The Presidential primary season ends on Tuesday but I seriously doubt the bizarre behavior of the men left in the race will stop at that point. What’s worse is that I doubt the violent and nasty behaviors of their supporters will change much either.
We had another night of violence at a Trump Rally in San Jose California. I really feel like we’re careening towards Banana Republic status more rapidly than usual given the dynamics of both the Trump and the Sanders campaign. Both hide their privilege–and their taxes–behind the bravado of populism and anger. Both have policy suggestions and actions that are contradictory and unactionable. Both have sets of True Believers that seem willing to do anything and do so with complicit and explicit consent of the candidate. Both parties are at a loss to control the surrounding chaos too. The Republicans have folded in the face of that chaos. The Democrats are trying to carry on behind the standard bearer. It’s a difficult time.
Josh Marshall of TPM analyzes this current wave of violence.
The rule of law is the only way to fight the bacillus Trump and Trumpism represents in this campaign. Trump introduced the violence and eliminationism into the campaign. His enemies are now following suit, indeed in significant ways expanding it. That’s not protest; it’s mob violence. The one saving grace of last night’s free-for-all and earlier ones is the sheer prevalence of social media. We’re seeing smartphone videos mainly from journalists who were on the scene. But if you look in the background of these videos, almost everyone who isn’t hitting, getting hit or actively taunting is holding up a hand cam of some sort. Everyone involved is readily identifiable, from multiple angles. They should all be identified, tracked down and prosecuted, not primarily as punishment but as deterrence.
What we have seen over the last two weeks isn’t just an escalation of chaos and low level violence but a progressive normalization of unacceptable behavior – more racist verbal attacks, more violence. This is in turn clearly attracting more people who want trouble – on both sides. If you’re an angry racist who wants to act out on his anger, can you imagine any better place to go than a Trump rally? If you hate Trump, his supporters and all he stands for and want to get physical about it, where best to go?
All groups have people looking for trouble. Trump events are the best place to find it. Are the folks who got violent more angry, more anti-racist or more righteous in their grievance than the folks who didn’t? Highly doubtful. They’re just more violent.
Protesters jumped on cars, pelted Trump supporters with eggs and water balloons, snatched signs and stole “Make America Great” hats off supporters’ heads before burning the hats and snapping selfies with the charred remains.
Several people were caught on camera punching Trump supporters. At least one attacker was arrested,according to CNN, although police did not release much information.
“The San Jose Police Department made a few arrests tonight after the Donald Trump Rally,” police said in a statement. “As of this time, we do not have specific information on the arrests made. There has been no significant property damage reported. One officer was assaulted.”
In one video circulating widely on social media, two protesters tried to protect a Trump supporter as other protesters attacked him and called him names.
Another video captured a female Trump supporter taunting protesters before being surrounded and struck in the face with an egg and water balloons.
A Donald Trump campaign staffer and a private security guard removed a POLITICO reporter from a campaign rally here on Thursday evening for reporting at the event without the campaign’s permission.
A campaign staffer spotted the reporter typing on a laptop outside of the press pen at the San Jose Convention Center and asked the reporter, who was attending on a general admission ticket, if he had press credentials. The Trump campaign has refused to credential the reporter for multiple events.
The staffer said he would consult with his superiors and returned minutes later with a private security officer who instructed the reporter to leave the premises, escorting him out a nearby exit.
“The campaign is not aware of the incident or any details pertaining to it and therefore cannot comment,” wrote campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks in an email. She added that the campaign is “looking into it.”
Thursday’s ejection occurred as Trump mounts an increasingly caustic campaign against the free press.
After weeks of media scrutiny about donations he promised to veterans groups, the presumptive GOP nominee held a news conference Tuesday to announce the groups that received the money. But Trump, who often refers to journalists as “scum” and “slime” — used the event instead to lambaste reporters for asking questions about the donations in the first place, referring to one ABC reporter as “sleaze.”
According to the Washington Post and the Associated Press, Trump sent many of the checks after reporters began asking the campaign about the fate of the donations. The total also fell short of the $6 million he originally boasted.
In response to Trump’s haranguing of reporters at the press conference, veteran newsman Dan Rather wrote, “a shudder went down my spine.”
Trump continues to attack the Judge in charge of the serious fraud case against Trump University and demonstrates a distinct lack of knowledge about the judicial system as well. This is Adam Liptak’s analysis from the NYT. A video there shows the speeches with Trump saying things that clearly show his contempt for law.
Donald J. Trump’s blustery attacks on the press, complaints about the judicial system and bold claims of presidential power collectively sketch out a constitutional worldview that shows contempt for the First Amendment, the separation of powers and the rule of law, legal experts across the political spectrum say.
Even as much of the Republican political establishment lines up behind its presumptive nominee, many conservative and libertarian legal scholars warn that electing Mr. Trump is a recipe for a constitutional crisis.
“Who knows what Donald Trump with a pen and phone would do?” asked Ilya Shapiro, a lawyer with the libertarian Cato Institute.
With five months to go before Election Day, Mr. Trump has already said he would “loosen” libel laws to make it easier to sue news organizations. He has threatened to sic federal regulators on his critics. He has encouraged rough treatment of demonstrators.
His proposal to bar Muslims from entry into the country tests the Constitution’s guarantees of religious freedom, due process and equal protection.
Mr. Trump accused the judge of bias, falsely said he was Mexican and seemed to issue a threat.
“They ought to look into Judge Curiel, because what Judge Curiel is doing is a total disgrace,” Mr. Trump said. “O.K.? But we will come back in November. Wouldn’t that be wild if I am president and come back and do a civil case?”
David Post, a retired law professor who now writes for the Volokh Conspiracy, a conservative-leaning law blog, said those comments had crossed a line.
“This is how authoritarianism starts, with a president who does not respect the judiciary,” Mr. Post said. “You can criticize the judicial system, you can criticize individual cases, you can criticize individual judges. But the president has to be clear that the law is the law and that he enforces the law. That is his constitutional obligation.”
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton continues to ignore Sanders–and rightly so–focusing attacks on the character and temperament of Donald Trump. Yesterday’s speech on foreign policy was a clear laundry list of the ways that Donald Trump is unfit for the office of President. The speech was well-received by the media. The only critic of the speech outside of Republican circles that are consolidating around Trump was nasty Senator Bernie Sanders whose march to irrelevance can’t come soon enough.
“Donald Trump’s ideas aren’t just different; they are dangerously incoherent,” she said. “They aren’t even really ideas, just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds and outright lies.”
Sanders has taken issue with Clinton’s own foreign policy, routinely blasting her for her early Iraq War support and her praise of Henry Kissinger, another former secretary of State.
In his statement on Thursday, Sanders added, “We need a foreign policy based on building coalitions and making certain that the brave American men and women in our military do not get bogged down in perpetual warfare in the Middle East. That’s what I will fight for as president.”
Both Trump and Sanders–and a cackling chorus of jackdaws in the media–continue to demonize Clinton. Both Sanders and Trump get away with annoying and aggressive personalities that have crossed the line to rudeness a long time ago. Yet, it’s Clinton that is deemed not human enough.
How can we explain the virulent hatred toward Hillary Clinton from men and women of both political parties? The attacks against her: Benghazi, personal emails, lying, etc., are relatively minor, the usual political scuttlebutt, in contrast to the extreme intensity of her vilification. So many people say they just don’t like her, and this negative impression is not new. Since her role as First Lady in Bill Clinton’s White House, she has been portrayed as a witch, a Lady Macbeth, a ruthlessly ambitious, egocentric woman who considers herself above the law to achieve her exploitative goals. Some see her as a shrieking harpy. As a psychoanalyst, I believe that the intensity of this character assassination is motivated by a largely unconscious misogyny that is deeply rooted in the human (male and female) psyche. It is often triggered in response to a strong, independent woman. But this enmity is especially intense for Hillary, who is emotionally reserved and aggressive in her pursuit of the presidency. (See SNL’s recent hilarious caricatures of these qualities.)
None of her caring activities have dispelled the impression that she is cold and inhuman. Not her steadfast work on behalf of children. Not her unwavering support of women: their reproductive rights and equal pay, and her advocacy for disadvantaged minorities: blacks and Hispanics. Not her exemplary role as a wife, who remained faithful to her philandering husband, nor her role as a loving mother to her daughter, Chelsea.
Male presidential contenders like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump can act strongly, ambitiously, strategically and aggressively, and the public admires them for these traits rather than demanding “emotional warmth.” As a cool tempered woman, Hillary is judged by a different standard. In 2008, it was only when she broke down crying at a coffee house campaign stop that she was perceived as capable of feeling.
What upsets so many Americans about a strong, competitive woman?
It’s refreshing to see the media coverage of her speech yesterday. Matthew Yglesias writes “Hillary Clinton rolled out the anti-Trump argument that could deliver a landslide” at VOX.This is no ringing endorsement of Hillary with the usual back handed jabs as well as a critique of Hillary trying to appeal to center right Republicans.
Over the course of the past year, Clinton has been talking primarily to Democratic Party primary voters. This argument — and this speech in general — is not one that will be especially appealing to them.
What she’s offering instead is an argument aimed at a much broader audience. It’s an argument that acknowledges, implicitly, that there are tens of millions of right-of-center Americans who’ve never voted for a Democratic presidential candidate but didn’t support Trump in the primary. Clinton is pitching an argument aimed at those people — one designed to offer little ideological or policy content in hopes of appealing to 70 percent of the population rather than 51 percent.
It’s clear he doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about. So we can’t be certain which of these things he would do. But we can be certain that he’s capable of doing any or all of them. Letting ISIS run wild. Launching a nuclear attack. Starting a ground war. These are all distinct possibilities with Donald Trump in charge.
In other words, ask yourself: What’s the worst that could happen? Conservative-minded people aren’t going to be thrilled with a Clinton presidency, but they’ve already lived through eight years of Bill Clinton and eight years of Barack Obama. The country is still standing. With Trump, by contrast, we really have no idea what we’re going to get.
Donald Trump’s ideas, Clinton said, are “dangerously incoherent”; indeed, “they’re not ideas at all.” She calls him “temperamentally unfit” and raised the specter of nuclear war.
For those who thought Hillary Clinton needed proxies or a running mate to attack Donald Trump with the savagery required of a long-slog campaign, her Thursday speech in San Diego should be a mind-changer.
The all-but-inevitable Democratic nominee showed that she’s fit to be her own attack dog, mauling her ill-matched Republican foe to shreds without getting muddy in the process.
Not two minutes into the speech, she calmly and coolly delivered this broadside:
Donald Trump’s ideas aren’t just different; they are dangerously incoherent. They’re not even really ideas, just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds, and outright lies. He is not just unprepared, he is temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability, and immense responsibility. This is not someone who should ever have the nuclear codes, because it’s not hard to imagine Donald Trump leading us into a war just because someone got under his very thin skin.
The audience gasped at hearing “bizarre,” tittered at “personal feuds,” and burst into laughter and applause at “very thin skin.” They hadn’t heard any presidential candidate talk like this—they certainly hadn’t heard Clinton talk like this. It was a full takedown of Trump, but in an anti-Trump manner, spoken not in vague adolescent epithets (“stupid,” “idiotic,” “crooked,” “goofy”), but in an itemized checklist of his utter, almost laughable unsuitability for the job.
“I will leave it to the psychiatrists,” she said later, to explain Trump’s “bizarre fascination with dictators and strongmen who have no love for America,” not least Vladimir Putin, for whom Trump shows not the slightest understanding and who, because of that, she reminded Trump—“will eat your lunch.”
It’s pretty clear that Hillary is not going to fold like the cheap lawnchair campaign of Jeb Bush. She’s in it to win and that’s a good thing because it’s pretty evident that there’s some very dangerous ideas and people associated with Trump and Sanders. The latter we should be rid of on Tuesday. The former will be inciting violence in a city near you until November. I don’t know how any Republican can look in the mirror knowing that.
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Yes, don’t we all wish we had a rich father who co-signed every deal and whose death ended the dealing because there was no longer a co-signer? Any one could do business on those terms. The laundry list above is basically what the media buries below the free advertising it bestows on a man that should be a pariah.
The other thing, too, that I think the media has to hold his feet to the fire on is he’s gotten away with this notion that he’s a superior deal-maker, and a very successful businessman. I thought about it after he went after the Iran deal. He said, “Obama negotiated this horrible deal with Iran. It’s a bad deal, and when I get to Washington, there won’t be bad deals anymore. I’m a great deal-maker.” And then the reality, the objective reality, is that he’s been a horrible deal-maker. His career is littered with bad deals. And yet, he’s essentially now a human shingle. He’s not someone who’s a particularly adept deal-maker, if you look at his whole career.
Donald Trump Biographer Timothy O’Brien
Why are the Republicans doing this to our nation? How much do they despise our country?
“This is too unreal. Can we watch something more realistic like Star Wars?” Philip Ytournel, Denmark’s Politiken
Writing in DPRK Today, a self-described Chinese North Korean scholar named Han Yong Mook called the presumptive Republican nominee “wise” and a “far-sighted presidential candidate.”
“The president that U.S. citizens must vote for is not that dull Hillary — who claimed to adapt the Iranian model to resolve nuclear issues on the Korean Peninsula — but Trump, who spoke of holding direct conversation with North Korea,” he wrote.
I cannot understand how many people do not see the appalling lack of character in this man. He is not fit for any level of public service and should’ve been cut off from any use of public funds years ago. It’s amazing to me that he’s not run afoul of the law before however, I am very aware that getting a rich white man into jail for stealing public treasure and racketeering is not an easily accomplished task given they can run amok in the justice system for some time. The Trump “University” scam should have landed the man in jail.
Fernando Liera, Mexico
I’ve taught university for some time both in for-profit Universities and state run Universities and community colleges. The stories coming out of the failed Trump “University” are horrifying. An article in The Atlanticwritten by Matt Ford refers to it as “The Art of the Swindle.” That’s very aptly put.
Predators, by and large, do not attack the strongest prey in the wild. They instead target the vulnerable, the very young, and the very old—the prey that is least able to defend itself.
Trump University, the defunct real-estate education program created by presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, pursued a similar approach, according to its former employees in legal documents unsealed Tuesday.
“Based upon my personal experience and employment, I believe that Trump University was a fraudulent scheme, and that it preyed upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money,” said Ronald Schnackenberg, a sales manager at Trump University in 2006 and 2007.
Those declarations and other internal Trump University documents depict an aggressive, ethically dubious business model that targeted potential customers’ financial fears and socioeconomic anxieties and offered Trump’s personal brand as the solution—a strategy later echoed in his presidential campaign.
The model of registering students in for-profit Universities is frequently to line up Sales People that have innocuous names like Student Adviser or Recruiter to apply the screws. Many of these For-Profits have either failed or reformed under lawsuit, threat of losing any accreditation they may have achieved or under threat of losing the ability to provide Student Loans. Trump “University” was never accredited and therefore never regulated under Federal laws. So, it operated outside even the worst of these models. Completely false information was provided to students as part of a heavy-handed sales pitch. This article from HuffPo has some extremely interesting documents that were released by Judge Curiel via a decision related to Art Cohen v. Donald J. Trump.
Since he launched his presidential bid last year, Trump has offered conflicting accounts of his involvement with Trump University. In March, Trump defended the company during a debate, saying that its salespeople “did a good job” and that the program had an “A” rating from the Better Business Bureau. (The truth is a little more complicated.) Trump has also claimed in promotional videos that he hand-picked the instructors at Trump U.
The playbooks instruct salespeople to mention Trump by name in order to intimidate potential customers who are hesitant to spend thousands of dollars on a Trump University product. “Mr. Trump will not listen to excuses,” the playbook tells salespeople to say, “and neither will we.”
In another scenario, salespeople are instructed to berate potential customers, telling them, “You’ve had your entire adult life to accomplish your financial goals… and you’re not even close to where you need to be.”
TRUMP UNIVERSITY
But according to more than 5,000 former Trump University customers, it wasn’t their plans that were flawed — it was the Trump U. business model itself. Many of the former students now suing Trump say they were pressured into spending money they didn’t have on Trump University products.
The playbook instructed Trump University employees on how to target potential customers with bad credit. “What most people do,” reads one prompt, “is handle the tuition by putting it on their credit cards because it gives them the ability to make very small monthly payments and maintain a low overhead to run their real estate project.” Later on, it says, they can “use their success in real estate to pay off the banks in a couple of months or so.”
“However, you don’t seem to have the advantage of having that kind of leveraging power,” the pitch continues. “Do you have any other seed capital or savings set aside to further invest into your real estate projects?”
TRUMP UNIVERSITY
The playbook also emphasizes the need to collect key financial information from potential customers. Salespeople were instructed to find out if clients were single parents who “had three children that may need money for food,” for example, or if they were a “middle-aged commuter.”
It’s worth remembering that even before Donald Trump launched his pseudo-fascist campaign for the presidency, he was already among the most loathsome humans our great nation has ever produced. On Tuesday, U.S. district court judge Gonzalo Curiel ordered the public release of Trump University’s “playbooks” — guides the (bait-and-switch scheme masquerading as a) real-estate school used to recruit (or con) its enrollees. The playbooks show that prospective students were encouraged to pay for the program, which could cost up to $35,000, by going into credit-card debt.
“We teach the technique of using OPM … other people’s money,” reads one sales script that was obtained by The Hill. “Most students who are invited to this program use established lines of credit, like a credit card, utilizing the bank’s money, OPM, to handle their tuition. I’m not talking about tens of thousands of dollars, but on the other hand, not a couple of hundred dollars either.”
In practice, Trump University staff delivered this message a bit more crudely, according to newly released written testimony obtained by the New York Times. “It’s O.K., just max out your credit card,” Corrine Sommer, an event manager at the school, recalled her colleagues telling prospective students.
If a cash-strapped applicant said, “I don’t like using my credit cards and going into debt,” the playbook instructed recruiters to respond, “[D]o you like living paycheck to paycheck? … Do you enjoy seeing everyone else but yourself in their dream houses and driving their dreams cars with huge checking accounts? Those people saw an opportunity, and didn’t make excuses, like what you’re doing now.”
Most charmingly, the playbooks suggest recruiters exploit the desperation of a single parent with hungry children in order to convince said parent to take on massive credit-card debt.
The Republican Party is well known for its massive and nasty Opposition Research and character smear blitzes. Roger Stone is with Trump so he obviously was not on the job working against his friend. However, where were the people behind Jeb Bush? This massive amount of information has been out there. The Politico link which leads to the first quote is an interview with five Trump Biographers who all basically find him to be an appalling person with pages of examples and citations.
Both the press and the Republican party have not done due diligence with Trump. Are they that obsessed about Hillary Clinton that they’ll let a fascist in the White House with less morality than any sentient being slithering, crawling, or slinking in the deepest, darkest nether regions of our planet?
David Rowe, Australia, The Australian Financial Review
I’m not the only one who has picked up signals over the years. Wayne Barrett, author of a 1992 investigative biography of Trump’s real-estate dealings, has tied Trump to mob and mob-connected men.
No other candidate for the White House this year has anything close to Trump’s record of repeated social and business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks. Professor Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, said the closest historical example would be President Warren G. Harding and Teapot Dome, a bribery and bid-rigging scandal in which the interior secretary went to prison. But even that has a key difference: Harding’s associates were corrupt but otherwise legitimate businessmen, not mobsters and drug dealers.
This is part of the Donald Trump story that few know. As Barrett wrote in his book, Trump didn’t just do business with mobbed-up concrete companies: he also probably met personally with Salerno at the townhouse of notorious New York fixer Roy Cohn, in a meeting recounted by a Cohn staffer who told Barrett she was present. This came at a time when other developers in New York were pleading with the FBI to free them of mob control of the concrete business.
From the public record and published accounts like that one, it’s possible to assemble a clear picture of what we do know. The picture shows that Trump’s career has benefited from a decades-long and largely successful effort to limit and deflect law enforcement investigations into his dealings with top mobsters, organized crime associates, labor fixers, corrupt union leaders, con artists and even a one-time drug trafficker whom Trump retained as the head of his personal helicopter service.
Now that he’s running for president, I pulled together what’s known – piecing together the long history of federal filings, court records, biographical anecdotes, and research from my and Barrett’s files. What emerges is a pattern of business dealings with mob figures—not only local figures, but even the son of a reputed Russian mob boss whom Trump had at his side at a gala Trump hotel opening, but has since claimed under oath he barely knows.
Tom Robbins writing for Vicealso has some very telling information.
Actually, there’s an old FBI memo that puts a different spin on Trump’s attitude about the mob. It is a classic example of a young but already shrewd Trump hard at work. It was written in 1981 by a veteran FBI agent, reflecting meetings that he and a fellow FBI official were having with the 35-year-old developer from Queens, then a rising star in New York’s business firmament. The topic of the meetings was Trump’s pending plunge into the Atlantic City casino industry. And while the memo was written in the stilted language of FBI-bureaucratese, Trump’s wide-eyed comments were recorded with what seems like barely suppressed amusement. “Trump advised agents that he had read in the press and media and had heard from various acquaintances that Organized Crime elements were known to operate in Atlantic City,” the memo states.
Then, there are the ties to white supremacist groups. This recent Forbes article is on his propensity to retweet NAZIs. Okay, I finally Godwinned.
Trump is “giving us the old wink-wink,” wrote Andrew Anglin, editor of a white supremacist website called The Daily Stormer, after Trump retweeted two other “white genocide” theorists within a single minute. “Whereas the odd White genocide tweet could be a random occurrence, it isn’t statistically possible that two of them back to back could be a random occurrence. It could only be deliberate…Today in America the air is cold and it tastes like victory.”
It is possible that Trump ― who, according to the campaign, does almost all of his own tweeting ― is unfamiliar with the term “white genocide” and doesn’t do even basic vetting of those whose tweets he amplifies to his seven million followers. But the reality is that there are dozens of tweets mentioning @realDonaldTrump each minute, and he has an uncanny ability to surface ones that come from accounts that proudly proclaim their white supremacist leanings.
There’s this article from The Atlanticwhich diagram’s Trump’s language to the KKK of the 1920s which would indicate his father’s influence. Where was the sunlight on this last fall? The analysis is by Kelly J. Baker.
Making America great required exclusion, intolerance, and vitriol. Unfortunately for the Klan, their message of 100 percent Americanism started losing ground by the end of the 1920s. Public scandals involving Klan leaders and convictions of Klansmen for murder made white Americans reconsider their allegiance to the order and its increasingly tarnished ideals. The Klan started to appear too extreme and dangerous for even the slightest association. Their steep rise was tempered by an equally steep fall. Moreover, the Klan developed an image problem: their persistent association with racism—which continues to plague the modern Klans despite efforts to rebrand their image to reflect the love of the white race, not racism per se.
The Klan’s message of 100 percent Americanism and restrictive immigration resonated in the 1920s, and their message gains traction again and again every time white Americans encounter social change and shifting demographics. With a black president, LGBT equality, an enormous Hispanic community, and predictions that America will soon be a majority minority country, their message resonates now, too. That’s why a former Klan leader is encouraging other white supremacists to vote for Trump and why The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos found that extremist white-rights groups also plan to vote for him. Maybe Trump doesn’t know better. Or maybe the echoes are less like echoes and more like the purposeful conjuring of a racialized message—one that too many white voters still want to hear.
You can follow any of these links to Trump’s sordid past, present, and undoubtedly our conjoined future. Perhaps both the Republican Party and the media are so caught up in their own frames that they’ve failed to take Trump seriously. We’re beginning to see more standard vetting now. However, it’s nearly too late. Phillip Bump of WAPO analyzes the consolidation of the party around Trump.
What’s changed, though, is that Republicans have warmed up to the guy. As the Times writes, “[U]nfavorable views toward Mr. Trump among Republican voters have plummeted 15 percentage points since last month; 21 percent now express an unfavorable view of him, down from 36 percent in April.” We pointed out last week that consolidating the Republican base would make Trump’s favorability numbers look more like Clinton’s, and voila.
The subtext to that is this: With their nominee settled, Republicans are rallying around him. There’s more evidence to this effect than is worth delineating, but this is not uncommon for presidential races.
There will be undoubtedly be much white washing. He’s still getting more free press than any one ever has before. Just this week as Clinton was introducing major policy initiatives on the military and veterans, the cable TV cameras were focused on an empty podium waiting the wildly-coiffed one. Corporate news chases profits and this man needs to be stopped at all costs. The two countries in the world that welcome Trump are Putin’s Russia and North Korea. The rest are horrified. We all should be horrified.
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I’m having one of those mornings when I feel completely unsettled and discombobulated about current events. All my life I’ve felt like an “outsider,” because I didn’t see the world in the same ways so many other people did.
As I have gotten older, I’ve realized that I’m far from unique; I know many people have this feeling. But when national and world events get as crazy as they are now, that feeling comes back to me. Why are so many people seemingly brainwashed by cultural memes?
We constantly hear and read that Hillary Clinton is a horrible, terribly flawed person who is constantly “struggling” to overcome her opponents because of her awful “speaking style,” her “inauthentic” personality, her “secrecy”–and that’s just from people who are not over-the-top Clinton haters.
From the Bernie bros and the GOP, we hear that she is practically the Devil incarnate–“cozy” with Wall Street and Walmart, a “criminal,” an “enabler,” and on and on. And yet, Hillary has millions more popular votes in the primaries than either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump.
Why is it that millions of people have no difficulty seeing Hillary’s “humanity,” her kindness, her love for children, her intelligence, her competence, her basic decency when so many in the media can’t? It seems that once people are part of the media in-crowd, they feel they must adopt certain Clinton stereotypes. Why is it that even wholehearted Clinton supporters like Joan Walsh feel compelled to write in every article that she is a “flawed candidate?” What candidate does not have flaws?
Audrey Hepburn
What got me started on this train of thought–for the umpteenth time–is a long piece by Rebecca Traister in New York Magazine: Hillary Clinton vs.Herself. There’s nothing simple about this candidacy—or candidate. I’ll be honest: I couldn’t even finish reading the article. This whole approach to Hillary–that somehow she is her own worst enemy–has just gotten so tired. I can’t take it anymore. Here’s Traister describing the “problem” with Hillary:
All the epic allusions contribute to the difficulty Clinton has long had in coming across as, simply, a human being. She is uneasy with the press and ungainly on the stump. Catching a glimpse of the “real” her often entails spying something out of the corner of your eye, in a moment when she’s not trying to be, or to sell, “Hillary Clinton.” And in the midst of a presidential campaign, those moments are rare. You could see her, briefly,letting out a bawdy laugh in response to a silly question in the 11th hour of the Benghazi hearings, and there she was, revealed as regular in her damned emails, where she made drinking plans with retiring Maryland senator and deranged emailer Barbara Mikulski. Her inner circle claims to see her — to really see her, and really like her — every day. They say she is so different one-on-one, funny and warm and devastatingly smart. It’s hard for people who know her to comprehend why the rest of America can’t see what they do.
“The rest of America?” Isn’t this really a media problem? About 12 million people have voted for Hillary in the Democratic primaries. Around 18 million voted for her in the 2008 primaries. She was elected twice to the Senate from New York. She is well known and admired around the world. Personally, I have no problem seeing Hillary as likable, even when she gives speeches. She has a beautiful smile and to me her personality comes through in debates, interviews, and speeches. But reporters and writers insist on denying my view of reality.
Far from feeling like I was with an awkward campaigner, I watched her do the work of retail politics — the handshaking and small-talking and remembering of names and details of local sites and issues — like an Olympic athlete. Far from seeing a remote or robotic figure, I observed a woman who had direct, thoughtful, often moving exchanges: with the Wheelers, with home health-care workers and union representatives and young parents. I caught her eyes flash with brief irritation at an MSNBC chyron reading “Bernie Sanders can win” and with maternal annoyance as she chided press aide Nick Merrill for not throwing out his empty water bottle. I saw her break into spontaneous dance with a 2-year-old who had been named after her, Big Hillary stamping her kitten heels and clapping her hands and making “Oooh-ooh-ooh” noises. I heard her proclaim, with unself-conscious joy, from the pulpits of two black churches in Philadelphia, that “this is the day that the Lord has made!” and watched the young campaign staff at her Brooklyn headquarters bounce up and down with the anticipation of getting to shake her hand.
Bob Dylan
Why these observations, the crowd reactions, and the fact that Hillary is winning do not convince Traister that the problem is somewhere else than with her, I cannot explain. And that’s why I couldn’t finish the article. Perhaps I’ll go back and read the rest later on.
A good antidote to the fixed media “narrative” about Hillary can be found at Cannonfire these days. Joseph Cannon has been on a mission to expose Bernie and his bros as well as the media memes about “the Clintons.” Today he exposes one of those wacky Bernie bros who have been writing for Huffington Post and Salon throughout the campaign: Meet Crazy Frank Huguenard, a CLASSIC BernieBro. Huguenard is in the news because he posted a piece at HuffPo that was deleted. In it he claimed that Hillary was about to be indicted.
“Huffpo has yet to respond to my request for an explanation,” Huguenard tweeted at this Breitbart News reporter Monday morning. “I’ve got my sources, they never asked.”
Huguenard later told Breitbart News, “I want to do another story but my HuffPo account has been temporarily disabled. Not sure what’s happening with them.”
I think I know why the thing was deleted: Huguenard is a liar. He falsely claimed that Hillary is being indicted because an official investigation revealed the Clinton Foundation to be a criminal enterprise.
Here is the actual wording:
James Comey and The FBI will present a recommendation to Loretta Lynch, Attorney General of the Department of Justice, that includes a cogent argument that the Clinton Foundation is an ongoing criminal enterprise engaged in money laundering and soliciting bribes in exchange for political, policy and legislative favors to individuals, corporations and even governments both foreign and domestic.
The truth: There is NO GODDAMNED INVESTIGATION OF THE CLINTON FOUNDATION and thus NO INDICTMENT.
Huguenard has no secret sources. If the DOJ were looking into the Clinton Foundation, would a little-known New Age whackadoodle find out before the New York Times or the AP or the Washington Post? If Huguenard has a source, why didn’t he name that source in his HuffPo piece? Why didn’t he offer a name to Breitbart?
Read the rest at Cannonfire, and while you’re there, check out some of Cannon’s other recent posts. He’s on a roll!
On Tuesday, June 7, I have decided to cast my vote for Hillary Clinton because I believe this is the only path forward to win the presidency and stop the dangerous candidacy of Donald Trump….
Hillary Clinton has convincingly made the case that she knows how to get things done and has the tenacity and skill to advance the Democratic agenda. Voters have responded by giving her approximately 3 million more votes – and hundreds more delegates – than Sanders. If Clinton were to win only 10 percent of the remaining delegates – wildly improbable – she would still exceed the number needed for the nomination. In other words, Clinton’s lead is insurmountable and Democrats have shown – by millions of votes – that they want her as their nominee….
The stakes couldn’t be higher. Our country faces an existential threat from climate change and the spread of nuclear weapons. A new cold war is on the horizon. This is no time for Democrats to keep fighting each other. The general election has already begun. Hillary Clinton, with her long experience, especially as Secretary of State, has a firm grasp of the issues and will be prepared to lead our country on day one.
Alec Ross, who was senior aide to Clinton during her term as Secretary of State, was speaking at The Hay Festival in Wales about the industries of the future.
Ross, said that the most open countries would have the greatest success in the coming decades because the biggest emerging markets were big data and genomics. But he warned that America could become a more closed society if Donald Trump was elected president.
“We’re having this struggle very publicly in the United States right now where a vulgar, demented, pig demon named Donald Trump is trying to make the United States a more closed society.
“We’ll be saying, no more brown people, no more Muslims, let’s get women back in the kitchen. Let’s make America great again.
“What he’s talking about is taking emasculated men in their forties, fifties and sixties who are not living the life they hoped for in their teens and twenties and saying, ‘you know what? there are people to blame for this. And we’re going to build a wall and we’re going make America great again.
“At the core of that is the struggle between being an open society and a closed society. And so if you want to know where the trillions of dollars of wealth creation that are going to come with the commercialisation of genomics, and the creation of big data companies, and the AI machine learning companies and all of the industries of the future my overarching line here is it’s going to be the most open societies.
Many observers were mystified when Donald Trump attacked New Mexico Republican Gov. Susana Martinez. But the story was really very simple: Martinez hit Trump, so Trump hit back. Especially now that Trump is the GOP’s presumptive nominee, he attempted to make an example of a Republican who won’t get with the program. It might work, or it might not, but from Trump’s perspective it’s the tactic he used to beat 15 rivals for the GOP nomination.
The Trump-Martinez bewilderment focused on four factors: Martinez is Hispanic, she’s a woman, she’s a Republican (head of the Republican Governors Association), and she’s popular. “I think it sent all the wrong signals,” said Newt Gingrich, who has generally been pro-Trump. “You particularly don’t want to see your candidate who needs to…get stronger with Latinos, and stronger with women, attack a Latina woman Republican governor.” ….
“[Martinez] continues to attack him publicly and privately,” one person in TrumpWorld told me recently. Trump has made a principle of hitting back harder than he is hit. And he has been so effective that many Republicans, elected and not, have decided the smart thing is to refrain from taking on Trump, even if they oppose him.
My guess is the fact that Martinez is a woman who dared to stand up to him had something to do with Trump’s angry response.
What else is happening? What stories are you following today?
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During a press conference in Japan, Obama said the American presidential election is being “very” closely watched oversees. He told reporters that “it’s fair to say” world leaders are “surprised” Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee.
“They are not sure how seriously to take some of his pronouncements but they’re rattled by him — and for good reason, because a lot of the proposals that he’s made display either ignorance of world affairs or a cavalier attitude,” Obama added.
He suggested Trump’s controversial proposals were more about “getting tweets and headlines” than “actually thinking through” what’s needed to keep America safe or the “world on an even keel.”
He also has said he wants to ban Muslims from entering the U.S., called the Iran deal “horrendous,” pledged to “build a wall” along the Mexican border and that he’d have “no problem speaking to” North Korea’s dictator.
President Barack Obama’s historic visit to Hiroshima is stirring conflicting emotions on both sides of the Atlantic.
Some 140,000 people were killed when the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on the city on Aug. 6, 1945. Countless others suffered after-effects that endure to this day.
The White House has stressed Obama will not apologize for America’s use of the bombs when he visits the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park on Friday — the first sitting president to do so….
“Of course everyone wants to hear an apology. Our families were killed,” Hiroshi Shimizu, general secretary of the Hiroshima Confederation of A-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, told The Associated Press.
Woman with a cat, Auguste Renoir
However, it would risk alienating Americans back home — especially giving the trip’s timing just ahead of Memorial Day.
Retired Army Staff Sgt. Lester Tenney, 95, spent more than three years in Japanese prison camps, and still has the blood-stained, bamboo stick Japanese troops used to beat him across the face.
“If you didn’t walk fast enough, you were killed. If you didn’t say the right words, you were killed, and if you were killed, you were either shot to death, bayoneted, or decapitated,” he told The Associated Press. “I’ll never forget it. And so for that reason … there’s no reason for us to apologize to them, not any reason whatsoever.
I have mixed emotions too. I’ve written here before that I probably wouldn’t be here today if Truman had not dropped the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My father was on a ship to Japan when the news came, and he and the rest of his companions celebrated, because it meant they would be going home instead of to their likely deaths. How can I not be glad that my father survived?
When I worked at M.I.T., the head of my department was a man who had survived the Bataan Death March and then spent years in a Japanese prison camp. He was lucky to come through that alive; hundreds of Americans and Filipino prisoners did not.
Pablo Picasso, Reclining female nude playing with a cat
…Obama’s week abroad not so subtly serves a purpose beyond foreign relations: how he can help Democrats’ looming campaign against the billionaire GOP presidential candidate.
Pledging to stay neutral in the Democratic primary, Obama has instead struck a middle ground to help the party’s likely nominee, Hillary Clinton. He has engaged in a twist on the so-called Rose Garden campaign strategy where incumbent presidents lean on the trappings of their office to remind voters of their power and achievements. Obama is instead reminding voters of the seriousness of the job and, by extension, his belief in Clinton’s readiness for it.
On Friday, this president who has repeatedly pointed to the heady challenges on his desk as an argument against making a former reality show star the next commander in chief travels to Hiroshima, where one of two nuclear bombs ever used in warfare was dropped, to underscore the horrors of war and the life-or-death decisions that presidents face.
He doesn’t plan to talk about presidential politics at all in proximity to his trip to a memorial for victims of the atomic blast that killed about 140,000 people, a grim reminder of the devastating impact of a military attack that Obama finds defensible.
But the trip nonetheless provides a vivid illustration for the question Obama wants voters to ask themselves as they consider a presidential candidate — can you trust this person with the nuclear codes?
“We are in serious times, and this is a really serious job,” Obama said from behind the seal of the president at the White House lectern this month. “This is not entertainment. This is not a reality show.”
White House officials say that the president is eager to begin making a case to voters about the stakes of the race to replace him in the Oval Office, and will do so vigorously once the primaries are over.
Lilla Cabot Perry, Woman with cat
I can’t wait until President Obama hits the campaign trail for Hillary! One thing we Democrats have over the Republicans is some very powerful surrogates who will work hard to hold onto the White House and save the country from Trump: Elizabeth Warren, John Lewis, Joe Biden, Elijah Cummings, John Kerry, Barbara Boxer, and so many more.
Warren has been getting under Trump’s skin for awhile now, and on Tuesday she attacked him in a high-profile speech.
Elizabeth Warren delivered an extensive, blistering speech last night about Trump that will serve as a template for how Democrats will attack him — both in terms of how they’ll prosecute his business past and how they’ll try to undercut his central arguments about the economy….
The line that is driving all the attention this morning is Warren’s suggestion, in the context of Trump’s 2006 comment that a housing crash might enrich him, that the Donald is a “small, insecure money-grubber.” But Warren isn’t merely dissing Trump’s manhood. Warren — who went on to note that Trump “roots for people to get thrown out of their house” because he “doesn’t care who gets hurt, as long as he makes a profit” — is making a broader argument. Trump is not just a small, greedy person, but a cruel one, too.
That theme is also threaded through Warren’s broadside against Trump on taxes. He isn’t just paying as little as possible — and openly boasting about it — because he’s greedy. He isn’t just refusing to release his returns because he doesn’t want to reveal he’s not as rich as he claims (another shot at Trump’s self-inflated masculinity). All this, Warren suggests, also reflects a larger moral failing: Trump plays by his own set of rules, engorging himself, while simultaneously heaping explicit scorn on social investments designed to help those who are struggling in the same economy that made him rich. Warren notes that Trump recently likened paying his taxes to “throwing money down the drain” — i.e., he is reneging on the social contract — after “inheriting a fortune from his father” and “keeping it going by scamming people.” Thus, Warren is making a broader argument about Trump’s fundamental cruelty.
Here’s a video:
It’s time for the media to stop helping Trump and start dealing with the danger he poses to the country. If nothing else, they should be motivated by his attacks on the reporters who cover his campaign and on the the First Amendment. A few days ago, Jake Tapper gave a clinic for journalists on how to handle Trump’s outrageous lies.
CNN host Jake Tapper laid into GOP candidate Donald Trump for dredging up a debunked conspiracy theory that his likely opponent in the general election, Hillary Clinton, was somehow responsible for the death of then-Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster.
Foster’s 1993 death was ruled a suicide.
Tapper called Trump out for saying in an interview that the circumstances around Foster’s death were “very fishy,” adding, “I don’t bring [Foster’s death] up because I don’t know enough to really discuss it. I will say there are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder. I don’t do that because I don’t think it’s fair.”
“Except of course you just did that, Mr. Trump,” Tapper said. “But you’re right, it’s not fair that you did that, certainly not to Mr. Foster’s widow or their three children.”
Watch the video:
We need much more of this kind of fact-checking of Trump from the media and a whole lot less obsessing about Hillary Clinton’s emails.
The presumptive Republican nominee spent the past 24 hours blasting his likely opponent, Hillary Clinton, and his most provocative antagonist, Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
But he didn’t stop there. He also slammed New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, the nation’s only Latina governor and a Republican. Martinez might be seen as an obvious choice for diplomacy, or even intensive courtship, given Trump’s standing among women and Hispanics.
Trump chose a different approach: He told the residents of New Mexico to get rid of her.
In all three cases, the clashes were classic Trump. Slight him, diss him, hit him — and he’ll hit back harder. Much harder.
But they also could play right into Democrats’ plans to brand Trump as a serial misogynist as he goes up against a rival who could become the first female president in history. His poor standing with women — a CNN/ORC poll in March found he was viewed unfavorably by 73% of registered female voters — is one of his biggest liabilities heading into the fall.
“He makes a habit of insulting women,” Clinton said Wednesday afternoon as a campaign stop in California. “He seems to have something about women.”
Let’s hope Don the Con keeps this up. If Republican women vote against Trump, he could lose all 50 states.
Amid recurring violence at political rallies held by presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, many local officials and activists are increasingly worried that this lakeside city is ill-prepared to deal with tens of thousands of protesters and agitators expected to descend on the Republican National Convention here in July.
Some worry that police might be overrun or that the city has not stockpiled enough water to hydrate the masses in the mid-summer heat. Others, particularly on the left, oppose new restrictions that will be placed on demonstrators and object to the kind of military-style equipment law enforcement authorities may use to control the crowds.
There is also unhappiness among groups on both sides over the slow progress the city has made in approving parade and demonstration permits with less than two months to go.
On Wednesday, under the threat of a federal lawsuit by some groups upset by delays, city officials finally unveiled an official parade route and speakers’ platform in a major downtown park. Parades and protests will be allowed, but plans by some groups to bring in trucks, horses and, in one case, a giant bomb-shaped balloon might need to be rethought.
A bomb-shaped balloon?! So classy.
So . . . what stories are you following today? Please post your thoughts and links in the comment thread and have a tremendous Thursday!
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Once again, I’ve been sitting here for hours trying to figure out where to begin a post on what’s happening in the news today. So far May has been so terrible for me personally and for my family that I can barely deal with the insanity that is happening in the world of politics. Has it ever been this bad before? I suppose it has, but somehow this election year seems so tawdry, so ugly, so ridiculous, and so horrifying that it’s hard to find a comparison, at least in my lifetime.
Hillary Clinton, one of the most qualified candidates for POTUS ever, is being forced to deal with two insane old white men who are using lies and conspiracy theories to try to bring her down as well as an irresponsible media full of “journalists” who want nothing more than to see her shamed and brought low. If they could get away with burning her at the stake, I believe they would do it without hesitation. I’m not alone. I found this in my Twitter feed:
It is well past time for Bernie Sanders to drop his vicious attacks on Hillary and the Democratic Party, but it has become clear that he is not going to do it. I’m beginning to believe that he actually wants to help elect Donald Trump so that “the revolution” he (Sanders) has dreamed of all of his life will come to fruition.
Bernie is delusional, and I don’t think the Democrats in DC realize the extent to which he has begun to live in his own fantasy world. I don’t think he is going to stop his attacks, and I would not be at all surprised if he tries running third party. I hope and pray that I’m just catastrophizing because of my own stress level.
One of the first things I clicked on this morning was a link on Memeorandum to Cannonfire: A sin against democracy. It’s a rant about what has become of Salon. You need to read the entire post, but here’s an excerpt:
Salon has become something worse than Fox. Comparing the two, I’m reminded of Steve Martin’s great line from Leap of Faith: “Manipulators are sneaky. I’m obvious!” Fox, at least, has the virtue of being obvious.
Here’s the truth: The Clinton Foundation is a charity. Watchdog groups consider it transparent and honest. It does an enormous amount of good. Liars have painted a completely false picture of that Foundation, what it does and how it runs. (They’ve also seeded the internet with utterly bogus stories about how much money actually reaches the needy.)
The attacks on the Clintons Foundation mirror the infamous “swiftboat” attacks on John Kerry’s war record. That, too, was a Republican smear campaign designed to target an opponent’s strength.
If people like Rove, Stone, Atwater — and the writers for Salon — had been around in 1960, they would have found ways to make people believe that JFK had acted abominably in the PT109 affair. I’m not sure how they would have created that impression, but casuistry can achieve miracles.
Sanders’s slate includes James Zogby, a longtime activist for Palestinian rights as well as a DNC member and official. Zogby currently co-chairs the party’s resolutions committee. His inclusion is a sign of Sanders’s plans to push the party’s policy on Israel toward what he has called a more even-handed approach to the Palestinian cause….
Rep. Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, who will chair the committee, was named by Wasserman Schultz. Most others named by Wasserman Schultz and Clinton are party stalwarts or Clinton supporters — the establishment Sanders has railed against to great effect. Sanders’s picks include people from outside the usual sphere of party influence, including a Native American activist and author and racial justice activist Cornel West….
Sanders also named Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, among his most prominent elected backers, author and environmental activist Bill McKibben and Native American activist Deborah Parker….
The Clinton campaign’s choices are Wendy Sherman, a former top State Department official and Clinton surrogate; Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and a longtime Clinton confidante; Rep. Luis V. Gutiérrez of Illinois; Carol Browner, a former director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy and former head of the Environmental Protection Agency; Ohio state Rep. Alicia Reece; and Paul Booth of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union.
I wonder if Cornell West will ask for inclusion of a plank containing some of his most outrageous attacks on President Obama? Read examples at the links below.
Bernie Sanders should be invisible at this point, but he just won’t stop screaming for attention, and neither will his abhorrent surrogates. Rosario Dawson was in fine form in California yesterday. The Daily Mail:
Actress Rosario Dawson told Bernie Sanders supporters this afternoon that winning the White House is only the beginning of the political revolution.
It’s time for a ‘clean sweep,’ she said.
‘It’s time for us to start looking at everyone down the ballot and go, “Are you really representing us?’ Dawson said at this afternoon at a Sanders rally in East LA. ‘Who are these superdelegates? Who are these Congress people and these senators – are they really with you?’
Dawson told the California crowd, ‘We need to reform, not conform.’ ….
At a rally later in the day for Sanders in Santa Monica she said ‘when they’re telling us that your vote doesn’t matter right now, but on the side they’re talking about party unity, what they’re really telling you’ is to conform….
Dawson intimated this afternoon as she campaigned for the U.S. senator in California ahead of the June 7 primary that the rest of the Democratic Party establishment ought to watch its back, too.
‘We need to vote together. They’re gonna do anything and everything in their power to stop you from doing that,’ she said, ‘to say that it doesn’t matter.’
Rosario Dawson, last seen bringing up Monica Lewinsky at a rally in Delaware [is now] somehow connecting a predicted Bernie Sanders win in the California Democratic primary to the birthday of recently-deceased music legend Prince. To cries of “Down with Hillary!”, Dawson explained that Bernie’s appeal to Republicans, Democrats, and independents meant that they were all going to “vote purple,” so,
So actually, I think it’s quite fitting that on June 7, the day that we’re going to win California, that that would’ve been Prince’s birthday.
Bernie is never going to go away. Never.
Meanwhile Donald Trump is doing his darndest to swiftboat Hillary with tired 1990’s attacks on her husband Bill, who is not running for anything. When will the mainstream media start writing about what Trump’s campaign is really about?
BURNS, TENNESSEE—Presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump has been accused of dog-whistling to white nationalists ever since he kicked off his campaign in the summer of 2015 and warned against “criminal” Mexican immigrants. His retweets of Twitter users with handles like “@WhiteGenocideTM” and his tepid disavowals of David Duke’s support have not gone unnoticed in that fringe community, either.
Tucked away in the woods of middle Tennessee’s Montgomery Bell State Park, 300 “white advocates” gathered over the weekend at the fourteenth annual American Renaissance conference to reflect on just how much fuel Trump has added to their movement this election cycle.
“I’ve never felt this sense of energy in our movement,” the conference host, Jared Taylor, said in his opening remarks. “I’ve never been more optimistic.”
For the conference, American Renaissance, a white nationalist publication, brought advocates for a white ethno-state together with Holocaust deniers, eugenicists and confederate sympathizers. American Renaissance and many of the groups the conference speakers are associated with are designated as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
According to Taylor, this year’s conference saw a 100-person jump in attendance from 2015; a show of hands identified half of the participants as first-time attendees and one-third as under the age of 30.
This is the man Bernie Sanders is helping–presumably because he thinks a Trump presidency will trigger a left-wing “political revolution.”
The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
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