scalia had just turned 76 when his Court heard Shelby County, and he’d watched his fellow Republicans bow over and over again to liberals. That, in Scalia’s mind, was a failure of democracy. His side had won the presidency and, in some cases, control of Congress. And yet the victor did not collect the spoils.
And so the Supreme Court’s Republican majority stepped up to cure this perceived injustice. Chief Justice Roberts led the charge.
There are more whistle blowers coming forward than ever before, including a few in the Justice Department that are testifying in front of Congress. Here is FBI Director Christopher Wray warning of Russian Interference Redux.
Plus, there’s this: “The FBI director also broke with Trump’s claim that antifa is a terrorist organization.” from Politico
FBI Director Christopher Wray on Thursday described “very active efforts” by Russia to interfere in the 2020 election, primarily by working to damage former Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Wray said Russians have been using social media, as well as “proxies, state media, online journals” and other vehicles to hurt Biden and what it views as anti-Russian factions in U.S. politics.
Wray’s assessment affirms the findings of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which last month described Russia’s efforts to damage Biden and specifically identified Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russian Ukrainian lawmaker who has met with President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, as an agent of Russia’s influence operations.
Wray’s testimony to the House Homeland Security Committee affirmed that Russia is continuing to take an active role in the 2020 campaign with less than 50 days until Election Day. He offered no new specifics in the early-going of the hearing, but emphasized that the intelligence community has not seen evidence that Russia is reprising its 2016 attempt to target election infrastructure, such as voter databases.
In testimony to the Homeland Security Committee, Wray also diverged from Trump’s claim that “antifa” is a terrorist organization. Rather, Wray said antifa is “more of an ideology or a movement than an organization” and though there has been violence by some who self-identify as antifa, it has not appeared to be part of a central organization.
“Antifa is a real thing,” Wray said. “But it’s not an organization or a structure.”
Under questioning from Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), Wray indicated that white supremacist violence is the largest portion of what he described as the most significant domestic terrorism threat in the country: “racially motivated violent extremism.”
Oh, look, two groups looking to overthrow the US’s form of government are basically the Trump Base and Trump’s Handler Putin. Which brings to me to the music accompanying my art theme today which is, again, German expressionists painting life during the rise of Hitler.
1917 Max Beckmann Autoportrait au foulard rouge
So, the most stunning thing to me this week is that our Attorney General and Head of Federal Law Enforcement has decided to not even hide his fascist and theocratic tendencies. BB had an entire list of Barr’s crazy notions in yesterday’s post. Grinding through them yesterday was one of the most depressing things I have ever done. The man should be tossed in a padded cell.
And so, after reading all that, this headline made a lot of sense to me. It’s from WAPO: ” The United States is backsliding into autocracy under Trump, scholars warn. The weakening of democratic values — a path that’s difficult to reverse — has accelerated, according to hundreds of indicators assessed each year.” This is by Christopher Ingraham.
Three years into the Trump administration, American democracy has eroded to a point that more often than not leads to full-blown autocracy, according to a project that tracks the health of representative government in nations around the world.
The project, called V-Dem, or Varieties of Democracy, is an effort to precisely quantify global democracy at the country level based on hundreds indicators assessed annually by thousands of individual experts. It’s one of several ongoing projects by political scientists that have registered a weakening of democratic values in the United States in recent years.
V-Dem’s findings are bracing: The United States is undergoing “substantial autocratization” — defined as the loss of democratic traits — that has accelerated precipitously under President Trump. This is particularly alarming in light of what the group’s historic data show: Only 1 in 5 democracies that start down this path are able to reverse the damage before succumbing to full-blown autocracy.
…
Each year, the V-Dem project asks its experts to rate their respective nations on hundreds of measures of democracy, such as the presence of legislative checks on executive power, freedom of personal expression, the civility of political discourse, free and open elections, and executive branch corruption, among others.
The United States is backsliding on all of those measures. “Executive respect for the Constitution is now at the lowest level since 1865,” said Michael Coppedge, a Notre Dame political scientist and one of the project’s chief investigators. “Corruption in the executive branch is basically the worst since Harding.”
Warren G. Harding, whose administration was tainted by corruption and scandal, is routinely ranked among the nation’s worst chief executives
1914 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Couple de danseur
Keep reading the article. The list is horrifying.
I’m pretty sure Mitchie is off doing his dirty work because already seated judges are busy overturning all kinds of Trumpist things at the state level. Today, a judge banned a Michigan law making it illegal to drive people to polls which is something churches routinely do for their elderly and homebound down here. Yesterday, a judge ordered the Post Office to stop and reverse everything it was doing to slow down the mail.
A federal judge on Thursday blocked controversial changes to the United States postal service, saying they were “a politically motivated attack” that had slowed the nation’s mail and likely would slow the delivery of ballots in the upcoming presidential election.
And, of course we’re back to the time where we just might possibly be purposefully sterilizing women of color in ICE Detention. This story grows more horrifying by the day too. “AP Exclusive: More migrant women say they didn’t OK surgery” reported b
Sitting across from her lawyer at an immigration detention center in rural Georgia, Mileidy Cardentey Fernandez unbuttoned her jail jumpsuit to show the scars on her abdomen. There were three small, circular marks.
The 39-year-old woman from Cuba was told only that she would undergo an operation to treat her ovarian cysts, but a month later, she’s still not sure what procedure she got. After Cardentey repeatedly requested her medical records to find out, Irwin County Detention Center gave her more than 100 pages showing a diagnosis of cysts but nothing from the day of the surgery.
“The only thing they told me was: ‘You’re going to go to sleep and when you wake up, we will have finished,’” Cardentey said this week in a phone interview.
Cardentey kept her hospital bracelet. It has the date, Aug. 14, and part of the doctor’s name, Dr. Mahendra Amin, a gynecologist linked this week to allegations of unwanted hysterectomies and other procedures done on detained immigrant women that jeopardize their ability to have children.
An Associated Press review of medical records for four women and interviews with lawyers revealed growing allegations that Amin performed surgeries and other procedures on detained immigrants that they never sought or didn’t fully understand. Although some procedures could be justified based on problems documented in the records, the women’s lack of consent or knowledge raises severe legal and ethical issues, lawyers and medical experts said.
Amin has performed surgery or other gynecological treatment on at least eight women detained at Irwin County Detention Center since 2017, including one hysterectomy, said Andrew Free, an immigration and civil rights lawyer working with other attorneys to investigate medical treatment at the jail. Doctors are helping the attorneys examine new records and more women are coming forward to report their treatment by Amin, Free said.
“The indication is there’s a systemic lack of truly informed and legally valid consent to perform procedures that could ultimately result — intentionally or unintentionally — in sterilization,” he said.
1920 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Malade dans la nuit
Is this just limited to this one doctor so it is likely fraud of some kind or is it systemic ?
Well, yesterday and today’s news is that the CDC was forced to publish Covid-19 testing guidelines against scientists complaints that were written by the Trumpist Regime and inserted on the site against every one’s advice. And TWICE now.
The guidance said it was not necessary to test people without symptoms of Covid-19 even if they had been exposed to the virus. It came at a time when public health experts were pushing for more testing rather than less, and administration officials told The Times that the document was a C.D.C. product and had been revised with input from the agency’s director, Dr. Robert Redfield.
But officials told The Times this week that the Department of Health and Human Services did the rewriting and then “dropped” it into the C.D.C.’s public website, flouting the agency’s strict scientific review process.
“That was a doc that came from the top down, from the H.H.S. and the task force,” said a federal official with knowledge of the matter, referring to the White House task force on the coronavirus. “That policy does not reflect what many people at the C.D.C. feel should be the policy.”
And we have Dan Coates and more Generals sounding an alarm..
So with that, I feel I need to leave you with this:
So, you know the routine! Be safe! Be kind and gentle to yourself and others! Stay home as much as you can! Check in with us so we know you’re okay!! We care about you!!!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Monday Reads: Trumpist Death Cult parties on in Nevada, Dude
Posted: September 14, 2020 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: People Died, Trump Lied 24 Comments
Lesnoi pozhar,A. K. Denisov-Uralsky, around 1900.
Good Day Sky Dancers!
The West Coast is burning. The Gulf Coast faces a significant hurricane likely to cause deadly flooding. The country is nowhere near out of the Covid-19 Pandemic. We lose about a 1000 of us a day to the disease and many survive with life changing aftereffects. However, the Trump Depraved Indifference Murder National Tour continues to prop up a rapidly deteriorating president’s ego and may be the ultimate Super Spread Event.
Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak, a Democrat, criticized President Donald Trump for violating the state’s rules on Sunday night by holding an indoor campaign rally attended by thousands of people.
Trump “is knowingly packing thousands into an indoor venue to hold a political rally” the governor wrote in a lengthy Twitter post. He added that Trump has “forgotten that this country is still in the middle of a global pandemic.”
“This is an insult to every Nevadan who has followed the directives, made sacrifices, and put their neighbors before themselves,” Sisolak said. “It’s also a direct threat to all of the recent progress we’ve made and could potentially set us back.”
“As usual, he doesn’t believe the rules apply to him,” Sisolak said of Trump, and accused the president of “reckless and selfish actions.”
Trump held his first indoor rally in months in Henderson, Nevada, on Sunday night. Aides said that every attendee would have their temperature checked before entering and would be provided with a mask that they were encouraged to wear. They also had access to hand sanitizer. However, like the president’s recent rallies, most supporters were not wearing face coverings.
Henderson authorities said in a statement late Sunday that officials warned the event organizer in writing and verbally that they must obey the governor’s directives, which include not gathering in groups larger than 50 people, wearing face coverings and social distancing.
In response to criticism the campaign received for holding the indoor rally, Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign 2020 communications director, said in a statement, “If you can join tens of thousands of people protesting in the streets, gamble in a casino, or burn down small businesses in riots, you can gather peacefully under the 1st Amendment to hear from the president of the United States.”
Autumn Scene, Charles Linford ,(American, 1846–1897)
Bob Woodward’s book showed us that ‘The president of the U.S. possessed specific knowledge that could have saved lives’ How are these actions that caused the death of thousands of Americans not depraved indifference murder?
In an interview with Savannah Guthrie on NBC’s “TODAY” show, Woodward said he found out about a briefing the president received from his national security advisers on Jan. 28 about the pandemic coming to the United States and, only a few days later, Trump didn’t share that information in his State of the Union address to Congress on Feb. 4, which 40 million people watched.
Woodward said Trump missed an opportunity that night to convey that warning, but the president said only that the U.S. was doing everything possible. Woodward said it’s like if President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told the American people the truth after Pearl Harbor that a lot more could have been done.
“It is one of those shocks, for me, having written about nine presidents, that the president of the United States possessed the specific knowledge that could have saved lives and historians are going to be writing about the lost month of February for tens of years,” Woodward said.
Jonathan Chait makes a controversial argument on locking Trump up in NYMag today: “Lock Him Up? For the Republic to survive Trump’s presidency, he must be tried for his crimes. Even if that sparks a constitutional crisis of its own.” Considering Barr and Trump are doing everything possible to get revenge on any one involved with the Russian investigation, this may seem tit for tat but is it when Trump actually is a criminal and has been for decades?
Mutual toleration means that political opponents must accept the legitimacy and legality of their opponents. If elected leaders can send their opponents to prison and otherwise discredit them, then leaders are afraid to relinquish power lest they be imprisoned themselves. The criminalization of politics is a kind of toxin that breaks down the cooperation required to sustain a democracy. This, along with the misogyny, was what made Trump’s embrace of “Lock her up!” so terrifying in 2016. He was already using the threat of imprisoning opponents as a political-campaign tool.
If the government is run by lawbreakers, though, the state faces a dilemma: Either the principle of equal treatment under the law or the tradition of a peaceful transition of power will be sacrificed. It’s hard to imagine any outcome under which the rule of law survives Trump unscathed.
One of the most corrosive effects of Trumpism upon the political culture has been to detach the law from any behavioral definition and to attach it to political identity. As Trump likes to say, “The other side is where there are crimes.” He has trained his supporters to understand this statement as a syllogism: If Trump’s opponents are doing something, it’s a crime; if Trump and his allies are doing it, it isn’t. The chants, which applied enough pressure to force James Comey to announce a reinvestigation of Hillary Clinton in October 2016, simply to protect the FBI from being delegitimized by Republicans after an expected Clinton victory, showed how the field had been sown for Trump even before he took office.
It is because Trump views the law as a morally empty category, a weapon for the powerful to use against their enemies, that he has spent his presidency calling for the prosecution and/or imprisonment of a constantly growing list of adversaries: Joe Biden and Barack Obama (for “spying” and “treason”), House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (for paraphrasing Trump’s Ukraine phone call in a speech), John Kerry (for allegedly violating the Logan Act), John Bolton (for writing a tell-all book), Joe Scarborough (for the death of a former staffer), Nancy Pelosi (for tearing up his State of the Union Address), and social-media firms (for having too many liberals). Trump has alleged a variety of crimes against at least four former FBI officials and three Obama-era national-security officials.
Things just really keep getting more disturbing as Trump gets more paranoid and shows more signs of dementia.
Grassfire 1,1995, Jennifer Walton
Here are two headlines that show us that things are not normal here.
Andrew Solender / Forbes:
Trump Says He Will ‘Negotiate’ Third Term Because He’s ‘Entitled’ To It — President Trump said Saturday that he plans to “negotiate” to run again in 2024 if he wins reelection in November, his latest in a series of comments that have alarmed critics who say he has little regard for constitutional boundaries.Shane Goldmacher / New York Times:
Biden Creates Legal War Room, Preparing for a Big Fight Over Voting — With two former solicitors general and hundreds of lawyers, the Biden campaign is bracing for an extended legal battle and hoping to maintain trust in the electoral process. — Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign is establishing
Alexander Vindman speaks out in a Atlantic interview with a really damning statement. This is by Jeffrey Goldberg: Alexander Vindman: Trump Is Putin’s ‘Useful Idiot’. In his first interview, a key witness in the impeachment trial says Trump goes out of his way to try to please the Russian president.
On July 25 of last year, Vindman, who, as the National Security Council’s director for European affairs, organized the call, listened, with other officials, to a conversation between Trump and the newly elected Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
“I would like you to do us a favor,” Trump told Zelensky, working his way to the subject of Joe Biden: “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution, and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution, so if you can look into it …”
Vindman was surprised by Trump’s approach, and by its implications. Like other American specialists in the successor states of the former Soviet Union, he was invested in the U.S.-Ukraine relationship. And like most national-security professionals, he was interested in countering Russia’s malign influence—along its borders, in places like Ukraine and Belarus and the Baltic states; across Europe; and in American elections. He believed in buttressing Ukraine’s new leadership. He also had an aversion to shakedowns, and this, to him, felt like a shakedown.
This really is a skillfully executed interview and an interesting conversation with a man who is quoted as simply saying this:
“I did my duty as an American citizen and Army officer.”
So, this will be a busy day for me as I have to work while Hurricane Sally barrels towards us and hopefully turns north before it gets to us. So, I’ll leave you with these stories knowing that as with every Monday that there is more fresh hell in the headlines.
Please be safe. Please be kind and gentle with yourself and others. Please continue to check in. We care about you.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
September 11 Reads
Posted: September 11, 2020 Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: People Died, Septermber 11 Attacks, Trump Lied 27 Comments
Good Day Sky Dancers!
This is the 19th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. It is a tragic event in our history and still very much shaping our policies. New York City’s skyline changed in a matter of hours as it lost many first responders and citizens to what was an unimaginable act of foreign terrorism.
Today, the FBI considers election interference by the Russians and Domestic Terrorism threats represented by White Right Wing Racist militias to be a bigger threat. However, our policies no longer reflect proper priorities for our National Security because the biggest threats to our security are also the biggest Trump supporters. Our President is a Russian Asset and White Nationalist. It is no wonder that the art that continues to speak to me is still German Expressionism which rose to prominence in Germany between the wars.
There are many interesting takes on exactly how much threat Trump, his base, and his Russian overlords are to our republic. Me, I’m running around here with my hair on fire. Here’s one from The Independent and writer Carl Hiaasen: “Carl Hiaasen: ‘They’re gonna have to drag Trump out of the White House’. The bestselling Floridian crime writer talks to Kevin E G Perry about returning to writing after his brother’s death in a mass shooting, his visit to the president’s Palm Beach mansion, his election fears, and his gripping new novel ‘Squeeze Me’”
Creating laughter in a tough world may be Hiaasen’s hallmark, but his razor-edged sense of humour never diminishes the very real anger he feels towards those whose actions are destroying the planet, either through malice or callous indifference. While he says he takes some solace from the passion of the younger generation – he’s written environmental activism-focused novels for children since 2002’s Hoot – he fears it may be too little, too late. “There might be hope in there, just because their generation cannot possibly muck it up worse than my generation,” he says. “But then you look at the political scene and it’s very, very depressing. The Trump administration is trying to open up Alaska to more oil drilling at a time when the industry itself isn’t even showing any great enthusiasm for going into the Arctic. His ego is such a shrivelled little nub that he has to undo Obama’s policies even when there’s no political pressure to undo them.”
Any real action on the environment seems unimaginable without a change of administration in November, but Hiaasen says he’s among those Americans who fear Trump will attempt to stay in office regardless of the election results. “I think they’re going to have to back a tow truck up to the White House and drag his fat ass out of there, to be honest with you,” he says. “He’s never done anything with dignity, so he’s not leaving with dignity. I’m very uneasy about how ugly it’s going to get and the potential for violence, because the most violent demonstrators we have now in this country are right-wing lunatics showing up to these protests with guns.”
Hiaasen knows all too well just how terrifying a prospect that is. The world may be filled with senseless violence meted out beneath an indifferent heaven, but at least on the page he is able to deliver karmic justice. In that context, the idea of sending mammoth pythons slithering their way into the president’s inner sanctum sounds suspiciously like wish fulfilment. “Yeah, well, you caught me,” says Hiaasen with a sly smile. “The pythons had been rattling around in my mind for a while. They’re an invasive species and they’ve completely decimated the ecosystem. They’ve eaten their way through the Everglades and now they’re showing up in various suburbs around Florida, so I thought: pythons? Mar-a-Lago? Why the hell not?” He laughs. “Is it a sick fantasy? Yes, it is, but I suspect I’m not the only one who has thought along those lines.”
I can see this headed to my Kindle shortly.
So, where’s Trumpo? He was firmly planted in Pennsylvania trying to pull another election ‘miracle’ there.
And, BTW, did I mention that native Louisiana son Retired Army LT General Russsel Honore is and will always be my hero?
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Self-portrait as a soldier
So, the weird thing to me is that we know both Rice and Dubya managed to miss the briefing that said that the Taliban were planning an attack and the result was that people died. We also know that Obama knew that there were signals and warnings coming from the FBI on the connection between Russia and the Trump organization and attacks on our election. He dithered the opportunity away with second guessing. The Trumpist regime is just one on going shit show of dead Americans and inadequate responses to natural disasters. Why didn’t Obama do more? Now, we don’t have to ask why Trump isn’t doing more about threats to our National Security but I do sense a pattern here.
BB wrote yesterday about the Strzok book where both he and Dan Coates and many others felt Trump was compromised by the Russians. And, of course, we know it’s all because of his great need for money because he fails at every project he attempts.
David Corn has written about how the Russian attacks on our election and the Trumpist negligenceand planned response to the Pandemic is tantamount to the greatest act of betrayal since the Confederates took up arms against our Country.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Tavern
Not since the Civil War—when leaders responsible for the enslavement and brutalization of millions of Americans sought to destroy the United States and took military action that resulted in the violent deaths of hundreds of thousands of citizens—has a group of politicians so profoundly betrayed the republic. And this band—Donald Trump and GOP officials—has done so on two fronts simultaneously. They have failed to respond effectively to a pair of immense threats: a pandemic that has claimed the lives of close to 200,000 Americans, and a foreign attack on the political foundation of the country. What exacerbates this double tragedy is that Trump and his Republican supporters have done so purposefully. This has been no accident or act of unintentional incompetence. In each case, they sacrificed the public interest—including the well-being and the lives of millions of Americans—to serve their own interests. Trump and his crew have forsaken the United States of America.
It can be easy to lose sight of this big picture, as headlines explode every hour within a political media world cursed by tribalized partisan divisions. There already exists more than enough information to support such an extreme-sounding verdict. But evidence piles up each day—perhaps coming so fast as to overwhelm. The latest revelation (as I write) regarding Trump and the coronavirus crisis is that he told reporter Bob Woodward in March, “I wanted to always play it down.” Here is confirmation of what Americans had repeatedly seen with their own eyes for months: Trump lied about the dangers posed by this killer virus. And those lies, mostly unchallenged by his Republican allies and largely echoed by conservative media propagandists, shaped the ineffectual federal response and influenced how millions of Americans viewed the risks posed by the pandemic. One example: sticking with this big lie, Trump, who in early February privately told Woodward that the virus was airborne, refused to encourage mask-wearing. It’s likely that thousands—or tens of thousands—have died due to this.
Trump now claims he did not want to spark a panic. That is clearly another lie. This man relishes in causing panic when it doesn’t exist: the immigrant caravan, antifa, the end of the suburbs. He downplayed the pandemic because in his misguided political calculation he believed such bad news would harm his election prospects. (Actually, doing his job well in response to this crisis would have been a damn good electoral strategy. But that did not seem to occur to Trump.) So he tossed out bullshit while Americans were perishing and the economy was crashing. He abandoned his solemn duty to protect the citizenry instead holding rallies, focusing on his TV ratings, and dismissing (and promoting disinformation about) the gravest threat to the nation in decades.
The Daily Beast puts it succinctly: “Has Any American Killed More Americans Than Donald Trump?”
So Donald Trump copped to it. He told Bob Woodward that he knew how deadly the virus was—and downplayed it anyway, encouraging MAGA nation to act as if COVID-19 was a cheap Chinese knockoff of the flu.
“It’s remarkable that in these interviews, the president of the United States confessed to fucking manslaughter,” Molly Jong-Fast says on the latest episode of The New Abnormal.
The lawyers might debate whether Trump has any criminal culpability. But to Rick Wilson, there’s no question about Trump’s moral responsibility
“No American has killed more of their fellow Americans in this country than Donald Trump, except for Robert E. Lee and Jefferson fucking Davis,” he says. “No one has a body count to rival Trump’s. He knew it. He knew it was there. He did it. He let it happen. It is the most unbelievable and horrifying outcome that we can imagine.”
Molly adds, “Mike Pence was at a pro-life event the other day. And I was thinking about the irony, right? This administration has killed 100,000 plus plus plus people. And they’re talking about embryos. Like, it’s almost beyond parody”
Wassily Kandinsky, Bedroom in Aintmillerstrasse
We also had the notion that Russian Trolls were using leftwing media to try to drive numbers away from Clinton in 2016 . The Daily Beast also has this exclusive which is quite the read. : “Leaked Documents Show Russian Trolls Tried to Infiltrate Left-Wing Media”. Dimwits like Susan Sarandon and Jill Stein were clearly useful fools. So were some of the more well known socialist media outlets.’
It’s no secret that Russia’s trolls, hackers, and spies are pulling for Donald Trump in 2020—just like they famously did at the last election. But Moscow’s propaganda-peddlers aren’t just pushing MAGA memes and Biden disinfo—they’re also attempting to infiltrate left-wing sites.
The Russian trolls’ private chat logs and emails, reviewed by The Daily Beast, show they tried to get their American contributors to write for Jacobin, a leading socialist outlet; recruited from Truthout, a left-leaning nonprofit news site; and tried to buy their way onto the website of the long-pedigreed liberal outlet In These Times.
The reporting also shows that none of these particular outlets bit. But, there were some that did. Read more at the link if you can get through the paywall.
Meanwhile, the unhinged continues to go unchallenged by most Fox entertainment personalities. The insanity just continues.
Movie poster for The Cabinet Of Dr. Calagari – 1920 (Italian version)
So, just to end and wrap up the topics of the day we get this exclusive from NYDN: “EXCLUSIVE: Trump administration secretly withheld millions from FDNY 9/11 health program” from investigative reporter Michael McCauliff.
The Trump administration has secretly siphoned nearly $4 million away from a program that tracks and treats FDNY firefighters and medics suffering from 9/11 related illnesses, the Daily News has learned.The Treasury Department mysteriously started withholding parts of payments — nearly four years ago — meant to cover medical services for firefighters, emergency medical technicians and paramedics treated by the FDNY World Trade Center Health Program, documents obtained by The News reveal.
The payments were authorized and made by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which oversees the program. But instead of sending the funds to the city, the Treasury started keeping some of the money.
“This was just disappearing,” the program’s director, Dr. David Prezant, told The News. “This is the most amazing thing. This was disappearing — without any notification.”
Prezant said he was docked about half a million dollars each year in 2016 and 2017. Then it crept up to about $630,000 in 2018 and 2019. This year, Treasury has nearly tripled its extractions, diverting $1.447 million through late August, according to Prezant.
“Here we have sick World Trade Center-exposed firefighters and EMS workers, at a time when the city is having difficult financial circumstances due to COVID-19, and we’re not getting the money we need to be able to treat these heroes,” said Prezant, the FDNY’s Chief Medical Officer.
“And for years, they wouldn’t even tell us — we never ever received a letter telling us this,” he explained.
Prezant was never able to get an explanation from NIOSH or the mammoth Department of Health and Human Services which has the agency under its umbrella.
After years of complaining, Prezant did get a partial answer when Long Island Republican Rep. Pete King put his political weight behind the inquiry. That answer was that some other agency in the city has been in an unrelated feud with the feds over Medicare bills.
Let me just sum up here …
Trump LIED, people DIED and TRUMP is still LYING and people are still DYING.
Have a good weekend! Be safe! Please check in with us if you’re on the west coast. We’re so worried about you with those fires so out of control! I cannot believe I have friends in Oregon City that will likely not have a home to return to and are fortunate to have gotten out with pets and a few things.
We can put an end to this! We must vote! Every one of us! We cannot take any more of this!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Labor Day Reads: Labor is Life
Posted: September 7, 2020 Filed under: morning reads, worker rights | Tags: American Labor Unions, Labor Day, Organized Labor, Workin Hard Blues 22 Comments
Happy Labor Day Sky Dancers!
Today is the day we celebrate the American Worker and the Union movement that brought us so many benefits and work safety enhancements that we should all appreciate Organized Labor. The day also serves as reminder of the continual fight to maintain what they earned for us through several centuries of labor movements and resistance. Republican elected officials still try to dilute all these laws that serve to protect workers and the safety of the work environment as well as dilute the right to organize.
I’m actually just going to do a tribute to the labor movement and to workers lost unnecessarily because of the greed, unsafe work places, and horrible working conditions suffered even by small children until the Labor Movement left them free to be children. I’m really not interested in spending the day on what usually serves as a kick off to the Election Season because we need a break today from all of that!
I also would like to make tribute to the indigenous people and to the slaves stolen from Africa whose human and natural resources were used to build this country. They had no pay, no thanks, and slavery for working and living conditions. They lived under religious mission systems, were sent on forced relocation to barren lands, and were bought by the Confederacy that supported ownership and torture of human beings. Their children and grandchildren continue to fight for the rights of full citizenship and recognition. I also make tribute to the diasporas and hopeful immigrants who come here to face often desperate conditions to become part of what we offer up as the America dream. We are here to form a more perfect union and organized labor makes that possible
Each of us deserve dignity, safety, and fair compensation for our work no matter who we are. Who we love, what reproductive organs we were born with, the color of our skin, and our religious and ethnic heritage should not influence the rights we have as workers. Equal Pay for Equal Work. PERIOD.
The History Channel maintains documents on the history of our Federal Labor Day Holiday.
Labor Day, an annual celebration of workers and their achievements, originated during one of American labor history’s most dismal chapters.
In the late 1800s, at the height of the Industrial Revolution in the United States, the average American worked 12-hour days and seven-day weeks in order to eke out a basic living. Despite restrictions in some states, children as young as 5 or 6 toiled in mills, factories and mines across the country, earning a fraction of their adult counterparts’ wages.
People of all ages, particularly the very poor and recent immigrants, often faced extremely unsafe working conditions, with insufficient access to fresh air, sanitary facilities and breaks.
As manufacturing increasingly supplanted agriculture as the wellspring of American employment, labor unions, which had first appeared in the late 18th century, grew more prominent and vocal. They began organizing strikes and rallies to protest poor conditions and compel employers to renegotiate hours and pay.
Labor Unions are more crucial than ever. States have taken more steps to pass so-called Right to work laws that are really just used to destroy the ability of people to negotiate their work environment and wages. The argument is that workers cannot be “forced” to join unions. However, this is just a disguise to defund unions and to stop the large amount of influence they used to be able to command in my states because of huge union numbers. Businesses have actively worked to dilute the ability of people to unionize and the service industry frequently uses illegal tactics to stop unionization in many ways. This is from a 2015 HuffPo article.
(Contrary to popular opinion, no worker in the U.S. can be forced to be a full dues-paying, card-carrying member of a union. But they can be compelled to pay so-called “agency fees” — the portion of dues that goes expressly to bargaining and representation costs, as opposed to, say, political campaigns. Right-to-work guarantees that workers do not have to pay these fees.)
On the right, proponents of right-to-work argue that the laws make states more competitive and attract business. On the left, opponents of right-to-work argue that the laws drive down wages and fail to create jobs. What few would deny is that right-to-work laws can be crippling for organized labor As workers bow out of unions, the remaining workers must bear a larger share of the costs associated with representation and organizing. And if the union becomes less effective, workers have even more reason to leave, creating a downward spiral.
Republicans in Michigan passed a right-to-work law there in 2012, despite the state’s storied labor history and the presence of the United Auto Workers union. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics has already revealed a drop in union density in Michigan. Last year, the estimated number of union members dropped by 48,000, despite the fact that the state added 44,000 more workers to its economy.
Whatever their feelings on labor unions’ role in the workplace, many Republicans have a political interest in passing right-to-work legislation. By weakening organized labor, the laws indirectly hurt the Democratic Party, as unions remain a critical piece of the party’s base. It’s worth noting that the very phrase “right to work,” with its positive connotations, constitutes a linguistic coup for the right. (Unions have sought, with much less success, to brand the legislation as “right to work for less.”)
Like other legislative attacks on collective bargaining, the proliferation of right-to-work laws plays a large role in organized labor’s ongoing existential crisis. Right now, not even 7 percent of private-sector workers belong to a labor union, down from a peak of about 30 percent in the post-World War II years. More right-to-work laws will likely diminish that density further.
You can read about the 30 Victories for Workers’ Rights won by Organized Labor here at Stacker. The first American Union formed in 1794 and was the Shoemakers. This is a truly interesting list of the history of US Labor and Labor Law.Today, American workers have a host of rights and recourses should their workplace be hostile or harmful. While the modern labor movement works to continue to improve the working conditions for all with big efforts around a fair minimum wage and end of employer wage theft, the movement has a history rich with fights and wins. It put an end to child labor, 10-to-16 hour workdays, and unsafe working conditions. Today, every wage-earning American today owes a debt of gratitude to organized labor for the 40-hour workweek, minimum wage (such as it is), anti-discrimination laws, and other basic protections. Far from basic, those protections were, until fairly recently, pipe dreams to the millions of American men, women, and children who labored endlessly in dreadful conditions for poverty wages.
The gratitude is owed mostly to the unions those nameless and disposable workers organized, which they did under the threat of being fired, harassed, evicted from company homes, beaten, jailed, and, in many cases, killed. In 1886, for example, over 200,000 railroad workers went on strike to protest an unjust firing. In 1894, over 250,000 workers walked out of the Pullman Palace Car Company factories to protest 12-hour workdays and wage cuts.
The 2018 Supreme Court case Janus v. AFSCME established that public-sector workers who are protected by unions—of which there are five times as many as private workers—but don’t wish to join, no longer have to pay fees on behalf of the union’s collective bargaining. This dealt a blow to public-sector unions, though it didn’t result in the mass exodus union detractors had hoped for. Overall union membership in the U.S. in 2019 was at 10.3%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. While that’s a historical low rate, some industries—like digital media, museums, and non-profits—are making inroads with new unions.
While we’re on the subject of hard work
I just wanted to say that I always was a man to work
I was born working and I worked my way up by hard work
I ain’t never go nowhere yet but I got there by hard work
Work of the hardest kind
I been down and I been out
And I’ve been busted, disgusted and couldn’t be trusted
I worked my way up and I worked my way down
I’ve been drunk and I’ve been sober
I’ve had hard times and I got hijacked
And been robbed for cash and robbed for credit
Worked my way into jail and outta jail
And I woke up alotta mornings and I didn’t even know where I was at
But the hardest work I ever done is when I was trying to get myself
A worried woman to ease my worried mind
So, I’d just like to wish you a happy labor day!!! Be safe! Be kind to yourself!
FDR Labor Day 1941
What’s on your blogging and read list today?
Friday Reads: Too many Crises to Count
Posted: September 4, 2020 Filed under: just because | Tags: children and parents separated at the border, Covid Data suppression, Republican voter suppression, Trump hates our military 25 Comments
Alexej von Jawlensky – Child with doll c 1910
Good Day Sky Dancers!
It’s getting difficult to keep track of all the atrocities committed by the Trumpist Regime. There are so many, in fact, that we lurch from headline to headline while forgetting some of the most important violations of human rights still happening.
I am a proud daughter of a Veteran of World War 2. Great Uncles of mine fought in World War 1. I had a cousin who fought in Vietnam in a swift boat. My family fought in the Civil War for the Union and many of my relatives signed the Declaration of Independence and fought for the Continental Army. I am outraged what the US Commander in Chief says about those who answer the call to defend the country. He pardons the few that do not honor the uniform. He damns the ones that died for it.
However, our country is actively suppressing votes of its citizens, sending military equipment to local Police gun to down our citizens in the streets, and we still cage children. It’s hard to keep all of these headlines on the front page. It’s difficult to understand a US President who has turned our US priorities into Putin’s policies with a huge side of grifting the country for all the money the regime can grab. He runs a crime syndicate and we are all are targets.
This is the year we decide what kind of future children in the United States will have and if it will be based on rule of law and democratic values. All of our children should grow up knowing they have access to liberty and justice. They have the right to the American Dream and should not fall prey to the Trumpist Regime’s installation of the nightmare of American Carnage.
1921 Otto Dix, Two Children
This is a headline from Harlligen, Texas where children have been detained by ICE during the Pandemic. This decision could happen today. “California judge on Friday could sanction ICE for detaining migrant children during pandemic.”
A California judge on Friday could issue harsh sanctions against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for not adhering to a court order to release detained migrant children who are at-risk for being held at family detention facilities in close quarters during the COVID-19 pandemic.
California Judge Dolly Gee, who oversees the Flores Settlement Agreement — a 23-year-old class action lawsuit settlement that put restrictions on how long and under what conditions minors may be held in immigration detention facilities — could rule from the bench on Friday and issue broad reaching remedies to force the government into compliance after the agency failed to meet a July 27 court deadline that ordered the release of the children due to health risks from coronavirus, migrant advocates said Thursday.
On Aug. 7, Gee ruled the government has been in breach of the Flores Settlement and said she is inclined to impose a remedy. Friday’s hearing will be held at 11 a.m. PT in the U.S. District Court Central District of California Western Division.
This is from the Tampa Bay Times and it discusses a tactic used by a local sheriff to determine who might just be a criminal on something other than evidence.
Doll, Cat, Child – Gabriele Münter 1937 German 1877-1962
This is the basis of a futuristic dystopian society and deeply mimics the 1984 concept of “thought crimes”. It seems straight out of the Soviet past.
Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco took office in 2011 with a bold plan: to create a cutting-edge intelligence program that could stop crime before it happened.
What he actually built was a system to continuously monitor and harass Pasco County residents, a Tampa Bay Times investigation has found.
First the Sheriff’s Office generates lists of people it considers likely to break the law, based on arrest histories, unspecified intelligence and arbitrary decisions by police analysts.
Then it sends deputies to find and interrogate anyone whose name appears, often without probable cause, a search warrant or evidence of a specific crime.
They swarm homes in the middle of the night, waking families and embarrassing people in front of their neighbors. They write tickets for missing mailbox numbers and overgrown grass, saddling residents with court dates and fines. They come again and again, making arrests for any reason they can.
One former deputy described the directive like this: “Make their lives miserable until they move or sue.”
In just five years, Nocco’s signature program has ensnared almost 1,000 people.
At least one in 10 were younger than 18, the Times found.
Some of the young people were labeled targets despite having only one or two arrests.
And that’s not the only story out of Florida today that should worry us. This especially targets the health of children and their families which may be multigenerational.
This is truly the act of a fascist state. What other reason is there to hide public health data than to protect D’oh Hair Furor? This is from The Orlando Sentinel.
Local health officials are barred from releasing detailed information about new COVID-19 cases in public schools because of privacy rules, a local health official said Thursday.
The number of students and school staff who are infected — or whether infections are being transmitted in classrooms ― will no longer be released by health officials, Dr. Raul Pino, the state’s health officer in Orange County, said at a Thursday briefing.
That’s a departure from earlier this week when Pino released the number of cases associated with schools as well as the number of students and staff under precautionary quarantine and a list of affected schools.
On Monday he noted that the health department was investigating its first potential case of student-to-teacher transmission, critical information for parents as they decide whether to send their children to face-to-face classes in the midst of a global pandemic. But on Thursday, Pino said he couldn’t disclose any more details about that case and whether the health department had drawn a conclusion about how the transmission occurred.
It’s easy to be disturbed by the daily onslaught of headlines of the daily outrageous Trumpist statement. However, we should never lose track of the malevolent actions these statements detract from. The Washington Post editorial board goes straight for the click bait we get every day Trump opens his mouthy or every story uncovered by a reporter of Trump’s oral barfings to his staff. “Presidents are expected to set the national tone. What we got with Trump has been catastrophic.” Yes, but more importantly Presidential policies and actions should jive with our national values, priorities, and rule of law. His minions are actively destroying US Institutions and US rule of law. The puppets are entertaining but pull away the curtain to see what the hell is going on in the background! We’ve always known he is not capable of rising to this:
President of the United States is a special office. Unlike the constitutional monarchs or prime ministers of European and other systems, the president is neither head of state exclusively nor head of government, but performs both roles — fusing two aspects of national leadership, symbolic and substantive, in a single person.
The Founders of this country anticipated, in short, that the president would not just execute national laws but also set a national tone. They understood that obedience to written laws could only do so much to perpetuate a republic; citizens would have to follow unwritten norms of civic virtue as well, and would be more likely to do so if their leaders modeled them. They designed the presidency with their epitome of personal integrity and decency, George Washington, in mind.
The great fear of these early Americans was that the presidency could fall into the hands of a demagogue: someone like the current incumbent, Donald Trump, whose impact on the nation’s political culture over the past three-plus years has been, if anything, more damaging than his impact on public policy. Where past occupants of the office have at least paid lip service to its inspirational aspects, and where both of his immediate predecessors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, actively campaigned on themes of unity, Mr. Trump lives by a different credo: “When someone attacks me, I always attack back . . . except 100x more.” This is a formula for upwardly spiraling conflict. Consistent with it, Mr. Trump has used the bully pulpit — magnified by social media — to debase public discourse.
Otto Dix (German artist, 1891-1969) Mother and Child
The media has to stop debasing the discourse by covering the side show instead of the big tent acts where damage continues to our environment, our national park systems, our nation’s endangered species, our nation’s indigenous peoples, our nation’s immigrant and minority population, our nation’s women and girls, our nation’s rule of law, our nation’s treasury, our nation’s economy, our nation’s public health and our nation’s trust in our institutions … and I could just keep adding things here … transgender service people … religious minorities … the first amendment….
This is the truly astounding headline to me instead of the repeated knowledge that Trump inherited his father’s propensity to hate on soldiers and the military. That’s a sideshow compared to this headline from the AP: “Pentagon orders shutdown of Stars and Stripes newspaper.”
The Pentagon has ordered the military’s independent newspaper, Stars and Stripes, to cease publication at the end of the month, despite Congressional efforts to continue funding the century-old publication.
The order to halt publication by Sept. 30, and dissolve the organization by the end of January, is the latest salvo in the Pentagon’s move earlier this year to cut the $15.5 million in funding for the paper from the department’s budget. And it is a reflection of the Trump administration’s broader animosity for the media and members of the press.
Members of Congress have objected to the defunding move for months. And senators sent a letter to Defense Secretary Mark Esper this week urging him to reinstate funding. The letter, signed by 15 senators — including Republicans and Democrats — also warns Esper that the department is legally prohibited from canceling a budget program while a temporary continuing resolution funding the federal government is in effect.
“Stars and Stripes is an essential part of our nations freedom of the press that serves the very population charged with defending that freedom,” the senators said in the letter.
And Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., in a separate letter to Esper in late August, also voiced opposition to the move, calling Stripes “a valued “hometown newspaper” for the members of the Armed Forces, their families, and civilian employees across the globe.” He added that “as a veteran who has served overseas, I know the value that the Stars and Stripes brings to its readers.”
In the memo, the department says that Esper has decided to discontinue publication of the paper as a result of his department-wide budget review. Signed by Army Col. Paul Haverstick, acting director of the Pentagon’s Defense Media Activity, the memo said plans to shut down the paper are due on September 14, and the final newspaper publication will be on September 30.
Stripes ombudsman, Ernie Gates, told The Associated Press on Friday that shutting the paper down “would be fatal interference and permanent censorship of a unique First Amendment organization that has served U.S. troops reliably for generations.
Notice that the paper is “independent” and doesn’t produce the kind of propaganda the Trumpist regime demands in its monarchical fealty to all things Trump. And it’s a sad day when I have to headline an Arnold Schwarzenegger share.
From Reuters: “Southern U.S. states have closed 1,200 polling places in recent years: rights group”. This can only be targeted to stopping Black Americans from voting. It’s full on Jim Crow.
States across the American South have closed nearly 1,200 polling places since the Supreme Court weakened a landmark voting-discrimination law in 2013, according to a report released by a civil-rights group on Tuesday.
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights found http://www.democracydiverted.org that states with a history of racial discrimination have shuttered hundreds of voting locations since the court ruled that they did not need federal approval to change their laws. The report did not have comparisons with polling places in other regions.
The report comes as Republican-led states impose a range of other restrictions, from shorter voting hours to photo-ID requirements. As turnout has surged in recent elections, voters in cities like Phoenix, Arizona and Atlanta, Georgia, have endured hours-long waits to cast their ballots.
Seven counties in Georgia now have only one polling place, the report found.
Under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, areas with a history of voting discrimination – such as requiring African American or Hispanic voters to pay a poll tax or pass a literacy test – had first to convince the U.S. Justice Department or a federal court that any election changes they wished to make would not have a discriminatory effect. The Supreme Court struck down that portion of the law in 2013.
The law covered a swath of southern states stretching from Virginia to Texas, along with Arizona, Alaska and a few counties in states like New York, North Carolina, Florida, Michigan, South Dakota and California.
The high number of poll closures in these regions shows that Congress needs to restore the protections that were previously in place, said Vanita Gupta, the group’s president.
So, that’s my rant for the day. Make sure what’s going on in the Big Tent gets the focus and not the click bait. Trump is incapable of empathy. He only thinks of himself and possibly some of his family but only in terms of how they reflect on him. He only cares about money and power and getting on the good side of Putin. We must get rid of him. If not for ourselves, for the future of our children.
Please stay safe and be kind to yourself! Check in! We care about you! And most of all, think of the children!!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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quixote
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