He didn’t fire them, they quit

Aug 16th, 2017 4:46 pm | By

CNBC tells the story of how the CEOs decided to say bye-bye to Trump.

After President Donald Trump’s incendiary comments last weekend about the violence in Charlottesville, the three female CEOs on his Strategic and Policy Forum helped get the ball rolling about appropriate responses.

The question, as they saw it, was whether it was better to remain on the Trump forum, with the ability to influence the White House? Or did it make more sense to back away to show disdain for the president’s seeming support of white nationalists?

It would be several days before the full forum ultimately made a decision. But by Monday the CEOs of Pepsi, IBM and GM – Indra Nooyi, Ginni Rometty and Mary Barra, respectively – had helped initiate a process that ultimately dissolved the high-profile panel of top chief executives and launched an embarrassing, public rebuke of Trump…

It is embarrassing, isn’t it. So embarrassing. Wouldn’t it be a good idea for him to resign now, to get over his embarrassment in private?

Starting late Sunday evening and early Monday, Pepsi CEO Nooyi made calls to see what others thought, said sources familiar with the matter. As the head of a consumer products company, she was particularly aware of the building public outcry.

Yeah we can boycott Pepsi. It’s not so easy to boycott, say, oil corporations.

(Well, actually, it’s not all that easy for me to boycott Pepsi, because I don’t drink it in the first place. But we as a people can boycott Pepsi.)

IBM CEO Rometty and GM CEO Barra joined her in actively surveying other members of the group to gauge their reaction to the president’s remarks. It was mostly “temperature taking,” according to a source.

It’s nice that it’s all women. Makes a good revenge. Take that, Pussygrabber.

“The thinking was it was important to do it as a group, as a panel, not as individuals because it would have more significant impact. It makes a central point that it’s not going to go forward. It’s done,” said a source who was a member of the panel.

So Trump was just lying when he said he decided to drop the panels.

“It’s a shame; it did some positive things. One of the most important [things] was to stop the currency war with China,” said the source who was a member of the panel. But on Wednesday, there was no debate about whether the panel should continue.

“There was such a firestorm. You don’t know what’s coming next or what he’s going to say or do next,” said the member. “It’s striking when the president loses the confidence of America’s CEOs.”

But but but he’s such a great businessman! He says so himself!

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Official talking points

Aug 16th, 2017 11:40 am | By

Yesterday evening the White House sent out its usual daily notes.

Every day, the White House communications office sends official talking points to Republican members of Congress. These communiqués help the GOP stay on the same page (and, in the Trump era, help the embattled president’s allies come up with arguments in his defense).

On Tuesday evening, a few hours after the president’s inflammatory press conference defending white nationalist protesters in Charlottesville, the office issued an “evening communications briefing,” which was passed along to me by a Republican congressional aide. It encourages members to echo the president’s line, contending that “both sides … acted inappropriately, and bear some responsibility.”

Oh yes. Driving a car at speed into a crowd of people is “inappropriate,” and the people who dented the car when it smashed into them are equally at fault.

You can read the talking points in their entirety here. The links in the text are the White House’s. The briefing goes on to include a transcript of the president’s question-and-answer session with reporters at Trump Tower, followed by commentary on other issues.

NEWS OF THE DAY

Charlottesville

  • The President was entirely correct — both sides of the violence in Charlottesville acted inappropriately, and bear some responsibility.
  • Despite the criticism, the President reaffirmed some of our most important Founding principles: We are equal in the eyes of our Creator, equal under the law, and equal under our Constitution.
    • He has been a voice for unity and calm, encouraging the country to “rediscover the bonds of love and loyalty that brings us together as Americans.”
    • He called for the end of violence on all sides so that no more innocent lives would be lost.
  • The President condemned – with no ambiguity – the hate groups fueled by bigotry and racism over the weekend, and did so by name yesterday, but for the media that will never be enough.
    • The media reacted with hysteria to the notion that counter-protesters showed up with clubs spoiling for a fight, a fact that reporters on the ground have repeatedly stated.
    • Even a New York Times reporter tweeted that she “saw club-wielding “antifa” beating white nationalists being led out of the park.”
    • The local ACLU chapter also tweeted that
  • We should not overlook the facts just because the media finds them inconvenient:
    • From cop killing and violence at political rallies, to shooting at Congressmen at a practice baseball game, extremists on the left have engaged in terrible acts of violence.
    • The President is taking swift action to hold violent hate groups accountable.
      • The DOJ has opened a civil rights investigation into this weekend’s deadly car attack.
      • Last Thursday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced it had completed the largest prosecution of white supremacists in the nation’s history.
  • Leaders and the media in our country should join the president in trying to unite and heal our country rather than incite more division.

There aren’t enough swears in the world to cover that.

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The first timbers fall

Aug 16th, 2017 11:34 am | By

I posted that collection of statements by departing CEOs just a little late: Trump has dissolved the councils.

President Donald Trump dissolved two of his economic advisory councils Wednesday after a rash of CEOs resigned in the wake of his response to a white nationalist attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, that occurred Saturday.

“Rather than putting pressure on the businesspeople of the Manufacturing Council & Strategy & Policy Forum, I am ending both,” Trump tweeted. “Thank you all!”

He must be seething.

Trump’s tweet came just moments after two more executives announced their resignations from his Manufacturing Council Wednesday. Leaders of another council, called the Strategic and Policy Forum, said they were disbanding the body because the Charlottesville debate had become “a distraction” to their purpose.

“As our members have expressed individually over the past several days, intolerance, racism and violence have absolutely no place in this country and are an affront to core American values,“ the group said in a statement. “We believe the debate over Forum participation has become a distraction from our well-intentioned and sincere desire to aid vital policy discussions on how to improve the lives of everyday Americans.”

“As such, the President and we are disbanding the Forum,” it added.

So, his administration is starting to collapse in on itself. Good. I hope he resigns by the end of the day.

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They moved quickly and quietly

Aug 16th, 2017 11:03 am | By

Baltimore didn’t mess around. Last night it took down all its Confederate statues and carried them away. Boom, done.

Confederate statues in Baltimore were removed from their bases overnight by city contractors, who used heavy machinery to load them onto flat bed trucks and haul them away — an abrupt end to more than a year of indecision on what to do with the memorials.

Mayor Catherine Pugh, who made the decision Tuesday morning to remove the monuments overnight, watched in person as the four statues linked to the Confederacy were torn from their pedestals.

“We moved quickly and quietly,” the mayor said. “There was enough grandstanding, enough speeches being made. Get it done.”

Men are always standing around yapping and arguing about whose turn it is. Women just get the damn job done.

The Council had already voted unanimously to take them down earlier in the week.

Crews removed the monuments unannounced, under cover of darkness between 11:30 p.m. and 5:30 a.m., in an effort to act quickly and avoid the potential for any violent conflicts similar to the ones in Charlottesville, Pugh said.

Protesters, who held a rally at the Robert E. Lee-“Stonewall” Jackson Monument at Wyman Park Dell near Johns Hopkins University Sunday, had pledged to tear down that statue themselves Wednesday night if the city didn’t. A group in Durham, N.C., toppled a Confederate statue there on Monday.

“It’s done,” Pugh said Wednesday morning. “They needed to come down. My concern is for the safety and security of our people. We moved as quickly as we could. … I did not want to endanger people in my own city.”

Done.

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Seven so far

Aug 16th, 2017 10:54 am | By

Business Insider provides a rundown of all the CEOs on Trump’s manufacturing council and their statements [if given] on resigning or not resigning. Seven have resigned at this point. Several who are still on the council didn’t give statements.

I’ll share the leavers’ statements.

  • Ken Frazier, Merck,  left the council. “As CEO of Merck, and as a matter of personal conscience, I feel a responsibility to take a stand against intolerance and extremism,” he said in a statement.
  • Brian Krzanich, Intel, announced Monday night he would step down from the council: “I am not a politician,” Krzanich said in a statement. “I am an engineer who has spent most of his career working in factories that manufacture the world’s most advanced devices. Yet, it is clear even to me that nearly every issue is now politicized to the point where significant progress is impossible. Promoting American manufacturing should not be a political issue.”
  • Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO, left the council on Tuesday after Trump made additional remarks about Charlottesville. “We cannot sit on a council for a President who tolerates bigotry and domestic terrorism. President Trump’s remarks today repudiate his forced remarks yesterday about the KKK and neo-Nazis. We must resign on behalf of America’s working people, who reject all notions of legitimacy of these bigoted groups.”
  • Denise Morrison, Campbell Soup Company, left the council on Wednesday. Campbell’s had originally said it was staying on.  “Racism and murder are unequivocally reprehensible and are not morally equivalent to anything else that happened in Charlottesville. I believe the President should have been – and still needs to be – unambiguous on that point,” Morrison said in a statement. “Following yesterday’s remarks from the President, I cannot remain on the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative. I will continue to support all efforts to spur economic growth and advocate for the values that have always made America great.”
  • Elon Musk, Tesla, left the council in June after Trump pulled out of the Paris agreement on climate change. He tweeted at the time: “Am departing presidential councils. Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”
  • Scott Paul, Alliance for American Manufacturing, announced Tuesday that he would step down from the council: “I’m resigning from the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative because it’s the right thing for me to do,” Paul tweeted.
  • Kevin Plank, Under Armour, announced Monday night he would step down from the council: “I joined the American Manufacturing Council because I believed it was important for Under Armour to have an active seat at the table and represent our industry,” Plank said in a statement. “We remain resolute in our potential and ability to improve American manufacturing. However, Under Armour engages in innovation and sports, not politics.”
  • Inge Thulin, 3M, annouced Wednesday that he is leaving the council: “Sustainability, diversity and inclusion are my personal values and also fundamental to the 3M Vision. The past few months have provided me with an opportunity to reflect upon my commitment to these values.I joined the Manufacturing Jobs Initiative in January to advocate for policies that align with our values and encourage even stronger investment and job growth – in order to make the United States stronger, healthier and more prosperous for all people. After careful consideration, I believe the initiative is no longer an effective vehicle for 3M to advance these goals. As a result, today I am resigning from the Manufacturing Advisory Council.At 3M, we will continue to champion an environment that supports sustainability, diversity and inclusion. I am committed to building a company that improves lives in every corner of the world.

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Put your foot down

Aug 16th, 2017 9:50 am | By

Nice.

Months before a man allegedly turned his vehicle into a weapon and plowed through a group of protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, an article that made the rounds in conservative media encouraged readers to do something similar.

Originally published by The Daily Caller and later syndicated or aggregated by several other websites, including Fox Nation, an offshoot of Fox News’ website, it carried an unsubtle headline: “Here’s A Reel Of Cars Plowing Through Protesters Trying To Block The Road.” Embedded in the article was a minute-and-a-half long video showing one vehicle after another driving through demonstrations. The footage was set to a cover of Ludacris’ “Move Bitch.”

Yeah, cool. Bitch didn’t move fast enough.

The article was published in January, but it drew renewed attention on Tuesday following this weekend’s deadly incident in Charlottesville. As the outrage grew on Twitter, Fox News took action, deleting the version Fox Nation had published.

“The item was inappropriate and we’ve taken it down. We regret posting it in January,” Noah Kotch, the editor-in-chief of Fox News Digital, said in a statement provided to CNNMoney.

Daily Caller removed it hours later. The author was Mike Raust, a Daily Caller video editor.

“Here’s a compilation of liberal protesters getting pushed out of the way by cars and trucks. Study the technique; it may prove useful in the next four years,” Raust wrote. “None of these clips are new, but that doesn’t mean they’re not still fresh.”

Haha. Hit the libbruls with your car, haha. When Mooslims do that it’s terrorism, but when we do it it’s patriotic.

Fox was far from the only outlet to pick up Raust’s post. Smaller conservative sites like Right Wing News and Conservative Post also published the video, and with glee.

There’s precedent for this type of rhetoric in conservative media. In fact, Raust isn’t even the first one at his outlet to endorse driving over protesters.

When thousands of demonstrators gathered Washington, D.C. in March to protest the Dakota Access pipeline, Daily Caller editor Katie Frates said on Twitter, “I wonder how many #NativeNationsRise #NoDAPL protesters I could run over before I got arrested #getouttamyway”

Glenn Reynolds, a conservative columnist and the proprietor of the blog Instapundit, was briefly suspended by Twitter last year for his own tweet encouraging drivers to run over protesters in North Carolina.

Seriously? He’s a law professor.

*follows link*

Yep, seriously.

https://twitter.com/elisabethlehem/status/778964386702647296

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What to commemorate

Aug 16th, 2017 9:27 am | By

Now what about this whole history question, eh? Is Trump right that removing statues is an attack on history? No, of course not. It’s just as much “history” that a statue is removed as it is “history” that a statue is standing there or put up in the first place. We’re allowed to second-guess our ancestors about what we want to commemorate and glorify with a statue and what we don’t. Statues of Confederate generals send a message that we glorify people who left the United States in order to keep millions of people enslaved. Why the hell would we want to commemorate and glorify that now? Why shouldn’t we say oh hey Lee was defending the ability of white people to keep black people enslaved, not as individuals but as a people, so that their children and grandchildren and so on forever would also be enslaved. That’s a gruesome and shameful aspect of our history, something to remember keenly but not to commemorate and glorify. There’s nothing more to it than that. Those people in Charlottesville that Trump has so much sympathy for were there to defend the right of white people to enslave black people. Get out of here with that shit.

Jennifer Schuessler at the Times looks at the ongoing discussion:

Mr. Trump’s comments drew strongly negative reactions on Twitter from many historians, who condemned his “false equivalence” between the white nationalists and the counterprotesters.

But “where does it stop?” — and just what counts as erasing history — is a question that scholars and others have found themselves asking, in much more nuanced ways, as calls have come to remove monuments not just to the Confederacy, but to erstwhile liberal heroes and pillars of the Democratic Party like Andrew Jackson (a slave owner who, as president, signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which led to the forced relocation of tens of thousands of Native Americans) and Woodrow Wilson (who as president oversaw the segregation of the federal bureaucracy).

…

Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor of history and law at Harvard who is credited with breaking down the wall of resistance among historians to the idea that Jefferson had a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, said that the answer to Mr. Trump’s hypothetical question about whether getting rid of Lee and Jackson also meant junking Washington and Jefferson was a simple “no.”

There is a crucial difference between leaders like Washington and Jefferson, imperfect men who helped create the United States, Ms. Gordon-Reed said, and Confederate generals like Jackson and Lee, whose main historical significance is that they took up arms against it. The comparison, she added, also “misapprehends the moral problem with the Confederacy.”

“This is not about the personality of an individual and his or her flaws,” she said. “This is about men who organized a system of government to maintain a system of slavery and to destroy the American union.”

They’re not heroes.

As for the idea of erasing history, it’s a possibility that most scholars do not take lightly. But James Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association, said that Mr. Trump’s comments failed to recognize the difference between history and memory, which is always shifting.

When you alter monuments, “you’re not changing history,” he said. “You’re changing how we remember history.”

Some critics of Confederate monuments have called for them to be moved to museums, rather than destroyed, or even left in place and reinterpreted, to explain the context in which they were created. Mr. Grossman noted that most Confederate monuments were constructed in two periods: the 1890s, as Jim Crow was being established, and in the 1950s, during a period of mass Southern resistance to the civil rights movement.

Almost as if they were put up to send a message, eh?

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Guest post: This is Adolf

Aug 16th, 2017 9:06 am | By

Image may contain: text

Guest post by Stewart.

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He would descend the golden elevators

Aug 16th, 2017 8:32 am | By

His staff is “stunned,” we’re told. Really? Why? Did they think he was a decent or thoughtful or humane guy?

Of course they didn’t, but I suppose they must have thought he had enough self-control to hide quite what a foul mindless sadistic demon he is. I suppose they’re stunned that he blew the thing so wide open.

Multiple sources inside and close to the White House described the president’s senior staff as confused and frustrated, caught off guard by Trump’s decision to defend his initial response to the violence in Virginia.

He “went rogue,” one senior White House official told NBC News.

The president’s team had choreographed a plan: he would descend the golden elevators of Trump Tower and step to the lectern in the lobby, flanked by his Treasury Secretary, his Transportation Secretary and his top economic adviser. He would highlight the infrastructure executive order he had just signed, and then he’d leave — head back upstairs and deploy his aides to handle any inquiries.

Instead, he took questions and had a full-on racist tantrum. Kids say the darndest things!

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The most disgusting public performance in the history of the American presidency

Aug 16th, 2017 8:22 am | By

David Rothkopf in the Post:

Donald Trump on Tuesday afternoon gave the most disgusting public performance in the history of the American presidency. Framed by the vulgar excess of the lobby of Trump Tower, the president of the United States shook loose the constraints of his more decent-minded advisers and, speaking from his heart, defended white supremacists and by extension, their credos of hatred. He equated with those thugs the courageous Americans who had gathered to stand up to the racism, anti-Semitism and doctrine of violence that won the cheers and Nazi salutes of the alt-right hordes to whom Trump felt such loyalty.

He made it crystal clear, in case anyone hadn’t caught on yet, that the reason it took him so long to rebuke the racist rally is the fact that he didn’t want to, because he liked it.

No one who values the best of what the United States has stood for could watch without feeling revulsion, anger or heartbreak. No one who comes from a past such as mine, which includes similar mobs rising up and ultimately collaborating in the murder of dozens of my family members in Hitler’s Europe, could view Trump’s performance without a degree of fear as well. Certainly, the same must be true for African Americans who have watched such mobs lynch their family members and seek to deny them the most basic rights.

Remember Edgar Ray Killen? He’s the KKK guy who was the architect of the murder of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner in Neshoba County, Mississippi in 1964. It’s as if we’d made him president. It’s as if we’d made Bull Connor president, or George Wallace, or David Duke. It’s that disgraceful and shaming and filthy.

He has to go.

Every day Trump remains in office is a victory for the extremists. But in that same moment on Tuesday, Trump made it clear that to defeat the champions of hatred in the United States, he must go. That he also must go to preserve the United States’ standing in the world, to ensure the safety of our people and our way of life has also been made clear in the past week. It is now time that we follow his dangerous words with our own actions. It is why Heather Heyer was on that street in Charlottesville. We owe it to her and to ourselves to remove him from office as soon as the law permits. Trump himself has demonstrated the price of each day of delay.

25th Amendment.

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A president out of control

Aug 15th, 2017 6:22 pm | By

Stephen Collinson at CNN doesn’t mince words.

A combative and unrestrained President Donald Trump opened his authentic political soul, in possibly the most memorable news conference in presidential history, that is certain to become a defining moment of his administration.

It was supposed to be a routine event at Trump Tower in New York to tout the President’s infrastructure plan.

But the session quickly veered off course into one of the most surreal political moments in years as Trump unloaded about the fallout from the weekend’s protests by “alt-right” activists, white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Virginia.

Gesticulating with this right hand, Trump blasted what he called the “alt-left,” protested that he had already condemned neo-Nazis and parroted far-right talking points on the Confederacy.

He did do a lot of gesticulating with that right hand. It went up and down, up and down, like a mechanical toy.

On the substance, it was a performance that quickly emboldened white nationalist groups and appeared certain to heighten racial tensions and fear in the country.

There’s no chance that Trump’s political team can finesse this one, or walk it back.

But the tone and the spectacle of Trump’s unchained performance was equally stunning.

The unapologetic, stream-of-consciousness style of delivery left no doubt at all: This was the real Trump, not the scripted version who appeared in the White House on Monday and tried to clean up his initial failure to condemn white supremacists after the death of a counter-protester in Charlottesville.

His anger emerged in a torrent, as he obliterated any benefit of the doubt he earned on Monday, thought piling on thought, in a style the nation has become accustomed to from his Twitter feed.

Not exactly thought piling on thought. Those weren’t really thoughts. Stunted half-formed bits of thoughts.

In the most incredible moment, as he stood at a podium bearing the seal of the President of the United States, Trump tore at the nation’s racial fault lines by appearing to offer a pass to a racist and neo-Nazi movement.

“I think there is blame on both sides,” Trump said, returning to his original position about the protest in Charlottesville, saying that an extreme right demonstration in which marchers held torches and Swastikas and chanted racist and anti-Semitic slogans contained some “bad people …. but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”

Trump accused counter-demonstrators of being as violent as the white supremacists.

“What about the fact they came charging — that they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do,” he said.

“I think there is blame on both sides,” Trump said.

The President’s fury was first sparked when he was challenged by reporters on his handling of Charlottesville, evidence of how Trump’s extreme sensitivity to personal slights sometimes leads him into politically self-destructive behavior.

It was a display that will renew questions about the suitability of Trump’s temperament for the presidency, and at a time of increasing tensions around the world that will exacerbate fears he will be unable to control his emotions at a time of crisis as commander-in-chief.

Yes. He was indeed in a towering temper, and he made it crystal clear how unpleasant and frightening he can be.

The rant about taking down the statues of Confederate traitors is right out of the white supremacist Big Book of Grievances.

“You’re changing history. You’re changing culture. And you had people, and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists.”

It did not take long for key figures in the extreme right movement to take comfort in Trump’s remarks, after the news conference appeared to nudge the President closer to an isolated spot on the far right of US politics.

“Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa, wrote David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, on Twitter.

That’s where we are.

The overall impression of Trump’s performance was of a president out of control, who is captive to his whims and instincts and defies any attempt to manage him — including by his new Chief of Staff John Kelly.

“That was all him — this wasn’t our plan,” a senior White House official told CNN’s Jeff Zeleny.

One person who has spent time with Trump over the past 24 hours describes the President as “distracted” and “irritable” in his interactions with top aides. Trump felt pressured into the Monday statement by staff members, the person said. As he went about his day Tuesday, Trump was upset and repeatedly returned to the topic, the person said, culminating in the lobby press conference.

CNN senior political analyst David Axelrod compared Trump to a “runaway truck, there are no brakes, there is no reverse.”

Axelrod also questioned why Kelly and other Trump aides even allowed the President to appear before reporters on Tuesday, given their presumed knowledge of the state of his mood over the Charlottesville coverage.

But ultimately, Tuesday’s stunning appearance will be remembered for the sentiments that passed the lips of a President of the United States.

In the long and tortured history of a nation still trying to work through its complicated story on race, Trump’s meltdown will stand out, as a moment ripped from the darkest pages of history and transposed into the 21st Century.

In the process, he appears to have abdicated any claim to the traditional presidential role as a moral voice for the nation and the world.

That’s where we are.

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Excuse me, excuse me

Aug 15th, 2017 5:24 pm | By

The whole hideous thing, in case you want to consult it.

The “Nazis: bad or good?” part starts around 7:30.

The “both groups” part starts around 14:30.

There are way too many guest appearances by the word “harrible.”

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David Duke praised Mr. Trump’s comments

Aug 15th, 2017 4:00 pm | By

The Nazi in chief gave a ragey press conference (or q&a session or whatever) this afternoon, by way of making sure we understood that he’s just as disgusting as we thought.

President Trump angrily defended himself on Tuesday against criticism that he did not specifically condemn Nazi and white supremacist groups following the weekend’s deadly racial unrest in Virginia, and at one point questioned whether the movement to pull down statues of Confederate leaders would escalate to the desecration of George Washington.

In a long, combative exchange with reporters at Trump Tower in Manhattan, the president repeatedly rejected a torrent of bipartisan criticism for waiting two days before naming the right-wing groups and placing blame on “many sides” for the violence on Saturday that ended with the death of a young woman after a car crashed into a crowd.

He’s like everybody’s least favorite relative, and it’s always Thanksgiving, and you can never leave.

Mr. Trump defended those gathered in the Charlottesville park to protest the statue’s removal, saying, “I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I’ve condemned many different groups. Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch.”

Yes they were. That’s what they were there for. That’s what the rally was about.

Mr. Trump unleashed a torrent of frustration at the news media, saying they were being “fake” because they did not acknowledge that his initial statement about the Charlottesville protest was “very nice.”

That’s because it was not “very nice.” Nor was it moderately nice or a tiny bit nice. It was zero nice at all.

The president added that blame for the violence in the city – which also took the lives of two Virginia state troopers when their helicopter crashed – should also be on people from “the left” who came to oppose the nationalist protesters.

“You had a group on one side and the other, and they came at each other with clubs, and it was vicious and horrible. It was a horrible thing to watch,” the president said. “There is another side. There was a group on this side, you can call them the left. You have just called them the left, that came violently attacking the other group. You can say what you want. That’s the way it is.”

…

The president’s breathtaking statements inflamed and stunned people across Twitter.

“White supremacy is repulsive,” wrote Speaker Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin. “This bigotry is counter to all this country stands for. There can be no moral ambiguity.”

So do something about it. Step up. Do something.

David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, praised Mr. Trump’s comments as a condemnation of “leftist terrorists.”

“Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville,” Mr. Duke said in a Twitter post.

Terrific. Absolutely wonderful. We have a raging racist as president and David Duke is thanking him for being such an awesome racist. That’s where we are.

on Tuesday, Mr. Trump returned to his initial feelings about the subject, which poured out without much prompting from reporters at Trump Tower.

“There are two sides to a story. I thought what took place was horrible moment for our country, a horrible moment. But there are two sides to the country,” the president said.

Mr. Trump said his initial statement on Saturday was shaped by a lack of information about the events on the ground in Charlottesville, even though television statements had been broadcasting images of the violence throughout the morning.

“There was no way of making a correct statement that early,” the president said. “I had to see the facts, unlike a lot of reporters. I didn’t know David Duke was there. I wanted to see the facts.”

But Mr. Trump also made it clear that even now –- with the benefit of hindsight -– he does not accept the overwhelming criticism that he should have reserved his condemnation for the white supremacist and Nazi groups.

But referring to the reporters assembled, he insisted that he had watched the protests “much more closely than you people watched it.” He said that he believes there were “bad” people on both sides, and he criticized other for being unwilling to say that.

“You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent,” the president said. “Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now. You had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit and they were very, very violent.”

The US president is an authoritarian fascist, and the “checks and balances” aren’t doing a damn thing about it.

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Show us your papers

Aug 15th, 2017 12:05 pm | By

Sessions is watching us.

The Justice Department is trying to force an internet hosting company to turn over information about everyone who visited a website used to organize protests during President Trump’s inauguration, setting off a new fight over surveillance and privacy limits.

What?? On what grounds? It’s not as if people brought guns or drove cars into the crowd.

Federal investigators last month persuaded a judge to issue a search warrant to the company, Dreamhost, demanding that it turn over data identifying all the computers that visited its customer’s website and what each visitor viewed or uploaded.

The company says that would result in the disclosure of a large volume of information about people who had nothing to do with the protests. Over 1.3 million requests were made to view pages on the website in the six days after inauguration alone, it said.

Dreamhost is fighting the warrant as unconstitutionally broad.

“In essence, the search warrant not only aims to identify the political dissidents of the current administration, but attempts to identify and understand what content each of these dissidents viewed on the website,” two lawyers for Dreamhost, Raymond Aghaian and Chris Ghazarian, wrote in a court motion opposing the demand.

Obama set some bad precedents in this area.

The fight, which came to light on Monday when Dreamhost published a blog post entitled “We Fight For the Users,” centers on a search warrant for information about a website, disruptj20.org, which served as a clearinghouse for activists seeking to mobilize resistance to Mr. Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.

The website featured maps to organize blockades of intersections arranged around various themes — like feminism, gay rights, racial justice, climate change, immigrant rights, antiwar, and labor — and tips for legal observers. It offered printable protest signs, many critical of Mr. Trump, and afterward it posted pictures of protests.

There was, the Times says, a minority faction at the protest that did do the usual anarchist-Antifa thing.

Rioting by a small group of anarchists has become common at broader left-wing demonstrations for the past generation, such as during anti-free trade protests outside World Trade Organization talks in Seattle in 1999.

During the Trump inauguration, such protesters broke the windows of shops and bus stop shelters, set a limousine on fire and threw rocks at police in riot gear, who fired tear gas at crowds. One masked man sucker-punched Richard Spencer, a prominent white nationalist, as he was being interviewed; a video of that assault was widely shared on the internet.

Therefore, the feds need to spy on all 1.3 million people who visited the web site.

Several civil rights groups criticized the Justice Department as going too far.

“People should be free to exercise their legitimate free-expression rights and explore new points of view without worrying that any digital footprints they leave could land them in a government database later,” said Sarah St. Vincent, a Human Rights Watch researcher and advocate who focuses on national security, surveillance and domestic law enforcement. “That could have a real chilling effect on web-based free speech.”

I daresay that’s the plan.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog


In Trump’s world, there isn’t really right and wrong

Aug 15th, 2017 10:09 am | By

Chris Cillizza explains Trump’s thinking on the whole fascism is bad-I love fascism thing.

On Monday night, just hours after he had, finally, condemned in harsh terms the neo-Nazis and white supremacists involved in violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, President Donald Trump took to Twitter. And he retweeted thisfrom a man named Jack Posobiec:

“Meanwhile: 39 shootings in Chicago this weekend, 9 deaths. No national media outrage. Why is that?”

It’s true, there were many shootings in Chicago over the weekend. It was 30, not 39, according to a report in the Chicago Sun-Times. Nine people died. But this is more about who Trump chose to retweet.

Posobiec is a well-known figure on Twitter — he has more than 181,000 followers — thanks to his vociferous defenses of Trump and his willingness to promote conspiracy theories.

He is, to put it kindly, an unreliable source. He peddles falsehoods. He is a provocateur, more interested in making headlines than adhering to established facts.

He’s the guy who’s organizing that stupid “March on Google” to protest against all this weak girly apologizing for talking sexist shit.

So why would Trump RT someone like that?

Maybe he didn’t know who Posobiec is…but it’s a lot more likely that he did know and that’s just what he likes.

Remember this: In Trump’s world, there isn’t really right and wrong. There are people who love him/work for his interest and people who hate him/work against his interests. There is no gray area between those two poles.

If you are in the love category, you are, by definition, good. The reverse is true for those Trump puts in the hate column.

And that’s Trump – a moral vacuum. In Trump’s world, Trump is all there is.

Can you imagine a more hellish world?

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Walk away

Aug 15th, 2017 9:17 am | By

Two more CEOs quit Trump’s manufacturing council yesterday after Kenneth Frazier led the way. He just said on Twitter that he can find plenty more where they came from, but I bet he’ll find it’s not that easy. I figure a lot of CEOs, maybe even most of them, won’t want the bad publicity.

The aftermath of the violence at a neo-Nazi and white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, represents the latest break between Trump, who sold himself as a businessman president, and leaders of corporate America.

They have also loudly opposed him on immigration and his decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement.

He is a businessman president…but he’s not a CEO president. His experience is of running a family business, not a large corporation. His experience is in marketing and construction, not manufacturing. His skill set…I honestly don’t know what that is, apart from skill at being a conspicuous noisy public asshole.

Kevin Plank, the CEO of Under Armour (UA), quit the council later in the day.

“Under Armour engages in innovation and sports, not politics,” he said in a statement. He said he would “continue to focus my efforts on inspiring every person that they can do anything through the power of sport which promotes unity, diversity and inclusion.”

Intel (INTC, Tech30) CEO Brian Krzanich was somewhat more direct.

“We should honor — not attack — those who have stood up for equality and other cherished American values. I hope this will change, and I remain willing to serve when it does,” he wrote in a blog post on the company’s website late Monday.

“I resigned because I want to make progress, while many in Washington seem more concerned with attacking anyone who disagrees with them,” he said.

It would be good if they all quit, and if no one would accept an invitation to replace them. Maybe then the Republicans would get serious.

Updating to add: Jake Tapper reports a fourth walker away.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 2 comments


Trump hearts Arpaio

Aug 15th, 2017 8:10 am | By

Trump. This morning. He retweeted a cartoon of a train killing a reporter. Haha. It’s one of his funny jokes, you see. Haha. If only all the reporters were dead, so that all we knew about Trump would come from his own PR team. Haha. So funny.

President Trump has retweeted a cartoon of a train bearing the Trump logo killing a CNN reporter, just days after a protester at a white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was fatally run down by a driver who participated in that rally. The cartoon reads “Fake news can’t stop the Trump train.” In July, Trump shared a GIF of himself beating the CNN logo to a pulp. Thirty minutes after promoting the cartoon at 7 a.m. Tuesday, it was deleted from Trump’s Twitter feed.

Thirty minutes too late, because we’ve seen it now.

Here’s something else he retweeted, and this one is still there.

He’s thinking about pardoning Joe Arpaio, whom Fox & friends calls the “colorful” former Arizona sheriff. No, he wasn’t a “colorful” sheriff, he was a sadistic sheriff who got away with it for years. NBC News takes a more sober view of him.

Critics said the pardon would be an endorsement of racism and further hypocrisy on the part of the president and blasted Trump for “attempting to lionize” Arpaio by calling him a ‘great American patriot’ despite his racial profiling of Latinos…

Arpaio is facing sentencing in October following his conviction on criminal contempt of court. A federal judge found Arpaio willfully disobeyed orders to stop arresting immigrants solely on the suspicion that they were in the country illegally. Before that, Arpaio had also been found to be ignoring court orders to stop racially profiling and illegally detaining Latinos.

So this is his poke in the eye to the rest of us for the fact that he was forced to pretend to condemn racism yesterday. This is his “Hahahaha I didn’t mean a word of it, suckers. If you force me to pretend I hate racism I’ll just do something extra racist an hour later.”

Salvador Reza, a Phoenix community organizer, said in a statement that Trump was throwing a bone to Nazi and Ku Klux Klan supporters after being forced to condemn them.

“He is also sending a signal to law enforcement nationwide that they can disobey a federal judge and disregard the constitution, whenever the victims are racially profiled for their ethnicity, color of skin or national origin,” said Reza.

Cecilia Wang, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, said if Trump follows through, he would be pardoning Arpaio’s “flagrant violation of federal court orders that prohibited the illegal detention of Latinos.”

“Make no mistake,” said Wang, “this would be an official presidential endorsement of racism.”

Official and conspicuous and advertised – by Trump, on Twitter. He’s letting us know. He wants to make sure we know. Mr Birther, Mr Kill the Central Park 5, Mr They’re all rapists, Mr Many sides, many sides – he wants to make damn sure we know. Trump despises brown and black people and he wants us to be in no doubt about that.

“He has done a lot in the fight against illegal immigration. He’s a great American patriot and I hate to see what has happened to him,” Fox reported Trump said of Arpaio.

He wants to be very sure we know.

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March to keep women out of Google

Aug 14th, 2017 5:31 pm | By
March to keep women out of Google

Ah yes, of course they are.

Members of the alt-right are planning to protest Google for “silencing dissenting voices.”

The #MarchOnGoogle website says protests are planned at Google headquarters on August 19 in five cities: Mountain View, Calif., New York City, Washington D.C., Austin, and Boston.

Behold: a manifesto.

Capture

It’s time to #MarchOnGoogle

Google is a monopoly, and its abusing its power to silence dissent and manipulate election results.

Their company YouTube is censoring and silencing dissenting voices by creating “ghettos” for videos questioning the dominant narrative.

We will thus be Marching on Google!

People across the country will be protesting in front of the offices of every Google office.

Protesters may also be exercising their free speech rights, which Google does not respect, by protesting in front of the homes of Google’s executive team.

The date of the protests will be announced soon.

In the meantime, bookmark this page, and…

Post to the hashtag #MarchOnGoogle with your best memes.

All on the theme “bitchez R diffrunt”?

Activist and protest march organizer Jack Posobiec told The Mercury News that Google’s recent firing of James Damore, who wrote a controversial diversity memo, was part of the impetus for the protest. “Google’s firing of James Damore is the flashpoint here,” he said. “An engineer fired for simply expressing an opinion that ran counter to Google’s politically-charged atmosphere of an “Ideological Echo Chamber” as (Damore) put it. Real Americans are sick of Big Tech’s crackdown on free speech and we’re taking to the streets.”

All workplaces must be safe for Men who need to explain why women are Different From Men and coincidentally but inescapably thus Not Suited For Work At Google…and other places whose names will be supplied upon request or upon receipt of a Manifesto, whichever comes first. Or second.

The dudebros

United

Will never be defeated.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 7 comments
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They came to hear the sound of bones being broken

Aug 14th, 2017 5:11 pm | By

Siva Vaidhyanathan wrote about Charlottesville for the Times today.

He and his wife and his friends have been discussing what to do about the Nazi rally all summer.

We could join many of our neighbors for teach-ins at the university, discussing racial history, prospects for diversity and paths toward justice. The University of Virginia had arranged a slate of public programs to give people a safe place to convene, commune and debate while armed, angry white supremacists invaded our downtown, just a mile and a half from the university.

Or we could join thousands of our neighbors who had pledged to confront the Nazis, risking broken bones, pepper-sprayed eyes, arrest or worse. We had friends and neighbors on both sides of this choice. And we saw virtue in both actions.

One school of thought says we should deny these extremists attention, as if attention were the oxygen that feeds their flaming torches. The other calls for direct confrontation: Show them they are unwelcome, outnumbered, and that the community is bravely united in disgust.

It’s hard to deny them attention unless everyone does it, and how do you make that happen? Anyway, is it really just attention that they want?

Plus, as we had learned from previous such assaults on our community, the hate groups were not just after attention. They wanted conflict. They came to hear the sound of flesh being struck, bones being broken. So the idea of denying them attention seemed less significant as the event drew closer. Still, there were compelling reasons to avoid confrontation.

The guns, the violence. Those are compelling reasons. They have a daughter. They stayed away.

I now believe we made the wrong choice. Does my status as a parent make me special? It shouldn’t. A young man named Dre Harris was ambushed in a parking lot and took dozens of blows by club-wielding thugs. He took them so I wouldn’t have to. Next time I will stand on the street with my neighbors, even at the risk of injury or death. It’s the least I can do to repay those who stood bravely this time.

We knew it would be violent. These racists are not a joke. They are not weak or small in number. They are not just pining for attention. This was not a media stunt. They did not come to offer “speech.” They did not come to engage in “debate.” They came here to hurt us.

And they did, and they’re hugging themselves with glee today.

These invaders hate my family. They threaten my country. They are numerous. They are emboldened. They are organized. They have friends in the White House. They are armed. They came in July. They came in August. And now they promise to return to Charlottesville to hurt more of us.

Charlottesville is an ideal stage for them to perform acts of terrorism. This was the home of Thomas Jefferson, the man who codified religious tolerance in colonial Virginia and who declared “all men are created equal.” It’s also the home of Thomas Jefferson, the man who owned, sold, raped and had whipped people he considered racially inferior to him. It’s the site of the University of Virginia, an institution steeped in conservative traditions that echo the Old South. And it’s the site of the University of Virginia, an elite, global research university with a cosmopolitan faculty and student body.

And then there’s that statue of Lee…you know, the traitorous general who did his best to destroy the United States in order to preserve slavery. That guy.

Two years ago, this city engaged in a civil conversation about how we would like our public monuments to represent our city. Last year, the City Council, after significant debate and dissent, voted to move two Confederate statues from two small neighborhood parks in the center of town to McIntire Park, a large, grassy park on the north side of the city. There, the monuments could remind us of our hateful, shameful past, but they would not represent our present or future.

We in Charlottesville demand the right to express our community values, not be bound by those of the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy. We demand that the rest of this country recognize how serious the threat of racial violence is. We never had illusions. It’s in our air and water. It’s our local history.

This is not about “free speech.” It never was. There is no “free speech” if anyone brandishes firearms to intimidate those they despise. You can’t argue with the armed. The Nazis told us their intentions clearly on Saturday. This, to them, is about “blood and soil.” They are serious. So are we.

If only the people at the top were.

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“We polled the race stuff and it didn’t matter.”

Aug 14th, 2017 11:44 am | By

Greg Sargent at the Post talked to Eric Foner, which is a wise thing to do.

The New York Times reports that a wide range of Trump’s advisers privately urged him to call out the white nationalists directly, but he kept steering the conversation back to a breakdown of “law and order.” We’ve seen this refusal to give in to pressure to condemn racism before. Trump dragged his feet before disavowing David Duke’s support. And Joshua Green’s new book on Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannonreports that in August 2016, as Hillary Clinton elevated the issue of white nationalism to national prominence with a major speech, the Trump campaign internally decided not to go too far in renouncing it. Bannon told Green: “We polled the race stuff and it didn’t matter.”

Didn’t matter to their numbers, he means.

It is likely that Trump views this whole affair as being all about him — that is, as all about whether he will surrender to his foes. He seems incapable of grasping that amid such crises, his office carries with it certain very grave responsibilities to the American people.

There is a reason we generally want our presidents to speak out against racism against African Americans amid outbreaks of racial strife and violence. They are well positioned to remind the nation of our founding creed, and of our most conspicuous betrayal of it — of the historically unique experience of African Americans as targets of centuries of violent subjugation, as well as sustained domestic terrorism and deeply ingrained racism, which continues today.

Our original sin, as a friend put it yesterday.

We need our presidents to say “that racism is a deeply entrenched feature of American society that must be combated at every level,” Eric Foner, the renowned historianof American racial relations, told me. “Racism is the deepest inequality we face. There are many people who face problems in our society, unfortunately, but racism is the deepest one, and we have to confront and understand it.”

Foner cited previous instances of presidents stepping forward at fraught moments, pointing to John F. Kennedy’s June 1963 speech in which he embraced the civil rights movement, which had been putting immense pressure on our country’s leadership amid the Birmingham protests. “Kennedy, like Trump, had a significant base among white segregationists in the South,” Foner said. “Yet he went on television and said that this is a moral crisis for the nation and we need to face up to it.” Foner pointed out that John McCain, while running for president in 2008, had showed similar leadership when he famously condemned racist attacks on rival Barack Obama.

“The president is supposed to be, and sometimes is, a kind of spokesman for the nation,” Foner continued. “Trump has repudiated that role from the beginning. His inaugural address was completely focused on his voters. It made no effort to appeal to anybody who hadn’t already voted for him.”

As Jeffrey Goldberg points out, moments such as this outbreak of “radical white terrorism” are precisely when we need our elected officials to speak out, forthrightly and with no equivocation. But the rub here is that Trump clearly recognizes no obligation to the broader public of any kind as a function of the office entrusted to him. This isn’t just racism. It’s also his megalomaniacal inability to envision that his role might require duties above and beyond his desire to deepen his bond with certain supporters (which of course is all about him) or the fact that he doesn’t want to be seen surrendering in some vague sense.

That is of course a massive part of what makes him so very odious – his constant focus on himself, and his childish lack of shame about displaying it.

And none of this is going to change; it will only get worse.

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