What else is Trump up to today?

Melania and I were treated very nicely yesterday in Pittsburgh. The Office of the President was shown great respect on a very sad & solemn day. We were treated so warmly. Small protest was not seen by us, staged far away. The Fake News stories were just the opposite-Disgraceful! pic.twitter.com/9B9HgCF1G9

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 31, 2018

Making his visit to Pittsburgh yesterday all about him and not at all about the reason he was there: the eleven people murdered and four people injured in a mass shooting by a racist on Saturday. The closest he got to mentioning the actual occasion is “a very sad & solemn day.” (“Solemn” is kind … Read the rest

Asia Bibi has been acquitted.

A Pakistani court has overturned the death sentence of a Christian woman convicted of blasphemy, a case that has polarised the nation.

Asia Bibi was convicted in 2010 after being accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammad in a row with her neighbours.

She always maintained her innocence, but has spent most of the past eight years in solitary confinement.

The landmark ruling has already set off violent protests by hardliners who support strong blasphemy laws.

Demonstrations against the verdict are being held in Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar and Multan. Clashes with police have been reported.

“Hardliners” is a good deal too euphemistic. They want a woman killed for supposedly saying something they don’t like about … Read the rest

Trump went to Pittsburgh even though many people there wanted him to stay away. That seems pretty typical of his callous narcissism. Yes, it seems to be part of a president’s job to assist with public mourning, but that gets complicated when the president spends a lot of time publicly inciting hatred against individuals and groups. He becomes a person you don’t want hanging around a funeral, especially a funeral for people murdered by someone shouting ethnic or religious hatred.

Trump is not a kind or generous or caring man. He’s the opposite. He’s angry, and greedy, and self-centered, and filled with hostility and aggression. He’s terrible in disasters, and it’s hard to imagine he’s any better at funerals … Read the rest

More orthodoxy-sniffing:

AART – Artists Against Rampant Transphobia

October 26 at 2:28 AM · 

It has come to our attention that Liverpool based artist Nina Edge is transphobic and has been spreading her vile bigotry on twitter via the Welsh Streets twitter account. We ask that anyone in the Liverpool art scene takes a stand against this by limiting her involvement in your projects and spreading awareness. Thank you once again for the incredible amount of public support and solidarity we have witnessed since this was discovered. Protect trans women and include them in feminist spaces!

Of course, she hasn’t been doing any such thing. But hey, let’s organize to destroy her anyway!… Read the rest

These 11 wonderful people were at Tree of Life Synagogue. I imagine they were holding prayer books singing Hebrew prayers Jews have loved for thousands of years. I’m sure many were wearing a Tallit, the Jewish Prayer Shawl. May They Rest In Peace. May Their Memory be a Bleasing. pic.twitter.com/wK0uxOwSSS

— Wolf Blitzer (@wolfblitzer) October 29, 2018

… Read the rest

No @PressSec, CNN did not say @realDonaldTrump was directly responsible for the bomb sent to our office by his ardent and emboldened supporter. We did say that he, and you, should understand your words matter. Every single one of them. But so far, you don’t seem to get that. pic.twitter.com/ZbH5DQggWq

— CNN Communications (@CNNPR) October 29, 2018

Look. If you incite hatred, then hatred has been incited. If you have a huge public megaphone – such as for instance the personal Twitter account of a president or prime minister – and you use it to call Xs “Enemy of the People” then you are doing just that. If you rant and rave over and over and OVER again that … Read the rest

A number of people in Pittsburgh have asked Trump to stay away. Of course he is going there anyway.

More than 35,000 people have signed an open letter to President Trump from the leaders of a Pittsburgh-based Jewish group who say the president will not be welcome in the city unless he denounces white nationalism and stops “targeting” minorities after a mass shooting Saturday at a local synagogue left 11 dead.

Nevertheless, the White House announced Trump would travel to Pittsburgh on Tuesday, ignoring the letter as well as a plea from Pittsburgh’s mayor that the president at least refrain from visiting “while we are burying the dead.” The first of the funerals for the 11 shooting victims

There were three terrorist incidents in the US last week, not two. The third was a white man who shot and killed two black people in a Kroger grocery store in Louisville, Kentucky.

https://twitter.com/KrisHuston77/status/1055582650117906434

Zak Cheney-Rice:

Maurice Stallard, 69, was at a Kroger supermarket when Gregory Bush, a 51-year-old white man, walked in and shot him multiple times. Bush then exited the store and shot Vickie Lee Jones, 67, in the parking lot before an armed bystander reportedly fired back, prompting him to flee. Police were unable to confirm accounts that Bush encountered a second armed man, who engaged him in a brief standoff where no shots were fired, according to the New York Times. “Don’t shoot me

And now Brazil.

Brazil on Sunday became the latest country to drift toward the far right, electing a strident populist as president in the nation’s most radical political change since democracy was restored more than 30 years ago.

The new president, Jair Bolsonaro, has exalted the country’s military dictatorship, advocated torture and threatened to destroy, jail or drive into exile his political opponents.

The word “populist” is too cuddly for all that. Far-right authoritarian is a better fit.

Mr. Bolsonaro, who will take the helm of Latin America’s biggest nation, is farther to the right than any president in the region, where voters have recently embraced more conservative leaders in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Paraguay and Colombia. He joins a

Fox News created a panic about a “caravan” of refugees, and Trump latched onto it, and that’s why 11 people were murdered in that synagogue yesterday.

On Tuesday, October 16, President Trump started tweeting.

“The United States has strongly informed the President of Honduras that if the large Caravan of people heading to the U.S. is not stopped and brought back to Honduras, no more money or aid will be given to Honduras, effective immediately!”

And more of the same, and Mike Pence joining in.

The apparent impetus for this outrage was a segment on Fox News that morning, which detailed a migrant caravan thousands of miles away in Honduras. That caravan began sometime in mid-October, made up