Month: March 2017

Saturday Night at the Movies

Beauty as the beast: The Lure **½

By Dennis Hartley

Parents teaching kids to be economically anxious

by digby

This story makes your heart hurt — in both a bad and a good way:

The day should have been one of glory and celebration for five fourth-graders.

The Pleasant Run Elementary students had just won a robotics challenge at Plainfield High School, and the students — new to bot competition this year — were one step closer to the Vex IQ State Championship.

The team is made up of 9- and 10-year-olds. Two are African American and three are Latino.

As the group, called the Pleasant Run PantherBots, and their parents left the challenge last month in Plainfield, Ind., competing students from other Indianapolis-area schools and their parents were waiting for them in the parking lot.

“Go back to Mexico!” two or three kids screamed at their brown-skin peers and their parents, according to some who were there.

This verbal attack had spilled over from the gymnasium. While the children were competing, one or two parents disparaged the Pleasant Run kids with racist comments — and loud enough for the Pleasant Run families to hear.

“They were pointing at us and saying that ‘Oh my God, they are champions of the city all because they are Mexican. They are Mexican, and they are ruining our country,’ ” said Diocelina Herrera, the mother of PantherBot Angel Herrera-Sanchez.

These are minority students from the east side of the city, poor kids from a Title I school.

“For the most part, the robotics world is kind of a white world,” said Lisa Hopper, the team’s coach and a Pleasant Run second-grade teacher. “They’re just not used to seeing a team like our kids.

“And they see us and they think we’re not going to be competition. Then we’re in first place the whole day, and they can’t take it,” she said.

Nearly 35 schools competed in the Feb. 2 robotics challenge. Plainfield High School was the host, but the participating elementary school teams came from more than 20 communities in and around Indianapolis.

Hopper said her team and their parents were unable to identify the competing students and the parent who made the comments.

Plainfield officials condemned the hurtful comments. A district spokeswoman did not know about the incident until she was contacted but said a letter would be sent to every participating school to reiterate district policies.

“We don’t condone that behavior; we don’t tolerate it in our schools,” said Sabrina Kapp, director of communications for Plainfield Community School Corp. “We talk a lot about community values here. That is simply not something that anybody associated with Plainfield schools would put up with.”

On Wednesday, Superintendent Scott Olinger of Plainfield Community Schools, released a statement:

The Plainfield Community School Corp. does not condone or tolerate language or behaviors that degrade others. Had our organizing team been made aware of the alleged behaviors by unknown adults on Feb. 2, we would have taken immediate action. 

We were pleased to host such an impressive array of young students, and we were equally proud of the teamwork, camaraderie, knowledge and fun that these children displayed. To learn now that adults may have acted in a way that distracted from the success of the day is disheartening. In the Plainfield schools, such behavior is unacceptable, regardless of whether it comes from adults or students.

Three weeks after the incident, the PantherBots won the Create Award — for best robot design and engineering — at the state championships, which qualified them for the Vex IQ World Championship next month in Louisville. They will compete there with students from all over the world.

And they say they’ll walk in with confidence.

“They yelled out rude comments, and I think that they can talk all they want because at the end we’re still going to Worlds,” said team leader Elijah Goodwin, 10. “It’s not going to affect us at all. I’m not surprised because I’m used to this kind of behavior.

“When you have a really good team, people will treat you this way,” he said. “And we do have a pretty good team.”

Hopper said she and her co-coach, after learning of the incident in Plainfield, gathered the team to see how they were handling it.

“I was afraid they would let it get in their heads and wig them out,” Hopper said. “We sat down and talked to our kids, and obviously we let them share their feelings.

“They were on top of it already,” she said. “They said: ‘We know they are mean. We know they were jealous. We’re not going to let it bother us.’ One of our guys said ‘to take stuff like that and let it make you stronger.’ ”

Just a few months ago, the PantherBots knew nothing about robotics.

The low-income school was given a grant to develop a robotics program. Fourth-grade teachers were asked to identify 10 students who had potential and exhibited leadership qualities.

As a tryout, the students were asked to build something with Legos.

Elijah Goodwin, 10; Angel Herrera-Sanchez, 9; Jose Verastegui, 10; Manuel Mendez, 9; and Devilyn Bolyard, 9, were selected.

“I’m just so proud of them,” Hopper said. “The great thing about these five kids is they all ended up having strengths that elevated the team. They are dynamic individuals.”

Now they’ll be traveling 125 miles south to a world championship April 23 to 25 that is aimed at middle school students. Their GoFundMe page already has raised $4,000 more than their $8,000 goal to get there and has stopped accepting donations.

“We are truly overwhelmed with all of the support we have received,” Hopper wrote on the page. “Any additional funds will be used to help with our robotics program next year.”

Here’s a little reminder that even back in the bad old days there were plenty of people who weren’t racist and said so. Even in popular musicals.

That was a long time ago. “South Pacific” was made in 1958. Trump was still a kid. But this racist crapola is still with us. And just like back then everyone’s got a reason why it isn’t really racist.

It is. It happened when I was a kid. And there were plenty of us kids who challenged it then too. I remember having to face down a group of horrible little girls in the second grade because my best friend was Mexican. It’s profoundly depressing to think that this is still going on. But it is. Let’s not lie to ourselves about it.

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Trump day parades

by digby

If you’re wondering why Trump is so adamant about spending massive sums to build up the military for no reason, you’ll recall that he has some big ideas about showing off American Greatness:

Donald Trump plans on displaying the United States military’s strength when he becomes president by having troops march in parades.

“Being a great president has to do with a lot of things, but one of them is being a great cheerleader for the country,” Trump told the Washington Post in an interview published Wednesday morning. “And we’re going to show the people as we build up our military, we’re going to display our military.”

“That military may come marching down Pennsylvania Avenue. That military may be flying over New York City and Washington, D.C., for parades. I mean, we’re going to be showing our military,” he continued.

Trump made the comments while talking about his campaign and its slogan, “Make America Great Again.” He revealed an option for a slogan for his 2020 re-election campaign to the Washington Post.

“Are you ready?” he told the Post. “‘Keep America Great,’ exclamation point.”

That’s what he wants.

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Ask not what Trump can do for you but what you can do for Trump

by digby

I know this is a day late but I wanted to share it in case you missed it:

Irish PM @EndaKennyTD tells @realDonaldTrump that for over 200 years, millions of Irish immigrants have called America home #StPatricksDay pic.twitter.com/Fx6vQp8yv1

— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) March 17, 2017

It’s fitting that we get together here each year to celebrate St. Patrick and his legacy. He too, of course, was an immigrant.

And though he is, of course, the patron saint of Ireland, for many people around the globe he’s aloud the symbol of, indeed the patron of immigrants.

Here in America, in your great country, 35 million people claim Irish heritage, and the Irish have contributed to the economic, social and political of cultural life of this great country for the last 200 years.

Ireland came to America, because of deprived liberty, deprived of opportunity, of safety — of even food itself the Irish believed and four decades before Lady Liberty lifted her lamp, we were the wretched refuse on the teeming shore.

We believed in the shelter of America, in the compassion of America, in the opportunity of America, we came and we became Americans.

We lived the words of John F. Kennedy, long before he uttered him. We asked not what America could do for us, but what we could do for America — and we still do.

Check out the look on Trump’s face.

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In case you forgot about Trump’s belief in eugenics

by digby

Just a friendly reminder. This is who he is:

Trump’s father instilled in him the idea that their family’s success was genetic, according to Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio.

“The family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development,” D’Antonio says in the documentary. “They believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.”

This is from the pre-election documentary “The Choice”.

Headlines

by digby

Last week I posted a bunch of headlines from Real America about Trumpcare. Here’s an example from Augusta Georgia:

The budget evoked headlines like this, from Charleston West Virginia:

Maybe it doesn’t matter an his followers love him so much  that they either think the news is all fake or that he’s somehow exempting them from all these horrible changes. (If they’re rich, he is.)  But if any of them thought he was a real populist, a man who cares about the average Joe, he’s showing very clearly now that that was a mistake. Of course, the gold-plated airplane should have the tip-off but …

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Learning to play offense
by Tom Sullivan

A column in Jacobin takes Democratic “elites” to task for being an opposition without a proposition. Politicking without politics, as it were. Paul Heideman argues that Obama’s “eight years of managerial centrism left the party hollowed out both institutionally and ideologically.” The hollowing out goes back before that, but whatever.

In response to a student’s question about whether Democrats might follow younger voters in moving left on economics, Rep. Nancy Pelosi quipped, “We’re capitalists. That’s just the way it is.” Heideman’s jeremiad against Democrats’ “non-ideological and pragmatic” opposition to Trumpism keys off Pelosi’s comments. He writes:

It is this continued fidelity to American capitalism, this unwavering commitment to keeping things more or less as they are, that stands behind the Democrats’ apparent fear of ideas. Any actual attempt to advance the principles that loom large in the American liberal imagination would entail some sort of confrontation with capital, and the Democratic Party, bought and paid for by capital, is unwilling to contemplate such a step.

Pelosi is, in a sense, right: while the Republicans have a clear ideology, a clear vision for society (gruesome as it may be), the Democrats can offer little more than meritocratic nostrums and technocratic tweaks. The social order should basically remain the same, their position seems to be, with an improvement here or there from smart, competent people.

Or as Howard Dean said after Democrats’ 2014 losses:

The Republican message was ‘We’re not Obama,’ no substance whatsoever. What was the Democrats’ message? ‘Oh, we’re not either.’ You cannot win if you are afraid! Where was the Democratic party? You gotta stand for something if you’re gonna win!

“We’re not Trump” is no more effective. The job of an opposition is not just to RESIST, not just to oppose, but to propose. That seems to have been lost on the party on much beyond social justice matters. Democratic elites, Heideman asserts, believe “they can subdue the reactionary right without articulating any alternative political vision beyond prudent governance.”

On the other hand, actually presenting alternatives won Bernie Sanders a small army of dedicated supporters in 2016. Many are still engaged today. Here in the mountains of western North Carolina, Sanders found support not just among the young, but among conservative-leaning Democrats and independents and, astonishingly, among older, mainstream Democrats who grew up on the New Deal. He represented a Democratic Party they hadn’t heard from in years.

A priest friend once quipped that faith is a concept many staunch believers simply misunderstand. For them, having faith means believing “really hard” in something; and an act of faith is “like straining on the toilet.” Democrats have the same problem conceptualizing offense. Their idea of playing offense is playing defense harder. But successful goal line stands by themselves don’t win football games. Especially given their current fortunes, Democrats should play their hearts out.

While canvassing the neighborhood last week, I saw my first in-person version of the sign at the top of this page. I had only heard reports online about the yard-sign effort to welcome immigrants. Heideman notes that on matters such as this, the liberal grassroots are once again out ahead of the Democratic leadership:

When thousands of people gathered at JFK Airport to protest the Muslim ban, they didn’t make an hour-long subway trip to stand in the cold because they thought Trump was being hypocritical or unpresidential. They gathered because they felt Trump had infringed on core values of egalitarianism and fairness. They were moved by a basic sense of injustice. They were moved, in other words, by politics.

While the liberal evasion of politics gives the impression that the Democrats have no ideas they are confident enough to defend, mobilizations like the refugee solidarity protests do the exact opposite. When thousands of people assemble with signs declaring “Refugees are Welcome Here,” they stake out a political ground that directly confronts Trump. They provide a political pole capable of further mobilization.

Even though the refugee support efforts stake out a moral position that needs staking out, it is another social justice position. Even the liberal grassroots Heideman praises is more comfortable promoting social justice than confronting economic injustice. But the hollowing out of America cannot be repaired without a groundswell of public support. For now, few Democrats in leadership are leading on building that. Economic injustice will be addressed with torches and pitchforks if all Democrats are prepared to confront it with is technocratic competence.

Friday Night Soother: I don’t know about you, but I need some kittens

by digby

That’s how I feel this week. It’s been brutal. So, here is a lynx taking a walk in the snow:

Jasper, the lynx kitten

Here are some 5 week old Caracel kittens at the Oregon zoo:

Look at them!!! Their ears are bigger than they are.

Ah. A couple of stiff drinkie winkies and some beautiful wild cats and I’m feeling much better. I hope you are too. 🙂

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It’s never just the economic populism is it?

by digby

Adele Stan has a great piece over at The American Prospect about Trump’s new hero, Andrew Jackson. Here’s an excerpt:

Historians often give Jackson something of a pass for being a slaveholder; he was a man of his times, they say, simply following in the footsteps of most of the presidents who came before him. But unlike his predecessors, Jackson never deigned to express guilt about it, according to Jackson biographer H.W. Brands. The seventh president, Brands writes in The Tennessean, “never admitted feeling guilty about anything.” Sound familiar?

Speaking to Ari Rabin-Havt in 2014, historian Harry Watson, professor of Southern culture at the University of North Carolina and author of Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America, said that Jackson always insisted that he didn’t hate the Indians; “he just felt the presence of Indians on land that ought to be white people’s was a barrier to the development of the white country.”

“By securing all this extra land from the Indians,” Watson told Rabin-Havt, Jackson “could make it available to white yeoman farmers and that was a way to protect their interests.”

Jackson is regarded as the first populist president; his purported connection to the ordinary people from which he sprang is the stuff of legend. Hailed as an economic populist for having opposed the creation of a centralized bank, it wasn’t quite that simple, according to New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, who notes that Jackson’s “opposition to a National Bank served the interests of the local banks that competed against it”—local banks that backed Jackson and his friends, who also reaped rewards from the Indian removal policy. Relating a point from Steve Inskeep’s book, Jacksonland, Chait wrote in 2016 that “Jackson and his cronies personally grew rich from the policy of land expropriation that formed the core of his agenda.”

Trump’s affection for Jackson, of whom he keeps a portrait in the Oval Office, apparently did not spring from his own appreciation of history but rather that of his strategist and consigliere, Stephen K. Bannon, the former chief executive of Breitbart News and a guy whose view of history seems to be telling him that it’s time for a violent, cataclysmic shift in American politics and policy—and one likely to serve the interests of Trump and his billionaire cronies.

Read the whole thing. This is right wing populism. And it’s very potent because it pits middle and lower class whites against people they already look down upon. Left wing populism is a heavier lift because white people in America see themselves as members of the same tribe as rich white people. Their resentment and fear of the wealthy doesn’t run nearly as deep. They want to identify with them  — foreigners and people of color not so much. The class identification gets subsumed by the nationalist/racial identification.

More on Trump’s newfound Jackson worship in this piece at the Daily Beast.

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He refused to shake her hand

by digby

He did. Look at it.  And he managed to hear all the other questions …

Photographers: Can we get a handshake?
Merkel (to Trump): Do you want to have a handshake?
Trump: *no response*
Merkel: *makes awkward face* pic.twitter.com/ehgpCnWPg7

— David Mack (@davidmackau) March 17, 2017

He is a cretin.

Also a weaselly, immature child:

Wow. Trump to Merkel about alleged wiretapping by Obama: “At least we have something in common, perhaps.” She appears to be very confused. pic.twitter.com/la4p9ZJGvo

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) March 17, 2017

President Donald Trump says his White House shouldn’t be blamed for quoting a Fox News analyst who accused British intelligence of helping former President Barack Obama spy on him.

There is no evidence such spying took place and GCHQ, the British electronic intelligence agency, has called the allegation “utterly ridiculous.”

Trump says during a joint press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel that “we said nothing. All we did was quote a certain very talented legal mind who was the one responsible for saying that on television.” 

He says, “you shouldn’t be talking to me, you should be talking to Fox.” 

He’s also doubling down on his unproven wiretapping allegation with a reference to 2013 reports that the U.S. listened in on Merkel’s phone calls.

He says that when it comes to wiretapping, “At least we have something in common, perhaps.

Some years ago I made a pledge to stop swearing so much on the blog. I try to keep it to a bare minimum and only let out the curse words on rare occasions. (I confess that I am not so good about that when I’m yelling at the TV. I’m afraid I have political Tourette’s Syndrome triggered by cable news.)

It’s getting very, very hard to keep that promise as I watch our president cluelessly degrade and destroy the world order we’ve has since 1948 with absolutely no idea that he’s doing that or what’s going to replace it.

I get more worried every day that he can’t be stopped. And my clean vocabulary is failing me. So I apologize in advance for my increasing use of bad words. I simply can’t help it.

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