so Olivia curled up in them for a nap. ♥
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
Daily Dose of Cute
so Olivia curled up in them for a nap. ♥
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
We Resist: Day 495
One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures (plus the occasional non-Republican who obliges us to resist their nonsense, too, like we don't have enough to worry about) is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.
So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.
Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.
* * *
Earlier today by me: Where's Melania? and Trump Suggests the Midterms Will Be Compromised.
Here are some more things in the news today...
The Clinton women continue to demonstrate that they have things to say worth listening to, and that we should have been listening to them all along.
Hillary Clinton: "Right now we are living through a crisis in our democracy. There are certainly not tanks in the street, but what is happening today goes to the heart of who we are as a nation. And I say this not as a Democrat who lost an election, but an American afraid of losing a country."
Chelsea Clinton: "I think one of the big mistakes was, for so long, we focused on tolerance, which I just think is insufficient. People tolerated casual misogyny, but casual misogyny is maybe the gateway drug. We have freedom of speech, which I do think is hugely important — and yet people thought you couldn't dispute hateful things, because they're like, well, it's freedom of speech. Well, freedom of speech doesn't mean there is freedom of consequences. Sure, you should not be in prison because you said something racist. But you also shouldn't be able to run for president. And yet here we are."
Both articles also continue to demonstrate that coverage of the Clinton women is absolute garbage.
Related to what both of these smart ladies are saying:
“The research suggests that when intolerant white people fear democracy may benefit marginalized people, they abandon their commitment to democracy.”https://t.co/nRkV6ClyrZ
— ashley yates (@brownblaze) May 27, 2018
Yup.
* * *
[Content Note: Racism] Lauren Etter and Michael Riley at Bloomberg: Inside the Pro-Trump Effort to Keep Black Voters from the Polls.
Bannon's deployment of the psychological-operations firm Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 campaign drew fresh attention this month, when a former Cambridge employee told a U.S. Senate panel that Bannon tried to use the company to suppress the black vote in key states. Carter's story shows for the first time how an employee at Bannon's former news site worked as an off-the-books political operative in the service of a similar goal.It certainly is. But even if an investigation were opened, would it ever get anywhere? Would it ever matter?
Carter's recollections and correspondence, which he shared after a falling-out with his fellow Trump supporters, provide a rare look inside the no-holds-barred nature of the Republican's campaign and how it explored new ways to achieve an age-old political aim: getting the right voters to the polls—and keeping the wrong ones away.
"If you can't stomach Trump, just don't vote for the other people and don't vote at all," Carter, 47, recalls telling black voters. It's the message he says the Trump campaign wanted him to deliver. "That's what they wanted, that's what they got."
The work Carter says he did, and the funds he was given to do it, also raise questions as to whether campaign finance laws were broken.
The group Carter founded, Trump for Urban Communities, never disclosed its spending to the Federal Election Commission—a possible violation of election law. In hindsight, Carter says, he believed he was working for the campaign so he wouldn't have been responsible for reporting the spending.
His descriptions of the operation suggest possible coordination between Trump's campaign and his nominally independent efforts. If there was coordination, election law dictates that any contributions to groups such as his must fall within individual limits: no more than $2,700 for a candidate. One supporter far exceeded that cap, giving about $100,000 to Carter's efforts.
Another potential issue is whether the unusual role played by the Breitbart reporter amounted to an in-kind contribution.
"There are some real problems here," says Lawrence Noble, who served as general counsel at the FEC during Republican and Democratic administrations and is now senior director and general counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan advocacy organization. "I would think this is more than enough evidence for the FEC to open an investigation."
Zack Ford at ThinkProgress: Ivanka Trump's Suspiciously-Timed Chinese Business Deals. "Ivanka Trump's business recently secured five more valuable trademarks from China (with a sixth given trial approval), allowing her to expand her business there to the tune of millions of dollars in profits. The timing of the approval suspiciously overlaps with [Donald] Trump's own dealings with China. The new trademarks were approved on May 7, just days before Trump promised on Twitter to help save the Chinese phone company ZTE. ...Ivanka's trademarks are not the only way the Trump family seems to have conspicuously benefited from Trump's support for one of China's biggest telecom companies. In the days before that public promise, China also loaned $500 million to an Indonesian theme park that will include a Trump-branded golf course and hotels." JFC.
Andrew Perez at Fast Company: Chris Christie Blocks Release of His Office's Emails with Jared Kushner's Company. "Christie, whose eight-year administration spent almost $1 million battling to keep public records secret, issued a letter in his last week in Trenton that declared any requests involving his office's electronic records would be handled by his private lawyer, rather than by state employees. ...Flavio Komuves, a partner at the Zazzali Fagella law firm in New Jersey, said that OPRA requires government officials to review records requests and determine whether to release documents. Under Christie's letter, Komuves said, 'that decision is being made by his personal lawyer who owes an obligation to him personally, and not by someone who has sworn an oath of office to look after the public interest. That is a very disturbing aspect of what's happened here.'" Fucking hell.
This administration is just unfathomably corrupt. As is everyone who's ever been associated with it. Goddammit.
* * *
[CN: Nativism. Covers entire section.]
Tina Vasquez at Rewire.News: By Painting Asylum Seekers as 'Violent Animals,' Trump Unlocked a School-to-Deportation Pipeline. "The president and his administration often conflate gang members, of which there are about 2,000 on Long Island, and asylum-seeking migrant children. ...Stories from immigrant children and their lawyers suggest the administration is crying wolf. An internal Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) review found that less than 2 percent of children in its care have direct gang ties. Many of the other children it appears have been falsely accused of gang ties for things as trivial as wearing shoelaces of a particular color, holding up a peace sign in a photo posted on their personal social media, or giving a classmate the finger."
"I think the idea that they're 'lost' is hyperbole to try and create an issue where I don't really think there is one," Santorum said. "Other than the fact that the bureaucracy — surprise, surprise — doesn't work very well." https://t.co/9GIOOi1IjJ
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) May 27, 2018
And 1500 abused/neglected children is neither the subject nor the time for Santorum to sniff about his disdain for the efficacy of a federal bureaucracy he has dedicated his career to undermining.
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) May 27, 2018
On a related note, there is a viral Twitter thread going around admonishing people not to share stories or worry about "lost children" in the U.S. immigration system, because they're not even really lost. I'm not going to get into a whole detailed rebuttal, but, although that thread makes an important distinction between the Department of Health and Human Services not knowing where around 1,500 unaccompanied minors are, and the policy of the Trump administration to separate parents and children at the border, then declaring those children unaccompanied minors, there's a lot that I find problematic about the thread.
Chiefly, I have a problem with the argument that the kids aren't "lost" when, in many cases, their own parents (whose parental rights haven't been severed) cannot find them, because they've been released to other relatives while separated from their parents. That makes them fucking lost. To their parents.
Is the contention that children cannot be "lost" as long as someone knows where they are? Because that's a pretty terrible definition of lost.
Anyway. I'll leave it there.
HHS put out a very terrible rebuttal to the concerns being raised, which includes the passage I highlighted on Twitter:
From this "reassuring" HHS statement on undocumented children: "Additional properties identified by federal agencies are being evaluated by ORR as potential locations for temporary sheltering as a routine part of its management of UAC shelter capacity." https://t.co/ri0gQFhGvB
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) May 29, 2018
That is some innocuous-sounding language about real estate acquisition, when what they're actually talking about is housing for detained immigrant children which they forcibly separate from their parents.
And finally on this subject: Danielle McLean at ThinkProgress: U.S. Border Patrol Changes Its Story About Why Its Officer Killed an Unarmed Woman. "Initially, the federal agency claimed a group of undocumented immigrants started hitting the officer with 'blunt objects' during an unprovoked attack while he patrolled a residential street searching for 'illegal activity.' Claudia Patricia Gómez González, who was shot and fatally wounded by the agent, was named as 'one of the assailants,' of that attack according to the New York Times. But in an updated statement on Friday, the agency now says they were told by the officer that a group of immigrants 'rushed him' instead of complying with demands to get on the ground. CBP no longer refers to the deceased woman as an assailant, but merely as a 'member of the group.'" Rage seethe boil.
* * *
[CN: War on agency] Not good. Not good at all.
BREAKING: US Supreme Court declines to consider whether controversial Arkansas law restricting access to medication abortions unconstitutionally burdens a woman's access to abortion services - @PeteWilliamsNBC pic.twitter.com/4LqB2w1zvM
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) May 29, 2018
SCOTUS won't jump into the fight over medication abortion in Arkansas, leaves in place a real bad 8th circuit ruling that could leave the state with one clinic. My background here #TeamLegalhttps://t.co/jvICYsbeum
— Jessica Mason Pieklo (@Hegemommy) May 29, 2018
[CN: Addiction; deadly corporate greed] And finally:
Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin, has long claimed it was unaware of the powerful opioid’s growing abuse until years after it hit the market — but a confidential DOJ report shows that it knew about “significant” abuse in the first years and concealed it. https://t.co/fjdyrDjevq
— Steve Kopack (@SteveKopack) May 29, 2018
My god. Breathtaking.
What have you been reading that we need to resist today?
Death Toll in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria Estimated to Be 72x Official Government Number
A new Harvard study released today estimates that the actual death toll in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria is 72 times the official government number.
There have been questions about the accuracy of the official death toll since last year, when officials were forced to acknowledge that, long after the storm, people were continuing "to die at rates far beyond normal."
And of course Donald Trump publicly told Governor Ricardo Rosselló that he could be "very proud" of the low official death toll, which doubled hours after Trump's comment.
Anyone with any sense has suspected that the official death toll was garbage, concealing a number of deaths attributable to the fallout and neglect following the storm. But the actual number is far worse than most people even imagined.
Arelis R. Hernández and Laurie McGinley at the Washington Post report:
At least 4,645 people died as a result of Hurricane Maria and its devastation across Puerto Rico last year, according to a new Harvard study released Tuesday, an estimate that far exceeds the official government death toll, which stands at 64.There is much more at the link.
The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that health-care disruption for the elderly and the loss of basic utility services for the chronically ill had significant impacts across the U.S. territory, which was thrown into chaos after the September hurricane wiped out the electrical grid and had widespread impacts on infrastructure. Some communities were entirely cut off for weeks amid road closures and communications failures.
Researchers in the United States and Puerto Rico, led by scientists at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, calculated the number of deaths by surveying nearly 3,300 randomly chosen households across the island and comparing the estimated post-hurricane death rate to the mortality rate for the year before. Their surveys indicated that the mortality rate was 14.3 deaths per 1,000 residents from Sept. 20 through Dec. 31, 2017, a 62 percent increase in the mortality rate compared to 2016, or 4,645 "excess deaths."
It is imperative that we have accurate numbers of deaths and understand the causes of those deaths, if we are to prevent deaths in future — and, no less important, to give important acknowledgment and closure to families of the dead, who are retraumatized by gaslighting over the causes of their loved ones' deaths.
With another hurricane season right around the corner, remember Puerto Rico. Demand accountability. Contact members of the government and members of the press and urgently request that the Trump administration be held to account for their deadly failures in Puerto Rico, before they're allowed to spectacularly fail again.
Trump Suggests the Midterms Will Be Compromised
On the night of the 2016 election, when the horrendous result became clear, one of the friends who was at my house that night sighed heavily and said, "Well, we'll just have to win back the House and Senate in 2018." To which I replied, "If we still have free and fair elections in 2018."
Her face dropped; she had not even contemplated that possibility. "Do you think that's possible?!" she exclaimed. I told her it could be; that after a year and a half of covering Donald Trump, I believed him to be a dangerous authoritarian who would not cede power easily — and whose power grab would be abetted by Congressional Republicans.
What I didn't tell her is that I did not just think it was possible; I thought it was likely.
Now, it is a virtual certainty that we will not have free and fair midterm elections. There is no doubt, except that which has been manufactured by disloyal scoundrels, that Russia interfered in the 2016 election — and, having suffered no consequences for that act of war on our democracy, they will absolutely interfere again.
At the same time, the Republican Party has continued to fight against any effort to undercut their attempts at gerrymandering and voter suppression, has refused to ensure election accountability with paper receipts, and has ignored calls for serious audits of electronic voting machines to ensure that they have not been compromised.
This morning, Donald Trump's morning tweetshitz contained this doozy:
The 13 Angry Democrats (plus people who worked 8 years for Obama) working on the rigged Russia Witch Hunt, will be MEDDLING with the mid-term elections, especially now that Republicans (stay tough!) are taking the lead in Polls. There was no Collusion, except by the Democrats!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 29, 2018
It's widely acknowledged that Trump speaks in projection. We should all be very concerned that he's telegraphing what his party is inviting during the midterm elections: "MEDDLING." Which should be obvious enough, anyway, by his failure to address meddling in the last election. https://t.co/7WVtdqy9tA
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) May 29, 2018
Let me be perfectly clear: I am categorically not saying that voting doesn't matter anymore. To the absolute contrary, I am saying that it is more important than ever — that progressives have to turn out the vote so overwhelmingly that it would be absurd to imagine that the Republicans could have won.
The best hope we have of overcoming the imminent attacks on the midterm elections is to make sure that even remotely winnable races aren't even close. We have to make every race a blowout.
That isn't going to be easy, but there isn't going to be a "blue tsunami" without an ocean of voters to overwhelm the attempts to defeat us outside the ballot box.
Get ready to get out the vote. The president has signaled his intent to cheat. We had better steel ourselves for the hard work it's going to take this fall to thwart him and the forces with whom he'll be colluding. Again.
Where's Melania?
[Content Note: Domestic violence.]
The last time First Lady Melania Trump made a public appearance was earlier this month, when she introduced her "Be Best" anti-bullying initiative. She then supposedly went into the hospital for a small kidney procedure and hasn't been seen since.
It's now been 18 days.
I've tweeted about this a few times, and the responses are always deeply upsetting. "Who gives a shit" is very common. So is "She's having plastic surgery." Stated with absolute confidence, despite the fact that there is absolutely no way to know this. I'm also getting a lot of assertions that she's in New York, because her Twitter account tags her location there, but it always has; as well as a lot of "the Secret Security confirmed she's in New York," which is not accurate.
So why has Melania not been in public for 18 days, even over a national holiday weekend?
18 days is a long time for anyone to not be seen in public. Especially a person married to someone with a history of domestic violence. It's *responsible* to ask questions in this situation, not "being conspiratorial," as I've seen suggested. https://t.co/cXR9V7jX1Q
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) May 29, 2018
As I said in comments on Friday: I have no idea why Melania has been out of public view for so long. The fact that the White House is clearly lying about why she has been is concerning. The possibility it's because she was harmed makes accurate information urgent.
I can find not a single good thing to say about Melania or her politics. I am unpersuaded by the argument that means I shouldn't care to find out if she's been physically harmed.
So where the fuck is the First Lady?
The Virtual Pub Is Open + Programming Note
Belly up to the bar,
and be in this space together.
Monday is Memorial Day in the United States, so we will be taking Monday off and will return on Tuesday. See you then!
Friday Links!
This list o' links brought to you by tomato juice.
Recommended Reading:
Anna Silman at the Cut: [Content Note: Childhood sexual abuse; child neglect] The Tale and the Truth About 13-Year-Old Girls
Eve Barlow at Vulture: Lily Allen Won't Be Shamed
Vivian Kane at the Mary Sue: [CN: Disablism] Pete Davidson Responds to Trolls Suggesting Mental Illness Means He Can't Be in a Healthy Relationship
Ashley Young at BYP: [CN: Misogynoir; trauma] I'm Not Bipolar; I'm Just Traumatized: What I Learned about Black Womanhood from My Misdiagnosis
Princess Weekes at the Mary Sue: [CN: Misogyny; harassment] The Well-Deserved Fallout from the Arrested Development Interview Continues
Breanna Edwards at the Root: [CN: Bullying] Philly Teen Who Used to Be Homeless Earns Full Ride to Harvard
Beth Elderkin at io9: Here's the Trailer for the Ursula K. Le Guin Documentary Almost 10 Years in the Making
Leave your links and recommendations in comments. Self-promotion welcome and encouraged!
Daily Dose of Cute
kept secure on a harness held by one of her servants. Cough.
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
We Resist: Day 491
One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures (plus the occasional non-Republican who obliges us to resist their nonsense, too, like we don't have enough to worry about) is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.
So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.
Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.
* * *
Earlier today by me: WE MUST RESIST: Undocumented Immigrants Are the Canaries in Trump's Despotic Coal Mine and If Kirstjen Nielsen Is on Her Way out at DHS, Let Us Fervently Hope Rudy Giuliani Is Not on His Way In.
Here are some more things in the news today...
Courtney Kube, Hallie Jackson, Carol E. Lee, Kristen Welker, and Peter Alexander at NBC News: Trump Wanted to Cancel North Korea Summit Before Kim Jong Un Could. "The decision occurred so abruptly that the administration was unable to give congressional leaders and key allies advance notice and the letter went out while more than two dozen foreign journalists, including several U.S. citizens, were inside North Korea where they had gone to witness a promised dismantling of a nuclear test site. ...One person familiar with the summit preparations said it was Bolton who drove the decision to cancel and that he had convinced Trump to make the move. Trump then relayed his decision to Pompeo, who felt blindsided, according to multiple officials. A driving factor for the president was the belief that Kim was heading toward a similar conclusion." What a shitshow.
Tierney Sneed at TPM: Senate Dem Accuses Don Jr. of False Testimony on Foreign Contacts in 2016. "A Senate Judiciary Democrat is alleging that Donald Trump Jr. gave false testimony in a September 2017 interview with the committee, in which the President's son denied that foreign governments or foreign nationals sought to assist [Donald] Trump's 2016 campaign. Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), in a Thursday letter to Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA), pointed to a recent report that Trump Jr. met at Trump Tower in August 2016 with an Israeli social media specialist and an emissary for princes in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The Israeli, Joel Zamel, touted his firm's ability to manipulate social media to boost Trump's campaign, while the emissary, George Nader, told Trump Jr. that the princes he represented would also like to help his father's election." Whooooops!
Guardian Sport: 'Patriotism and Nationalism Are Different': NFL Players React to New Anthem Policy. "'I just think that when you love something you care about it you want to work to get it right. I love my children. When they do wrong things, I'm going to let them know they're doing wrong things. I'm not just going to sweep it under the rug because I love them,' [Demario Davis, linebacker for the New Orleans Saints] said. 'I think that's the difference between patriotism and nationalism. Nationalism is loving your country just to love it, you know, even when it's right or wrong, you're going to take the side of your country. Patriotism is loving it enough to sacrifice for it, but also to call it [out] when it's wrong. The people who are speaking up for the people who are hurting have a deep love and devotion for our country. That's kind of gotten misconstrued at times. But it's important for people to understand that.'" YES.
[Content Note: Nativism] Molly Hennessy-Fiske at the LA Times: Border Patrol Union Calls Trump's National Guard Deployment 'Colossal Waste'. "A month after [Donald] Trump called for sending National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, the head of the national Border Patrol union called the deployment 'a colossal waste of resources.' ...The criticism is a dramatic departure for the group, which endorsed Trump's candidacy for president and has praised his border security efforts... The borderwide National Guard deployment is expected to cost the federal government $220 million to $252 million through the end of the year, according to Christopher Sherwood, a Department of Defense spokesman. That includes $204 million to $221 million in pay and support costs for 3,143 troops and $16 million to $31 million for 12,000 flying hours by 26 UH-72 Lakota helicopters, Sherwood said. ...While troops were 'not used for law enforcement,' they have logged 2,000 hours of helicopter surveillance 'for detection.'" Oh.
NB: Grandiose shows of militarism are a feature of many authoritarian regimes. And, historically, they have frequently been precursor to violent militarism waged against the population who became inured to their presence via seemingly "pointless" posturing.
[CN: White supremacy; violence; police harassment] Sam Levin at the Guardian: Stabbed at a Neo-Nazi Rally, Called a Criminal: How Police Targeted a Black Activist.
Cedric O'Bannon tried to ignore the sharp pain in his side and continue filming. The independent journalist, who was documenting a white supremacist rally in Sacramento, said he wanted to capture the neo-Nazi violence against counter-protesters with his GoPro camera.Rage seethe boil.
But the pain soon became overwhelming. He lifted up his blood-soaked shirt and realized that one of the men carrying a pole with a blade on the end of it had stabbed him in the stomach, puncturing him nearly two inches deep. He limped his way to an ambulance.
But the police did not treat O'Bannon like a victim. Records obtained by the Guardian reveal that officers instead monitored his Facebook page and sought to bring six charges against him, including conspiracy, rioting, assault, and unlawful assembly. His presence at the protest — along with his use of the black power fist and "social media posts expressing his ideals" — were proof that he had violated the rights of neo-Nazis at the 26 June 2016 protests, police wrote in a report.
None of the white supremacists have been charged for stabbing O’Bannon.
[CN: Environmental disaster] Natasha Geiling at ThinkProgress: Runaway Barges Full of Coal Spill into Pennsylvania River. "More than a dozen barges carrying coal down a river in western Pennsylvania broke loose Thursday, with two of those barges sinking and spilling coal into the Monongahela river. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Quality says that the spilled coal won't present a risk to water downstream from the spill. But coal does contain toxic elements like arsenic, as well as heavy metals like lead and mercury. The spill occurred roughly 5 and a half miles from a drinking water intake owned by Pennsylvania American Water. ...As of 2014, 12 percent of all coal shipped in the United States was transported by river barge." Damn.
* * *
[CN: Sexual violence; assault; harassment. Covers entire section.]
Read @lindaholmes' great piece on the Arrested Development interview, and consider as you read it how firmly the gender lines were drawn here, and know that a man who *only* harms women is damn well a sexual harasser, no matter the form that harm takes. https://t.co/eGBSDlMRFK
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) May 24, 2018
Amy Zimmerman at the Daily Beast: Terrence Howard Is Accused of Violent Abuse. When Is His Time Up? "If we've learned anything from #MeToo, #MuteRKelly, and the cinnamon roll recipe Mario Batali attached to the end of his sexual misconduct apology letter, it's that men who have done (allegedly) horrible things continue to expect, and to get, unlimited second chances. Apathy is an age-old illness when it comes to these sorts of crimes, especially when the perpetrators are famous, handsome, well-liked, or really good at making pasta. The fact that even #MeToo-era men outed for bad behavior are creeping back into Hollywood's good graces bodes well, I guess, for the abusers grandfathered into collective amnesia — men like Terrence Howard, who was landing jobs in spite of his personal history back when Harvey Weinstein was still an open secret."
Speaking of Harvey Weinstein... Amanda Holpuch and Jamiles Lartey at the Guardian: Harvey Weinstein Appears in Court Charged with Rape and Other Sexual Offences. "The disgraced Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein has been charged with rape, a criminal sex act, sex abuse, and sexual misconduct for alleged incidents involving two separate women, after he earlier surrendered to authorities in New York. During a brief court appearance on Friday, Weinstein remained quiet as his lawyers agreed he would post $1m (£750,000) bail and wear an electronic monitoring device. He also surrendered his passport, and agreed not travel beyond New York and Connecticut. A prosecutor told the judge that the investigation was ongoing, and that authorities have encouraged other survivors to come forward."
I take up space in solidarity with Weinstein's many victims, and I desperately hope that the women whose victimization by Weinstein yielded these charges eventually get something that resembles justice, even a little.
And on that note:
"It was a shocking moment; it was a beautiful moment," she said of hearing the jury's decision to award her $1 billion in damages in a lawsuit against the security company that hired her rapist. "It showed human kindness in its purest form." 😭❤️ https://t.co/TQcNzkWxRf
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) May 25, 2018
Blub.
What have you been reading that we need to resist today?
If Kirstjen Nielsen Is on Her Way out at DHS, Let Us Fervently Hope Rudy Giuliani Is Not on His Way In
[Content Note: Nativism; police violence. Please read the previous piece, "WE MUST RESIST: Undocumented Immigrants Are the Canaries in Trump's Despotic Coal Mine," for important background to this one.]
So, in addtion to his usefulness in gaslighting the country as part of a sophisticated messaging strategy to shift the discourse in a way that makes room for authoritarianism, one of the reasons I believe that Rudy Giuliani is back on the scene is that Donald Trump (still) wants him in his cabinet.
Just earlier this week, I wrote: "Kirstjen Nielsen is a Trumpian placeholder if ever I saw one. He wants Rudy Giuliani in there, running a national militarized law enforcement arm of the executive branch, so bad even I can taste it."
This morning, I read this at the Washington Post Josh Dawsey and Nick Miroff:
[Donald] Trump began berating Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in the Oval Office earlier this spring, according to administration officials, griping about her performance and blaming her for a surge in illegal border crossings."Soaring promises." In case you weren't sure if this is a piece of administration propaganda.
...The president has chastised her on several occasions this spring, including a much-publicized meeting earlier this month when he attacked her in front of the entire Cabinet. He has grown furious because his administration has made little progress building the border wall, and his most ardent supporters have blamed Nielsen for not doing more to halt the caravan of Central American migrants whose advance Trump saw as a personal challenge.
...It remains unclear, according to several people familiar with the situation, how much longer the relationship can last, but the strains illustrate the difficulty faced by Trump subordinates who are tasked with delivering policy solutions to match his most soaring promises.
There is, naturally, much more at the link, but the long and short of it is that Trump is unhappy with Nielsen, because she can't get the job done. "The job" being fully ignoring the law, decency, and reality in pursuit of the president's vile nativist agenda.
Now, maybe it's just a coincidence that Giuliani is back in the mix at the same time that this garbage balloon about Nielsen was published in the WaPo. Maybe Giuliani really is just going to be part of Trump's legal team and nothing more. Maybe he really is just being sent out on the cable news circuit as Trump's attorney and not to reassert his profile just ahead of Trump rearranging his cabinet yet again to include another authoritarian loyalist.
Or maybe we have something about which to be very, very alarmed.
I am certainly alarmed by the fact that Giuliani is back in the mix at all, no less in combination with a story that signals DHS is about to get a vacancy.
Giuliani is the king of crackdowns. He loves domestic crackdowns like John Bolton loves war.
The political press has largely greeted Giuliani's return by treating him like a clown. The lack of scrutiny is not dissimilar from that which he enjoyed while serving as "America's Mayor" in the '90s, despite the fact that he was overseeing one of the most vicious eras of racist policing in NYC history, which is really saying something.
Lumumba Bandele, a lifelong New Yorker and police reform advocate, described Giuliani's law enforcement policies as creating "an environment of terror for communities of color." He oversaw the institution of NYC's "stop and frisk" policy, later deemed unconstitutional, which Trump has nonetheless said he wants to see instituted nationwide.
And Giuliani's hostility to undocumented immigrants and refugees dates back the Reagan administration, during which time he was the third-ranking official of the Justice Department, arguing that Haitian asylum-seekers should be turned away by the United States, during testimony in a lawsuit where DHS' precedessor, the INS, was accused of illegally detaining undocumented Haitians and denying them access to lawyers.
That Trump, whose personal relationship with Giuliani is very close and goes back decades, has Giuliani anywhere near his administration is very troubling. That he has expressed a desire to replicate nationally how Giuliani "cleaned up" New York is chilling. That Giuliani is making moves in Trumpworld as stories are placed suggesting there will soon be a vacancy at the top of DHS should concern us all.
The last fucking thing we need is Rudy Giuliani overseeing Donald Trump's nativist gestapo.
WE MUST RESIST: Undocumented Immigrants Are the Canaries in Trump's Despotic Coal Mine
[Content Note: Nativism; white supremacy; eliminationism; child abuse; violence.]
Donald Trump did not invent terrible immigration policy. U.S. immigration policy has been broken for a very long time. But he has empowered and institutionalized a nativist, white supremacist, anti-immigrant agenda that I have long been warning will underwrite a targeting of U.S. citizens.
In January, the administration did the previously unthinkable: Revoked a naturalized citizen's citizenship, reverting him to a lawful permanent resident and potentially making him subject to deportation. Last week, a border patrol agent detained two women who are citizens and demanded to see ID because they were speaking Spanish in public. This week, the president suggested that that people who protest state violence (police killings) should be removed from the country.
I have said before and will keep saying: This administration's (mis)treatment of undocumented immigrants is their canary in the coal mine. The targeting of undocumented immigrants is intolerable on its face, but understand that whatever they are doing to undocumented immigrants, they will target others in the same way eventually. We must resist their nativist strategies not only because they are cruel and indecent and unjust, but also because if we fail to resist them, they will proliferate.
We cannot turn our backs on undocumented immigrants.
A month ago, PBS' Frontline did a major piece about how the Department of Health and Human Services lost track of over a thousand children, with some of the "unaccompanied minors" they "released to family or other sponsors" ending up in the hands of human traffickers. EJ Montini, an AZCentral columnist, picked up the story earlier this week, which subsequently resulted in a month-old piece in the New York Times being recirculated and getting lots of attention today.
This heinous story is notable not only for the depth of depravity the United States government is exhibiting toward undocumented children, but for how we must understand what it means in the context of a nativist agenda that is being used for a practice run for the treatment of any and all "undesirables" in the population under authoritarian leadership.
We are meant to not care about undocumented children, lost in a system. And that is why, in addition to the basic decency of protecting children, we must urgently care for them, and what is being done to them.
On Twitter, Yonatan Zunger has written a chilling but necessary thread on this story, detailing the breathtaking scope of the harm and what history tells us may come next. I encourage you to read the entire thread, which begins at the link, but following is an excerpt:
If anyone was wondering why people have been sounding the alarm so hard about the complete lack of legal accountability of police, "they can disappear children by the thousands and nobody can do anything about it" would be why.
— (((Yonatan Zunger))) (@yonatanzunger) May 25, 2018
So the current run rate is probably around 20,000 children per year. Trump, Kelly (who, remember, headed DHS for Trump before being his chief of staff), and Sessions have all been very clear that they intend to grow and expand the program.
— (((Yonatan Zunger))) (@yonatanzunger) May 25, 2018
Hi. We're going to do some serious fucking analysis of this, making real engineering estimates, the way that I promise you ICE is. This is not going to be pleasant, if you were somehow expecting that.
— (((Yonatan Zunger))) (@yonatanzunger) May 25, 2018
[...]
So you would need to set up some kinds of facilities where large numbers of children could be warehoused, under guard, until ultimately… well, that's an interesting question that we'll come to in a moment. But first, if they wanted to scale, they'd need warehousing. So:
— (((Yonatan Zunger))) (@yonatanzunger) May 25, 2018
[...]
If you want to understand how these things have worked in the past, and feel like not sleeping for the next week or more, look up "Volkswagen baby nursery." I'm not going to link it; even thinking about reading that again makes me feel ill.
— (((Yonatan Zunger))) (@yonatanzunger) May 25, 2018
All of this, against a backdrop of the Attorney General of the United States publicly threatening to forcibly separate undocumented families, to detain children separate from their parents. To make them "unaccompanied minors," even if they are actually not.
And such separations are already happening:
A weeping mother has been forced to wear a yellow insignia (bracelet) as she is ripped away from her children indefinitely.
— Adam Klasfeld (@KlasfeldReports) May 25, 2018
In the United States. By policy.
Read this story.https://t.co/kUdogZ2B6L pic.twitter.com/vQ7XutNDiR
Meanwhile, ICE is destroying records of the abuses, even deaths, that happen to people in their custody:
ICE Plans to Start Destroying Records of Immigrant Abuse, Including Sexual Assault and Deaths in Custody https://t.co/pPVzjHXvxD via @aclu
— Garance Franke-Ruta (@thegarance) May 25, 2018
All of this is documented. It is not conjecture. It is not conspiracy theory. It is what's happening. Undocumented families, some of whom have made lives in this country for decades, are being ripped apart. Children are being separated from their parents. Children are being "lost" by the thousands. Records of mistreatment are being destroyed. The government is exploring larger detention facilities.
That is a photo of children "assigned to living areas separated by tall chain-linked fences and segregated by age and gender" — or, more honestly, children being kept in what looks like fucking dog kennels — in a detention center in Nogales, Arizona, where hundreds of children were being kept. And that photo is from 2014 — two years before Donald Trump assumed control of the presidency.
That's what our treatment of undocumented children looked like already under Obama. And now policy is being set by a president whose base doesn't believe this country should accept refugees, who himself calls undocumented immigrants "animals", and who thinks that demonizing Latinx people is a great joke.
During an Oval Office meeting last February, Trump acted as if he was at a rally, making up Hispanic names and noting crimes they might have committed -- saying the crowd would roar for deportations. Jared Kushner and Stephen Miller laughed. https://t.co/3rLF1J73q4 pic.twitter.com/N9SqiJkg1d
— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) May 25, 2018
As Aphra_Behn noted yesterday, those of us "who are pointing out similarities between what's going on here and other authoritarian, racist regimes are trying to jolt people out of the Dream of American Exceptionalism."
It's not even that it could happen here. It is.
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Question of the Day
Suggested by Shaker BlueJean: "What's your favorite remake, and why? (I've grown attached to the Japanese remake of Ghost, where the business executive/ghost is a woman and the potter is a man. Better special effects, too, though the ending isn't as satisfying.)"
Off the top of my head, I can't think of any remakes I prefer to the original material — not that that was a stipulation of BlueJean's question, anyway — so, with that caveat, my favorite remake is probably A Bug's Life, which is a splendid remake of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai.
You might be thinking: Liss, that is just an homage, not a remake!
But oh no, my friend. It is a remake. 😀
Everything's Fine
Cool. https://t.co/BESmyDi3jT
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) May 24, 2018
Good for her.
*jumps into Christmas tree*
Roger Stone Sought Stolen Clinton and State Department Emails During Campaign
Shelby Holliday and Rob Barry at the Wall Street Journal: Roger Stone Sought Information on Clinton from Assange, Emails Show.
Former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone privately sought information he considered damaging to Hillary Clinton from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.So, we'll pause here briefly to note a couple of things:
The emails could raise new questions about Mr. Stone's testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in September, in which he said he "merely wanted confirmation" from an acquaintance that Mr. Assange had information about Mrs. Clinton, according to a portion of the transcript that was made public.
In a Sept. 18, 2016, message, Mr. Stone urged an acquaintance who knew Mr. Assange to ask the WikiLeaks founder for emails related to Mrs. Clinton's alleged role in disrupting a purported Libyan peace deal in 2011 when she was secretary of state, referring to her by her initials.
"Please ask Assange for any State or HRC e-mail from August 10 to August 30--particularly on August 20, 2011," Mr. Stone wrote to Randy Credico, a New York radio personality who had interviewed Mr. Assange several weeks earlier. Mr. Stone, a longtime confidant of Mr. Trump, had no formal role in his campaign at the time.
One, that per Rep. Adam Schiff, ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the email exchange between Stone and Credico was not provided to congressional investigators.
[Schiff] said the emails hadn't been provided to congressional investigators.Two, that as noted by former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti, "It is a federal crime to knowingly receive stolen material that has crossed a national or international boundary."
"If there is such a document, then it would mean that his testimony was either deliberately incomplete or deliberately false," said Mr. Schiff, who has continued to request documents and conduct interviews with witnesses despite the committee's probe concluding earlier this year.
And three, that Stone "had no formal role" in Trump's campaign at the time is totally irrelevant to everyone aside from treason apologists.
Which Stone knows as well as anyone and better than most. Hence this:
Mr. Stone, in a text message to the Journal, said that Mr. Credico had "provided nothing" to him and that WikiLeaks never handed anything over.Maybe. Or maybe not. Roger Stone isn't known for his rigorous honesty. Either way, the very fact that he was soliciting State Department emails, which would have had to be stolen for him to access them, is a problem. And the likelihood that he omitted information during his congressional testimony could be a crime.
Unfortunately, the usual issue is that there still doesn't appear to be anyone in the Republican majority who has even the slightest inclination to hold anyone accountable for any of this.
#365feministselfie: Week 21
I am again participating in the #365feministselfie project, now in its fifth year, and promised a thread for others to share selfies and/or talk about the project, visibility generally, self-apprecation, and related topics. So here is a thread for Week 21!
A few of my selfies over the last three weeks:
secondhand cardigan from my friend Miller!
affected all the cartilage on the left side of my body. Brutal.
a pleasant physical sensation on which to focus to redirect
it away from the pain of my flaring chondritis. ♥
Please feel welcome and encouraged to share your own selfies in comments, or share your thoughts on the project, or solicit encouragement or advice, or do whatever else feels best for you to participate, if you are inclined to do so!
Daily Dose of Cute
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
We Resist: Day 490
One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures (plus the occasional non-Republican who obliges us to resist their nonsense, too, like we don't have enough to worry about) is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.
So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.
Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.
* * *
Earlier today by me: Trump Opens His Filthy Yapper About the NFL's Terrible New Anthem Policy and Trump Calls Off North Korea Summit with Vile Letter and Trump Straight-Up Lies About James Clapper.
Here are some more things in the news today...
While Trump was making a statement at the signing ceremony for the bill rolling back the financial protections of Dodd-Frank, he said this:
JUST IN: Pres. Trump says U.S. military is "ready if necessary," adding Japan and South Korea are "willing to shoulder much of the cost of any financial burden...by the United States in operations, if such an unfortunate situation is forced upon us." https://t.co/aRUXu8ETIv pic.twitter.com/bfzmMDIDUd
— ABC News (@ABC) May 24, 2018
I've spoken to General Mattis and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and our military, which is by far the most powerful anywhere in the world, and has been greatly enhanced recently, as you all know, is ready, if necessary. Likewise, I've spoken to South Korea and Japan, and they are not only ready, should foolish or reckless acts be taken by North Korea, but they are willing to shoulder much of the cost of any financial burden, any of the costs associated, by the United States in operations, if such an unfortunate situation is forced upon us.Remember what it was like when we had a president who wasn't just wantonly threatening and provoking war every goddamn day? That was nice.
BBC News: MH17 Missile Owned by Russian Brigade, Investigators Say. "The missile that downed a Malaysia Airlines flight over eastern Ukraine in 2014 belonged to a Russian brigade, international investigators say. For the first time, the Dutch-led team said the missile had come from a unit based in western Russia. All 298 people on board the Boeing 777 died when it broke apart in mid-air flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. It was hit by a missile fired from rebel-held territory in Ukraine. Russia says none of its weapons was used. But on Thursday Wilbert Paulissen, a Dutch official from the Joint Investigation Team (JIT), told reporters: 'All the vehicles in a convoy carrying the missile were part of the Russian armed forces.'" Oh. That seems significant. Once upon a time, we had presidents who might have cared to make a comment on that.
Josh Dawsey at the Washington Post: In Reversal, Giuliani Now Says Trump Should Do Interview with Mueller Team. OF COURSE HE DOES. BECAUSE GIULIANI'S ENTIRE PURPOSE IS TO PUBLICLY CREATE ENDLESS CHAOS AND CONFUSION. Does everyone believe me now?!
Anyway. In that interview, buried far beneath the exact headline that Trumpworld wanted, is some real news: "Giuliani said he was concerned that the president would become a target or that the interview would be a perjury trap, because the 'truth is relative.' The president's legal team continues to try to set limitations on an interview, including the duration and questions posed, he said. 'They may have a different version of the truth than we do,' Giuliani said."
Alternative facts. Fake news. "A different version of the truth." This is what life under authoritarian rule looks like. This is what it feels like. A slow drip of gaslighting that becomes like the Chinese water torture, from which there is no escape. It feels like descending into madness.
* * *
[Content Note: War on agency] Ally Boguhn at Rewire.News: Trump Praises His War on Reproductive Rights at Anti-Choice Gala. "[Donald] Trump in his Tuesday address to the anti-choice Susan B. Anthony List's annual gala...lauded his administration for proposing a rule aimed at banning domestic family planning funding from going to health providers that provide separately-funded abortion care. ...[T]he Department of Health and Human Services officially announced that it had proposed the policy hours before the president joined the anti-choice event on Tuesday. Trump at the gala characterized the move as a 'new rule to prohibit Title X funding from going to any clinic that performs abortions,' and justified it by falsely claiming that federal funds were going to abortion care." Rage seethe boil.
"White House press secretary Sarah Sanders says it bugs her when people accuse of her lying to the press. 'It certainly bothers me... Because one of the few things you have are your integrity and reputation." Oh maybe stop lying then? https://t.co/oY1eZTd6Yn
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) May 24, 2018
Natasha Geiling at ThinkProgress: Trump Is About to Repeal One of Obama's Last Climate Rules. "The rule change, finalized by the Department of Transportation on Tuesday and set to be published to the Federal Register in the coming days where it will become official, removes the obligation for states and cities to measure greenhouse gas emissions from fuel use by vehicles on their roads that would be associated with new projects such as expanding highways. Targets for limiting greenhouse gas emissions will not be required either. ...This news comes after the Environmental Protection Agency announced the rollback of separate Obama-era vehicle emissions standards — a decision over which states are now suing the agency." JFC.
* * *
[CN: Sexual violence; abduction; misogyny; terrorism; starvation] Kate Hodal at the Guardian: Women Saved from Boko Haram Say Soldiers Made Them Trade Sex for Food.
Thousands of women and girls who believed they were being led to safety from Boko Haram by Nigerian security forces were instead systematically abused in exchange for food and assistance, an Amnesty International investigation has revealed.My god. That the international community has allowed this nightmare to go on endlessly is a shame on all of us. It truly is.
The shocking claims were made by more than 250 people interviewed over a two-year period. Some allege they were raped by members of the Nigerian military and Civilian Joint Task Force (Civilian JTF), while others say they were starved. The troops ordered civilians out of their villages and into satellite camps, where thousands of people, including children, have died of hunger, the report claims.
"The soldiers, they betrayed us — they said that we should come out from our villages," said Yakura*, 35, who fled her home in December 2016, believing the government soldiers were delivering her and her family to safety. "They said it would be safer and that they would give us a secure place to stay. But when we came, they betrayed us. They detained our husbands and then they raped us women."
[CN: Sexual harassment] An Phung and Chloe Melas at CNN: Women Accuse Morgan Freeman of Inappropriate Behavior, Harassment. "In all, 16 people spoke to CNN about Freeman as part of this investigation, eight of whom said they were victims of what some called harassment and others called inappropriate behavior by Freeman. Eight said they witnessed Freeman's alleged conduct. These 16 people together described a pattern of inappropriate behavior by Freeman on set, while promoting his movies and at his production company Revelations Entertainment." Horrible.
[CN: Sexual assault] Gideon Resnick at the Daily Beast: Democrat Nate Boulton Ends His Iowa Gubernatorial Campaign over Sexual Misconduct Allegations. "Iowa State Sen. Nate Boulton, one of six candidates in the state's Democratic gubernatorial primary, announced Thursday that he will suspend his campaign following accusations of sexual misconduct. On Wednesday, The Des Moines Register reported that [five women accused Boulton of nonconsensual sexual touching]. ...Boulton didn't deny the allegations to the Register but said: 'I don't have the same recollection. But I am not going to offer any additional context to this, other than to say if someone's perspective is that it was inappropriate and I crossed a line and I misread a situation in a social setting, I do apologize.'" Okay.
* * *
Let's end with some good resistance news...
"Black women are moving from winning elections for others to winning elections for themselves." 🔥 https://t.co/YISUG5b19B
— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) May 24, 2018
YES!!!
And finally: Amanda Michelle Gomez at ThinkProgress: ADAPT Activists Put Their Bodies on the Line to Gain Support for Disability Integration Act. "Roughly 200 ADAPT activists last Tuesday surrounded the Washington, D.C. headquarters of AARP, the influential non-profit focused on older adults, barricading exits so no one could leave. Police eventually guided people out of the building. But they only made it as far as the end of the block before activists stopped them again with their bodies. ADAPT wouldn't let up until either AARP endorsed a critical civil rights bill, or they were arrested. ...ADAPT protested for six hours in humid, 90-degree heat before police successfully escorted every AARP employee out of the garage — but only after employees were forced to drive on a sidewalk they secured from activists." Powerful.
What have you been reading that we need to resist today?
