Trump 22: Not Even Poe Could Make This Shit Up

[fraurosena]

Just when you think he has hit the all time low, he does this:

How many times now, has he incited and glorified violence? I lost count. 

[laPapessaGiovanna]

Please tell me the Trumpy bear is an SNL sketch. People can't be that stupid right?

22 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Just when you think he has hit the all time low, he does this:

How many times now, has he incited and glorified violence? I lost count. 

I hope there are screenshots around.

ETA found ss

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/08/15/trump_retweets_trumptrain_running_over_cnn.html

[Ali]

http://gettrumpybear.com

The website seems legit. I was hoping for satire.

I am waiting for tweets bragging about how there is already more grumpy bears sold than teddy bears because people love him more than Teddy Roosevelt.

[laPapessaGiovanna]

My FJ lesson for the day: Teddy bears are named after President Theodore Roosevelt. I had no idea, well this adds a new level of narcissistic craziness to the Trumpy bear. Thank you @Ali

[GrumpyGran]

10 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

One of the men identified from the Charlottesville fiasco is no longer employed. Apparently people are contacting companies when their employees are identified. "Charlottesville white nationalist demonstrator loses job at libertarian hot dog shop"

  Reveal hidden contents

A white nationalist who participated in the torch-lit march through the University of Virginia’s campus this weekend has lost his job at a Berkeley, Calif., hot dog restaurant after Twitter users posted his photo and place of employment. The employee, Cole White, was identified online after he was photographed among a shouting and torch-wielding mob during the march Friday night in Charlottesville.

After being “inundated with inquiries,” his former employer, Top Dog, in downtown Berkeley, posted a sign on its door that reads: “Effective Saturday 12th August, Cole White no longer works at Top Dog. The actions of those in Charlottesville are not supported by Top Dog. We believe in individual freedom and voluntary association for everyone,” multiple news outlets reported. The shop has a political bent of its own, as it’s well-known in Berkeley for the libertarian stickers and articles posted on its walls, and website.

...

Top Dog issued a statement to the Washington Post that read, in part:

“Cole chose to voluntarily resign his employment with Top Dog and we accepted his resignation. There have been reports that he was terminated.  Those reports are false.  There have been reports that top dog knowingly employs racists and promotes racist theology.  That too is false. Individual freedom and voluntary exchange are core to the philosophy of Top Dog. We look forward to cooking the same great food for at least another 50 years.”

Another part of the statement noted: “We do respect our employees’ right to their opinions. They are free to make their own choices but must accept the responsibilities of those choices.”

When asked by The Post if White would have been permitted to keep his job had he not resigned, the shop declined to comment further.

White was in Charlottesville for the “Unite the Right” rally, which turned deadly on Saturday. James Alex Fields Jr., 20, who was described as a Nazi sympathizer by one of his high school teachers, is accused of ramming his car into a group of counterprotesters, injuring 19 and killing Heather Heyer, 32. Two Virginia state troopers — H. Jay Cullen, 48, and Berke Bates, 40 —  were killed while doing surveillance work during Saturday’s rally when their helicopter crashed.

The mostly male crowd that participated in Friday night’s tiki-torch-lit rally did not cover their faces, and they were widely photographed. A Twitter account, @YesYoureRacist, began posting photographs of participants and uncovering their identities. White was among the first it named. The account would soon identify students enrolled at the University of Nevada and Washington State University, leading both of the schools to issue statements condemning racism.

...

Top Dog, a Berkeley campus fixture, isn’t shy about its libertarian values. “The walls … are covered with libertarian bumper stickers, yellowed newspaper articles urging the privatization of the postal service, and hand-lettered signs with statements like, ‘Beware the leader’ and ‘There’s no government like no government,'” wrote SF Weekly in 1996.

A section of the restaurant’s website is dedicated to “Propergander,” posting articles about sanctuary cities, nuclear war and diversity. A recent article about an anti-diversity memo circulating at Google read, in part, “Jim Crow is long gone, but it seems that Progressives (which gave us Jim Crow in the first place) now are imposing what essentially is a new form of segregation, that being ideological and religious segregation that is more reminiscent of how the former USSR treated dissidents than anything we have seen in private enterprise.” The website was down for a time after the weekend’s incidents but was online as of Monday afternoon.

The restaurant wrote to one Twitter user that it had been overwhelmed with inquiries about White:

...

The restaurant’s Facebook page has been deluged with complaints about White, and its Yelp page is under “active cleanup alert,” due to the high number of people posting negative comments about him (Yelp’s note says it tries to remove comments related more to news events than users’ experience with the business). One sample review: “Great place for Neo-Nazis. For people who aren’t Neo-Nazis? Not so much. A hot dog is a hot dog, but a hot dog place that not only employs Neo-Nazis but posts alt-right screeds on their webpage is a place that makes me want to vomit. But if you hate minorities, you might have a friend in Berkeley’s Top Dog.”

By the way, the hot dogs are kosher-style.

That restaurant sounds like such a lovely place. Please note extreme sarcasm. The whole "propergander" is just too freaking much.

I'm sorry but whenever I hear someone say "I'm a Libertarian" I think "Republican who knows their party is full of intolerant, greedy assholes, so not willing to be identified directly with the party." They seem to eventually end up spewing some right-wing crap and then claiming individual rights and responsibility. Hot Dog stand seems to be struggling with their desire for $$$ as opposed to true colors. Apologies to anyone who may follow the true path of the party but it seems a little naive in this day and age.

Is it wrong that I want a movie called "Get Trumpy" where he's pursued and terrorized by Chucky?

[GreyhoundFan]

Alexandra Petri usually writes sarcastic and funny articles. This article is much more serious than her norm, but it's excellent: "Donald Trump’s despicable words"

Spoiler

There should be no real difficulty in condemning Nazis, white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan. They are, for God’s sake, Nazis and white supremacists. This should not require moral courage. This is obvious. This is the moral equivalent of the text you type to prove you’re not a robot.

President Trump is always, terminally, at a loss for words, but it would be hard to think of worse words at a more vital time than his speeches in the aftermath of the racist, terrorist violence in Charlottesville on Saturday. First, Saturday’s mealy-mouthed speech about “this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. On many sides.” And then Monday’s halting, teleprompted follow-up, in which (two days later) he barely managed to acknowledge that, well, racism and bigotry have no place here.

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. On many sides,” he said Saturday.

On many sides.

It is important when you consider the situation of a man whose face has been crushed by a boot to wonder if any damage might have been done to the boot.

One man’s life has been threatened, but on the other hand, another man’s property has been threatened. (Where have I heard this before? What is this park we are standing in, again?) You must consider and weigh these two things against one another. The North showed considerable aggression against the South, you could say.

This is not good enough. At what point can we stop giving people the benefit of the doubt? “Gotta Hear Both Sides” is carved over the entrance to Hell. How long must we continue to hear from idiots who are wrong? I don’t want to hear debate unless there is something legitimately to be debated, and people’s rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not among those things. They are self-evident, or used to seem so.

“It’s been going on for a long time in our country,” Trump said on Saturday. “Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama, this has been going on for a long, long time. It has no place in America.”

If only. If only it had no place here. If only these statues had sprung up out of the earth on their own.

What did they think the mob was doing, gathered with torches?

Of course they gathered with torches, because the only liberty they have lost is the liberty to gather with torches and decide whose house to visit with terror. That is the right that is denied them: the right to other people’s possessions, the right to be the only person in the room, the right to be the only person that the world is made for. (These are not rights. They are wrongs.) You are sad because your toys have been taken, but they were never toys to begin with. They were people. It is the ending of the fairy tale; because you were a beast, you did not see that the things around you were people and not objects that existed purely for your pleasure. You should not weep that the curse is broken and you can see that your footstool was a human being.

But to rejoice in that discovery you have to stop being a beast first, and they have not. Why would they? Trump promises to turn the world back and bring the curse again. That is implicit in his every speech, a dog whistle strong enough that every dog in America is deaf and in constant pain.

Here we are in the year of our lord 2017 and the president of the United States lacks the moral courage to condemn Nazis and white supremacists. And they are not even making it difficult. They are saluting like Nazis and waving Nazi flags and chanting like Nazis and spewing hatred like Nazis. Maya Angelou was not wrong. When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Especially if what that person is telling you is “I am a Nazi.”

Barely, after two days, he has managed to mumble that their ideology has (should have) no place in our society. Silence sells hats, I guess.

“We’re proud of who we are,” Trump also said, “so we want to get the situation straightened out in Charlottesville, and we want to study it. And we want to see what we’re doing wrong as a country where things like this can happen.”

“We want to see what we’re doing wrong as a country where things like this can happen.”

Hmm, what could it be that we are doing wrong as a country? What is it exactly that has allowed these horrible ideologies to come out of the shadows, waving tiki torches and bringing terror with them? Could it be, Donald, something you’ve said? Could it be the silence that has greeted all your statements, so far past the pale of acceptable discourse that you can’t even see acceptable discourse from where you’re standing? Could it be all the refusal to name a campaign that began with rants about “rapists” and promises of a wall and a Muslim ban, and continued with sexist taunts and promiscuous retweets of conspiracists for the horror that it was? It was silence then from people who wanted to win that got us to where this can happen — this attack and this president, who won’t denounce even the most egregious of groups at the time when they have been responsible for a hideous act of terror.

But we have always been a country where things like this can happen. It is just harder not to notice now. And it is possible, sometimes, to be angrier at the person who makes you notice than at the thing you are seeing.

A truth that murder mysteries get right about human nature is that even when you find a man stabbed before the soup course, someone always wants to finish the soup. All right, someone was murdered, but I didn’t do it, and can this possibly mean I don’t get my soup? There are few things that are harder to shake than the conviction that you have never done anything wrong. You can’t have. It’s you. All right: You are not a murderer. You are a good person. But that does not mean that what you have was not ill-gotten. That does not mean that you deserve everything you have. You have to look at your history and see it, all of it.

“My administration is restoring the sacred bonds of loyalty between this nation and its citizens,” Trump went on, “but our citizens must also restore the bonds of trust and loyalty between one another. We must love each other, respect each other and cherish our history and our future together.”

We must cherish our history. (Somewhere, a dog whimpers.) Can we be a little more specific about what history? Can we be a little more specific about any of this? The specifics are where the principles are. What will we cherish, and what will we disavow? What are we putting on a pedestal, and what are we putting in a museum? Not all history is created equal.

You want many sides? Then history is a good place to start.

Monuments are always misleading, because so little good is unmixed. History contains heroes, but no one is a hero entirely, and no one is a hero for very long. You can be brilliant in some ways and despicable in others. You can be a clean, upright, moral individual in your private life who never swears, treats women with respect, and speaks highly of duty and honor– and go out every day and dedicate yourself to a cause that makes the world worse. You can live a despicable life and yet give people a powerful expression of an idea that makes the world ultimately, slowly, better. It is possible to contain such contradictions.

Thomas Jefferson, presiding spirit of Charlottesville, certainly did. He wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights … life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” but he also wrote in 1769 to the newspaper demanding the return of his property: a man named Sandy, a left-handed shoemaker, “something of a horse jockey.” This is one man’s inconvenient loss of property and another man’s freedom. Many sides.

“So important,” Trump said. “We have to respect each other. Ideally, we have to love each other.”

Maybe. But there is nothing more pathological than the desire to be liked by everyone all the time. If you are continually attracting Nazis and white supremacists, you shouldn’t say, “WOW, everyone LIKES ME! Great!” you should ask yourself, “Where in my life have I gone seriously wrong?”

Who would stand over the body of someone who died protesting a hateful, violence, racist ideology and say that “we have to come together”? That we have to find common ground? I am sure there is common ground to be found with the people who say that some are not fit to be people. The man who thinks I ought not to exist — maybe we can compromise and agree that I will get to exist on alternate Thursdays. Let us only burn some of the villagers at the stake. We can eat just three of the children. All ideas deserve a fair hearing. Maybe we can agree that some people are only three-fifths of people, while we are at it. As long as we are giving a hearing to all views.

Only someone with no principles would think that such a compromise was possible. Only someone with no principles would think that such a compromise was desirable. At some point you have to judge more than just the act of fighting. You have to judge what the fighting is for. Some principles are worth fighting for, and others are not.

Certain truths used to be self-evident, to quote a man whose words were often better than he was.

But to Trump, they aren’t. Trump’s words are no better than he is. They are terrible words. They are the worst words.

 

[Palimpsest]

1 hour ago, Ali said:

http://gettrumpybear.com

The website seems legit. I was hoping for satire.

I am waiting for tweets bragging about how there is already more grumpy bears sold than teddy bears because people love him more than Teddy Roosevelt.

The perfect gift for the man in your life and "introduces children to politics." Yuck.

I think I'd rather buy Trump toilet paper.  Yes, it exists - along with a talking Trump loo roll holder.

[GrumpyGran]

Regarding his morning Twitter BM: What is going on? This is not the usual first fart of the day for him. He's at home, slept in his own bed so you would expect him to be in rare form.

He starts with the CNN crap, which is now, apparently, the first thing he thinks of when he wakes up. But then it is removed? The he just posts re-tweets? Granted they're re-tweets of things he wants to do but it seems like he's trying to claim that he himself is not tweeting antagonist things, he's just re-tweeting the things "people are saying." Maybe Melania is on his ass?

[GreyhoundFan]

@GrumpyGran -- one of those retweets is too funny. Partway down in this article is a great quote:

Spoiler

...

If the president awoke Tuesday thinking his Twitter account would help him regain control of his political narrative, he was mistaken, however, as he also misfired in retweeting a man calling him a “fascist.”

A user named Mike Holden was replying to a Fox News story that said Trump had told the network in an interview that he was considering issuing a presidential pardon for former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was found guilty of defying a judge's order to halt traffic patrols on suspected undocumented immigrants. “He's a fascist, so not unusual,” Holden wrote, only to find himself retweeted by the 45th president of the United States.

< tweet >

Holden has posted a rapid-fire series of tweets and retweets over the past days on British politics and the fallout from the violence in Charlottesville, including a retweet of a cartoon in the Guardian newspaper depicting the White House topped by a KKK-style pointed hood. His Twitter page also has various tributes to Bernard Kenney, a British man who attempted to subdue a far-right gunman who fatally shot British parliament member Jo Cox last year. Kenney, who was stabbed by the attacker Thomas Mair, died Monday.

In a telephone interview with The Washington Post, Holden described himself as a 53-year-old information technology worker who lives near Manchester, England, whose politics are left-wing but not radical. He was bracing for Trump's morning dose of tweets -- which because of of the 5-hour time difference usually land around lunchtime for Holden.

Holden said he had walked away from his computer after his tweet and was shocked when he logged back in. “My Twitter went completely bananas,” he said. Holden, who said he was angered by Trump's response to the Charlottesville violence, hoped more people might question Trump's motives.

“It’s a strong term to use, but I wouldn’t apologize for it,” Holden said of the word "fascist." “Why he retweeted it is beyond me, but maybe he got a taste of his own medicine.”

Holden called the Charlottesville rally a "fascist march."

"For a president to still be at Bedminster playing golf and not come out and say more? From a large catalogue of things he’s done, it seemed among the worst," he said.

Holden quickly set a screen shot of Trump's retweet as his Twitter background image and boasted about the endorsement — kind of — in his bio on the social media site.

“Officially Endorsed by the President of the United States,” he wrote. “I wish that were a good thing.”

...

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I knew about the CEO from Merck, but didn't hear about the others "Merck, Intel, Under Armour CEOs quit council over Trump’s initial response to rally"

Spoiler

Just a month ago, President Trump invited Merck chief executive Kenneth C. Frazier to the White House, calling him one of the “great, great leaders of business in this country.” On Monday morning, Trump singled out Frazier again, this time to express his displeasure over the pharmaceutical executive’s abrupt decision to resign from the president’s American Manufacturing Council.

Frazier, citing a “matter of personal conscience,” said he felt “a responsibility to take a stand against intolerance and extremism” in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville and Trump’s failure to quickly and explicitly condemn the white supremacists who organized the rally.

It took Trump just 54 minutes to respond, calling out Frazier among the legions of activists, celebrities and politicians from both parties expressing similar sentiments.

“Now that Ken Frazier of ­Merck Pharma has resigned from President’s Manufacturing Council, he will have more time to LOWER RIPOFF DRUG PRICES!” Trump tweeted.

Frazier, one of a handful of African American chief executives of Fortune 500 companies, is just the latest corporate executive to break with the administration. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Disney chief Robert Iger stepped down from their roles on White House advisory councils following Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. Former Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick, too, said he would no longer participate in a White House economic council, following an uproar in February over Trump’s travel ban.

Late Monday, Kevin Plank, CEO of Under Armour, said on Twitter that he, too, was stepping down from the manufacturing council. “I love our country and our company and will 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,” Plank wrote in a statement.

Hours later, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich also announced in a blog post that he was resigning from the council “to call attention to the serious harm our divided political climate is causing to critical issues.”

Ever since Trump assumed office, executives have struggled to balance their desire to engage the White House on policy with the growing expectations by some that they exercise a voice on social issues — all at the risk of alienating shareholders and customers on one side or another.

Executives at giants like General Electric, Dell and Dow tried to walk that fine line Monday, saying they would continue to work with the administration, in hopes of representing their companies’ interests, even as they decried hate, bigotry and violent extremism.

But Frazier, without criticizing Trump by name, was the first to choose to part ways Monday. “America’s leaders must honor our fundamental values by clearly rejecting expressions of hatred, bigotry and group supremacy,” Frazier said in a statement tweeted by Merck.

Some rallied to support Frazier.

“I’m thankful we have business leaders such as Ken to remind America of its better angels,” tweeted Meg Whitman, chief executive of technology services giant Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a Trump critic in the past.

Others criticized Frazier for undermining the president, who ultimately denounced white supremacists and neo-Nazis in remarks Monday afternoon, two days after the Charlottesville unrest.

Frazier, chief executive of Merck since 2011, has not been shy about wading into sensitive issues. As a corporate lawyer, he took on a death-row appeal that led him to write about the injustices within the system for capital punishment. (James Willie “Bo” Cochran’s conviction was ultimately overturned). While acting as CEO of Merck, he led a committee investigating child abuse by former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky. Under his leadership, Merck announced that its charitable foundation would suspend donations to the Boy Scouts of America over its anti-gay stance at the time. The Scouts have since changed their policy.

“Ken Frazier has been speaking truth to power since well before he crossed over to the ranks of the powerful,” said Seamus Duffy, a partner at the law firm Drinker Biddle & Reath, who called Frazier a role model for him and a generation of lawyers. “He’s a man of principle, and I think he just couldn’t let himself or his company be associated with an administration that would hesitate to condemn racism.”

Frazier found support among current and past Merck leaders.

“I have known Ken for 25 years, since I first recruited him to Merck. He is always smart, always ethical and repeatedly makes the right decisions. I applaud his decision to step down from the Council,” Roy Vagelos, former chairman and chief executive of Merck said in a statement. “Ken is driven by a strong sense of morality in everything he does and he continues to make me proud.”

Thomas H. Glocer, former chief executive of Thomson Reuters and a Merck board member, encouraged other CEOs to do the same.

“Ken has stood up for true American values,” he wrote in a tweet. “I call on all other members of Trump’s image-burnishing committees to do the same.”

Frazier rose to prominence at Merck when, as general counsel, he was the architect of the company’s legal strategy to aggressively defend itself against lawsuits from people who suffered heart attacks and strokes while taking its Vioxx painkiller. The company eventually settled thousands of cases for $4.85 billion, a fraction of what analysts estimated the company might face if it stuck to its plan to fight every lawsuit.

A Merck spokeswoman said the company had nothing to add beyond Frazier’s statement and declined a request to interview him.

Trump has courted the business community assiduously in his presidency, filling his Cabinet with business leaders and inviting CEOs from various industries to Trump Tower and the White House to advise on an agenda he promised would cut taxes, eliminate regulations and boost jobs.

“We’ll have these meetings every — whenever you need them, actually — but I would say every quarter, perhaps,” Trump said at one gathering.

At an early meeting with pharmaceutical companies, Frazier sat at Trump’s side. Just last month, Frazier was at the White House again, standing beside Trump, with other chief executives, as the president championed an initiative to manufacture better glass packing for drugs.

It is unclear whether Trump’s tweet could portend negative repercussions for Merck or the pharmaceutical industry generally. Trump has repeatedly promised to bring down drug prices and has used harsh language to describe the industry, but has not taken any strong actions.

The president, though, continued to press his cause Monday night, tweeting: “@Merck Pharma is a leader in higher & higher drug prices while at the same time taking jobs out of the U.S. Bring jobs back & LOWER PRICES!”

Ultimately, those who know Frazier said he acted as he did because of his deep convictions, which have guided him throughout his career.

“This is one of the finest men I’ve ever met,” said Jim Sweet, former chairman of Drinker Biddle & Reath, who has known Frazier for four decades — since Frazier was a summer intern at the law firm. “If he knew that [Trump’s tweet] was coming and that was the response, he would have done it anyway. That wouldn’t have inhibited him.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I'm surprised he didn't throw a twitter tantrum about this: "‘New York hates you’: Protesters greet the president at Trump Tower"

Spoiler

When President Trump returned to his hometown of New York City on Monday night, he received anything but a warm welcome.

Trump was returning to his eponymous tower for the first time since being inaugurated.

Protesters gathered in the shadow of Trump Tower on Monday evening, filling the sidewalk for several blocks and forming a gauntlet of signs and chants that ran several blocks down Fifth Avenue. Various organizers and a popular Facebook event had called for people to gather at Trump Tower starting at 5:30 p.m., and law enforcement was ready. Protesters were kept to the sidewalks with metal barricades, and the numbers gradually swelled as the evening progressed.

For hours, protesters chanted “New York hates you!” and “Shame, shame, shame!”

...

New York City is, famously, a liberal bastion (with the notable exception of the borough of Staten Island). Though Trump was born in the borough of Queens and made his name as a Manhattan real estate developer and tabloid fixture, his hometown has been less than proud of its native son.

Numerous protests have racked the city since Trump was elected. Thousands marched up to Trump Tower the night after the election to protest his victory. New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport also saw major protests following Trump’s initial travel ban on individuals from certain Muslim-majority countries.

His first return to Trump Tower was always going to be an affair. But the recent white nationalist demonstrations in Charlottesville — and Trump’s initial blame of “many sides” for the violence that ensued — upset both liberals and conservatives alike.

“His hateful rhetoric caused what happened in Charlottesville,” said Ronald Gerring, who was visiting New York from Chicago along with his wife, Lachandra Geri. Though it was a birthday trip for Gerring, the two decided to protest.

“He didn’t seem to be concerned to voice that he was against Charlottesville. But he’s so against every other issue,” he said.

“I didn’t know we’d have to protest Nazis in 2017,” said James Brennan, who attended the protest with a sign supporting LGBT rights.

On Monday, before traveling to New York City, Trump issued another statement on Charlottesville that more forcefully condemned racist groups. “Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans,” Trump said.

But these newly blunt words did little to erase the skepticism raised by his initial statements.

By the time Trump touched down in New York City, his detractors were ready for a fight. People at the Trump Tower protest spoke out against the president’s position on a number of issues, from immigration to foreign policy to women’s and LGBT rights.

“This is personal for me,” said Bihn Thai, a New York City teacher whose family fled Vietnam after the war. He said his family’s experience as refugees had made him critical of Trump’s strict stance on immigration and accepting refugees.

“He should be a uniter. All he’s done is divide us and Balkanize us” as a country, he said. Thai noted that his family was divided on Trump; his brother, a businessman, supported some of Trump’s economic policies. But Thai said his family was united against the president on most social issues.

In the end, Trump declined to give New Yorkers a show. Though several blacked-out sport utility vehicles and police on motorcycles drove down Fifth Avenue, drawing jeers from the crowd, the president was nowhere in sight. According to the White House pool report, Trump’s motorcade avoided Fifth Avenue and the protesters, whisking the president into his residence without being seen by the crowd.

The lines of protesters eventually thinned out. By 9:30, only a few dozen of the initial demonstrators remained, chanting on the sidewalk as they milled and chatted among themselves in the barricaded street.

“He avoided the people he’s supposed to take care of,” said Ashley Tsegai, 20.

Many protesters felt that though Trump had not seen them, their presence at the demonstration was effective.

“If you’re silent, you’re part of hate speech,” said Carlos Laureano, who had moved to New York from Puerto Rico two years ago. “We can’t be silent.”

 

[sawasdee]

@GreyhoundFan So Petri proves she could make it as a political commentator, as well as a satirist. Brilliant!

Meanwhile, Jennifer Rubin continues her roll...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/08/15/dont-argue-with-pelosi-on-this-one-republicans/?utm_term=.346eb4d6ab38

Spoiler

On Monday, after President Trump’s grudging denunciation of neo-Nazis and white supremacists, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) released a statement:

The President’s statement on Saturday was a direct reflection of the fact that his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, is an alt-right white supremacist sympathizer and a shameless enforcer of those un-American beliefs.  In his long overdue statement today, President Trump called white supremacists ‘repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.’  If the President is sincere about rejecting white supremacists, he should remove all doubt by firing Steve Bannon and the other alt-right white supremacist sympathizers in the White House.

From the beginning, President Trump has sheltered and encouraged the forces of bigotry and discrimination.  President Trump’s failure to immediately denounce white supremacy is well in line with the unmistakable conduct of his Administration toward immigrants, Muslims, and communities of color.

She concluded: “It shouldn’t take the President of the United States two days to summon the basic decency to condemn murder and violence by Nazis and white supremacists.”

It is no longer impossible to imagine that Bannon might be forced to step down. When Pelsoi, Rupert Murdoch and conservative anti-Trump writer David French all agree that he’s a drag on the president, perhaps he will finally return to Breitbart. French writes:

There’s a good reason that white nationalists rejoice at Steve Bannon’s proximity to power. There’s a good reason that countless Americans look at that man so close to the Oval Office and fear his influence on their president’s mind and heart. How can Trump look the American people in the face and say that he unequivocally condemns the alt-right when one of the men who did more than anyone else to enhance its influence works down the hall?

Whether it works or not, Republicans should join Pelosi. Republicans need to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth: Their party supported and still supports Trump, who feeds the monster of white resentment and who focuses their anger, fear and frustration on minorities.

The memes that immigrants are “stealing our jobs”; Christianity is a persecuted religion in the United States; Mexican immigrants are “murderers”; and millions of illegal immigrants voted in the election have given white nationalists rhetorical cover to propound their even more extreme racist views. Bannon and company have introduced in the Oval Office the “blood and soil” definition of nationalism, the suggestion that the media is the enemy of the people and a nonstop attack on the truth. They refused to abandon a presidential candidate who attacked a federal court judge on the basis of race, for heaven’s sake.

More than a year ago, the New York Times reported:

In countless collisions of color and creed, Donald J. Trump’s name evokes an easily understood message of racial hostility. Defying modern conventions of political civility and language, Mr. Trump has breached the boundaries that have long constrained Americans’ public discussion of race.

Mr. Trump has attacked Mexicans as criminals. He has called for a ban on Muslim immigrants. He has wondered aloud why the United States is not “letting people in from Europe.”

His rallies vibrate with grievances that might otherwise be expressed in private: about “political correctness,” about the ranch house down the street overcrowded with day laborers, and about who is really to blame for the death of a black teenager in Ferguson, Mo. In a country where the wealthiest and most influential citizens are still mostly white, Mr. Trump is voicing the bewilderment and anger of whites who do not feel at all powerful or privileged.

Trump and his apologists can deny until the cows come home that their intent was to stoke white racism, but in retrospect it’s clear that was to be the means by which Trump won the White House. Trump “opened the door to assertions of white identity and resentment in a way not seen so broadly in American culture in over half a century, according to those who track patterns of racial tension and antagonism in American life,” the Times reported. “Dozens of interviews — with ardent Trump supporters and curious students, avowed white nationalists, and scholars who study the interplay of race and rhetoric — suggest that the passions aroused and channeled by Mr. Trump take many forms, from earnest if muddled rebellion to deeper and more elaborate bigotry.”

This does not mean only racists supported Trump, nor does it mean that some of the positions he has taken have rationales not rooted in racism. But it is no longer deniable that Trump’s campaign and presidency have been fueled by white resentment toward minorities. And now we have unbridled expressions of white nationalism, something about which Trump was warned:

His slow reaction angered his critics even more as they were in the knowledge that a range of authority figures had warned Trump of the threat that white supremacists posed months before James Alex Fields Jr. plowed his car into counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer. An intelligence bulletin obtained by Foreign Policy, entitled “White Supremacist Extremism Poses Persistent Threat of Lethal Violence” and dated May 10, shows that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security briefed Trump as recently as May, at least indirectly, about the threat of the white supremacist movement and the threat of further attacks by members of this ultra-conservative group.

This does not mean only racists supported Trump, nor does it mean that some of the positions he has taken have rationales not rooted in racism. But it is no longer deniable that Trump’s campaign and presidency have been fueled by white resentment toward minorities. And now we have unbridled expressions of white nationalism, something about which Trump was warned:

His slow reaction angered his critics even more as they were in the knowledge that a range of authority figures had warned Trump of the threat that white supremacists posed months before James Alex Fields Jr. plowed his car into counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer. An intelligence bulletin obtained by Foreign Policy, entitled “White Supremacist Extremism Poses Persistent Threat of Lethal Violence” and dated May 10, shows that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security briefed Trump as recently as May, at least indirectly, about the threat of the white supremacist movement and the threat of further attacks by members of this ultra-conservative group.

“We assess lone actors and small cells within the white supremacist extremist movement likely will continue to pose a threat of lethal violence over the next year,” the bulletin reads.

The FBI explicitly says in the briefing that white supremacists are to blame for the majority of domestic extremism. They “were responsible for 49 homicides in 26 attacks from 2000 to 2016…more than any other domestic extremist movement,” the document states.

Not only have the security services warned Trump about the threat of white supremacists, but so too have his Democratic rivals and predecessors.

What did Trump do in response? Did he ignore a domestic terrorism threat because it undercut his political message?

And so we come to the present. Unless and until Trump is impeached, resigns or loses reelection, he and his brand of politics dominate the GOP. The only means to free itself of the yoke of Trump is to discard the personnel and policies that embody his white racial resentment ploy. With a unified voice, Republicans can denounce the president’s alt-right advisers, the voting fraud commission (which itself is a fraud), the proposed pardon of anti-immigrant hero Joe Arpaio and other symbols of Trump’s identification with white grievance. The GOP either rejects Trump or once and for all it sacrifices the Party of Lincoln to a ragtag band of white nationalists — some more subtle than others but all an anathema to American democracy.

 

ETA And his reaction to the warnings was to cancel funding for FBI monitoring of far right groups....

[Cartmann99]

If you are cruising around town with Trumpy Bear on your motorcycle, or giving it to children, that thing better be washable. If it is washable, I bet the Trumpdo will never look like it did before you washed it. 

You know what they say about fools and money...

[fraurosena]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Alexandra Petri usually writes sarcastic and funny articles. This article is much more serious than her norm, but it's excellent: "Donald Trump’s despicable words"

  Hide contents

There should be no real difficulty in condemning Nazis, white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan. They are, for God’s sake, Nazis and white supremacists. This should not require moral courage. This is obvious. This is the moral equivalent of the text you type to prove you’re not a robot.

President Trump is always, terminally, at a loss for words, but it would be hard to think of worse words at a more vital time than his speeches in the aftermath of the racist, terrorist violence in Charlottesville on Saturday. First, Saturday’s mealy-mouthed speech about “this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. On many sides.” And then Monday’s halting, teleprompted follow-up, in which (two days later) he barely managed to acknowledge that, well, racism and bigotry have no place here.

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. On many sides,” he said Saturday.

On many sides.

It is important when you consider the situation of a man whose face has been crushed by a boot to wonder if any damage might have been done to the boot.

One man’s life has been threatened, but on the other hand, another man’s property has been threatened. (Where have I heard this before? What is this park we are standing in, again?) You must consider and weigh these two things against one another. The North showed considerable aggression against the South, you could say.

This is not good enough. At what point can we stop giving people the benefit of the doubt? “Gotta Hear Both Sides” is carved over the entrance to Hell. How long must we continue to hear from idiots who are wrong? I don’t want to hear debate unless there is something legitimately to be debated, and people’s rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not among those things. They are self-evident, or used to seem so.

“It’s been going on for a long time in our country,” Trump said on Saturday. “Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama, this has been going on for a long, long time. It has no place in America.”

If only. If only it had no place here. If only these statues had sprung up out of the earth on their own.

What did they think the mob was doing, gathered with torches?

Of course they gathered with torches, because the only liberty they have lost is the liberty to gather with torches and decide whose house to visit with terror. That is the right that is denied them: the right to other people’s possessions, the right to be the only person in the room, the right to be the only person that the world is made for. (These are not rights. They are wrongs.) You are sad because your toys have been taken, but they were never toys to begin with. They were people. It is the ending of the fairy tale; because you were a beast, you did not see that the things around you were people and not objects that existed purely for your pleasure. You should not weep that the curse is broken and you can see that your footstool was a human being.

But to rejoice in that discovery you have to stop being a beast first, and they have not. Why would they? Trump promises to turn the world back and bring the curse again. That is implicit in his every speech, a dog whistle strong enough that every dog in America is deaf and in constant pain.

Here we are in the year of our lord 2017 and the president of the United States lacks the moral courage to condemn Nazis and white supremacists. And they are not even making it difficult. They are saluting like Nazis and waving Nazi flags and chanting like Nazis and spewing hatred like Nazis. Maya Angelou was not wrong. When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Especially if what that person is telling you is “I am a Nazi.”

Barely, after two days, he has managed to mumble that their ideology has (should have) no place in our society. Silence sells hats, I guess.

“We’re proud of who we are,” Trump also said, “so we want to get the situation straightened out in Charlottesville, and we want to study it. And we want to see what we’re doing wrong as a country where things like this can happen.”

“We want to see what we’re doing wrong as a country where things like this can happen.”

Hmm, what could it be that we are doing wrong as a country? What is it exactly that has allowed these horrible ideologies to come out of the shadows, waving tiki torches and bringing terror with them? Could it be, Donald, something you’ve said? Could it be the silence that has greeted all your statements, so far past the pale of acceptable discourse that you can’t even see acceptable discourse from where you’re standing? Could it be all the refusal to name a campaign that began with rants about “rapists” and promises of a wall and a Muslim ban, and continued with sexist taunts and promiscuous retweets of conspiracists for the horror that it was? It was silence then from people who wanted to win that got us to where this can happen — this attack and this president, who won’t denounce even the most egregious of groups at the time when they have been responsible for a hideous act of terror.

But we have always been a country where things like this can happen. It is just harder not to notice now. And it is possible, sometimes, to be angrier at the person who makes you notice than at the thing you are seeing.

A truth that murder mysteries get right about human nature is that even when you find a man stabbed before the soup course, someone always wants to finish the soup. All right, someone was murdered, but I didn’t do it, and can this possibly mean I don’t get my soup? There are few things that are harder to shake than the conviction that you have never done anything wrong. You can’t have. It’s you. All right: You are not a murderer. You are a good person. But that does not mean that what you have was not ill-gotten. That does not mean that you deserve everything you have. You have to look at your history and see it, all of it.

“My administration is restoring the sacred bonds of loyalty between this nation and its citizens,” Trump went on, “but our citizens must also restore the bonds of trust and loyalty between one another. We must love each other, respect each other and cherish our history and our future together.”

We must cherish our history. (Somewhere, a dog whimpers.) Can we be a little more specific about what history? Can we be a little more specific about any of this? The specifics are where the principles are. What will we cherish, and what will we disavow? What are we putting on a pedestal, and what are we putting in a museum? Not all history is created equal.

You want many sides? Then history is a good place to start.

Monuments are always misleading, because so little good is unmixed. History contains heroes, but no one is a hero entirely, and no one is a hero for very long. You can be brilliant in some ways and despicable in others. You can be a clean, upright, moral individual in your private life who never swears, treats women with respect, and speaks highly of duty and honor– and go out every day and dedicate yourself to a cause that makes the world worse. You can live a despicable life and yet give people a powerful expression of an idea that makes the world ultimately, slowly, better. It is possible to contain such contradictions.

Thomas Jefferson, presiding spirit of Charlottesville, certainly did. He wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights … life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” but he also wrote in 1769 to the newspaper demanding the return of his property: a man named Sandy, a left-handed shoemaker, “something of a horse jockey.” This is one man’s inconvenient loss of property and another man’s freedom. Many sides.

“So important,” Trump said. “We have to respect each other. Ideally, we have to love each other.”

Maybe. But there is nothing more pathological than the desire to be liked by everyone all the time. If you are continually attracting Nazis and white supremacists, you shouldn’t say, “WOW, everyone LIKES ME! Great!” you should ask yourself, “Where in my life have I gone seriously wrong?”

Who would stand over the body of someone who died protesting a hateful, violence, racist ideology and say that “we have to come together”? That we have to find common ground? I am sure there is common ground to be found with the people who say that some are not fit to be people. The man who thinks I ought not to exist — maybe we can compromise and agree that I will get to exist on alternate Thursdays. Let us only burn some of the villagers at the stake. We can eat just three of the children. All ideas deserve a fair hearing. Maybe we can agree that some people are only three-fifths of people, while we are at it. As long as we are giving a hearing to all views.

Only someone with no principles would think that such a compromise was possible. Only someone with no principles would think that such a compromise was desirable. At some point you have to judge more than just the act of fighting. You have to judge what the fighting is for. Some principles are worth fighting for, and others are not.

Certain truths used to be self-evident, to quote a man whose words were often better than he was.

But to Trump, they aren’t. Trump’s words are no better than he is. They are terrible words. They are the worst words.

 

Everybody should just stop pussy-footing around and say out loud what is the most self-evident fact of all:

The presidunce is a proven racist, bigot and misogyinist. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

@fraurosena -- Seth Meyers didn't pussy-foot.  Oh, and I agree with you, but I'd add small-minded, shallow, and narcissistic.

[sawasdee]

@GreyhoundFanWhen the best criticism, and the most insightful analysis, on broadcast media is coming from comedians - then you have a major problem with your broadcast media. The ludicrous 'balance' offered by CNN and MSNBC needs to stop. Don't defend the indefensible, and don't give mouthpiece liars and apologists airtime. Faux News doesn't give time to the truth....so why give it to purveyors of 'alternative facts'?

Thank Rufus for Meyers, Colbert, Oliver, Noah, SNL et al - they may help save your democracy.

 

[sawasdee]

How I would love it if Jeremy Paxman - a BBC journalist - could be exported to the US. He once asked the same question 12 times in a row, ignoring non answers completely, when the minister he was interviewing obfuscated. On another occasion, his interviewee walked out on live tv rather than face his questions. He'd make mincemeat of Kellyanne and her cohorts.

On the whole, British journalists are much less patient with less than straight answers - and much less respectful. There is no written Constitution in the UK, but the media has decided, over decades? centuries? that the public deserves answers - and they will press hard for them. Yes, there is political bias - particularly in the printed media - but the hard questions get asked somewhere. And if they are not answered, there is usually hell to pay.

[fraurosena]

25 minutes ago, sawasdee said:

How I would love it if Jeremy Paxman - a BBC journalist - could be exported to the US. He once asked the same question 12 times in a row, ignoring non answers completely, when the minister he was interviewing obfuscated. On another occasion, his interviewee walked out on live tv rather than face his questions. He'd make mincemeat of Kellyanne and her cohorts.

On the whole, British journalists are much less patient with less than straight answers - and much less respectful. There is no written Constitution in the UK, but the media has decided, over decades? centuries? that the public deserves answers - and they will press hard for them. Yes, there is political bias - particularly in the printed media - but the hard questions get asked somewhere. And if they are not answered, there is usually hell to pay.

I think they'd all have hissy fits if Jeremy Paxman crossed the pond and started interviewing! 

For those interested, here's the interview @sawasdee is referring to:

 

[Zola]

This may not be popular, or something people agree with, but I must say...

Take the statues, flags, whatever Confederate regalia out of public and get rid of them, melt them down and reuse what you can, what have you, they do not belong there.

But please leave the Civil War battlefields and cemeteries alone.

I will explain. I live rather close to both Antietam and Gettysburg, and they are both favorite haunts of mine. They are both serene and beautiful. Especially Gettysburg - Little Round Top in particular just sings out uncommon magnetism. I am literally drawn to it.

Both have many statues and monuments that depict images and sentiment of both sides, Union and Confederate. I believe this is fitting and proper, as both sides fought and died there, or are buried there. But ONLY in the battlefields and in the cemeteries. These are the only acceptable locations for Confederate iconery.

Both sides were comprised of Americans who loved their country (even if they wanted it divided) and were willing to die for it. I can respect that, at least on a very basic level. After all, those Confederate men and their families were also human. I can respect that without agreeing with their cause.

(And make no mistake, I am a born and bred Yankee and staunch abolitionist, and proud of it. I do not agree with the Confederate cause at all. However, I was raised to honor the dead, and as I see it, that's all that the battlefields and cemeteries should be about.)

The cemetery in Gettysburg at which Lincoln gave his Address has unknown soldiers buried in the perimeter, and I have seen random rebel flags decorating the Confederate graves, most likely bought at the gift shop across the street. It makes me happy to see them, if you can believe that. Those men, unnamed, unclaimed, have not been entirely forgotten. Simple honor and respect, stripped down to its barest form - a cheesy, cheap little flag. Again, I see this as fitting and proper. Do I do it? No. And I wouldn't. But I won't stop anyone who does.

So in that light, I can tolerate Confederate remembrance in battlefields and cemeteries, but nowhere else. I hope others might too, but I can understand if they do not.

I also worry that as soon as all of those statues and monuments are gone, future generations will begin to forget just exactly how our history unfolded, and may be doomed to repeat it. No one wants that.

Eta: I asked once if there is a flag for Yankees that says "I am a Yankee and proud of it" the same way the rebel flag does for those who admire the Confederacy, and, yes, there is. It is either the 34 or 35 star American flag. The 34 star flag was flying over the WH when Lincoln first took office in 1860, and the 35 star flag was created during the War, when the state of West Virginia was created.

I own a 34 star flag. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"An ugly pattern is taking shape. Trump exaggerates certain threats. He plays down other ones."

Spoiler

President Trump’s reluctance to issue a direct, full-throated condemnation of the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville continues to be scrutinized for clues to Trump’s personal sympathies (his racism and white nationalism) and to his political imperatives (his need to avoid alienating hard-core elements of his base at a time when scandals are closing in and his unpopularity has driven him into the danger zone).

But that reluctance should also be looked at against the backdrop of a broader pattern that has taken shape, one that could have serious policy consequences for the country. Trump has been dramatically inflating certain types of threats (those posed by immigrants and migrants from majority-Muslim countries) while playing down or failing to acknowledge the seriousness of other ones (those posed by domestic right-wing extremists and potential Russian sabotage of upcoming elections).

Two new pieces make this pattern starkly clear:

First, Trump continually exaggerates the threat posed by immigration. The Post’s Michelle Ye Hee Lee reports on a new Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that has been filed against Trump’s Justice Department. To summarize, the lawsuit seeks to establish whether Trump lied in a speech to Congress this year when he claimed that according to administration data, “the vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our country.”

Those remarks were part of a broader campaign in which Trump was pushing for his travel ban, which has now been partly held up by the courts. Trump attributed that assertion to “data provided by the Department of Justice.” The lawsuit, which was filed by Lawfare Blog founder Benjamin Wittes, seeks to determine whether that data exists — and by extension, whether Trump invented its existence to justify the claim. Wittes first submitted a FOIA request asking for any communications between the White House and DOJ showing that this data was provided. He hasn’t received a reply, so he filed the FOIA lawsuit.

We will find out soon enough whether that DOJ data exists. But right now, the claim looks like complete nonsense. Lee, who is a Post fact-checker, did an extensive dive into various data sources that we do know exist and found that they don’t come close to supporting Trump’s claim. More to the point, however, Lee also shows that this is part of a pattern, in which the threat of terrorism from foreigners has been exaggerated by Trump on multiple occasions. The travel ban itself represents such an exaggeration: It is premised on the idea that refugees and immigrants from the designated majority-Muslim countries represent a major national security threat without more extreme vetting, yet this whole rationale has been undercut by two analyses from Trump’s own Homeland Security Department.

The still-larger pattern here: As part of his recent embrace of a plan to slash legal immigration in half, Trump has made inflated claims about the impact that low-skilled immigration has on American workers and about the degree to which immigrants drain welfare benefits. If the lawsuit described above does show that Trump invented DOJ data, it will be a powerful illustration of the deep rot of bad faith that infests this administration when it comes to the blithe disregard of empirical information in making policy, particularly on (but not limited to) immigration.

Second, Trump appears to be reluctant to confront the far-right fringe threat — and the Russian threat to future elections. NBC News’s Benjy Sarlin talked to multiple experts who have concluded that Trump needs to more aggressively confront white supremacist groups who, they believe, have been energized by his rise. They are demanding that his administration roll out a comprehensive plan to try to contain this trend. Meanwhile, a memo from the FBI and DHS that was obtained by Foreign Policy warned this spring that white supremacist groups carried out more attacks than any other domestic extremist group in recent years and “will continue to pose a threat of lethal violence over the next year.”

To be fair, it’s hard to know what Trump’s rhetoric tells us about the reality of what is going on in terms of security policy at the agencies. But Trump’s rhetorical emphasis matters, too — and in more ways than one. As those experts told NBC’s Sarlin, Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants and Muslims itself appears to be playing a role in emboldening white supremacists to play a more vocal role — even as his muted response to the latest outbreak of white supremacy, initially at least, also emboldened those groups. And so, the exaggeration of one threat and the reluctance to call out the other one are intertwined with one another.

In the background of all this, Trump has a well-documented history of dismissing concerns about Russian undermining of the 2016 election as a hoax. This has forward-looking significance: Our intelligence services have warned that Russia will try again. By constantly dismissing claims of Russian sabotage as a hoax — not just the idea of Trump campaign collusion in it but also the sabotage itself — Trump signals he isn’t taking seriously this future threat to our elections.

The bigger story here is that this developing pattern is not just significant for what it tells us about Trump’s personal views and desire to appeal to certain elements in his base. It also speaks to Trump’s policy priorities when it comes to defending the country.

...

Gee, the TT exaggerates? Color me surprised. <end sarcasm>

[sawasdee]

@Zola Beautifully expressed! We can respect the dead without glorifying their cause, and the cemeteries and battlefields do exactly that.

The statues don't.

[GreyhoundFan]

This is appalling: "Lincoln Memorial vandalized with red graffiti"

Spoiler

WASHINGTON (WUSA9) - National Park Service crews are working to remove red graffiti from the Lincoln Memorial.

It appears someone spray painted “[expletive] law” on one of the columns, the National Park Service said. It was discovered at 4:30 a.m. Tuesday.

A monument preservation crew is using a mild, gel-type paint stripper that is safe for use on historic stone. After the gel is applied on the paint, it sits for an hour and then is rinsed with clean water. The crew will evaluate after each application, but treatments will be applied as necessary until all of the graffiti is gone.

Another act of vandalism in silver spray paint was discovered on a Smithsonian wayfinding sign in the 1400 block of Constitution Avenue, NPS said.

The vandalism comes three days after a “Unite the Right” rally turned deadly in Charlottesville, Va. Alt-right demonstrators, white nationalists, and Neo-Nazis were protesting the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

A Confederate monument in Baltimore also was vandalized on Monday, the Baltimore Sun reported. Someone poured red paint on a 114-year-old statue of a dying Confederate soldier embraced by a winged figure of Glory. 

The United States Park Police is investigating the incident; anyone with information is asked to contact them at 202-610-7515.

I put this in the main TT thread because I have little doubt one of his newly empowered alt-right thugs is responsible.

[JMarie]

Trump gave a speech about infrastructure, and is getting cranky because the press isn't asking questions about infrastructure.

[GreyhoundFan]

This is so true: "The Daily 202: Trump acts like the president of the Red States of America"

Spoiler

THE BIG IDEA: Donald Trump often behaves, first and foremost, as if he is the president of the states and people who voted for him.

That’s at odds with the American tradition, and it’s problematic as a governing philosophy — especially in a moment of crisis. Trump’s initially tone-deaf response to Charlottesville underscores why.

Animated by grievance and congenitally disinclined to extend olive branches, Trump lashes out at his “enemies” — his 2020 reelection campaign even used that word in a commercial released on Sunday — while remaining reticent to explicitly call out his fans — no matter how odious, extreme or violent.

Channeling his inner-Richard Nixon, who kept an enemies list of his own, candidate Trump often claimed to speak for “a silent majority.” After failing to win the popular vote, President Trump has instead governed on behalf of an increasingly vocal but diminishing minority.

The president has held campaign-style rallies in places like West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. Indeed, almost all his political travel has been to places he carried last November. He keeps stacks of 2016 electoral maps to hand out to people visiting the Oval Office so he can point out the sea of red. He speaks often about his “base,” preferring to preach to the choir rather than evangelize for his policies. “The Trump base is far bigger & stronger than ever before,” Trump wrote on Twitter last week.

-- Apparently the president sees “the Trump base” as distinct from the GOP base: “Trump's job approval rating in Gallup Daily tracking is at 34% for the three-day period from Friday through Sunday — by one point the lowest of his administration so far,” Frank Newport wrote yesterday. “Republicans' latest weekly approval rating of 79% was the lowest from his own partisans so far, dropping from the previous week's 82%. Democrats gave Trump a 7% job approval rating last week, while the reading for independents was at 29%. This is the first time independents' weekly approval rating for Trump has dropped below 30%.” In the latest Gallup polling, 46 percent of whites approve of Trump’s job performance. That’s the same share Barack Obama had at this point in 2009. But while only 15 percent of nonwhites support Trump, 73 percent backed Obama.

-- Trump appeared reluctant to make his brief remarks yesterday, in which he explicitly condemned the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists. He tacked them on to a hastily arranged speech after praising his own stewardship of the economy, two days after he did not specifically condemn the “Unite the Right” rally and only after an outpouring of criticism from Republican leaders for that omission. Reading from a teleprompter, Trump said that the displays of hatred and bigotry in Charlottesville have “no place in America.” (Read a transcript of the president’s comments here.)

-- The president was still more tepid than members of his own Cabinet. “Though Trump has regularly employed the phrase ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ to describe other attacks in the United States and the Middle East, he chose not to echo Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s conclusion that the violence in Charlottesville met the Justice Department’s definition of ‘domestic terrorism,’” David Nakamura and Sari Horwitz note.

-- Conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin describes Trump’s performance as “classic narcissistic behavior”: “The sole determination of whether Trump likes someone (Saudi royalty, thuggish leaders, etc.) is whether they praise him. It’s always and only about him. He has been far more antagonistic toward Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his own attorney general … than he has been toward white nationalists because the former were disloyal in his mind, the only unforgivable sin in the Trump White House. …

“The white nationalists in Charlottesville did not hide their intentions. They were there to revel in the Trump presidency, which explicitly told them it was time to ‘take their country back,’” Rubin notes. “Former KKK grand wizard David Duke left no confusion as to his followers’ admiration for the president: ‘This represents a turning point for the people of this country. We are determined to take our country back. We’re going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in, that’s why we voted for Donald Trump, because he said he’s going to take our country back, and that’s what we’ve got to do.’”

-- Meanwhile, alt-right leader Richard Spencer dismissed Trump’s statement as “nonsense,” telling reporters at a news conference yesterday that "[only] a dumb person would take those lines seriously.” Spencer also said he did not consider the president’s words to be a condemnation of the white nationalist movement. “I don't think he condemned it, no,” said Spencer, whose group advocates for a form of American apartheid, per Business Insider. “Did he say 'white nationalist?' 'Racist' means an irrational hatred of people. … I don't think he meant any of us.” Asked whether he considers Trump an ally, Spencer replied that while he didn't think of Trump as “alt-right,” he considers the president to be “the first true authentic nationalist in my lifetime.”

-- Compare Trump’s muted reaction to Charlottesville with his animated response last December to a similar incident in Columbus, another college town where an extremist plowed a car into a crowd of people. Abdul Razak Ali Artan, an Ohio State University student, drove a Honda sedan through a crowd outside a school building last November before emerging from the vehicle and slashing at people with a butcher knife. As president-elect, Trump flew to OSU to meet with survivors and praise the cop who shot the attacker. “This is a great honor for me today,” Trump told reporters during the visit. “We’re in a fantastic state that I love, Ohio.” One big difference: Artan was a Somali Muslim refugee. It's not even clear Trump has tried to call the mother of Charlottesville victim Heather Heyer.

-- In this context, Trump’s announcement that he is mulling a pardon for Joe Arpaio can be viewed as a strategic sop to mollify some of the most xenophobic elements of his nativist base. The president told Fox News in an interview published yesterday that he is “seriously considering” a full pardon to the former Arizona sheriff, who was convicted last month of criminal contempt for ignoring a federal judge’s order that he stop racially profiling Hispanics.

“I might do it right away, maybe early this week. I am seriously thinking about it,” the president told Gregg Jarrett. He called Arpaio a “great American patriot” who has “done a lot in the fight against illegal immigration”: “Is there anyone in local law enforcement who has done more to crack down on illegal immigration than Sheriff Joe? … He doesn’t deserve to be treated this way.”

Arpaio, who remains a “birther” and has insisted he has proof that Obama was not born in Hawaii, lost reelection last year. He was an early Trump endorser — going to Iowa for the announcement — and linked himself closely with the GOP nominee — speaking in prime time during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

Radley Balko, the author of the book “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” argues that Trump is giving racists “a reassuring wink” by floating the Arpaio pardon. “I very seriously doubt Arpaio would ever get jail time. Federal judges aren’t known for sending octogenarian ex-cops to prison. But his name and reputation ought to be stained. If any cop deserves that, it’s Arpaio,” he writes on The Watch.

“In 2011, the Justice Department concluded that Arpaio’s deputies had engaged in the worst pattern of racial profiling that the DOJ had ever investigated,” Balko recounts. “That report found that Arpaio’s deputies routinely put Spanish-speaking prisoners in solitary confinement as punishment for their inability to speak English. … 1 in 5 traffic stops during Arpaio’s immigration sweep’s involved Fourth Amendment violations. … Latinos were four to nine times more likely to be pulled over than non-Latinos. … Accusations that Arpaio’s deputies continued to harass Latinos were affirmed by another federal judge in 2013. Arpaio then launched an investigation of that judge. That report also found that Arpaio was spending so much time harassing Latinos that his department was neglecting violent crime.

“On multiple occasions, federal judges have found that Arpaio’s jails are unconstitutionally inhumane, most notably when it comes to diet, health care and mental health. The vast, vast majority of the people in Arpaio’s jails are being held on suspected immigration violations. … Arpaio in fact once boasted that his jails were akin to a ‘concentration camp.’”

“He faces up to six months in prison at his sentencing, which is scheduled for Oct. 5,” Matt Zapotosky reports. “Jack Wilenchik, Arpaio’s attorney, said after Arpaio was convicted that the former sheriff would appeal to get a jury trial. … A Justice Department spokeswoman said she was not aware of the president’s remarks but would wait until action was taken before commenting.”

“I would accept the pardon,” Arpaio told Fox News, “because I am 100 percent not guilty.”

-- Bottom line: If Trump pardoned Arpaio, it would add another data point to the cementing narrative that the president lacks respect for the rule of law.

-- In stark contrast to his caution after Charlottesville, it took Trump just 54 minutes to attack the chief executive of Merck by name on Monday morning after he resigned from the president’s manufacturing council. Kenneth C. Frazier, one of the few African American chief executives in the Fortune 500, touted the virtues of diversity in a statement. “I feel a responsibility to take a stand against intolerance and extremism,” he said. “America's leaders must honor our fundamental values by clearly rejecting expressions of hatred, bigotry and group supremacy, which run counter to the American ideal that all people are created equal.”

POTUS continued to use his social media bully pulpit to go after him last night:

...

-- Trump’s fixation on his populist right flank, rather than the center, has made it easier for other corporate chieftains to distance themselves.

Kevin Plank, chief executive of Under Armour, joined Merck’s Frazier last night in announcing that he, too, is stepping down from Trump’s manufacturing council. “I love our country and our company and will 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,” he wrote on Twitter.

A few hours later, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich announced in a blog post that he will also resign from the council — “to call attention to the serious harm our divided political climate is causing to critical issues.”

Yesterday’s defections will further intensify pressure on executives at companies that continue to collaborate with the administration — including General Electric, Dell and Dow — to follow their lead.

-- Meanwhile, even after his speech yesterday, Trump still has not reacted publicly to a bomb that was detonated at a Minnesota mosque Aug. 5. Sebastian Gorka, a far-right nationalist on Trump’s National Security Council, defended his silence last week. “There's a great rule: all initial reports are false,” Gorka said on MSNBC from the White House briefing room. “You have to check them. You have to find out who the perpetrators are. … We've had a series of crimes committed — alleged hate crimes — by right-wing individuals in the last six months that turned out to actually have been propagated by the left. So let's wait and see.” (The governor of Minnesota had already declared the mosque attack as “an act of terrorism” when Gorka said this.)

The president, of course, showed no such caution after attacks this spring in Paris and London. And don’t forget when he falsely described a casino robbery in Manila as a terrorist attack. Or his attacks on Mexican immigrants.

-- Finally, Trump’s botched response to Charlottesville should be viewed as another consequence of electing the first president in American history with no prior governing experience. “Say what you will about politicians as a group, but it is striking how all of them, from Bernie Sanders to Ted Cruz, knew the right thing to say in response to Charlottesville,” writes Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University. “Running for office repeatedly tends to hone one’s rhetorical instincts. At a minimum, most professional politicians learn the do’s and don’ts of political rhetoric. Trump’s political education has different roots. He has learned the art of political rhetoric from three sources: reality television, Twitter and ‘the shows.’ His miscues this past week can be traced to the pathologies inherent in each of these arenas.”

-- “One of the difficult but primary duties of the modern presidency is to speak for the nation in times of tragedy,” Michael Gerson, a speechwriter for George W. Bush, wrote in a column this weekend. “It falls to the president to express something of the nation’s soul — grief for the lost, sympathy for the suffering, moral clarity in the midst of confusion, confidence in the unknowable purposes of God. Not every president does this equally well. But none have been incapable. Until Donald Trump.

“The president is confident that his lazy musings are equal to history. They are not,” Gerson continues. “Trump could offer no context for this latest conflict. No inspiring ideals from the author of the Declaration of Independence, who called Charlottesville home. No healing words from the president who was killed by a white supremacist. By his flat, foolish utterance, Trump proved once again that he has no place in the company of these leaders.”

 

[onekidanddone]

6 minutes ago, JMarie said:

Trump gave a speech about infrastructure, and is getting cranky because the press isn't asking questions about infrastructure.

If he wants to talk about infrastructure per chance he should focus on his crumbling sanity.  Just did a fly by glance at WoPo seems he is making even more excuses for his remarks on Saturday.  I can't watch because I have to leave soon and if I hear his voice I might be injured by flying glass as I kick my computer.