Four Pinocchios for Donnie

Aug 18th, 2017 11:19 am | By

Trump said at that scarifying q and a on Tuesday that the counter-protesters didn’t have a permit. He was lying.

“You had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit, and they were very, very violent. . . . You had a lot of people in that [white nationalist] group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest, because you know — I don’t know if you know — they had a permit. The other group didn’t have a permit.”
— President Trump, remarks during a news conference on infrastructure, Aug. 15, 2017

In blaming both sides for the violence in Charlottesville that left one person dead, President Trump twice asserted that the people protesting white supremacists and neo-Nazis lacked a permit, unlike the groups that gathered to protest the possible removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

But that’s turned out to be false, according to documents and interviews obtained by our Washington Post colleague Justin Wm. Moyer.

Walt Heinecke, a professor at the University of Virginia, told Moyer that he received a “special events certificate of approval” for events at McGuffey Park and Justice Park — sites blocks from Emancipation Park, where white nationalists had a permit for a Saturday rally.

Fourth Street, where Fields slammed his car into all those protesters, runs alongside Justice Park.

But anyway they didn’t need permits.

Charlottesville spokeswoman Miriam I. Dickler told Moyer that only one permit was issued for Emancipation Park — the one received by white nationalists staging the “Unite the Right” rally. However, counterprotesters did not need permits to protest that rally, she said.

“Please bear in mind that people do not need a permit to enter a public park, even when another event is scheduled to take place there, nor are they required to have one to be on streets or sidewalks adjacent to or outside the park,” Dickler said in an email.

Trump also said the fascists at U-Va Friday night protested “very quietly.” Not so much.

On Friday night, about 250 white nationalists carrying torches marched and chanted anti-Semitic slogans on the U-Va. campus, where they encountered about 30 students who had locked arms around the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson, according to a Washington Post timeline. Brief clashes took place, resulting in some injuries. U-Va. allows access to open spaces, and so permits were not required for such marches, according to a statement by U-Va. President Teresa A. Sullivan condemning the “intimidating and abhorrent behavior displayed by the alt-right protestors.”

Carrying torches (yes even tiki torches from Wal-Mart) chanting “Jews will not replace us” is not “very quietly.”

The Pinocchio Test

President Trump twice claimed that counterprotesters lacked a permit to demonstrate in Charlottesville. But they did have permits for rallies on Saturday — and they did not need one to go into or gather near Emancipation Park, where white nationalists scheduled their rally. No permits were needed to march on the U-Va. campus on Friday night. The president earns Four Pinocchios.

Four Pinocchios

 

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Also quitting Trump’s administration

Aug 18th, 2017 11:03 am | By

The arts and humanities commission.

The remaining members of a presidential arts and humanities panel resigned on Friday in yet another sign of growing national protest of President Trump’s recent comments on the violence in Charlottesville.

Members of the President’s Committee are drawn from Broadway, Hollywood, and the broader arts and entertainment community and said in a letter to Trump that “Your words and actions push us all further away from the freedoms we are guaranteed.”

“Reproach and censure in the strongest possible terms are necessary following your support of the hate groups and terrorists who killed and injured fellow Americans in Charlottesville,” the commissioners wrote in a letter sent to the White House on Friday morning. “The false equivalencies you push cannot stand. The Administration’s refusal to quickly and unequivocally condemn the cancer of hatred only further emboldens those who wish America ill. We cannot sit idly by, the way that your West Wing advisors have, without speaking out against your words and actions.”

The commission was established by Reagan in 1982.

Members of the commission are Obama-era holdovers, including the actor Kal Penn, a longtime Barack Obama supporter and former White House staffer; director George C. Wolfe; painter and photographer Chuck Close; Jill Udall, the former head of cultural affairs for New Mexico and the wife of Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.); and entertainment executive Fred Goldring, who helped produce the “Yes We Can” video with musician Will.i.am in support of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Another commissioner, talent manager and producer Eric Ortner, explained that the group is quitting because, “Our job is to protect those who tell America’s story, we wanted to be on the right side of history.”

Some of the members had already quit right after the election, but others stayed on pending replacements.

Never mind, Trump still has his beloved “base.”

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No wait, he’s quit

Aug 18th, 2017 10:24 am | By

According to ABC News.

Steve Bannon has resigned from his role as White House chief strategist, ABC News has learned.

A source close to Bannon told ABC News the resignation was effective Aug. 14, exactly one year after he joined the Trump campaign.

“White House chief of staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve’s last day. We are grateful for his service and wish him the best,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement to ABC News.

The alt-right invasion will begin at midnight.

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Bannon will go…one of these days, maybe

Aug 18th, 2017 10:19 am | By

The Times reports that Trump has decided to “remove” Bannon…but also that it may take him some time. (Should we start a pool on whether he can get Bannon out before he himself is “removed”?)

President Trump has told senior aides that he has decided to remove Stephen K. Bannon, the embattled White House chief strategist who helped Mr. Trump win the 2016 election, according to two administration officials briefed on the discussion.

The president and senior White House officials were debating when and how to dismiss Mr. Bannon. The two administration officials cautioned that Mr. Trump is known to be averse to confrontation within his inner circle, and could decide to keep on Mr. Bannon for some time.

Like, say, 3.5 years?

As of Friday morning, the two men were still discussing Mr. Bannon’s future, the officials said. A person close to Mr. Bannon insisted the parting of ways was his idea, and that he had submitted his resignation to the president on Aug. 7, to be announced at the start of this week, but the move was delayed after the racial unrest in Charlottesville, Va.

Mr. Bannon had clashed for months with other senior West Wing advisers and members of the president’s family.

That’s odd. He seems like such a nice guy.

Mr. Bannon’s dismissal followed an Aug. 16 interview he initiated with a writer with whom he had never spoken, with the progressive publication The American Prospect. In it, Mr. Bannon mockingly played down the American military threat to North Korea as nonsensical: “Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.”

He also bad-mouthed his colleagues in the Trump administration, vowed to oust a diplomat at the State Department and mocked officials as “wetting themselves” over the consequences of radically changing trade policy.

Of the far right, he said, “These guys are a collection of clowns,” and he called it a “fringe element” of “losers.”

Then he slapped on a red clown nose and departed singing The Internationale.

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He was trying to fix a broken culture

Aug 18th, 2017 8:12 am | By

The war over the Google memo continues. Business Insider has another conversation with young James Damore.

A lot of the debate about fired Google memo writer James Damore has centered around his views, the science he cited, and whether or not he deserved to get fired.

But what’s been largely ignored is how women within Google felt and his reaction to that.

In an interview with Business Insider, Damore says he wasn’t trying to attack women, but fix what he views as a broken culture within Google. He didn’t express remorse for what he wrote, and went back to his point that he was fired for his conservative views, not the fact that he violated Google’s code of conduct for making assumptions about women, as CEO Sundar Pichai said.

That’s fatuous, of course. He wasn’t fired for his “views” – he was fired for circulating a memo disparaging women and saying they’re too different to work at Google. Nobody at any corporation gives a flying fuck about the “views” of any young minor employee; what the bosses give a fuck about is what employees say to other employees on company time and company computers.

Steve Kovach: So there’s been a lot of debate and discussion about this. And instead of asking you the same questions you’ve been asked probably a thousand times before, I wanted to focus more on the reason why, at least from Google’s perspective, you were fired. And also the impact it had on some of your former colleagues. I’ve spoken to numerous people within the company, and one thing I keep hearing from your former female colleagues is they felt attacked by a lot of what was written in that memo. How would you respond to the women at Google who did feel attacked by what you wrote?

James Damore: Obviously, no one should feel attacked. I was simply trying to fix the culture in many ways. And really help a lot of people who are currently marginalized at Google by pointing out these huge biases that we have in this monolithic culture where anyone with a dissenting view can’t even express themselves. Really, it’s like being gay in the 1950s. These conservatives have to stay in the closet and have to mask who they really are. And that’s a huge problem because there’s open discrimination against anyone who comes out of closet as a conservative.

Yeahhhhhh no. Coming out of the closet is one thing, and telling a set of fellow employees that they are your inferiors is another. If “conservative”=telling other people they’re inferior, then it needs to stay in the closet with the door locked.

Kovach: I don’t think that’s why women particularly felt attacked. They felt attacked by some of the assumptions you were making. We won’t really get into a discussion about whether the science you cited was valid or not, but they didn’t feel attacked because you’re conservative. They felt attacked because of the assumptions you were claiming about women.

Exactly. Nobody gives a damn about James Damore’s politics as such. What people give a damn about is what he is telling his fellow employees.

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Not messing around

Aug 17th, 2017 5:46 pm | By

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The open society and its enemies

Aug 17th, 2017 5:00 pm | By

Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance:

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Coming to a town near you

Aug 17th, 2017 4:40 pm | By

From Facebook: a picture taken on a Charlottesville street last Saturday.

These are not the cops or the military, these are the invaders.

Image may contain: 6 people, outdoor

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At the very top of the facade

Aug 17th, 2017 4:09 pm | By

Speaking of beautiful statues that are causing Donald Trump to mourn and pine when they are moved from one spot to another, a couple of Facebook friends have been reminding us of some that were demolished altogether decades ago. They adorned what was then Bonwit Teller at Fifth Avenue and 56th Street in Manhattan.

At the very top of the facade were limestone relief panels of two nearly naked women brandishing large scarves, as if dancing. The architects were Whitney Warren and Charles Wetmore, super-traditional Beaux-Arts designers of mansions and clubs — a puzzling choice for a such an outré building. In time the reliefs would become a Bonwit Teller signature.

Image result for bonwit teller art deco figures trump

Beginning in the 1960s, a series of corporate takeovers changed the face of retailing. Bonwit’s was sold several times, and it lost the luster that Bergdorf, in particular, was able to retain. Although some ancillary stores survived until 2000, Bonwit Teller closed its store at Fifth and 56th in 1979.

That was good news for Donald Trump, who acquired the old Bonwit’s building and began demolition in 1980. He had promised the limestone reliefs of the dancing women to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which wanted them for its sculpture collection, although the offer was conditional on his being able to remove them. But suddenly workmen jackhammered them to bits.

This act was condemned by, among others, The New York Times, which said: “Evidently, New York needs to make salvation of this kind of landmark mandatory and stop expecting that its developers will be good citizens and good sports.”

The Trump organization replied that the two-ton panels were “without artistic merit,” that saving them would have delayed construction for months and cost $500,000.

Plus they weren’t Confederate generals or General Pershing or Mussolini, so you know, who cares.

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Geneva Convention? That’s for losers

Aug 17th, 2017 3:07 pm | By

Ok, here’s a new low. Trump has tweeted that we should commit a war crime to stop terrorism. (Joke’s on him: war crimes are terrorism.)

President Donald Trump appeared to cite an apocryphal story about an American general executing dozens of Muslim prisoners in the Philippines and defiling their bodies with pig blood in the wake of a deadly terror attack in Barcelona, Spain, Thursday.

After first condemning the attack and offering the United States’ support, the president said to “study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught,” an apparent reference to a debunked legend about World War I-era General John J. Pershing that Trump repeatedly recounted in his speeches on the campaign trail.

The story about Pershing is apocryphal, but Trump apparently believes it. (Now there’s a surprise.)

“He took fifty bullets, and he dipped them in pig’s blood,” Trump said at a rally in South Carolina in February 2016. “And he had his men load his rifles and he lined up the fifty people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the fiftieth person he said ‘You go back to your people and you tell them what happened.’ And for 25 years there wasn’t a problem, okay?”

Historians says there’s no evidence for that.

Trump said at the time the moral of the story was: “We better start getting tough and we better start getting vigilant, and we better start using our heads or we’re not gonna have a country, folks.”

And by “tough” he means we’d better murder a bunch of people as an example and defile them for good measure and then tell their friends at home we did it. A war crime; a deliberate calculated war crime meant to instill terror.

Trump’s tweet came hours after a car crashed into a crowd in Barcelona, Spain. Authorities there have labeled the incident a terrorist attack and taken a suspect into custody.

In addition to celebrating what would be tantamount to a war crime, Trump’s claim that such tactics ended terrorism is also inaccurate. The unrest he cited continued long afterwards and was rooted in conflict over colonial rule.

Ok but it would be so much fun.

https://twitter.com/ezlusztig/status/898256679833227264

https://twitter.com/ezlusztig/status/898256839749414912

https://twitter.com/ezlusztig/status/898257036592390144

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Guest post: The way traitors to the country were so heavily ennobled

Aug 17th, 2017 2:38 pm | By

Originally a comment by Freemage on An early Confederate rallying cry.

If you go to Gettysburg, they have a driving trail that you go along, through the fields. Dotted throughout are the usual monuments describing key battles, but there’s also a host of monuments built declaring when individual units first arrived (typically on the spot of their original location), the unit’s composition and then listing the casualties suffered by the unit.

These monuments appear to have been individually funded by different organizations dedicated to the memory of the units–which means that the Daughters of the Confederacy have been able to inscribe the Confederate memorials with phrases like, “The brave souls from Alabama.” My father-in-law lives in Baltimore, after growing up in the Midwest and spending much of his life in California. When we went to Gettysburg with him during a visit, he was utterly flabbergasted by the way traitors to the country were so heavily ennobled.

My best friend’s wife, OTOH, is from Alabama. She long ago disabused me of the notion that real history is taught down South (she got out for a reason, and is generally quite happy to have done so).

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Stunned, despondent and numb

Aug 17th, 2017 11:40 am | By

The Times reported on the bleak mood among Trump’s people yesterday. (Sometimes urls are oddly…striking. “trump-charlottesville-military-jews-ceos.html” hmmmm yeah.) There’s a good deal of interesting information.

President Trump found himself increasingly isolated in a racial crisis of his own making on Wednesday, abandoned by the nation’s top business executives, contradicted by military leaders and shunned by Republicans outraged by his defense of white nationalist protesters in Charlottesville, Va.

The breach with the business community was the most striking. Titans of American industry and finance revolted against a man they had seen as one of their own, concluding Wednesday morning they could no longer serve on two of Mr. Trump’s advisory panels.

They’re good with the wholly “business can do no wrong” approach, hence the willingness to work with the malevolent incompetent blowhard, but when it becomes outright pro-KKK racism it’s a little too much.

Five armed services chiefs — of the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, the Marines and the National Guard Bureau — posted statements on social media condemning neo-Nazis and racism in uncompromising terms. They did not mention Mr. Trump by name, but their messages were a highly unusual counter to the commander in chief.

So maybe a pro-Trump military coup is a little less likely.

In a tweet on Wednesday night, Mr. Trump urged supporters to “join me” at a campaign rally scheduled for Aug. 22 in Phoenix. But the Phoenix mayor, Greg Stanton, said in his own tweet that he was “disappointed” that the president would hold a political event “as our nation is still healing from the tragic events in Charlottesville.” He urged Mr. Trump to delay the visit.

And that’s not all he said.

“If President Trump is coming to Phoenix to announce a pardon for former sheriff Joe Arpaio…” Oh dear god.

Even more disgustingly, Trump is feeling great. He really told those New York elitist jews a thing or two.

The president’s top advisers described themselves as stunned, despondent and numb. Several said they were unable to see how Mr. Trump’s presidency would recover, and others expressed doubts about his capacity to do the job.

In contrast, the president told close aides that he felt liberated by his news conference. Aides said he seemed to bask afterward in his remarks, and viewed them as the latest retort to the political establishment that he sees as trying to tame his impulses.

Mr. Trump’s venting on Tuesday came despite pleas from his staff, including his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner. Instead of taking their advice to stop talking about the protest, the president eagerly unburdened himself of what he viewed as political correctness in favor of a take-no-prisoners attack on the “alt-left.”

Yeah, that pesky “political correctness” that thinks having armed racists marching through cities is not the best thing ever.

But hey, Steve Bannon is happy.

One aide who felt energized by the president’s actions was the embattled White House chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, who shares Mr. Trump’s anger at the efforts of local governments to remove monuments honoring prominent Confederate figures like Robert E. Lee. The proposed removal of a Lee statue from a public park in Charlottesville spurred the demonstrations last weekend.

Mr. Bannon, whose future in the White House remains uncertain, has been encouraging Mr. Trump to remain defiant.

Defend the Confederacy! Put the white sheet on again!

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A big future

Aug 17th, 2017 10:52 am | By

In happier news…

PPE at Oxford is what people do when they plan to go into Parliament.

Hitchens did PPE.

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An early Confederate rallying cry

Aug 17th, 2017 9:56 am | By

Ok that email that Trump’s lawyer forwarded to like-minded right wing assholes – that’s what it was – a “hey guys looka this” among the prosperous conservative quisling set.

President Trump’s personal lawyer on Wednesday forwarded an email to conservative journalists, government officials and friends that echoed secessionist Civil War propaganda and declared that the group Black Lives Matter “has been totally infiltrated by terrorist groups.”

The email forwarded by John Dowd, who is leading the president’s legal team, painted the Confederate general Robert E. Lee in glowing terms and equated the South’s rebellion to that of the American Revolution against England. Its subject line — “The Information that Validates President Trump on Charlottesville” — was a reference to comments Mr. Trump made earlier this week in the aftermath of protests in the Virginia college town.

In one way the South’s rebellion is comparable to that of the American Revolution against Britain: in both cases it was a slave state rebelling against a non-slave state*. That’s a shameful fact about US history that should never be ignored or brushed aside.

But other than that, it’s not. Britain wasn’t meddling with slavery in America in 1776 and the rebellion was not about slavery. The South’s, of course, was. There’s no equivalent of the Declaration of Independence to accompany the South’s rebellion. There’s no invocation of the self-evident truth that all humans are created equal, as there couldn’t be, because it would cut the legs out from under slavery.

“You cannot be against General Lee and be for General Washington,” the email reads, “there literally is no difference between the two men.”

Goodness, what a ludicrous claim. That’s not true of identical twins, and it’s sure as hell not true of two guys who lived a century apart. If that’s a ridiculously sloppy way of claiming that there ideas were identical or that they led their respective armies for identical reasons…that’s not true either.

Mr. Dowd received the email on Tuesday night and forwarded it on Wednesday morning to more than two dozen recipients, including a senior official at the Department of Homeland Security, The Wall Street Journal editorial page and journalists at Fox News and The Washington Times. There is no evidence that any of the journalists used the contents of the email in their coverage. One of the recipients provided a copy to The New York Times.

“You’re sticking your nose in my personal email?” Mr. Dowd told The Times in a brief telephone interview. “People send me things. I forward them.” He then hung up.

The email’s author, Jerome Almon, runs several websites alleging government conspiracies and arguing that the F.B.I. has been infiltrated by Islamic terrorists. He once unsuccessfully sued the State Department for $900 million over claims of discrimination.

Mr. Almon’s email said that Black Lives Matter, a group that formed to protest the use of force by police against African-Americans, is being directed by terrorists. Mr. Almon blamed the group for deadly violence against police last year in Texas and Louisiana.

The email’s comparison of secessionists to the nation’s Founding Fathers echoes an early Confederate rallying cry, said Judith Giesberg, a Villanova University historian and editor of The Journal of the Civil War Era. Washington’s face appeared on Confederate money, she said, and secessionists were eager to place their rebellion in the context of the American Revolution.

“The first states to secede drew a straight line back to the Revolution,” she said in a telephone interview. “They said they were the inheritors of this revolutionary tradition that traces back to Washington.”

They would, wouldn’t they.

Mr. Almon listed several reasons Lee is no different from Washington. “Both rebelled against the ruling government,” the email reads, adding, “Both saved America.”

Say what? Lee saved America? How does that work?

Then comes a jolt.

Mr. Almon, who is black, said in his email to Mr. Dowd that the protesters should “go back to the ghettos and do raise their children and rebuild places like Detroit.”

He’s black? He’s black and he’s a fan of the Confederacy? That’s…depressing.

We do get the explanation of how Lee “saved America.”

The email that Mr. Dowd forwarded, however, issues a full-throated endorsement of those comments. It declared that Lee “saved America” by opting to surrender rather than launch guerrilla attacks in the final days of the Civil War.

Professor Giesberg said it is true that Lee rejected such tactics, but his decision did not save America.

“It’s like a history I don’t even recognize,” she said.

In an interview, Mr. Almon said he is not a Republican and that he does not reflexively support Mr. Trump.

“I’m against racism,” he said.

But not a system in which white people held black people in chattel slavery. Ok…

*Updating to add: a reader tweeted me to point out that one can hardly call 18th century Britain a non-slave state. True enough. I meant non-domestically slave-owning state, but that’s a quibble. The slave trade wasn’t abolished until 1807 and it continued illegally after that.

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The ascent of white supremacy, Day 5

Aug 17th, 2017 9:19 am | By

Eileen Sullivan at the Times analyzes Trump’s latest white supremacist rant.

Officials in several states have called for the removal of public monuments that have become symbols of the Confederacy.

The Twitter posts were the latest in his escalating remarks that critics contend validate white supremacist groups who led a bloody rally over the weekend in Charlottesville, Va. The proposed removal of a statute of the Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a public park in Charlottesville spurred the demonstrations.

Mr. Trump’s tweets came the morning after his personal lawyer forwarded an email to conservative journalists, government officials and friends that painted Lee in glowing terms and echoed secessionist sentiment from the Civil War era.

WHAT??

Oh, god, how can we even keep up.

On Thursday morning, Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, repeated his criticism of the president’s actions in a series of Twitter posts after Mr. Trump tweeted that Mr. Graham was “publicity seeking.”

“Because of the manner in which you have handled the Charlottesville tragedy you are now receiving praise from some of the most racist and hate-filled individuals and groups in our country. For the sake of our Nation — as our President — please fix this,” Mr. Graham wrote on Twitter.

No. Get him out. 25th Amendment, now.

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Trump mourns the white supremacist statuary

Aug 17th, 2017 9:08 am | By

Trump has been outdoing himself this morning.

Yet another fascist rally, because we haven’t had enough fascist rallies yet. Yet another opportunity to worship the dear führer, because he can never have enough worship because he is so revoltingly narcissistic and needy.

Note the incredible chutzpah of Donald Trump calling anyone else on the planet “publicity seeking” (especially a mere few hours after promoting yet another Worship Trump Rally). Note the familiar but still repellent lying. He did say that; he said exactly that; he treated the Nazis and the people protesting the Nazis as equivalent. And finally note the familiar (again) vulgar pseudo-explanation.

Oh, sure. They “totally misrepresent” it by showing the video in which you say it, loudly and furiously.

Random. Personal. Vulgar. Trashy. Childish.

And then the threnody for the tragic lost Confederacy.

He wants a race war and is doing his best to set one off.

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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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