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MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Order today at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
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A bot that retweets tweets from people the president follows on Twitter.
So you can see exactly the same thing Trump is seeing on his Twitter feed.
A project of @pbump. (Philip Bump, Washington Post national correspondent)
By Yamicha Alcindor & Maggie Haberman @ NYTimes.com, Aug. 17
WASHINGTON — Kara Young, a biracial model who dated Donald J. Trump for two years before he married another model named Melania Knauss, remembers clearly bringing up her race with the real estate tycoon early in their relationship. As with so many issues, he steered the conversation to celebrity.
“I didn’t hide my race from Donald Trump. He knew,” Ms. Young said in a rare interview. “He would say, ‘You’re like Derek Jeter.’ And I would say, ‘Exactly.’”
“I never heard him say a disparaging comment towards any race of people,” she added.
The furor that Mr. Trump has created with his equivocation over the violence this weekend at a white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Va., has refocused attention on the president’s complex relationship with matters of race. Long before he embarked on his improbable political career, he had courted racial controversy [....]
[....] more than ever, the question is being asked: Is Mr. Trump personally racist?
The few African-Americans in his inner circle respond with an emphatic no. Most privately describe him as a 71-year-old man with fixed views and a cloistered history, raised in a heavily white enclave in Queens, who came of age and built a tower in the Manhattan sky when New York City was roiling with racial strife [....]
Sitting in Spain glad I didn't choose Barcelona or Valencia this time. As usual Europe and elsewhere get it worse, but we complain more.
More at La Vanguardia for thise who read Spanish
“Our country’s greatest strengths are the diversity of its people and the principles of equal dignity and inclusion that unite us all. There are troubling events planned in our state in the coming weeks. This is an incredibly painful and difficult time for millions of Californians. For those who are wondering where we stand – the ACLU of California fully supports the freedom of speech and expression, as well as the freedom to peacefully assemble. We review each request for help on a case-by-case basis, but take the clear position that the First Amendment does not protect people who incite or engage in violence. If white supremacists march into our towns armed to the teeth and with the intent to harm people, they are not engaging in activity protected by the United States Constitution. The First Amendment should never be used as a shield or sword to justify violence.”
- Abdi Soltani, Executive Director of the ACLU of Northern California
- Hector Villagra, Executive Director of the ACLU of Southern California
- Norma Chávez-Peterson, Executive Director of the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties
By Chris Perez @ NYPost.com, Aug. 16
White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon claims he wants to “crush” the far-right — calling them “losers” and “a collection of clowns” — during a shockingly candid interview with a liberal magazine.
“Ethno-nationalism — it’s losers. It’s a fringe element,” Bannon said during a surprise phone call with The American Prospect writer Robert Kuttner.
“I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more,” he added. “These guys are a collection of clowns.”
The rare interview, which was published Wednesday, covered a wide range of topics — including the events in Charlottesville, Bannon’s ongoing rivalries inside the White House, and economic tensions between the US and China [....]
More on the original piece, which comes from a phone interview occurring soon after Trump's infamous Tues. news conference, below the fold...
By Binyamin Applebaum @ NYTimes.com, Aug. 16
WASHINGTON — The renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement is off to a rocky start.
The Trump administration lectured Canada and Mexico on the failures of the current agreement at an opening news conference Wednesday morning, while behind closed doors negotiators began to seek significant concessions from America’s neighbors.
“We feel that Nafta has fundamentally failed many, many Americans and needs major improvement,” said Robert Lighthizer, the United States trade representative, who is leading the United States team aiming to overhaul the 25-year-old agreement [....]
Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao stood shoulder-to-shoulder Tuesday with President Donald Trump, the same man who railed against her husband, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, last week and demanded that the lawmaker "get back to work" on health care."I stand by my man -- both of them," Chao said, when asked by reporters what she thought of her boss's criticism of her husband.
A Los Angeles-based tech company is resisting a federal demand for more than 1.3 million IP addresses to identify visitors to a website set up to coordinate protests on Inauguration Day — a request whose breadth the company says violates the Constitution.
Review of Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency
By Sam Tanenhaus @ New York Review of Books, Aug. 17 issue, available free online
[...] Joshua Green’s new book, Devil’s Bargain, argues that Trumpism is best understood through his partnership with Stephen K. Bannon, now the president’s chief political strategist. Green, formerly a correspondent at The Atlantic and now at Bloomberg Businessweek, has been writing about conservatives since the George W. Bush years. It is a testament to his adroit intertwining of Bannon’s story with Trump’s that we’re not certain which of the two figures has sold the bigger part of himself to the other. In the broader sense, they are coauthors of our moment’s tabloid conservatism.
Trump has had many biographers, but it was Green who did the first in-depth reporting on Bannon, in a long Bloomberg profile in October 2015, ten months before Bannon formally joined the Trump campaign and rescued it from what looked like certain defeat [....]
By Matt Egan @ CNN Money, Aug. 14
The election of a businessman to the White House fueled a wave of optimism among America's CEOs. Now some of those same business leaders are turning on President Trump.
Like it or not, the president of the United States embodies America itself. The individual inhabiting the White House has become the preeminent symbol of who we are and what we represent as a nation and a people. In a fundamental sense, he is us. It was not always so.
A Twitter account dubbed “Yes, You're Racist” is exposing the white nationalists who attended the “Unite the Right” rally at Emancipation Park condemning the city's decision to take down the Robert E. Lee statue....Cole White — a protester pictured on the account — was fired from his job at Top Dog, a restaurant in Berkeley, Calif., the company said.
By Sue Win-Long & Philip Wen @ Reuters. com, Aug. 12
DANDONG, China - Chinese textile firms are increasingly using North Korean factories to take advantage of cheaper labor across the border, traders and businesses in the border city of Dandong told Reuters.
The clothes made in North Korea are labeled "Made in China" and exported across the world, they said.
Using North Korea to produce cheap clothes for sale around the globe shows that for every door that is closed by ever-tightening U.N. sanctions another one may open. The UN sanctions, introduced to punish North Korea for its missile and nuclear programs, do not include any bans on textile exports [....]
Twenty-five people wounded after 25kg bomb detonates in Quetta amid celebrations for forthcoming independence day
By Associated Press from Quetta, Aug. 12
A suicide bomber on a motorcycle has targeted a military truck with a bomb killing eight soldiers and seven civilians in the south-western city of Quetta, Pakistani officials have said.
Kabeer Khan, an explosives expert who examined the site, said after collecting forensic evidence that it was a suicide attack and that the attacker had been carrying 25kg of “incendiary explosives” on a motorcycle that he had rammed into the military truck [....]
@ AlJazeera.com, 58 minutes ago
Iraqi PM asked to lead Saudi mediation with Iran, which has welcomed the initiative, according to Iraqi TV station.
Human rights groups say at least 24 people have been killed in violence following the presidential vote, which opposition supporters claim was rigged
By Jason Burke in Nairobi for TheGuardian.com, Aug. 12
Mid-afternoon, and black smoke trails above the grey tenements. Broken glass, burned tyres, rubble and makeshift barricades block roads. Charred spars mark where a stall once stood, incinerated in confused clashes overnight. Police, armed with batons and assault rifles, cluster around their trucks. Angry men shout slogans and wave fists.
The morning has seen much violence: teenagers throwing rocks, police firing teargas. During the night, Mathare, a sprawling slum in Nairobi, has echoed to the sound of gunfire and police helicopters. There have been many casualties, some fatal [.....]
In tough neighborhoods, can high-school mental health counselors cut the school-to-prison pipeline?
By Brianna Ehley for Politico.com's special series The Agenda 2020
[....] A growing number of school districts, like the District of Columbia school system, are beginning to provide comprehensive mental health services on campus, seeing it as not just a service to students, but a key way to keep lives on track, keep kids out of the justice system, and to treat problems before they get out of hand [....]