Lately, Trump’s stupendous instability has actually been looking like a plus. There he was, telling Democrats that he didn’t want to cut taxes on the rich. Trying to find a way to save the Dreamers
.. Better insane than sorry.
.. Then came the U.N. speech, and the reminder that the one big plus on Pence’s scorecard is that he seems less likely to get the planet blown up.
.. Nikki Haley, our U.N. ambassador, argued that the president’s speech was a diplomatic win because “every other international community” has now started calling Kim “Rocket Man,” too.
.. Does this sound like a triumph to you, people? It’s perfectly possible Kim takes it for a compliment since he does like rockets. And I’ll bet he likes Elton John songs, too.
.. But about the “totally destroy North Korea” part: I believe I am not alone in feeling that the best plan for dealing with a deranged dictator holding nuclear weapons is not threatening to blow him up.
.. We tell ourselves that the president is surrounded by men who are too stable to let him plunge us into a war that will annihilate the planet. But Trump’s U.N. speech was a read-from-the-teleprompter performance, not a case of his just blurting out something awful. People in the White House read it and talked about it in advance.
.. He tried to be super-nice at a luncheon with African leaders, assuring them, “I have so many friends going to your countries trying to get rich.”.. The big takeaway, however, was that the president of the United States had threatened to destroy a country with 25 million people.Comments:
We can survive an ultra conservative president who is not totally insane and who listens to advisors…at least until 2020. It’s not at all clear that we or the rest of the world can survive the insanity of the Child in Chief now in the Oval Office... There’s little doubt that Democrats stand to gain politically from the train-wreck presidency of impulsive and short-sighted Trump. But the Democrats must choose country before party. A sane, hard-line conservative like Pence is better for the nation than an irrational narcissist who could plunge the entire world into war.
.. A president Pence would give the right just what they wanted a twitterless occupant of the Oval Office. If anyone would like to know how a Pence would run the 50 states just look at how he ran the state he was governor of.
.. Trump, while not exactly the devil I know, is at least fairly predictable in that his main concerns are self preservation and self enrichment.
.. It is time for this fantasy of impeachment to stop. An election is not “fraudulent” because a foreign power releases information that persuades Americans to vote one way or another. Absent evidence that Russia actually hacked the voting machines and changed votes, or that Trump personally colluded with Russia to influence the elections, there is no shot at impeachment, and such evidence seems unlikely to emerge. Russia should pay a price for its actions, and the Democrats – and I am one- should forget about Hillary, stop the apocalyptic rhetoric, stop fantasizing and demonstrating, and concentrate on winning state, local, and. Congressional elections in the short term, and the next presidential election after that.
.. Threats like these only ADD to Kim’s determination to escape the fate of Iraq and Libya. The US has a “big stick.” It should “speak softly.”
.. 70 percent of the voters in Pennsylvania were Democrats and yet Pennsylvania is represented by a majority of Republicans.
.. That’s called gerrymandering.
.. In Pence’s favor he does not have a legion of “supporters” who back him no matter what he does or says. Pence doesn’t seem to have won allies either as a governor or a representative from Indiana. Trump supporters seem to tolerate him, but reserve their adoration for Trump himself.
.. there will be no easy end to the Trump/Pence administration. Their crimes against the people of the US will linger for generations. They will not go quietly by vote or impeachment.
.. As awful as he is, I’ll still take Trump over Pence. Trump is so ignorant and unhinged that he’s not helping the Republicans destroy our own country with their selfish, hate-the-people agenda. Pence would be the driving force that would allow the destruction to move ahead unchecked. We’d lose Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, women’s reproductive rights, and religious freedom. (The Republicans and their extreme-right-wing Christian supporters believe in religious freedom only for themselves and want their beliefs turned into law.)
‘Policing The Police’: How The Black Panthers Got Their Start
Nearly 50 years ago, in 1966, a group of six black men in Oakland, Calif., came together in an effort to curb police brutality against African-Americans in the city. Because of a quirk in California law, the men were able to carry loaded weapons openly. The Black Panthers, as they became known, would follow the police around, jumping out of their cars with guns drawn if the police made a stop.
“They would observe the police and make sure that no brutality occurred,” filmmaker Stanley Nelson tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “What they were really doing was policing the police.”
.. the group was a response to what some saw as the limitations of the nonviolent civil rights movement.
.. young people, who kind of felt that the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King … had run its course,” Nelson says. “It had gotten what it could get, and something else was needed; new tactics were needed.”
.. the Panthers put forth a 10-point program that sought to address a host of problems, including police brutality, poor housing and subpar education.
.. Sometimes the rhetoric is definitely over-the-top, and I think that’s one of the things that the Panthers knew and wanted it to be over-the-top. It’s saying, “OK, we’re going to totally break from what the traditional civil rights movement is asking for. We’re not asking for a right to sit on a bus or eat in a restaurant — our demands are much more radical, and they might be over-the-top, but they’ll also get your attention.” And I think [what] the Black Panthers wanted to do — they wanted to get attention. I think what happens as time goes on is they are kind of trapped into this corner that they’ve painted for themselves: one, with the over-the-top rhetoric; two, with the guns that they carry at first.
the Panthers saw that young kids were not being fed breakfast before school; there was no national government program to give kids a healthy meal before school. So the Panthers just started doing it
.. It was a very, very successful program for the Panthers, and actually J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, said it was probably the most dangerous thing that the Panthers were doing, because it was winning not only the hearts and minds of young kids but also of their parents.
.. “Every young black man has a black leather jacket or can get one or can borrow one if they can’t buy one.”
.. The look was very, very calculated. This was a break from … Martin Luther King and the suits and ties and that kind of “we’re going to look proper.” … A lot of people don’t know that was really part of the traditional civil rights movement, that they dressed up because they wanted to show you the difference between them all dressed up in suits and ties — the women were encouraged to wear dresses and sometimes little white gloves — because they wanted to show you the difference between them and the mobs that would be chasing them or screaming at them.
.. [Hoover] issues memos … that basically say to his agents, “Do anything that you can, anything that you can think of to destroy the party.” So the FBI does things that range from infiltrating the party and having agent provocateurs inside the Panther Party who are provoking violent acts and buying guns and supplying guns to the Panthers, to he has [a] memo that says we have to set spouse against spouse. .
.. The idea of writing letters to people’s husbands or wives to tear them apart … that was one of the tactics that the FBI was using, but just anything that they could possibly do to tear people apart and to create the sense of paranoia
.. You didn’t know what was true or what was not true; you didn’t know who your friends were. All of those things the FBI was using and I don’t think anybody really understood the extent and the low level that the FBI would sink to to destroy people it looked at as its enemies.
‘We Can’t Walk Away From This Truth’
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu explains to his city why four monuments commemorating the Lost Cause and the Confederacy had to come down.
And it immediately begs the questions: why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame—all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans.
So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission. There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it. .. As President George W. Bush said at the dedication ceremony for the National Museum of African American History & Culture, “A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.”..The historic record is clear. The Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P.G.T. Beauregard statues were not erected just to honor these men, but as part of the movement which became known as The Cult of the Lost Cause. This ‘cult’ had one goal—through monuments and through other means—to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity... It is self-evident that these men did not fight for the United States of America, They fought against it. They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots... These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for... After the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city... Should you have further doubt about the true goals of the Confederacy, in the very weeks before the war broke out, the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, made it clear that the Confederate cause was about maintaining slavery and white supremacy. He said in his now famous “corner-stone speech” that the Confederacy’s:corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
.. I want to try to gently peel from your hands the grip on a false narrative of our history that I think weakens us, and make straight a wrong turn we made many years ago—so we can more closely connect with integrity to the founding principles of our nation and forge a clearer and straighter path toward a better city and a more perfect union.
.. This is, however, about showing the whole world that we as a city and as a people are able to acknowledge, understand, reconcile, and most importantly, choose a better future for ourselves, making straight what has been crooked and making right what was wrong.
.. History cannot be changed. It cannot be moved like a statue. What is done is done. The Civil War is over, and the Confederacy lost and we are better for it. Surely we are far enough removed from this dark time to acknowledge that the cause of the Confederacy was wrong.
And in the second decade of the 21st century, asking African Americans—or anyone else—to drive by property that they own; occupied by reverential statues of men who fought to destroy the country and deny that person’s humanity seems perverse and absurd... All we hold dear is created by throwing everything in the pot; creating, producing something better; everything a product of our historic diversity... He said, “I’ve never looked at them as a source of pride … it’s always made me feel as if they were put there by people who don’t respect us … This is something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. It’s a sign that the world is changing.”.. If presented with the opportunity to build monuments that told our story or to curate these particular spaces, would these monuments be what we want the world to see? Is this really our story?.. So before we part let us again state the truth clearly.The Confederacy was on the wrong side of history and humanity. It sought to tear apart our nation and subjugate our fellow Americans to slavery. This is the history we should never forget and one that we should never again put on a pedestal to be revered.