Today would be a good day for Donald trump to release his tax returns.

        I need you all to pay attention to what is happening in America.

" A federal judge has denied congressional Democrats’ request to speed up their case seeking copies of President Donald Trump’s personal tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service.

Thursday’s decision by U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden makes it less likely that Democrats will win their lawsuit before November 2020, though nobody knows for sure how long the district court case and subsequent appeals might take.

The American public has seen the tax returns of every president from Richard Nixon through Barack Obama. Trump has offered a series of shifting justifications for keeping his private, including that he’s been under audit and that “people wouldn’t understand” them.

The House Ways and Means Committee sought access to the president’s returns under a federal disclosure law, but the Trump administration blocked its request in an unprecedented move. Democrats sued in July and then last week asked the court to hurry the case.

But Trump’s lawyers argued that the lawsuit raises too many questions about the separation of powers between Congress, the executive branch and the judiciary for the court to rush, and Judge McFadden agreed.

McFadden, a Trump appointee, wrote in his order Thursday that “the weighty constitutional issues and political ramifications it presents militate in favor of caution and deliberation, not haste.”

And there’s another reason McFadden wants to wait: Duane Morley Cox, an 80-year-old Trump supporter who has been filing motions to intervene in this case and several others from Logan, Utah. 

Allowing this case to proceed could distract the president from his official duties, Cox argued in a brief filed in July. If Democrats had obtained the tax returns and were asking questions about them back in June, he suggested, Trump might have been too distracted to reconsider a retaliatory attack on Iran.

“But then the Iranians might have escalated matters,” Cox wrote, “and we could today be in a military situation which affected oil deliveries throughout the world, and resulting military consequences with their attendant negative impact upon the economies of many nations, including the United States.”

Trump’s team has already told the judge that it doesn’t want Cox’s help and doesn’t think he has standing to intervene. But McFadden still cited Cox as a reason to not speed up the case, noting that the Ways and Means Committee had “taken no position on whether Mr. Cox should be allowed to intervene” and that he hadn’t made up his mind, either.

The tax return lawsuit is one of several cases stemming from the administration’s refusal to provide testimony or documents in response to more than a dozen subpoenas from House committees. Another of those suits, in which Democrats are seeking Trump’s personal financial records from Deutsche Bank, might also yield some tax information.

McFadden’s order means that Democrats will have to rebut arguments that the court shouldn’t even hear the matter as well as arguments about the merits of their case, which turns on the clear language of a tax code provision known as Section 6103. The law says that in response to a request from a tax committee like Ways and Means, the Treasury secretary “shall furnish such committee with any return or return information specified in such request.”

Trump’s lawyers say Democrats have no legitimate legislative reason for their request and just want to embarrass the president.

Democrats argue that they’re conducting legitimate oversight of the IRS’s review of a sitting president’s returns and that a whistleblower has given them evidence of possible interference with Trump’s audit. " [Source]

The question we must continue to ask ourselves is this: What is Mr. trump trying to hide? Why is he fighting so  hard to keep his tax returns a secret? This is after he promised us that they would be released. 

Lawrence O'Donnell recently said he had good reason to believe that some of the co-signers on trump's loans with Deutsche Bank were Russian billionaires. He has since backtracked on that story, because the folks over at MSNBC legal told him to. Of course this doesn't mean that the story is not true, it's just that it was single sourced and that's not enough in the world of journalism.

“Maybe I’m going to do the tax returns when Obama does his birth certificate. I’d love to give my tax returns. I may tie my tax returns into Obama’s birth certificate,”  

He already dd Mr. trump. Now it's your turn.

*Pic from abc.go.com

The day of the Geechie is NOT gone.

       Racism can take many forms. There is the trump/ MAGA type of racism, which stems from ignorance and a quest for control and power. There is the NAZI type of racism, which is just vile and evil. And there is the "innocent" I didn't mean it type of racism, which is just as dangerous as the  other two that I listed above..

A perfect example of the latter is what transpired in Oklahoma City between two news anchors. It has to do with a gorilla, a blonde (save the King Kong jokes), and a poor go along to get along Negro who ended up finding himself to be the butt of a racist insult on live television. 

"Oklahoma City news anchor Alex Housden attracted national attention when she committed a huge racist blunder by comparing her black co-anchor Jason Hackett on-air to a gorilla.
A segment about a gorilla at the Oklahoma City zoo began rolling on camera. The gorilla started to poke its head up at the camera. “This is Fin. He’s a resident at the Oklahoma City Zoo and this week the zoo’s ape caretaker took over their Instagram and we are all loving that they did,” Housden told the audience at home. “Now as you can see, Fin was fascinated by the camera,” said the KOCO anchor Housden.

“Definitely ready for his close up,” Hackett replied.

“He kinda looks like you,” Housden joked. Hackett awkwardly laughed and agreed."

You know the worst part of this story? That this CJ type Negro agreed with Missy's assessment of him.  The Negro should have gotten up and walked off the set right then and there, but noooo, instead, he laughed and agreed with Missy's racist characterization. Someone should tell this Negro that "the day of the Geechie is gone."

Of course the next day, as is always the case with the "innocent" racist, Missy apologized to her black co-anchor, and cried tears of pain when she realized what a racist she was.

"Housden issued a tearful on-air apology the next day after realizing the effects of her joke. Many had taken to Twitter calling for her to be fired.

“I said something yesterday that was inconsiderate, that was inappropriate, and I hurt people,” began Housden. “I hurt people. I want you to know I understand how much I hurt you out there and how much I hurt you. I’m just humiliated,” she continued, before emphasizing her deep friendship with Hackett.

Hackett accepted her apology, saying that he loves Housden as a friend as well.
“The lesson here is that words matter,” he said. “We have to understand the stereotypes, we have to understand each other’s backgrounds and the words that hurt, the words that cut deep.” [Source]

Misssy said that she is humiliated. She calls her black co-worker a gorilla on live television and She is humiliated. 

Hey, at least they are still friends. That is until she innocently calls him a Nigger at the Christmas office party.

Caption Monday.

I need a caption for this pic.

*Pic via twitter.com 

The meltdown.

The following article from Eugene Robinson is a must read.

It's why I am posting it here for you tonight.

"Uh-oh. President Trump is in such a state of panic about his dimming reelection prospects that he’s getting his lies mixed up and occasionally blurting out the truth.

“It’s tough for Apple to pay tariffs if it’s competing with a very good company [Samsung] that’s not,” the president told reporters Sunday — flatly contradicting the ridiculous and utterly false narrative that he has spent months trying to sell. Trump apparently forgot his standard lie that China is somehow paying “billions of dollars” in tariffs, acknowledging instead that they are taxes paid by U.S. companies and, ultimately, the American consumer.

This reflects more than just the difficulty of juggling multiple lies. Evidence suggests that Trump is melting down. Again.

And for good reason.

Fears of a global recession, greatly exacerbated by Trump’s erratic and self-destructive trade policies, have sent financial markets tumbling. A sharp downturn would close off one of the principal lines of attack the president was hoping to use against his Democratic opponent. He tried it out at a rally in New Hampshire last week: “You have no choice but to vote for me,” he told the crowd, “because your 401(k)’s down the tubes, everything’s gonna be down the tubes” if he loses. “So whether you love me or hate me, you gotta vote for me.”

Fact check: No.

Trump is flailing. He berates his handpicked chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome H. Powell, for not cutting interest rates fast enough to goose the economy. He practically begs Chinese President Xi Jinping for a meeting to work out a trade deal — any trade deal, apparently — and is met with silence. He threatens more tariffs but then backs down, at least for now. According to published reports, he sees himself as the victim of a conspiracy to exaggerate the growing economic anxiety in order to hurt his chances of winning a second term.

He entertains grandiose, almost Napoleonic fantasies — purchasing Greenland from Denmark in what he calls “a large real estate deal,” perhaps, or imposing a naval blockade to force regime change in Venezuela. He apparently spent much of this past weekend fuming about not getting credit for how his New Hampshire rally broke an attendance record for the arena that had been set by Elton John.

And Trump can’t seem to stop railing against a recent Fox News poll that showed him losing to four of the leading Democratic contenders. The president seems to consider Fox News his administration’s Ministry of Propaganda — indeed, that is the role the network’s morning-show hosts and prime-time anchors loyally play — but the polling unit is a professional operation. “There’s something going on at Fox, I’ll tell you right now. And I’m not happy with it,” Trump told reporters Sunday . He added a threat, saying that Fox “is making a big mistake” because he is “the one that calls the shots” on next year’s general election debates — the implication being that Fox News might not get to broadcast one of them if it doesn’t toe the party line.

For the record, Trump’s claim about his political standing is that it couldn’t be better — but could be better.

“Great cohesion inside the Republican Party, the best I have ever seen,” he tweeted Monday. “Despite all of the Fake News, my Poll Numbers are great. New internal polls show them to be the strongest we’ve had so far! Think what they’d be if I got fair media coverage!”

An hour later, he was back on Twitter to attack Anthony Scaramucci, who famously spent 11 days as White House communications director and recently became the latest Trump supporter to hit the “eject” button. Predictably, Trump called him a “nut job,” claimed to barely know him and dusted off the ultimate insult, calling him “bad on TV.”

The astonishing thing is that the president of the United States is, let’s face it, raving like a lunatic — and everyone just shrugs.

The nation is still reeling from two mass shootings. The financial markets are yo-yoing by hundreds of points. A bomb in Afghanistan, where we’re still at war, killed 63 revelers at a wedding. Tension between the United States and Iran continues to mount. North Korea keeps testing new missiles. India is playing with fire in Kashmir. Hong Kong has been convulsed for months by massive protests seeking to guarantee basic freedoms.

And Trump obsesses about buying Greenland.

The truth is that we don’t have an actual presidency right now. We have a tiresome reality show whose ratings have begun to slide — and whose fading star sees cancellation on the way." [Source]

*Pic from progressive-charlestown.com

Tweets of the insane.

In case you all have not been paying attention, your president is insane. 

If you have been reading Mr. trump's twitter rants of late, you can come to no other conclusion. I honestly believe that @jack and the folks over at twitter need to stage an intervention. Clearly the man is addicted to the social platform. He is on twitter more than he is on the golf course these days, and that's saying something.

It wouldn't be such a bad thing if what he said on twitter made sense, or if it was constructive, but rather than send out something meaningful to his sixty million followers, he uses the platform to fight petty battles, and boast about insignificant things such as the crowd sizes at his Klan  political rallies.

Lately he has been railing against Anthony Scaramucci , FOX NEWS, American Muslim elected officials. and the American press. He has been mad at all these people and institutions because of perceived slights and them doing things that put him in a bad light. For Donald trump, it's all about HIM. Nothing else matters, and he uses twitter to vent to the world if he is not feeling the love that he thinks he deserves.

Meanwhile, the country and the world is having some serious problems. We are now in an arms race with Russia, Hong Kong is in a state of chaos, and they are blowing up people in churches in Afghanistan. Here in America economists are starting to talk about the R word, white domestic terrorist are out of the woodwork, and trump's trade tariffs are starting to hit American families in their wallets.

All of this is happening while the president locks himself away in a room full of Big Macs and tweets all day.

@jack, get your people on that intervention ASAP. 

Caption Sunday.

                                           

I  need a caption for this pic. 

Not all protests are created equal.

I'm sorry people, but I have to attack black tonight.

We all know by now about the mass shooting in Philly this past Wednesday. Six police officers shot, an entire neighborhood put on lock down, and one urban terrorist with a rap sheet as long as Broad Street keeping an entire city and community in a state of fear and terror for damn near three hours. (He was firing shots out of a trap house while little children in the area were being let out from their day- care for crying out loud!)

Fortunately for all those involved , there was no loss of life, and the urban terrorist was taken alive. (Shout out to Philly's police chief for a job well done.)

So having said all that, I am mad at my people tonight because I was shocked to hear that some folks in the community were actually holding a rally on behalf of....wait for it....wait for it.....the urban terrorist who allegedly created all of this mayhem and chaos in the first place. Now why in the name of Huey P. Newton would folks march to protest his treatment at the hands of police?  It seems to me that the folks in our various communities should be coming together to figure out just what in the hell is going on with these young bucks who have no respect for human life. There were five more injured in one shooting incident yesterday. And I am quite sure that there will be more just like this in the days to come. 

And yet....

"Organizers of a protest in support of Maurice Hill, the suspect in the Philadelphia shootout earlier this week, expected 200 to 300 people to show up, CBS affiliate KYW-TV reported.

The chaotic and lengthy shootout that played out in the Nicetown-Tioga neighborhood Wednesday left six police officers injured and captured national attention.

 Richard Ross, the city’s police commissioner, said cops would show up at the Friday night demonstration in North Philadelphia, according to KYW-TV. “There’s certain marches I do understand, this is definitely not one of them,” Ross said." 

I couldn't agree with the commissioner more

My brothers and sisters, this is not a hill you want to die on. It diminishes the real struggle for social justice when we rally around urban terrorists who do not deserve our support. 

• 
  

Give me your Europeans yearning to be free.

           As America lurches closer to becoming a a white nationalist dystopian state, the crazies under their supreme leader are starting to show their true colors. (Pun intended.)

First, let's turn our attention to the Director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, who, incredibly, declared yesterday that the Emma Lazarus poem written on the Statue Of Liberty was meant for people coming over from Europe only. Yes, he really said that.

"Well, of course, that poem was referring back to people coming from Europe where they had class-based societies, where people were considered wretched if they weren't in the right class, and it was written one year after the first federal public charge rule was written. "

It's scary stuff, but this is just how Mr. trump wants it. The White Nationalist in chief has drawn a line in the sand. And with the help of people like Stephen Miller and the elected republican sycophants enabling him, he will purge this country of brown and poor people if he can. Ken Cuccinelli earlier gave us his own personal take on what Lazarus really meant with her poem. To him it was only poor people who could stand on their feet that we should welcome to our shores. And just in case we weren't clear, he wanted us to know that it was European poor people who could stand on their feet and not those other people.

Now, obviously, with the white nationalist in charge, the white nationalist mass has been emboldened.

Don't believe me?

Just look at these few examples:

A sheriff in Mississippi. 

A jailer's wife in Arkansas.

Young high school graduates in Illinois. 

And, of course, the police are still being called on black men for....well... being black men. 

Thoughts?

"A bizarre cosmic joke."

This is not normal. The president of the United States just endorsed the thought of a former president being a rapist and a pedophile.  But this is where we are in America. trump and his deplorables have normalized what was previously unthinkable in this country.

David Frum (I can't believe I am posting an essay by this guy on this site.) wrote the following article for The Atlantic about the shame and ignorance of this presidency.

"August 10, 1969: San Clemente, California—President Richard Nixon accused his predecessor Lyndon Baines Johnson of complicity in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Speaking with reporters on the first day of a 10-day stay at his Pacific Ocean vacation home …

Of course, that never happened. Obviously. How could it; how dare it? But had it happened, such an accusation—by a president, against a former president—would have convulsed the United States and the world. Today, President Donald Trump accused his predecessor Bill Clinton—or possibly his 2016 campaign opponent, the former first lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—of complicity in the death of the accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Many seem to have responded with a startled shrug. What do you expect? It’s just Trump letting off steam on Twitter.

Reactions to actions by Trump are always filtered through the prism of the ever more widely accepted view—within his administration, within Congress, within the United States, and around the world—that the 45th president is a reckless buffoon; a conspiratorial, racist moron, whose weird comments should be disregarded by sensible people.

By now, Trump’s party in Congress, the members of his Cabinet, and even his White House entourage all tacitly agree that Trump’s occupancy of the office held by Washington, Lincoln, FDR, and Eisenhower must be a bizarre cosmic joke, not to be taken seriously. CNN’s Jake Tapper on August 2 quoted a “senior national security official” as saying: “Everyone at this point ignores what the president says and just does their job. The American people should take some measure of confidence in that.”

So even though Trump just retweeted the comedian Terrence K. Williams accusing the Clinton family of murder, the people who work for Trump may ignore that, too. They know that the president punching the retweet button like an addled retiree playing the slots through a fog of painkillers means nothing. The days of “taking Trump seriously, not literally” have long since passed. By this point, Trump is taken neither seriously nor literally. His words are as worthless as Trump Organization IOUs.

But cosmic joke or no cosmic joke, Donald Trump is the president of the United States. You may not like it. I don’t like it. Mike Pompeo doesn’t like it. Mitch McConnell doesn’t like it. Kevin McCarthy doesn’t like it. But it’s still a fact, and each succeeding outrage makes it no less a fact. Grinning and flashing a thumbs-up over an orphaned baby? Yes, still president. Tweeting that a third-tier dictator has threatened him with more missile tests unless he halts military exercises with a U.S. ally——and that he has surrendered to that blackmail? Shamefully, still president. Accusing a former U.S. president of murder? It’s incredible, it’s appalling, it’s humiliating … but, yes, he is the president all the same.

Trump’s circle probably expects the world to sputter for a while and then be distracted by some new despicable statement or act. That is how it has gone for nearly three years, and that is how it is likely still to go. Trump is steering the U.S. and the world into a trade war, and perhaps a financial crisis and recession along with it. He is wrecking the structure of U.S. alliances in Asia, and his rhetoric is inciting shooting rampages against minorities. Compared with that, mere slurs and insults perhaps weigh lighter in the crushing Dumpster-load of Trump’s output of unfitness for the office he holds.

But it shouldn’t be forgotten, either, in the onrush of events. The certainty that Trump will descend ever deeper into subbasements of “new lows” after this new low should not numb us to its newness and lowness.

Neither the practical impediments to impeachment and the Twenty-Fifth Amendment process, nor the foibles and failings of the candidates running to replace him, efface the fact that this presidency shames and disgraces the office every minute of every hour of every day. And even when it ends, however it ends, the shame will stain it still." [Source]

*Pic from thestar.com

Caption Friday.

I need a caption for this pic.

"Making America white again."

Toni Morrison passed away recently, and in honor of her memory I am going to post this wonderful essay that she wrote for The New Yorker Magazine after the election of Donald trump. It is sadly apropos to what is taking place in America today.

"This is a serious project. All immigrants to the United States know (and knew) that if they want to become real, authentic Americans they must reduce their fealty to their native country and regard it as secondary, subordinate, in order to emphasize their whiteness. Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force. Here, for many people, the definition of “Americanness” is color.

Under slave laws, the necessity for color rankings was obvious, but in America today, post-civil-rights legislation, white people’s conviction of their natural superiority is being lost. Rapidly lost. There are “people of color” everywhere, threatening to erase this long-understood definition of America. And what then? Another black President? A predominantly black Senate? Three black Supreme Court Justices? The threat is frightening.

In order to limit the possibility of this untenable change, and restore whiteness to its former status as a marker of national identity, a number of white Americans are sacrificing themselves. They have begun to do things they clearly don’t really want to be doing, and, to do so, they are (1) abandoning their sense of human dignity and (2) risking the appearance of cowardice. Much as they may hate their behavior, and know full well how craven it is, they are willing to kill small children attending Sunday school and slaughter churchgoers who invite a white boy to pray. Embarrassing as the obvious display of cowardice must be, they are willing to set fire to churches, and to start firing in them while the members are at prayer. And, shameful as such demonstrations of weakness are, they are willing to shoot black children in the street.

To keep alive the perception of white superiority, these white Americans tuck their heads under cone-shaped hats and American flags and deny themselves the dignity of face-to-face confrontation, training their guns on the unarmed, the innocent, the scared, on subjects who are running away, exposing their unthreatening backs to bullets. Surely, shooting a fleeing man in the back hurts the presumption of white strength? The sad plight of grown white men, crouching beneath their (better) selves, to slaughter the innocent during traffic stops, to push black women’s faces into the dirt, to handcuff black children. Only the frightened would do that. Right?

These sacrifices, made by supposedly tough white men, who are prepared to abandon their humanity out of fear of black men and women, suggest the true horror of lost status.

It may be hard to feel pity for the men who are making these bizarre sacrifices in the name of white power and supremacy. Personal debasement is not easy for white people (especially for white men), but to retain the conviction of their superiority to others—especially to black people—they are willing to risk contempt, and to be reviled by the mature, the sophisticated, and the strong. If it weren’t so ignorant and pitiful, one could mourn this collapse of dignity in service to an evil cause.

The comfort of being “naturally better than,” of not having to struggle or demand civil treatment, is hard to give up. The confidence that you will not be watched in a department store, that you are the preferred customer in high-end restaurants—these social inflections, belonging to whiteness, are greedily relished.

So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble.
On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

William Faulkner understood this better than almost any other American writer. In “Absalom, Absalom,” incest is less of a taboo for an upper-class Southern family than acknowledging the one drop of black blood that would clearly soil the family line. Rather than lose its “whiteness” (once again), the family chooses murder. " [Source]

After reading this brilliant essay, I have come to the conclusion that we shouldn't be surprised that America elected a white supremacist to be president.

*Image from msmagazine.com