Friday: Something Fascist This Way Comes
Posted: July 31, 2020 Filed under: just because 16 Comments
Good Day Sky Dancers!
It’s just so hard to start this morning because the headlines are particularly disturbing and not what one expects to see in what was once a fully mature democracy and a highly developed nation. The economic numbers are truly devastating. What makes it worse is that policy and lack of national health strategy is making us live through more than a shock to the economy and more than a national health crisis.
We’ve had a crisis in national health for years. Our broken system and the continuing focus of Republicans on hyping cultural wedge issues and voodoo economics while funneling taxpayer money to billionaires has just hit something that’s put the Republican agenda since Reagan on its destructive full display. It’s no longer slowly killing most of us. It’s actively killing most of us and the world is watching us like we’re living the real version of American Horror Story.
I’ve always enjoyed a good horror movie but sheesh, do we have to live in one? Sir John Cleese has started a zoom performances, speeches, thoughts, etc. He’s spot on here as quoted in the Daily Beast. He’s doing a series of live stream talks from an empty Cadogan Hall in London that is the very essence of the art of dark comedy.
“I don’t mean there’s no hope for us as individuals,” he clarifies when I ask him to elaborate on the ominous title. What he means is, “There is no hope for us that we could ever live in an intelligent, kind, well-run society. Mainly because most people have no idea what they’re talking about.”
Whenever he meets someone who is at the top of their respective field, Cleese asks them how many people in their profession “really know what they’re doing.” He says most people answer in the 10-15 percent range, which may say more about individual arrogance than widespread ineptitude, but he takes them at their word.
“So that means that six out of seven people really don’t know what they’re doing,” he says. “They can just follow routines. But if the routines don’t work, then they don’t understand it at that deeper level.” As is often the case with Cleese, the serious point is followed by a joke: “They’re like I am when my computer crashes.”
From there, Cleese says he moves on the question of why people seek power, which of course brings him to Donald Trump. The comedian has been prolifically anti-Trump on his Twitter account for the past several years and does not need much prompting to start ranting against the American president.
“If you look around at the moment, most of the people who seek great power are complete assholes, who are really only out for themselves,” he says. “Well, if someone’s out for themselves primarily, like our dear President Donald Trump, with no interest in other people at all, it’s not very likely that they’re going to be very good at building a society. And you see that the characteristics of people who are powerful is that they have a deep, deep fear of losing their power.”
“So with all these things going on there’s very little chance we will ever have a sensible society and this is a particularly bad moment,” Cleese adds.
Referring to the rise of strongman leaders around the world like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and others, Cleese says, “We have madness and power-seeking and complete unscrupulousness and pathological lying. And it’s very interesting why. Is it because people are very stupid? That’s a possible explanation.”
It’s really hard to watch and listen to the eulogies from three past presidents for such a towering human as John Lewis with normal behavior then return to the Daily Trumpist Reality Shit Show. It was on express view yesterday since former President Obama is an ongoing trigger for which ever personality disorder is front most at that particular point in time. However, President Obama did a job on him that should royally trigger him without even mentioning his name. This article is from Stephen Collinson at CNN: “Obama warns that Trump’s actions threaten US democracy.”
In one of the most jolting moments in modern political history, former President Barack Obama reclaimed his political pulpit with a stark warning that his successor is a grave and imminent threat to American democracy and racial justice.
Then, even more remarkably, President Donald Trump went on television and proved him right, putting a foreboding shadow over an election that he is already seeking to cast as illegitimate in the eyes of millions of Americans.
The campaign between Trump and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has mostly chugged along out of sight, obscured by a pandemic that has killed more than 150,000 Americans.
But the extraordinary interventions Thursday of two presidents, whose legacies will be forever entwined, suddenly underscored how this election, in the words of the quadrennial cliché, will actually be the most important one of our lifetimes.
Thursday brought a tableau of one president, liberated now that he is out of office, at the funeral of Rep. John Lewis, weaving the life of a national hero into a parable of America’s long struggle to reach its promise. The current commander in chief, mired in crisis and desperate to cling to power, reached not for inspiration but for lies and disinformation to obscure the truth.
Yes. Trump held a press conference so he could do his magic hands routine to distract the press away from everything and anything. The shocking but not possible announcement of the day was his inkling of putting off the national election. The shock was undoubtedly the point. From archconservative and a co-founder of The Federalist Society Steven G Calabresi writing in a NY Times Op Ed today: “Trump Might Try to Postpone the Election. That’s Unconstitutional. He should be removed unless he relents.” Trump has been doing things since he came down that elevator shadowing the need to remove him and every time that happens Mitch McConnell calls a recess and leaves town.
But I am frankly appalled by the president’s recent tweet seeking to postpone the November election. Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist. But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate.
Read the paragraph that precedes this one and realize that this man is really a major indicator of the problem. His late arrival to the party pearl clutching is really just typical of an oligarch realizing there’s a guillotine out there with his name on it. Trump is a champion mangler of the US Constitution. Where has he been?
The “rigged campaign” Trumpist Election Strategy is basically a strategy of projection. We’re supposed to look the other way while they rig the campaign and depress and fail to count votes. This is from Politico: ‘Rigged election’ goes from Trump complaint to campaign strategy. The notion that the president might not accept the election results has jumped from the partisan fever swamps to center stage in the campaign.” Translation of this is that if his rigging of the election doesn’t quite work he won’t leave but will try to tie things up endlessly in the courts.
Donald Trump’s suggestion that he might try to delay the election — or might not accept the result — is rapidly coming to the forefront of the presidential campaign, foreshadowing a final stretch roiled not only by the coronavirus and the economy, but by clashes over the nation’s most fundamental democratic norms.
Though Trump has no authority to move the election — an idea he floated Thursday — Democrats are already bracing for Republican challenges to absentee ballots and at vote counting on Election Day. They have good cause to be prepared: the president has repeatedly raised the prospect of a “rigged election” and recently declined to say if he’ll accept the results.
Trump’s rhetoric points increasingly to the possibility that he will dispute the outcome in a year marked by primary election administration meltdowns — a prospect that is heightened by his absolute control of state and national party machinery and an attorney general who has amplified Trump’s unsubstantiated claims about mail-in voting fraud.
“I don’t have any doubt that’s where he’s headed,” Pete Giangreco, a Democratic strategist who has worked on nine presidential campaigns, said of Trump’s effort to discredit the election. “He wants to delay the election because if they had the election today, he’d lose. The further out he gets from today, the better off he is … So, he wants more time to jerry-rig the system to somehow spit him out as the winner.”
So, here’s a horrifying report from WAPO on the DHS. And you thought they only sent secret police out to terrify those folks peacefully assembled while exercising the first amendment rights! “DHS compiled ‘intelligence reports’ on journalists who published leaked documents.” Everybody gets to lose their first amendment rights but whacko white nationalist christianists.
The Department of Homeland Security has compiled “intelligence reports” about the work of American journalists covering protests in Portland, Ore., in what current and former officials called an alarming use of a government system meant to share information about suspected terrorists and violent actors.
Over the past week, the department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis has disseminated three Open Source Intelligence Reports to federal law enforcement agencies and others, summarizing tweets written by two journalists — a reporter for the New York Times and the editor in chief of the blog Lawfare — and noting they had published leaked, unclassified documents about DHS operations in Portland. The intelligence reports, obtained by The Washington Post, include written descriptions and images of the tweets and the number of times they had been liked or retweeted by others.
After The Post published a story online Thursday evening detailing the department’s practices, the acting homeland security secretary, Chad Wolf, ordered the intelligence office to stop collecting information on journalists and announced an investigation into the matter.
“Upon learning about the practice, Acting Secretary Wolf directed the DHS Intelligence & Analysis Directorate to immediately discontinue collecting information involving members of the press,” a department spokesman said in a statement. “In no way does the Acting Secretary condone this practice and he has immediately ordered an inquiry into the matter. The Acting Secretary is committed to ensuring that all DHS personnel uphold the principles of professionalism, impartiality and respect for civil rights and civil liberties, particularly as it relates to the exercise of First Amendment rights.”
Some of the leaked DHS documents the journalists posted and wrote about revealed shortcomings in the department’s understanding of the nature of the protests in Portland, as well as techniques that intelligence analysts have used. A memo by the department’s top intelligence official, which was tweeted by the editor of Lawfare, says personnel relied on “FINTEL,” an acronym for financial intelligence, as well as finished intelligence “Baseball cards” of arrested protesters to try to understand their motivations and plans. Historically, military and intelligence officials have used such cards for biographical dossiers of suspected terrorists, including those targeted in lethal drone strikes.
Yeah. Isn’t that special!
And then there’s this from CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin ” Fearing Trump interference, FBI agents hid copies of Russia investigation docs”. It’s excerpted from his new book TRUE CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS: The Investigation of Donald Trump,” by Jeffrey Toobin. Feeling better yet?
From Comey’s first meetings with Trump, shortly after he won the presidency, the FBI director developed misgivings about his new boss’ behavior — about Trump’s demands for “loyalty,” and even more unnerving, his request that the Bureau drop its investigation of Flynn. Comey’s conversations with Trump had been so distressing that the director started writing up contemporaneous summaries of their interactions and sharing them with a handful of top officials at the Bureau. Now, suddenly, Comey was out — and the question arose of what to do with his memos about his conversations with the President
Andrew McCabe, who was Comey’s deputy and now the acting director of the FBI. McCabe thought Trump’s behavior was sufficiently problematic to be investigated for possible obstruction of justice, and he told his team to open a criminal case.
Given the wild pace of events, McCabe couldn’t be sure how long he’d last as director, so he wanted to lock down as much evidence as possible. Most important, he told the investigating agents to place Comey’s memos in SENTINEL, the FBI’s case management software. McCabe knew that once documents were inside the system, they were virtually impossible to remove. With Comey’s memos in the system, the investigators were certain to have access to them — even if McCabe himself would eventually be gone.
Indeed, FBI officials even went a step farther. Once McCabe became director, Bureau employees grew so concerned that Trump would try to shut down the investigation that they secreted at least three copies of key documents, including Comey’s memos, in remote locations around the Bureau. This was to make sure that in the event Trump directed an end to these inquiries, the documents could always be preserved, located, and shared.
On May 17, eight days after Trump fired Comey, Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, announced that he had appointed Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the FBI from 2001 to 2013, to serve as special counsel. Rosenstein gave Mueller a broad mandate — to investigate ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, as well as any matters that arose from his investigation. Mueller’s team ultimately took possession of Comey’s memos, and they proved to be important evidence in the report Mueller filed two years later. As Mueller later learned, and included in his report, Trump seriously contemplated firing the special counsel on several occasions — so the initial suspicions at the FBI, about the President’s real intentions, were well-grounded.
And, I haven’t even gotten to the economy yet. Dan Rather puts it rather succinctly.
Yes. There’s that. We’re officially in a recession and this is the worst Quarter’s GDP ever.
The US economy contracted at a 32.9% annual rate from April through June, its worst drop on record, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said Thursday.
Business ground to a halt during the pandemic lockdown in the spring of this year, and America plunged into its first recession in 11 years, putting an end to the longest economic expansion in US history and wiping out five years of economic gains in just a few months.
A recession is commonly defined as two consecutive quarters of declining gross domestic product — the broadest measure of the economy. Between January and March, GDP declined by an annualized rate of 5%.
Okay, we’ll let’s listen to something a little more uplifting.
Please be safe! Be gentle with yourself and others! Give yourself space to heal and relax! Check in with us! We love and value your thoughts!!!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today!
Monday Reads: Horticulture
Posted: July 27, 2020 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Dorothy Parker, Horticulture, Melania Trump, Trumpistan, Whore-to-Culture 6 Comments
Woman With Flower 1932 By Pablo Picasso
Good Morning Sky Dancers!
I’m going to borrow something–well steal it directly–with attribution to my friend and writer Michael Tisserand. It’s a reference to Dorothy Parker which is a hell of a lot better to read about than anything I can find on a Monday Morning in Trumpist America. It’s also a one word reminder for me to get my horticulture class finished up shortly despite that the weather here is really messing with everything except my damn banana trees. Michael wins the internet for the entire month of July with his tweet hands down! (See below).
So, let’s do the background work for Michael’s punchline in which Dorothy is brilliant and Michael is spot on. You can see his tweet below and how he revamped it for the bizarre announcement that Melania has suddenly taken an interest in revamping the Rose Garden.
There is substantive evidence that Dorothy Parker created the horticulture pun while she was participating in a word game at a party. She may have spoken it during a meeting of the famed Algonquin Round Table. These gatherings were held regularly by a group of columnists, playwrights, actors and other bright individuals at lunch within the Algonquin Hotel in New York City between roughly 1919 and 1929.
The earliest evidence, however, appeared several years later in 1935 in the widely-syndicated column of Walter Winchell. The actual pun was too taboo to print in a newspaper in the 1930s; hence, Winchell’s comment was curiously cryptic. Boldface has been added to excerpts: 1
Dorothy Parker can make up a sentence containing the word “Horticulture,” but hardly here.
A month later another gossip columnist named Harrison Carroll printed an elliptical comment that also linked Parker to the pun without sharing with readers the details of the witticism: 2
What was Dorothy Parker’s priceless offering when the gang at the James Gleason party were playing one of those “make a sentence with a word” games and someone suggested “horticulture”?
Special thanks to top researcher Bill Mullins who located the two citations given above.
The earliest account presenting a full version of Parker’s remark that QI has located was published in 1962 in a magazine of arts and literature called “Horizon”. An article by the prominent drama critic John Mason Brown referred to two puns. The first quip was based on the word “meretricious”, and an exploration of its provenance is available in another entry here. The second jest was ascribed to Parker: 3
Frank Adams’s solving the problem of building a sentence around “meretricious” with “Meretricious ‘n’ a Happy New Year,” and Mrs. Parker’s solving the same problem with “horticulture” by coming up with “You may lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think”—these and a hundred others of their kind may by now have become enfeebled by familiarity. But they were born of a moment, and meant for that moment, and at that moment they were triumphant.
In addition to wordplay with “horticulture” Parker cleverly refashioned a very old English proverb about stubbornness: You may lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. As noted previously, when Parker delivered her joke it was too racy to be reprinted in contemporaneous books or periodicals published for a wide audience.
Frederic Bazille: Black Woman with Peonies 1870
So, given those disastrous–albeit not permanent–Christmas displays where she ruins the White House annually, I can only wonder how dark and deranged the nation’s First Illegally visa’d sex worker will make the Rose Garden. My guess is this is another attempt to distract us from the miserable job her Sugar Daddy has done on everything and his continued assault on civil liberties as well as his massive grifting enterprise.
And then, not to mention the folks around him like crank Economist Peter Navarro who felt inclined to mock Dr. Fauci’s first pitch today.
“You know, the only thing I regret is Dr. Fauci’s pitch the other day at Opening Day. I felt bad for him,” Navarro said. “But I always look forward, and we’re all part of the team. And he actually tells people to wear the masks, and my job is to get them made.”
All the best people! All the BEST! People! Be BEST!
Henri Matisse (1869-1954) Jeune fille aux anémones sur fond violet
Okay, enough levity. It’s back to the Sugar Daddy billing it all to us and the depths of depravity he brings to this country.
So, I don’t often read Town & Country, but when I do I make sure the article is almost as cheeky as Dorothy Parker. “How Brooks Brothers Became a Symbol of What Not to Wear to the Revolution. That notorious “Ken and Karen” couple from St. Louis politically slimed a 202-year-old staple of American belonging. Is it still Ok to wear sensible chinos and a pink polo?”
Clothes are not the only politicized aspect of our appearances now—nor were they ever; hair is also a prominent battleground. During the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette’s signature powdered pouf was copied by the bourgeoisie, but it was reviled by the starving sans-culottes, who saw it as a wasteful indulgence, another representation of her to loucheness and profligacy.
A more modern hairdo once popular with hipsters is the shaved/faded sides and long-on-top look, or grown-out “high and tight” once favored by everyone from Macklemore to David Beckham. That, too, has been appropriated by far-right figurehead Richard Spencer and his ilk, who have taken to wearing it with Brooks Brothers suits, because Nazis used to wear the hairdo to look tidy under their helmets.
The New York Times once dubbed it the “Hitler Youth,” but it has since gone on to be nicknamed the “Fashy Haircut”—short for fascist, natch—and some of its adherents seem blithely unaware of the politics telegraphed by their coiffure. In 2016, the Washington Post once noted the irony of white nationalists “sporting a hairstyle that’s already been repurposed in the 21st century by young people whose ethos is radical safe-space inclusiveness, not ethnophobic separatism with eugenic undertones.”
In the context of today, that misdirection is precisely the point. The alt-right has intentionally become more sophisticated about blending in, substituting red tank tops and MAGA hats with more ambivalent iconography, the kind of fungible avatars that can be taken at face value, or interpreted as dog whistles if weaponized.
Arguably, another head of hair that looks suspect in the current climate is worn by perennially corporate hyper-conservatives like Jared Kushner. It’s the third-grade-picture-day, combover haircut that announces you have a turtle in your lunchbox and get to wear big boy pants because you haven’t wet the bed in weeks. It’s hair that looks excessively Boy Scouty and feckless precisely because it isn’t, like when predatory octopods camouflage themselves by mimicking the ocean floor.
For maximum due diligence, ask yourself a few difficult questions before opting for the old standbys when getting dressed for your next Zoomtinis. Remember that something that looks “safe” on the surface rarely is. We must all make sacrifices during times of (culture) war, but dressing in flip flops and pajama bottoms is arguably better than walking out of your house looking like you want to annex the Sudetenland.
The McCloskeys, by the way, are looking at a possible felony for what the Circuit Attorney’s Office in St. Louis called unlawful use of a gun “in an angry or threatening manner.” The fashion police, however, has not yet pressed charges, though a guilty verdict seems like a foregone conclusion.
Suzanne Valadon | The Blue Room, 1923
And of course, having enough money to eke a roof and essentials during a global pandemic and a country wide depression is just too much for Republican Senators who want every one back lifting that bale and toting that barge. Maybe they should be forced to find a job in this environment. After all, they caused it.
From WAPO: “GOP, White House aim to temporarily reduce weekly unemployment benefit from $600 to $200. House Democrats have proposed keeping $600 benefit in place through January but the program is set to expire later this week; $200 would be bridge as states move to new system.”
“We have unemployment running out, we have renter protection running out, we have state and local governments going into new month and won’t have the money and will lay off thousands and thousands of people,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Monday morning on MSNBC. “We’re at all these cliffs and we still at this very moment don’t have a plan from the Republicans. We want to sit down and negotiate. But you can’t negotiate with a ghost.”
Given the difficulty of reaching agreement on the multiple contentious issues at play, Meadows and Mnuchin suggested over the weekend that Congress might need to pass a narrow bill including just the unemployment insurance, schools money and liability provisions.
Democrats have rejected that approach, and McConnell has yet to publicly embrace it, either.
The legislation will exclude the payroll tax cut President Trump had demanded, which Senate Republicans opposed. But it is expected to include language related to the FBI headquarters building that is diagonal from Trump’s hotel in downtown D.C. It was unclear exactly what the language would say, but Trump has said he wants to see a new headquarters building built on the site, and his administration killed a plan to relocate the headquarters to the suburbs.
The legislation also appeared likely to contain a number of other provisions pushed by a variety of Senate Republicans, which could potentially help secure more votes. These include a bill by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) aimed at bringing production lines back to the U.S. from China. Graham predicted over the weekend that half of Republicans wouldn’t support a new coronavirus spending bill.
Legislation by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) on increasing incentives for advanced chip manufacturing also was being eyed for inclusion, as was a bill by Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) called the Safeguarding American Innovation Act.
Woman Seated By A Bouquet Of Flowers Artwork By Suzanne Valadon
Nothing like the smell of bacon in the morning!!! Grifters gotta grift!!!
The plan does include an August payment to all of another $1200. The generosity and humanity underwhelms! So Greg Sargent has an interesting hypothesis up today. Is this just Click Bait or Wishful Thinking? “How Fox News may be destroying Trump’s reelection hopes”. This is also from WAPO.
It would be a peculiarly apt form of poetic justice if the entity that has done so much to help President Trump run this country into the ground — Fox News — ends up playing an outsize role in helping destroy his chances at reelection.
Yet that may be exactly what’s happening.
This possibility is thrust upon us by two remarkable new reports: one in The Post illuminating Trump’s unsettled mental universe as he grapples with the new coronavirus surge, and one in the New York Times reporting that his law enforcement crackdowns are only accelerating more protests in response.
For Trump, Fox News has two functions: With some exceptions, it largely functions as his “shameless propaganda outlet,” as Margaret Sullivan put it, aggressively inflating his successes and faithfully pushing his messages. When Fox occasionally departs from this role, Trump rages at it as a form of deep betrayal.
Okay, so this is enough for me today. But hey, we got the whole week and at least until January to endure all this pettiness, meanness, greed, law breaking, … oh, go ahead! Add to that list!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Finally Friday Reads: Be More Like Baseball!
Posted: July 24, 2020 Filed under: just because | Tags: American Cities under Federal Attack, MLB, Portland demonstrations, Seattle, vintage Baseball 17 Comments
Baseball in the 1800s
Good Day Sky Dancers!
Let’s start with a little in your face Trumperz from the Yankees and the Nationals! Not only did Dr. Fauci–with a wild pitch–get the honor of throwing out the first pitch of the shortened MLB season, we also got this! All the players took the knee during the National Anthem. Now, let’s just continue with giving him a good old fashioned Bronx Cheer.
Black Lives Matter is a part of the culture now even if the Hair Furor’s white nationalist christianist racists want it all to go away. Every day more people turn on the Trumpist Regime but every day he responds with something crazier and crazier. This is from baseball stats and numbers wonk Nate Cohn writing at the NYT.
Recent national polls show that Joe Biden’s commanding lead has eroded longstanding demographic divisions that have favored Republicans, endangering their hold on a tier of states where the Democratic Party usually has little chance to prevail in federal elections, even Republican strongholds like Kansas or Alaska.
President Trump still has plenty of time to close the gap with Mr. Biden. But with Mr. Biden’s lead enduring well into a second month amid a worsening coronavirus pandemic, it’s worth considering the potential consequences of a decisive Biden victory.
Remarkably, Mr. Trump’s lead among white voters has all but vanished. On average, he holds just a three-point lead among them, 48 percent to 45 percent, across an average of high-quality telephone surveys since June 1. His lead among white voters has steadily diminished since April.
Let’s hope the country can outlast him. I’m not a ‘surburban housewife’ but I feel less safe with under the Trumpist Regime than I did as a kid ducking and covering under my desk from the nukes in Cuba. I just want us all to be safe at home.
Jackie Robinson American Baseball Player
So, the Dark Side is coming to Seattle and Dr. Daughter’s neighborhood as of yesterday. Why is he going to places with either women mayors or governors? Trying to work out mommy issues now? Also from the NYT: “Feds Sending Tactical Team to Seattle, Expanding Presence Beyond Portland. After outrage over the presence of federal agents in Portland, Ore., the Trump administration is sending a team to Seattle. Officials say they will be on standby.”
The deployment to Seattle came on the same day that the inspector general of the Justice Department announced an investigation into tactics used by the federal agents in Portland and in front of Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., in early June.
The inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, Joseph V. Cuffari, is also conducting an inquiry into the tactics of the agents in Portland. Mr. Cuffari said in a letter to Democrats that he expected to examine the authority used to deploy agents to the city after President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to increase security at monuments, statues and federal property.
The order prompted the Homeland Security Department to form teams that were briefly deployed to multiple cities to guard federal property, including Seattle, for the July 4 weekend. The tactical teams in Portland have remained at a federal courthouse as tension with protesters there has heightened.
Dorothy Kamenshek American baseball player
A Federal Judge in Oregon has restricted the actions of Federal Troops terrorizing Portland Protestors. This is from OPB: “Judge restricts force federal officers can use in Portland”.
U.S. District Judge Michael H. Simon has temporarily curbed the use of force by federal officers deployed to Portland, restricting their interactions with legal observers and journalists observing nightly protests against police violence.
On Thursday afternoon, Simon issued a temporary restraining order on officers from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Marshals Service sent to Portland to guard federal buildings. The restrictions will last for two weeks. The judge is still considering a longer-lasting injunction against federal law enforcement.
The order comes as part of a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in Oregon, alleging law enforcement has been targeting and attacking journalists at the protests.
The city of Portland was originally the main defendant in the suit. In early July, Simon issued a temporary restraining order against the city, placing new restrictions on how local police can interact with observers. Last week, the Oregon chapter of the ACLU successfully added the federal government to its lawsuit and immediately began pushing for similar restraints.
The new restrictions for federal officers are nearly identical to the limits already placed on Portland police. Federal officers are barred from arresting, threatening to arrest or using physical force against someone who they should “reasonably know” is a journalist or a legal observer unless they have probable cause to believe that person has committed a crime. Journalists and observers are also not required to follow orders to disperse nor can a federal officer tell them to stop documenting the protest.
One difference between the two orders: If a federal officer intentionally violates the order, it states they would not be protected under the doctrine of qualified immunity, a legal principle that often protects officers in police brutality lawsuits.
Like the last order, the judge said federal officers should identify legal observers by the green hats, worn by observers from the National Lawyers Guild or blue vests, worn by observers from the ACLU. Journalists should be identified by either a press pass or clothing that identifies them as press.
More on this from the ACLU: “FEDERAL COURT ISSUES RESTRAINING ORDER ON FEDERAL AGENTS IN PORTLAND”.
U.S. District Judge Michael Simon today blocked federal agents in Portland from dispersing, arresting, threatening to arrest, or targeting force against journalists or legal observers at protests. The court’s order, which comes in response to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon, adds the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Marshals Service to an existing injunction barring Portland police from arresting or attacking journalists and legal observers at Portland protests.
Under the court order, federal agents also cannot unlawfully seize any photographic equipment, audio- or video-recording equipment, or press passes from journalists and legal observers, or order journalists or legal observers to stop photographing, recording, or observing a protest.
“This order is a victory for the rule of law,” said Jann Carson, interim executive director of the ACLU of Oregon. “Federal agents from Trump’s Departments of Homeland Security and Justice are terrorizing the community, threatening lives, and relentlessly attacking journalists and legal observers documenting protests. These are the actions of a tyrant, and they have no place anywhere in America.”
Satchell Paige American Baseball player
From John Feffer at Foreign Policy in Focus: “Feds Attack! Trump’s use of federal paramilitaries is a classic tactic of autocrats to test how far they can push their authority in opposition-controlled regions.”
President Trump is doubling down, not backing down. He says that the paramilitaries are there to restore order. The Feds are preparing to descend on Chicago, and Trump is also warning Philadelphia and New York that they’re next. “Look at what’s going on — all run by Democrats, all run by very liberal Democrats. All run, really, by [the] radical left,” Trump said. “If Biden got in, that would be true for the country. The whole country would go to hell. And we’re not going to let it go to hell.”
Halfway around the world, meanwhile, the Russian authorities arrested Sergei Furgal, the governor of the far eastern city of Khabarovsk, on charges that he orchestrated the murder of two men 15 years ago. Over the last week, tens of thousands of people have demonstrated on the streets of Khabarovsk demanding the release of this leader of the opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Furgal and his supporters argue that the arrest is politically motivated.
In Hong Kong, authorities are using a new national security law criminalizing many forms of protest to arrest several pro-democracy advocates, including the politician Tam Tak-chi, who was expected to run for the legislature in the September election. The action put an immediate damper on opposition efforts to select candidates for the vote. From Beijing, the Chinese Communist Party is cracking down on any challenges to its authority from the periphery, whether in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, or Tibet.
Analysts of the new authoritarian wave that has swept across the world in the last few years have largely focused on power grabs in capitals. Leaders like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping have attempted to reduce the influence of legislative and judicial bodies in favor of their own executive power. They have targeted civil society and media. They have used the coronavirus crisis to consolidate their control.
An equally important feature of this new authoritarianism is its intolerance for regional or local power bases that lie beyond executive reach. For countries that have federal structures, this means a conscious effort to strengthen the federal center at the expense of the regions. It’s part of the remaking of the nation-state in the 21st century, a reversal of the two-edged trend to devolve power to local authorities and delegate authority to international institutions.
These nationalists don’t just hate globalists. They hate anybody who stands in their way, including just about any potential counterforce taking shape on the periphery.
Ty Cobb 1928 American Baseball Player
Feffer suggests Trump has started a “new civil war”.
Now Trump is claiming that areas of the country under Democratic Party control are in fact swamps of anti-Americanism. He is deploying the classic vocabulary associated with dehumanizing America’s putative enemies prior to attack. This is no longer a conflict between red and blue. Trump is transforming America’s political divide into an existential battle between grey and blue, where the Feds are supporting a Confederate-friendly president and the rebellious states long for the return of a more perfect Union.
Trump’s use of federal paramilitaries is a classic tactic of autocrats to test how far they can push their authority and what forces they can count on in an emergency. The Black Lives Matter protests inadvertently provided Trump with that opportunity. Come election time, he’ll know which guns are on his side if he chooses to question the election results and stay in office.
There are two more stories today that show that getting more than just white men in office = change for the better.
Women used to play in this?
From the Chicago Trib: “Mayor Lori Lightfoot has Christopher Columbus statues removed from Chicago parks overnight” And look who complained:
It was not immediately clear where the statues were taken. Reports from television stations showed the statue in Arrigo Park, 801 S. Loomis St., in Chicago’s historic Little Italy neighborhood, was removed a few hours after the downtown statue.
The Grant Park removal capped off an at-times surreal evening. Late Thursday, Chicago Fraternal Order of Police president John Catanzara made his way to the downtown statue wearing an “Italia” T-shirt. He lounged around, talking with cops, criticizing Lightfoot, and promising there would be a pro-police protest there on Saturday even if the statue stayed in place..
He also got into debates with anti-Columbus protesters, some of which grew heated.
Boston 1909
Good bye Columbus! Good Bye all you pantheons to White Male Colonizers! And a big fuck off to jerks like Representative YoYo. From The New Yorker and David Remnick: “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Delivers a Lesson in Decency on the House Floor”.
The video of Ocasio-Cortez’s speech is available online, of course; it should be studied for its measured cadence, its artful construction, and its refusal of ugliness.
She began with narrative, setting the scene: “I was minding my own business, walking up the steps, and Representative Yoho put his finger in my face. He called me ‘disgusting.’ He called me ‘crazy.’ He called me ‘out of my mind.’ And he called me ‘dangerous.’ ” Then she broadened her scope: “This issue is not about one incident. It is cultural. It is a culture of lack of impunity, of accepting violence and violent language against women and an entire structure of power that supports that.” Ocasio-Cortez made it clear that she was not going to fall down and faint. She had heard it all before, on the subway and as a bartender. But she wasn’t going to let this pass, not from a fellow-member of Congress: “I could not allow my nieces, I could not allow the little girls that I go home to, I could not allow victims of verbal abuse, and worse, to see that. To see that excuse, and see our Congress accept it as legitimate and accept it as an apology and to accept silence as a form of acceptance. I could not allow that to stand.” What’s more, she was not going to allow Yoho, in his clumsy way, to use his family as a “shield” for his barrage.
“Having a daughter does not make a man decent. Having a wife does not make a decent man. Treating people with dignity and respect makes a decent man. And when a decent man messes up, as we all are bound to do, he tries his best and does apologize,” she said. “I am someone’s daughter, too.”
The politics of our moment are dominated by a bully of miserable character, a President who has failed to contain a pandemic through sheer indifference, who has fabricated a reëlection campaign based on bigotry and the deliberate inflammation of division. His language is abusive, his attitude toward women disdainful. Trump is all about himself: his needs, his ego, his self-preservation. Along the way he has created a Republican Party in his own image. Imitators like Ted Yoho slavishly follow his lead. On the House floor Thursday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez exemplified a different sort of character. She defended not only herself; she defended principle and countless women. And all in just a few short minutes on the floor of the House of Representatives.
So, there are some things uniquely American that change and adapt while still remaining uniquely American in a very good way. Baseball is used as a metaphor for many things. I’ll just go with that. It used to be all white male. Then it was not. It used to have no women players. Then it did not. It missed the usual season opening stuff in 2020 but reinvented itself to play in an atmosphere compatible with the Covid-19 Pandemic and Dr. Fauci–not the Orange Snot Blob–threw out the first pitch. The MLB is fully on board with the social justice goals of Black Lives Matter.
America! Be more like Baseball!
What’s on your blogging and reading list today?
Monday Morning Reads: Government by the Superstition instead of Acts of Faith
Posted: July 20, 2020 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: coronavirus pandemic Covid-19, Portland demonstrations 18 Comments
“Voidness is the womb of compassion”
Good Day Sky Dancers!
The weirdest thing on the internet for me today was to find out that my Governor follows me on Twitter when I just had to sound off at him.
Oh, and I decided to use some art on spiritual leaders giving teachings just in keeping with every thing that tics me off today. Also,I included a quote that I find relevant just to show that I don’t hate individuals practicing their belief system in some nice quiet room or gathering of choice.. In fact, I find unity in that all teach some form of acting, speaking, and thinking Compassionately.
This first is from Nagarjuna who is widely considered one of the most important Buddhist philosophers after Gautama Buddha. He’s considered a second Buddha.
I suppose I should be glad he’s not quite as bad as the Governor of the supposed “Show Me State”. This is from the St Louis Dispatch.
In an interview on Friday with talk-radio host Marc Cox on KFTK (97.1 FM), Parson indicated both certainty and acceptance that the coronavirus will spread among children when they return to school this fall. The virus has killed 1,130 people in the state despite a weekslong stay-at-home order in the spring that helped slow the virus’ spread — and the state set a record on Saturday with 958 new cases.
In the same 10-minute interview, Parson said that if it came to it, he would probably pardon the Central West End couple who pointed guns at protesters marching past their home on a private street on June 28.
Parson’s comment on the coronavirus signaled that the decision to send all children back to school would be justified even in a scenario in which all of them became infected with the coronavirus.
St. Louis-area schools are expected to release their reopening plans on Monday.
“These kids have got to get back to school,” Parson told Cox. “They’re at the lowest risk possible. And if they do get COVID-19, which they will — and they will when they go to school — they’re not going to the hospitals. They’re not going to have to sit in doctor’s offices. They’re going to go home and they’re going to get over it.”
So, I spent three evenings over the weekend listening to His Holiness the Dali Lama give a speech on the middle path broadcast on Facebook so it’s not like I’m completely devoid of the ability to pray, follow some form of belief, or be influenced by a moral structure. It’s just I would never be all pious out in front of the public as a public servant. I certainly wouldn’t lead a state and suggest three days of fasting and prayer in times that call for action.
Oh, and just as a side note, HHDL thought the camera and broad cast was off and starting saying the leader of the United States could use a few of Nagarjuna’s teachings on how to be compassionate and empathetic and was hushed by one of his attendant Lamas. He immediately switched to “some world leaders” but he inkled the first bit loud enough that he seriously slammed Trump for being unable to feel any kind of higher feelings to fellow human beings. That made my Saturday night.
Jesus of Nazareth “Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you. This is the essence of all that is taught in the law and the prophets.”
It’s the small things in life that matter in these wretched times.
Axios has a rather strong heading today in its Health Science section: “We blew it.” Governors and the Federal government in the majority of states have led us into a plague state.
America spent the spring building a bridge to August, spending trillions and shutting down major parts of society. The expanse was to be a bent coronavirus curve, and the other side some semblance of normal, where kids would go to school and their parents to work.
The bottom line: We blew it, building a pier instead.
There will be books written about America’s lost five months of 2020, but here’s what we know:
We blew testing. President Trump regularly brags and complains about the number of COVID-19 tests conducted in the U.S., but America hasn’t built the infrastructure necessary to process and trace the results.
- Quest Diagnostics says its average turnaround time for a COVID-19 test has lengthened to “seven or more days” — thus decreasing the chance that asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic carriers will self-quarantine.
- The testing delays also make it harder for public health officials to understand current conditions, let alone implement effective contact tracing.
- Speaking of contact tracing, it remains a haphazard and uncoordinated process in many parts of the country.
We blew schools. Congress allocated $150 billion for state and local governments as part of the CARES Act, but that was aimed at maintainingstatus quoservices in the face of plummeting tax revenue.
There was no money earmarked for schools to buy new safety equipment, nor to hire additional teachers who might be needed to staff smaller class sizes and hybrid learning days.
- U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was not among the 27 officials included in the White House Coronavirus Task Force, and rarely appeared at Task Force press conferences.
- The administration insists that schools should reopen this fall because kids are less likely to get very sick from the virus, but it has not yet offered detailed plans to protect older teachers, at-risk family members, or students with pre-existing respiratory or immune conditions.
- Silicon Valley provided some free services to schools, but there was no coordinated effort to create a streamlined virtual learning platform. There also continue to be millions of schoolkids without access to broadband and/or Internet-connected devices.
We blew economics. The CARES Act was bold and bipartisan, a massive stimulus to meet the moment.
- It’s running out, without an extension plan not yet in place.
- Expanded unemployment benefits expire in days. Many small businesses have already exhausted their Paycheck Protection Program loans, including some that reopened but have been forced to close again.
- There has been no national effort to pause residential or commercial evictions, nor to give landlords breathing room on their mortgage payments.
We blew public health. There’s obviously a lot here, but just stick with face masks. Had we all been directed to wear them in March — and done so, even makeshift ones while manufacturing ramped up — you might not be reading this post.
Babaylan: The Ancient Witches of Tribal Philippines ““There will always be a subtle yet vital role that only females can play within the intricate tales of myths and mysticism. Among all the creations, they are the only one who are given the power of procreation; the ability to conceive life. Such qualities are usually attributed with omnipotent gods and that is why being a woman escalates an individual to a certain degree that makes them special among the people of their society. This is quiet notable during the ancient days where the daughters of Eve are the only acclaimed mediators between the spirit world and the mortal realm.”
The Health Section of WAPO delves into the how the US response to the Pandemic has shocked the world. Failure will define us for some time.
Six months after the coronavirus appeared in America, the nation has failed spectacularly to contain it. The country’s ineffective response has shocked observers around the planet.
Many countries have rigorously driven infection rates nearly to zero. In the United States, coronavirus transmission is out of control. The national response is fragmented, shot through with political rancor and culture-war divisiveness. Testing shortcomings that revealed themselves in March have become acute in July, with week-long
waits for results leaving the country blind to real-time virus spread and rendering contact tracing nearly irrelevant.
The United States may be heading toward a new spasm of wrenching economic shutdowns or to another massive spike in preventable deaths from covid-19 — or both.
How the world’s richest country got into this dismal situation is a complicated tale that exposes the flaws and fissures in a nation long proud of its ability to meet cataclysmic challenges.
In other words, we’re in for a long period of suffering on all levels for some time which probably means most of us will have the time and the desire to seek some meaning of things beyond the reality outside our door. This is when friends and family as well our local community become more relevant than ever.
I’ve not been amazed–but have been very thankful–for the spirit of neighbors and neighborhoods here in New Orleans. We not only have little libraries now. We have little food pantries. We have facebook pages and twitter feeds asking who needs help and where to get it. We have folks doing local food gardens and openly advertising community tables where every one drops off what they have to share. At this basis of all of this, we have our community.
Yesterday, the call went out from a nurse for plasma donations. Our hospitals have run low to out on them. We must think globally and act locally more than ever. Folks can rely on their own faith as my Governor John Bel Edwards seems to drive home. But also, the works part is the most necessary which is quite stressed in the teachings of his own Catholicism. Humanity and compassion do not spring from external beings but from within all of us.
No one exemplified this more than the late Congressman Lewis. I’m seeing this in the many of the folks he mentored. As I’ve said about him frequently. he didn’t just pass a torch forward. He used his to light millions of them.
The Mayor of Atlanta and her ability to do what’s best in governing her city is under attack by the Governor of Georgia. Georgia Governor Kemp has made direct attacks on her via new York Magazine and Matt Steib. “Governor Kemp Attacks Atlanta Mayor As Georgia Outbreak Worsens.”
On Thursday Kemp filed a lawsuit that aims to overturn Bottoms’s recent order requiring masks in public — itself a rebuke of the governor’s ban on cities and counties ordering face coverings in public. Now Bottoms says Kemp’s move was “personal retaliation,” noting that the governor “did not sue the city of Atlanta, he filed suit against myself and our City Council personally.” While Kemp has claimed the sole authority for issuing rules to halt the spread of the coronavirus, Bottoms has asserted that she is following the recommendations of public-health officials, including a July 14 report from from the White House coronavirus task force, which advised Georgia to “mandate statewide wearing of cloth face coverings outside the home.”
The two had sparred earlier this month over Bottoms’s order for Atlanta to return to the first phase of its reopening plan, which Kemp called “merely guidance.” But the lawsuit regarding masks escalated the conflict, as the governor requested that a state superior-court judge stop Bottoms from issuing any public-health mandates “more or less restrictive than Governor Kemp’s executive orders” and ban her from any media appearances related to the matter.
>Compassion is fellow-feeling, the emotion of caring concern; in post-biblical Hebrew rahamanut, interestingly from the word rehem, ‘womb’, originating in the idea of either motherly love or sibling love (coming from the same womb); in biblical Hebrew rahamim. The Talmudic rabbis (Yevamot 79a) considered compassion to be one of the three distinguishing marks ofJews. A Talmud ic term frequently used for God, particularly in legal discussions, is the Aramaic Rahamana, ‘the Compassionate’, denoting that the Torah, the Law, is God’s compassionate gift to Israel.”
The old cliché about finding out the true character of some one during a crisis still holds. And, so we come down to this (via Wapo as reported by Marissa J Lang): “A Navy vet asked federal officers in Portland to remember their oaths. Then they broke his hand.”
He came to the protest with a question. He left with two broken bones in a confrontation with federal officers that went viral.
Christopher David had watched in horror as videos surfaced of federal officers in camouflage throwing protesters into unmarked vans in Portland. The 53-year-old Portland resident had heard the stories: protesters injured, gassed, sprayed with chemicals that tugged at their nostrils and burned their eyes.
David, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and former member of the Navy’s Civil Engineer Corps, said he wanted to know what the officers involved thought of the oath they had sworn to protect and defend the Constitution.
So, he said, on Saturday evening, he headed to downtown Portland to ask them.
That night’s protests outside the federal courthouse — the 51st day of ongoing demonstrations — began with a line of local moms linking arms and demanding the federal agents stop targeting Portland kids. David, who had never attended a protest before, hung back and watched.
He was trying to keep his distance, he said, as a host of health problems have made him especially vulnerable amid a still-raging coronavirus pandemic. He asked one woman when the feds would show up, but she said it was also her first protest since the Department of Homeland Security deployed tactical units from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection to bolster protections for federal buildings and officers in the Pacific Northwest city.
Just as he was about to leave, David said, the federal officers emerged. They rushed a line of protesters nearby, knocking them to the ground. David walked toward a gap in the line, calling out to the officers.
“Why are you not honoring your oath?” he bellowed. “Why are you not honoring your oath to the Constitution?”
So, the one thing I can say about the accomplishments of the Trumpist regime is that he has managed to tear down the rule of law, he has broken the explicit social contracts between our government and we the people, and he has spread divisiveness through hateful racism, misogyny, and bigotry of sexual preferences, gender identification, ethnic background and religion.
We are a resourceful people and many of us do have deeply held spiritual beliefs based on compassion. I am respectful that the image of Mohammed is not something to display. But, this is from HuffPo and I will share these teachings on compassion
“A good deed done to an animal is like a good deed done to a human being, while an act of cruelty to an animal is as bad as cruelty to a human being.” – (Mishkat al-Masabih)
“I never saw anyone who was more compassionate towards children than Allah’s Messenger (pbuh).” (Sahih Muslim)
“Every Muslim has to give in charity.” (Sahih Al-Bukhari)
“Stop, O people, that I may give you ten rules for your guidance in the battlefield. Do not commit treachery or deviate from the right path. You must not mutilate dead bodies. Neither kill a child, nor a woman, nor an aged man. Bring no harm to the trees, nor burn them with fire, especially those which are fruitful. Slay not any of the enemy’s flock, save for your food. You are likely to pass by people who have devoted their lives to monastic services; leave them alone.” (Prophet Muhammad’s Rules of War)
The problem seems to be in the application of all these teachings I find through various traditions of various religions and beliefs. It’s hard to find one where a main teacher does not teach–as a central tenant– compassion. It’s just really hard to find the followers that enact it.
So, I leave you on hopefully higher ground. I’m working on creating my own little library, little pantry, and community table as something always available other than something I’ve done when I’ve had the opportunity. I still am daily a neighbor among neighbors.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today? Check in and let us know how you are! We care!
Friday Reads: Wretched times
Posted: July 17, 2020 Filed under: Afternoon Reads 22 Comments
Portrait of Estelle Musson Degas | New Orleans Museum of Art 1872
Good Morning Sky Dancers!
I’m not sure if this headache found me before I started looking at the news on my Twitter feed but both the news and the headache together have certainly wrecked my morning. I’m hoping this finds you in a safe and good place even though these are wretched times.
Our National Treasure–justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg–has experienced a return of her cancer. She still has no plans on retiring. I never ever thought I’d ever look forward to a President Joe Biden after the Anita Hill Ordeal but it it was it is. I need to get His Holiness to write a special Long Life Prayer and Practice for her.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at 87 the U.S. Supreme Court’s oldest member, said on Friday she is receiving chemotherapy treatment for a recurrence of cancer – the latest in a series of health issues – but indicated no intention to retire.
In a statement released by the court, Ginsburg said that a periodic scan in February, followed by a biopsy, revealed lesions on her liver. She said she is tolerating the chemotherapy treatment well and that it is yielding positive results. She said she began her chemotherapy on May 19.
“I have often said I would remain a member of the Court as long as I can do the job full steam. I remain fully able to do that,” Ginsburg said.
The health of Ginsburg, the court’s senior liberal member, is closely watched because a Supreme Court vacancy could give Republican President Donald Trump the opportunity to appoint a third justice to the nine-member court and move it further to the right. The court currently has a 5-4 conservative majority including two justices appointed by Trump – Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 and Neil Gorsuch in 2017.
Gustav Corbet, The Trellis, 1862
From Betsy Klein at CNN: “Task force report says 18 states in coronavirus ‘red zone’ should roll back reopening”.
An unpublished document prepared for the White House coronavirus task force and obtained by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit newsroom, recommends that 18 states in the coronavirus “red zone” for cases should roll back reopening measures amid surging cases.
The “red zone” is defined in the 359-page report as “those core-based statistical areas (CBSAs) and counties that during the last week reported both new cases above 100 per 100,000 population, and a diagnostic test positivity result above 10%.”
The report outlines measures counties in the red zone should take. It encourages residents to “wear a mask at all times outside the home and maintain physical distance.” And it recommends that public officials “close bars and gyms” and “limit social gatherings to 10 people or fewer,” which would mean rolling back reopening provisions in these places.
Well, that’s really an astounding headline to read in a democracy, isn’t it?
Political leaders in Oregon have accused President Donald Trump of interfering in Portland’s handling of widespread protests and riots in the wake of George Floyd’s death as a political stunt to rally his base ahead of the November election.
Despite repeated calls from Oregon Gov. Kate Brown and Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler for federal authorities to remove their officers from the city’s streets, the Trump administration has remained adamant on maintaining a law enforcement presence in Portland.
In an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity on Thursday, Homeland Security Acting Secretary Chad Wolf acknowledged that local and state officials wanted federal authorities to “pack up and go home.”
Emilio Grau Sala | Woman with bouquet
And here’s another one you don’t expect to see either “Major USPS Changes Could Hamper Vote-By-Mail At The Worst Possible Time” via TPM by Tierney Sneed. I cannot figure out why these folks hate the Post Office unless none of them have read the constitution.
Election officials who were already facing major challenges in making voting accessible operations during the pandemic were thrown a new curveball this week.
Mail service could be slowed down in coming months, as part of a campaign to overhaul the U.S. Postal Service launched by new agency leadership appointed by President Trump.
The proposed operational changes were first reported by the Washington Post this week, based on internal documents, some of which TPM has also obtained. In a statement to TPM, the U.S. Postal Service said that the “overall plan” had not been “finalized,” while stressing that the agency is “committed to delivering Election Mail in a timely manner.”
But major questions remain about how the newly-reported changes could affect the ability of absentee voters to get their ballots in on time to be counted. Several other aspects of the election process also rely on the mail, and there is now a scramble, in light of the recent USPS news, to understand what steps election officials need to take to keep things running smoothly.
https://twitter.com/DingusJMcGee/status/1282435701737287680
William Henry Margetson Arranging Flowers
From the Chicago Sun Times: ” Postmaster General’s bad plan to slow-walk your mail should be labeled ‘return to sender’ “
The U.S Postal Service traditionally has been the federal government’s most trusted agency, doing a pretty good job of delivering and processing 472 million pieces of mail each day.
But that reputation is about to take a hit. President Donald Trump’s new postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, has effectively ordered his troops to purposely delay mail delivery to save on overtime costs.
…
But for DeJoy, to go to battle for the agency he runs apparently is a bridge too far. A Trump donor with no previous postal service experience, he was installed by a president who openly mocks the postal service as a “joke” while claiming falsely that it undercharges the retail giant Amazon for deliveries.
And DeJoy is no less disparaging. In a memo outlining the new rules, DeJoy has likened the postal service to once “untouchable” U.S. Steel, asserting that “the largest company in the world” is now “gone.”
Far from gone, U.S. Steel is a $3 billion-a-year company that employs almost 30,000 people.
The post office needs a fix. Trump has sent in a guy with a dull hatchet.
What are the chances that Trump, who fears mail-in balloting benefits the Democratic Party, is simply trying to neuter the postal service to improve his re-election prospects? Knowing Trump, we’d have to say pretty good.
In 34 states, absentee ballots have to be received by election officials, not just postmarked, by Election Day.
In Louis DeJoy, Trump appears to have found himself another Bill Barr: a bootlick willing to undermine a government agency — and our democratic institutions — to further the boss’s personal political aims.
Oh, and we’re still being taken for a ride by Trumperz’ .
Anyway, I hope you have a nice week. I think I need to go back to sleep for awhile.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
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