All entries by this author
Oct 30th, 2018 11:32 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The Times on Trump’s attack on the 14th Amendment:
Doing away with birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants was an idea Mr. Trump pitched as a presidential candidate, but there is no clear indication that he would be able to do so unilaterally, and attempting to would be certain to prompt legal challenges. The consensus among legal scholars is that he cannot, but Mr. Trump and his allies are eager to test it in the Supreme Court.
Naturally. They lost the popular vote by over 3 million in a heavily gerrymandered election, so why wouldn’t they be eager to destroy the amendment that covers equal rights for all citizens?
“We all cherish the language of the 14th
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4 comments
Tags: Fourteenth Amendment, Trump
Oct 30th, 2018 5:09 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Trump adds another item on the white supremacist agenda: getting rid of citizenship by birth aka the Fourteenth Amendment.
President Trump is planning to sign an executive order that would seek to end the right to U.S. citizenship for children of noncitizens born on U.S. soil, he said in a television interview taped on Monday.
A president can’t ditch a constitutional amendment just by signing an order.
The move would be certain to spark a constitutional debate about the meaning of the 14th Amendment. It reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
In other words, the people … Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
11 comments
Tags: Fourteenth Amendment, Trump
Oct 29th, 2018 5:15 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
More orthodoxy-sniffing:
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
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
10 comments
Oct 29th, 2018 4:02 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
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
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
4 comments
Oct 29th, 2018 11:29 am |
By Ophelia Benson
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.
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
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Oct 29th, 2018 10:42 am |
By Ophelia Benson
But hey, it’s all ok because Trump is the champion of The Little Guy (not The Little Gal so much), the scourge of the elites, the populist, the friend of miners and factory workers.
Except, wait a second. He’s being sued for bullshitting people with no money into scam get-rich schemes.
A new lawsuit accuses President Trump, his company and three of his children of using the Trump name to entice vulnerable people to invest in sham business opportunities.
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The 160-page complaint alleges that Mr. Trump and his family received secret payments from three business entities in exchange for promoting them as legitimate opportunities, when in reality they were get-rich-quick schemes that harmed investors, many of whom were
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Tags: Trump
Oct 28th, 2018 5:34 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
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
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11 comments
Oct 28th, 2018 4:21 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
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
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2 comments
Oct 28th, 2018 9:10 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Julia Ioffe asks how much responsibility Trump has for the synagogue massacre.
The summary: he doesn’t have to do the shooting himself to be part of the cause of the shooting.
Culpability is a tricky thing, and politicians, especially of the demagogic variety, know this very well. Unless they go as far as organized, documented, state-implemented slaughter, they don’t give specific directions. They don’t have to. They simply set the tone. In the end, someone else does the dirty work, and they never have to lift a finger — let alone stain it with blood. I saw it while reporting on Russia, where, after unexpected pro-democracy protests and the annexation of Crimea, Putin created an environment so vicious,
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Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
5 comments
Tags: Trump
Oct 27th, 2018 3:01 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Meanwhile the dedicated campaign to get women’s jobs taken away if they don’t agree that men can be women continues.
“Students spoke up” apparently after and because these two inquisitors spat out a bunch of tweets accusing Nina Edge of the usual bullshit, complete with tagging a bunch of people like the nasty wannabe cops they are. And took a bragging selfie to say so.… Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
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