Month: February 2017

“This is my ballot.”
by Tom Sullivan

During early voting here in 2008, this happened.

A young African-American woman approached one of our poll greetsrs outside the Board of Elections station downtown. The woman was nervous, almost trembling. This was her first vote, an important vote. She had lots of questions.

The greeter explained the voting process several times. Finally, the young woman practiced on a sample ballot before lining up inside to vote.

When she finished, she rushed back out onto the sidewalk and blurted, “You won’t believe what happened to me in there.”

An older white woman in line saw her sample ballot and snatched it and the pen from her hands. Telling the young voter she didn’t have to vote just for Democrats, the older woman filled in the “straight Republican” oval. (This was before GOP-led legislature eliminated straight-ticket voting in NC.)

The young woman pulled it back and said, “This is my ballot. I’m going to vote the way I want. You have your own ballot. You can vote the way you want.”

My wife took the younger woman by the shoulders and said, “I am so proud of you.” They hugged with tears in their eyes.

We are sometimes so cynical. We get so caught up in candidates and factions and policy fights we sometimes lose touch with what voting means to people. People bled and died to enforce that young woman’s right to a voice in governing this country. As the story shows, there are still plenty of people out there not happy about sharing power with her or anyone else who looks different from them.

Yesterday’s turnout was epic. As the Democratic National Committee went through the interminable process of electing new officers (Tom Perez won the chair’s slot), Democrats here held annual precinct organizing meetings — usually pretty boring stuff. We had planned for large. What we got was huge. At our “cluster” meetup, 250 people showed up for meetings of eight precincts. The mayor was there and a city councilman, plus the district attorney and a superior court judge. And a lot of younger voters. When I asked how many were attending for the first time, almost half in the grade school auditorium put up their hands. As I wrote last Sunday, something (or someone) has brought people off their couches.

Many have voted for years. Others have not. Now they want to know how all this works.

One man wanted to know when we craft policy at the local level. Organizing strategy and election mechanics, yes. We don’t really set policy. Voters elect candidates who do that. But it’s funny, once they count on you to get them elected they are a lot more receptive to policy suggestions for some reason. I wrote about what that work looks like in North Carolina during the DNC platform fight last summer:

There is a massive logistical effort behind putting on elections, a lot of it volunteers and party-organized. Most voters are accustomed only to seeing the 4 or 5 retirees who work the polling station in their neighborhood on Election Day. Three election judges (a Republican Judge, a Democratic Judge, and a Chief Judge) plus an assistant or two. These people get paid (poorly) for the day, but that’s not why they do it. They are putting in a 14-hour day because they believe what they are doing matters, that their community matters, and that democracy is important.

The handful of people you see every Election Day don’t appear out of thin air. Precinct leaders from each party recruit them (plus multiple backups) in the odd-numbered years here and provide a list of their names to the county Board of Elections. I spend six weekends every other summer compiling the list for local Democrats. It’s a chore and a half. Four or 5 people per precinct, plus backups. In my county there are 80 precincts. In North Carolina alone there are 2,709 precincts.

That’s virtually an army division mobilized to put on a general election. In a single state.

But it’s the small, human stories that make the work worth the effort. My wife got choked up last night talking about another of those “moments” outside the polling station.

She and a partner saw a sullen-looking, African-American teenager round the corner. He didn’t seem happy to be there.

“Are you coming to vote?” they asked.

He looked down and said nothing. They explained the ballot gently and mentioned candidates they knew personally. By his age, it would have to be his first time. Barack Obama was running for reelection. It was 2012.

A well-dressed couple approached from another direction. His parents. Attorneys maybe. The three went in to vote together.

When the young man came out, he carried himself differently. The sullenness was gone.

“Did you get voted?” the team asked.

“Yeah!” he said, and broke into a wide grin.

“Feels good, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah!” he said.

Broad grins all around.

Little men in uniforms

by digby

Remember when Trump said he was going to be the “law and order”president? Well, he’s making good on that promise:

The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, said on Tuesday that the president wanted to “take the shackles off” of agents, an expression the officers themselves used time and again in interviews to describe their newfound freedom.

“Morale amongst our agents and officers has increased exponentially since the signing of the orders,” the unions representing ICE and Border Patrol agents said in a joint statement after President Trump issued the executive orders on immigration late last month.

Two memos released this past week by the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of ICE and the Border Patrol, provided more details about how it would carry out its plan, which includes Mr. Trump’s signature campaign pledge — a wall along the entire southern border — as well as speedier deportations and greater reliance on local police officers.

But for those with ICE badges, perhaps the biggest change was the erasing of the Obama administration’s hierarchy of priorities, which forced agents to concentrate on deporting gang members and other violent and serious criminals, and mostly leave everyone else alone.

A whirlwind of activity has overtaken ICE headquarters in Washington in recent weeks, with employees attending back-to-back meetings about how to quickly carry out President Trump’s plans. “Some people are like: ‘This is great. Let’s give them all the tools they need,’” said a senior staff member at headquarters, who joined the department under the administration of George W. Bush.

But, the official added, “other people are a little bit more hesitant and fearful about how quickly things are moving.”

Two officials in Washington said that the shift — and the new enthusiasm that has come with it — seems to have encouraged pro-Trump political comments and banter that struck the officials as brazen or gung-ho, like remarks about their jobs becoming “fun.” Those who take less of a hard line on unauthorized immigrants feel silenced, the officials said.

ICE has more than 20,000 employees, spread across 400 offices in the United States and 46 foreign countries, and the Trump administration has called for the hiring of 10,000 more. ICE officers see themselves as protecting the country and enforcing its laws, but also, several agents said, defending the legal immigration system, with its yearslong waits to enter the country, from people who skip the line.

John F. Kelly, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement after the first large-scale roundups of the Trump administration: “President Trump has been clear in affirming the critical mission of D.H.S. in protecting the nation.”

“There is no greater calling than to serve and protect our nation,” he added, “a mission that the men and women of ICE perform with professionalism and courage every single day.”

Agents are, in fact, predominantly male and have often served in the military, with a police department or both. New agents take a five-week Spanish language program as well as firearms training; they also learn driving maneuvers and have to pass seven written examinations and a physical-fitness test that includes an obstacle course.

The element of surprise is central to their work, and the sight of even a single white van emblazoned with the words Department of Homeland Security can create fear and cause people to flee. To minimize public contact, the arrests are frequently made in the early morning hours.

A supervisor in Northern California described a typical operation, with teams of at least five members rising before dawn, meeting as early as 4 a.m. to make arrests before their targets depart for work. To avoid distressing families and children, the agents prefer to apprehend people outside their homes, approaching them as soon as they step onto a public sidewalk and, once identified, placing them in handcuffs.

But arrests can appear dramatic, as agents arrive in large numbers, armed with semiautomatic handguns and wearing dark bulletproof vests with ICE in bright white letters on them. When they do have to enter a home, officers knock loudly and announce themselves as the police, a term they can legally use. Many times, children are awakened in the process, and watch as a parent is taken away.

Some of the more visible ICE operations in recent weeks have ricocheted around the internet, and sometimes drawn a backlash. At Kennedy Airport, Customs and Border Protection agents checked documents of passengers getting off a flight from San Francisco because ICE, a sister agency, thought a person with a deportation order might be on the plane. They did not find the person they were looking for.

These are customs agents forcibly checking the ID of every passenger deplaning from Delta flight 1583 tonight at JFK. A domestic flight. pic.twitter.com/fHMgyzCjo5

— Britton Taylor (@brittontaylor) February 23, 2017

After the arrests outside the church in Alexandria, Va., Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, wrote a letter to Mr. Kelly, saying the action “raises a concern that, unlike previous actions, ICE agents are detaining Virginia residents without cause or specific allegations of criminal activity.”

Bystanders are now being taken in if they are suspected to be undocumented, even if they have committed no crime, known within the agency as “collateral” arrests. While these arrests occurred under the Obama administration, they were officially discouraged, to the frustration of many agents. “Which part of illegal don’t people understand?” an agent in Arizona asked.

But officers said their work had become more political than ever, and they bristled at what they considered stereotypes of indiscriminate enforcers who want to sweep grandmothers off the street or separate families.

Perhaps their biggest challenge, said the supervisor in California, is the agency’s steadily deteriorating relationship with other law enforcement agencies, especially in liberal-leaning cities that have vowed to protect immigrants from deportation, known as sanctuary cities.

In one city alone, the supervisor said, the police once transferred 35 undocumented immigrants a day into federal custody, compared with roughly five per week during the final years of the Obama presidency.

On Thursday, Los Angeles, a sanctuary city, asked that ICE agents stop calling themselves police officers, saying it was damaging residents’ trust of the city’s own police officers.

Although all of the agents interviewed felt the old priorities had kept them from doing their jobs, John Sandweg, an acting director of ICE in the Obama administration, defended the rules as making the best use of limited resources. Without them, he said, fewer dangerous people might get deported. “There are 10 seats on the bus, they go to the first 10 you grab,” Mr. Sandweg said. “It diminishes the chances that it’s a violent offender.”

He said that he had spent a lot of time on the road, speaking at town halls where he heard a great deal from the rank-and-file agents about the priorities. “Certainly they were not terribly popular,” he said. “They wanted unfettered discretion.”

Agents said that even with the added freedom, they would still go after the people who presented the greatest danger to the public. And what Mr. Sandweg called unfettered discretion, they called enforcing the law.

“The discretion has come back to us; it’s up to us to make decisions in the field,” a 15-year veteran in California said. “We’re trusted again.”

These are your American gestapo. I’m sorry to have to bring that  allusion into it, but there’s just no avoiding it.

*Note that tweet above refers to a domestic flight.  No border involved.

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The jerk at the end of the bar

by digby

I’ve always said that’s who he is….here’s proof:

Slow Donald Trump down a bit and he becomes that drunken old man ranting in a bar.https://t.co/WizE2G32qwpic.twitter.com/JoOpxLhRx5— James Melville (@JamesMelville) February 24, 2017

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Idiocracy at the border

by digby

This is so stupid I don’t even know what to say:

The son of legendary boxer Muhammad Ali was detained for hours by immigration officials earlier this month at a Florida airport, according to a family friend.

Muhammad Ali Jr., 44, and his mother, Khalilah Camacho-Ali, the second wife of Muhammad Ali, were arriving at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport on Feb. 7 after returning from speaking at a Black History Month event in Montego Bay, Jamaica. They were pulled aside while going through customs because of their Arabic-sounding names, according to family friend and lawyer Chris Mancini.

Immigration officials let Camacho-Ali go after she showed them a photo of herself with her ex-husband, but her son did not have such a photo and wasn’t as lucky.

Mancini said officials held and questioned Ali Jr. for nearly two hours, repeatedly asking him, “Where did you get your name from?” and “Are you Muslim?”

What the hell?????

When Ali Jr. responded that yes, he is a Muslim, the officers kept questioning him about his religion and where he was born. Ali Jr. was born in Philadelphia in 1972 and holds a U.S. passport.

[…]

“To the Ali family, it’s crystal clear that this is directly linked to Mr. Trump’s efforts to ban Muslims from the United States,” Mancini said, referring to President Trump’s executive order signed Jan. 27 that instituted a ban for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries.

He’s clearly an American. An African-American. The son of the most famous American Muslim in the world.

I don’t know how stupid you have to be to not know that or realize that if you just let his mother, the former wife of the most famous American Muslim in the world go through, that means he is the son of the most famous American Muslim in the world, but apparently it’s not so stupid that you can’t be given a uniform and told to guard our borders.

This is the kind of stuff that’s making me actually feel afraid. Obviously these people are so dumb that a smart terrorist would be able to talk circles around them. It’s just average Americans and foreigners who still believe the world makes sense who are getting caught in this web.

Update: More morons

A visiting scholar to Texas A&M was detained by customs officials in Houston this week while on his way to speak at a symposium in Aggieland, officials said Friday at the conference.
Henry Rousso was flying in from Paris to participate in the Hagler Institute Symposium when he was “mistakenly detained” Wednesday evening upon his arrival, according to Richard Golsan, director of the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M.

“When he called me with this news two nights ago, he was waiting for customs officials to send him back to Paris as an illegal alien on the first flight out,” said Golsan during his introduction to the session which Rousso was set to participate in.

After learning about the dire situation, Golsan said he immediately called university officials, leading A&M President Michael K. Young to enlist the help of Texas A&M Law School professor and director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic Fatma Marouf.

“Due to her prompt and timely intervention, Rousso was released,” Golsan said.
Rousso, 62, is a senior researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research, or CNRS, which the Egyptian-born scholar and author joined in 1981.

His work centers on the history and memory of traumatic pasts, France in WWII and the post-war period, his profile on the CNRS website says. Rousso’s current study involves the relationship between history, memory and justice.

Oh who needs a guy like that, amirite?

Tweet O’ The Day

by digby

Used to be only religion reporters had to fact check the apocalypse https://t.co/SLmAjuezCx

— Sarah Posner (@sarahposner) February 25, 2017

Can you believe this stuff? Anyway, here’s the fact check:

In President Donald Trump’s estimation, the U.S. border isn’t merely porous, it’s “wide open.” Darkness and danger are everywhere, even Sweden. American infrastructure isn’t just in need of improvement but it’s in “total disrepair and decay.” The health law is not only flawed, but it’s an “absolute and total catastrophe.”

His apocalyptic view of everything he intends to fix leaves no nuance, but that’s where reality often resides. For example, Trump himself actually likes parts of former President Barack Obama’s health overhaul, such as the extended coverage for older children. And the U.S. remains an economic powerhouse able to transport goods in a stressed system of roads, bridges and ports that are not in total decay.

But the president is one to overreach for superlatives, whether describing the state of things as he found them or what he plans to do about them — or claims to have done already.

Some statements from the past week:

TRUMP: “Obamacare covers very few people.”

THE FACTS: That’s only true if you consider more than 20 million people to be “very few.” That’s how many are covered by the two major components of the law: expanded Medicaid and subsidized private health insurance.

The Medicaid expansion, adopted by 31 states and the District of Columbia, covers about 11 million low-income people, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The other, more visible, component is HealthCare.gov. The federal website and state-run online insurance markets have signed up 12.2 million people for this year, according to an Associated Press count this month, based on federal and state reports.

Altogether, since Obama’s law passed in 2010, the number of uninsured people has dropped by about 20 million and the uninsured rate has declined below 9 percent, a historic low.

___

TRUMP, repeating a week-old assertion that Sweden is an example of violence and extremism due to immigration: “Take a look at what happened in Sweden. I love Sweden, great country, great people, I love Sweden. But they understand. The people over there understand I’m right.”

THE FACTS: Trump was ridiculed in Sweden after he warned at a rally in Florida that terrorism was growing in Europe and something terrible had happened in Sweden the previous night. But there had been no extraordinary trouble that night in Sweden, a country welcoming to immigrants.

Two days later, though, a riot broke out after police arrested a drug crime suspect. Cars were set on fire and shops looted, but no one was injured. Attacks in the country related to extremism remain rare. The biggest surprise for many Swedes was that a police officer found it necessary to fire his gun.

___

TRUMP: The U.S. is providing security to other nations “while leaving our own border wide open. Anybody can come in. But don’t worry, we’re getting a wall. … We’re getting bad people out of this country.”

THE FACTS: His wide-open border claim is bogus. The number of arrests of illegal border crossers — the best measure of how many people are trying to cross illegally — remains at a 40-year low. The U.S. government under Presidents George W. Bush and Obama roughly doubled the ranks of the Border Patrol in the past decade or so.

In addition, the number of people expelled from the country since Trump took office Jan. 20 has not been disclosed. No available data support his claim, made Thursday, that immigrants in the country illegally are being expelled at a rate “nobody has ever seen before.” Deportations were brisk when Obama was president.

Altogether in January, 16,643 people were deported, a drop from December (20,395) but a number that is similar to monthly deportations in early 2015 and 2016.

This month, Homeland Security officials have said 680 people were arrested in a weeklong effort to find and arrest criminal immigrants living in the United States illegally. Three-quarters of those people had been convicted of crimes, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said. The remaining 25 percent were not.

The government has not provided information about who was arrested in that roundup, so it’s impossible to determine how many gang members or drug lords were in that group. It is also unclear how many of those “bad people” have actually been deported.

That roundup was largely planned before Trump took office and was alternately described by the Trump administration as a routine enforcement effort and a signal of his pledge to take a harder line on illegal immigration. During the Obama administration, similar operations were carried out that yielded thousands of arrests.

___

TRUMP: “We have authorized the construction, one day, of the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines. And issued a new rule — this took place while I was getting ready to sign. I said who makes the pipes for the pipeline? Well, sir, it comes from all over the world, isn’t that wonderful? I said nope, comes from the United States, or we’re not building it. American steel. If they want a pipeline in the United States, they’re going to use pipe that’s made in the United States.”

THE FACTS: It’s not that straightforward. Trump’s executive order leaves lots of wiggle room on how much U.S. steel is actually used. The order states new, expanded or repaired pipelines in the U.S. must use U.S. steel “to the maximum extent possible” and allowed by law. That’s not an all-USA mandate.

What’s judged possible in the Keystone XL project remains to be seen. Pipes are already purchased. Contrary to his statement, Trump has not approved the project. Rather, he revived it by asking TransCanada to resubmit its application.

TransCanada did so in late January while saying it needs time to review how any buy-American plan would affect the company. It has said the majority of steel would be from North America, but that includes Canada and Mexico.

Trump’s Jan. 24 order on U.S. steel has little effect on the Dakota Access project because it is nearly complete.

___

TRUMP on arrests of people in the country illegally: “It’s a military operation because what has been allowed to come into our country, when you see gang violence that you’ve read about like never before and all of the things, much of that is people who are here illegally. And they’re rough and they’re tough, but they’re not tough like our people. So we’re getting them out.”

THE FACTS: He was wrong in calling immigration enforcement a military operation.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, responsible for finding and deporting immigrants in the country illegally, is a civilian law enforcement agency. Military personnel were not responsible for recent raids that resulted in the arrests of 680 people. Planning for that roundup had been underway during the previous and was in step with large, periodic raids when Obama was president.

Kelly contradicted Trump on the nature of plans to step up border enforcement: “There will be no use of military forces in immigration,” Kelly said. “There will be no — repeat, no — mass deportations.”

___

TRUMP again claimed credit for a $700 million savings in the military’s contract with Lockheed for the F-35 fighter jet. Speaking to the defense contractor’s CEO Marillyn Hewson, he said: “Over $700 million. Do you think Hillary would have cost you $700 million? I assume you wanted her to win” — referring to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

THE FACTS: Cost savings for the F-35 began before Trump’s inauguration and predate his complaints about the price tag.

The head of the Air Force program announced significant price reductions Dec. 19 — after Trump had tweeted about the cost but weeks before Trump met about the issue on Jan. 13 with Hewson.

“There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of additional F-35 cost savings as a result of President Trump’s intervention,” said Richard Aboulafia, an analyst with the aerospace consulting firm Teal Group. He said Trump appears to be taking credit for prior-year budget decisions and for work already done by managers at the Pentagon who took action before the presidential election to reduce costs.

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Breaking the glass table

by digby

From the you cannot make this stuff up files:

A Republican state senator in Texas broke a glass tabletop Wednesday during a hearing on three anti-abortion bills, hitting his gavel so hard during a NARAL Pro-Choice Texas intern’s testimony that the room was stunned into silence as the glass shattered.

The 24-year-old intern, Maggie Hennessy, was wrapping up her two-minute testimony against SB 415 — a bill that would limit doctors’ ability to perform the dilation and evacuation medical procedure, which is used in about 95 percent of second-trimester abortions — when Senator Charles Schwertner verbally warned her that her time was up. As Hennessy concluded her testimony — surpassing the time limit by several seconds to urge lawmakers to “stop playing with women’s health care as if it’s your own political puppet” — Schwertner hammered his gavel prompting a swift crack that shattered the desk top and echoed through the senate chamber.

NARAL Texas communications director Alexa Garcia-Ditta was watching from the gallery and took the following photo of the damage:

A few minutes later, Schwertner allowed the president of the anti-abortion Texas Alliance for Life lobby group to extend his testimony, including a quote attributed to Catholic saint and scholar Thomas More, for the same length of time as Hennessy’s, without an interruption. Schwertner is the chair of the Texas Senate Health and Human Services Committee.

Dozens of Texans gathered at the capitol for the hearing, which lasted more than five hours. But Schwertner’s aggressive gaveling appeared to be limited to Hennessy’s testimony. When others’ statements went over time, the senator instead warned them by repeatedly thanking them for their testimony.
[…]

Schwertner, an orthopedic surgeon who has served in the Texas Senate since 2012, has carried a number of anti-abortion bills in the Legislature, including an early version of part of the state’s omnibus anti-abortion bill that was struck down by the Supreme Court last year.

He had a violent reaction. How surprising.

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Fascism is the latest cool new thing on campus

by digby

Yes, that’s a Russian flag, provided by a prankster. The CPAC folks waved them proudly until the organizers finally caught on and confiscated them.

It’s not your daddy’s CPAC anymore. This piece by Michelle Goldberg is chilling:

On Thursday, white nationalist Richard Spencer was thrown out of the Conservative Political Action Conference. As security escorted him to the door, a college junior in a blue blazer and fashy haircut followed him. “I’m representing the alt-right club at Penn State,” said James O’Mailia, who then invited Spencer to come and speak. “Please come!” he said. “We’ll host you and everything.” 

O’Mailia’s club, the Bull-Moose Party, was formed to support Donald Trump’s presidential campaign; it made news last year for building a pro-Trump plywood wall around an American flag on campus. He says he grew up as a “George W. Bush conservative” and got into the alt-right, in part, through Breitbart. “It’s the new punk rock,” he said, meaning it’s edgy and subversive. 

O’Mailia was resentful that people on campus had called his group racist. “In this new social justice warrior–dominated society, people will look at someone waving the American flag as being a white supremacist,” he said. That may be, I replied, but he just invited Spencer, an actual white supremacist, to speak at his school. “I just think it’s a good idea to bring his opinion into it,” he shrugged. 

CPAC, the country’s largest annual conservative gathering, has long drawn energy from young people who are resentful about liberal hegemony on college campuses. Now, however, it’s flailing as it tries to establish its own moral boundaries on right-wing speech. Its trouble started when Matt Schlapp, CPAC’s chairman, invited professional troll Milo Yiannopoulos to give a keynote address, sparking a furious backlash from traditional conservatives, who dug up statements by Yiannopoulos justifying man-boy sex. That ultimately led to Yiannopoulos losing his book deal, as well as his CPAC slot, and resigning from his job at Breitbart. In the aftermath, CPAC is trying to distance itself from the alt-right. Yet top Trump aide Steve Bannon, who once boasted that his website, Breitbart, was the “platform of the alt-right,” still had a prime Thursday afternoon speaking slot. And many young people in attendance reveled in the alt-right’s rebellious frisson of fascism. 

Shortly after the conference began on Thursday, Dan Schneider, executive director of the American Conservative Union—the group that puts on CPAC—gave a speech denouncing the alt-right as left-wing infiltrators. “There is a sinister organization that is trying to worm its way into our ranks,” he said, arguing that the term “alt-right” had been “hijacked” by a “hate-filled left-wing fascist group.” 

Schneider referred specifically to the conference in November where Spencer, standing before a giddy crowd of clean-cut racists, gave a Nazi salute and said, “Heil Trump, heil our people, heil victory!” Schneider’s argument was similar to the one Jonah Goldberg made in his risible book Liberal Fascism: Fascists are inherently left-wing because they believe in government power. (Apparently this is true even when they’re hailing the government power to crush the left.) “Hateful left-wing fascists are not like anybody here,” Schneider said. 

Even if you accept his absurd framing, what he said was wrong. Spencer himself—who, far from hijacking the term alt-right, actually coined it—was there watching from a seat near the stage. And it was clear that there were fellow travelers in the crowd. “There are lots of people here that I know,” Spencer told me after Schneider’s speech. Soon he was mobbed by journalists as well as by eager young conference goers who wanted to pose with him for selfies. One young man called out “Praise Kek!”—an alt-right in-joke. A guy named J.P. Sheehan pulled a T-shirt saying RADIX—the name of Spencer’s online journal—out of his bag, happily flashing it toward Spencer. “I know a lot of people are afraid of him, but Richard Spencer is like, the coolest guy,” he said.

There’s a lot more so read the whole thing. This really says it all, though:

Sheehan, 26, says he voted for Obama twice, but as Obama’s presidency progressed, he came to feel like minorities had become emboldened at his expense. He realized, he said, “This actually isn’t in my best interest, and I can do better for myself.” Eventually, Sheehan came to see his whiteness as a source of meaning. “The thing about racial identity and ethnic heritage is that it’s like your shadow,” he said. “It’s going to be with you everywhere you go, but it reminds you that the sun is shining on you. People think the alt-right is just simply about being mean to other people. It’s really not. The alt-right is simply identity politics for white people.”

Such sweet kids. She interviews the organizers who offer even more of their inane bullshit about this being left wing and denying that one of their keynote speakers, Steve bannon special adviser to the president, is the guy who said his websire what the platform for the “alt-right” after which he came up with the nonsensical explanation that “alt-right” had been hijacked by left wing fascists.

Sometimes I fell as if the right is going to win simply by gaslighting us all into a padded room.

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Define “great”
by Tom Sullivan

Amor (Cupid) kisses Psyche by Antonio Canova, Louvre. Photo by Jörg Bittner Unna via Creative Commons.

When Barack Obama ran for president “hope” became his watchword. For Donald Trump, it was “great.” The terms were vague enough that fans could impress on them anything their hearts desired. Many dreamed bigger than their leaders could deliver are would/will be disappointed.

As to a country’s greatness, that is probably in the eye of the beholder, at least over the short term. But in historical terms, greatness has more to do with positive achievements and cultural legacy: legal, mathematical, social, scientific, artistic. It’s hard to imagine anything like that coming out of the current crop of know-nothing nihilists running amuck at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

A young coworker expressed a desire this week to visit the Louvre Museum. She can’t pronounce it well, but she knows what it is, knows it is in France, and feels is is important that she go. The sitting U.S. president this week visited the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and declared slavery “just not good.” He told the press he loathes:

“Today and every day of my presidency I pledge to do everything I can to continue that promise of freedom for African-Americans and for every American,” Trump said, calling his tour “a meaningful reminder of why we have to fight bigotry and hatred and intolerance.”

(The Management hopes you weren’t reading that with a mouthful of coffee.)

A museum visit notwithstanding, Trump proposes stripping funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and other cultural programs. Supporters of the arts are scrambling to defend their programs.

At Foreign Policy, David Rothkopf writes that it is not the “deep state” Americans need to worry about, but the emergent shallow one that “actively eschews experience, knowledge, relationships, insight, craft, special skills, tradition, and shared values.” With Trump as its avatar, the shallow state believes:

… knowledge is not a useful tool but a cunning barrier elites have created to keep power from the average man and woman. The same is true for experience, skills, and know-how. These things require time and work and study and often challenge our systems of belief. Truth is hard; shallowness is easy.

If this is greatness, it is not the kind lovingly preserved in museums as a cultural legacy. If this is greatness, it will not produce classic works of art treasured for celebrating “What a piece of work is a man!”

Rothkopf writes:

Art is not an adornment to society. It is not a luxury. It is the purpose of society. It becomes our legacy. It is also, however, our teacher; it helps us consider that which is around us and what we want to be. It makes demands on us that in turn lead us to place demands on ourselves and those with whom we live and work. And that is precisely why these programs have been targeted by Trump. They are the enemies of the shallow state. So, too, of course, are the members of the press whom Trump has mislabeled as “enemies of the people.” The only people they are the enemy of are those who are at war with truth and thought: Trump and his supporters, the champions of the shallow state. That is why, while it is easy to simply be angry or to laugh at a president who doesn’t read or to be distracted by half-baked conspiracy theories like the deep state, we must recognize that the shallow state is much more pernicious. This administration has come to power because America has allowed public discourse, the quality of education we give our kids, and the standards we set for ourselves to decline. Trump seeks to institutionalize that decline. He is at war with that which has made our society great. He seeks to eviscerate the elements of our government and discredit those within our society who are champions of the depth on which any civilization depends.

But art is challenging and being challenged is taxing and taxing is “just not good.” The great societies of the past have nothing to fear.

(h/t S.R.)

Friday Night Soother: Grizzly pole dancing edition

by digby

Feel the funk ya’ll:

Get down, get down …

That’s from the new BBC series Planet Earth II, which is just great. It’s a wonderful reprieve from the political hellscape.

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Can yellow dogs learn new tricks?
by Tom Sullivan

Midtown Atlanta from Georgia Tech. Photo by Isawooty via Creative Commons.

Saturday, Democrats meeting in Atlanta choose a new chair for the Democratic National Committee. Handicapping seems to make it a tossup between Rep. Keith Ellison (the early favorite) and former labor secretary Tom Perez who entered the race a month after Ellison at the behest of the Obama White House. At the New Republic, Clio Chang quotes a Clinton ally who told The Hill, “Perez and Ellison are cut from the same progressive cloth. Either one would be a strong leader.” That sounds about right. So why urge him to run at all?

Because the difference that makes a difference is over who stands to lose influence inside party ranks:

As Jeff Stein points out at Vox, Sanders supporters are likely overstating the power of the DNC chair. But that is all the more reason to throw them a win. If an Ellison victory is a modest, symbolic concession, the upside is that Democrats will signal to progressive and younger voters, who Democrats will be desperate to turn out in 2018 and 2020, that they are on their side. It would be a choice of utmost pragmatism.

But members of the Democratic establishment don’t quite see it that way. The Hill reports, “Perez supporters have expressed concern about handing the party over to the Sanders wing of the party, arguing that Ellison would move the party too far to the left.” And the New York Times suggests that Democratic leaders pushed Perez to run because they viewed Ellison as too close to the Sanders wing.

[…]

And it’s not just Obama- and Clinton-ites that could see some power slip away with an Ellison-headed DNC. Paid DNC consultants also have a vested interest in maintaining the DNC status quo. Nomiki Konst, who has extensively covered the nuts and bolts of the DNC race, asked Perez how he felt about conflicts of interest within the committee—specifically, DNC members who also have contracts with the committee. Perez dodged the issue, advocating for a “big tent.” In contrast, in a forum last month, Ellison firmly stated, “We are battling the consultant-ocracy.”

These concerns about power, control, and money echo of the dismal failures of 2008, when top Democratic operatives decided to fold Obama’s online grassroots behemoth, Organizing for America, into the DNC. The story is infamous now: Party regulars wanted to ensure control of the group, rather than allowing it to flourish as an independent entity, one that could challenge the party itself. The muzzling of Obama’s grassroots support has been blamed for being partly responsible for the Democratic Party’s enormous losses in state and local seats over the past decade. Chris Edley, who pushed for OFA’s independence, told the New Republic recently about the choice, “If you’re not really that committed, as a matter of principle, to a bottom-up theory of change, then you will find it nonsensical to cede some control in order to gain more power.”

At issue now is whether party leaders who squandered the opportunity Obama’s army of volunteers represented are the ones to fill in the hole they helped dig. A Republican operative quoted in “Crashing the Gate” said, “I don’t get it. When a consultant on the Republican side loses, we take them out and shoot them. You guys — keep hiring them.” Killing off OFA, Micha Sifry wrote at New Republic, was “a sin of imagination, one that helped decimate the Democratic Party at the state and local level and turn over every branch of the federal government to the far right.” Is it time to turn the page?

Fear of an emergent grassroots movement is a familiar story in North Carolina. This one goes back a dozen years, but could have been written yesterday.

Jerry Meek, a tall, unmarried attorney in his early thirties, won his race for state chair over the opposition of virtually the entire state party establishment. He told Markos Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong what he did in “Crashing the Gate” (2006):

Meek had won an upset victory in early 2005 over Ed Turlington, the former state cochairman of local-boy John Edwards’ presidential campaign with John Kerry. Turlington not only had Edwards’ and the state’s entire congressional delegation’s blessing to become state party chairman, but also the governor’s, the state legislative leaders’, and all but one statewide elected official. “Pretty much every single elected Democrat in North Carolina supported my opponent,” Meek told us. Yet he won by bringing together a coalition of party activists that had been ignored.

“It was a weird mixture. It was part conservative, rural, and part very liberal urban progressive, and both of them felt the state party had excluded them,” Meek said. “The rural people felt like the state party was the party that just invested in the urban areas and had an interest in the urban areas. The urban progressives felt like the state party they ignored them because of their philosophical perspective on politics.”

And echoing the same sentiment we find in most components of the new movement, Meek was more interested in building a big tent
party than in ideology. “I put together really two coalitions that ordinarily could not coexist in the same room, which made it tricky because during the campaign I never talked about issues-I never talked about whether I’m liberal or moderate or conservative. I just talked about the insiders versus the outsiders. I talked about the need to have a party that embraced everybody and that included people in the decision-making process. And that’s what both sides were looking for. And they came together and created a majority.”

Meek mobilized the marginalized and out-organized the “power” players. Although he had served as a state party officer, party stalwarts were horrified at Meek’s effrontery. How dare he run against the governor’s choice? Why, he was too young. He was too liberal. It would be the end the Democratic Party in North Carolina. “And you know,” one party doyen whispered to me, “he’s gay.” (Which today might make his wife and kids roll their eyes.) As candidate and as chair, the “too liberal” Meek worked the state in his pickup, delivering grassroots support and training to state counties. In 2008 with Meek at the helm, North Carolina went blue for the first time since 1976.

In 2016, as in 2008, the fate of another grassroots army hangs in the balance. Indivisible, Our Revolution, and other groups are looking beyond mere engagement. The DNC chair contest Saturday is about more than just control. It is about direction, conviction, and about courage. A skittish party establishment reflexively clutches ever harder at what control it thinks it still has rather than embrace new energy at a time when it has little left to lose. Since I’ve been involved, “savvy,” centrist Democrats have perpetually second guessed themselves, asking, “But if we fight for [fill in your progressive policy here], what will the Republicans do (to hurt us) at election time?” As if Republicans would leave them alone if they don’t stick their necks out. As if they would run out of lies to deploy and hit Democrats over the head with facts instead.

No guts is not a good look for a party asking to lead the last superpower. People aren’t going to vote for the abused spouse party. Democrats need to be showing voters, including millions taking to the streets, that they have the courage of their convictions and will fight for them. Let Republicans worry about themselves.

I used to love when the small liberal arts school I attended played football against bigger teams like Clemson. They had nothing to prove. They were expected to lose. Yet they would play their hearts out, use their heads, rise to the challenge, and play above their usual level. Sometimes against opponents a full head taller. It was as glorious as cheering for Rocky that very first time. That’s what American voters want to see. That’s who they want to vote for. Recklessness is a fault, but always playing it safe is not what leadership and heart looks like. And it is not what the times call for now. Legacy Democrats who call themselves “yellow dogs” risk being seen as just yellow. The question tomorrow and going forward is whether they capitalize on and not squander the opportunity before them. Can their party still learn new tricks?