Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: November 9, 2019 Filed under: Foreign Affairs, morning reads, U.S. Politics 26 Comments
By Midori Yamada
Good Morning!!
It has been an interesting week in the impeachment inquiry and next week should be even more interesting. Will John Bolton testify? He’s apparently OK with his lawyer leaking information to The New York Times: Bolton Said to Know of ‘Many Relevant Meetings’ on Ukraine, but Will Not Testify.
John R. Bolton, President Trump’s former national security adviser, knows about “many relevant meetings and conversations” connected to a pressure campaign on Ukraine that House impeachment investigators have not yet been informed of, his lawyer told lawmakers on Friday.
The lawyer, Charles J. Cooper, tucked the tantalizing assertion into a letter to the chief House lawyer in response to committee chairmen who have sought Mr. Bolton’s testimony in their impeachment inquiry but expressed unwillingness to go to court to get an order compelling it….
By Tetsuo Takahara
…hints about what Mr. Bolton might be able to add came as new details emerged from the impeachment inquiry about how an effort by Mr. Trump’s allies to use the United States’ relationship with Ukraine to accomplish the president’s political goals opened a bitter rift inside the White House.
According to testimony made public on Friday, the push, spearheaded in large part by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, pitted Mr. Bolton, who sought repeatedly to resist it, against Mick Mulvaney, the acting chief of staff who senior officials said may have played a central role in carrying it out.
Trump is sucking up to Bolton this morning.
This from the NYT article makes me want to read Fiona Hill’s testimony this weekend.
Transcripts of testimony by Fiona Hill, the former senior director for Russia and Europe at the National Security Council, and Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, the Ukraine expert there, described how the council under Mr. Bolton became consumed with trying to thwart Mr. Giuliani’s efforts to bend Ukraine policy to the president’s political advantage.
By Cheryl Wilson
They said there was evidence Mr. Mulvaney was involved in setting up a quid pro quo in which Ukraine could not receive a White House meeting unless top officials there committed to investigations that Mr. Trump wanted. And they showed how the foreign policy officials most deeply knowledgeable about Ukraine were sidelined and forced to act as mere spectators — in some instances watching for Mr. Giuliani’s freewheeling appearances on cable news for clues — in dealing with the relationship with Kiev.
Ms. Hill said Mr. Bolton repeatedly sought to cut off the influence of Mr. Giuliani, whom he referred to as a “hand grenade.”
Mr. Bolton was “closely monitoring what Mr. Giuliani was doing and the messaging that he was sending out,” she told investigators, adding that he warned “repeatedly that nobody should be meeting with Giuliani.”
And Hill knows about Trump’s history with Russia.
Alexander Vindman’s testimony might be an interesting read too. He tore apart Trump propagandist John Solomon’s “reporting” on the fake Ukraine conspiracy. The Washington Post: ‘But you know, his grammar might have been right’: Lt. Col. Vindman bashed John Solomon in testimony.
Kazuaki Horitomo
In his deposition last month on Capitol Hill, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman characterized as “false” the work of John Solomon, the former executive vice president for digital video at The Hill, according to a transcript released Friday. Vindman just might know: He has served as the top Ukraine hand at the National Security Council and watched as Solomon’s reports on the country in The Hill surfaced earlier this year. He gave his deposition as part of the House impeachment inquiry.
In the pages of The Hill, Solomon poured starting fluid on the idea that former vice president Joe Biden had pressed for the ouster of a Ukrainian prosecutor so as to lessen the pressure on the company where his son, Hunter Biden, held a board seat. Part of this Solomon oeuvre included an interview with then-Ukrainian prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, who alleged that former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch had presented him a do-not-prosecute list.
There’s no evidence for such a deed. Lutsenko later retracted the claim, and Vindman called it “preposterous” in his deposition.
Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) decided to press Vindman on his conclusion that Solomon was pushing bogus reporting.
Zeldin: Did your sources, though, say that everything was false or just parts of it were false?Vindman: I think all the key elements were false.Zeldin: Just so I understand what you mean when you say key elements. Are you referring to everything John Solomon stated or just some of it?Vindman: All the elements that I just laid out for you. The criticisms of corruption were false.Zeldin: You mentioned —Vindman: Were there more items in there, frankly, congressman? I don’t recall. I haven’t looked at the article in quite some time, but you know, his grammar might have been right.
To check on Solomon’s reporting, Vindman had quizzed his “interagency colleagues” at the State Department and the intelligence community. He asked for “background” and wanted to know if there was “anything substantive in this area.”
Read more at the WaPo.
By Kamwei Fong
Alexander Nazaryan at Yahoo News: Testimony from Alexander Vindman and Fiona Hill caps a devastating week for Trump.
The week ended on a sour note for President Trump, with the public release of testimony by two national security council staffers — one current, one former — who expressed alarm over the way Trump officials pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for political help at home. The campaign, orchestrated by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and intended to harm Joe Biden, a political rival, is now the subject of an impeachment inquiry launched last month by the House of Representatives….
That scheme was managed by Giuliani, whose role in attempting to wrest political concessions from Zelensky was plainly troubling to career public servants unused to his unorthodox approach. “Rudy Giuliani is a hand grenade that is going to blow everybody up,” national security adviser John Bolton told Fiona Hill, a Russia hardliner on the National Security Council whose testimony was released on Friday.
The other transcript released on Friday is of the interview with Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a Ukraine expert at the NSC. Vindman remains at his job at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, right next to the White House, despite having been the subject of withering attacks by Trump and his allies. Bolton was fired in September, while Hill left her post in June.
The testimony of the two officials is bound to energize Democrats ahead of next week’s public hearings. It includes a denunciation by Vindman of the “inherent risk” of playing politics with world affairs and Hill’s flat assessment of the Republican talking point — that Ukraine “was launching an effort to upend our [2016] election” — as “a fiction.”
Read the rest at the link. You can also read a good summary of the testimony highlights at CNN: We read all 2,677 pages of impeachment inquiry testimony released to date. Here’s what’s clear.
The New York Times has a background piece on John Eisenberg, the White House lawyer who is accused of ordering concealment of Trump’s Ukraine phone call: Ukraine Affair Thrusts White House Lawyer Into Center of Crisis.
Mr. Eisenberg has emerged as a central figure in the impeachment inquiry, appearing frequently in the new transcripts. House investigators want to question him, but he skipped a scheduled deposition this week….
By Didier Lourenco
Mr. Eisenberg, 52, served a decade ago as a Justice Department lawyer who worked on surveillance law. Interviews with more than two dozen current and former colleagues paint a portrait of a meticulous, conservative lawyer with a tightly wound and introverted, sometimes prickly manner.
Former associates questioned whether his experience made him an awkward fit for his current role, which requires rendering legal judgments in fast-moving crises arising from military and intelligence operations. The Trump transition team selected Mr. Eisenberg over many prominent Republican national security lawyers who had signed “Never Trump” statements.
That figures. At the DOJ, Eisenberg was a supporter of warrantless surveilance program.
During the George W. Bush administration, Mr. Eisenberg landed at the Justice Department’s powerful Office of Legal Counsel, where he came to focus on national security.
In Mr. Bush’s second term, Mr. Eisenberg was among a few executive branch lawyers who tried to put its contentious warrantless surveillance program onto firmer legal footing. Mr. Bush began the program after the Sept. 11 attacks based on an expansive claim of executive power, even though a 1978 law required court orders for wiretaps on domestic soil.
Mr. Eisenberg and the other lawyers developed a creative legal theory for why a court could lawfully issue orders blessing the program. They persuaded a judge in 2007 to do so. But another judge balked, and the administration turned to Congress to enact a new surveillance law instead.
Read more about Eisenberg at the NYT link.
According to Dana Millbank at The Washington Post, there are plenty of examples of Trump’s childish behavior in the impeachment inquiry transcripts: The United States is being run by a toddler.
He has tantrums. He rips up paper. He disregards facts. He believes crazy conspiracies. He’s erratic and ill-informed. Those around him walk on eggshells, trying to prevent him from doing the geopolitical equivalent of sticking his finger in an electrical socket.
U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, a Trump donor and political appointee, described Trump’s style: “President Trump changes his mind on what he wants on a daily basis. I have no idea what he wanted on the day I called him.” Sondland also spoke about Trump’s “completely inconsistent” behavior: “The funny part is that he was railing about the problems with Ukraine in our meeting, but I think shortly after that he sent essentially an unconditional invitation to President Zelensky to come visit him.”
By Hiroshige
Sondland testified about Trump’s unreasonableness (“He sort of went on and on and on about how Ukraine is a disaster and they’re bad people”), limited attention (“He didn’t even want to deal with it anymore, and he basically waved and said, ‘Go talk to Rudy’”) and poor judgment (“Taking directions from the president, as I must, I spoke with Mr. Giuliani … Please know that I would have not recommended that”). Likewise, George Kent, the deputy secretary of state overseeing Ukraine, painted a picture of aides trying to soothe a childlike Trump. “Initially the president did not want to sign a congratulatory letter, and he actually ripped up the letter that had been written for him,” Kent testified. “But by the end of the meeting he’d been convinced.”
Republicans’ questions suggest they, too, accept that the president is not entirely rational; they urged witnesses to respond as “if you are in President Trump’s world,” whether Trump’s views are “reasonable or not” and “fair or not.”
For example: “If the president, for whatever reason, true or untrue, develops a feeling that he’s got an ambassador that isn’t loyal to him, he’s going to bring them home, correct?”
And: “If you try to get inside the president’s head, I mean, he may have been searching for the name ‘Burisma’ but couldn’t grasp it so he spits out ‘Biden’?”
More examples at the link.
I’m going to end there. Please share your thoughts and recommended reads in the comment thread below.
Friday Reads: A Search for Wisdom
Posted: November 8, 2019 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: wisdom women 23 Comments
Welsh Saint Melangell
Good Afternoon Sky Dancers!
A Welsh friend of mine who shares my Buddhist practices reminded me that today is Welsh Saint Melangell’s day. I was raised Presbyterian which meant we basically shunned these kinds of icons but as I moved deeper into my own Vajrayana practice I came to realize that having something to look at that’s an embodiment of something good, something worth aspiring to isn’t exactly the same as worshiping a graven image. (h/t to Damian Tidmarsh)
There are many examples of female wisdom beings in my Vajrayana practice although most of them are stylized in ways that help the aspirant to remember the aspects of wisdom, justice and compassion that each of these beings brings should bring to mind. I think that we can see saints in the same way.
Saint Melangell is a Catholic Saint from the 6th century CE. She’s a protectress of animals and seen holding the hare she saved from a pack of ferocious hunting dogs led by a nobleman in Powys. She is said to have mesmerized the dogs by her sanctity and shortly thereafter the Nobleman built a church in her honor and gave up such sport.
Again, there are women of wisdom in every spiritual practice including Islam which we never really hear much about in the west. Many are assigned to small enclaves of followers and again, I’m talking about most spiritual paths. But, not following the wisdom of women in my tradition and disrespecting the wisdom of women is considered to be one of the worst infractions there is and it’s one of the reasons that I find so much in the practices of many women Bodhisattvas. My favorite practices come from Yeshe Shogyal and Madchig Labdron. Madchig Labdron was a woman from the Tibet of 11th century CE. She is best known for resolving conflict by literally feeding your inner demons.
Machig Labdron from the Treasury of Lives. Machig Labdron Yidam and historical figure – the founder of Chöd
So, obviously these are not the kinds of things I blog on here because we’re mostly focused on the more venal things in life and there is nothing more venal today that what we see in the politics here and for that matter what’s popped up in the UK and other European countries. I usually follow the distinctly Presbyterian and Buddhist traditions of keeping your religion to yourself unless you’re really really really asked about it. But here I am using female wisdom beings to enter us into the conversation of why it’s so damned difficult for us to get a woman president and why we see ongoing attacks on a woman Speaker of the House and women in Congress like the so-called Squad. I don’t agree with all these women but would never dream of going after them for that!
Amazon went after a City Council Seat in Seattle with the force of the God of American White Men the almighty greenback. Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant who is a socialist is struggling to maintain her seat. The tech boyz went after her with one of their own with a show of overwhelming greenback power.
Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant gained a lot of ground in her District 3 race based on additional votes tallied Thursday, and is threatening to catch challenger Egan Orion.
The socialist incumbent is still trailing business-backed Orion, but her share is now 48.6%, up from 45.6% Tuesday and 45.8% Wednesday. More progressive candidates, such as Sawant, tend to surge in Seattle elections as later votes are counted.
Fatima bint Muhammad Her significance to practitioners of the Shi’ia traditions lies in her piety, compassion and suffering.
Now, you can all say it’s because she’s a socialist and this is an outlier governing philosophy here in the US. But, I still think the fact she’s an Indian American Woman is probably a larger factor. Well, that and again, the amount of money spent by companies like Amazon to to take her out. Amazon literally has tried to buy a City Council Seat.
Early election results for the Seattle City Council show that the company’s loudest opponent, the incumbent councilmember Kshama Sawant, trailed an Amazon-backed candidate as of Tuesday night. But results indicate that Amazon’s favored candidates won’t make up the majority of the council.
Amazon donated $1.45 million to a political action committee backed by Seattle’s chamber of commerce, called Civic Alliance for a Sound Economy (CASE), in the hope of beating back progressive politicians who blame Amazon’s growth — and the dizzying real estate frenzy that has accompanied it — for much of the city’s ills, which include rising homelessness rates and soaring rents. Amazon gave just $25,000 to the same group four years ago, according to Reuters.
As of Tuesday night, three of the seven Amazon-backed candidates had healthy leads, three were losing, and one race was a virtual tie. Seven of the nine seats on the city council were up for vote. It’s worth noting that most votes in Seattle elections are cast by mail-in ballot, meaning close races can take days to call as last-minute mail-ins are counted. New results are expected late afternoon Wednesday Pacific time.
One of the candidates in the lead is Egan Orion, a CASE-backed politician who received significant personal donations from Amazon executives and was running against Sawant. He was leading Sawant by about 8 percentage points as of Tuesday night, but the incumbent has not conceded because she has previously made up ground in the days after a prior election to come out on top. During her time in office, Sawant has been a frequent critic of Amazon, hosting several rallies at the company’s headquarters to protest its perceived negative impacts on Seattle.
My doctor daughter and doctor husband of Bengali heritage live in this district and I will hear with that have to say this weekend. What really got me into this blog post today has been the ongoing weirdness of media coverage of the presidential race where the focus of all Democratic angst appears to be Elizabeth Warren and the focus–well basically no focus at all–appears to be on the other two highly qualified Women Senators running in that race. The dynamic of coverage and lack of coverage appears to reflect this ongoing denigration of the women of wisdom in this country. Better remind me what their names are because I will rarely hear them on TV.
Often overlooked, Miriam saved her brother Moses in his youth and led the Jewish people in celebration after they successfully crossed the Red Sea to safety.
Elizabeth Warren has the white male power structure in such a twit that we now have another white Male Billionaire in the overly crowded race (Michael Bloomberg). We also hear lurid tales of what appears to buying Iowa endorsements and stealing of volunteer lists from Senator Harris’ campaign from another for billionaire candidate Tom Steyer. And, now, Hillary Clinton, suddenly looks pretty damned good by some media accounts because she’s really not that anti-business after all.
Let’s ignore Bloomberg candidacy–please–and move to the heart of the problem. White male Billionaires appear to have their fee fees hurt because there’s suggestion of a potential tax on where they hide their money. This is from The American Prospect and Alexander Sammon on why suggesting they asked for it. Is it just enough for them to put some thing into foundations especially after the business you created essentially becomes a monopoly with extremely high costs to the economy as well as benefits?
Led prominently by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett, the Giving Pledge would account for many billions of dollars in redistribution. “This is about building on a wonderful tradition of philanthropy that will ultimately help the world become a much better place,” said Gates at the time.
The pledge quickly proved highly popular among the world’s rich. In 2015, Mark Zuckerberg, who became a Giving Pledge signatory five years earlier at age 26, decided to up the ante even further, vowing to give away 99 percent of his Facebook shares. Today, the pledge includes 204 of the world’s wealthiest individuals, couples, and families, ranging in age from their 30s to their 90s, spanning 30 states (plus D.C.) and 23 countries.
Yet, despite the world’s best, supposedly brightest, and definitely most well-endowed dedicating their lives to diminishing their colossal holdings, the Giving Pledge has been a near-total failure. Try as they might to spend it down, their dynastic winnings continue to swell, as favorable tax deals, loopholes, and havens have helped balloon their money to unfathomable and unspendable amounts. In the decade the billionaire class has had to effectuate its self-imposed wealth tax, none of the highest-profile signees have even managed to slow the growth rate of their wealth, let alone come anywhere close to cutting the total in half.
The problem with having billions of dollars in wealth, most of which is held in assets and investments, is that it compounds and grows exponentially. Just investing that money in the stock market would yield an annual return of 10 percent on average, and even more in recent years. Which is why all but one of the world’s 20 wealthiest tech figures have seen their net worth surge by billions of dollars in the ten months of 2019 alone, per Business Insider. And the only one who didn’t hit that growth threshold was not even a Giving Pledge signatory: It was Jeff Bezos, who shelled out a record-shattering sum in his divorce settlement and still managed to remain the world’s richest person.
Durga is a Hindu warrior goddess protecting and safeguarding her people from evil
We can argue if this Crime Syndicate Family actually are billionaires but here’s a good look at how America’s Borgias pilfered their so-called charitable foundation where donations made for children with cancer lined their pockets. They’ve been ordered to pay $2 million and write a mea culpa. Trump has already twittered something that is likely a breach of the agreement.
The payment is the final resolution to a case brought by the New York attorney general’s office after the Trump Foundation held a fundraiser for military veterans during the 2016 campaign.
The televised fundraiser took in nearly $3 million in donations that were dispersed on the eve of the Iowa caucuses as directed by then-campaign chief Corey Lewandowski.
The two million must be paid by President Trump himself for breaching his fiduciary duty to properly oversee the foundation that bears his name.
“I direct Mr. Trump to pay the $2,000,000, which would have gone to the Foundation if it were still in existence, on a pro rata basis to the Approved Recipients,” Judge Saliann Scarpulla wrote.
The lawsuit filed by the state’s attorney general accused President Trump — along with his children, Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka — of conflating charity with politics, repeatedly using charitable donations for personal, political and business gains, including legal settlements, campaign contributions and even to purchase a portrait of Trump to hang at one of his hotels..
Ah, New York Attorney General Letitia James, truly an American Woman of Wisdom.
So, let’s head back to this: “Female 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidates Face a ‘Gender Penalty’ Online, Study Finds” discussed by Time Magazine‘s Suyin Hayes.
A new analysis of Twitter and news coverage surrounding the Democratic primary candidates for the U.S. 2020 presidential elections shows that female candidates are attacked significantly more often than male candidates by trolls and fake news accounts.
The report, published Nov. 5 by Lucina Di Meco, Global Fellow at The Wilson Center, used artificial intelligence in partnership with non-partisan data analytics firm Marvelous AI to track the coverage of six Democratic candidates on Twitter, measuring the volume of conversation around each candidate between December 2018 and April 2019. Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar were the candidates included in the study, which forms part of the broader report titled #ShePersisted: Women, Politics and Power in the New Media World.
These online conversations were analyzed for one week after each candidate’s official campaign launch between December 2018 and April 2019, depending on the candidate. Marvelous AI also examined the political bias and credibility of Twitter users participating in the conversation, as well as the themes and narratives surrounding each candidate.
Let me direct you to these 2 paragraphs in particular.
More social media attention on a candidate was not necessarily a positive. The study concluded that social media narratives around female candidates were more negative and focused on issues of character and identity, rather than electability or policy. The largest narrative on social media across the political spectrum surrounding Elizabeth Warren focused on her character, in particular the narrative that she “lied about her ethnic heritage.” The dominant narrative for Kamala Harris focused on her identity, attacking her as “not authentically American” because both her parents were immigrants to the U.S.
The focus on identity and character was largely the norm for female candidates, whereas it was the exception for male candidates. The dominant narrative surrounding Joe Biden focused on previous allegations of inappropriate touching, but this was still linked to his electability rather than his character or identity. “The role that social media platforms’ click-optimization algorithms played in spreading the misogyny and other biases is by now well documented,” said Olya Gurevich, Chief Scientist and co-founder at Marvelous AI. “I believe that technologists now have the moral responsibility, as well as the opportunity, to help ameliorate the unfairness in media, and this goes beyond just changing the click incentives.”
Eighth Century Female Bodhisattva Yeshe Tsyogal of Tibet
It’s always nice when your gut feelings shine through a study based in data and statistical testing. It’s enough to make this women Economist weep with joy. But nothing says misogyny like an actual discussion of talking heads on who is electable with Nate Cohn.
Michael Barbaro
Nate, it’s been my sense that Warren is basically neck and neck, and in some cases, running ahead of Biden in these national Democratic primary polls. So if that’s true, how can it be that she’s lagging so far behind Biden in her ability to beat Trump?
Nate Cohn
Yeah, I was surprised by how poorly she fared in our polls. But 6 percent of voters told us that they would support Joe Biden against the president but would not support Elizabeth Warren in a head-to-head match-up against Donald Trump. And that 6 percent is going to be hard for her. We asked every one of these voters whether they agreed with the statement that Elizabeth Warren was too far to the left for them to feel comfortable supporting her, and a majority of them said they agreed with that statement. We also asked all of these voters whether they agreed with the statement that most of the women who run for president just aren’t that likable. And 40 percent of them said they agreed with that statement.
Michael Barbaro
That’s a very specific way of wording that question.
Nate Cohn
Yeah. We were trying to give people permission to say that, in their mind, there’s just something wrong with the women who have run for office, without making them say they don’t want a woman to be president.
Michael Barbaro
You’re essentially giving people permission, through indirect language, to be sexist.
Nate Cohn
Sexist, I think — right.
The Saint as envisioned by Juliet Venter (link attached to her studio)
Here’s a bit further down where we finally get discussion of some other candidates.
Nate Cohn
Yeah, I think it’s a tough poll for Democrats to take right now. They might look at our data and consider other options. They might try and pursue a blue Texas or Georgia that maybe could make up for their weakness in these whiter working-class states. They might consider whether they ought to look at some of these other candidates again, maybe an Amy Klobuchar or a Cory Booker, who knows? Someone who’s closer to a compromise between the two wings of the party. They might conclude that they have to try and change the composition of the electorate, that they may be trailing among registered voters now, but after a year of registering new young and nonwhite voters, perhaps they could take the lead. But with the electorate we have today, and with the question of electability in mind, it seems like voters today are likeliest to supported a moderate Democratic nominee. But there’s a lot more to a candidate than whether you’re a moderate or a liberal. Moderates aren’t assured to win this election. People on the left aren’t assured to lose it, either. Right now, with these particular set of candidates, Elizabeth Warren fares the worst against President Trump. Joe Biden fares the best. And on balance, the voters who seem to be switching from candidate to candidate are concerned that the major Democratic nominees too far to the left. There’s no guarantee that that’s how it will stick, but that’s where things are now.
That’s as far as the discussion goes. No other women and certainly no mention of the one Hispanic running in the race.
Lilth and Eve by Karla Gudeon CoveGallery.com
So, here’s a story that tells us more than any reason why we need more women and POC of our government. This is the republican hero who is going to save Trumperz from the Constitution and the rule of law. “Referee says he told Rep. Jim Jordan that Ohio State doctor performed sex act in shower. The referee said the response of Jordan and another former coach was, “Yeah, yeah, we know.” via NBC
A professional referee says in a lawsuit filed Thursday that disgraced doctor Richard Strauss masturbated in front of him in a shower after a wrestling match at Ohio State University, and that he reported the encounter directly to Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who was then the assistant coach.
“Yeah, that’s Strauss,” Jordan and then-head coach Russ Hellickson replied, according to the lawsuit, when the referee, identified in court papers as John Doe 42, told them about the incident. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Ohio, implies that Jordan’s response to the incident, which the referee said happened in 1994, was essentially a shrug.
John Doe 42 is the second person to say he told Jordan directly about either being approached or molested by Strauss, who was found by independent investigators to have sexually abused 177 male students over two decades.
What can you say about a man who protects a pedophile? This the best the Republicans have to offer? A pedophile enabling gym teacher?
Katharine Coldiron of NPR perhaps frames it best for me while reviewing a new book ‘Burn It Down’ Diagnoses, Analyzes The State Of American Women’s Anger.” I’m reminded of the Burning Bed which captured the feelings of women survivors of violent marriages. This is a collection of 22 women’s voices so it’s no dependent on any one woman.
Every writer in the book completes that assignment in her own way. Some writers lean more heavily on analysis (Leslie Jamison), while others lean on memoir (Minda Honey). Some write poetically (Rios de la Luz) while others write practically (Lisa Factora-Borchers). Every writer explains the particular pressure point for her own anger, be it misgendering, food, religious intolerance, chronic pain, or toxic family members. Some essays, some experiences, overlap: angry fathers; Audre Lorde; the bright hot fury of adolescence; and how the body is tangled up with anger. Often, these women’s bodies have been violated, and the bodies struggle with containing or letting go of anger just as the people inside them do.
Nearly all of these women have been instructed — consciously or not — to hide their anger. “I intuitively embraced and supported other women’s anger but struggled to claim my own,” Jamison writes, in an essay previously published in The New York Times Magazine. “Anger in a woman is akin to madness; it felt like madness inside of me, it looked like madness to others,” Erin Khar adds, in an incandescent, tightly written piece. “Anger should’ve been an acceptable emotion to such a violation of the self, and yet I’d had a lifetime of experience that said otherwise,” Monet Patrice Thomas explains, with enormous control over words that depict unacceptable treatment.
Many of the essays in Burn It Down imply — or just say — that women’s anger in greater society is not merely hidden or underexpressed, but treated as if it should never exist. As if it’s a wing of the house of human emotion that women cannot enter. Of course this stricture is complicated by other aspects of a woman’s identity (well-represented in the book), whether the woman is openly trans, fat, Black, Chicana, Muslim, or disabled.
“My anger has always been dismissed or overlooked, because it was superseded by the fear of what I’d lose by expressing it, whether it be my dignity, my safety, or my livelihood,” Thomas writes.
Seeing what we lost when we lost Madam President Hillary Clinton and what we stand to loose if we dismiss any of these Democrat women senator’s right to express their vision of America and to represent it as our president makes me both angry and sad. We does modern American dismiss its wisdom women? Why do we not get to actually see and completely understand their visions?
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Thursday Reads: I Can’t Take It Anymore . . .
Posted: November 7, 2019 Filed under: Foreign Affairs, morning reads, U.S. Politics 21 Comments
Good Morning!!
I’m having another one of those “I can’t take anymore” days. I couldn’t stand reading the news yesterday and today the feeling is even stronger as I’ve forced myself to surf for stories to post. Here’s what I’ve come up with.
An aide to Mike Pence is testifying in the impeachment inquiry today. Reuters: As public hearings loom, Vice President Pence aide meets with U.S. House committees.
U.S. congressional committees conducting an impeachment investigation of President Donald Trump met on Thursday for the first time with a top adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, one of the last witnesses to testify behind closed doors before public hearings start next week.
Jennifer Williams, a career foreign service officer and special adviser to Pence for Europe and Russia, arrived at the U.S. Capitol to testify behind closed doors on Thursday morning with members of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs, Intelligence and Oversight committees.
Lawmakers will look to Williams for information about how much Pence knew about efforts by Trump and those around him to pressure Ukrainian officials to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and foreign interference in the 2016 U.S. election.
According to CNN, Williams was “concerned” about Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine president Zelensky.
Williams was on the July 25 call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymr Zelensky, and she was concerned about what she heard on the call but there is no indication Williams raised her concerns to her superiors, according to the source.
Justin Shur, Williams’ attorney, told CNN in a statement Wednesday night that she would answer the committee’s questions “if required to appear.”
“Jennifer is a longtime dedicated State Department employee,” Shur said in the statement. “If required to appear, she will answer the Committees’ questions. We expect her testimony will largely reflect what is already in the public record.” [….]
Williams, a longtime State Department staffer, is detailed to Pence’s office as special adviser on European and Russian affairs and was one of two Pence aides on the call. The other was Gen. Keith Kellogg, the vice president’s national security adviser, who has not yet been called to testify.
Williams would be the first person on Pence’s national security team to appear. She has knowledge of how much the vice president knew about the efforts by Trump and those around him to push Ukraine to launch investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, as well as 2016 election interference, a source familiar with her thinking told CNN.
We’ll probably hear more about Williams and what she has to say later on today.
The New York Times reported this morning that Zelensky received the message about a quid pro quo loud and clear, and he was planning to do Trump’s bidding: Zelensky Bowed to Trump’s Demands, Until Luck Spared Him.
KIEV, Ukraine — It was early September, and Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, faced an agonizing choice: whether to capitulate to President Trump’s demands to publicly announce investigations against his political enemies or to refuse, and lose desperately needed military aid.
Only Mr. Trump could unlock the aid, he had been told by two United States senators, and time was running out. If the money, nearly $400 million, were not unblocked by the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30, it could be lost in its entirety.
In a flurry of WhatsApp messages and meetings in Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, over several days, senior aides debated the point. Avoiding partisan politics in the United States had always been the first rule of Ukrainian foreign policy, but the military aid was vital to the war against Russian-backed separatist forces in eastern Ukraine, a conflict that has cost 13,000 lives since it began in 2014.
By then, however, Mr. Zelensky’s staffers were already conceding to what seemed to be the inevitable, and making plans for a public announcement about the investigations. It was a fateful decision for a fledgling president elected on an anticorruption platform that included putting an end to politically motivated investigations.
Zelensky was prepared to make a public statement about the two investigations Trump was demanding, until news broke about Trump’s withholding of military aid.
Finally bending to the White House request, Mr. Zelensky’s staff planned for him to make an announcement in an interview on Sept. 13 with Fareed Zakaria, the host of a weekly news show on CNN.
Though plans were in motion to give the White House the public statement it had sought, events in Washington saved the Ukrainian government from any final decision and eliminated the need to make the statement.
But word of the freeze in military aid had leaked out, and Congress was in an uproar. Two days before the scheduled interview, the Trump administration released the assistance and Mr. Zelensky’s office quickly canceled the interview.
Read the whole thing at the NYT.
Also at The New York Times, a story on how Lev Parnas got the money to pay for Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to manufacture dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden: Behind the Deal That Put Giuliani Together With a Dirt-Hunting Partner.
It has been one of the enduring mysteries of the impeachment drama: Where did a cash-strapped Ukrainian-born American businessman get $500,000 to pay President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani?
It turns out that the money came from a Long Island lawyer named Charles Gucciardo, a Republican donor and supporter of Mr. Trump. The payment was part of a deal in which Mr. Gucciardo would become an investor in a company started by the businessman, Lev Parnas, according to Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Gucciardo’s lawyer and other people familiar with the arrangement.
The money, paid to Mr. Giuliani’s firm in September and October 2018, cemented a relationship between Mr. Parnas and Mr. Giuliani. Within months that relationship would evolve into a critical front in the campaign by the president and Mr. Giuliani to pressure the Ukrainian government to start investigations that would benefit Mr. Trump politically.
Mr. Gucciardo, 62, a plaintiff’s lawyer, has not been implicated in any wrongdoing, and there is no evidence that he was involved in the Ukrainian pressure campaign.
Read the rest at the NYT.
Information has begun leaking out about the upcoming tell-all book by “Anonymous” and it doesn’t look good for Mike Pence. Yashar Ali at HuffPost: Exclusive: Book Claims Senior Officials Believed Pence Would Support Use Of 25th Amendment.
The much-anticipated book “A Warning,” reportedly written by an unnamed senior White House official, claims that high-level White House aides were certain that Vice President Mike Pence would support the use of the 25th Amendment to have President Donald Trump removed from office because of mental incapacity.
According to the exposé, which is written by someone that The New York Times and the publisher of the book say is a current or former senior White House official, using the pen name “Anonymous,” highly placed White House officials did a back-of-the-envelope tally of which Cabinet members would be prepared to sign a letter invoking Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, which says that if the president is deemed unfit to discharge the duties of his office, the vice president would assume the role.
That letter would need to be signed by a majority of the Cabinet, delivered to Pence for his signature and then submitted to Congress.
According to Anonymous, there was no doubt in the minds of these senior officials that Pence would support invoking the 25th Amendment if the majority of the Cabinet signed off on it.
Trump is not going to be happy with Mike today.
Meanwhile, Republicans–led by Rand Paul–are trying to out the Ukraine whistleblower. The name has been out there for awhile, but Republicans are trying to bait mainstream reporters into printing it. Yahoo News: Whistleblower attorneys fear for client’s safety as Trump allies move to out him.
On the evening of Oct. 2, Mark Zaid, one of the attorneys representing the anonymous official whose whistleblower complaint sparked the impeachment probe into President Trump, received an email with the subject line: “a bullet in your head.”
Zaid reported the email to the FBI, which investigated and determined the threat wasn’t credible, but that message was just one of the dozens received by the whistleblower’s attorneys from individuals ranging from the merely critical to downright threatening.
On Wednesday morning, a person using the encrypted email service ProtonMail told Zaid to “DIE you piece of FILTH,” and another emailed the legal team repeatedly, in one message saying that Russian President Vladimir Putin “would have already shot scum like this,” referring to the whistleblower. A third told Andrew Bakaj, the whistleblower’s primary lawyer and head of his own law firm Compass Rose Legal Group, that someone would “come up to [him] on the street” when he “least expects it,” hinting at violence.
Others are less threatening but still critical, like a man going by the name Jeb Stuart, who called in to insist the whistleblower come forward with their complaints publicly.
A review of a trove of voicemails, emails and messages on social media provided to Yahoo News by the whistleblower’s legal team demonstrate the effects of efforts by Trump allies to vilify the whistleblower and those testifying against the president in the impeachment inquiry. That campaign consists of a blend of talking points promoted by key conservative figures and those originating from Trump or his allies themselves.
The results, according to the whistleblower’s lawyers, has been a campaign of harassment that makes them fear for their client’s personal safety.
More details at Yahoo News.
The Roger Stone trial is going to be interesting. A couple of stories to check out:
Zoe Tillman at Buzzfeed News: A Jury Saw Records Of Trump’s Phone Calls With Roger Stone After The DNC Announced It Was Hacked In 2016.
Stone, a longtime adviser to President Donald Trump, is charged with lying to Congress about trying to contact WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, during the 2016 campaign and communicate what he was learning to Trump’s campaign. To prove that, prosecutors spent the first day of the trial presenting evidence that Stone did try to contact WikiLeaks — and that he was, in fact, not only in touch with the campaign, but with Trump himself.
The jury saw emails, text messages, and call records documenting Stone’s communications with the campaign around the same time that he was in touch with two associates about tracking down emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee that were eventually released by WikiLeaks; the US intelligence community later concluded that Russian intelligence was involved in hacking the DNC and orchestrating the release of the stolen emails through WikiLeaks.
The jury saw records of phone calls between then-candidate Trump and Stone in 2016, including on June 14, 2016, when the DNC announced it had been hacked, and in the weeks that followed. Prosecutors made clear that they didn’t know what the two men discussed — they only had the call logs — but they placed those calls in the middle of a timeline of Stone’s alleged efforts to get messages to WikiLeaks and Assange.
“Evidence will show Roger Stone lied to the House Intelligence Committee because the truth looked bad. The truth looked bad for the Trump campaign and the truth looked bad for Donald Trump,” Assistant US Attorney Aaron Zelinsky told the jury.
Attacking the CIA: November 4, 2019
CNN: Roger Stone’s ‘payload is still coming’ email went to Erik Prince, prosecutors say.
On the opening day of Roger Stone’s trial for allegedly lying to Congress and obstructing its investigation, one mystery appeared to be solved by prosecutors.
The Donald Trump supporter who Stone alerted in October 2016 that “the payload is coming” — an apparent reference to WikiLeaks’ release of damaging emails from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign — was Blackwater founder Erik Prince, according to prosecutors….
The communication is one of several at the center of the trial. Prosecutors expect to call members of the Trump campaign but are not planning on calling Prince, according to a person familiar with the plan.
Two days after Stone learned that “big news” damaging to Clinton’s campaign would soon be leaked by WikiLeaks he emailed Prince — the founder of Blackwater, a controversial private military company — telling him “the payload is still coming,” according to the source.
According to the indictment, Stone emailed Prince on October 3, 2016, two days after Randy Credico told Stone, “big news Wednesday” and six days before WikiLeaks released hacked emails from the Clinton campaign. In the email, Stone tells Prince, “Spoke with my friend in London last night. The payload is still coming.”
Late the following day Prince sent a text message to Stone asking if he had “hear(d) anymore from London.” Stone replied, “Yes — want to talk on a secure line — got Whatsapp?”
Stone told Prince, according to the indictment, that more material would be released that would be damaging to the Clinton campaign.It isn’t clear why Stone would have relayed that information to Prince. They didn’t know each other prior to the campaign, the source said. Credico has denied that he acted as Stone’s intermediary with WikiLeaks and said his messages to Stone were based on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s public statements.
That’s all I have for you today. I’m going to spend the rest of the day escaping into a book. What stories are you following?
Tuesday Reads: The Latest News with Rabbits
Posted: November 5, 2019 Filed under: Foreign Affairs, morning reads, U.S. Politics 39 Comments
A Night In, by Kim Parkhurst
Good Morning!!
So much is happening.
Yesterday, the House Intelligence Committee released two transcripts of State Department Officials who have testified in the impeachment inquiry, Marie Yovanovich and Michael McKinley. Today, the Committee will release two more transcripts from Kurt Volker and Gordon Sundland. CBS is providing live updates on the transcript releases and the impeachment inquiry generally. None of this is looking good for Trump.
Dana Millbank at The Washington Post: So this is why Trump doesn’t want officials to testify.
Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) released the first batch of transcripts Monday from the closed-door depositions, including that of Marie Yovanovitch, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine removed from her post by President Trump at the urging of his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
If this is a sign of what’s to come, Republicans will soon regret forcing Democrats to make impeachment proceedings public. Over 10 hours, the transcript shows, they stumbled about in search of a counter-narrative to her damning account.
A Family of Rabbits (Oil on Canvas), by Alfred Richardson Barber
Yovanovitch detailed a Hollywood-ready tale about how Giuliani and two of his now-indicted goons hijacked U.S. foreign policy as part of a clownish consortium that also included Sean Hannity and a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor. Their mission: to oust the tough-on-corruption U.S. ambassador who threatened to frustrate Giuliani’s plans to get Ukraine to come up with compromising material on Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.
Mike Pompeo has a cameo as the feckless secretary of state who refuses to stand up for his diplomat out of fear of setting off an unstable Trump. It all culminated in a 1 a.m. call from State’s personnel director telling Yovanovitch to get on the next flight out of Kyiv. Why? “She said, ‘I don’t know, but this is about your security. You need to come home immediately.’ ”
Yovanovitch, overcome with emotion at one point in her testimony, said she later learned that the threat to her security was from none other than Trump, who, State officials feared, would attack her on Twitter if she didn’t flee Ukraine quickly.
Read the rest at the WaPo.
Also at the Post, Greg Sargent writes: The scope of Trump’s corruption is mind-boggling. New developments show how.
At this point, the broad contours of the Ukraine scandal are well understood. President Trump appears to have used hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money appropriated as military aid to extort a vulnerable ally into helping him rig the 2020 election on his behalf.
But there are two other aspects of this scandal that need elaboration. The first is the degree to which this whole scheme is corrupting multiple government agencies and effectively placing them at the disposal of Trump’s reelection effort.
The second is that two of the scheme’s goals — getting Ukraine to validate a conspiracy theory absolving Russia of 2016 sabotage, and to manufacture smears of one of Trump’s leading 2020 rivals — are really part of the same story. At the core of this narrative is Trump’s continuing reliance on foreign help in corrupting our democracy to his advantage, through two presidential elections, and the covering up of all of it.
Much more at the link.
More suggested reads on Ukraine/impeachment:
The New York Times: Pompeo Faces Political Peril and Diplomats’ Revolt in Impeachment Inquiry.
Grant Stern at Occupy Democrats: Key impeachment witness transcript reveals Trump Jr.’s role in setting up Ukraine-Biden dirt plot.
Rand Paul is calling on the media to print the name of the Ukraine Whistle blower. Greg Olear writes about Paul’s transformation into a Trump/Russia stooge at Medium: Red Paul: The Senator from Kentucky is Now Working for Vladimir Putin.
Michelle Goldberg at The New York Times: On Ukraine, Trump Is a Con Man, but He’s Also a Mark.
Aaron Rupar at Vox: Trump’s responses to the impeachment inquiry are becoming increasingly incoherent.
In New York, two significant players in the Ukraine scandal were in court yesterday, and one of them, Lev Parnas, is talking to impeachment investigators.
The New York Times: Lev Parnas, Giuliani Associate, Opens Talks With Impeachment Investigators.
Still Life with Rabbits and Fruit by Jacob Samuel Beck
The associate, Lev Parnas, had previously resisted speaking with investigators for the Democrat-led impeachment proceedings, which are examining the president’s pressure attempts in Ukraine. A former lawyer for Mr. Trump was then representing Mr. Parnas.
But since then, Mr. Parnas has hired new lawyers who contacted the congressional investigators last week to notify them to “direct any future correspondence or communication to us,” according to a copy of the letter.
The lawyers also signaled on Monday that Mr. Parnas, who was arrested last month on campaign finance charges, is prepared to comply with a congressional subpoena for his documents and testimony.
Mr. Parnas, a Ukrainian-born American citizen who was central to Mr. Giuliani’s efforts to dig up dirt on Mr. Trump’s rivals, could offer Congress a vein of information about the efforts in Ukraine.
“We are willing to comply with the subpoena to the extent that it does not violate any appropriate privilege that Mr. Parnas may properly invoke,” said Joseph A. Bondy, who along with Edward B. MacMahon, Jr. now represents Mr. Parnas.
Mr. Bondy said that given the federal criminal charges, his client may invoke his right under the Fifth Amendment not to incriminate himself.
Feeding White Rabbits, by Frederick Morgan
Parnas was angered by Trump’s claims that he doesn’t even know who the Giuliani pal is.
“Mr. Parnas was very upset by President Trump’s plainly false statement that he did not know him,” said Mr. Bondy, whose client has maintained that he has had extensive dealings with the president.
After federal prosecutors in Manhattan announced charges against Mr. Parnas and three other men, Mr. Trump told reporters that he did not know Mr. Parnas or Igor Fruman, another Giuliani associate who also worked to help Mr. Trump in Ukraine and was among those charged with campaign finance violations. The two men had contributed extensively to political committees supporting Mr. Trump and appeared with the president in pictures posted on social media.
More big news should come out soon, since Roger Stone goes on trial today. NPR: Roger Stone, Trump Friend And Alleged Tie To WikiLeaks, Faces Trial In Washington.
President Trump’s friend and political adviser Roger Stone is set to go on trial Tuesday in a proceeding that could reveal just how close Trump world got to the Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Jury selection is scheduled to commence following months of unusual public silence from Stone, who has been gagged by the judge in his case following a flap this year over his posts on social media.
Stone pleaded not guilty in January after a grand jury in Washington, D.C., returned an indictment with one count of obstructing a proceeding, five counts of making false statements to Congress and one count of witness tampering — because prosecutors allege that he tried to persuade another witness to lie to Congress too.
A bit more:
Stone and some of his associates may have been links in a chain that connected Trump in New York City with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in London, who at the time had confined himself in the Ecuadorian Embassy there.
Assange, in turn, was in contact with Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, which had stolen a trove of embarrassing material from political targets in the United States.
WikiLeaks released many of those emails and other documents with disruptive effects on political life in the U.S. — and enjoyed public encouragement by Trump and his campaign.
What Mueller’s investigation revealed was how much Trump and aides worked to get more.
More Roger Stone reads to check out:
Michael Isakoff: Roger Stone’s trial could hang on a comedian’s drunken texts.
Politico: The Idiot’s Guide to the Roger Stone trial.
Emptywheel: What Prosecutors Need to Show to Prove Roger Stone Guilty.
There’s also a primary campaign going on. Some interesting stories about that:
The Post and Courier: Tom Steyer aide resigns after stealing Kamala Harris’ SC 2020 volunteer data.
Two Rabbits, by H. Baert
COLUMBIA — A South Carolina aide for Tom Steyer’s 2020 presidential campaign stole valuable volunteer data collected by Kamala Harris’ campaign using an account from when he worked with the S.C. Democratic Party, according to multiple state and national party officials.
The Steyer campaign said that it does not have possession of the data and that Democratic officials were only aware of the download, which they said was inadvertent, because they proactively notified them. Both the Democratic National Committee and S.C. Democratic Party denied that.
The Democratic National Committee said they quickly caught the attempt on Friday by Steyer’s deputy S.C. state director Dwane Sims to export Harris’ data, which contained thousands of volunteer contacts collected over the course of the campaign in this critical early-voting primary state.
Read more at the link. This reminds me of how Bernie Sanders’ campaign stole data from Hillary Clinton and then sued the DNC for suspending their access to data for a short time.
Also in South Carolina, the Post and Courier reports that Elizabeth Warren appears to be planning to basically cede the state’s primary: Elizabeth Warren is having a moment, but will it translate into South Carolina momentum?
Warren has yet to secure any major endorsements here. Her visits have been sporadic at best.
When she participated in an environmental justice roundtable in Charleston’s Rosemont neighborhood a few weeks ago, her campaign announced the visit with less than 24-hours notice.
The visit, which included a walking tour of the neighborhood, also never appeared on Mobilize America, a website that serves as a centralized system for Democratic and progressive campaigns to post about upcoming events.
When Warren was invited to speak at the Charleston County Democratic Party’s Blue Jamboree, she declined, despite the urging of multiple South Carolina Democratic leaders.
“I think she’s conceded the state,” said Charleston County Democratic Party Chair Colleen Condon. “It’s very disappointing.”
That isn’t likely to help her standing with African American voters. Kamala Harris seems to be conceding New Hampshire to focus on Iowa, but that isn’t surprising since either Warren or Sanders is likely to win there.
Bill Barr continues to act as Trump’s personal attorney. Now he’s trying to smoke out the name of the anonymous staffer who wrote a NYT op-ed that he or she has now turned into a book.
The Washington Post: The Justice Department is fishing for details about the anonymous ‘resistance’ op-ed writer.
The Justice Department is looking for identifying details about the anonymous Trump administration official who excoriated the president’s “amorality” in an unsigned New York Times opinion column last year, according to a letter the agency sent Monday.
By Walter Hunt
The author of the column, whose identity has remained a secret for more than a year, has also written a tell-all book that will publish this month — and Assistant Attorney General Joseph H. Hunt wants proof that the writer is not bound by a government nondisclosure agreement.
Either that, Hunt wrote in the letter, or the book’s publisher and the author’s agents should turn over the official’s employment information: where in the government the person worked, and when he or she worked there. If the official had access to classified information, Hunt warned, the book should be “submitted for pre-publication review.”
The book has been billed as the behind-the-scenes sequel to the searing column, which described a White House in dangerous disarray and an internal “resistance” force that sought to thwart Trump’s “misguided impulses.” The Times identified the author only as “a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure.” The book will list the author as “Anonymous.”
I’ve only scratched the surface of today’s news. What stories have you been following?
Manic Monday Reads: Save the American Dream
Posted: November 4, 2019 Filed under: Baby Boomers, morning reads 35 Comments
Good Morning Sky Dancers!
Once again, we are visited by so many odd and unfortunate things–covered all the time in the news–that have been brought on by our stolen Presidential Election that it’s difficult to get a handle on them all. We are ruled by a monster put there by Russians and worse monsters. This? This is the next culture war? More horrid attacks on children white Christians fear? (Jeremy W. Peters / New York Times: A Conservative Push to Make Trans Kids and School Sports the Next Battleground in the Culture War). We’re going to have to endure additional attacks on vulnerable children ? Children in Cages is not enough?
I’m not even going to cover that but you can go read it and and feel angry if you wish. Today, my 64th birthday, I am searching for America the beautiful in the faces of ancestors who tried to fight the tyranny of the rich and few and the many who have suffered at their hands. Not the ones we study in school though. It’s in the faces of ordinary Americans. The diverse, wonderful America we love. We have shared ancestry for many reasons, shared history of both good and bad, and shared dreams promised in our Constitution. This demands we put things right for every one. We all should be able to pursue life, liberty and justice for all. We all share this:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
White men started this country on the backs and blood of others. We are now all in this together regardless of the good done by these men and the evil.
I just read this this morning (also in the New York Times) and hope it can offset what will only be another election year of interference by Russians, Chinese, and most likely Saudi Arabia.. “Democratic Strategists Set Up $75 Million Digital Campaign to Counter Trump. David Plouffe, the former Obama campaign manager, will advise the effort, which aims to compete with the president on his terms. ” It can’t hurt but pray that it helps. A. LOT. We are an increasingly diverse country and the white male minority is obviously not going down without making things nasty.
A progressive organization is plunging itself into the presidential campaign, unveiling plans to spend $75 million on digital advertising to counter President Trump’s early spending advantage in key 2020 battleground states.
The effort, by a nonprofit group called Acronym and an affiliated political action committee, is an outgrowth of growing concern by some Democratic officials that Mr. Trump could build an insurmountable edge in those key states through massive early advertising efforts. Mr. Trump has spent more than $26 million so far nationally just on Facebook and Google, more than the four top-polling Democrats — Joseph R. Biden Jr., Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg — have spent in total on those platforms.
“The gun on this general election does not start when we have a nominee; it started months ago,” said David Plouffe, who managed Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and was a key adviser to him in 2012, and who recently joined Acronym’s board. ”If the things that need to happen don’t happen in these battleground states between now and May or June, our nominee will never have time to catch up.“
In an interview, Mr. Plouffe and Tara McGowan, the founder and chief executive of Acronym, said their digital campaign would kick off immediately with a heavy focus on shaping how the public views Mr. Trump and the Democratic Party during the primary season, well before a nominee emerges.
“Our nominee is going to be broke, tired, have to pull together the party and turn around on a dime and run a completely different race for a completely different audience,” Mr. Plouffe said.
“There is an enormous amount of danger between now and then,” he added. “If the hole is too steep to dig out of, they’re not going to win.”
So, I agree with that. I know both of them worked media miracles on the Obama campaigns so I’m all in for that.
This is the kind of thing at stake. “Wealthy Americans will receive billions in tax cuts if Obamacare is overturned, new report says.” from CNBC. And working and poor Americans will die, I might add.
Wealthy Americans stand to gain from Obamacare’s demise.
The rich will likely receive billions in tax cuts if the health-care law is overturned, according to a new analysis published Monday from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington think tank.
The nation’s top 0.001%, the 1,409 U.S. households with annual incomes over $53 million, would receive a combined $3.8 billion in tax cuts if the law is overturned, according to the report.That’s because overturning Obamacare would eliminate several taxes that were imposed to help pay for the law’s expansion, including a 0.9% Medicare tax on single Americans who earn more than $200,000 a year or couples who make $250,000, the report said.
A ruling against the health law would also eliminate a 3.8% Medicare surtax on net investment income for high-income filers — $200,000 for single filers and $250,000 for joint filers.
Most of these tax cuts would go to households with incomes over $1 million, who would receive tax cuts averaging about $46,000 apiece, according to the report.
The pharmaceutical industry would also benefit. Obamacare collects an annual fee from pharmaceutical companies that sell branded prescription drugs.
While the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers and pharmaceutical companies would benefit, the middle-class and poor would be at a disadvantage. About 25 million Americans may be left uninsured if the law is struck down in its entirety, including those insured through Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.
“In arguing the ACA should be struck down, the administration and the state attorneys general are in effect seeking to transfer billions of dollars of income from low- and moderate-income Americans to people on the top rungs of the income ladder,” said Aviva Aron-Dine, vice president for health policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and lead author of the report.
A federal appeals court in New Orleans is expected to issue a decision any day now on a lower court ruling that overturned Obamacare, formally known as the Affordable Care Act, in a case known as Texas vs. the United States.
The cruelty of today’s Republicans knows no bottom. And, what about the so-called Trumpist great economy?
According to the Washington Post, “Unemployment is climbing in key swing states, including Michigan and Wisconsin.”
Then, there is this: from the Financial Times and Lauren Fedor : Nearly two-thirds of US voters say Trump has not made them better off
Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they are not better off financially than they were when Donald Trump was elected, casting doubt on whether economic expansion and a record bull market will boost the president’s re-election campaign in 2020. According to a poll of likely voters conducted by the Financial Times and the Peter G Peterson Foundation, 31 per cent of Americans say they are now worse off financially than they were at the start of Mr Trump’s presidency. Another 33 per cent say there has been no change in their financial position since Mr Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, while 35 per cent say they are better off. Persistently slow wage growth appeared to be a main driver of discontent, with 36 per cent of those who said they were worse off blaming their income levels. On Friday, the US labour department said average hourly income had risen 3 per cent in October, growth that was near highs for the past decade but lower than before the financial crisis. Another 19 per cent pointed to personal or family debts as the reason they felt worse off.
And, we see more signs of NAZIs and the Klan among us Yesterday, JJ posted on the desecration of the memorial to American Emmett Till lynched by an angry mob.
Guardians of Emmett Till’s memorial have gotten used to the site’s desecration – so used to it that a new, bulletproof plaque dedicated two weeks ago acknowledges the repeated abuse as an essential part of Till’s story.
“Signs erected here have been stolen, thrown in the river, shot, removed, replaced, and shot again,” the monument tells those who visit the Tallahatchie River, where the black 14-year-old was found 64 years ago, killed by white men never convicted. The litany of damage is a “reminder of the progress yet to be made,” the latest marker says.
So Till’s cousin Airickca Gordon-Taylor wasn’t surprised this weekend to learn about the latest outrage. A white-supremacist group had gathered in front of the memorial to shoot a video.
Gordon-Taylor says she felt a familiar anger at another testament to the racism “alive today in the fabric of our United States of America.” But there was also a feeling of resolve.
“They can keep coming, and the more they do, we can do more,” Gordon-Taylor told The Washington Post.
The visit by white nationalists to Till’s memorial has provoked a new round of dismay, at the way a remembrance of horrific injustice could be a magnet for those who promote bigotry. Till’s torture and lynching – he was accused of flirting with a white woman in a grocery store, a charge the woman would largely recant – helped galvanize the civil rights movement.
Today? (Via CNN)
Norwegian authorities have arrested a high-profile American white supremacist, hours before he was due to give a speech at a far-right conference in Oslo on Saturday.
The detained American, Greg Johnson, is editor-in-chief of the white nationalist Counter-Currents Publishing group.
He had been scheduled to speak at the Scandza Forum, a network known for its anti-Semitic and racist views.
Norway’s intelligence service considered Johnson “to be a threat, not because of what he could do but because of his hate speech and his previously expressed support for Anders Breivik,” spokesman Martin Bernsen told CNN.
White Supremacists Richard Spencer is back in the news. Have we all caught on to the pattern of the Trump Regime by now? This is via Vice: “Noted Racist Richard Spencer Apparently Yelled Racist Slurs After Racist Rally. Leaked audio purportedly shows the far-right leader screaming anti-Semitic slurs and threatening further violence in Charlottesville.”
In the audio, the person Milo (note: Yiannopoulos ) claims is Spencer promises to return to Charlottesville, despite the national uproar about the rally, at which hundreds of white nationalists marched and a white supremacist murdered anti-racism protester Heather Heyer when he drove a car into a crowd of counterprotesters.
“We are coming back here like a hundred fucking times. I am so mad. I am so fucking mad at these fucking people,” Spencer says on the tape. “They don’t do this to fucking me. We’re going to ritualistically humiliate them. I am coming back here every fucking weekend if I have to. Like this is never over! I win! They fucking lose!”
You can read more from Matt Novak writing for Gizmodo: “Internet-Savvy Nazi Says a Bunch of Old Fashioned Nazi Shit in Leaked Tape “.
They discard religious teachings, increase the deficit, and expand government power, but there’s one area where Republican politicians are remarkably consistent: bigotry.
They’ve proven this in Congress, reintroducing bills to allow religious discrimination against gay marriage and confirm Supreme Court nominees who likely aim to overturn the landmark marriage equality ruling.
They fight to disenfranchise black Americans, gerrymandering districts and suppressing turnout by making it harder to vote.
They try to (further) control women’s bodies, angling to overturn Roe v. Wade, and prevent sex and racial equality in the workplace with votes against equal pay initiatives.
They make clear their disdain for non-white immigrants and conduct a wide-ranging “assault on transgender existence.”
Indeed, nothing we see coming from them sounds the least bit like “love one another”. Remind me who said that again? And up on the campaign agenda Natasha Korecki writes this for POlitico: ‘Dems tiptoe around ‘Pocahontas’ and Hunter as Trump licks his chops ‘.
“Pocahontas?” A racial slur unfit for discussion. Bernie’s heart attack? Out of bounds. Questions about Hunter Biden’s business dealings? Stop carrying Donald Trump’s water.
To listen to 2020 Democrats, some of the most volatile critiques of the top three polling candidates aren’t worthy of public debate — even though Trump and GOP operatives have made clear they’d hammer them on those issues during the general election
Some Democrats fear the crowded field is doing the eventual nominee a disservice by tiptoeing around their possible vulnerabilities while the GOP loads torpedoes into the tubes. It’s a dynamic reminiscent of the 2016 Democratic primary, when Democrats — including primary candidate Bernie Sanders — downplayed the controversy surrounding Hillary Clinton’s emails, only to confront a vicious general election onslaught on those very questions from Donald Trump.
“Trump has more money than God, no embarrassment gene, no shame and no guardrail,” said Sue Dvorsky, former Iowa Democratic Party chairwoman, who has endorsed Kamala Harris in the race. “I worry when so many of our activists say: ‘I like all of them.’ It is not our job to like everybody, it is our job to pick one. I worry as this goes on that we are not having a vigorous enough debate.”
So, from this baby with an election time birthday during the Eisenhower Republicans regime, I say impeach the shit out of him and vote him out. No more Steve Millers in the White House.
So, in 1955 both houses of Congress were controlled by Democrats. What happened during the election cycle that led to 1956?
At the 1956 Democratic convention, in Chicago, the delegates renominated Adlai Stevenson. The only drama at the convention occurred when Stevenson opened up to the convention body to decide on his Vice Presidential running mate. John F. Kennedy opposed the veteran Senator Estes Kefauver for the nomination. Senator Kefauver won.
Stevenson faced almost insurmountable odds, in opposing the very popular incumbent President. Stevenson attempted to contrast his vigor, with Eisenhower’s health problems. Stevenson made proposals regarding benefits for senior citizens, health, education, natural resources, and economic policies. He also called for the end of the draft and the creation of a professional army. Stevenson further called for a Test Ban Treaty on Atomic weapons with the Soviet Union. Stevenson’s efforts were unsuccessful. Eisenhower won a landslide victory.
With the 1956 elections approaching the primary question was whether President Eisenhower would run for a second term. He had suffered a heart attack in 1955. In February, he announced his decision to seek a second term. He was immediately nominated for re-election by the Republicans in San Francisco. The only question was whether Nixon would remain on the ticket. Eisenhower decided in favor of keeping Nixon on as his running mate.
And the rest, as they say, is history. Let’s make some new history. Let’s vote for a whole lot of some ones that can get us out of this hell realm.
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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