MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
New satellite images show North Korea has made rapid improvements to the infrastructure at its Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center -- a facility used to produce weapons-grade fissile material, according to an analysis published by 38 North, a prominent North Korea monitoring group.......The con man Trump was conned....Who woulda guessed..?
Joe Heim, Devlin Barrett, WaPo this afternoon:
The Justice Department charged James Alex Fields Jr., the driver accused of murdering a counterprotester at last year’s white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., with multiple hate crimes Wednesday.
The charges include one hate crime act that led to the death of Heather Heyer, a counterprotester who was run over when Fields allegedly drove his car into a throng of anti-racist marchers. Fields also was indicted on 28 counts of hate crimes “causing bodily injury and involving an attempt to kill.” Those charges are related to the dozens of people injured in the same event.
“At the Department of Justice, we remain resolute that hateful ideologies will not have the last word and that their adherents will not get away with violent crimes against those they target,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement. “Last summer’s violence in Charlottesville cut short a promising young life and shocked the nation. Today’s indictment should send a clear message to every would-be criminal in America that we aggressively prosecute violent crimes of hate that threaten the core principles of our nation.”
One of the counts filed in federal court in Charlottesville carries the possibility of the death penalty, though under Justice Department guidelines it will take months for prosecutors to decide if they would seek execution if Fields, 21, is convicted.
Fields, who has been described by those who know him as a Nazi sympathizer, drove to Charlottesville from Ohio last summer as members of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi organizations and far-right white nationalist groups converged on the city. The groups participated in an Aug. 11 torchlight march through the University of Virginia campus and a “Unite the Right” rally the following day.
Both events were marked by racist and homophobic slurs and chants such as “Jews will not replace us” and “Our blood, our soil!” And both events rapidly descended into violence as marchers and counterprotesters clashed on the streets of the typically placid college town.
..........
By Perry Bacon Jr. @ FiveThirtyEight.com, June 26
The defining divide in American politics is probably between Republicans and Democrats. It encapsulates all our other divides — by race, education, religion and more — and it’s growing.
This partisan divide is such a big part of people’s political identities, in fact, that it’s reinforced simply by “negative partisanship,” or loyalty to a party because you don’t like the other party. A Pew Research Center poll from last year found that about 40 percent of both Democrats and Republicans belong to their party because they oppose the other party’s values, rather than because they are particularly aligned with their own party.
But what if Americans’ views of the parties, particularly whichever one they don’t belong to, are, well, kind of wrong? That’s the argument of a study by scholars Douglas Ahler and Gaurav Sood that was recently published in The Journal of Politics. They had the polling firm YouGov ask American adults to estimate the size of groups in each party. For example, what percentage of Democrats are black, or lesbian, gay or bisexual? What percentage of Republicans earn more than $250,000 a year, or are age 65 or older?
What they found was that Americans overall are fairly misinformed about who is in each major party — and that members of each party are even more misinformed about who is in the other party [....]
By John Wagner @ WashingtonPost.com, June 26
President Trump sought Tuesday to keep a spotlight on Rep. Maxine Waters, a veteran Democratic lawmaker whose call for aggressive protests of administration officials prompted rebukes from members of both parties.
In a morning tweet, Trump said that the California congresswoman is now “the face of the Democrats” and that Waters and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) make a “fine leadership team.”
“They should always stay together and lead the Democrats, who want Open Borders and Unlimited Crime, well into the future....and pick Crooked Hillary for Pres,” Trump wrote, referring to Hillary Clinton [....]
Trump’s campaign also made a mention of Waters later Tuesday in a fundraising email to supporters under the subject line “Harassment.” Trump’s tweet was an attempt to leverage more political advantage from a Los Angeles rally over the weekend at which Waters told supporters, “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them!”
Her call for political harassment was criticized Monday by Republicans and Democrats, including Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). [....]
By Julie Hirschfeld Davis, Thos. Kaplan & Robert Pear @ NYTimes.com, June 16
WASHINGTON — Seventeen states sued President Trump on Tuesday for his administration’s practice of separating immigrant parents from their children, saying that the tactic is causing “devastating harm,” even as a top official said the government was struggling to reunite families fractured by the policy [....]
The states, including Washington, California and New York and joined by the District of Columbia, branded the forcible separation of immigrant families unconstitutional, “cruel and unlawful,” calling it a violation of the principles of due process and equal protection. They requested that the court halt it and immediately compel the government to reunite parents with their children.
Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services, told senators on Tuesday that his department — which is charged with taking custody of undocumented unaccompanied minors — was having trouble figuring out how to care for the children it was holding who had been separated from their parents.
Some of them, he said, were in federal custody even though their parents had been sent back to Central America after trying to enter the United States illegally.
“As to any parent who’s deported, the child has independent rights,” Mr. Azar said during a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee, where his plan to discuss prescription drug pricing was upended by a grilling over the separated families. “We often do find, when a parent is deported, that they ask the child to remain separate and remain in this country.”
Mr. Azar said his department is holding 2,047 separated children, only six fewer than it held last week [....]
By Robert Barnes and Ann E. Marimow @ WashingtonPost.com, 25 minutes ago
Order barred travelers from certain majority-Muslim nations
In a 5-to-4 decision, justices said President Trump has the authority to ban travelers from certain areas if he thinks it is necessary to protect the United States, a major affirmation of presidential power.
I tuned in to President Trump’s event on immigration. Before I knew it, I had tumbled down a rabbit hole of white supremacy.
The president, in need of a change of subject from the treatment of migrant children at the border, brought in “angel” moms and dads on Friday who are “permanently separated from their loved ones” killed by illegal immigrants.
The purpose was to stoke fears that an illegal-immigrant crime wave is swamping the nation. Voluminous evidence shows that illegal immigrants don’t commit crimes in greater proportion than native-born Americans. But the angel parents had been told otherwise.
“You know,” said Mary Ann Mendoza, one of the angel moms on stage with Trump, “if the public would go to illegalaliencrimereport.com and see the magnitude of crimes being committed against your fellow Americans by illegal aliens allowed to stay in this country, you will be sickened.”
I did as she said and looked into the Illegal Alien Crime Report. I was indeed sickened by what I found: white-nationalist claims of “genocide” and a “Holocaust” being perpetrated against white Americans. And now, those promoting such filth are getting mentioned behind a lectern bearing the presidential seal, at an official event hosted by the president himself.
...........
Dana Milbank opinion piece, Washington Post, last night
Op-ed by John Solomon @ TheHill.com, June 25
One of the more devastating intelligence leaks in American history — the unmasking of the CIA’s arsenal of cyber warfare weapons last year — has an untold prelude worthy of a spy novel.
Some of the characters are household names, thanks to the Russia scandal: James Comey, fired FBI director. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Department of Justice (DOJ) official Bruce Ohr. Julian Assange, grand master of WikiLeaks. And American attorney Adam Waldman, who has a Forrest Gump-like penchant for showing up in major cases of intrigue.
Each played a role in the early days of the Trump administration to try to get Assange to agree to “risk mitigation” — essentially, limiting some classified CIA information he might release in the future [....]
On Monday, Harley-Davidson Inc. said it will shift some production out of the U.S. in order to mitigate the impact of European Union tariffs targeting its motorcycles. Those penalties — which Harley-Davidson estimates may cost it $100 million annually...
By Jim van Der Hei & Mike Allen @ Axios.com, June 25, found quoted & recommended by
The most popular American, whose legacy is the primary target of Donald Trump, has, for now, virtually disappeared from public life.
By Gabriel DeBenedetti @ NYMag.com, June 24
[....] Obama’s reticence is more than simply a matter of communications strategy. He has mostly opted out of liberal America’s collective Trump-outrage cycle. Though he reads the Times and other newspapers, he doesn’t follow daily Trump developments on Twitter or watch television news. He is upset by the administration’s actions, and he’s confided to friends that what worries him most is the international order, the standing of the office of the presidency, the erosion of democratic norms, and the struggles of people who are suddenly unsure of their immigration status or the future of their health-care coverage. Still, in conversations with political allies, Obama insists that today’s domestic mess is a blip on the long arc of history and argues that his own work must be focused on progress over time — specifically on empowering a new generation of leaders. He says his legacy is not what concerns him. (“Michelle and I are fine,” he tells those who ask about it.) And while he often says he misses the day-to-day work of fixing people’s problems, he has even less patience for day-to-day politics than he did as president.
In fact, in private conversations, Obama rarely mentions Trump at all. Those who’ve visited the office he’s leased from the World Wildlife Fund in Washington’s West End say he’s eager to talk for hours about the world’s ills. When informed about the latest presidential tweetstorms aimed at him, he chuckles and changes the subject. One friend of Obama’s recalled that after a 45-minute meeting that avoided the subject of Trump entirely, the pair ducked into an aide’s office and saw on television that the president was claiming to have been absolved in the Russia inquiry. Obama’s eyes flicked toward the chyron and his face took on a decidedly bemused aspect for a beat before he turned back to their conversation as if nothing had happened.
“The important thing to think about with Obama in the context of politics is what his overall goals are,” says Jim Messina, [....] Obama’s first goal is to adhere to the precedent George W. Bush set, leaving him alone and respecting the peaceful transfer of power. The second is to engage a younger generation of leaders. “And then, three, how to carefully decide when you have to sacrifice one and two, especially one. He has been really careful about No. 1,” Messina says. “He could pick a fight with Donald Trump every day, and (a) the only winner would be Donald Trump, and (b) we would kind of get into this back-and-forth the Clintons have gotten themselves into: Is there too much Obama? Not enough Obama?” [....]
MUCH MORE
The 28-year-old former refugee has become a viral sensation since being appointed to the role – and has won over his critics. ‘I decided to be myself,’ he says
By Decca Aitkenhead, The Saturday Interview @ The Guardian.com, June 22
[....] He also invited the letter-writers who condemned his appointment in the local press to a round-table meeting, because “I believe we should be having uncomfortable conversations, rather than sweeping things under the carpet”. The man who had complained that the city’s people were “losing their identity” didn’t show up. “But others did and they came around to it at the end of the day.” Really? “Yes, genuinely, they did.”
Magid strikes me as unusually untroubled by self-doubt. He agrees. He is well aware of some hostility on the council towards him and his ideas, but he says it is concentrated in one party, which he won’t name. His plan is to “kill it with kindness and bury it with a smile. You could be the most racist person to me; I will still open that door for you. You can’t solve hate with hate. That doesn’t solve anything whatsoever. I will still be kind to you, because at the end of the day you’re human; we all go through the same problems, same issues, face the same things, and I believe people can come around just by meeting people. I treat people with kindness, because arguing doesn’t solve anything.” He knows there are people who are waiting for him to mess up – “100%, massively” – and he is sure he will, sooner or later. “I’m not perfect. I’m going to make mistakes [....]
After White House directive, military moderated previous concerns about cost, integration
By Andy Pasztor & Gordon Lubold @ WSJ.com, June 22
President Donald Trump’s call this week for a separate U.S. “space force” was the culmination of months of frustration over what he felt was a lack of Pentagon action on his initial suggestions about the topic, according to people familiar with the decision.
The announcement on Monday—which surprised many military officials, senior aerospace industry executives and lawmakers—went against well-known opposition by Pentagon leaders to the idea of establishing a new branch of the U.S. armed forces [....]
George Will has been a persistent anti-Trumper since 2016. Still, for the lifetime conservative pundit to urge voters to reject congressional Republicans in November is remarkable:
In today’s GOP, which is the president’s plaything, he is the mainstream. So, to vote against his party’s cowering congressional caucuses is to affirm the nation’s honor while quarantining him. A Democratic-controlled Congress would be a basket of deplorables, but there would be enough Republicans to gum up the Senate’s machinery, keeping the institution as peripheral as it has been under their control and asphyxiating mischief from a Democratic House. And to those who say, “But the judges, the judges!” the answer is: Article III institutions are not more important than those of Articles I and II combined.
Minister’s comments recirculate after leader of far-right League party announces ‘census’ of Roma community
By Tom Embury-Dennis @ Independent.co.uk, June 21, with video @ link
[....] Matteo Salvini’s comments are being shared on social media after he announced a “census” of the country’s Roma community, setting the stage for deportations of the ethnic group. “We need a mass cleansing, street by street, piazza by piazza, neighbourhood by neighbourhood,” Mr Salvini, who is also Italy’s deputy prime minister, said in an interview last year. “We need to be tough because there are entire parts of our cities, entire parts of Italy, that are out of control.”
During the same interview, the 45-year-old suggested Italy could adopt policies on immigration similar to those of Donald Trump in the US.
Earlier this week, Mr Salvini said those Roma found to have Italian nationality would “unfortunately” be allowed to stay in the country while others would be expelled [....]