You're so vain, I bet you think this day is about you.

• "Sociopath- "a person with a psychopathic personality whose behavior is antisocial, often criminal, and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience."

You know we are in trouble as a country when the president makes a day that is to honor those who gave the ultimate sacrifice for our country about him. What makes it worse is that there is no collective outrage. Throw in the fact that said president is a draft dodger (Bone spurs?!) who made fun of a captured American soldier to score cheap political points, and you can see that it's not hyperbole to say that we are heading for disaster.

"Happy Memorial Day!," Trump tweeted Monday morning. "Those who died for our great country would be very happy and proud at how well our country is doing today. Best economy in decades, lowest unemployment numbers for Blacks and Hispanics EVER (& women in 18years), rebuilding our Military and so much more. Nice!"'

Nothing "happy" about this day for those who lost loved ones. And you have to be a real sociopath if you  don't understand that this day is not about self-promotion or partisanship. 

But hey, it won't matter. He will still have his lemmings and a cowardly republican party to support him and remain complicit every step of the way. 
 

When autocrats rule children suffer.

An unarmed young woman was shot in the head and killed by a border patrol agent, recently. The agency also tried to cover it up and lie about how the woman was executed. Her crime? Being a poor immigrant who was trying to get into this country to further her education and improve her lot in life. If you saw how some conservatives commenting on the story rejoiced in her death,  you would be sickened by the thought of being an American.

Under the current trump regime this type of behavior by those in law enforcement---- who enforce immigration laws have been encouraged and praised.  Incredibly, it is actually a policy of this administration to separate children from their families.

 ICE agents are now known for breaking up hardworking loving families and snatching loved ones from the arms of each other. They are known to go after illegal immigrants in the most inhumane ways. And they have been known to do it in what we thought were the most sacred of places: Church.

We are also now learning that some 1,500 children of immigrants have gone missing, and that the trump administration and their inhumane policies are to blame. These children have been put in the homes of "sponsors" but many are still unaccounted for.  

There are even some conspiracy theories floating around out there. Sadly, given what we know about the evil in the hearts of some of these people, they are not too far fetched.

Here is an interesting take on this issue from The Root:

"Donald Trump has been the conspiracy whisperer throughout his entire public life. Even before he was president, he was convinced that the Central Park Five were guilty (they weren’t). He spent years claiming that former President Barack Obama was born in Kenya (he wasn’t). He suggested that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s death may have been Democratic foul play (it wasn’t). Those are just the theories he was spouting before he got into office.
This week, CNN’s Jake Tapper listed the half-dozen unfounded or disproven conspiracy theories that Trump and his administration have spewed since getting into the White House. These include everything from Obama using transformer microwaves to spy on the Trump White House (Optimus Hot Pockets?); Black Lives Matter being a terrorist organization; and the Democrats running a child sex trafficking ring out of a pizza place in Washington, D.C. (also known as “pizzagate”).

Of course, all of these theories are unfounded or disproven, but they still rile up the base and keep Reddit full of traffic, so why should khaki-wearing “alt-righters” have all the fun? Now it turns out that the Trump administration may have an equally implausible conspiracy on its hands: Is the administration involved in child sex trafficking or just white nationalism? Follow me down the rabbit hole and see for yourself.

August 2017: Immigration and Customs Enforcement asks permission from the Trump administration to start destroying old files and documents relating to 11 subjects. These include reports of violence, solitary confinement, death and sexual abuse inflicted on those detained by ICE agents while still in their custody. It is still being determined how long these reports would be held before being destroyed. Two years? Twenty years? Six weeks? ICE isn’t saying. Some congressional candidates have found this policy so disturbing, they’ve begun to campaign on it.

April 26, 2018: During a Senate hearing, Steven Wagner, acting assistant secretary of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families, says that the department has lost nearly 1,500 unaccompanied minors who had been placed in homes or facilities since being picked up at the border. Over a thousand human beings lost, like luggage, a cellphone or a fancy hat.

Our government can track what porn sites ISIS, or the Islamic State, is clicking on in the mountains of Afghanistan, but can’t find 1,500 kids in America? What’s worse, nobody seems to know what to do about it. This is despite reports that children have been placed in homes where they were sexually assaulted, abused or possibly trafficked.

May 8, 2018: Attorney General Jeff Sessions announces that if you are caught sneaking across the border as a family, you will be prosecuted and separated from your children. Which will lead to more children being taken from the safety of their parents and then suspiciously “lost” in the system somewhere in America.

May 11, 2018: White House Chief of Staff John Kelly doubles down on the new Trump white nationalist and human-rights-violating policy of separating parents from minor children. When asked what will happen to separated kids, Kelly states:

Obviously, “whatever” includes everything from being placed in a nice, loving home and adopted by Daddy Warbucks, or Mitt Romney, to falling off the grid and being abused, sold or worse by any random stranger who shows up at Homeland Security offering to “help” these displaced kids.

We’ve seen this before with “good samaritans” from the United States attempting to snatch Haitian children temporarily separated from their families and take them who knows where. Now Trump and Sessions—with the help of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen—are putting even more children at risk, breaking up families and contemplating throwing kids into internment camps or sending them off into homes with unvetted or unmonitored adults, and losing kids right and left. If someone did want to traffic a bunch of barely literate, frightened, lost brown children fleeing poverty and violence in South America, Trump and Sessions just made it a lot easier.

Now, of course, none of this means that Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump are part of some vast conspiracy to sell minority children to the highest bidder like some scene out of Taken 4: Bad Hombres. This could all just be a series of unfortunate policies and events. It could just be white nationalism at work, destroying black and brown families seeking a better life, and demonstrating a careless disregard for nonwhite children.

However, why be hamstrung by the facts, as bad as they are? Trump has shown America that you can get away with whatever salacious, ridiculous and unfounded conspiracy you want as long as you say it loudly enough and find enough other people to repeat it.

Which story sounds better: Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions continue their white nationalist policies by destroying refugee and undocumented immigrant families, or Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions let missing children fall prey to sex traffickers? If you can’t figure out which is the better conspiracy, imagine any of this happening at this level—the missing children, the separation of families and lack of concern for finding them—under the Obama administration. Which story do you think Trump would actually tweet? He’s never been one to let facts get in the way of a good conspiracy. "
[Source]

Today, in an unbelievable tone-deaf and insensitive act, Ivanka trump channeled her inner Marie Antoinette and tweeted a picture of herself and her child for all the world to see. She wrote, My love! in case we didn't believe that a mother could actually love her own child.

For her sake, I hope that she realizes that there are at least 1,500 mothers who will not be able to do what she did in that tweet this morning because of her father's inhumane policies.      

Caption Saturday.

I need a caption for this pic.

*Pic from slate.com

Open thread Friday.

It's open thread Friday, and I need you to tell me what is on your mind.

I am thinking about the NFL capitulating to the fascist whims of an immoral leader.

I am thinking about how easy it is for said leader to lie. 

I am thinking that every day it is becoming more and more obvious why players need to take a knee against social injustice and police misconduct.  

I am thinking that Kanye West has really lost his damn mind. (How would you like it if someone posted pics of your dead mama?) He and trump deserve each other.

I am thinking about how trump said that no one in his campaign had contacts with Russia and everyday there is a new revelation of yet another one of his people having contacts with the Russians.

I am thinking about trump's pardon of Jack Johnson to score cheap political points with black people. 

I am thinking that the president of the United States publicly commented and showed sympathy for a right wing  hack and agitator because someone threw water in her direction, but never sent a tweet sympathizing with the victims in the Waffle House shooting, or, for that matter, praising the hero who disarmed the gunman. (Of course we know why. The aforementioned hack is a young blonde woman, and the Waffle House victims (and the hero who saved them) were people of color.

Thoughts?


   

How truth died in America.

Remember when Hillary's e-mail was a thing?

"Late on Monday we learned that President Trump has stubbornly resisted staff efforts to secure his smartphones, leaving his cameras and microphones vulnerable to bugging, and turning his lengthy evening gab sessions with friends and former aides into broadcasts for the world’s intelligence services.

It has been airbrushed out of popular lore, replaced with gauzy platitudes about populism, but the 2016 election turned to a comical degree on a fabricated consensus among Republicans and the political media that strict adherence to information security protocols was a central qualification for the presidency. Specifically, Republicans pretended to believe Hillary Clinton had committed a disqualifying and imprisonable crime by using a personal email server to do work when she was secretary of state, and reporters pretended to believe that these infosec concerns were offered up in good faith.

The notion that Republicans didn’t actually care about infosec practices, and that reporters knew they didn’t care, isn’t just bitter gloss on bygone reporting decisions. It is a fact reporters themselves have let on in their collective response to serial Trump-era infosec lapses. It is so taken for granted in the halls of power that Republicans don’t actually care about this issue, and never did, that nobody even bothers to ask them to square their hair-on-fire behavior in 2016 with their insouciance today. Two years ago, House Speaker Paul Ryan repeatedly and publicly requested that Clinton be stripped of her security clearance because of her email practices. On Tuesday, less than 24 hours after the Trump phone-breach story broke, he held a routine Capitol briefing for reporters and fielded zero questions about it.

Trump’s laziness has probably left the country’s secrets more vulnerable to capture by hostile powers than Clinton’s email server, which was more secure than Trump’s phone and contained none of the codeword intelligence Trump has nonchalantly shared with senior Russian officials, the authoritarian president of the Philippines, and others. To the extent that Trump—an inveterate crook and philanderer—keeps blackmail material on his phone, his insistence on using easily hacked equipment creates further risk to the national security.

Nevertheless, it is arguably reasonable of reporters to tuck this scandal under other, larger ones. Trump’s administration teems with corruption. He is at the center of a federal criminal investigation which looks more and more every day like an effort to ascertain whether he and his aides sold out the country’s foreign policy to a consortium of authoritarian foreign governments who offered to help him get elected. The fact that Trump is passively lax with national security when he fires up his smartphone pales in comparison to the fact that he actively trades away national security to autocrats.
But the fact that Republicans played the political press corps—and, worse, that the political press corps consciously allowed itself to be played—is a huge professional failing that should, but by all appearances won’t, be accounted for and corrected going forward.

Trump’s behavior is aberrant enough, and Republican indifference to it so stark, that many reporters now freely acknowledge it calls the sincerity of past conservative fixations (with Clinton’s email, or her health, or Bill Clinton’s tarmac encounter with Loretta Lynch, or Benghazi) into question.
There’s a broad (and correct) media consensus that Republicans feign outrage about alleged infractions, then proceed to do much worse when in power—that right-wing politics is built on a foundation of feigned outrage and bad faith. But there’s also a broad (and incorrect) consensus that this should not factor in to how journalists interpret and report on the parties.

If the standard journalists set for themselves is that anything Republicans claim to be outraged about must be treated as a live controversy, then journalists disclaim a major potential point of failure, and become conduits for propaganda. This insulates media organizations from accountability for their handling of the email server matter, but also guarantees that the patterns of the past years will repeat themselves. One month ago, a handful of conservatives pretended to be upset about a standup comedy routine at the White House correspondents dinner, which they pretended to consider indecorous. Everyone knew they were pretending because they had a wonderful time at the dinner and continued to hobnob with their supposed elite media antagonists at black-tie afterparties when the dinner ended. Everyone knew they were pretending because these self-professed keepers of decorum support Donald Trump. And yet rather than dismiss their complaints as obvious fabrications, the White House press corps publicly disassociated itself with the comedian Michelle Wolf, who was the correspondents association’s invited guest.

The Wolf incident was the talk of the chattering classes for several days, but for all the wrong reasons. It was only really important as a window into the future. It showed that when the balance of political power shifts again, the right will resume pretending to be outraged over nonsense as if the Trump presidency had never happened, and most reporters will proceed as if it’s all sincere. This standard of newsworthiness can be changed in theory, but only if our media institutions decide that bad faith politics should be treated as such, and not rewarded indefinitely at the expense of the truth."
[Source]

Lets be honest, the American press is a joke. And, thanks to them, we have a joke of  a president in the White House. 

*Pic from wearechange.org

A chaotic power grab.

Watching what is happening to us in America, you can't help but think that we are getting closer to that civil war that every sane person has been dreading, and what people on the extreme end of each political side has been hoping for.

Knowing that he will never get  sixty five percent of the people in this country to support him,  Donald J. trump is hoping for a civil war, or a serous Constitutional crises. Anything to get his rabid and clueless supporters in a we against them Mexican standoff that can possibly keep him in office beyond the four years that he is inevitably going to be given. He wants more, and if he takes the republic down with him, then so be it.

The president has now declared war on his own FBI, and he  is demanding that they launch an investigation into the agency and the man charged with investigating him. It's madness, I know, but this is where we are now.

trump says that the man who occupies a permanent space in his head, Barack Obama, ordered spies on his campaign, and he wants to get to the bottom of it. The entire assertion is laughable, but no one is laughing. The republican partisans in Washington have gone along with him, and they will be given a special briefing and given access to information about the FBI surveillance of trump's joint campaign with the Russians. Incredibly, the democrats in Washington will be shut out of the very same meeting.

Anyway, Mr. trump is getting away with all this because the press that we rely on to put a check on his power grab, have been complicit and lazy. Throw in the fact that he has an entire network and a solid 35% of hardcore trumpbots in his corner, and you can see why I believe that something very ominous is on the horizon.

Speaking of something ominous, if you are Michael Cohen, you have to think that your business partner cutting a deal with the law enforcement authorities ( I see you Mr. Mueller) today is the worst thing possible for you.

Apparently he will be singing like Gladys Night in exchange for probation instead of a possible 20 plus years in the big house.

Expect an angry twitter storm from the White House in 5..4..3.. 

Living in the new America.

Tonight my racism chase takes me to Kansas. (No wonder Dorothy left for Oz.)

Folks, I can't say this enough: Thank you lord for social media.

"A man driving through Winfield, Kan., went live on Facebook during a traffic stop after cops told him he was being pulled over for allegedly failing to signal a turn within 100 feet. But what should have been a citation or warning led to Rudy Samuel [above] being detained because of “vegetation” on his windshield.

The incident occurred last Sunday and when the cop told Samuel that he noticed the flora on the windshield, Samuel couldn’t believe what he was hearing, because it was just tree debris. The unidentified cop told Samuel that he’s going to test the “vegetation” and Samuel informed him that he doesn’t even smoke.

And that’s when things took a left turn.

The officer returns from his car—without testing the “vegetation”—and tells Samuel to get out. Samuel says he wants the officer to run the test first.

“I’ll test it here in a little bit, OK, I ain’t got to test it right now,” the officer replied. When Samuel asked the officer why does he have to get out, the video then shows the officer forcibly removing him.

Although Samuel is no longer holding the phone to capture the video, the cop can be heard saying that the car is going to be searched. Samuel states that he does not give them permission. You can also hear Samuel telling the officer he has a legal firearm in the middle console of his car, and then the video stops. Samuel said it was because the cop turned off the recording.

“Yea straight stereotyped me he grab[bed] my phone I told him he better get a warrant for it so he powered it off,” Samuel wrote on Facebook.

According to CT News, Winfield’s police Chief Brett Stone says that the incident is being investigated. Of course, no drugs were found, and Samuel was sent off with just a warning and his life." [Article with video] 

Some of these cops don't even pretend not to be racist anymore. I guess this is all a part of trying to  "make America great again." 

I mean even black folks trying to do good in the community by picking up trash are subject to being profiled and having the police being called on them.

I think we can all agree that it is time to stop the madness. Sadly, I suspect that we will have to live with this for at least the next three years.   

*Pic from Rudy Samuel's facebook.

CAPTION SATURDAY.

I need a caption for this pic.

*Pic from dailykos.com 

Again!

If only "thoughts and prayers" could stop bullets we would all be in a better place. Unfortunately, they can't.

We will be hearing a lot of that from republican politicians over the next few days. Why? Well we just had another mass shooting in one of our schools, and rather than try to find real solutions to the gun problem in this country, they will continue to take the NRA's money and stick their rather empty collective heads in the sand.

President trump read from a teleprompter about the shootings, and he read something that was obviously written for him by one of his aides for the occasion. The fact that this man can't just speak from his heart after such a tragedy says all you need to know about him. I guess in order to speak from your heart you have to have one. In fact, the only time he really goes off script and says what he really means is when he is spewing hate. 

But this too shall pass. After a month or so we will forget all about Santa Fe, Texas. Just like we did about Newtown, Parkland, and Columbine. The NRA, of course, will follow their old tried and true playbook: Keep a low profile, keep giving money to all the right people, and keep feeding the crazies on the right with rhetoric that the government is coming to take their guns away.

“To the students, families, teachers and personnel at Santa Fe High, we’re with you in this tragic hour and we’ll be with you forever,” Trump said. “My administration is determined to do everything in our power to protect our students, secure our schools, and to keep weapons out of the hands of those who pose a threat to themselves and to others.”

“Everyone must work together at every level of government to keep our children safe,” the president continued. “May God heal the injured and may God comfort the wounded, and may God be with the victims and with the victims’ families.”

“Very sad day..... “Very, very sad.”

Your words ring hollow tonight. Just a couple of weeks ago you were in Dallas, Texas (the very state where this animal slaughtered his classmates today), and you were embracing the NRA and telling them that they will always have a friend with you as their president. You called them all patriots. As if to suggest that the rest of us were not. This was after you lied to the parents of the Parkland massacre about pushing legislation to address gun safety and sensible gun laws in this country.  That task force you put together to look into school shootings has met only twice so far. Twice!

This doesn't make it look like you cared so much about school shootings to me. You did it all for political expediency. Just like you are doing now.   

Strolling with your baby while black.

Now this is just getting ridiculous.

Did you hear about the black man who had security called on him by a frightened white lady who saw him out with his baby in a stroller? 

Yes, it really happened.

 "Well, it looks like the epidemic of well-meaning white folks (I guess) calling the police or security on black people as they go about their lives is par for the course in 2018 America.

It is becoming increasingly clear that although the whites have always had an irrational fear of black people, as they move in closer proximity to them (i.e., via gentrification), they also bring their biases—along with ironic dive bars and astronomical rents.

If you are even a semiregular reader of The Root, you have seen in the last month or so (since the “Starbucks incident”) that this type of shit happens every day—that these attacks (because be clear: When you call the law on black people in America, it is an attack) happen with frightening regularity to black folks from all walks of life.   

This time, a black father was pushing his son in a Washington, D.C., park, and a white woman saw fit to notify park security about “a suspicious man walking the bike path with a baby.”

It should make no difference that that man, Donald Sherman, is a professional, a lawyer, because to some folks, he will always be a scary black guy.

Sherman explained in a May 10 Facebook post that on the day in question, his son was not feeling well, so he stayed home with him.

After some time, baby Caleb seemed better, so he took the little guy out for some fresh air at Kingman and Heritage Islands Park, man-made islands in the Anacostia River, not too far from his gentrified neighborhood. Sherman wrote:

30 minutes into our stroll I got flagged by a security officer in one of those cars marked “Special Police” on the side. I was a bit confused as to whether she was looking for me to stop but she honked twice and pulled over so I got the picture. She told me that she received a complaint from someone who said there was a “suspicious man” walking on the bike path with a baby. She said that when the complainant was asked to describe my race, she declined.

What is clear to anyone with eyes, however, is that Sherman is dark-skinned while his son is not, perhaps prompting the woman to think that a black man somehow stole a white baby. I guess.

Sherman noted that the only person he saw on their walk was “a white lady on a bike who veered off as Caleb and I were walking in her direction” and that she was the one who “saw fit to report me to security.”

Thankfully, Sherman reported that his interaction with the security officer was “pleasant” and that she just wanted to let him know what happened.

But being a black man in America, we know it could have ended in tragedy.

“If this complaint had been made to a different security officer or an actual cop, things could have gone very differently,” he wrote. “This is exactly why we have to talk about white privilege and why black lives matter. Because at any point doing anything anywhere my safety and my child’s safety could [have] been in jeopardy because [of] some well-intentioned complaint.”

Let’s break out the flowchart one mo’ gin for those who obviously need it:"

[Source and flow chart]

A brother can't even take his infant out on a stroll without that "fear of a black planet" ruining his day. *shakes head*   

++Photo from Donald Sherman (Facebook)

Open thread Wednesday.

It's open thread Wednesday, and, as is usually the case, I have a few things on my mind.

For instance, do you believe Donald trump, Jr., when he says that he didn't recall telling his father about the Russian meeting in trump tower?

Do you still believe Junior's father when he says that he did not know about the Stormy Daniels payment from his lawyer, Michael Cohen?  

Do you think it's cool for black conservatives to play the race and victim card when it suits their purpose?

How do you feel about this spate of incidents in America where white women call law enforcement on Negroes for doing mundane things?  (Walking your baby while black. Now I have seen it all.)

Do you still think that Donald trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize?

Finally, now that we know that Stephan Bannon wanted to suppress the African America vote, is anyone surprised?