Month: April 2018

Cruel forced pregnancy for rape victims

by digby

Here’s the story of the lovely Trump appointee who is stopping desperate young rape victims from getting abortions:

Scott Lloyd’s unadorned job title betrays little hint of the power he has over the pregnant teenagers in his custody.

As director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, he oversees the assistance program for the tens of thousands of refugees who still seek shelter in the United States, even with the Trump administration’s crackdown. But as the government official who is also responsible for the care of young, undocumented immigrants who enter the United States without their parents, he spends much of his time trying to stop those who want an abortion.

He has instructed his staff to give him a spreadsheet each week that tells him about any unaccompanied minors who have asked for one and how far along they are in their pregnancy. In at least one case he directed staff to read to one girl a description of what happens during an abortion. And when there’s a need for counseling, Mr. Lloyd’s office calls on someone from its list of preferred “life affirming” pregnancy resource centers.

Last fall Mr. Lloyd’s refusal to let a 17-year-old in Texas leave the shelter where she was living to get an abortion drew an admonishment from a federal judge who said she was “astounded” the government had been so insistent on keeping someone from obtaining a constitutionally protected procedure. Last week another judge barred him from trying to prevent any girl in his care from getting an abortion, but government lawyers have asked for a stay and plan to appeal.

How Mr. Lloyd, an appointee of President Trump, turned a small office in the Department of Health and Human Services that provides social services to refugees into a battleground over abortion rights is part of the larger story of the Trump administration’s push to enact rules that favor socially conservative positions on issues like abortion, contraception and gay, lesbian and transgender rights.

Unlike some traditional Republicans, many religious conservatives eagerly sought jobs in the administration and the chance to shape policy after eight years of a Democratic president. This was especially true at H.H.S., where the senior ranks are staffed with former activists who have built careers advancing socially conservative causes.

Some of those hires at H.H.S. include a deputy general counsel who was a lawyerwith the Alliance Defending Freedom, a well-funded conservative legal group that opposes gay rights and abortion and fought the Obama administration’s contraception coverage requirements; the chief of staff to the assistant secretary for health, who used to lead an abstinence advocacy group; and the head of the department’s Office for Civil Rights, whose work at the Heritage Foundation involved promoting religious freedom initiatives.

After a relatively slow start as key personnel were put in place, the department has been responsible for a flurry of new policies. It has told states that they no longer have to follow Obama-era rules that made it difficult to withhold Medicaid funding from Planned Parenthood. It has announced the creation of an entity inside its Office for Civil Rights called the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division, which will respond to alleged violations of conscience and religious protections. And its new strategic plan commits the department to “protecting Americans at every stage of life, from conception.”

The result, activists on both sides of the fight say, is that no White House has been as aggressive in shaping policy in a way that hews so closely to the priorities of the religious right.

“Times are changing,” said Roger Severino, the head of the Office for Civil Rights, as he announced the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division this year. “And we are institutionalizing a change in the culture of government, beginning with H.H.S.”

Unlike previous Republican administrations, when it was Congress or the Supreme Court that initiated the biggest changes to abortion law, many of the most significant developments today are occurring at the agency level, largely out of public view. And that troubles liberal advocates like the American Civil Liberties Union, which has sued Mr. Lloyd and won several times.

“There’s much more action at the federal level under Trump than there has been with other administrations,” said Jennifer Dalven, the director of the A.C.L.U.’s Reproductive Freedom Project.
[…]
The Administration for Children and Families at H.H.S., which oversees the Office of Refugee Resettlement, said in a statement that as the legal guardian for the minors, Mr. Lloyd’s office is required by law to act with the girls’ interests in mind. And the Trump administration has determined, the statement added, that “the best interests of illegal immigrant children in our care include the protection of mothers and their babies in our facilities, and we will defend human dignity for all in our care.”

Mr. Lloyd has taken the position that as unauthorized immigrants, the girls are not entitled to the same constitutional protections as citizens. Under questioning from an A.C.L.U. lawyer during a deposition, he said he did not know of any set of circumstances that would cause him to grant an abortion request, though he said that if a girl’s life were in danger that could “potentially” sway him. He has denied at least one request for an abortion from a girl who said she had been raped.

Anti-abortion groups have welcomed his defiance as a hopeful sign. And they echo what H.H.S. officials have said themselves: A new culture is taking hold inside the Trump administration.

The good news is that he’s a populist who cares about the average person so that’s good. No need to worry that his government might actually be the most authoritarian in American history.

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“Just blowing off steam”

by digby

GOP Senator Ben Sasse has always tut-tutted Trump’s demeanor. Now he doesn’t like his policies either. Huh. I wonder what he could have done about it …

Some Trump followers needs to wake up and realize that Trump doesn’t see them as Real Americans either. He cares about steel workers, manufacturing workers and miners. He has as much interest in a bunch of farmers as he does in people who work as Starbucks barristas or hotel maids, which is to say none. If you don’t wear a hard hat, he doesn’t see you as his base even though you are.

I don’t know if his followers will actually care if he destroys their own economic well-being. They love him that much. But it’s got to put a strain on the relationship.

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Just don’t use the “t” word

by digby

Because if you don’t say the word nobody will know what you’re doing:

President Donald Trump has spoken: He wants U.S. troops and civilians out of Syria by the fall. But don’t call it a “timeline.”

Wary of charges of hypocrisy for publicly telegraphing military strategy after criticizing former President Barack Obama for the same thing, the White House has ordered Trump’s national security team not to speak of a “timeline” for withdrawal. That’s even after Trump made it clear to his top aides this week that he wants the pullout completed within five or six months.

It wasn’t the result top national security aides wanted. Trump’s desire for a rapid withdrawal faced unanimous opposition from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon, the State Department and the intelligence community, all of which argued that keeping the 2,000 U.S. soldiers currently in Syria is key to ensuring the Islamic State does not reconstitute itself.

But as they huddled in the Situation Room, the president was vocal and vehement in insisting that the withdrawal be completed quickly if not immediately, according to five administration officials briefed on Tuesday’s White House meeting of Trump and his top aides. The officials weren’t authorized to discuss internal deliberations and requested anonymity.

If those aides failed in obtaining their desired outcome, it may have been because a strategy that’s worked in the past — giving Trump an offer he can’t refuse — appears to have backfired.

Rather than offer Trump a menu of pullout plans, with varying timelines and options for withdrawing step-by-step, the team sought to frame it as a binary choice: Stay in Syria to ensure the Islamic State can’t regroup, or pull out completely. Documents presented to the president included several pages of possibilities for staying in, but only a brief description of an option for full withdrawal that emphasized significant risks and downsides, including the likelihood that Iran and Russia would take advantage of a U.S. vacuum.

Ultimately, Trump chose that option anyway.

I guess he showed them who’s boss. You just don’t tell Trumpie that he can’t have what he wants when he wants it:

I don’t know about the abrupt pull-out but maybe it’s as good an option as anything else at this point. I do know that Vlad had to feel good about it. He’s demonstrating to all the world that his faith in the Donald is well placed. Russia is now the pre-eminent outside player. Let’s hope they don’t push the envelope or things could get very much out of hand because Trump is clueless and anything that requires finesse, building alliances or negotiation on the part of the US will not go well. Keep your fingers crossed that we get a miracle here.

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He wants a “real war” and big parade


by digby

The Washington Post reports on the kind of wars Trump wants to fight.

He’s not saying we won’t get our hair mussed …

President Trump’s pronouncement that he would be pulling troops out of Syria “very soon” has laid bare a major source of tension between the president and his generals.

Trump has made winning on the battlefields of Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan a central tenet of his foreign policy and tough-guy identity. But Trump and the military hold frequently opposing ideas about exactly what winning means.

Those differences have played out in heated Situation Room ­debates over virtually every spot on the globe where U.S. troops are engaged in combat, said senior administration officials. And they contributed to the dismissal last month of Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster who as national security adviser had pressed the president against his instincts to support an ­open-ended commitment of U.S. forces to Afghanistan.

Trump’s words, both in public and private, describe a view that wars should be brutal and swift, waged with overwhelming firepower and, in some cases, with little regard for civilian casualties. Victory over America’s enemies for the president is often a matter of bombing “the s— out of them,” as he said on the campaign trail.

He returned to the theme this week. “We’re knocking the hell” out of the Islamic State, Trump said at a rally in Ohio last month. The boast was a predicate to the president insisting that U.S. troops would be “coming out of Syria real soon.”

For America’s generals, more than 17 years of combat have served as a lesson in the limits of overwhelming force to end wars fueled by sectarian feuds, unreliable allies and persistent government corruption. “Victory is sort [of] an elusive concept in that part of the world,” said Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, who led troops over five tours of Iraq and Afghanistan. “Anyone who goes in and tries to achieve a decisive victory is going to come away disappointed.”

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis echoed that point in late November when he outlined an expanded role for U.S. forces in preventing the return of the Islamic State or a group like it in Syria. “You need to do something about this mess now,” he told reporters. “Not just, you know, fight the military part of it and then say, ‘Good luck on the rest of it.’ ”

His remarks reflected a broader Pentagon consensus: In the absence of a clear outcome, winning for much of the U.S. military’s top brass has come to be synonymous with staying put. These days, senior officers talk about “infinite war.”

“It’s not losing,” explained Air Force Gen. Mike Holmes in a speech earlier this year. “It’s staying in the game and . . . pursuing your objectives.”

The Army recently rewrote its primary warfighting doctrine to account for the long stretch of fighting without victory since 9/11. “The win was too absolute,” said Lt. Gen. Michael Lundy of the old document. “We concluded winning is more of a continuum.”

The tension between the White House and the military over how and when to end America’s wars is not entirely new. To the frustration of his generals, President ­Barack Obama announced plans in 2014 to pull all U.S. combat forces out of Afghanistan by the end of his presidency. “Americans have learned that it’s harder to end wars than it is to begin them,” he said. “Yet this is how wars end in the 21st century.”

The decision drew heavy criticism from Republican lawmakers, and in 2016, with the Taliban expanding across Afghanistan, Obama decided to leave about 8,000 American troops in place.

Trump came to office promising to give the Pentagon a free hand to unleash the full force of U.S. firepower. His impatience was evident on his first full day in office when he visited the CIA and was ushered up to the agency’s drone operations floor.

There agency officials showed him a feed from Syria, where Obama-era rules limited the agency to surveillance flights — part of a broader push by the previous administration to return the CIA to its core espionage mission and shift the job of killing terrorists to the military.

Trump urged the CIA to start arming its drones in Syria. “If you can do it in 10 days, get it done,” he said, according to two former officials familiar with the meeting.

Later, when the agency’s head of drone operations explained that the CIA had developed special munitions to limit civilian casualties, the president seemed unimpressed. Watching a previously recorded strike in which the agency held off on firing until the target had wandered away from a house with his family inside, Trump asked, “Why did you wait?” one participant in the meeting recalled.

He’s a sadistic psychopath. But you knew that:

“The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families,” Trump said during an appearance on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” in December 2015. “They care about their lives, don’t kid yourself. When they say they don’t care about their lives, you have to take out their families.”

I will have to give more thought to this idea of infinite war. That’s a pretty terrifying prospect. I do know that if the idea is to keep low level conflicts low level in order to prevent global conflagration Trump will never understand such a thing.

He is desperate for his victory parade and the ability to brag to his cult that he “won.” And they will probably believe him because they are war-lovers at heart but in a purely Hollywood sort of way, just like him. If it all blows up in his face in some horrific way he doesn’t care. He will just blame others and deploy more brutal force to put it down.

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Trump’s lurid anti-immigrant rant

by digby

I wrote about the demagogue-in-chief’s latest xenophobic rant for Salon this morning:

Everyone has notice by now that Trump is no longer even attempting to stick with script, evidently feeling that he’s been ill-served by people who observe political norms and common definitions of what it is to be a president of the United States. He’s starting trade wars, declaring an abrupt withdrawal from Syria and attacking businessmen who also own newspapers he wants to quash. He’s been animated and energized by this new found freedom to “tell it like it is” as he did yesterday at a tax forum in West Virginia, where he claimed he is the first president in 40 years to deliver on taxes because only he had the guts to call them tax cuts instead of tax reform.

As is now the required ritual at any meeting where Donald Trump appears, other speakers at the forum dutifully flattered and praised him, one attendee nearly crying as she thanked him for the tax cuts, saying,  “thank you for listening to us. Thank you for fighting for us.”

But despite this demonstration of loyalty and commitment, Trump is showing all the signs of a man who senses that his lover is unhappy with him so he’s bringing home gifts and flowers to show how much he cares. He’s hearing from friends that he’s been a disappointment because he hasn’t fulfilled that yuuuge promise he made when they were courting, the one that sealed the deal. He hasn’t built that big beautiful wall.

Ann Coulter is one of the only 45 people Trump follows on twitter and she retweeted this so he would see it:

https://t.co/SRkswLF3zd

— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) April 3, 2018

Radio host Mark Levin went ballistic:

Build the damn wall! You got the House. You got the Senate. You got the presidency. You got the bureaucracy. The art of the deal, screw the art of the deal. It should be the art of the victory. The art of victory. It’s time to roll Schumer. It’s time to roll the Democrats.

There is ample reporting that Trump is now having frequent dinner parties with his Fox News kitchen cabinet down in Mar-a-lago and at the White House and is hearing personally from the likes of Judge Jeanine Pirro and Sean Hannity that the base is restless.

Trump’s problem is that the congress didn’t fund his wall beyond a “mere” $1.6 billion which he considers an insult and which his followers have been convinced is a capitulation on his part. They are right about that. The White House was heavily involved in all the negotiations and agreed to the numbers.  Evidently the master negotiator was busy tweeting and didn’t have time to do the kind of magical arm-twisting that he promised makes such deals “easy.”

He seemed to be taken by surprise when he tuned in his top political advisory panel on Fox and Friends the morning of the signing ceremony and learned that they were not happy.  He’s been on a tear ever since trying to appease them with some of that old time demagoguery and the promise of bringing down the hammer on immigrants in some other satisfying way.

At first he indicated that he’d just have the military build the wall. He seems to think the federal budget is like the books at his Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City where when he came up short to pay the bills he could just shift some cash around to keep up appearances. And evidently he figures the military budget is now so bloated that it’s got billions just sitting around gathering dust, which may be true. Unfortunately, he doesn’t control the books or sign the checks in the federal budget so he’d have to get congressional approval and that doesn’t look likely.

He fulminated about it over the week-end and really got going when the Sunday Fox and Friends crew discussed an annual “caravan” of migrants from Central America, many of whom are seeking political asylum, who make the trek to the border through Mexico to draw attention to their plight and travel in the safety of the spotlight. They interviewed Brandon Judd the president of the Border Patrol Council, who claimed they were all going to be released into the country endangering decent people everywhere:

They’re going to wait for a immigration reform, and they’re going to create havoc and chaos. I mean, how many times do we have to hear stories of United States citizens being killed by people that are here illegally before we actually do something?”

Trump’s flurry of angry tweets about immigrants flowing over the border to “take advantage of DACA” (which makes no sense since you had to be in the country before 2011 to qualify) was obviously inspired by his commentary, including the idea that the Senate should end the filibuster to fix the problem. (He apparently forgot that he couldn’t even get a bare majority of Republicans in the senate to sign on to his immigration plan.)

None of this appeased his right wing critics. But when he said he would send troops to the border, they got excited:

Are they going to shoot the illegals? Just standing there doesn’t do a thing. We need to do what Israel does: immediate detention and removal. https://t.co/byXxDbG2po

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) April 4, 2018

Trump has been going on about changing the laws to make it easier to deport people so it’s fair to assume he and Coulter are on the same wavelength there.

At the tax event in West Virginia on Thursday, the president threw away his script about the tax cuts and went on a long xenophobic rant, once again evoking his notorious announcement speech in which he claimed that Mexican immigrants were rapists and criminals. He once again made lurid remarks about girls being “cut up” by MS-13 gang members. It’s an image he has disturbingly evoked in other contexts, including a creepy impression of the thug in the 1970s movie “Death Wish” saying. “I’m gonna cut you up.” He once again claimed that in California undocumented immigrants vote by the millions and the state is “guarding their records,” another pathetic attempt to imply that he actually won the popular vote.

Referencing that awful announcement speech, Trump claimed he’d just learned that the caravan in Mexico was full of rapists, saying, “Women are raped at levels never seen before.” Nobody knows where he got that from: He just blurted it out. It may have been the ugliest and most xenophobic speech he’s given since the beginning of his 2016 campaign, a rambling assault on foreigners, immigrants and the states where many of them live. It was nauseating.

It’s obvious Trump is worried about this mini-rebellion on the right. It remains to be seen whether sending some National Guard troops to the border (a largely symbolic move) and this kind of crude demagoguery will quell it. If not, we could be in for a messy fight between Trump and his followers. The losers, as always, will be immigrants and refugees.
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Trump Just About to a T

by tristero

Madeline Albright:

At one time or another, Trump has attacked the judiciary, ridiculed the media, defended torture, condoned police brutality, urged supporters to rough up hecklers and — jokingly or not — equated mere policy disagreements with treason. He tried to undermine faith in America’s electoral process through a bogus advisory commission on voter integrity. He routinely vilifies federal law enforcement institutions. He libels immigrants and the countries from which they come. His words are so often at odds with the truth that they can appear ignorant, yet are in fact calculated to exacerbate religious, social and racial divisions. 

That is almost exactly right. Trump is no doubt ignorant, but as Albright points out, he wasn’t born yesterday.

He knows exactly what he’s doing when he cuddles up to neo-Nazis or insults women, Hispanics, blacks and the disabled. If Trump was simply ignorant, there wouldn’t be such a hideous consistency to his actions and behavior. And there’s a reason for its expression.

Both Trump and Republicans know that a enormous number of Americans have few problems with a racist, sexist, and authoritarian leader. In fact, a distressingly large number of Americans actually want such a leader and crave the opportunity to revel vicariously in such a leader’s downright maliciousness.

So yes, Trump’s ignorant and impulsive, but the important point is that the expression of his ignorance and impulsiveness is calculated to appeal directly to these people.

And it works. Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is 86%.  Numbers that high rhat takes calculation. Not your kind of calculation, perhaps, but calculation nevertheless. That number is absolutely no accident and his rabid support among Republicans has been steady during this entire godawful presidency.

The kiss of death
by Tom Sullivan

They have no bottom to hit.

“One more episode of the telenovela,” Republican pundit Anna Navarro told CNN, describing EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s apartment rental controversy. Instead of “draining the swamp” in Washington, D.C., Donald Trump has brought “an entirely new species of swamp things” to his administration.

People thought his cabinet members are so rich they would not have to be corrupt. It turns out that assumption was faulty and Trump’s base doesn’t care, Navarro said. She criticized Republicans for standing by an administrion they would be investigating if led by a Democrat.

Not only was Pruitt getting a $50 per night — only when he sleeps there — sweetheart deal on a Capitol Hill condo from the wife of a lobbyist, his landlord was pestering him because Pruitt fell behind on payments:

Pruitt’s living arrangement is the latest ethical issue to come under scrutiny by the EPA’s inspector general’s office, which said Thursday it’s considering opening an investigation into Pruitt’s lease arrangement — a move that would add to reviews of Pruitt’s taxpayer-funded first-class travel, his use of special hiring authority to grant raises to aides and his spending on a soundproof phone booth for his office.

The EPA head was renting the condo from health care lobbyist Vicki Hart, whose husband, J. Steven Hart, is an energy lobbyist.

Pruitt’s interview with Fox News and questions about raises given to staff was a disaster. Not to mention the optics of an abandoned proposal for a $100,000-a-month charter aircraft and gems like this:

Shortly after taking his job, Pruitt was stuck in traffic and asked the head of his security detail, Special Agent Eric Weese, to turn on his sirens to clear cars off the road. Weese, a 16-year veteran of the agency, told Pruitt that sirens were only used for emergencies. Pruitt fired him.

The Hill reported yesterday a longtime colleague and top Pruitt aide has resigned:

Samantha Dravis, the senior counsel and associate administrator in EPA’s Office of Policy, tendered her resignation last week, the agency confirmed to The Hill on Thursday.

A friend close to Dravis described the agency as “a shit show.”

Asked Thursday whether he still had confidence in his EPA chief, the president said, “I do, I do,” adding, “I think he’s a fantastic person.”

Trump might as well have kissed him on the lips. We’ll see if Pruitt survives the Friday news dump.

Navarro said of Pruitt’s Fox interview, “he made Betsy DeVos look like Albert Einstein.”

It’s been said that Trump likes to create chaos among his staff. But because he has to be the undisputed alpha male, perhaps he also prefers hiring people he believes are not as smart as he is. That would explain a lot.

* * * * * * * *

For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail. (If you are already on my email list, check your in-box.)

It’s the Character That Matters, Jeffrey, Not the Writing Ability

by tristero

Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, hired a writer who actually believes that women who’ve had abortions should be hanged. And that begs the question: Why?

“I recognized the power, contrariness, wit, and smart construction of many of his pieces.”

The mind boggles. Goldberg’s saying he could overlook murderous misogyny in a guy if he can write good. (And I won’t repeat what the same writer wrote about 9-year-old child who doesn’t share his skin color.)

Well, there was a lot of pressure on Goldberg and he fired the writer. In the letter announcing the firing, Goldberg wrote:

[The misogynist] is a gifted writer, and he has been nothing but professional in all of our interactions. 

Huh? That’s like saying that while it’s sadly true that in his spare time he tortured and murdered young women, Ted Bundy was gifted and professional when he worked on various Republican political campaigns.

Dark money, dark message

by digby

It wasn’t just Russian government agents doing this stuff:

As the final weeks of the 2016 elections ticked down, voters in swing states like Nevada and North Carolina began seeing eerie promotional travel ads as they scrolled through their Facebook feeds or clicked through Google sites.

In one, a woman with a French accent cheerfully welcomes visitors to the “Islamic State of France,” where “under Sharia law, you can enjoy everything the Islamic State of France has to offer, as long as you follow the rules.”

The video has a Man in the High Tower feel. Iconic French tourist sites are both familiar and transformed — the Eiffel Tower is capped with a star and crescent and the spires of the Notre Dame are replaced with the domed qubba of a mosque.

The Mona Lisa is shown looking, the ad says, “as a woman should,” covered in a burka.

If it wasn’t already clear that the ad was meant to stoke viewers’ fears of imminent Muslim conquest, the video is interspersed with violent imagery. Three missiles are seen flying through the sky as the video opens. Blindfolded men are shown kneeling with guns pointed at their heads, and children are shown training with weapons “to defend the caliphate.”

Here it is:

Most Americans have never heard of the far-right neoconservative nonprofit that ran the ads. It has no employees and no volunteers, and it’s run out of the offices of a Washington, D.C. law firm. More importantly, most voters never saw the ads.

And that was by design.

The group, a social welfare organization called Secure America Now, worked hand in hand with Facebook and Google to target their message at voters in swing states who were most likely to be receptive to them.

And new tax documents obtained by OpenSecrets show that the money fueling the group came mostly from just three donors, including the secretive multimillionaire donor Robert Mercer.

As a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization, Secure America Now (SAN) is not required to disclose its donors to the public, but they are required to report them to the IRS. This information is usually redacted when provided for public inspection. However, when OpenSecrets called to request a 2016 return, an unredacted return was provided by the group’s accounting firm.

Oops.

It’s high-tech demagoguery on behalf of the white nationalist moron in the White House.
There was a boatload of this stuff and there will be more going forward. What’s depressing is how many people eagerly buy into this garbage.

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White nationalism, north and south

by digby

I don’t know about you but this doesn’t seem all that surprising:

A former elected official used the n-word several times during a public meeting, offending a black member of a Georgia city’s board of commissioners.

The tense exchange between the two men happened on the same day that the Atlanta suburb of Griffin, Ga., declared April as Confederate History Month. While speaking about the declaration during the public comments portion of the meeting, Larry Johnson, a former member of the board who is white, immediately turned his attention to Rodney McCord, who appears to be one of two black officials at the table.

What began as harmless reminiscing of their differences back when they were serving as city officials together quickly escalated when Johnson reminded McCord of a conversation he said they once had about race.

“I told you at that time that there were white folks, and there were black folks when I was growing up,” Johnson said, speaking to McCord from the podium. “There was white trash — my family — and there was n—–town. I lived next to n—–town.”

The comment immediately caught McCord off guard, while the other board members sat quietly.

“You lived next to what town?” he asked Johnson.

And Johnson’s matter-of-fact reply: “N—–town, son. I’m telling you son, now that changed. I’m no longer white trash … ”

“Hold on a second,” McCord interrupted.

In the next few minutes, as shown in a public video of the meeting, an agitated McCord tried to express his frustration, while the board’s chairman, Douglas Hollberg, stopped him so Johnson can keep talking.

“Mr. McCord, please let him get to the point so we can move on,” Hollberg said.

To which McCord, with his voice raised, said:

He can get to his point, but I’m not going to sit here … Maybe y’all are comfortable with it, I don’t know. I’m not going to sit here and let this man use that type of language. And if nobody else is offended, then I am. Now if y’all want to clap and think that that’s okay for this gentleman to stand, in 2018, and get here at the board of city commission meeting — 2018 — the Civil War is over and he is using the n-word not once, not twice — three times! And he just continues to say it with not one word about who it offends.

At that point, Hollberg asked Johnson to refrain from using the racial slur. Johnson then went on to talk about the Confederacy, why he supports the Confederate flag, the Civil War and his Scottish heritage.

“My skin is white, my neck is red, and I was born in Southern bed,” he said. “Nothing wrong with that. I hope that doesn’t offend anybody.”

He also apologized to McCord, and before leaving the podium, reiterated an earlier argument that the Civil War wasn’t fought over slavery…

Those who supported the proclamation said the objections were based on misinformation and argued that the Confederacy was about heritage, not about racism, slavery or hate. But many historians reject the notion that the war had nothing to do with slavery.

Fergawdsakes.

The good news is that the President of the United States is a white supremacist but he doesn’t use the n-word so it’s all good.

If you don’t believe me, read this creepy story:

There was no mistaking Ricky Vaughn’s influence. He had tens of thousands of followers, and his talent for blending far-right propaganda with conservative messages on Twitter made him a key disseminator of extremist views to Republican voters and a central figure in the “alt-right” white supremacist movement that attached itself to Trump’s coattails. The MIT Media Lab named him to its list of top 150 influencers on the election, based on news appearances and social media impact. He finished ahead of NBC News, Drudge Report and Stephen Colbert. Mainstream conservatives didn’t know they were retweeting an avowed racist and anti-Semite, but they liked what Ricky Vaughn had to say.

“He did this thing that people connected to organized white nationalism have not been able to do ― walk both sides of the extremist line in the sand,” said Keegan Hankes, a data intelligence expert at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Ricky Vaughn also played an important role in amplifying disinformation injected into American politics by the Russian government. HuffPost and a team of data scientists known as Susan Bourbaki Anthony that tracks online propaganda analyzed who was retweeting the now infamous Kremlin-controlled Twitter account @TEN_GOP, which consistently praised Trump, attacked Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and churned out a vile medley of racism, Islamophobia and “fake news.”

In the data set of significant accounts we looked at, Ricky Vaughn retweeted @TEN_GOP the most, by far. Although Twitter shut down his @Ricky_Vaughn99 handle in October 2016, another handle he used, @RapinBill, took over and retweeted @TEN_GOP at least 162 times between early March and late August 2017. (@RapinBill also retweeted @Pamela_Moore13, another Kremlin-controlled account, at least 37 times during this period.)

Curiously, @RapinBill, which is still active and followed by Donald Trump Jr., does not appear to have received a single reciprocal retweet from @TEN_GOP in this time period, perhaps indicating an attempt to conceal the connection. @RapinBill retweeted @TEN_GOP until the end. When Twitter finally shut down @TEN_GOP last August, after having ignored numerous complaints about the Russian account, Ricky Vaughn did not take it well. He groused that @TEN_GOP had been “banned for supporting our president.” Within hours, he was steering traffic to the Kremlin’s backup account.

It turns out that Ricky Vaughn is a white supremacist from Vermont a Middlebury graduate and who now lives in Brooklyn and until recently worked in the finance industry. A nice young white Trump guy who happens to be a raging racist, misogynist and anti-semite. (I’m not kidding. Read the whole thing … oy.)

This monster is right at the surface of Americans life right now. Whether it slinks back under the rock where it normally lives depends upon whether or not Trumpism is soundly defeated and the mainstream right learns its lesson. It won’t ever go away, of course. But this grotesque explosion is one of the worst we’ve seen in over 50 years and so far, it’s not abating.

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