Monday Reads: Trump’s Disastrous Records as a President, a Citizen, and a Business Owner
Posted: September 28, 2020 Filed under: 2020 Elections, morning reads | Tags: People Died, Trump Lied, Trump's Fraud, Trump's Taxes 20 Comments
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Tightrope Walk, 1908-10 Neue Galerie New York
Good Day Sky Dancers!
By now it is abundantly clear that the Trumpist Regime makes the Nixon years look like a peaceful and crimefree cakewalk and the Hoover years a time of great economic growth. We’ve got lots of news today to both cry about and reveal as good news. The Sunlight is shining!
Lindsay Graham may be about to be replaced. He’s been drug down by Trump and this rush to appoint a SCOTUS justice during a national election. We’ve finally got Trump’s taxes and they are everything we thought they’d be. He’s basically been broke a very long time and is living off credit from countries that are the true shitholes because they are your basic thugocracies. Today, it’s being argued he’s a definite threat to US National Security because he’s just about as broke as you can get and desperate to keep his false front. His tax revelations may also put Ivanka in the slammer.
How’s that for a little bit of karma? I’m going to truly enjoy delineating each and every one of the portraits of the disaster that is the Trumpist Businesses and Regime. Yes, it’s a an all out circus! Come join in the fun!
Otto Dix, Zirkus (Circus), 1922
Let’s start with the New York Times‘ reveal with its tales of tax fraud and business busts of the last 15 years. This is a good summary by 18 Revelations From a Trove of Trump Tax Records. Times reporters have obtained decades of tax information the president has hidden from public view. Here are some of the key findings.”
Among the key findings of The Times’s investigation:
Mr. Trump paid no federal income taxes in 11 of 18 years that The Times examined. In 2017, after he became president, his tax bill was only $750.
He has reduced his tax bill with questionable measures, including a $72.9 million tax refund that is the subject of an audit by the Internal Revenue Service.
Many of his signature businesses, including his golf courses, report losing large amounts of money — losses that have helped him to lower his taxes.
The financial pressure on him is increasing as hundreds of millions of dollars in loans he personally guaranteed are soon coming due.
Even while declaring losses, he has managed to enjoy a lavish lifestyle by taking tax deductions on what most people would consider personal expenses, including residences, aircraft and $70,000 in hairstyling for television.
Ivanka Trump, while working as an employee of the Trump Organization, appears to have received “consulting fees” that also helped reduce the family’s tax bill.
As president, he has received more money from foreign sources and U.S. interest groups than previously known. The records do not reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.
George Grosz, The Rabble Rouser, 1928.
From Timothy O’Brien at Bloomberg News: “Trump’s Taxes Show He’s a National Security Threat. What trade-offs would a president with this level of indebtedness be willing to make to save face?” My guess is mister O’Brien is happy as a clam to finally get his eyes on all of these.
Due to his indebtedness, his reliance on income from overseas and his refusal to authentically distance himself from his hodgepodge of business, Trump represents a profound national security threat – a threat that will only escalate if he’s re-elected. The tax returns also show the extent to which Trump has repeatedly betrayed the interests of many of the average Americans who elected him and remain his most loyal supporters.
I have some history with Trump and his taxes. Trump sued me for libel in 2006 for a biography I wrote, “TrumpNation,” claiming the book misrepresented his track record as a businessman and lowballed the size of his fortune. He lost the suit in 2011. During the litigation, Trump resisted releasing his tax returns and other financial records. My lawyers got the returns, and while I can’t disclose specifics of what I saw, I imagine that Trump has always refused to release them because they would reveal how robust his businesses and finances actually are and shine a light on some of his foreign sources of income. The Times has now solved that problem for us.
According to the Times, Trump has about $421 million in debts which he has personally guaranteed and which are coming due over the next several years. This is consistent with earlier reporting about how much debt he carries, a chunk of which could be gleaned from the personal financial disclosures he is required to file with the federal government. But Trump’s overall indebtedness is greater than the Times tally, I believe.
Russ Choma reported in Mother Jones last summer that Trump’s debts were nearly $500 million and would come due in relatively short order, pressuring the president’s finances. But Trump’s debts are even bigger than that, and he’s worked hard to keep them hidden for decades. Dan Alexander, a senior editor at Forbes, has been covering Trump’s business interests since 2016 and has a new book out about the president’s financial conflicts of interest, “White House Inc.” Alexander, in a helpful tally he shared Sunday evening, estimates Trump’s total indebtedness to be about $1.1 billion. Now that’s more like it.
La Malady d’Amour 1916, George Grosz
From Jason Easley: “Ivanka Trump Could Be Going Down Thanks To Her Dad’s Tax Fraud”.
The “consultants” are not identified in the tax records. But evidence of this arrangement was gleaned by comparing the confidential tax records to the financial disclosures Ivanka Trump filed when she joined the White House staff in 2017. Ms. Trump reported receiving payments from a consulting company she co-owned, totaling $747,622, that exactly matched consulting fees claimed as tax deductions by the Trump Organization for hotel projects in Vancouver and Hawaii.
Ms. Trump had been an executive officer of the Trump companies that received profits from and paid the consulting fees for both projects — meaning she appears to have been treated as a consultant on the same hotel deals that she helped manage as part of her job at her father’s business.
Fake consulting deals with members of a company that is also managing the same project are a big red flag to the IRS. Trump hid income by listing his own daughter a consultant on projects that she was managing. In other words, Ivanka Trump and her father were cheating the United States government, and the American people to hide income and avoid paying taxes.
Ernest Ludwig Kirchner, Couple in a Room, 1912
This is from Forbes and I must say that Lindsey and his sullen little face fit right in with our art today!
New polls released Sunday show Sen. Lindsey Graham’s reelection bid deeply threatened by Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison as the former gears up for what promises to be a brutal partisan battle over the Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett.
KEY FACTS
- In an internal poll of 608 likely South Carolina voters conducted by Harvard University fellow Cornell Belcher for the Harrison campaign, Graham trails Harrison by 2 points, 43% to 45%.
- Meanwhile, a CBS news/YouGov poll of likely voters has Graham leading by 1 point, with 45% to Harrison’s 44%.
- Both Graham and President Trump have shown signs of unique weakness in the Palmetto State, which typically elects Republicans by double digit margins; Graham led by 1 point in a Morning Consult poll released last week, while Trump led by 6.
- Driving Harrison’s lead in the internal poll is a poor approval rating for Graham, with 55% of voters saying they disapprove of the job he is doing and 58% saying it’s time to elect someone new, compared to 32% who say Graham deserves re-election.
So, we’re not quite done yet!
Otto Dix
Marseille, 1922
This is by far something that might get through to a few undecides from USA Today: “Trump wants to run on his record. We hope he does. It’s been a disaster for America. Trump’s historically, mind-bogglingly bad record is on the ballot. He has destroyed lives and livelihoods, weakened America and risked our democracy. ‘This is an op ed from David Rothkopf and Bernard L. Schwartz.
At some point during the debates, perhaps more than once, Donald Trump will say yet again that he has accomplished more in his first term than any prior president. Despite his penchant for lying, it is hard to deny that among all our presidents, his record does stand out — just not in the way he wants you to think it does.
Trump has presided over the worst U.S. public health catastrophe in more than a century. His leadership failures during that crisis — from lying to suppressing data to promoting quack cures to endangering his own supporters in mass gatherings without masks or social distancing — have led to nearly 205,000 COVID deaths. That’s many more per capita than other developed nations, in some cases more than double their toll.
Trump’s mishandling of the COVID pandemic helped produce the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression — including an unemployment rate of nearly 15% in April. Some estimates suggest that over 40 million Americans lost their jobs as a result of the crisis. Only a fraction of those jobs have returned. Some will never return.
Economists predict that the unemployment rate through the end of the year, even with recent improvement, could average about 10%, roughly the same as during the worst of the Great Recession a decade ago. In fact, as a recent advertisement for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has made clear, Trump has the worst job creation record of any president in our modern history.
The gross domestic product contraction of 31.7% in the second quarter of this year, on an annualized basis, is by far the largest recorded in U.S. history. According to economists tracked by Bloomberg, the annualized growth rate under Trump’s first four years under a reasonable projection for the remainder of his term is likely to be 0.6%. That’s the worst since Herbert Hoover, about a quarter of the growth level under Barack Obama, and just about a seventh the average growth rate during Bill Clinton’s eight years in office.
As a result of the crisis, today 1 in 5 mothers of children under 12 reported that their children were not getting enough to eat.
“Man in the Zoo” George Grosz, 1927
Originally published in The Evergreen Review Issue 40 in 1966 and featured in Issue 107 in 2004.
When we we’re growing up we were told to eat because there were starving children elsewhere who had no food. Which countries now tell their children about the starving children in the United States? The children separated from the parents and placed in cages? The children whose education has been forever changed by having to be pulled from school for a long period of time then more than ceremoniously dumped back in to get sick or bring that illness home with them?
So, here’s the big NYT article with the Tax Forms Analysis in case you didn’t read it last night when it hit us all square in the face. “The Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.”
Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.
He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.
As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.
I can only wonder how these square up with his internal records that should be on their way to the Southern District of New York unless Bill Barr can continue to block them and is willing to put his own freedom in jeopardy. You can read more of that at BiPartisan Report “Trump Family Terrified After Southern District Of New York Strikes Again”.
A recent court ruling regarding Trump’s financial records and an investigation by the Southern District of New York into alleged tax and bank fraud determined that a criminal lawsuit can be brought against a sitting U.S. president no matter how busy he claims to be. For Trump rape accuser and author E. Jean Carroll, that decision may have an impact in her case against Trump for defamation.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, The Street, 1913
This is from Greg Sargent and the link in the tweet.
Now that the New York Times has broken the explosive news that Donald Trump paid a scant $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017 — and that Trump paid no income taxes at all in 10 out of the 15 preceding years — it provides an occasion to reconsider one of the biggest scams Trump has been perpetrating on the American people for years now.
I’m not talking about the scam that Trump was a good businessman, or that a good businessman will be a good managerial president, though both have long been central to Trump’s game, and this new exposé leaves that game in ruins.
Rather, I’m talking about a scam that’s more fundamental to the Trumpist mystique. It’s the idea that someone with extensive inside experience in milking a system rigged to enrich elites like him is uniquely positioned to either (in the more charitable telling) un-rig that system for the benefit of all or (in the less charitable one) unlock its spoils for supporters who place him in a position of power to do so.
The Times exposé strips the sheen off Trump’s image-making like so much imitation gold leaf. We learn that Trump evaded income taxes for many years largely through his epic financial losses. While Trump scooped in hundreds of millions of dollars off “The Apprentice,” he dumped those profits into a series of big-league money losers that he owned and ran himself.
All of this shows that Trump is simply “pouring more money into many businesses than he is taking out,” the Times observes, which “exposes the “hollowness” behind the “self-made-billionaire image.”
We know Trump is basically a carnival barker. He’s not a billionaire. He was never self-made. He has no business acumen. He can only think of how to scam people by bringing them into the big top to see the freaks and greedos he surrounds himself with. This includes an assorted oddball group of christianist conmen. How many of them will eventually go down for their crimes? Will we ever seen the hardcore Trump believers leave the death cult alive?
Stay tuned as we start to fight to keep the Handmaiden’s Tale off the Supreme Court. Welcome to the Christoban Caberet! Where it’s all for sale as long as you make them feel superior to every one else!
And so I have to ask again, what is on your reading and blogging list today?
But, this also. How do you feel? Are we going to make it through this? We care about you! Please take care of yourselves and check in with us!
There’s only two types of people in the world
The ones that entertain, and the ones that observe
Well baby I’m a put-on-a-show kinda girl
Don’t like the backseat, gotta be first
I’m like the ringleader
I call the shots (call the shots)
I’m like a firecracker
I make it hot
When I put on a showI feel the adrenaline moving through my veins
Spotlight on me and I’m ready to break
I’m like a performer, the dance floor is my stage
Better be ready, hope that you feel the sameAll eyes on me in the center of the ring
Just like a circus
When I crack that whip, everybody gon’ trip
Just like a circus
Don’t stand there watching me, follow me
Show me what you can do
Everybody let go, we can make a dance floor
Just like a circusThere’s only two types of guys out there
Ones that can hang with me, and ones that are scared
So baby I hope that you came prepared
I run a tight ship so, beware
I’m like the ringleader
I call the shots (call the shots)
I’m like a firecracker
I make it hot
When I put on a showI feel the adrenaline moving through my veins
Spotlight on me and I’m ready to break
I’m like a performer, the dance floor is my stage
Better be ready, hope that ya feel the sameAll eyes on me in the center of the ring
Just like a circus
When I crack that whip, everybody gon’ trip
Just like a circus
Don’t stand there watching me, follow me
Show me what you can do
Everybody let go, we can make a dance floor
Just like a circus
Friday Reads: It came from the Sewers of Queens (2020)
Posted: September 25, 2020 Filed under: 2020 Elections, Afternoon Reads | Tags: American Horror Shows 22 Comments
Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)
Good Day Sky Dancers!
The president is a poo poo platter of pathologies and chief among them is that he is a psychopath. This op ed piece is written by ALAN D. BLOTCKY and SETH D. NORRHOLM. I’m adding to the outrage that BB wrote about yesterday and upping the volume to 11. We’re being run by some one who should be under psychiatric care and placed in some place where he can’t hurt any more people.
“Get rid of the ballots” and “there won’t be a transfer,” said Donald Trump on Wednesday. This comment is a direct and dangerous expression of his anti-democratic intention. If unstopped, Trump may well destroy our 244-year-old democracy.
It is time to stop pulling punches. It is time to stop relying on political pundits to weigh in on Trump’s behavior, which they often soften and even normalize.
We are psychologists, and we are convinced Donald Trump is a psychopath. His malignant behavior over the past four years is growing and escalating right before our eyes. Trump’s psychopathy will change us forever if he is not stopped.
This is not hyperbole. This is not an expression of “a left-wing agenda.” This is a mental health opinion based on thousands of hours of documented behavior by this president.
He breaks norms, rules, and laws with impunity.
He lies, on average, 15 times a day.
He peddles fake conspiracy theories and irrational magical thinking.
He has been accused of sexually predatory behavior by at least 25 women.
He blames, scapegoats and gaslights as easily as he breathes.
He undermines the vital role of the free press because he abhors oversight and accountability.
His lies and anti-scientific advice and intentional downplaying of the coronavirus pandemic has led to countless American deaths.
He is callous and cold and unfeeling because he has no conscience.
He denigrates and humiliates anyone and everyone in his path.
He has no respect for military heroes or renowned experts.
He is racist and xenophobic.
He incites violence and culture wars.
He is obsessed with power and adoration.
He is a greedy opportunist.
He is corrupt to the core.
House on a Haunted Hill with actress Carol Ohmart (1959)
Can’t argue with any of that.
After more than four years of nonstop voter fraud claims, insinuations that he might not accept the presidential election results and at least one float about delaying the November election, it’s no secret. Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transition of power this week — and his choice not to walk back his remarks Thursday in the face of widespread unease — merely broadcasts his strategic intent in terms both parties can understand.
As a result, Republicans can no longer truthfully deny that Trump may be unwilling to leave officein the event he is defeated. And Democrats must now confront the possibility they may not have the power to stop him.
It’s an unprecedented backdrop for a modern presidential race, one that could stretch the electoral process to its limits, almost guaranteeing a chaotic, divisive finish to the campaign.
“We are super alarmed,” said Matt Bennett of the center-left group Third Way, which released a primer this week on how Trump is laying the groundwork to dispute the election results in the event of a defeat. “I now think it’s very, very likely that Joe Biden will win the election if the votes are counted, but it’s not clear that the votes will be counted.”
Recalling the 2000 election, in which the Supreme Court prohibited further recounts of the Florida vote, awarding the presidency to George W. Bush, Bennett said, “We’re a lot more organized than in 2000. A lot … But I don’t know if it’s enough.”
Ruth Bader Ginsberg is the first woman to lie in state in the US Capitol. She is also the first Jewish person to do so. This is via USA Today.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi began the day’s events with a formal arrival ceremony in National Statuary Hall, in which eight military pallbearers carried Ginsburg’s flag-draped casket up the Capitol steps as lawmakers stood in somber observance.
Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer led Ginsburg’s family into the large hall before her casket was carried inside. Lawmakers and guests, including Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his wife Jill Biden, held their hand over their hearts as Ginsburg’s casket was placed on the Lincoln Catafalque, which first supported President Abraham Lincoln’s casket in the U.S. Capitol after his assassination in 1865.
“It is with deep sympathy to the Ginsburg family that I have the high honor to welcome Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to lie in state in the Capitol of the United States,” Pelosi said in brief opening remarks.
Many female lawmakers were in attendance, including vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris. The bipartisan, masked group honoring Ginsburg’s legacy and 27 years on the high court remained safely distanced in the approximately 100 seats. But the two highest ranking Republicans, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, did not attend.
“Justice Ginsburg embodied justice, brilliance and goodness,” Pelosi said in a statement Friday. “Her passing is an incalculable loss for our democracy and for all who strive to build a better future for our children.”
In a nod to Ginsburg’s passion for opera, American soprano Denyce Graves – a friend whom the justice saw perform many times – sang “Deep River” and “American Anthem” before lawmakers and other guests filed past her casket in small groups to say their goodbyes.
“America, America, I gave my best to you,” Graves belted out in the marbled hall.
The She Creature (1956)
The DOJ continues to do weird things to undermine the confidence of voters in the election probably paving the way for an endless Trump Court battle which he hopes to win as he continues to pack the court with simply temperamentally, professionally, and mentally unfit people. This is from NPR: “Feds, In Unusual Statement, Announce They’re Investigating A Few Discarded Ballots.”
The FBI and the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania said Thursday that they are investigating “potential issues” with nine military ballots in one county. They believe the ballots were opened improperly, though they have not filed any charges or taken official action.
U.S. Attorney David Freed noted that the investigation remains active but said he is releasing the news publicly “based on the limited amount of time before the general election and the vital public importance of these issues.”
Voting rights experts and Justice Department veterans, however, said that proximity to the election and the preliminary nature of the investigation make Freed’s announcement highly unusual.
The announcement comes as President Trump continues to baselessly claim that voting by mail will lead to widespread fraud and as the Justice Department is under scrutiny for allegations that its decisions under Attorney General William Barr are increasingly directed at boosting Trump’s reelection efforts.
Trump’s campaign immediately seized on the announcement of an investigation to conclude that it was evidence Democrats were trying to “steal” the election.
The potential voting irregularities in Pennsylvania came to light after President Trump mentioned them, offhand, in an interview with a Fox radio host Thursday.
“We have to be very careful with the ballots,” the president told reporters later, according to a news pool report. He described what he called a “scam” where ballots had been found in the trash. The president has been criticizing the integrity of this year’s election for months.
“We want to make sure the election is honest, and I’m not sure that it can be,” Trump continued.
And, don’t forget we have this and a Pandemic to deal with. Over 200,000 Americans are dead from Covid-19.
Mnunchin has announced that he and Speaker Pelosi will once more try to get something done in terms of economic relief. But where are the Republicans in the Senate? (From the Hill)
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Thursday that he and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) have agreed to revive negotiations over a stalled follow-up coronavirus relief bill.
“I’ve probably spoken to Speaker Pelosi 15 or 20 times in the last few days on the CR,” Mnuchin told the Senate Banking Committee during a hearing with Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome Powell, referring to a continuing resolution to extend government funding, “and we’ve agreed to continue to have discussions about the CARES Act.”
Pelosi also said Thursday that she expected negotiations with the White House to resume shortly, telling reporters at the Capitol, “We’ll be hopefully soon to the table with them.”
Mnuchin and Pelosi’s comments come amid a months-long partisan stalemate over a follow up to the CARES Act, the $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief bill signed by President Trump in March.
While there is broad bipartisan support for certain components of a stimulus bill, Democrats and Republicans remain deeply divided over the size and scope of another package. Spiking partisan tensions driven by the looming November elections and the battle over the Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg have also made a breakthrough unlikely before Election Day.
Democrats have insisted that the federal government must approve trillions in further aid to renew a lapse in enhanced unemployment benefits, bolster state and local government budgets, send another round of direct relief payments to struggling households and expand housing and eviction protections.
Republicans, however, are wary of adding to the national debt and prefer a targeted package intended to help schools and day care centers reopen and bring Americans back to work as quickly as possible.
Mnuchin, one of Trump’s two chief stimulus negotiators, urged Democrats to come back to the table for a bill built around areas of wide bipartisan agreement such as revamping the Paycheck Protection Program to aid small businesses and relief payments.
The Monster that Challenged the World with Actress Audrey Dalton (1957)
This is all nice and well but none of these businesses will hire people if they don’t have customers buying their stuff and holding them open on a thread of funds seems unkind given the incredible botched job of getting the pandemic under control. How long are they going to bleed taxpayer and their own cash before we release that customers who can’t buy anything are the ones that sink businesses.
So, I’m not sure how long this little horror show called the Trumpist Regime wrecks the US Economy and Democracy while killing tens of thousands of people, but Gee I’m ready for the cartoons. I’m ready for some America Heroes to return the Monster from Queens to his sewer.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Monday Reads: Peace of Mind
Posted: September 21, 2020 Filed under: 2016 elections, 2018 elections, 2020 Elections, abortion rights, Affordable Care Act, morning reads, white nationalists, Women's Rights, worker rights 24 Comments
Henri Matisse “Madame Matisse(The Green Line),” 1905
Good Morning Sky Dancers!
Trump and his Death Cult seem to thrive on anger and chaos. We couldn’t even mourn the great legal mind and contributions to civil rights of our second woman on SCOTUS without Trump and the cult jumping into offer the usual platter of women that hate themselves to replace her. We’re supposed to get the pick on Friday or Saturday and I hope the Democrats go nuclear. I’ve been fighting these same damned battles for too long and I didn’t expect to hand my daughters more church control of their bodies sanctioned by the US Government.
There are two women that appear on Trump’s short list and they are both appalling religionists. One is definitely a member of a cult and a bit of an offshoot of Catholicism. The other is one of those Catholics that the court is stacked with already which is the subcult of Opus Dei. WTF is this? Are we reversing the entire Age of Enlightenment and Reason and the Renaissance? How far back into the Dark Ages must we be thrown before they’re satisfied?
and … Where do all these nuts keep coming from? Only monsters could raise monsters like these!
I’ve switched to Fauvism for awhile and peak Beatles during the psychedelics’ period because we all can see the wild and I’d rather have the artistic version of it than the political.
So first up on the crazy list is the literal crazy and definite cult member. This woman is basically Aunt Lydia. Her church was the basis of Hand Maid’s Tale. “What is People of Praise? A look inside Amy Coney Barrett’s church that inspired ‘The Handmaid’s Tale'” She’s on the short list but there are “safer” alternatives if you want to call them that because either way were fucked because most of the Republicans who said they’d never vote for a SCOTUS nomination so close to elections have folded like cheap deckchairs on the Titanic.
Fauvist Portrait, Skarlet-Raven based on Robert Delaunay’s Rhythm, Joie de Vivre. Published: May 21, 2010 © 2010 – 2020 Skarlet-Raven
So, catch this:
Apart from being an attorney, Barrett and her family are members of a controversial church called People of Praise. The church asks members to take a “lifetime loyalty ‘covenant’, encourages female submission to their husbands”, as reported by Daily Mail. The church also inspired ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, a show that gained popularity when it first made its debut in 2017. The church was formed as part of the Catholic revitalization movement in 1971, and at least 10 members from Barrett’s family are part of it. Barrett’s father, Mike Coney, is part of the board of members of the church. They are believed to be the “highest authority”.
The website of the church calls themselves “a charismatic Christian community. We admire the first Christians who were led by the Holy Spirit to form a community”. Those early believers put their lives and their possessions in common, and “there were no needy persons among them”. Each member of the church is allotted a “personal adviser” who helps them with the “decisions on marriage, career, and other life choices”. Apart from this, the members are also asked to give out other information, such as sins committed by them, their financial information. While they are being called advisors, previously these people were known as “heads” for males and “handmaids” for females. The outlet further reports that the church believes the husband has authority over his wife. While members of the church had to make a lifelong commitment, they were given time to think about their decision.
Self-Portrait with a Hat – Andre Derain
(e.g. It’s a cult) OR we get the choice of all the Republican Whackados in Florida pushing this one because, well every one wants to win Florida in November. Plus, she’s Cubano and is one of those that carefully hides what she wants to do which seems to appeal to Susan Collins. From Politico: “Florida Republicans: Nominating Lagoa could clinch state for Trump. Top GOP leaders in the nation’s largest swing state say the Cuban-American federal judge could win Hispanic votes and shield vulnerable members of Congress.”
But it’s Lagoa’s background as a Florida Cuban-American that could have the most salience for Trump. His reelection hinges on the too-close-to-call battleground state, where his campaign has made outreach to Hispanic voters a top issue, worrying some Democrats.
“If the president picks Barbara Lagoa, they will be dancing salsa with joy in Hialeah well past November,” said Gaetz, referring to Lagoa’s home town, a blue-collar majority Cuban-American city that borders Miami and leans Republican.
Lagoa, a 52-year-old Columbia Law School graduate and mother of three children, emerged this weekend as a leading contender to take the Supreme Court seat held by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the liberal stalwart who died Friday at the age of 87.
Lagoa is no lock for the post, however. She’s a relative unknown compared to the favorite of Washington’s conservative establishment anti-abortion groups, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who became a darling of the religious right after her bruising federal confirmation fight in 2017. Barrett and Lagoa are both high on the president’s short list for the post, officials with knowledge of the process told POLITICO.
In contrast, Lagoa’s views on abortion are little known. She had no high-profile rulings on the matter in the nearly 500 decisions she wrote as a state appeals court judge or in other decisions during her brief time on the Florida Supreme Court justice and, since late last year, a judge on the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Portrait of a Woman Maurice de Vlaminck
The ever location of both siderisms–The NYT–reports this today: “Trump and Democrats Brace for Showdown Over Supreme Court Seat. The president’s determination to confirm a replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg before the election set lawmakers on a collision course as Congress deals with other major issues.” This is written by the dynamic duo of both-siderisms: Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman. S0, here’s Joe Biden’s side.
Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential challenger, on Sunday denounced Mr. Trump’s decision to move ahead with a nomination and appealed to the handful of moderate Senate Republicans to stop the president from making a lifetime appointment that would shift the balance of power on the nation’s highest court without waiting to see the results of the election.
“To jam this nomination through the Senate is just an exercise in raw political power,” Mr. Biden said in a speech in Philadelphia, noting that Republicans refused to even consider President Barack Obama’s nominee after Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, citing the coming election. “I don’t believe the people of this nation will stand for it. President Trump has already made it clear this is about power, pure and simple.”
If Mr. Trump wins the race, Mr. Biden added, then the Senate should consider his choice. “But if I win the election, President Trump’s nomination should be withdrawn,” said Mr. Biden, who has promised to make his first appointment to the Supreme Court an African-American woman. “As the new president, I should be the one who nominates Justice Ginsburg’s successor, a nominee who should get a fair hearing in the Senate before a confirmation vote.”
So, it is exactly as Mary Ziegler describes it.
The Supreme Court seems strangely immune to the bitterness that plagues our politics. Even now, when Americans can no longer agree on basic facts, the Court’s relative popularity has endured. Following Donald Trump’s 2016 election, the Court has what may be its most conservative majority in decades. And yet this August, the Supreme Court recorded its highest approval rating since 2009.
But there are so many ways that the current moment could turn out very badly for the Court. First off, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell seems ready to test just how much damage the Court’s institutional integrity can take. In 2016, McConnell refused to hold hearings for Barack Obama’s Supreme Court pick, Merrick Garland, because the next election was too close. Then, within hours of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing, McConnell vowed to replace her before the next election.
Ginsburg, of course, was no ordinary justice. She was a hero to many. McConnell’s speed in replacing her comes across as not merely unseemly; to many who admired the late justice, it will also be a declaration of war.
Regardless of what McConnell does, the Court now looks far more conservative than the electorate. That too doesn’t bode well for the Court’s legitimacy, especially when the justices could once again decide the result of a presidential election. The Court may have to wade into one of the hundreds of voting-rights lawsuits triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many have followed fights about whether the president has deliberately crippled the U.S. Postal Service to make it harder to vote. Republicans have claimed (without evidence) that mail-in voting will lead to massive fraud and have sued to stop it.
Henri Matisse, Femme au chapeau (Donna con cappello), 1905
I’m not so certain that matters to the theocrats the Republicans spent decades placing carefully on the court to punish women, religious minorities, people of color and the GLBT for daring to think they could be equal to White Christianist Men.
So, want some new crazy by a White Christianist Man in charge of the DOJ? And straight from the DOJ: “Department Of Justice Identifies New York City, Portland And Seattle As Jurisdictions Permitting Violence And Destruction Of Property
Identification is Response to Presidential Memorandum Reviewing Federal Funding to State and Local Governments that are Permitting Anarchy, Violence, and Destruction in American Cities ”
Self-Portrait, 2014 Leudy Marquez – Fauvism Collages
This WAPO analysis was written by Devlin Barrett.
The Justice Department labeled the cities of Portland, Ore., New York and Seattle on Monday as jurisdictions “that have permitted violence and destruction of property,” targeting them for possible cuts in federal funding.
Following a memorandum that President Trump issued earlier this month, the Justice Department published a list of cities that the White House wants to get more aggressive on civil unrest in the wake of police shootings and killings.
“We cannot allow federal tax dollars to be wasted,” Attorney General William P. Barr said in a statement. “It is my hope that the cities identified by the Department of Justice today will reverse course and become serious about performing the basic function of government and start protecting their own citizens.”
The Trump administration was unsuccessful in a similar funding-cut move against New York and other cities over their immigration policies. A federal appeals court ruled that the move violated the separation of powers spelled out in the Constitution.
So, I would like a little peace and quiet and boring ol’ Joe Biden sounds better all the time. But, we also need to concentrate on getting rid of this asshole: “Mitch McConnell is the apex predator of U.S. politics” by Howard Fineman.
Historian Rick Perlstein has long described this chapter in the American story as “Nixonland,” a jagged terrain of White racial fear and populist resentment of the federal authority that began in the mid-1960s. But while GOP presidents from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump have tilled that soil when it suited their purposes, McConnell has been, over the years, its most constant gardener, mixing arcane, cynically hypocritical legislative procedure and judicial appointments to turn emotion into lasting policy.
He has jammed hundreds of conservative judges onto the federal bench, making it younger, Whiter and more male — and far more partisan — in the process. In concert with the Federalist Society, McConnell is transforming the federal judiciary from sometimes-defenders of the poor, immigrants and people of color into the Praetorian Guard of corporations, the wealthy, and those whose cultural and racial privileges make them, at best, oblivious to their collective responsibility to all Americans. At the same time, McConnell is standing in the schoolhouse door of dozens if not hundreds of pieces of needed legislation, rendering the “world’s greatest deliberative body” an empty pantomime of itself.
And if he succeeds in forcing another pliable justice onto the Supreme Court, he may prove responsible for undercutting whatever legitimacy a possibly disputed presidential election might have if, as many suspect, it must be settled by that court. One reason to move fast and give the court a 6-3 conservative majority? To take the relatively independent (and therefore unreliable) Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. out of the equation.
McConnell has been around so long people think they know him. But they don’t, and that is by design. When you are the apex predator of U.S. politics, you don’t really care what anyone thinks. In Kentucky, where I worked for six years as McConnell was beginning his rise, he is not so much loved as endured. People talk about him like the rainy Ohio River Valley weather: It’s a pain, but it waters the crops. He retains an iron grip on state politics, has been elected statewide six times and is likely to win a seventh term in November. Democrats are pouring millions into defeating him. It’s not a great bet.
My best strategy offer is to get him out of the Senate Majority Seat. We need to make sure Republicans go down where we can make them go down and Susan Collins and Martha McSally are at the top of my list. Which brings me back to the idea of why so many white women sell the rest of the women of the world out?
Oh, well, I close here before I have to go curl up in a ball and suck my thumb.
Be safe and stay home if you can as much as possible! Be kind to yourself and others! Check in and let us know you’re safe because we care!
What’s on you reading and blogging list today?
Friday Reads: So much Outrage so little Time
Posted: September 18, 2020 Filed under: 2016 elections, 2020 Elections, abortion rights, Afternoon Reads, Psychopaths in charge, public corruption | Tags: Donald Trump and fascism 29 Comments
Georg Tappert. Carnival, 1930
Good Day Sky Dancers!
The headlines today are so outrageous that I had trouble reading even one of them for awhile. We have to get rid of Mitch McConnell. This greeted me from Salon and I had to go lie down in bed for awhile to pet the dog. Petting my cats and dogs is getting to be such a comfort ritual for me they all take turns jumping up to see if I’m okay.
The Republican-led Senate confirmed six of President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees to lifetime appointments over two days this week, even though it has delayed crucial coronavirus relief since May.
The Senate filled four federal vacancies in California and two in Illinois, Bloomberg Law reported. It is also expected to confirm two additional Illinois judges in short order.
“The Senate has confirmed six of Trump’s judicial nominees in the past 30 hours,” tweeted Vanita Gupta, the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “These are lifetime appointments that McConnell’s pushing through instead of the HEROES Act & other crucial legislation.”
Three of the judges were appointed to seats covering Los Angeles, while another was appointed to a seat covering San Diego. There are 11 additional nominees to California courts awaiting Senate confirmation.
The Senate additionally confirmed David Dugan and Stephen McGlynn to the Eastern District of Illinois while ending the debate on the nominations of Iain Johnston to the Northern District. The upper chamber is also expected to end debate on the nomination of Franklin Ulyses Valderrama to the Northern District of Illinois.
Three of the judges were appointed to seats covering Los Angeles, while another was appointed to a seat covering San Diego. There are 11 additional nominees to California courts awaiting Senate confirmation.
The Senate additionally confirmed David Dugan and Stephen McGlynn to the Eastern District of Illinois while ending the debate on the nominations of Iain Johnston to the Northern District. The upper chamber is also expected to end debate on the nomination of Franklin Ulyses Valderrama to the Northern District of Illinois.
Advocacy groups sounded the alarm over the confirmations of Dugan and McGlynn, who received support from anti-abortion organizations and signaled their opposition to abortion rights.
“Today’s vote should never have even happened. People are calling on their senators to provide relief from the COVID-19 pandemic, economic recession and the rampant anti-Black violence occurring around the country,” Anisha Singh, the director of judiciary affairs at Planned Parenthood, said in a statement. “And yet, the Senate majority continues to prioritize confirming judges for lifetime appointments — many with hostile records on reproductive and civil rights, including abortion.”
Singh called on the Senate to “immediately halt” upcoming votes, noting that the two judges’ “records demonstrate they are more likely to be threats to people’s health, rights and bodily autonomy.”
Georg Tappert. Creole, 1911
Today’s Republican Party is a pantheon of anti-democratic values. These judges they appoint are the same kinds of goose steppers you’d expect to find in any Banana Republic. From Vox and Ian Millhiser: “Chief Justice Roberts’s lifelong crusade against voting rights, explained. He has fought to undermine voting rights his entire career.”
John Roberts was 26 years old, and he was outraged that he’d just been outmaneuvered by older and much more experienced political hands.
It was 1981. Roberts had just completed a prestigious clerkship with Justice William Rehnquist — then the most conservative judge to serve on the Supreme Court in decades — and, as an aide to Attorney General William French Smith, Roberts was tasked with making the case against one of the most consequential voting rights laws in the nation’s history.
The House had recently passed legislation extending the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — a seminal civil rights bill that dismantled much of Jim Crow — and shoring up one of its key provisions after a 1980 Supreme Court decision had severely weakened the law. Meanwhile, a filibuster-proof majority of the Senate had co-sponsored the same bill.
Roberts was distraught.
“Something must be done to educate the Senators on the seriousness of this problem,” Roberts wrote his boss, Smith, just a few days before Christmas. In a subsequent memo, he argued that the rapidly advancing bill — which now forms much of the backbone of American voting rights law — was “not only constitutionally suspect, but also contrary to the most fundamental tenants [sic]of the legislative process on which the laws of this country are based.”
Roberts’s early crusade against voting rights ended in failure. Though President Reagan preferred a weaker voting rights law — he once described the Voting Rights Act as “humiliating to the South” — the conservative president eventually bowed to political pressure and signed the legislation Roberts deemed contrary to many of our nation’s “most fundamental” tenets.
But time was on Roberts’s side. He rose within government and within the legal profession until President George W. Bush made him chief justice of the United States in 2005. Roberts is now the most powerful judge in the country. As Congress has grown more and more dysfunctional, the Supreme Court is increasingly the locus of policymaking within the United States.
Georg Tappert. Fest, 1925
What follows in this long read is a good explanation of what Conservative (sic) Republicans have against voting rights even though the last time it passed it had overwhelming bipartisan support and was signed into law by Dubya. But, then came Shelby.
Justice Antonin Scalia gave voice to this frustration during oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Roberts Court case that quashed preclearance. The Voting Rights Act, Scalia claimed, was a “perpetuation of racial entitlement,” and “whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.”
“I don’t think there is anything to be gained by any Senator to vote against continuation of this act,” Scalia continued. “And I am fairly confident it will be reenacted in perpetuity unless — unless a court can say it does not comport with the Constitution.”
Scalia had just turned 76 when his Court heard Shelby County, and he’d watched his fellow Republicans bow over and over again to liberals. That, in Scalia’s mind, was a failure of democracy. His side had won the presidency and, in some cases, control of Congress. And yet the victor did not collect the spoils.
And so the Supreme Court’s Republican majority stepped up to cure this perceived injustice. Chief Justice Roberts led the charge.
There are more whistle blowers coming forward than ever before, including a few in the Justice Department that are testifying in front of Congress. Here is FBI Director Christopher Wray warning of Russian Interference Redux.
Plus, there’s this: “The FBI director also broke with Trump’s claim that antifa is a terrorist organization.” from Politico
FBI Director Christopher Wray on Thursday described “very active efforts” by Russia to interfere in the 2020 election, primarily by working to damage former Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Wray said Russians have been using social media, as well as “proxies, state media, online journals” and other vehicles to hurt Biden and what it views as anti-Russian factions in U.S. politics.
Wray’s assessment affirms the findings of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which last month described Russia’s efforts to damage Biden and specifically identified Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russian Ukrainian lawmaker who has met with President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, as an agent of Russia’s influence operations.
Wray’s testimony to the House Homeland Security Committee affirmed that Russia is continuing to take an active role in the 2020 campaign with less than 50 days until Election Day. He offered no new specifics in the early-going of the hearing, but emphasized that the intelligence community has not seen evidence that Russia is reprising its 2016 attempt to target election infrastructure, such as voter databases.
In testimony to the Homeland Security Committee, Wray also diverged from Trump’s claim that “antifa” is a terrorist organization. Rather, Wray said antifa is “more of an ideology or a movement than an organization” and though there has been violence by some who self-identify as antifa, it has not appeared to be part of a central organization.
“Antifa is a real thing,” Wray said. “But it’s not an organization or a structure.”
Under questioning from Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), Wray indicated that white supremacist violence is the largest portion of what he described as the most significant domestic terrorism threat in the country: “racially motivated violent extremism.”
Oh, look, two groups looking to overthrow the US’s form of government are basically the Trump Base and Trump’s Handler Putin. Which brings to me to the music accompanying my art theme today which is, again, German expressionists painting life during the rise of Hitler.
1917 Max Beckmann Autoportrait au foulard rouge
So, the most stunning thing to me this week is that our Attorney General and Head of Federal Law Enforcement has decided to not even hide his fascist and theocratic tendencies. BB had an entire list of Barr’s crazy notions in yesterday’s post. Grinding through them yesterday was one of the most depressing things I have ever done. The man should be tossed in a padded cell.
And so, after reading all that, this headline made a lot of sense to me. It’s from WAPO: ” The United States is backsliding into autocracy under Trump, scholars warn. The weakening of democratic values — a path that’s difficult to reverse — has accelerated, according to hundreds of indicators assessed each year.” This is by Christopher Ingraham.
Three years into the Trump administration, American democracy has eroded to a point that more often than not leads to full-blown autocracy, according to a project that tracks the health of representative government in nations around the world.
The project, called V-Dem, or Varieties of Democracy, is an effort to precisely quantify global democracy at the country level based on hundreds indicators assessed annually by thousands of individual experts. It’s one of several ongoing projects by political scientists that have registered a weakening of democratic values in the United States in recent years.
V-Dem’s findings are bracing: The United States is undergoing “substantial autocratization” — defined as the loss of democratic traits — that has accelerated precipitously under President Trump. This is particularly alarming in light of what the group’s historic data show: Only 1 in 5 democracies that start down this path are able to reverse the damage before succumbing to full-blown autocracy.
…
Each year, the V-Dem project asks its experts to rate their respective nations on hundreds of measures of democracy, such as the presence of legislative checks on executive power, freedom of personal expression, the civility of political discourse, free and open elections, and executive branch corruption, among others.
The United States is backsliding on all of those measures. “Executive respect for the Constitution is now at the lowest level since 1865,” said Michael Coppedge, a Notre Dame political scientist and one of the project’s chief investigators. “Corruption in the executive branch is basically the worst since Harding.”
Warren G. Harding, whose administration was tainted by corruption and scandal, is routinely ranked among the nation’s worst chief executives
1914 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Couple de danseur
Keep reading the article. The list is horrifying.
I’m pretty sure Mitchie is off doing his dirty work because already seated judges are busy overturning all kinds of Trumpist things at the state level. Today, a judge banned a Michigan law making it illegal to drive people to polls which is something churches routinely do for their elderly and homebound down here. Yesterday, a judge ordered the Post Office to stop and reverse everything it was doing to slow down the mail.
A federal judge on Thursday blocked controversial changes to the United States postal service, saying they were “a politically motivated attack” that had slowed the nation’s mail and likely would slow the delivery of ballots in the upcoming presidential election.
And, of course we’re back to the time where we just might possibly be purposefully sterilizing women of color in ICE Detention. This story grows more horrifying by the day too. “AP Exclusive: More migrant women say they didn’t OK surgery” reported b
Sitting across from her lawyer at an immigration detention center in rural Georgia, Mileidy Cardentey Fernandez unbuttoned her jail jumpsuit to show the scars on her abdomen. There were three small, circular marks.
The 39-year-old woman from Cuba was told only that she would undergo an operation to treat her ovarian cysts, but a month later, she’s still not sure what procedure she got. After Cardentey repeatedly requested her medical records to find out, Irwin County Detention Center gave her more than 100 pages showing a diagnosis of cysts but nothing from the day of the surgery.
“The only thing they told me was: ‘You’re going to go to sleep and when you wake up, we will have finished,’” Cardentey said this week in a phone interview.
Cardentey kept her hospital bracelet. It has the date, Aug. 14, and part of the doctor’s name, Dr. Mahendra Amin, a gynecologist linked this week to allegations of unwanted hysterectomies and other procedures done on detained immigrant women that jeopardize their ability to have children.
An Associated Press review of medical records for four women and interviews with lawyers revealed growing allegations that Amin performed surgeries and other procedures on detained immigrants that they never sought or didn’t fully understand. Although some procedures could be justified based on problems documented in the records, the women’s lack of consent or knowledge raises severe legal and ethical issues, lawyers and medical experts said.
Amin has performed surgery or other gynecological treatment on at least eight women detained at Irwin County Detention Center since 2017, including one hysterectomy, said Andrew Free, an immigration and civil rights lawyer working with other attorneys to investigate medical treatment at the jail. Doctors are helping the attorneys examine new records and more women are coming forward to report their treatment by Amin, Free said.
“The indication is there’s a systemic lack of truly informed and legally valid consent to perform procedures that could ultimately result — intentionally or unintentionally — in sterilization,” he said.
1920 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Malade dans la nuit
Is this just limited to this one doctor so it is likely fraud of some kind or is it systemic ?
Well, yesterday and today’s news is that the CDC was forced to publish Covid-19 testing guidelines against scientists complaints that were written by the Trumpist Regime and inserted on the site against every one’s advice. And TWICE now.
The guidance said it was not necessary to test people without symptoms of Covid-19 even if they had been exposed to the virus. It came at a time when public health experts were pushing for more testing rather than less, and administration officials told The Times that the document was a C.D.C. product and had been revised with input from the agency’s director, Dr. Robert Redfield.
But officials told The Times this week that the Department of Health and Human Services did the rewriting and then “dropped” it into the C.D.C.’s public website, flouting the agency’s strict scientific review process.
“That was a doc that came from the top down, from the H.H.S. and the task force,” said a federal official with knowledge of the matter, referring to the White House task force on the coronavirus. “That policy does not reflect what many people at the C.D.C. feel should be the policy.”
And we have Dan Coates and more Generals sounding an alarm..
So with that, I feel I need to leave you with this:
So, you know the routine! Be safe! Be kind and gentle to yourself and others! Stay home as much as you can! Check in with us so we know you’re okay!! We care about you!!!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Friday Reads: We’re on a Long Muck-filled Road to November
Posted: August 28, 2020 Filed under: 2020 Elections, just because, white nationalists 17 CommentsGood Day Sky Dancers!
There are two tropical waves coming off of Africa heading straight to the Gulf again even while parts of Louisiana and Texas are still in a state of cataloguing the damage from the last two. Severe weather also popped up over Northeast section of the country with tornadoes and thunderstorms. We continue to see wildfires north of San Francisco.
You have to be in denial to not see the strengthening of storms and the more expansive areas ruined by wildfires. It’s like we’ve angered the old “gods” that harness the earth, water, and weather against us.
I have spent the last 4 days with the weather channel, working, and just trying to maintain some semblance of normal as if that were some how possible. I have not once gone to see any one of the hundreds–if not thousands–of violations of the Hatch Act that was the Trump Family Crime Syndicate Revival last night.
My one take away is the ugly green dress and ugly look Melania shot Ivanka headed to Daddy and the microphone. Abusive Daddy will probably be unhinged some time today over this.
https://twitter.com/DGComedy/status/1299171443905761280
Why would any one want four more years of what was on display and what has happened?
So, here’s Susan B. Glasser’s take writing at The New Yorker: “The Malign Fantasy of Donald Trump’s Convention. Using the White House as his prop, the President makes war on Joe Biden, and pretends the pandemic is all but defeated.”
For four years, Donald Trump has been asking us to believe the unbelievable, to accept the unthinkable, to replace harsh realities with simple fantasies. On Thursday night, using the White House as a gaudy backdrop, the President made his case to the American people for four more years. His speech capping the Republican National Convention was long, acerbic, untruthful, and surprisingly muted in comparison to the grandeur of the setting, which no chief executive before him has dared to appropriate in such a partisan way. “We will make America greater than ever before,” he promised.
Even for a salesman like Trump, it was never going to be an easy deal to close, what with a deadly pandemic, mass unemployment, nationwide protests over racial injustice, and even a killer hurricane smashing into the Gulf Coast hours before his speech. Some seventy per cent of Americans currently believe that the country is on the wrong track, according to recent polls. Who can blame them?
Hindu Goddess of Rain Mariammam
This should be devastating context for a President, any President, seeking reëlection, a true picture of American carnage to replace the false one that Trump conjured four years ago. Yet the strategy of Trump and his team is now clear: to talk about how bad things would be in Joe Biden’s America, a violent socialist ruin in which freedom itself will no longer exist and rampaging protesters, like those now committing “rioting, looting, arson, and violence” in “Democrat-run cities,” will be coming soon to a suburb near you. “The hard truth is, you won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,” Vice-President Mike Pence said on Wednesday night. “No one will be safe in Biden’s America,” Trump said on Thursday night. To say this sounded a bit off in actual America, Trump’s America, does not do justice to the bizarre dissonance of this year’s Republican Convention.
Americans know Trump pretty well by now, and so it was more than a little discordant to hear him extolled throughout the Convention this week as a family man, promoter of women, friend to African-Americans, champion of religious liberty, and lover of immigrants, who interrupted his own Convention to preside over a White House naturalization ceremony for five lucky new citizens. A courageous patriot who works “from dawn to midnight,” as his daughter Ivanka told us, this Convention Trump personally charmed German Chancellor Angela Merkel, made peace in the Middle East, and single-handedly saved U.S. industries and unborn babies. And then there was his response to the coronavirus pandemic, perhaps the Administration’s shining hour, in which the President bravely disregarded the so-called experts to ban flights from China, thus saving millions of lives, while working closely with America’s governors, providing medical workers with all the resources they needed, reopening schools and businesses, and putting the greatest economy in history on the path to a fast recovery. The trolling was as epic as the setting was legally questionable: sitting and listening to Trump were more than a thousand supporters, packed together tightly in white chairs on the White House lawn, and almost none of them were wearing masks. While thus publicly and flagrantly flouting public-health standards, Trump touted his response to the pandemic as one that is focussed exclusively “on the science, the facts, and the data.”
Did they expect anyone to believe it?
My backyard. My Banana Trees hold up to the last winds and rain of Laura.
Mike Barnicle at The Daily Beast was even more descriptive: “A Sick President Scrambles to Spread His Contagion of Fear”
Before last night’s neon obscenity—a Trump rally on the South Lawn of the American White House—the 2020 Republican National Convention was close to cartoonish in its attempt to scare the country into voting for Donald J. Trump. It began as dark comedy with a cast of family members, supplicants, incompetents, political ne’er do wells and loud worshippers of a guy who never really believed he’d win on that long-gone night in November 2016 but now thinks he belongs on Mount Rushmore.
As each day melted into the next, though, there were no laugh-lines. Only the specter of a dark hand with a gun and a knock on your door, the mob empowered by Democrat radicals come to take your life, your dreams. By the time that Donald emerged from the White House—think about it, the White House—to deliver his convention speech on Thursday night, you could feel the nuts and bolts holding together this nearly 245-year-old republic loosening with each assault on a form of government that has stood through civil war, depressions, injustice and the stain of racism.
The best read of the day for me so far has been this description of the crazies that do still think Donald Trump will save them and what they fear most. This is by Joseph Marguiles for The Washington Post: “Vigilantes claim to preserve law and order. Their true goal is to save Whiteness. They draw strength from guns, God and Donald Trump.”
The spasm of vigilante violence takes place at the intersection of several powerful currents in American life, and draws its strength from guns, God and Donald Trump, all joined in the service of an imperiled Whiteness.
The first of those currents is the belief that government, and especially law enforcement, has been so hobbled and emasculated by the radical left that it cannot protect the good people from the bad. The Movement for Black Lives, a coalition that includes Black Lives Matter, has come in for particular attack, which reveals the unspoken assumption of the narrative: The good people are White; the bad are either Black or Brown or besotted with their cause.
For those inclined to believe this narrative, evidence of the emasculation is everywhere. After the shootings in Kenosha, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who can always be counted on to give this narrative its voice, asked rhetorically, “How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?” As he spoke, the chyron at the bottom of the Fox screen read, “Kenosha in chaos as leaders abandon another city.” The Facebook page for the Kenosha Guard had implored the police to give the militia free rein, since it was “evident that no matter how many Officers, deputies, and other law enforcement officers that are here, you will still be outnumbered.”
Yet the narrative loses its plot when it becomes clear that the uprisings themselves are not the issue. After all, we didn’t see this sort of vigilantism in response to the uprisings in the 1960s, which were far more destructive. Instead, the protests are important because they illuminate and reveal the perceived impotence of Whiteness — an impotence that was not so keenly felt a half-century ago.
Today’s uprisings are taking place during a moment of profound unease. The term most often used for this unease — White grievance — does not remotely do it justice; to say that one has a grievance conjures the banal image of a complaint card sliding into a box and being forgotten. What we saw in Kenosha, and what we have seen across the country in response to the protests against police violence, is an insensate terror at the advancing prospect of White irrelevance. It is no less than a fear of White erasure.
Whiteness itself is imagined as under siege — culturally, demographically and, most of all, politically. President Trump plays on this fear when he warns ominously that the Democrats want to destroy the serenity of American suburbs, and vows to wall them off from the race-mingling scourge of low-income housing. It is no matter that the fear is irrational; there is no threat to Whiteness in this country, and there never has been. Irrational fears are always the most terrifying, and it is this terror that fuels the vigilantism.
The second current is the celebration of gun culture. Here, the vigilantes have the law to thank. Since the Supreme Court decision in Heller v. District of Columbia in 2008, which upheld the right of private gun ownership under the Second Amendment, it has become dramatically easier for people to travel the streets of this country armed. According to the Giffords Law Center, which tracks gun laws nationwide, in most states, including Wisconsin, it is perfectly legal for a person to openly carry a loaded firearm in public, without a permit.
Zephyrus the west-wind as spring, Greco-Roman mosaic from Antioch C2nd A.D.,
I’ve read a lot of this on facebook from besotted white men who really believe all this and the underlying theme is evident to every one but them. They don’t like him but gee, those policies!
Meanwhile, Vice Presidential Candidate for the Democratic Party–Senator Kamala Harris–continues to punch and remind us of the real issues. Here’s her call for justice for Jacob Blake as reported in USA Today “Kamala Harris: Officer in Jacob Blake shooting should be charged”. See the interview at this link.
In her first one-on-one network interview since becoming the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Kamala Harris talks to TODAY’s Craig Melvin about the shooting of Jacob Blake, saying “I don’t see how anybody could reason that that could be justifiable” and calling for “a thorough investigation.” Saying that “the fish rots from the head,” she draws a distinction between the leadership styles of Donald Trump and her running mate, Joe Biden.
Egyptian Lion Goddess of Dread Sehkmet
We have a long road before Hurricane Season and the political season end because both end the first week of November. CNN Politics has already called out 20 false or misleading statements in Trump’s Dark Speech from last night.
Trump is a serial liar and he serially lied during his speech accepting the Republican nomination.
CNN counted more than 20 false, exaggerated or misleading claims from Trump on Thursday night. That’s in addition to a number of falsehoods from other speakers.
Trump’s dishonesty touched on a range of topics, from the economy to his administration’s performance during the coronavirus pandemic. Some of Trump’s most egregious false claims were directed at Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
In his scripted remarks, Trump suggested Biden wants to take down the border wall, but Biden has specifically rejected that idea, saying only that he’ll stop further construction. Trump baselessly said that Biden’s plan would eliminate borders, which it wouldn’t.
Trump claimed he passed Veterans Choice, a law that Obama signed in 2014. Trump also touted a “record” 9 million jobs gained over the past three months, without mentioning the record 22 million job losses that preceded that.
Trump also boasted about the Covid testing system and his general response to the pandemic, even though experts near-universally say the US was fatally slow in its response, especially slow in setting up adequate testing.
You can read more or watch the video interview with CNN Fact Checker by Anderson Cooper at the link.
So, I’m going for a quiet weekend and hoping that everything around me cooperates! You take care! Let us know you’re okay!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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