Shameless.

The president of the United States retweeted something that was originally posted on what is the equivalent to a KKK website in Britain, and he got mad at the British Prime Minister for calling him out on it. I need every American to think about that for a minute.

He has also been telling people that he still believes  Barack Obama was not born in this country, and that he (trump) made a mistake by apologizing for spreading his racist lie for years. 

And people like Lindsey Graham (who himself called the president a kook) wonder why we are questioning his sanity.

These are interesting and scary times. It's when a racist White House can boldly and shamelessly flaunt their racism for all of us to see. They have given up on trying to pretend that they are not a  more powerful version of of their white nationalist brothers and sisters, who play weekend war games in rural America and hide behind their sheets. 

Speaking of racism, check out this story:

 "CHICAGO - Outside a West Side medical clinic late last summer, a fed-up Tyler Lumar told Chicago police he'd had enough.

Officers were called to the East Garfield Park clinic after Lumar, a 22-year-old with asthma there for a first visit after his longtime doctor died, yelled and allegedly threatened a physician who refused to refill his cough medicine prescription, then tossed papers on the floor and said he would come back and shoot the place up, according to a police report.

"I'm so tired of racism, bro," Lumar said outside the clinic, according to a Chicago police squad car dashcam recording of the encounter, alleging the incident began when the doctor accused Lumar, who has no criminal record, of reselling his prescription drugs. "That's racial profiling. I don't gangbang, I went to Oak Park and River Forest (High School). I played baseball."

Police let Lumar go without charges, but moments later the same officers stopped him as he walked down Madison Street, records show. They arrested him because a western Illinois county had issued a warrant over an overdue $25 payment in a misdemeanor traffic case but had failed to remove the warrant when Lumar paid up.

Less than 24 hours later, the father of one attempted to hang himself in a Harrison District police holding cell, police said. As a result, he's suffered massive brain injuries and can no longer move or speak; he's spent the past year on life support, racking up medical bills of about $2 million.
Meantime, his family has tried to determine why he was kept locked up overnight on a low-level warrant even though he had the cash, according to an arrest report, to bail himself out. They have filed a federal lawsuit alleging Lumar was wrongfully detained and that Chicago police failed to check on him every 15 minutes in his cell - even falsifying the inspection logs, a record-keeping breach the lawsuit says is a common police practice in Chicago.

"My son never should've been there (in a police lockup)," his mother, Lisa Alcorn, a Verizon Wireless training manager from River Forest, said in an interview as tears streamed down her face.
The case is not only another example of the city's and county's alleged failure to keep nonviolent offenders from languishing in jails - an issue experts say disproportionately affects the poor and minorities - but also highlights the tightrope that defendants walk even in misdemeanor cases, where a slightly late payment can land someone in jail.

Lumar's longtime girlfriend, Casey Tecate, 23, who once thought of becoming a cop herself, said "it definitely is scary; it goes to show it could literally happen to anybody. I feel like they, meaning the police, just don't ... look at certain people as people. They're just like 'Oh (this is) some person from the West Side of Chicago.' They weren't looking at him as Tyler Lumar: a dad, a brother, a son." 

  She spends part of most days in a Des Plaines rehab hospital with the now 23-year-old man she had planned to marry. Sometimes Tecate brings their daughter, Savannah, now 4.
Alcorn, who visits her son after work, said she hopes the lawsuit will not only help the family pay for Lumar's medical care but change how Chicago police treat those they arrest. "In Chicago, you should be scared for your son," she said. [More]

And there is this one:

"A Mississippi police officer who was suspended for racially bigoted social media posts earlier this year was put on leave after killing a black man once he returned to active duty.

Columbus Police Department (“CPD”) Patrolman Jared Booth was given a 28-day suspension in June after the Columbus city council voted 4-1 against him on the basis of those posts.

One of the posts is said to be sexually explicit–featuring a female CPD officer, an image of a sex toy and a reference to oral sex. Another post used a racial slur–a common derivation or permutation of the N-word.

A third post was homophobic in nature and directed toward a different, former officer with the CPD who later filed a wrongful termination suit against the department.

One of those posts was made on April 18, while another made its way to Facebook the day after.
Columbus’ social media policy forbids city employees from posting content that is “malicious, obscene, threatening or intimidating, that disparages co-employees, suppliers or that might constitute harassment or bullying.”

Earlier this month, on November 4, Booth responded to a disturbance call outside of a nightclub. That call, alleged disturbance, and night ended in the shooting death of 24-year-old Raymond Davis, who is black. Booth was the officer who fired the fatal shots.

Immediately after the shooting, Columbus city officials insisted that Davis was holding a gun. Columbus Mayor Robert Smith even went so far as to state, “We know for a fact the gun wasn’t planted.” He continued:

Officer Booth did activate his camera at the time he received the call of a disturbance at the Premier Lounge…The entire incident was captured on body camera. It is early in the investigation and I am not allowed to go through the entire incident at this time. But I will say the video shows Raymond Davis with a gun in his hand at the time of the shooting.

Police Chief Oscar Lewis was pressed on whether Booth’s prior Facebook posts would factor into any investigation over his lethal use of force. He said, “I think they are two different incidents, and I think the first incident has been addressed.”

A crowded vigil held the day after Davis’ death featured his children holding a sign directed at Booth which read, “You Killed Our Dad.”' [Source]

This is Donald trump's America. Y'all better stay woke. 





 

OPEN THREAD WEDNESDAY.

It's open thread Wednesday field hands, and as is always the case, I need your thoughts on a few things.

Is the president of the United States an Archie Bunker type bigot? Or is his type of bigotry a  dangerous and calculated manipulation of the masses?

Will the Royal family really allow a little color to creep into their bloodlines?

Has Sarah Huckabee Sanders hit Kelly Ann Conway territory with her lies?

Did we really need Rev. Al to visit Meek Mill in prison? 

Does the Washington Post exposing that fraud James O'Keefe and his gang prove that they do real journalism?

Is trump merchandise being made in China a big deal?

Finally, North Korea launched an intercontinental ballistic missile off the coast of Japan today, and trump said that he "will take care of it". Do you believe him?

"The 'Racist' Card"

Here is an interesting take on Republicans and racism via an interview with Peter Beinart. 

The Field Negro education series continues.

“Is American conservatism inherently bigoted?” That’s the question asked by Peter Beinart in a new piece for the Atlantic. It’s also a question that a lot of Americans have been asking over the past several years, particularly with the rise of Donald Trump. Beinart has been a passionate critic of Trump’s racism and bigotry, but he argues that liberals have been too unsparing in their labeling of people and institutions as racist. With Americans becoming increasingly progressive in some ways, Beinart recognizes that the ground is constantly moving beneath people’s feet. (Six years ago, Barack Obama was not openly in favor of gay marriage; now such an opinion is often considered beyond the pale.)

To discuss his essay and the American dialogue a year after Trump’s election, I spoke by phone with Beinart recently. During the course of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed Ed Gillespie’s Virginia campaign (before we knew his racial appeals didn’t end up working), the notion that political correctness causes racism, how to talk to people who embrace social change at a different rate than you do, and the costs and benefits of labeling people who vote for bigots as “racist.”

 

Isaac Chotiner: You don’t really mention this in the essay, but one thing that struck me while reading it is: However we want to define people, and whether “racist” is the right label for them, a lot of people—46 percent of voters—just undeniably voted for a racist. How do we talk about them?

Peter Beinart: One of the points that Ta-Nehisi Coates has made repeatedly that is very well taken is that journalists should not think like political consultants. So, it may be politically unwise to call those people “deplorable” and to call out their racism, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. But I do think that in applying the term racist or bigot, except in the really extreme cases, it makes sense to try to apply the term towards an act or a policy or a statement rather than to a person.

And I think if I were going to critique Hillary’s “deplorable” comment, I might critique it along those lines, which is to say that a lot of Trump supporters believe deplorable things—which they absolutely do; just look at how much support the Muslim ban had in all of the polls—rather than to call the people “deplorable.” Because I think there’s a way in which, again, except in really extreme cases, even people who hold bigoted views are more complicated than that. And it also, obviously, is going to get people’s backs up much more, and so we should try to focus these terms on policy and action rather than individuals.

To take an example in the news: Ed Gillespie in Virginia ran a campaign that I think you and I would say has racist elements to it.

Yes. 

In some ways, it’s a Trumpian campaign. But it’s also very similar to a lot of Republican campaigns from the pre-Trump era. And you see a lot of Democrats labeling the campaign racist, or labeling Ed Gillespie racist for running this campaign. How do you think we should talk about something like the Gillespie campaign, which really is mainstream Republican at this point?

My piece just came out, but I actually wrote it a couple months ago, and I actually think that the circumstances are worse now than they were back then, because I think it’s become more clear now that the Gillespie campaign and the New Jersey campaign are good examples of this—and the kind of exiting of Jeff Flake and Bob Corker—of how much Trumpism is the model for the Republican Party. I think it was a little bit less clear even this summer.

As much as possible I think we should try to be specific in the way we deploy these terms, so I think saying Ed Gillespie is racist—or even the Ed Gillespie campaign is racist—is less valuable both descriptively but also in terms of its impact than saying this particular ad of Ed Gillespie is racist in this particular way. I certainly am not suggesting that we should take these terms out of parlance, because goodness knows we are in the Trump era, where so much of this deserves that. But I also think that they have such power because there is this sense, rightly or wrongly, amongst conservatives, that conservatives genuinely seem to believe, a lot of them, that they are routinely and unfairly tagged with these terms. I think it makes it all the more important that when they are deployed, that they’re deployed as specifically as possibly, so I would want people to say, name me the specific thing that Ed Gillespie has said or done in this campaign that’s racist.

You mentioned in your piece what Marco Rubio said about Black Lives Matter a long time ago, where he kind of tried to show some empathy for people who are feeling like race relations in the country needed to change, and you pointed out that when Republicans do things like this that, Democrats can and should highlight them and applaud them. But when this is all happening under a paradigm of Republicans, especially Republican officeholders, supporting a bigoted president, it’s just very hard to have any sort of conversation.

I agree with you, but I think that this is so bad for the country. The country needs a less racist conservatism, or less bigoted conservatism, if not a nonbigoted—I mean, many people say our liberalism is bigoted too, so it depends on from what perspective you’re seeing this. I think that in some ways, we didn’t appreciate—you know, Mitt Romney and George W. Bush had lots of problems and all, but we are in so much worse shape now than we were then, that I think it’s kind of incumbent on liberals and conservatives to try to think together, those who oppose Trump, what it would take to try to breathe some life back into this, to have a Republican that actually wanted to compete for the black and Latino vote again, rather than purely running against them. I don’t claim to kind of have conclusive answers, but I think the project is one that liberals and conservatives of good will need to really both be engaged in.

There is this idea out there, which I see online if I ever write something about Trump and racism, that basically one reason white people are driven to Trump is because they get called racist all the time.

Right, right

“I’m so angry about being called racist that I’m going to vote for a racist president.”

Right! Doesn’t exactly disprove the thesis!

It’s a ridiculous thesis. But I also think it’s worth thinking about culturally what it means having a country where a lot of people are labeled racist.

This was something that I was really wrestling with and struggling with a lot in writing the piece. As I think the question implies, it’s somewhat ridiculous to suggest that political correctness is creating racism when America was pretty darn racist for a long time before anyone had heard of the term political correctness, and before any of this kind of culture of “political correctness” existed, right? So, obviously American racism does not require political correctness to exist and flourish throughout our history.

So I think that’s kind of obvious. I do think that, though—and I tried to cite a couple of studies in the piece—there are more and less effective ways of talking to people who hold views, some of which we would consider bigoted. And there is an art of persuasion, and that art kind of matters politically, and it also matters civically, like it matters in the way we interact. And while it’s true while Ta-Nehisi Coates says, like, journalists should just say what’s true, that’s definitely true, but it’s also important that we try to think about how we nurture and strengthen nonbigoted points of view, nonbigoted attitudes among people who we still fundamentally disagree with, you know? And I think that’s what I was trying to get at in the first half of the piece.

One thing that’s come up in conversations I’ve had about Weinstein and sexual harassment with people who are, say, over the age of 50, is this real discomfort about how things are changing in the culture. I hate the Mark Lilla thesis that, you know, Democratic Party PC-ness is what’s costing them elections, but I also think that, just for the health of our civic culture, it’s important to be aware of how people are different. I guess I don’t have an answer, because things like sexism and racism need to change, and going easy on them because it makes people “uncomfortable” is its own form of PC-ness. 

Certain cultural norms emerge, and sometimes they emerge quite quickly, like let’s say around issues about trans people. I mean, that’s been pretty recent in terms of its evolution in the broad public consciousness. And certain language emerges, and certain norms emerge about how you talk. And that’s very good, those things, and that’s partly why I am a progressive. I believe in that progressive impulse. But I think where it can be a problem is where you basically don’t give people any time and space to evolve a little bit more slowly, and one of the things I tried to say in the piece is I think it’s important to look at whether people are moving in the right direction, rather than necessarily demand that they move at the same speed.

To say, “Well at least we’re moving in the right direction on these things” after this election is really hard, when you are scared the country is in the broad sense not progressing but entering a reactionary time.

Right. I think there have been several moments in American history where progressives bought into the kind of famous Martin Luther King Jr. line about the arc of the moral universe being long and bending toward justice, and then you get shocked into the realization that actually there’s no inevitability about that at all. And I think that happened to liberals during World War I, I think it happened in the 1960s and ’70s and now it’s happening again. You’re right, in that moment it becomes much harder and unfortunately these are the wages of Donald Trump’s presidency. [Source]

I disagree with Beinhart's take, and I call bullshit on people who say that they voted for the racist because they were called racists.

No, they voted for the racist because they are racists.

It's really that simple.  

White picket fences, apple pies, and Nazis.

I first met Richard Fausset over a decade ago when he did a feature on me for his old paper, the Los Angeles Times. He shadowed me for a day and I got to know him pretty well. I though his reporting was fair and accurate, and I found him to be genuine and thoughtful. I did then-- and still do-- believe that he is someone from the majority population who gets it.

Fausset now writes for the New York Times, and an article he wrote recently for his paper has been getting a lot of buzz for all the wrong reasons.

Apparently his editors believe that a Nazi next door article was something that the world needed right now. Normalizing Nazis, though, is not something that twitterland and lots of other folks felt was cool, and they let the New York Times know about it in no uncertain terms. I must confess that I too thought that an article on the Nazi next door from America's paper of record was not a good look. The author himself appears to  have had reservations about the article after he wrote it, and he must have been thinking to himself: how did I let my editors get me into this mess? 

To be fair,  it's not only the New York Times. The American media in general has had a love affair with white supremacists ever since the election of Donald trump.  There has been one article after another about the typical trump supporter and what it is that makes him or her tick. (As if that's hard to figure out.) If I read one more article about the poor trump supporter and his "economic anxiety" I will scream.

While the main stream media continues to fawn over over the trumpbots, the rest of us are having a hard time figuring out this normalization of hate that has been going on in America. When the New York Times does an article on a suburban boy next door Nazi, you know what we are in trouble. I mean Hitler loved dogs for crying out loud. 

I have no problem with reporting on white extremist and racist to let us know what we are dealing with in this country. But I do have a problem when we treat them like they are just a bunch of folks with a different political point of view. They are far more dangerous than that. I don't expect the white power structure that controls the media in this country to understand this, but I do expect them to have a certain amount of sensitivity for the rest of us who are threatened by these people.

I will close with the words of Jamelle Bouies's response to someone on twitter.

"my explanation is that the overwhelming whiteness of political journalism is a genuine impediment to understanding white racist extremists as a genuine, dangerous threat and reporting on them accordingly."

CAPTION SATURDAY.

I need a caption for this pic.

Example: "He better not be wearing a wire." 


Pic from politicususa.com

Another whopper from the tweeter in chief?

"Time Magazine called to say that I was PROBABLY going to be named “Man (Person) of the Year,” like last year, but I would have to agree to an interview and a major photo shoot. I said probably is no good and took a pass. Thanks anyway!" 

That was a tweet from the president of the United States earlier today. I am not sure if it was before or after he played a ("quick") round of golf with Tiger Woods, who is involved with a personal business project with him.     

 First, I am not even sure if it's true. (This White House has truth issues with the simplest of things.) m) We know that trump is obsessed with this particular award, as he has posted a phony Time magazine cover photo with him receiving said award at one of his properties.

Second, even if it is true, so what? Who cares other than this narcissist? It's no wonder that psychiatrist all over the country are starting to question this mentally flawed individual. Although, if we are going to be honest, they should be questioning the mental state of the people who voted for him in the first place. 

Clearly something is not right with a man who is allegedly very wealthy, who is the president of the most powerful country on earth, and yet is still so obviously insecure that he has to cover himself in self aggrandizement.

Wait....this just in from Time magazine.

"The President is incorrect about how we choose Person of the Year. TIME does not comment on our choice until publication, which is December 6."

He just can't help himself.

Turkey day.

Sup field hands?

I know it doesn't seem like there is much to be thankful for with that big turkey in the White House, but try to count your blessings and find some things that make you thankful.

Some of these men are not like the others.

*The White House couldn't cover for him any longer, so Mr. trump finally came clean with his love for the "alleged" pedophile down in Alabama, Roy Moore. (That whole "birds of a feather" thing I guess.)

Anyway, it seems that it's now cool to be an "alleged" sexual predator, as long as you belong to the right tribe. Politics now trump (pun intended) all things, including morality.

Anyway, these are interesting times when it comes to sexual harassment, and one writer has an interesting take on why all these "alleged" sexual predators fit a certain physical profile.

 "You may have noticed that as this extremely depressing and never-ending “celebrity sex abuser” storyline plays out, there are at least a couple of patterns. One of them, which no one has had the courage to fully examine, is that almost all of the most high-profile alleged abusers from the world of media/entertainment/politics are men who would not be generally considered physically attractive. Some might even be called ugly, and not just because of their behavior.

I am always very skeptical of when the media takes a few stray data points and weaves them into a convenient narrative, but there is clearly something to this. Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes, Mark Halperin, Louis C.K., Roy Moore, Al Franken, Charlie Rose, Glenn Thrush, John Conyers, John Lasseter, and Jeffery Tambor all clearly fit within this description.

So, is this just a coincidence, or is there a connection between a male celebrity lacking good looks and him being more likely to be accused of sexually inappropriate, or even criminal conduct? I have a theory that there is indeed an association here, one which may play a role in multiple directions.

Given the highly sensitive nature of this subject matter and the incredibly toxic current environment surrounding this topic, I want to first make very clear that I am not looking to in any way to excuse the very bad behavior, which, as the father of two young girls, I obviously abhor. Instead, I am only trying only to explain a portion of what is really going on here and make sense of what seems to be an overwhelming level of insane news stories all coming out at the same time.

Charlie Rose, in his ill-fated “defense” against allegations which led to his instant and shocking downfall, said, “I always felt that I was pursuing shared feelings, even though I now realize that I was mistaken.” While the nature of the allegations, some of which he is denying, makes his perspective difficult to believe, let’s, for a moment, take him at his word. If one understands celebrity and power, this assertion may not be nearly as preposterous as it first appears to be.

Having spent a lot of time around many rather famous and powerful people, I believe that “celebrity” is effectively a disease. It completely screws with a person’s brain and often makes them quite delusional (which is why making someone whose whole life has been about achieving celebrity, the president of the United States, was a REALLY bad idea). In short, a person begins to believe, quite literally, that their crap does not stink.

This creates a situation where they really believe that they can do no wrong and that the people around them, who never tell them “no” and praise nearly everything they do, actually adore them. Much like animals in a first-class zoo, they begin to live in a world with no actual connection to reality and their ability to properly gauge personal interactions becomes greatly diminished.
Inevitably, this impacts their contact within “romantic” relationships, especially if they are heterosexual men. As Harvey Weinstein’s gorgeous and soon to be ex-wife proves, it is well known that some women are extremely attracted to–or at least pretend to be–celebrity, power, and money.
It is hardly a stretch then that these same men, who probably got no female attention in their formative teenage years, in their adulthood as a “celebrity” want to take their new fancy sports car (if you will) out for a ride as often as possible. Inevitably, this means that they will eventually drive this car too fast/recklessly, causing them to crash and burn.

In other words, these men get used to the idea that some women really will, just as Donald Trump infamously told Access Hollywood, “let you do anything” if you are a “star.” They start to think that they are George Clooney because some women actually really do treat them that way (and they are too egotistical to realize that these women are probably mostly faking it). Effectively, they end up WAY “over punting” their “coverage” and bad things, sometimes very bad things, end up happening, especially since these men also tend to have massive entitlement issues.

I know that a lot of people, especially liberal feminists, will be outraged by this analysis because they will wrongly perceive that I am minimizing these widely varied acts of abuse, but I am not. They will also say that I am portraying the motivation of the act incorrectly because sex abuse, to them, is all about power and not about sex.

As an actual heterosexual man, who knows a lot of other real heterosexual men, I believe that this perception is, for the vast majority of cases, way off. The reality is that these men want to have sexual relations with women more beautiful than their own level of attractiveness would normally allow. This is why they pursued the very attributes (fame, power, money) which would make this possible for them to achieve. (Part of why I know this is because, as teenage mega-geek, I started my career as a TV sportscaster for some of the same reasons and, after initially enjoying the “perks,” quickly matured enough to realize they weren’t worth the downside.)

It is instructive here to see how men view sexual abuse when it occurs in reverse. Take, for instance, female teacher sex abuse cases, which are shockingly common and which, not coincidently, get a lot of media coverage, at least when the teacher is considered to be “attractive.” There is zero doubt that the average male, whether they admit it publicly or not, judge the heinousness of these acts based solely on how good-looking the teacher is. For instance, right or not, I have never met a man who thought that the crimes committed on a teenage boy by “hot teacher” Debra Lafave were particularly horrible.

This phenomenon does not generally work the same way with women because biologically they tend to see the role and desirability is irrelevant in judging and interpreting the actions of men in the realm of sexual harassment and abuse. I am convinced, for instance, that if Al Franken looked like Brad Pitt, no one would have ever taken Leeann Tweeden’s charge remotely seriously.

As Tom Brady memorably taught us in a 2012 Saturday Night Live sketch, the rules to follow for not sexually harassing women in the workplace are: “Be handsome, Be Attractive, Don’t Be Unattractive.” [Source]

Now let's be clear, I do not agree with the author's views. I happen to think that if a woman wants to allow *Idris Elba or *George Clooney to flirt with her and not Donald trump or Roy Moore, that is her prerogative. If you happen to be an old unattractive white man who thinks that your money and power allows you to be a pig, then you  might want to do some soul searching and face reality: You are not Idris Elba, George Clooney, or brad Pitt.

It might seem like a double standard, but it's not. That's her choice to make, not yours.   

*Pic from lehren.com

LaVar vs Donald.

I was thinking the same thing as the author of the following article today.

"Trump’s Twitter War with LaVar Ball Underlines a Bigger Problem.

With all the pressing issues of the day, Donald Trump still finds time to engage in a twitter war with LeVar Ball, father of UCLA basketball player LiAngelo Ball. LiAngelo and some of his teammates had been arrested on suspicion of shoplifting while on tour in China. LeVar Ball expressed skepticism about the level of help Trump gave in assisting the basketball players. One has to ask why the president of the United States has such a thin skin that he must respond to every slight or criticism. Why are most of Trump’s targets people of color?


Trumps seems to find plenty of time to engage in twitter wars with people of color but doesn’t ever find the time to call into question the behavior of people lik Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer. Trump is engaged in twitter wars with ESPN sportswriter Jemele Hill. He was upset when Hill referred to him as a white supremacist. Hill was upset over comments Trump made during the Charlottesville Neo-Nazi riots when Trump claimed there were “good people on both sides.”

Who can forget the time Trump attacked a Gold Star family over remarks made at the 2016 DNC Convention? Trump couldn’t stand having his foreign policy criticized, so he launched a bigoted attack against Mr. Khan’s religion. Trump remains silent on acts of terrorism committed by right-wing white men. He remains silent about how to fix the problem of mass shootings. He takes the time to attack any high profile person of color who dares to criticize him. Maybe Jemele Hill is right." [Source]  

With all the problems in the world and the work that this clown  (Donald trump) should be doing, he is engaged in a twitter war with LaVar Ball of all people/. All because his son didn't kiss his ring like a good Negro should after he gets help from Mr Charlie. 

Give me a break! 

Memo to POTUS: You are a president of all the people, and it is your job to help Americans when you can and if they are in need. Even if they are young Negro basketball players. 

*Pic from tmz.com

Enough?

     * So we have finally reached a turning point when it comes to calling out sexual harassment in America. It's a welcome thing, but clearly it has come too late. And forgive me if  am not convinced that this is a watershed moment, after all we have been down this road many times before. 

Had the #MeToo movement been in effect about 27 years ago,  maybe there would be no Justice Clarence Thomas sitting in the Supreme Court today. No one believed Anita Hill then, and Thomas used the race card to escape the reality of his transgressions. 

Poor Anita Hill must be wondering to herself: where was the #MeToo movement when I needed it? 

Fast forward to 2017, and we are at a place in time where it seems that every day another woman comes forward to tell her story about being sexually assaulted, harassed, or abused by a male in  a position of power.

There have been so many of late, that it has gotten hard for us to keep up.  They are calling it the Weinstein effect, and powerful men from New York to Hollywood are shaking in their boots.  It might just shake up a senate race in Alabama, because the candidate who was leading in the race is "allegedly" a sexual pedophile who has a predilection for underaged girls.  It might also cause a sitting senator to have to resign his seat depending on where an investigation by his colleagues lead.

One person who has escaped the scrutiny is the man who should be scrutinized the most: the sitting president of the United States. He is a man who was accused by at least 15 women of  sexual assault. He is a man who admitted on tape to assaulting women. He is also a man who has a history of publicly insulting women in the most misogynistic manner, and yet there he sits in the White House with no shame ----or fear of being called out for his reprehensible and possibly criminal behavior. 

The president himself has weighed in on all of this with an unbelievable tweet condemning Al Franken for being a hypocrite  (talk about living in a glass house and throwing stones). He just couldn't help himself, and now folks are reminded what a scumbag some of them held their noses and voted for.

I know of a few women who I am sure didn't vote for him. Ubet Ninni Laaksonen ,Jessica, Drake Karena Virginia, Cathy Heller, Summer Zervos, Kristin Anderson, Jessica Leeds, Rachel Crook, Mindy McGillivray, Natasha Stoynoff, Jennifer Murphy, Cassandra Searles, Temple Taggart McDowell,and Jill Harth.  

I am sure there are others, let's hope that the #MeToo movement gives them the courage to speak out as well. 

*Pic from democracynow.org






  

CAPTION SATURDAY.

I need a caption for this pic.

*Pic from people.com

The death of democracy.

Did the greatest democracy on earth die with the election of Donald trump?

The following article might help with some answers to that question.

The Field Negro education series continues.

 "It’s been one year since the election of Donald Trump as president and, despite his questionable commitment to the country’s political traditions, American democracy is still standing. Some of Trump’s most dangerous policies have been stopped by the judiciary. Others have not made it through Congress. Special counsel Robert Mueller is closing in on the dangerous liaisons between the Trump campaign and Russia (and perhaps much more). The president’s approval rating has hit a dismal 38 percent, and Democrats scored a landslide in Virginia’s elections last week.

Is it time to rejoice in the strength of American institutions? That would be underestimating the threat on the horizon and overestimating the strength of U.S. institutions. There are two complementary prongs to Trump’s onslaught on American democracy, and both are still clear and present threats.

The first is a systematic attack on democratic political norms.

Democracy is supported by a complex set of political norms that encourage restraint and compromise from the main political actors. These norms are the lifeblood of democratic institutions because no constitution can specify a complete recipe for resolving conflicts in the disparate situations in which politicians, political parties, and other powerful actors will find themselves. Even when certain rules are specified, they need to be interpreted and are often vulnerable to abuse. Democratic political norms fill in this vacuum. They encourage compromise and rule out actions that enable those who currently hold power from impairing rivals. Without these norms, those in office will find ways to abuse their power, undermining the workings of democratic institutions.

The recent history of Argentine democracy illustrates the disastrous consequences of the violation of such norms. Argentina’s famous strongman Juan Perón was elected as president in 1946, after his stint as minister of labor in the former military regime. One of his first acts was to replace three Supreme Court justices with his cronies. Thereafter, Argentina’s Supreme Court ceased to be viewed as a check on presidential power, and it became a new normal for every president, even those who came to power via democratic elections, to oust justices and replace them with loyalists.

Of course, the political norms of democratic compromise in the United States were seriously strained even before Trump’s presidency, as illustrated, for example, by systematic gerrymandering to lock in the domination of the party currently controlling a state’s legislature or by the unwillingness of Senate Republicans to even consider former President Barack Obama’s final nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland. But Trump’s demonization of opposition and media, blurring of lines between personal and presidential, removal of all types of auditing and other control mechanisms on the administration, and legitimization of uncompromising, or even hateful, views via his implicit support for far-right protesters in Charlottesville and his pardon of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio have set new lows not just by U.S. but by any international standards.
Political norms that are the bulwark of our democracy cannot be easily repaired once damaged, even if Trump’s most dangerous policies are stopped. Nor can white supremacist, anti-immigrant, and nativist rhetoric be swiftly sidelined once condoned by the U.S. president.

The second prong of the Trump onslaught is an attempt to weaken institutions so as to elevate the personal power of a would-be autocrat. The recent history of democratic institutions succumbing to such attacks in Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela illustrate that the takeover of democratic institutions is often a slow, gradual process. First comes the silencing of internal opposition within the party or the political movement of the strongmen. Then, there is the slow process of neutralizing the judiciary, followed by a systematic, if uneven, sidelining of independent civil service. All throughout, the media and other civil society organizations are increasingly muzzled and silenced by threats, co-option, and smearing.

Of course, if democratic institutions are truly strong and alert against threats, these attacks can be resisted. But the performance of U.S. checks and balances so far gives no comfort.

The last several months have shown clearly that Congress, so long as it remains under the control of Republicans, will provide none of the checks on the president’s power that are often presumed. On the contrary, the fact that only senators not seeking re-election have been able to speak against Trump underscores the near-complete capitulation of the Republican Party. And it is set to get worse as Republican lawmakers are witnessing how the small but highly motivated and mobilized minority of Americans devoted to Trump will bombard them with tweets, messages, or even threats if they so much as disagree with the president.

Several judges stood firm against Trump’s travel ban for several Muslim-majority countries. But in the next three years, Trump, through appointment, can completely change the balance of the judiciary, especially for cases that make it up to the Supreme Court, where he may have an opportunity to appoint several more justices. Banking on the judiciary to defend democracy would be foolhardy indeed.

The growing chorus of Trump supporters demanding the termination of Mueller’s investigation, fully anticipating that Republicans in Congress would not stand in the way, should dispel any notion that the judiciary can single-handedly defend American institutions.

It is heartening to see how several states and cities have stood for the rights of immigrants and taken actions for protecting the environment, even as the Environmental Protection Agency has turned into an anti-environment agency under Administrator Scott Pruitt. But states can neither stop the buckling of federal institutions under the president’s onslaught nor counter the collapse of political norms undergirding American democracy.

America’s most effective safeguards against Donald J. Trump so far are not to be found in Congress, the judiciary, or the states, but in the media and in civil society.

Many media outlets, led by the Washington Post and the New York Times, have enthusiastically embraced their critical role in these turbulent times and have spearheaded the defense of our democracy, keeping the spotlight on the president’s campaign against U.S. institutions and his and his family’s questionable business deals. But can we be sure that Trump’s unremitting attacks on the New York Times, CNN, and other critical outlets won’t work? It is true that when another would-be autocrat, Argentina’s previous president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, tried to browbeat her country’s opposition media group Clarín, it did not succeed. But that’s small comfort. Independent newspapers did at first stand up to Hugo Chávez, Vladimir Putin, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan too, but they got worn down slowly by threats, financial pressure, and relentless smear campaigns by other media blindly loyal to these strongmen. Even if the tradition of fierce, investigative and sometime rambunctious journalism in the United States gives us some hope, we cannot bank on these media outlets to defend our democracy in this age of weaponized fake news.

The people who get their voice from democratic political institutions are — have to be — their last line of defense. The American people have risen up to this challenge. Their mobilization against the policies and the values of Trump’s administration are the true silver lining of the dark clouds of today. It is this mobilization that has paved the way to the defeat of the president’s ban on citizens of several majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States, that made it impossible for even Republican congressmen to repeal Obamacare, and that has egged on Democrats to stand firm against the president. But history is full of examples where such mobilization peters out, especially when faced with soft (and even worse, hard) repression, or when it runs out of steam or gives way to internal squabbles (witness the emergence of Democratic litmus tests, already starting to divide the opposition).

So the slow battle between America’s democratic institutions and its 45th president is set to continue. But even more worryingly, there are the wild cards.

Putin’s subversion of Russian institutions would have been much harder without the Chechen War and the alleged Chechen attack on four apartment blocks in Russia in 1999. The suspension of the remaining constitutional checks on Turkish President Erdogan would have been all but impossible without the intensification of the war between Turkish security forces and the Kurdish rebels. What would happen if we witnessed a series of foreign terrorist attacks on U.S. soil? Or if war broke out against North Korea?

It’s too soon to rejoice, and too dangerous to be complacent. We are still the last defense." [Source]

Learning day.

Here are some things I learned today.

Sexual harassment is not a partisan issue.  (Mr. Franken, you should probably resign your senate seat. But then the president has allegedly done worst things and he is still the president.)

Anti Gay republicans are hypocrites.  

Christian republicans can be the most racist. 

Congress spent 15 million dollars to protect some sexual harassers in their midst.

Apparently if you are a celebrity rapper and you commit crimes in your community, you get to have folks come out and protest on your behalf.  (That Free Meek Mill bandwagon is going to have to pass me by.)

It's not cool to put a sign on your car that disparages the president in Texas.(Southern sheriffs really love trump.)

If you are poor in America, you are about to really get screwed.   

trump supporters can be really disruptive in public spaces.   

Charles Manson is knocking on hell's door. .

And, oh yes, there is more drip drip to that Russian scandal. 

Open thread Wednesday.

 It's open thread Wednesday, field hands, and I need your thoughts on a few things.

 Roy Moore had a press conference today to discredit one of his accusers, but with another accuser coming forward today, do you believe Roy Moore?

Do you think Jeff Sessions knows what day it is?

Does having a dry throat make you a liar? 

If a room full of CEOs say that they will not invest the money they get from tax cuts, should they still get it?

How long will trump's silence last on this Roy Moore scandal? 

Why do some republicans believe the victims in the Roy Moore case but not all of the women who accused trump of sexual harassment?   

Tell me anything else that's on your mind.