Month: February 2017

Battle-hardened and gaining strength
by Tom Sullivan

Greensboro sit-in lunch counter is now a museum.

Voters who sat out the Iraq War, extraordinary rendition, black sites, Abu Ghraib, and Bush II’s Privatize Social Security 2005 Tour are finally in the streets and trying to wrap their brains around the whole activism thing. President Donald Trump’s election, sexism and xenophobia brought home the need for engagement in a way military interventions in faraway lands and far-off retirement concerns did not. Plus, a lot of those in the streets today weren’t old enough to vote a decade or more ago. For those with a lot more future in their futures, the stakes are higher.

In response to Trumpism, several Indivisible groups have already formed and merged here and are active. How many across the country will survive the inevitable shaking out no one knows. Setbacks are certain. But so is victory for those who refuse to lose.

At The Guardian, Erica Chenoweth argues that history shows that when campaigns of nonviolent resistance “prepare, train, and remain resilient, they often succeed regardless of whether the government uses violence against them.” Studies show a mere “3.5% of a population engaged in sustained nonviolent resistance” are enough to topple even brutal dictatorships. Plus, those in resistance have never been better equipped to fight back:

Today, those seeking knowledge about the theory and practice of civil resistance can find a wealth of information at their fingertips. In virtually any language, one can find training manuals, strategy-building tools, facilitation guides and documentation about successes and mistakes of past nonviolent campaigns.

Material is available in many formats, including graphic novels, e-classes, films and documentaries, scholarly books, novels, websites, research monographs, research inventories, and children’s books. And of course, the world is full of experienced activists with wisdom to share.

Here is a bit of wisdom at Think Progress from an activist with over a decade in the streets, someone who knows how to fight and win (emphasis mine):

Yes, we’re witnessing extremism in Washington, D.C. But some of us have been facing it for a while now. The extremists took over state government in my home state of North Carolina four years ago. But we challenged them with the moral language of our deepest religious and constitutional traditions. We dug deep into our state’s history of fusion politics and committed to stand together. And we learned something about extremism.

The same folks who were attacking public schools in our state were attacking health care. And the same folks against health care were against the LGBTQ community. And they were against labor. And they were attacking immigrants and Muslims and poor people. And to top it all off, the extremists were crying “voter fraud” as justification for the worst voter suppression measures we’d seen since Jim Crow.

They didn’t have any more evidence than Trump has now. We fought them in court and won. But we had to realize something deeper about our movement: if they were cynical enough to get together on all of these issues, we had to be courageous enough to come out of our single-issue silos and fight together in the streets, in the legislature, in the courts and at the ballot box.

When we linked up and started fighting back with Moral Mondays, they fought us harder. We lost some battles, and we’ve spent some long nights in jail. But even as Trumpism rolled across the South this past November, we beat extremism in our governor’s race, in four Council of State races, and in the race for a state Supreme Court seat. The extremists controlled all three branches of government before the election, but they only have the legislature now. And a federal court has ordered a special election this year because they found the legislature districts were gerrymandered with racial intent.

America needs more than a strategy to win back some seats for Democrats in 2018. We need a long term plan for a moral movement that links up and fights together for a moral agenda. Trump’s extremism is bad, but I’m convinced that it’s the last gasp of an order that knows it’s passing away. The question isn’t whether these lies and attacks can last. They cannot. The question is, “Who will stand together to offer a real alternative to the disaster of these policies?”

At the #MoralMarch #WeMarch to say #ImmigrantsWelcome! @RI4A we're looking forward to seeing you at #HKonJ. RSVP: https://t.co/yurRLXb5TO— NC NAACP (@ncnaacp) February 3, 2017

One week from today, thousands will take to the streets of Raleigh, North Carolina with Rev. William Barber for the 11th time. It is not only a show of force by a community calling for justice from a system that institutionalized inequality. It is an act of defiance against governance by leaders who wish people different themselves would just go away.

After a 2014 visit to the International Civil Rights Center & Museum in Greensboro (where you will find the famous lunch counter preserved), I wrote:

One place you hear it is in their rhetoric about voter fraud. It is a very personal affront to them that the power of their votes might be diminished by the Other. Every time someone ineligible casts a fraudulent ballot, they insist, it “steals your vote.” Your vote. They have convinced themselves that there are thousands and thousands of invisible felons stealing their votes every election. Passing more restrictive voting laws is a matter of justice and voting integrity, of course. What other motivation could there be for railroading eligible poor, minority, and college-age voters?

The Others they suspect of this heinous activity are people who do not believe as they do nor vote as they do. Voter fraud itself is a code word, the way Lee Atwater used “forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff.” It’s “much more abstract,” as Atwater said. The issue is not really whether the invisible “those people” are voting illegally or not. It is that they are voting at all. Sharing in governance, sharing power, is a privilege for deserving, Real Americans, not for the unwashed Irresponsibles. That Others do so legally is just as much an affront. Right now they’re targeting the invisible Others. Restricting voting to Real Americans comes later, I guess.

With Trump in the White House and Republicans in control of all three branches of government, later is now. The country as a whole faces what North Carolina faced in 2013 when Republicans gained full control of the governor’s mansion and the legislature for the first time in 100 years. They rolled into Raleigh just as they have today in Washington. D.C. But in North Carolina, the resistance is already fully formed, battle-hardened, gaining strength, and winning.

Come see how it’s done at the 11th Annual Moral March on Raleigh & HKonJ People’s Assembly next Saturday.

Friday Night Soother

by digby

via GIPHY

I think we need some happy animals tonight, don’t you?

The KKK is free at last, free at last

by digby

Online neo-Nazi and white supremacist forums have been unmistakably jubilant lately, as web chatter moved from celebrating President Donald Trump’s electoral victory to celebrating individual cabinet appointments and policy proposals.

On Thursday, internet racists celebrated another perceived victory: Reports that President Trump will soon remove white nationalist groups from a federal effort to study and neutralize extremist radicalization, and rebrand the program to focus solely on groups associating themselves with Islam.

“Yes, this is real life. Our memes are all real life. Donald Trump is setting us free.”

The Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program partners government agencies with community organizations in hopes of preventing people from being radicalized into various types of terror and hate groups. Its primary focus has always been in Muslim communities, but the Obama administration designed it to also encompass the American far-right groups that propagandize to people like Dylann Roof.

News of Trump’s plan to reverse that symbolic recognition of right-wing threats prompted a wave of celebration in white nationalist circles.

“Donald Trump wants to remove us from undue federal scrutiny by removing ‘white supremacists’ from the definition of ‘extremism,’” the founder and editor of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer (which takes its name from a Nazi propaganda publication) wrote in a post on the site. “Yes, this is real life. Our memes are all real life. Donald Trump is setting us free.”

I don’t know how much more blatant they can get.

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Week 2: “You’re a bad world!”

By Dennis Hartley

Well, let’s see how busy Donnie’s been on the Twitter this week:

by digby

I wrote about yet another of Trump’s cadre of white nationalists for Salon this morning:

One of the more jarring aspects of the Donald Trump era is the bedrock belief among his core supporters that he represents their last best chance to save a country that has devolved into a dystopian hellscape. They see the Obama years as a conscious destruction of civil society through politically correct racial McCarthyism, confiscatory taxes, overbearing regulation, religious oppression, rampant crime and disarmament of the populace. This is not the America that most of us recognize as the one where we live. But for legions of Trump voters, it’s the Obama America they saw on Fox News, heard about from Rush Limbaugh and read about on Breitbart News for nearly a decade.

This is the version of reality Donald Trump learned about when he had his flunky listen to talk radio for him and type up all the high points. It’s where he found out about the supposed horrors of Common Core and the “traitorous” Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who Trump believes should have been summarily executed. And Trump’s America is a place perceived by a rich man who sees the country only from overhead in his Boeing 757 or through the tinted windows of his Escalade as he travels highways at breakneck speed on his way to a rally.

Recall that Trump actually said at a rally in Virginia that Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, “looked like a war zone” when he flew over it the previous day:

I looked down, and I looked at, it looked like a war zone where you have these massive plants, and you can see 25 years ago, vibrance. Families being taken care of. Work. Education. Health care. People working. It’s all in Mexico now. The businesses have moved to Mexico. And other places.

In truth, Harrisburg is a bustling middle-sized city, the state capital of Pennsylvania and center of a robust local economy. Even in places where factory jobs actually have left over the past several decades and people are economically insecure, their lives can’t be reduced to this depressing stereotype.

Trump is similarly simplistic in his clear assumption that African-Americans all live in squalid and violent urban ghettos, repeatedly insisting that people cannot walk down streets in these locales without being shot down by marauding criminals. This is not true either, of course. There are certainly violent neighborhoods in American cities, but crime is way down from its peak a couple of decades ago. Trump seems to be stuck in the New York of the 1970s when crime was spiraling out of control and parts of the city were gritty and grim, as historian Rick Perlstein pointed out in a Salon article:

Think of Trump coming of age in the New York of the 1977 blackout, the search for the Son of Sam, and Howard Cosell barking out “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning” during Game Two of the World Series at Yankee Stadium as a helicopter hovered over a five-alarm fire at an abandoned elementary school (40 percent of buildings in the Bronx were destroyed by the end of the 1970s, mostly via arson — often torched by landlords seeking insurance windfalls). 

Think of Trump learning about the ins and outs of public life in this New York, a city of a frightened white outer-borough middle-class poised between fight or flight, in which real estate was everywhere and always a battleground, when the politics of race and crime bore all the intensity of civil war.

Trump calls himself the “law and order president” and he is going to let the police take off the gloves and set things right. But it isn’t 1977 anymore, and the country he is “saving” today is one that lives as much in his imagination as the utopian 1950s that he promises to return us to.

As we know, Trump isn’t alone in his belief that the United States is on the verge of economic and social collapse. His followers believe it, too. Right-wing media outlets constantly advance this idea, even as they busily count their millions. For decades they’ve made a profit out of saying that the country’s going to hell. But they aren’t the only ones. Conservative intellectuals have bought into this fantasy as well.

The Weekly Standard’s Michael Warren announced on Thursday that the author of some notorious essays written under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus is actually a former George W. Bush speechwriter named Michael Anton, who has now joined the Trump administration as a national security adviser. (Anton’s pseudonym apparently refers to a Roman general who sacrificed himself in battle.) He has been glimpsed briefly in the White House press room — as in the photo accompanying this article — but as yet has taken no public role in the administration.

These essays, posted on a couple of different websites throughout the presidential campaign, thrilled elite Trump supporters like Rush Limbaugh, who were being pressured by the “Never Trump” faction among old-line conservatives. The most famous of Decius’ prose works was called “The Flight 93 Election,” an allusion to the doomed plane that was headed to the White House on 9/11 and went down in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers overran the al-Qaida hijackers.

In Anton’s telling the plane is America and conservatives are the heroic passengers who say “Let’s roll” and charge the terrorists who are, of course, liberals and immigrants. He suggested that even if a Donald Trump presidency led to a metaphorical plane crash, that would be better than a Hillary Clinton victory, which he predicted would result in “vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent.” (Presumably all the Clinton voters would be gleefully chanting, “Lock them up!”)

But Clinton was not the real danger to America in this telling, merely the mechanism for what he believed is a foreign invasion:

The ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle.

As you can see, “Third World foreigners” and the “left” are not traditionally American in his view. Their children are being spawned for the purpose of forming a permanent class of rulers dedicated to oppressing the white and native-born “real”Americans who have the only legitimate claim to the country. Anton passionately declared, “I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live.”

The “people” Anton referred to are the same ones Trump calls “the forgotten people,” the only citizens he believes he has any responsibility to represent, the people who think the liberal, foreign hijackers took over America in 2008. They believe they saved their desolate, destroyed hulk of a country by taking on these invaders and voting for the avenging angel Donald Trump. Unlike their heroes aboard Flight 93, who gave their lives to spare the lives of others, they’re steering the plane directly into the White House themselves.

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by digby

The European Union is accustomed to crises. But it is probably safe to say that none of the 28 leaders who are gathering in Malta on Friday expected the crisis that has overtaken the agenda: the United States of America.

Like much of the world, the European Union is struggling to decipher a President Trump who seems every day to be picking a new fight with a new nation, whether friend or foe. Hopes among European leaders that Mr. Trump’s bombastic tone as a candidate would somehow smooth into a more temperate one as commander in chief are dissipating, replaced by a mounting sense of anxiety and puzzlement over how to proceed.

If many foreign leaders expected a Trump administration to push to renegotiate trade deals, or take a tough line on immigration, few anticipated that he would become an equal opportunity offender. He has insulted or humiliated Mexico, Britain, Germany and Iraq; engaged in a war of words with China and Iran; and turned a routine phone call with the prime minister of Australia, a staunch ally, into a minor diplomatic crisis.

This is not normal. But you knew that.

Throughout the campaign I would say to friends that if Trump won we would wake up to a different world. The post-war security arrangement that had kept the world from another horrific conflagration like the two that happened in the first half of the 20th century would be over. I never thought this was because Trump would “withdraw peacefully behind the walls of Fortress America.” If you have any instincts about human nature he’s obviously a megalomaniac. He believes America is the biggest and strongest and therefore has the right to run the world. And he has the mind of a 12 years old.

I don’t think most people took him seriously or they assumed the Republican party would rein him in. But they are just as nuts as he is. So here we are. The natural response of the rest of the world will be to protect themselves.

From us.

And you cannot blame them.

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For Trumpies, it’s Christmas everyday

by digby

Celebrate, good times, come on!

Sixty percent of Californians voted for Hillary Clinton. And President Trump, nationally, has a low approval rating — and he’s only been on the job 14 days.

Still, there are Republicans in California and many of them think President Trump is doing a bang-up job.

KCAL9’s Crystal Cruz spoke to some of the president’s ardent supporters, many who identify themselves as Tea Party members. They said they appreciate the fact the president is tackling issues important to them.

“I heard someone say earlier it feels like Christmas everyday,” said Robin Hvidston, “and that is how we feel.”

Said Gina Macisaac, another Trump fan “I really think it’s great that he’s moving so fast. I think getting things done is what a president is supposed to do.”

The room was filled with signs saying things like “Help Americans First!” and “No, No, No, Syrian Refugees” and “The People Elected Trump!”

“Trump will make America great again,” said one man. “And I’m going to change that into Trump is making America great.”

That same man said he is a proud American of Mexican descent. “And that’s why I support Trump. Cause he’s taking care of business.”

Backlash from Trump’s executive orders on travel haven’t swayed people in this crowd.

“If they’re not happy with this country they’re free to go,” said one woman. “Anytime.”

Said another Tea Party member. “I endured eight years of Barack Hussein Obama – I hated every moment of it. Now it’s our turn.”

Agnes Gibboney came to this country 13 years ago. She loves Trump’s stand on immigration. Her son was killed by a man who was in the country illegally.

“It took my family 13 years to legally immigrate,” she said, “they can wait four months.”

Gallup:

“According to the poll, more than half—55 percent—of Americans disapprove of the temporary travel ban, while 42 percent support the measure. And 58 percent disapprove of Trump indefinitely suspending the country’s Syrian refugee program.” 

Trump overall job approval rating: 43% approve; 52% disapprove

CBS:

“In the CBS News Poll’s first measure of Mr. Trump’s job performance as president, 40 percent of Americans approve of the job he is doing — the lowest of any president just after his first inauguration since the Gallup Poll began taking those measures in 1953. Some 48 percent disapprove.” 

“Slightly more Americans disapprove (51 percent) than approve (45 percent) of President Trump’s executive order temporarily banning people from entering the U.S. from seven designated countries. Views on temporarily suspending entry for refugees are the same.”

PPP:

“52% of voters think that the order was intended to be a Muslim ban, to only 41% who don’t think that was the intent. And the idea of a Muslim ban is extremely unpopular with the American people- only 26% are in favor of it, to 65% who are against it.”

Trump’s own Operation Eagle Claw
by Tom Sullivan

Wreckage from Operation Eagle Claw in Iranian desert, 1980.

That’s two debacles in the desert. Just different deserts.

In April 1980, the Iranian embassy hostage crisis having dragged on since November, President Jimmy Carter dispatched the Army’s Delta Force on a mission to rescue 52 American diplomats and civilians held in Tehran. After five months of planning, the rescue to be staged from a desert landing zone did not end well. Everything went wrong. The aborted mission has been studied for years, but this summary of Operation Eagle Claw is succinct enough:

U.S. forces were able to secure the Desert One landing zone, although the operation was complicated by the passage of a bus on a nearby road. As a result, more than 40 Iranians were detained by ground forces in an effort to preserve operational security. Of the eight navy helicopters that left the USS Nimitz, two experienced mechanical failure and could not continue, and the entire group was hindered by a low-level dust storm that severely reduced visibility. The six remaining helicopters landed at Desert One more than 90 minutes late. There another helicopter was deemed unfit for service, and the mission, which could not be accomplished with only five helicopters, was aborted. As the forces were leaving, a helicopter collided with a C-130 and exploded, destroying both aircraft and killing five air force personnel and three marines. The remaining troops were quickly evacuated by plane, leaving behind several helicopters, equipment, weapons, maps, and the dead.

The planning for that mission took five months and ended in flames, taking Carter’s presidency with it.

Now to 2017. Donald Trump is president. His first military operation went sour in Yemen. Reuters:

The U.S. military said on Wednesday it was looking into whether more civilians were killed in a raid on al Qaeda in Yemen on the weekend, in the first operation authorized by President Donald Trump as commander in chief.

U.S. Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens was killed in the raid on a branch of al Qaeda, also known as AQAP, in al Bayda province, which the Pentagon said also killed 14 militants. However, medics at the scene said about 30 people, including 10 women and children, were killed.

Reuters reports that the base was more heavily fortified than expected:

U.S. military officials told Reuters that Trump approved his first covert counterterrorism operation without sufficient intelligence, ground support or adequate backup preparations.

As a result, three officials said, the attacking SEAL team found itself dropping onto a reinforced al Qaeda base defended by landmines, snipers, and a larger than expected contingent of heavily armed Islamist extremists.

The Washington Post explains the mission’s purpose:

The goal of the operation was to detain Yemeni tribal leaders allegedly collaborating with al-Qaeda in Yemen and to gather intelligence about the group. Instead, a massive firefight ensued that brought in U.S. aircraft to strike the fighters and rescue the military team.

One of the aircraft, an MV-22 Osprey from a U.S. naval ship offshore, lost power and hit the ground hard enough to disable it and wound two service members. The $70 million aircraft was then intentionally destroyed by a U.S. bomb to ensure that it did not fall into militant hands.

Fred Kaplan at Slate has more background on the decision:

As the New York Times reported on Wednesday, Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, presented the plan over dinner at the White House, on Jan. 25, to Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and his political strategist Steve Bannon.

Officials told me that Trump approved the plan then and there. The next day, the National Security Council’s Deputies Committee—an interagency group of deputy and undersecretaries from various Cabinet departments—held a meeting to discuss the plan. But, as one official put it, the meeting was “pro forma and irrelevant,” as the decision had already been made.

Kaplan asks why the Pentagon proposed the mission if intelligence was so poor:

Or were they pushing for it? Usually, in these situations, military briefers outline a whole set of risks, contingencies, and caveats involved in a combat operation, if just to spread the blame if things go south. Did they do this with Mattis and Dunford? Did Mattis and Dunford do it with Trump, Bannon, and Kushner?

Even as the Trump administration claim the mission had already been approved by President Barack Obama, members of the Obama security team denied it, saying briefing materials left for Trump indicated significant risks.

The Operation Eagle Claw debacle and Carter’s failure to resolve the Iranian hostage situation are referenced to this day among conservatives as evidence of a weak and failed presidency. So how is Trump handling his raid gone wrong?

President Donald Trump declared Sunday’s mission a success, and the Pentagon released a statement Wednesday that said U.S. forces had captured “materials and information that is yielding valuable intelligence.”

But a senior military official told NBC News “almost everything went wrong.” A senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the operation said it’s not yet clear if the mission was a success. “We went in with the intent of capturing phones and computers and we don’t know yet if anything of great value was obtained,” the official said.

Sean Spicer is on the job, McClatchy reports:

This was a very, very well thought out and executed effort,” White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said. He called it “a successful operation by all standards.”

But this is an administration already known for its low, low standards. McClatchy’s report continues:

Medics in the region and local media reported 30 casualties, including at least 10 women and children. The London-based human rights group Reprieve, which monitors civilian casualties of drone strikes, on Thursday said it had obtained evidence of 23 civilian casualties, including a newborn and 10 children.

One of the civilian casualties was the 8-year-old daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, a senior U.S.-born al Qaida leader who was killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2011, according to posts by her family on social media. Nawar al-Awlaki, who was known as Nora, also was a U.S. citizen. Her brother, 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, also died in a drone strike authorized by Obama.

Likely, Trump-Bannon saw an opportunity for a quick “win” Trump could brag about for the cameras to show he’s tough and means business. Instead, Trump was off quietly to Dover Air Force Base to welcome home the body of the first American citizen killed as a direct result of one of his decisions. The second, Nora, missed the flight.

QOTD: another wingnut

by digby

When asked about Steve Bannon’s qualifications for the National Security Council, one of Trump’s new wingnuts,Sebastian Gorka, replied:

I think you need to look at what Stephen Bannon did in terms of building a media giant that has crushed its left-wing rivals in terms of a Breitbart.com

ISIS had better watch out baby. This guy’s a got a track record.

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