It’s going to be a long week full of the Trump and Rudy show and torture and lying and all the usual horror of this era. So, I thought I’d share a wonderful, good-news story to remind us that the world is not all dark and ugly:
He is faster than a speeding stroller, more adorable than a kitten, and able to get a stranger’s attention with a single courtesy. This is America’s latest superhero — and the only superhero with the power to feed the homeless.
By day, Austin Perine is a mild-mannered 4-year-old from Birmingham, Alabama. But once a week, he turns into this alter ego: a superhero set on feeding as many homeless people as possible. He likes to go by the name “President Austin.”
“That’s his idea of what the president is supposed to do,” said TJ Perine, Austin’s father. “I was like, buddy, you have no idea, but hey, I’m going along with it.”
TJ says this all began when they were watching a TV show about pandas. It showed a mama panda abandoning a baby, and TJ told his son the cub was now homeless.
“He says, ‘What’s homeless?’ I said, ‘It’s when you don’t have a home and sometimes you don’t have mom or dad around,'” said TJ.
That’s when Austin asked: are people homeless?
Watch the video. It will warm your heart and validate your belief that people are not born with hate in their hearts, they are taught to do it:
There’s a tiny superhero with a special gift for capturing the hearts of the homeless in Alabama
Gina Haspel, President Trump’s nominee to become the next CIA director, sought to withdraw her nomination Friday after some White House officials worried that her role in the interrogation of terrorist suspects could prevent her confirmation by the Senate, according to four senior U.S. officials.
Haspel told the White House she was interested in stepping aside if it avoided the spectacle of a brutal confirmation hearing on Wednesday and potential damage to the CIA’s reputation and her own, the officials said. She was summoned to the White House on Friday for a meeting on her history in the CIA’s controversial interrogation program — which employed techniques such as waterboarding that are widely seen as torture — and signaled that she was going to withdraw her nomination. She then returned to CIA headquarters, the officials said.
Taken aback at her stance, senior White House aides, including legislative affairs head Marc Short and press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, rushed to Langley, Va., to meet with Haspel at her office late Friday afternoon. Discussions stretched several hours, officials said, and the White House was not entirely sure she would stick with her nomination until Saturday afternoon, according to the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Trump learned of the drama Friday, calling officials from his trip to Dallas. He decided to push for Haspel to remain as the nominee after initially signaling he would support whatever decision was taken, administration officials said.
Haspel, who serves as the CIA’s deputy director and has spent 33 years in the agency, most of it undercover, faces some opposition in Congress because of her connection to the interrogation program, which was set up after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In late 2002, Haspel oversaw a secret CIA detention facility in Thailand, where one al-Qaeda suspect was waterboarded. Another detainee also was waterboarded before Haspel’s arrival.
Three years later, Haspel was involved in the CIA’s destruction of nearly 100 videotapes that recorded the men’s interrogations, touching off an investigation by a special prosecutor who ultimately decided not to bring charges against those involved.
“There has been a fascinating phenomenon over the last few weeks. Those who know the true Gina Haspel — who worked with her, who served with her, who helped her confront terrorism, Russia and countless other threats to our nation — they almost uniformly support her,” said Ryan Trapani, a CIA spokesman. “That is true for people who disagree about nearly everything else. There is a reason for that. When the American people finally have a chance to see the true Gina Haspel on Wednesday, they will understand why she is so admired and why she is and will be a great leader for this agency.”
Personally, I think anyone who was involved in that hideous program should have been fired at the very least and in a just world, prosecuted.This was a war crime perpetrated by the United States and people should have been held accountable. I don’t care how great a CIA operative any of them were.
But my God — making one of the torturers and a person involved in the destruction of evidence the Director of the CIA? It really could not be more of a signal that the US is no longer a civilized nation.
I’ll be surprised if she withdraws and even more surprised if she isn’t confirmed. After all the violent psychopath president of the United States ran on an explicitly pro-torture platform:
And he still loves it:
I will be shocked if she withdraws. But she should.
I’m just going to throw these up here in case you missed the latest. It’s getting so surreal that I think we must be hitting a new phase. I don’t have any idea what it will be:
It’s all crazy. But Nunes threatening to hold Sessions in contempt for failing to turn over all the probable cause to investigate Trump and his associates to Nunes and the House Republicans.
The same Nunes who was caught red handed doing a big kabuki dance rushing up to the White House to inform them that he’d “discovered” un-masking of Trump officials only to be revealed to have been passed the information from the White House in the dead of night.
I don’t think I have to spell out what he would do with the evidence about the Mueller investigation.
KellyAnne was just outrageous this morning with the spin. I don’t know why anyone bothers to have her on frankly.
And Rudy. Oh dear. The petting his arm like a cat thing. I think he had a few too many Limoncellos before he went on the air.
One hopes that people will take this into account should Trump fail to complete his term or decide not to run again. Pence is his chief enabler and a man with no more of a moral compass than Trump.
It’s interesting that a number of Trump supporters have spoken out on the president lying about his payment to Stormy Daniels.
The recent collapse of Trump’s lies about his hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels has prompted conservative media outlets to hit the panic button.
Several right-wing outlets and personalities have taken a quick break from helping to prop up Trump’s unpopular presidency to criticize how he and his team have handled the story.
Newly hired Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani has created yet another slow-motion trainwreck for this administration, this time consisting of a series of television appearances and newspaper interviews in which Giuliani admitted Trump paid Michael Cohen to funnel money to Daniels in exchange for her pre-election silence.
Fox News host Neil Cavuto complained on-air in a commentary directed to Trump: “How can you drain the swamp if you’re the one who keeps muddying the waters?”
Citing Trump’s direct denials of the payments, in contrast to the evidence now known about the transaction, Cavuto said, “I’m having a devil of a time figuring out which news is fake.”
The criticism echoes some elements of press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ press briefing, where she effectively admitted that Trump had lied about the details of the story when it first broke.
Cavuto told Trump “your own words” give “lots of pause.” He concluded, “I guess you’re too busy draining the swamp to ever stop and smell the stink you’re creating. That’s your doing. That’s your stink. Mr. President, that’s your swamp.”
An editorial from the Wall Street Journal called out Trump’s “public deceptions” and noted “the attempted cover-up has done greater harm than any affair would have.”
The conservative newspaper highlighted the crisis of credibility that Trump has created as he repeatedly lied about the payoff, and now “wants everyone to believe a new story that he could have told the first time.”
In their conclusion, the Journal writes, “Mr. Trump is compiling a record that increases the likelihood that few will believe him during a genuine crisis,” and, “Mr. Trump should worry that Americans will stop believing anything he says.”
According to the Washington Post, which has been diligently noting down every single falsehood along with The Fact Checker’s database, Trump’s 3,001 untrue claims have come at a quicker rate lately.
In the first 100 days, he told 4.9 lies, whereas in the last two months he’s told an average of nine a day.
It isn’t just the frequency of his lying that’s a surprise either – it’s the repetition of old lies. The Washington Post found Trump repeated 113 untrue claims at least three times apiece.
He’s a pathological liar and they know it. But they seem to have decided that it’s time to step in and say something about it. I wonder why?
Worth bearing in mind when reflecting on loyalty of DJT support: – In 1932, in teeth of Great Depression, with discredited Herbert Hoover running against ascendant FDR, Hoover still got FORTY PERCENT of the popular vote! There is, and always has been, such a thing as “the base.”— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) May 5, 2018
It is important to keep in mind that there has always been a right wing in America and there always will be. It is a large faction and every once in a while they get extreme, usually with hubris because they believe they are “tougher” and “braver” than the other side. Trump is the funhouse mirror of this line of thought.
They are not going anywhere. But they are nuts right now and they need to be blocked at all costs.
“You can’t compromise with demography”
by Tom Sullivan
There was a time you couldn’t find a Republican in his county, Bob Kuppers told me last night. They existed in the western mountains, but wouldn’t admit to it. Now Democrats like him are the ones fighting to re-exert themselves. They won’t be cowed. Kuppers is running to reclaim the NC state senate seat lost in 2010 after Art Pope, North Carolina’s own mini-Koch brother, injected nearly a million dollars into the district, personally and through his independent political groups. It was “a huge amount in a poor, backwoods district,” Jane Mayer wrote for The New Yorker in “State For Sale.”
The district’s red shift is in part a reflection of the rural-urban divide. But that tension exists in part because, not unlike adopting abortion as a political weapon, conservatives see exacerbating the “divide” as electorally useful. Wherever they can drive the wedge deeper, they will so long as it wins elections.
I have argued abandoning rural America out of spite over Trump’s election is counterproductive. The map is the math. So long as state legislatures control decennial redistricting, Republican majorities there will have the power to cement themselves in power, privatize public infrastructure and schools, enact voting restrictions on minorities, and rig the rest to render government of, by and for the people a phrase reserved for talking mannequins in the Hall of Presidents. And they will control Washington, D.C. too.
There are only so many urban areas for the left to win and, in many states, not enough seats there to form a governing majority. Ignoring the rest is not an option. The alternative is not moral compromise, but victory.
Leonard Pitts is of no mood to invest energy in understanding Trump voters in such places. It is a mistake to try, he believes:
Long before Trump even existed as a political force, many of us noted with alarm the rise of a backlash among right wingers deeply angry and profoundly terrified by the writing on the demographic wall. Said writing foretold — and for that matter, still foretells — the declining preeminence of white, Christian America. As several studies now show, a sense of alarmed displacement among white, Christian America is the soil from which the weed of Trumpism grew.
A reflex for understanding opponents “bespeaks a great generosity of spirit,” Pitts writes. And in normal times, it might have merit. But these are not normal times.
No compromise is possible here for a simple reason Trump followers seem to understand better than the rest of us: You can’t compromise with demography, can’t order numbers to stop being what they are and saying what they say about the coming tide of change. But what you can do is seize the levers of power and change the rules of the game in hopes of blunting the force of that tide. That — again, look at the studies — is what Trump supporters elected him to do.
So while, it is admirable to think “understanding” can fix this country, it is also naive. Progressives should ask themselves: When’s the last time you heard any Trump supporters talking about the need to understand you? You haven’t — and that ought to tell you something.
They don’t need to be understood, Pitts concludes. They need to be defeated.
But that cannot be accomplished simply by winning statewide races by bigger margins in Los Angeles or Chicago. The fight is in rural areas less welcoming to progressive politics. Progressives have to compete there. They have to win state Senate and House seats there. It’s math.
Donald Trump brought his campaign to Duplin County in rural, eastern North Carolina, a campaign operative observed Friday over coffee. Kenansville, NC to be precise, quadrupling the town’s population.
“The whole county shut down. They closed the schools. The sheriff’s department provided an escort,” he said. Hillary Clinton visited the bright blue spaces and sent campaign surrogates there. Clinton won the cities. Trump won the state.
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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.
When strangers were welcome here: A hopeful mixtape
By Dennis Hartley
I don’t know if you’ve been following the story about the Central American caravan, but once they reached Tijuana last week, the media seemed to lose interest (it’s not as captivating as the new royal baby, I suppose). Well, media outside of Fox, where pundits continue to gin up the nativist hysteria that kicked off with Trump’s remarks claiming that the women within the relatively small group of asylum seekers “are [being] raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before”. He has also Tweeted he won’t let them through.
While there’s certainly nothing new about the anti-immigrant rhetoric that Donald Trump has been spouting nearly all his adult life (much less as “our” president), there’s been something particularly sickening to me about the racist dogpiling atop this group of people. Sure, we don’t know all their personal histories, but they are still human beings:
The final remnants of the Central American caravan began to disappear in Tijuana Friday after the last group of asylum seekers entered the United States.
Volunteers and migrants who plan to stay in Mexico slowly dismantled tents and canopies, picked up trash, folded blankets and swept dirt from the ground they slept on since arriving to the U.S.-Mexico border Sunday.
As the last members of the caravan entered the U.S. – about 70 of a total of 228 – some said goodbye to loved ones. Those staying behind include people who need more legal help before crossing into the U.S. and those who have already been deported and have slim changes of asylum.
Mario Mejia, 34, of El Salvador, said farewell to his wife.
The couple planned to claim asylum together, but lawyers told Mejia his case for asylum is weak.
Mejia was deported from the U.S. five times between 2010 and 2013 after getting caught crossing the border illegally in the Arizona desert.
“The last time I was deported I spent a year and a half in prison,” he said. “The judge told me if I tried again I’d serve twice as much.”
Apart from his deportations from the U.S., Mejia has been deported from Mexico eight times. He’s applied for asylum in both countries but has been denied.
Mejia left El Salvador when he was 14 after members of MS-13 threatened to kill him if he didn’t join their gang.
“It’s a hard life,” he said. “I’ve never had a stable place to live in.”
As his wife walked toward the San Ysidro border crossing Friday, Mejia told her to keep moving forward and promised to call her brothers, who live in the U.S., to make sure they take care of her.
Later, as he packed his belongings into a backpack and helped clean up the caravan’s makeshift tent city, he pondered his future. He said he plans to stay in Tijuana and hopes to find a job in construction until he makes enough money for a bus ticket to Mexicali, where he has friends and better job opportunities.
From there? “I don’t know,” he said.
And that’s just one of the stories. It breaks your heart (if you have one). Here’s the thing-that’s not just Mario’s story. Outside of Native Americans, it is all our stories; all Americans. None of us are really “from” here; if you start tracing your family’s genealogy, I’ll bet you don’t have to go back too many generations to find ancestors who were born on foreign soil. Some Americans have conveniently forgotten about that fact.
That’s why I think it’s time for some music therapy. I’ve chosen 10 songs that speak to the immigrant experience and serve to remind us of America’s multicultural foundation.
“Across the Borderline” – Freddy Fender
This song (co-written by John Hiatt, Ry Cooder, and Jim Dickinson) has been covered many times, but this heartfelt version by the late Freddy Fender is the best. Fender’s version was used as part of the soundtrack for Tony Richardson’s 1982 film The Border.
“America” – Neil Diamond
Diamond’s anthemic paean to America’s multicultural heritage first appeared in the soundtrack for Richard Fleischer and Sidney J. Furie’s 1980 remake of The Jazz Singer (thankfully, Diamond’s stirring song has had a longer shelf life than the film, which left audiences and critics underwhelmed). Weirdly, it was included on a list of songs deemed as “lyrically questionable” and/or “inappropriate” for airplay in an internal memo issued by the brass at Clear Channel Communications in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Go figure.
“America” (movie soundtrack version) – West Side Story
This classic number from the stage musical and film West Side Story (with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and music by Leonard Bernstein) is both a celebration of Latin immigrant culture and a slyly subversive takedown of nativist-driven ethnic stereotyping.
“Ave Que Emigra” – Gaby Morena
Speaking of exploding stereotypes-here’s a straightforward song explaining why cultural assimilation and cultural identity are not mutually exclusive. From a 2012 NPR review:
As a song that speaks of being an immigrant, [Gaby Moreno’s “Ave Que Emigra”] strikes the perfect emotional chords. So many songs on that topic are gaudy, one-dimensional woe-is-me tales. Moreno’s story of coming to America is filled with simple one-liners like “tired of running, during hunting season” (evocative of the grotesque reality Central Americans face today at home and in their journeys north). Her cheerful ranchera melody, with its sad undertone, paints a perfect portrait of the complex emotional state most of us immigrants inhabit: a deep sadness for having to leave mixed with the excitement of the adventure that lies ahead, plus the joy and relief of having “made it.”
No habla espanol? No problema! You can see the English translation of the lyrics here.
“Buffalo Soldier” – Bob Marley & the Wailers
Sadly, not all migrants arrived on America’s shores of their own volition; and such is the unfortunate legacy of the transatlantic slave trade that flourished from the 16th to the 18th centuries. As Malcolm X once bluntly put it, “[African Americans] didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; the Rock was landed on us.” Bob Marley entitled this song as reference to the nickname for the black U.S. Calvary regiments that fought in the post-Civil War Indian conflicts. Marley’s lyrics seem to mirror Malcom X’s pointed observation above:
If you know your history, Then you would know where you’re coming from Then you wouldn’t have to ask me Who the heck do I think I am I’m just a Buffalo Soldier In the heart of America Stolen from Africa, brought to America Said he was fighting on arrival Fighting for survival
“Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” – Arlo Guthrie
Woody Guthrie originally penned this “ripped from the headlines” protest piece as a poem in the wake of a 1948 California plane crash (the music was composed some years later by Martin Hoffman, and first popularized as a song by Pete Seegar). Among the 32 passengers who died were 28 migrant farm workers who were in the process of being deported back to Mexico. Guthrie noticed that most press and radio reports at the time identified the 4 crew members by name, while dehumanizing the workers by referring to them en masse as “deportees” (plus ca change…). His son Arlo’s version is very moving.
“The Immigrant”– Neil Sedaka
In a 2013 Facebook post reflecting on his 1975 song, Neil Sedaka shared this tidbit:
I wrote [“The Immigrant”] for my friend John Lennon during his immigration battles in the 1970s. I’ll never forget when I called to tell him about it. Overwhelmed by the gesture, he said, “Normally people only call me when they want something. It’s very seldom people call you to give you something. It’s beautiful.”
I concur with John. It’s Sedaka’s most beautifully crafted tune, musically and lyrically.
“Immigration Blues” – Chris Rea
In 2005, prolific U.K. singer-songwriter Chris Rea released a massive 11-CD box set album with 137 tracks called Blue Guitars (I believe that sets some sort of record). The collection is literally a journey through blues history, with original songs “done in the style of…[insert your preferred blues subgenre here]” from African origins to contemporary iterations. This track is from “Album 10: Latin Blues”. The title says it all.
“Immigration Man” – David Crosby & Graham Nash
After an unpleasant experience in the early 70s getting hassled by a U.S. Customs agent, U.K.-born Graham Nash (who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1978) didn’t get mad, he got even by immortalizing his tormentor in a song. The tune is one of the highlights of the 1972 studio album he recorded with David Crosby, simply titled Crosby and Nash. I love that line where he describes his immigration form as “big enough to keep me warm.”
“Thousands are Sailing”– The Pogues
An ode to the Irish migrant wave that was driven by the Great Famine of the mid-1800s.
At the NRA Convention yesterday:“Right in the middle is like a war zone for horrible stabbing wounds,” he said. “Yes, that’s right,” he went on. “They don’t have guns, they have knives. And it’s said that there’s blood all over the floors at this hospital. They say it’s as bad as a military-war-zone hospital. Knives, knives, knives.”
(This, btw, is just some wet dream of his. Nobody knows wtf he’s talking about.)
CPAC: “are animals, they cut people. They cut ’em. They cut ’em up in little pieces, and they want them to suffer.
In the White House: “They are killing people. Not necessarily with guns because that is not painful enough,” the president opined. “They want to do it more painfully… and slowly. So they cut them up with knives. They don’t use guns, they use knives because they want long, painful death.”
Harrisburg Pennsylvania: “They don’t shoot people because it’s too fast and not painful. They cut them up into little pieces.”
Long Island, New York: “They stomp on their victims. They beat them with clubs, they slash them with machetes, and they stab them with knives. They have transformed peaceful parks and beautiful quiet neighborhoods into bloodstained killing fields. They’re animals.”
There was this one during the campaign:
And this:
Go to about 2:30 — “We’re gonna cut you up sir, we’re gonna cut you up…”
He has a lurid, violent imagination and he’s revealed it repeatedly in public. He gets off on it.
Aides to Donald Trump, the US president, hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a “dirty ops” campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, the Observercan reveal.
People in the Trump camp contacted private investigators in May last year to “get dirt” on Ben Rhodes, who had been one of Barack Obama’s top national security advisers, and Colin Kahl, deputy assistant to Obama, as part of an elaborate attempt to discredit the deal.
The extraordinary revelations come days before Trump’s 12 May deadline to either scrap or continue to abide by the international deal limiting Iran’s nuclear programme.
Jack Straw, who as foreign secretary was involved in earlier efforts to restrict Iranian weapons, said: “These are extraordinary and appalling allegations but which also illustrate a high level of desperation by Trump and [the Israeli prime minister] Benjamin Netanyahu, not so much to discredit the deal but to undermine those around it.”
One former high-ranking British diplomat with wide experience of negotiating international peace agreements, requesting anonymity, said: “It’s bloody outrageous to do this. The whole point of negotiations is to not play dirty tricks like this.”
Sources said that officials linked to Trump’s team contacted investigators days after Trump visited Tel Aviv a year ago, his first foreign tour as US president. Trump promised Netanyahu that Iran would never have nuclear weapons and suggested that the Iranians thought they could “do what they want” since negotiating the nuclear deal in 2015. A source with details of the “dirty tricks campaign” said: “The idea was that people acting for Trump would discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to pull out of it.”
Ben Rhodes was pn Chris Hayes last week and Chris asked him why he thought these people hated the Iran deal so much. He said, and I think he’s right, that they want an excuse to confront Iram militarily and potentially overthrow the government. After everything we’ve done in the past decade and a half, they still think real men want to go to Tehran.
I would normally point out the utter hypocrisy of this action in light of all the pearl clutching about the Fusion GPS campaign oppo but hypocrisy is not longer operative so I’ll refrain:
According to incendiary documents seen by the Observer, investigators contracted by the private intelligence agency were told to dig into the personal lives and political careers of Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, and Kahl, a national security adviser to the former vice-president Joe Biden. Among other things they were looking at personal relationships, any involvement with Iran-friendly lobbyists, and if they had benefited personally or politically from the peace deal.
Call it impeccable timing: A federal judge in January tossed a lawsuit claiming Donald Trump was in violation of a constitutional ban against using the presidency for financial gain from foreign governments. Less than a month later, Qatar shelled out a cool $6.5 million for new digs in the Trump World Tower in Manhattan.
