Thursday Open Thread
Posted: August 8, 2019 Filed under: just because | Tags: Iowa Polls Dems 2020 primary 4 Comments
Race Horses, Edgar Degas
Morning Sky Dancers!
BB is having some trouble with her internet connection atm so here’s something to keep us busy while her provider attempts to fix the problems at the cheapest cost to them possible!!
Here’s the latest polls and qualifier for Dem Debates in September.
This is an open Thread! Have a great day!
Monday Mourning Reads
Posted: August 5, 2019 Filed under: morning reads 39 Comments
Pablo Picasso – Weeping Woman 004 1937
It’s a sad morning and an ongoing reminder of what kind of deviant is occupying the White House. His diminished capacity was on full display as he dryly read a script completely defying everything he’s ever said and done in his life. He could’t even get the location of the last mass shooting straight as he read as if he could care less. He said Toledo. Yeah, right up there with the Bowling Green Massacre you know that we all will remember…
But, we know…
We know that the El Paso shooter’s manifesto echos the speech of Trump
At campaign rallies before last year’s midterm elections, President Trump repeatedly warned that America was under attack by immigrants heading for the border. “You look at what is marching up, that is an invasion!” he declared at one rally. “That is an invasion!”
Nine months later, a 21-year-old white man is accused of opening fire in a Walmart in El Paso, killing 20 people and injuring dozens more after writing a manifesto railing against immigration and announcing that “this attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
The suspect wrote that his views “predate Trump,” as if anticipating the political debate that would follow the blood bath. But if Mr. Trump did not originally inspire the gunman, he has brought into the mainstream polarizing ideas and people once consigned to the fringes of American society.
We’ve all seen clips of the MAGA Rallies which are resoundingly White Nationalist in nature.
There’s just only so much I can write about today and share with you so this is likely going to be short.
Gely Korzhev Mother 1964-1967
Including this headline from the Washington Examiner: “Confusion: Biden offers sympathy for the ‘tragic events in Houston today and also in Michigan’”. Are these two sad, old men plus Bernie Sanders the best leadership we can offer for our ongoing moments of crises? Old guys that can’t even remember where the slaughters happened? And demented old Bernie who has his own history with the NRA and suggested Trump doesn’t want his words to kill people?
I don’t think so. This all does not have to be baked into our cake.
In August 2017, three men from rural Illinois—members of one of our country’s numerous heavily armed and rather poorly regulated “militias”—drove to Bloomington, Minnesota, just south of Minneapolis, to plant an IED in the Dar al-Farooq Islamic Center. Following their arrest, two of the men admitted their guilt. They had set out from Illinois, they said, determined to scare Muslims into leaving the United States.
The story barely made a ripple in the political press, focused, as it was, on the already routine chaos of Donald Trump’s Washington—the president was engaged in a complicated beef with Senator Richard Blumenthal; Mike Pence was supposedly setting up a “shadow campaign” for 2020; North Korea was maybe going to nuke us. All this squalid executive-branch rancor left the right free to spin the incident before the facts were known. (Shortly after the bombing, Sebastian Gorka, the Breitbart editor turned White House foreign policy adviser, suggested on MSNBC that the attack had been a false flag “propagated by the left.”) The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville would happen a week later, forcing still another news cycle devoted to the president’s response, or nonresponse, to right-wing political violence.
This summer, Trump took aim, on Twitter, at Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, who, he said, “originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all).”
“Why,” he asked, “don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came?”
And then the ” Go Back” chants started. And while some one erased Trump’s tweets calling immigrants an infestation we all know that he can’t disappear them. He can’t disappear all those speeches and pressers where he says “infestations” over and over and over and called caravans “invasions” over and over and over.
The Widow (1882) by Frank O’Meara
Is this how our nightmare will end? From Politico: “Nadler: Judiciary panel could recommend articles of impeachment by late fall.” Well, no, but it’s a beginning. We still have the #MoscowMitch problem.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler said Monday that his panel could recommend articles of impeachment by late fall, sketching a rough timeline for potential efforts to remove President Donald Trump just days after a majority of House Democrats signaled their willingness to support an impeachment inquiry.
“If we decide to report articles of impeachment, we could get to that late in the fall, in the latter part of the year,” Nadler said on MSNBC.
Nadler is petitioning a federal judge to get lawmakers access to grand jury evidence collected by former special counsel Robert Mueller, and his committee is preparing to sue former White House counsel Don McGahn to compel his testimony in the committee’s ongoing investigation into potential abuses of power by Trump.
“I think that we will probably get court decisions by the end of October, maybe shortly thereafter. We’ll have hearings in September and October with people we don’t — witnesses who are not dependent on the court proceedings,” Nadler said.
Käthe Kollwitz,Self-Portrait with Hand on Forehead, etching , 1910;
I’m going to end this post with something from Slate and the keyboard and mind of Tom Scocca: “Where Taking the Concerns of Racists Seriously Has Gotten Us”.
Within last week’s story of how Ronald Reagan made a racist phone call to Richard Nixon, there was a second story—a parable, effectively: a small point that contained a much larger point. It had nothing, or almost nothing, to do with Ronald Reagan’s own character; it happened after Reagan had finished fuming to Nixon about how African leaders who’d thwarted American foreign policy at the United Nations were “monkeys,” and the two men had gotten off the phone.
Nixon then called Secretary of State William Rogers, to relay Reagan’s message and to warn Rogers that the White House should not express too much public support for the U.N., given the anger of the conservatives that Reagan represented. “As he said,” Nixon said, “he saw these, he said, these, uh, these cannibals on television last night.” At the word cannibals, the men shared a chuckle.
But Reagan hadn’t said cannibals. Nor was Nixon calling the leaders cannibals himself. He had conjured the word from somewhere, and attributed it to Reagan—in Reagan’s role as a voice of the bigoted faction of the public—and passed it along to Rogers, without anyone having directly produced it. It was a racist slur, yet no particular racist person could claim authorship of it. It just happened.
In response to the El Paso massacre, it’s been easy enough for people to draw the connection between the vitriol that Donald Trump and Fox News express toward immigrants and the professed motives of the person arrested for the slaughter. Open, seething hate of nonwhite people has become a recurring presence in this country under Trump.
The point to this article is to provide examples from the NYT and others that coddle the same sentiment. And that’s the deal, we can’t afford to coddle the feelings of people who have a philosophy of life that is anathema to the principles the underlie our Rule of Law and our Democracy. We protect their right to grasp and display their ideas under their right to Free Speech. Our Government can only do so much and that is why it’s up to us but it’s also up to our Leaders. Our Laws may not imprison folks for free speech but our leaders must not defend the indefensible nor make excuses for it or support the hatred and bigots that reside in their political parties. Our President should not represent everything our society has moved against on our path to a more perfect union.
We have to get rid of this scourge and it’s up to every one of us to do something in the space we have around our lives.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Finally Friday Reads: Short Fingered Vulgarian is Vulgar meanwhile Back in the USSovietRepubliklans
Posted: August 2, 2019 Filed under: 2020 Elections, morning reads | Tags: #KKKremlinCaligula, #MoscowMitch, LeningradLindsey 34 Comments
Good Morning Sky Dancers!
It’s Friday, so of course the news is off the wall. I miss my Daddy terribly but I’m really glad that he didn’t live to see the World he fought a war to create crumble at the hands of the Russian potted plant in the Oval Office and his enablers like #MoscowMitch and #LeningradLindsey.
Here’s something you shouldn’t share with your grandchildren ever! But, hey, he’s the new Evangelical Christian Savior so maybe it’s now a sacred gesture!
Trigger Warning: Icky Vulgarian hand gestures.
The big question we have to ask ourselves now is Who are We as a Country? No, really, after all these years as a some what flawed but better than anything else out there constitutional democracy with aspirations towards a more perfect union we now face a group of fanatics who are redefining us into a theocracy and an authoritarian kleptocracy. What has a small group of white republicans and their greedy, power hungry representatives made us into? Will we be able to stop this?
Will Wilkinson writes this Op Ed for the NYT today: “Conservatives Are Hiding Their ‘Loathing’ Behind Our Flag. The molten core of right-wing nationalism is the furious denial of America’s unalterably multiracial, multicultural national character.”
The Republican Party under Donald Trump has devolved into a populist cult of personality. But Mr. Trump won’t be president forever. Can the cult persist without its personality? Does Trumpist nationalism contain a kernel of coherent ideology that can outlast the Trump presidency?
At a recent conference in Washington, a group of conservatives did their level best to promote Trumpism without Trump (rebranded as “national conservatism”) as a cure for all that ails our frayed and faltering republic. But the exclusive Foggy Bottom confab served only to clarify that “national conservatism” is an abortive monstrosity, neither conservative nor national. Its animating principle is contempt for the actually existing United States of America, and the nation it proposes is not ours.
Bitter cultural and political division inevitably leads to calls for healing reconciliation under the banner of shared citizenship and national identity. After all, we’re all Americans, and our fortunes are bound together, like it or not.
Yet the question of who “we” are as “a people” is the central question on which we’re polarized. High-minded calls to reunite under the flag therefore tend to take a side and amount to little more than a demand for the other side’s unconditional surrender. “Agree with me, and then we won’t disagree” is more a threat than an argument.
The way the nationalist sees it, liberals always throw the first punch by “changing things.” When members of the “Great American Middle” (to use the artfully coded phrase of Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri to refer to nonurban whites) lash out in response to the provocations of progressive social change, they see themselves as patriots defending their America from internal attack.
The attackers — the nature-denying feminists, ungrateful blacks, babbling immigrants, ostentatiously wedded gays — bear full responsibility for any damage wrought by populist backlash, because they incited it by demanding and claiming a measure of equal freedom. But they aren’t entitled to it, because the conservative denizens of the fruited plain are entitled first to a country that feels like home to them. That’s what America is. So the blame for polarizing mutual animosity must always fall on those who fought for, or failed to prevent, the developments that made America into something else — a country “real Americans” find hard to recognize or love.
The practical implication of the nationalist’s entitled perspective is that unifying social reconciliation requires submission to a vision of national identity flatly incompatible with the existence and political equality of America’s urban multicultural majority. That’s a recipe for civil war, not social cohesion
I see nothing driving the Republican party today but Racism and personal greed. What does it mean to reject pluralism? Remember when our national motto was not about some angry sky fairy that wasn’t supposedly a commie but “E pluribus unum?”
People at President Donald Trump’s rally in Ohio grew rowdy as they clashed with demonstrators advocating for immigration rights on Thursday, cheering when a protest sign got ripped.
Protesters chanted and held banners that read “Immigrants Built America” and “Chinga La Migra,” which is Spanish slang for “Fuck Border Patrol/Immigration.”
At the time, Trump was falsely accusing Democrats of caring more about inhumane conditions for migrants detained at the border than about the conditions of U.S. citizens.
The president paused his speech for almost three minutes as the scuffle broke out and one of the protesters’ banners was ripped. Security guards eventually escorted the demonstrators out of the stadium.
The crowd roared when the small group of protesters left, and almost the entire arena broke into chants of “Na-na-na-na, hey-hey, goodbye!” and “USA!”
“Cincinnati, do you have a Democrat mayor?” Trump asked sarcastically as he resumed his remarks.
And that follows this horrifying act by Leningrad Lindsey yesterday: “#LeningradLindsey trends after Graham forces asylum bill through Senate committee.” via The Hill.
The hashtag “LeningradLindsey” trended on Twitter Thursday after Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) forced a controversial asylum bill through committee.
The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday advanced a bill to overhaul U.S. asylum laws, waiving committee rules to force the bill through to the full Senate, where it likely won’t get the 60 votes it needs to pass.
But Graham’s move to push the bill through the panel outraged Democrats who say the South Carolina senator broke the rules on how lawmakers take up legislation in order to move a partisan bill along.
And KKKremlinCaliguala insists the Russians didn’t interfere in one of the most bizarre pressers of his Mad King Rule to date. “Donald Trump doubts Russian meddling in 2020 election, disputing Robert Mueller” via USA Today.
President Donald Trump on Thursday questioned former special counsel Robert Mueller’s assessment that Russia is already interfering in the 2020 presidential election, dismissing the notion just as he did after the 2016 election.
“You don’t really believe this. Do you believe this?” Trump told reporters at the White House as he prepared to leave for a political rally in Cincinnati.
His words were in response to a direct question about whether he raised Mueller’s assessment during a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump said he did not discuss election interference with Putin during a phone call Wednesday.
Mueller, whose staff prepared a report detailing efforts by Russians to hack Democrats and manipulate social media platforms during the 2016 election, said last week they will try it again in 2020.
“They’re doing it as we sit here,” Mueller said during high-profile House hearing.
Another unbelievable headline was made by Icky Lizzy Cheney : “REP. CHENEY ACCUSES TRIBES OF “DESTROYING OUR WESTERN WAY OF LIFE” OVER SACRED GRIZZLY PROTECTIONS.” This story is via Native News Online Net.
On a momentous day for Tribal Nations, Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY), the House Republican Conference Chairwoman, stated that the successful litigation by tribes and environmentalists to return the grizzly bear in Greater Yellowstone to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) “was not based on science or facts” but motivated by plaintiffs “intent on destroying our Western way of life.”
One of the largest tribal-plaintiff alliances in recent memory prevailed in the landmark case, Crow Tribe et al v. Zinke last September, when US District Judge Dana Christensen ruled in favor of the tribes and environmental groups after finding that the Trump Administration’s US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) had failed to abide by the ESA and exceeded its authority in attempting to remove federal protections from the grizzly. Tuesday, USFWS officially returned federal protections to the grizzly.
Removing protections from the bear, revered as sacred to a multitude of tribes, would have left the grizzly vulnerable to high-dollar trophy hunts and lifted leasing restrictions on some 34,375 square miles. Extractive industry, livestock and logging interests are among those desirous of capitalizing on the area, a region comprised of tribal treaty, reserved rights and ceded lands.
“IF THIS WASN’T LIZ CHENEY AND THE ERA OF THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION, YOU MIGHT BE RENDERED SPEECHLESS BY THE INSENSITIVITY AND MENDACITY OF THE STATEMENT,” SAID TOM RODGERS, A SENIOR ADVISER TO THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN TRIBAL LEADERS COUNCIL (RMTLC), WHO TESTIFIED AT MAY’S CONGRESSIONAL HEARING ON THE TRIBAL HERITAGE AND GRIZZLY BEAR PROTECTION ACT. HR 2532, INTRODUCED BY HOUSE NATURAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN RAUL GRIJALVA, WAS INSPIRED BY THE GRIZZLY TREATY SIGNED BY OVER 200 TRIBAL NATIONS.
“So, in striving to protect our culture, our religious and spiritual freedoms, our sovereignty and our treaty rights – all of which are encapsulated in the grizzly issue – we are ‘destroying’ Cheney’s idea of the ‘Western way of life’?” questioned Rodgers. “I would remind the Congresswoman that at the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition an estimated 100,000 grizzly bears roamed from the Missouri River to the Pacific Coast. That was all Indian Country. Now there are fewer than 2,000 grizzly bears and our people live in Third World conditions on meager reservations in the poorest counties in the US. Does she really want to talk about ‘destroying’ a ‘way of life’?” asked Rodgers.
So-called Party of Reagan: WHY WHY WHY this? “US-Russia arms control treaty dies; US to test new weapon” via ABC. Which side are we on these days? I don’t get it at all
The United States plans to test a new missile in coming weeks that would have been prohibited under a landmark, 32-year-old arms control treaty that the U.S. and Russia ripped up on Friday.
Washington and Moscow walked out of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty that President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed in 1987, raising fears of a new arms race . The U.S. blamed Moscow for the death of the treaty. It said that for years Moscow has been developing and fielding weapons that violate the treaty and threaten the United States and its allies, particularly in Europe.
“Russia is solely responsible for the treaty’s demise,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement released on Friday.
Russia pointed a finger at America.
“The denunciation of the INF treaty confirms that the U.S. has embarked on destroying all international agreements that do not suit them for one reason or another,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement Friday. “This leads to the actual dismantling of the existing arms control system.”
BB sent this link to me to read and it’s as scary as anything I’ve seen in a while. It’s from the UK site Church and State and it shows us what an obscenely right wing religious nutter we have as AG Barr: “Trump’s attorney general wants god’s moral order enforced by government”. This is still giving me nightmares. He’s actually a living breathing THEOCRAT.
J. Beauregard Sessions was a legitimate threat to America’s secular government as Trump’s attorney general, but his theocratic aspirations paled in comparison to Trump’s latest theocratic cabinet member – a conservative Catholic malcontent who is unlikely to ever defend the U.S. Constitution because it is a secular document. It is noteworthy that Sessions only stated that, according to his mind, the separation of church and state in the Constitution is a concept that is unconstitutional. However, his replacement ardently believes that America’s government is duty-bound to enforce god’s laws because there is no place for secularism.
In a 1995 essay, Barr expressed the extremist Christian view that “American government should not be secular;” secularism is an abomination in Barr’s theocratic mind despite the law of the land is unmistakably secular. Furthermore, Barr contends America’s government is supposed to be imposing “a transcendent moral order with objective standards of right and wrong that flows from God’s eternal law;” eternal law best dictated by the Vatican and taught in public schools at taxpayer’s expense.
It is true that as attorney general William Barr will defend Trump’s criminality and corruption; it is one of the only reasons Trump nominated him. However, the real danger to the nation is Barr’s belief that the government’s primary function should be defending and enforcing his god’s moral edicts while ardently opposing any legislative branch effort to make secular laws according to the secular Constitution.
As noted by Michael Stone a couple of weeks ago, in addition to the racism and misogyny one expects from a radical conservative Christian, “Barr is also a bigot when it comes to non-religious people and others who respect the separation of church and state.”
Barr epitomizes the typical extremist religious fanatic by blaming everything from crime to divorce to sexually transmitted diseases on what he alleges is “the federal government’s non-stop attacks on traditional religious values.” In fact, he joins no small number of Republican evangelical extremists who demand that taxpayers fund religious instruction, specifically Catholic religious instruction, in public schools. Barr, as a matter of fact, has called for the United States government to subsidize Catholic education and categorically called for federal legislation to promote Vatican edicts to “restrain sexual immorality;” an explicit reference to his religion’s ban on homosexuality, extramarital sex, and “artificial” birth control. Don’t believe it?
In an address to “The Governor’s Conference on Juvenile Crime, Drugs and Gangs,” Barr condemned the idea of adhering to the U.S. Constitution’s mandated separation of church and state in the public education system. The theocrat said:
“This moral lobotomy of public schools has been based on extremist notions of separation of church and state or on theories of moral relativism which reject the notion that there are standards of rights or wrong to which the community can demand adherence.”
Barr also penned an article in The Catholic Lawyer where he complained vehemently about what he asserted was “the rise of secularism;” something he claims is anathema to a nation he believes should be ruled by theocrats. Barr attempted to give an answer to “the challenge of representing Catholic institutions as authorities” on what is considered right and wrong, or morally acceptable in a secular nation. In discussing what Barr termed was “The Breakdown of Traditional Morality,” the new attorney general complained thus:
“We live in an increasingly militant, secular age… As part of this philosophy, we see a growing hostility toward religion, particularly Catholicism. This form of bigotry has always been fashionable in the United States. There are, today, even greater efforts to marginalize or ‘ghettoize’ orthodox religion…”
Barr is also a bigot when it comes to people who respect the Constitution’s separation of church and state in providing equal rights for all Americans whether theocrats agree or not. Barr’s belief that government is bound to enforce Vatican dictates is what drives his assertion that, for example, equal rights laws demanding that colleges treat homosexual groups like any other student group is inherently wrong.
He claims treating LGBTQ people like everyone else is detrimental because:
“[Equality] dissolves any form of moral consensus in society. There can be no consensus based on moral views in the country, only enforced neutrality.”
Yeah, stuff of nightmares, isn’t it? Try this read on for reasons to run away from your Trump loving whackado relatives and any one else invading your environs with propaganda.
https://twitter.com/profagagne/status/1156971085050667008
So are they going to keep getting away with all of this? How long will Trumpist insanity define our country?
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Live Blog: Second night of Second Debates
Posted: July 31, 2019 Filed under: 2020 Elections, Live Blog 21 Comments
Yup Sky Dancers! It’s happening again!
Will tonight be any better or will Jack Tapper out dud the Chuck Todd?The first night didn’t got so well … or says us all and The Atlantic: “CNN Was Ill-Equipped for This During the debate it hosted yesterday, the news network made its best effort to convert discussions of policy into the thing it knows best: punditry.”
The melodrama, it would turn out, was fitting. Throughout the debate, the first of a two-night doubleheader set at Detroit’s Fox Theatre, the event’s moderators—Jake Tapper, Dana Bash, and Don Lemon—did what the network’s trailer suggested they would: They asked questions that might turn this fight for the heart of the party into a plain old fight.
One of their questions: “Senator Warren, you make it a point to say you’re a capitalist. Is that your way of saying you’re a safer choice than Senator Sanders?” Another: “Congressman Ryan, are Senator Sanders’s proposals going to incentivize undocumented immigrants to come into the country illegally?” Another: “Congressman O’Rourke, you live near the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso and disagree with Mayor Buttigieg on decriminalizing the border crossings. Please respond.” The chyrons gave away the game: “QUESTION: Congressman Delaney, do you think Sen. Warren’s wealth tax is a fair way to fund child care and education?” Here was another: “QUESTION: Sen. Klobuchar, who are you referring to when you say candidates are making promises just to get elected?”
Let’s get READY to RUMMMMMMMBle!!!!
Monday Reads: Racism defines that Basket of Deplorables
Posted: July 29, 2019 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: deplorables, Racism, Trumpism 18 Comments
Good Morning Sky Dancers!
Racism has always defined the life and times of the Slum Lord’s son occupying the White House who was undoubtedly planted there with hacking by Russians as well as baskets of deplorables. Will racism continue to define the future of this country as well as its past? What can we do to end our national nightmare?
The much publicized Trumpkins Twitter Rampage we endured the last few weeks comes from a sick mind and heart of some one who is very insecure about his unearned success. This same some one is very much aware he’s out of his league, probably facing jail time if he loses the election, and likely to learn more every day that he is a joke among national leaders who recognize him for the small minded bigot and thug he is. So, rather than do a little soul searching, he blames completely innocent people whose only discernible distinction is how their skin handles melanin.
We never think these Twitter Rampages could get uglier but they always do. The uncouth, hateful bigot that occupies the Oval Office keeps finding new lows since there are no more functioning guards on the man and few guardrails to contain his sociopathic behavior. The last one will go this week, the stoic Director of National Intelligence Dan Coates His replacement will undoubtedly purge what ever he can of evidence showing the Russians–with the help of the Trump Family Crime syndicate–stole our elections.
But meanwhile, Esteemed Congressman Elijah Cummings and the city and people of Baltimore are under systemic racist attack. He’s angry so why not pick on good people of color and others? The rest of us must come to their defense or lose our souls. We all must rid our country of Trump or lose our hope for democracy and a more perfect union.
Here is some commentary that might interest you on the topic.
Most of us laughed when the many in the media went out of their way to say that the Republican base just faced “economic uncertainty” and Trump was simply a result of that. These are people that have ignored the systemic race baiting of the Republican party since Nixon–the so-called Southern Strategy–and the howls of white evangelicals in the south who wanted their schools kept segregated and found no quarter in the Democratic Party under LBJ. Trump’s Racism defines that party and any one that doesn’t damn his bigoted public attacks on the many shades of brown and black Americans to whom this country owes much is complicit and racist.
Echos of Harlem, 1980 Faith Ringgold
From Bloomberg Opinion and Timothy L O’Brien: “Trump’s Racism Infests the Republican Party”.
Over this past weekend Trump put Cummings and his Baltimore district in his crosshairs, tweeting at him 17 times in a racially-charged salvo of alternately bigoted, hostile and inaccurate insults that commenced at 7:14 a.m. on Saturday and concluded at 6:49 a.m. on Monday. Baltimore and its neighboring areas, the president allowed, were a “very dangerous & filthy place” and a “rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being would want to live.” Cummings was “incompetent” and a “brutal bully” responsible for Baltimore’s problems, a “racist” who “spends all of his time trying to hurt innocent people.” As he has done before, Trump also retweeted the musings of a far-right British pundit who is a self-described racist to make his case against Cummings.
A broad, diverse swath of Baltimore residents and supporters responded to Trump by coming to Cummings’s and their city’s defense, acknowledging that Baltimore had myriad problems, including crime and poverty, but was hardly the noxious monolith the president was slagging. #WeAreBaltimore became a ubiquitous hashtag and a rallying cry on social media. Perhaps the most poignant and powerful voice in all of that was a CNN anchor, Victor Blackwell, who was born in Baltimore and noted during a pointed, emotional broadcast on Saturday that Trump frequently uses the words “infested” and “infestation” when describing the homes or countries of people of color.
“Donald Trump has tweeted more than 43,000 times. He’s insulted thousands of people, many different types of people. But when he tweets about infestation, it’s about black and brown people,” Blackwell said. “There are challenges, no doubt. But people are proud of their community. I don’t want to sound self-righteous, but people get up and go to work there. They care for their families there. They love their children, who pledge allegiance to the flag just like people who live in districts of congressmen who support you, sir. They are Americans, too.”
One person who has yet to speak out on Cummings’s behalf is his good friend, Meadows. The congressman from North Carolina, like his entire political party, has remained silent while Trump – an inveterate racist– has spent yet another weekend targeting a high-profile Democrat of color in heinous, prejudiced ways. In that context, Meadows is a proxy for the lack of political courage and moral clarity in Trump’s Republican Party.
Mick Mulvaney, the president’s acting chief of staff, sat for an interview with Fox News on Sunday and said there was nothing racist about Trump’s comments. “If I had poverty in my district like they have in Baltimore,” Mulvaney said, “I’d get fired.” (Mulvaney’s old South Carolina district does have poverty rates like Baltimore’s – as do many of the rural, red state districts that Trump avoids criticizing).
https://twitter.com/BJS_quire/status/1155457940444319745
The Broken Column, Frida Kahlo
Herb Keinon of the Jerusalem Post reminds Republicans that ‘32,000 JEWS LIVE IN BALTIMORE DISTRICT, TRUMP: ‘NO HUMAN’ WANTS TO” and that “Elijah Cummings, bashed by Trump, helps sponsor month-long summer program in Israel for black students”.
Elijah Cummings, the African-American Baltimore congressman who found himself on the receiving end of a Twitter thrashing from US President Donald Trump, has a LARGE number of Jewish residents in his district, is close with the local Jewish community, and for the last two decades has helped sponsor a trip to Israel for black students from his district.
In 2014, Maryland’s 7th district, where Trump said “no human would want to live,” housed some 32,000 Jews, 4.46% of the population in the district. According to data in the Jewish Federations of North America’s Berman Jewish Data Bank, this district would rank in the top 65 of America’s 435 congressional districts with the largest Jewish population.
The chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Cummings has been sharply critical of Trump’s immigration policies. Earlier this month he slammed acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan during a Congressional hearing over border conditions along the Mexican frontier, and his committee has launched a number of investigations of the Trump White House.
On Saturday, Trump hit back.
“Rep. Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous,” Trump tweeted. “His district is considered the Worst in the USA.”
Cumming’s district, Trump said, “is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.” The president said that Cummings’ district, WHICH INCLUDES western Baltimore, “is considered the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States. No human being would want to live there. Where is all this money going? How much is stolen? Investigate this corrupt mess immediately.”
For the last two decades, Cummings has partnered with the Baltimore Jewish Council in backing the Elijah Cummings Youth Program in Israel (ECYP), a two-year leadership fellowship that aspires to build leadership and bridges between the African-American and Jewish communities.
Some 200 students have participated in the program, with its centerpiece being a month spent in Israel. The students live at the Yemin Orde Youth Village south of Haifa and are paired, as its promotional literature says, “with displaced teens from over 24 countries, including Ethiopia, Israel, South America, Europe and the former states of the Soviet Union.”
When you’re a person of color — whether in politics, journalism or regular life — you’re accustomed to folks demanding that you criticize or denounce people, especially if they look like you. Some of them deserve criticism for what they’ve said. (See Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.) Some of them aren’t worth the oxygen required of denunciation because they are marginal characters who don’t have any power. (See Louis Farrakhan.) But we do it because it is the moral and right thing to do.
Yet, the president of the United States goes on a racist tear against Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), chairman of the House oversight committee, and his Baltimore district, and there is virtual silence from the president’s supporters. The president of the United States goes on a racist tear against Omar and three other women of color elected to serve in the House of Representatives, and there is virtual silence. The president of the United States stands back for 13 seconds as his bread-and-circuses crowd brays “Send her back!” about Omar, and there is virtual silence. Actually, it’s worse than that. Excuses are made.
Facing a grilling from Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said of Trump’s racist tweets: “It has absolutely zero to do with race.” He told Margaret Brennan, the host of CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” about the racist tweets about Baltimore, “I understand that everything that Donald Trump says is offensive to some people.”
Woman with a Basket of Calla Lilies, mural details, José Clemente Orozco,
So, there’s this op ed also from WAPO and it’s not that the facts on the ground are wrong, because they aren’t. It’s not that a lot of things under Trump are wrong, because they are. It’s not even that the list of Trump’s evil is longer than one issue, because it’s way longer.
It’s this. The discussion today is and should be about Racism and the evil that the Republicans and Trump are doing to people who are Americans and people that want to be Americans simply because they are some shade of brown. Racist screeds and actions inciting white nationalists to violence are enough to Damn The Occupant of the White House to hell and Impeachment.
To the world, it is not just Trump taking these positions. It is America. The damage will be long-lasting.
And his ignorance and cynicism reverberate through some of the biggest stories of our time: the confidence of authoritarian strongmen in China, Russia and beyond; their distortion of technology from a liberating force into a malevolent tool of surveillance and suppression; the destructive warming of the climate, which the United States ignores and abets. None of these is easily reversible.
The story is similar, if more familiar, at home. The constant, willful lying; the attacks on the press and on the very idea of truth — these are not harmless. They draw from but also foster a lack of trust that will persist long after his presidency.
So does the racism. So do the ugly attacks on immigrants. So do the contempt for science and the refusal to stand up to foreign attacks on our elections. So do the disparaging of public servants and the casual threats to wield the vast powers of the federal government against perceived political enemies. These things used to be not okay. Now they are okay. There will be no easy return.
Yes, we’ve avoided recession, the nation is (mostly) at peace, the government will not default. Naturally, we are thankful.
Official portrait of President Barack Obama , Kehinde Wiley Official portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama, Amy Sherald
Dear Fred (fellow white human being). The racism is not a side show or an afterthought. It’s not one point in a long list today. It’s the central theme (Send them Back), the ongoing theme (Many Good People on both sides), the first spoken theme (Drug Dealing and Rapist Mexicans), and the ever present theme (shit hole countries and infested American cities). The dog whistles and race baiting Republicans have employed to wink and nod at bigots have finally come full circle. The policies of Voter Suppression, Family Separation, and White Nationalism are a pogrom. They are a Republican Pogrom worthy of the KKK.
Jeet Heer has something to say about that in The Nation and it harkens back to something deeper and stated here for quite some time.
The contrast between Trump’s utter disdain for non-white lawmakers and his willingness to chastise an American ally on behalf of a jailed musician is partly traceable to the president’s special warmth for celebrities, especially if they praise him. It’s a bluntly personal response: if you criticize Trump, as Cummings and others have, you’re his enemy. If you are Trump’s pal, he’ll go the extra mile to help you out.
The priority Trump gives to transactional relationships gives some credence to Senator Lindsey Graham’s argument that the president is a narcissist rather than a racist.
But Graham’s formulation is too simple. It’s more accurate to say Trump’s racism and narcissism are both facets of his desire to rule like a feudal lord. If we see Trump as a would-be baron or an aspiring king, then his varied reaction to people of color makes sense: he loves those who pledge loyalty to him and hates those who defy him in any way.
Writing in the November/December issue of The New Left Review, University of California sociologist Dylan Riley challenged the popular view, found across the political spectrum, that Trump is a fascist. Using the ideas of Max Weber, Riley argued that Trump was rather a practitioner of patrimonialism, the style of governance built on personal loyalty that was found in “the later Roman Empire and medieval Europe.”
It is patrimonialism that links Trump to oddball cronies like Wilbur Ross, Jared Kushner, Thomas Barrack, Stephen Miller, and Matthew Whitaker. As Riley observes, “Bonds of purely personal loyalty bind the seedy milieu of lumpen-millionaires (Ross and Kushner inside the Administration, Thomas Barrack outside) and hangers-on of various sorts (Miller, Whitaker) to Trump.” Patrimonialism also explains Trump’s use of the presidential pardon power on behalf of his political supporters such as Dinesh D’Souza, Conrad Black and Joe Arpaio.
Structurally, the American presidency has always been an elected monarchy. But Trump has ruled more like a king than most presidents, transforming the traditional bonds of partisanship or ideology into relationships of personal fealty.
Trump’s essentially feudal conception of politics is surely traceable to his long-standing connections to the Mafia, perhaps the modern organization that most closely resembles the patrimonial governance of the pre-modern world. In the mob, the Godfather is a de facto lord, who offers protection in exchange for respect and tribute.
Still, the underlying thing of all things Trump has been racism. This was true of his first ventures in being a slum lord right up and through the Central Park Five lynching calls. It’s his response to Charlottesville. It’s his attack on the women of color in Congress. He enjoys going on racist screeds. He gets some kind of sadistic thrill from it.
He has underlying motivations that can probably be carved out in the territory of a number of personality disorders and venal sins. But, there is something pervasive and overtly deep felt about his actions and words that show a special hatred of women and an even deeper hatred of people of color. Again, he gets off on being an outspoken race war baiting racist and he should not get a pass, a side wink, or even an excuse.
That is something we cannot ignore, trivialize, or bury in a list of all his evil deeds. And, that’s really how I feel.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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