I don't really care about this sort of thing, but if Biden did it, there would be a slew of tweets from Trump campaign staff suggesting Biden was deteriorating before our very eyes, and the clip would end up in its ads. https://t.co/gfDWy9ITdm
The whole campaign is going to be based upon the idea that Joe Biden is senile. It’s tried and true. Remember this?
From the looks of Matt Drudges home page, Hillary Clinton is so sick, she needs help getting up a flight of stairs.
But looks can be deceiving. The Drudge Report, one of the most widely read sites on the web, is misleading visitors by taking a six-month-old photo out of context.
Clinton slipped on some stairs while campaigning in South Carolina ahead of the February 27 primary — that much is true. A couple of men helped her up the stairs.
Photos of the awkward entrance were published right afterward by two wire services, Reuters and Getty.
The photos were forgotten — until Saturday. What happened then, when a cadre of pro-Trump Twitter accounts started reposting the pictures as evidence that Clinton has a hard time walking, shows how easily photos can be distorted to take on a new and more sinister meaning.
In conspiratorial corners of the conservative media, doubts about Clinton’s health and stamina have persisted ever since she had a health scare in 2012. Some armchair commentators even predicted Clinton wouldn’t be able to run for president in 2016.
They were clearly wrong, and the health concerns are largely considered a fringe issue. Her personal physician said one year ago that she was physically fit to serve as president.
But given all the past chatter about her physical condition, the message from the pro-Trump accounts was clear: Clinton can barely walk.
A right-wing blog called The American Mirror picked up on the tweets and published a short story on Sunday. “SHOCK PHOTO: Multiple staffers help unstable Hillary up stairs,” the headline said.
The story asked, “At what point is the mainstream media going to question Clinton’s health status?”
It is 100% fair to ding Trump for his obvious lack of balance as he tries to walk down stairs and drink water holding the bottle with two hands. I get it. I’m not as physically confident as I once was and I’m quite a bit younger than Trump. But Trump thinks the best way to win is to say his opponents are frail and sickly and can’t handle the rigors of the presidency.
Please. He’s barely coherent and well … look at that footage. He deserves to be tortured over it.
Former Vice President Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump in the polls for a lot of different reasons. One large one is his support from female voters.Biden is earning a historic amount of support from female voters for a presidential nominee when examining polling over the last 70 years.Take a look at the most recent live interview polls of registered voters from May and June compiled by The New York Times’ Nate Cohn.
Biden is leading among female registered voters by 59% to 35%, a 25-point margin when the numbers aren’t rounded. That’s a significant increase from his 19-point advantage earlier this year and the 14-point lead Hillary Clinton had in the final 2016 preelection polls of registered voters. Clinton had a 13-point edge with likely female voters.
We can go back even further. Prior to 2016, Gallup would take its final preelection poll and readjust it to match the final margin. I look to Gallup to make the closest apples-to-apples comparison (i.e preelection polling to preelection polling) that we can make.
The only year that comes close to what we see in the polls right now is 1964. That year, Democrat Lyndon Johnson won nationally by 23 points overall, and Gallup had him taking the women’s vote by 24 points. Biden’s doing a point better than Johnson did among female voters, even as he is doing 13 points worse overall.
In no other year since 1952 did the Democratic nominee win among female voters by more than 15 points.(If we look at Republican nominees as well, Richard Nixon won the women’s vote by 24 points in 1972 as he won nationally by 23 points.)Perhaps what makes Biden more impressive with women is how weak he is with men. He’s seen only a 2-point climb with them from earlier this year and is still losing them to Trump by 6 points. That’s about how Clinton did with them in the final 2016 preelection polling. Clinton trailed by 5 and 7 points among registered voters and likely male voters, respectively.
In fact, the only candidate to win the presidency since 1952 and do as poorly as Biden is doing with male voters right now was Barack Obama in 2012. Obama lost them by 6 points, per Gallup’s tally.
The fact that Biden is leading overall (10 points) by a significantly wider margin than Obama won by (4 points), despite how poorly Biden is doing with men, is another indication of how strong he is with female voters.
When you contrast female and male voters, you see that we could be heading toward a record gender gap. The 31-point difference right now blows past any in past preelection polling. Both 2012 and 2016 featured gaps of around 20 points. The average from 1996 to 2016 was a gap of about 16 points, which is only about half of what we’re seeing in the polling right now.
A gender gap isn’t necessarily good for the Democratic Party. If Biden were winning among women by a point and losing men by 30 points, he’d be down significantly.Still, you’d rather have women on your side than men for the simple reason that they make up a slightly larger share of voters. Biden’s overall advantage would be about a point less if women and men made up an equal share of the electorate. That doesn’t matter at this moment, but it could if the polls tighten up.
Maybe it’s time to start asking what in the hell is going on with the majority of men? I know there are tens of millions of decent, intelligent guys who are just as appalled by Trump as most women are. But there sure are a lot who like them.
Why? How? Good God, the man is an utter fool and a cartoon version of masculinity. You’d think most men would be embarrassed by him.
If anything had come of Trump’s inane love-fest with Kim Jong-Un perhaps it would have been worth the international embarrassment of his ridiculous behavior. Unfortunately, all the greatest dealmaker in the world did was give away American leverage to make a laughingstock of himself and give Kim Jong Un the space to grow his nuclear arsenal.
On the other hand, he didn’t start a nuclear war so there’s that.
North Korea officially declared an end Friday to its diplomatic dalliance with the U.S. But experts say it’s been clear for some time that President Donald Trump’s bold but risky effort to sweet talk Kim Jong Un into relinquishing his nuclear weapons never really went anywhere.
Two high-profile meetings with North Korea’s leader bought Trump a hiatus from bellicose rhetoric and nuclear tests, but Kim never stopped building nuclear warheads and the missiles to deliver them, U.S. intelligence officials and private analysts say.
Now, on the second anniversary of that first Trump-Kim summit in Singapore, North Korea is renouncing the diplomacy while promising to expand its weapons program, even as experts say it is ever closer to perfecting a long-range missile capable of reaching and destroying an American city.
Trump therefore joins a long list of presidents who tried and failed to cut a deal to get rid of North Korean nuclear weapons — but the first one who met face to face with the leader of the outlaw regime, lending it a measure of legitimacy. Trump at one point mused that he and Kim “fell in love,” and he showered praise on a dictator who is said by human rights groups to keep tens of thousands of political prisoners in vast gulags.
Trump made a series of other concessions, including the unilateral cancellation of joint U.S. and South Korean missile exercises. He got very little in return.
“In terms of the so-called goals of the summit, we made no progress in any of those things,” said Victor Cha, a former White House adviser to President George W. Bush and now senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an NBC News contributor. “And this was arguably the one piece of diplomacy into which Trump put all of his personal capital.”
Now:
Kim resurfaced last month, and on Friday, his government made clear that any agreement with Trump was now null and void.
“Even a slim ray of optimism for peace and prosperity on the Korean Peninsula has faded away into a dark nightmare,” the country’s foreign minister, Ri Son-Gwon, said in a statement marking the second anniversary of the Singapore summit.
He called the talks “nothing but a foolish trick hatched to keep [North Korea] bound to dialogue and use it in favor of the political situation and election in the U.S.,” adding, “Never again will we provide the U.S. chief executive with another package to be used for achievements without receiving any returns. Nothing is more hypocritical than an empty promise.”
According to the experts they believed that the deal was to give Trump some good news in exchange for sanctions relief. They didn’t get the sanctions lifted in spite of Trump’s obvious desire to do it. But they got a lot:
The president stopped talking about North Korean human rights abuses. When House Republicans recommended sanctioning 12 Chinese banks allegedly involved in sanctions busting and money laundering for North Korea, Trump sanctioned none of them.
And the Trump administration cancelled joint military exercises on the Korean peninsula even as North Korean military exercises continued apace. Meanwhile, Trump pressed South Korea to pay more to support the U.S. troop presence on its soil.
“It didn’t improve relations with South Korea and it didn’t lead to any reciprocal actions by North Korea,” Klingner said.
China, Russia and South Korea also “took their foot off the pedal,” in terms of enforcing sanctions to pressure the regime, Cha said.
North Korea did send home the remains of 55 U.S. service members, but 619 sets of remains have been sent back in previous administrations, Klingner said.
The North freed five detainees, compared to 11 during the Obama administration. One of them was Otto Warmbier, who returned in a vegetative state and soon died.
Even the suspension of nuclear and long-range missile testing is less than meets the eye, Klingner said. “We’ve had several instances of three or more years of no testing under Bush and Obama,” he said.
It’s not that Trump wasn’t warned. Even as he was declaring victory, intelligence officials were telling NBC News that North Korea had not halted work on its nuclear program.
That glaring contradiction was among the reasons Congress was unable to hold a public Worldwide Threats hearing, an annual briefing, this year. Intelligence officials didn’t want to have to once again dispute the president in public.
Trump truly believes that anyone who flatters him is his friend and anyone who doesn’t is his enemy. He is a child and Kim Jong Un gave him the lollipops he wanted.
But the flattery was actually almost all going in the other direction. Trump gave Kim the legitimacy he craved and went to incredible lengths to lick his boots, absolving him of the grotesque carnage of the Kim regime, even defending him against accusations that he knew about the torture of Americans. Even more sickening was the GOP’s acquiescence to Trump’s ridiculous overtures after having insulted previous presidents as weaklings and Commie symps for having negotiated treaties that actually held the Kim regime back.
Again, any result that doesn’t wind up with nuclear war is better than the alternative. But Trump played all the cards and failed miserably. He gave away the leverage that could have been useful for a sane president going forward and ended up with a much more heavily nuclear-armed North Korea than he started with. It’s very hard to predict what will come next.
A group of hippie circus performers on a converted bus named Buttercup were briefly detained by a SWAT team at a Downtown protest. The next day, Columbus police stoked fears over rioting in social media posts about the bus that went viral, eventually reaching Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
+Several years ago, Stephen Palmer went to see Ohio jam band the Werks with a friend who liked to spin mini hula hoops. While hanging out after the concert, his friend taught him a few things with the hoops, and ever since, Palmer has been hooked on the Flow Arts.
Think of a circus act without the aerobatics or the animals, and you’re pretty close to Flow Arts, an umbrella term for a type of street performance that usually involves juggling and spinning flaming objects. “I like juggling rings, juggling balls, spinning plates. I like the more whimsical stuff that not a lot of people like to play with. It makes you more unique,” said Palmer, who moved to Columbus from Richmond, Indiana, in 2017. “All of those props you can make yourself or buy online, and you use a little fuel and some Kevlar wicking to make the wicks. Then you can light your props on fire and it looks really cool.”
In 2012, Palmer attended a Flow Arts retreat called Kinetic Fire, which used to be held in southwest Ohio. At these events, he didn’t just learn how to juggle. He found a community.
It became a travelling hippie circus. I’m sure you’ve all seen similar. It’s the sort of thing you’ve seen at Dead concerts and and reggae gatherings for 50 years.
Anyway, here’s what happened:
According to Palmer and Coggins, the small group of friends, plus an extra protester they picked up along the way, waited for the crowd to disperse and then began to pull the bus out of the parking lot. A nearby police officer stopped them briefly and told them to head to Third Street and leave Downtown. But as Buttercup approached the intersection of Broad and Third streets, police cruisers pulled up with flashing lights and sirens, along with a black SWAT vehicle carrying officers in camouflage and riot gear.
[…]
Kaylee Oiler, one of Palmer’s friends on the bus, got out her phone and filmed the next eight minutes with a Facebook Live video. “Oh, my God. Don’t hurt us,” Oiler says from the back of the bus while looking out the window at police surrounding the vehicle (Oiler declined to be interviewed, citing threats she has received since the incident). Digati can be heard asking the police how to comply: “Should I back up? What should I do here? … I’m just trying to leave.”
“We were terrified and confused, because we were literally just complying with the orders [to leave Downtown],” Palmer said.
While the group of friends stood in the bus with their hands up, police had each person leave the bus one at a time with their hands up, then sit on the sidewalk with their hands behind their back. “The [officer] who took my name, I didn’t want to give him my Social Security number, because he’s writing it down in a notepad,” Palmer said. “I was like, ‘What are you gonna do with that notepad?’ He goes, ‘It’s OK, I tear it up every time.’ So I was like, ‘Will you tell me your name?’ He said, ‘No.’ … He had a yellow piece of tape over his badge. All of them covered up their badges and none of them would give us their names.”
Police checked the bus occupants’ IDs and detained them without handcuffs or zip ties for about 45 minutes, then let them go. “They said, ‘Nothing’s going to happen to you guys. You guys are fine. You just have to leave Downtown,’” Palmer said. “And then they gave Reese a citation for blocking the road.”
The cops impounded the bus and everyone found their way home.
Then Columbus police posted about the bus on social media. You just can’t believe this nonsense:
As demonstrations in support of the Black Lives Matter movement gained nationwide momentum in late May, rumors began circulating about busloads of militant antifa fighters supposedly infiltrating towns across America. The same weekend Buttercup was impounded, the rumor spread to Upper Arlington. People believed it, and the rumor had staying power. Last weekend, in Washington state, a multi-racial family in a school bus was reportedly followed and harassed by multiple vehicles; community members even trapped the family by cutting down trees to block the road. A similar version of the rumor, this time focusing on Chillicothe, recently showed up on Facebook:
“Warning to those in Chillicothe, Ohio. Antifa has brought 2 busloads of protestors to Chillicothe. They are already here staying at a local hotel. … Businesses have already begun boarding up their businesses. We have word that people are already spreading bricks around town for the mayheim [sic]. It’s also being reported that they are planning on hitting more rural areas and will kill farmers and livestock along the way.”
The rumor was a baseless hoax, part of a since-debunked misinformation campaign that can be traced, at least in part, to a tweet by a fake antifa Twitter account that Twitter has said was created by white nationalist group Identity Evropa. Still, localized versions of the rumor have persisted, and each time, the gossip involves antifa fighters coming to town by the busload.
On Monday, June 1, the day after police stopped Buttercup, Columbus police posted a photo of the bus on social media and gave its own account of the incident: “This bus was stopped yesterday at Broad St. & 3rd due for obstruction of traffic. There was a suspicion of supplying riot equipment to rioters. Detectives followed up with a vehicle search today and found numerous items: bats, rocks, meat cleavers, axes, clubs and other projectiles. Charges are pending as the investigation continues.”
Word spread quickly. Angry commenters railed against antifa rioters funded by George Soros. They zoomed in on the word “murder” painted on the bus (conveniently overlooking the words “stop ‘legal'” that precede it). As of today, the post has nearly 4,000 comments and has been shared more than 18,000 times. On Twitter, CPD’s tweet has been retweeted nearly 14,000 times. “Here ya go doubters…this bus was bringing riot tools to protests in Columbus. Columbus police caught them. Good,” reads one response tweet. “Militant marxist antifa members must be arrested and punished wherever they are,” reads another.
Even Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther got in on the action, tweeting, “The limited arrests to this point do not reflect the significant safety concerns we have for the city. I would point to the recovery of a bus registered in Vermont filled with bats, rocks, meat cleavers and axes on Sunday night.”
Eventually, the tweet made its way to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who tweeted, “Police in Ohio found a bus near protests filled with bats, rocks & other weapons. But I guess still ‘no evidence’ of an organized effort to inject violence & anarchy into the protests right?”
Making matters worse, ABC-6 ran a story with the headline “City attorney details arrests during protests in Columbus” and paired it with a photo of Palmer, Coggins and their friends being detained in front of the bus, leading some to believe the occupants were arrested for rioting. (ABC has since switched the photo.)
Digati and Oiler tried to set the record straight in the comment section of CPD’s Facebook post, letting people know they weren’t rioting, weren’t supplying rioters, and were there simply to lend aid at the protest. “Hey everyone! This is my bus,” Digati posted. “We were at the protest handing out water and washing mace off of people’s faces. If you have any questions, please feel free to talk to me. This bus is my home and I often use it as a supply vehicle. We were peaceful the entire time. The ‘weapons’ that were found are tools. Axes for my wood stove, knives for cooking, etc. … The ‘riot gear’ was literally a child’s shoulder pads, elbow, and knee pads for sports.”
Some commenters tried to come to their defense. “There’s people that don’t even know us that are like, ‘This is obviously dumb, guys. These are some hippies on a bus,’” Palmer said. “And that’s 100 percent what we are.”
“Yeah, there’s a hatchet on the bus — with a bunch of wood sitting next to a wood-burning stove. Well, duh. The rocks were crystals and fossils. They emptied out a knife block [from the kitchen area] and said they found a meat cleaver,” Coggins said.
And the clubs? Juggling clubs.
Palmer and Coggins said their friends have been repeatedly harassed in the aftermath of CPD’s post, but Palmer said the worst part of the entire ordeal has been the way in which the event has been twisted to distract from the entire reason the Buttercup crew was at the protest in the first place.
“[The police] want to use our participation — which was only out of love, only out of wanting to help the movement — and use it to hurt the movement. That’s what hurts us the most,” Palmer said. “You can detain me. It’s fine. I’m not hurt or anything. But it really does a disservice to say that there are people [rioting] like this when you have no proof. It’s discrediting an entire movement for no reason.”
These are anarchists Bill Barr and Fox News are getting the wingnuts all excited about: hippie jugglers.
The police obviously don’t know the difference and neither does Fox News which is pimping the block party in Seattle as if it’s long hot summer of 1967.
“Here is the entrance to CHAZ. We were very lucky that this strict security station and ID check was unstaffed! In fact, I noticed that all the ingress points were unstaffed, so very fortunate to time our entry past multiple security gates during the changing of the guard!” Photos and satirical commentary by Gus Lopez via Facebook.
“What the f*ck is happening in Seattle?” a friend texted Emily Pothast. At Medium, Pothast provides more prehistory to the “George Floyd rebellion” in Seattle than there is time to recount this morning. But just as interesting is how Fox state television’s response raised eyebrows among photojournalism ethics experts.
Misinformation about the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ) set up by protesters has the propaganda network, well, spreading propaganda, and the acting POTUS again threatening to send the army into the streets of an American city (CNN):
But claims that bands of militant Antifa members are roving the Seattle streets appear to be grossly exaggerated in right-wing media. In fact, according to the Seattle mayor’s office, city officials haven’t seen any evidence to indicate armed members of Antifa are even on the ground.
After tear gas- and flash grenade-fueled policing of over a week of Seattle protests related to the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis, police finally backed away from the Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Protesters turned the several city blocks into a pedestrian mall and street fair. Reports of Seattle’s devolution are greatly exaggerated. The protesters’ set of demands are here, plus a livestream.
Predictably, Fox News set its hair on fire, reporting that armed brigands had taken over part of the city and set up a communist state or something. “Reports flood in about extortion and violence” in CHAZ, began a Fox report on Friday.
“Where are all of the anti-Second Amendment crowd because there are people walking around with scary-looking long guns and firearms in their waistbands?” asks Fox’s David Webb over footage showing no such thing. “These are dangerous people.”
Fox’s website for much of the day featured a photo of a man standing with a military-style rifle in front of what appeared to be a smashed retail storefront.
The image was actually a mashup of photos from different days, taken by different photographers — it was done by splicing a Getty Images photo of an armed man, who had been at the protest zone June 10, with other images from May 30 of smashed windows in downtown Seattle. Another altered image combined the gunman photo with yet another image, making it appear as though he was standing in front of a sign declaring “You are now entering Free Cap Hill.”
Donald Trump branded Capitol Hill residents domestic terrorists and demanded Wednesday night that Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan “take back” the neighborhood:
“Radical Left Governor @JayInslee and the Mayor of Seattle are being taunted and played at a level that our great Country has never seen before,'” the president tweeted. “Take back your city NOW. If you don’t do it, I will. This is not a game. These ugly Anarchists must be stooped IMMEDIATELY. MOVE FAST!”
Insleee told Trump to mind his own business and “‘Stoop’ tweeting.” Durkan responded, “Make us all safe. Go back to your bunker.”
Gus Lopez responded on Facebook with a set of ironically captioned photos taken on his visit to CHAZ:
Zen Wolfgang posted his own images of the liberal hellscape:
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like. Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.
“Once again, tyranny and treachery are in our midst, and although we feel we’ve descended into a hellish state of existence, we must never forget, hell is conquerable,” Flynn wrote in a bizarre op-ed Thursday, linking to Matthew 16:18.
It was a striking juxtaposition: Before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday, Flynn’s lawyer Sidney Powell and DOJ attorneys argued in agreement that Judge Emmet Sullivan, the district court judge, had overstepped his authority by appointing an outside lawyer to make the argument that Flynn’s case should not be dropped.
Meanwhile, visitors to The Western Journal could read Flynn expounding on how “the idea or notion of a heaven on Earth is the very real sense of being free.”
The website was founded by none other than Floyd Brown, the conservative media man who produced the infamous “Willie Horton” ad during the 1988 presidential campaign and founded the political action committee Citizens United.
As The New York Times reported last year about the site, it’s an information source for millions lured in by clicky headlines and a fringe conservative slant on the news.
Flynn’s headline, “Forces of Evil Want To Steal Our Freedom in the Dark of Night, But God Stands with Us,” didn’t explain much about his point.
Neither did the op-ed itself. Was he discussing theology? Or the ongoing nationwide protests over racism and police brutality? His own criminal case? All of the above? It wasn’t clear. Read the first three paragraphs and see if you can figure it out:
There are seminal moments in American history that test every fiber of our nation’s soul.
We are facing one now.
Revolutionary forces are causing every American citizen to question which direction the country is heading. To determine the outcome, we must examine our nation’s history to project ourselves forward into the future.
This:
I read this last night and when I woke up this morning thought I’d dreamt it.
A federal appeals court hearing arguments about President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn on Friday firmly pushed back on his attempts to force his criminal charge’s dismissal immediately, even after the Justice Department backed Flynn.
Two of three judges on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals said Flynn’s case wasn’t ready to leave the hands of the trial-level judge below them, meaning that Flynn may not get a quick exoneration in court.
The appeals argument was an unusual turn in an even more unusual case that has come to signify the politics of the Justice Department, feed Trump’s attacks on the Russia investigation and enliven a battle between the Trump administration and other branches of government. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in late 2017 as part of the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the election.
Trump, who has repeatedly defended the Confederacy, says he's done more for black community than any president with possible exception of Abraham Lincoln but then adds of Lincoln: "He did good although it's always questionable, you know, in other words, the end result." #wutpic.twitter.com/nIuu6fRAM2
Most Americans, including a majority of President Donald Trump’s Republican Party, support sweeping law enforcement reforms such as a ban on chokeholds and racial profiling after the latest death of an African American while in police custody, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Thursday.
The national survey on June 9-10, shows the public broadly on the side of Democratic lawmakers, who proposed a series of changes to police departments (here) in the United States as protesters gathered nationwide to condemn the death of George Floyd and racism.
The White House and Republican lawmakers are preparing their own plans for changes in policing, though they are expected to fall short of the deep reforms being sought by Democrats in Congress and Joe Biden, their party’s presumptive presidential nominee in the Nov. 3 election to challenge Trump.
The poll (here) conducted online of 1,113 U.S. adults showed bipartisan support for many of the Democrats’ proposals.
For example, 82% of Americans want to ban police from using chokeholds, 83% want to ban racial profiling, and 92% want federal police to be required to wear body cameras.
It also found that 89% of Americans want to require police to give the people they stop their name, badge number and reason for the stop, and 91% support allowing independent investigations of police departments that show patterns of misconduct.
Seventy-five percent of Americans want to support “allowing victims of police misconduct to sue police departments for damages.”
Trump, who has been trying to win back suburban voters by positioning himself as a “law-and-order” president, called on states to crack down on the protests. Trump had previously said that he could use military forces if states did not quell protests, which have been mostly peaceful apart from some arson and looting and clashes with officers.
According to the Reuters/Ipsos poll, rank-and-file Republicans appear to be mostly supportive of the proposals Democratic lawmakers in Congress unveiled on June 8.
According to the poll, six out 10 Republicans supported a provision that would allow “victims of police misconduct to sue police departments for damages.”
Seven in 10 Republicans support bans on racial profiling and chokeholds. Nine in 10 Republicans agree that police should wear body cameras and the same proportion agreed that law enforcement agencies should be open to independent investigations.
Does any of this go far enough? Not by a long shot. But for the first time in my life, most Republicans are not reflexively supporting whatever the police say they need to do to keep control of America’s streets and that is something. If we want to actually accomplish changing the racist and violent policing in this country, this first step is vitally important.
As for the “defund police” demands, get a load of this:
76% said they supported moving “some money currently going to police budgets into better officer training, local programs for homelessness, mental health assistance, and domestic violence.”
Now it’s true that there is less support (although 39%, quite a large number) in favor of completely disbanding all police and using the money to fund social programs to address homelessness, mental health and domestic violence. But the fact that a vast majority are already in favor of spending some of the money currently devoted to policing to do that, is an amazing leap in American culture. And from what I have gathered from many of the defund police advocates, that is actually what they are looking for.
It’s true that we are in a moment. And the right-wing is hardly going to fundamentally change their views on race and policing overnight. But this is very good news nonetheless. Progress happens in fits and starts and I think this may be one of those times when it lurches forward.
That picture above is a screenshot from a video by the Dallas Police Department urging everyone to take a knee and move forward with dialog and understanding:
I realize a lot of this is bullshit PR and yes, it’s police porn of a more friendly kind. But I refuse to be so cynical that I believe every last cop is a psychopath or that there is no way forward from racist policing to a form of public protection that is decent and moral. I don’t know if completely dismantling police departments will happen but I do know that whatever changes occur will, in the end, require some form of state-sponsored public safety. The alternative is likely to be vigilantism and that will not go well for anyone.
I think it’s worthwhile to extend a little bit of good faith in this moment, along with vigilance and strong demands for transparency and reform as the country approaches this window of opportunity. There are a whole lot of white people in this country, many of them conservative, and we all have to live together. It’s smart and strategic to welcome their recognition of the problem and give them some space to sign on to major reform.
Of course, that’s easy for me to say. I’m white and live in a world of privilege and I understand that my thoughts on this are not particularly meaningful. But when I see those shots in the video of young, African American protesters reacting generously and openly in the moment to the cops who took the knee, I choose to follow their lead.
When Melania Trump stayed behind in New York after her husband’s presidential inauguration, she said it was because she didn’t want to interrupt their then-10-year-old son Barron’s school year. News stories at the time concentrated on an apparent frostiness between the first couple and on the exorbitant taxpayer costs to protect Melania and Barron away from Washington.
Those stories are true, but Washington Post reporter Mary Jordan reveals in a new book that the first lady was also using her delayed arrival to the White House as leverage for renegotiating her prenuptial agreement with President Trump.
The campaign had been full of harsh news about Trump’s alleged sexual indiscretions and infidelities, from the “grab them by the p—y” Access Hollywood tape to an affair with Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal; Melania learned new details from the media coverage, Jordan writes.
The incoming first lady needed time to cool off, and “to amend her financial arrangement with Trump — what Melania referred to as ‘taking care of Barron,’ ” Jordan writes in “The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump.”
Melania’s original prenup had not been incredibly generous, Jordan reports. But she has been married to Trump longer than both his ex-wives and had bargaining power: Her perceived calming effect on him was so great that Trump’s pals and at least one of Trump’s adult children exhorted her to come to the White House as soon as possible.
The 286-page book, which plays off the title of Trump’s well-known business guide, is a deeply reported look at the rise of the country’s only immigrant first lady since Louisa Adams.
For her book, Jordan conducted more than a hundred interviews, with everyone from the first lady’s Slovenian schoolmates to former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and she lays out an argument that Melania Trump is as devoted to her own mythmaking as her husband is to his.
“Both are avid creators of their own history,” Jordan writes, arguing that the #FreeMelania hashtag ought to be retired because of her consistent support of her husband and her moves to stay in the White House.
“She is . . . much more like him than it appears,” Jordan adds.
I have always thought that. It’s obvious that they have a transactional relationship. That’s the only thing Trump understands. And she has always struck me as a savvy player. So it’s not surprising that she would use her leverage in this way.
The rest of the story is worth reading if you’re a mind to dig into this. Melania is a total phony, of course. Her life is as much a fiction as his is. And she knows how to play him.
Observers in the White House had noticed an uptick in her mood by mid-2018 that might account for her being so willing to fight for a second term. According to three people close to Trump, Jordan writes, Melania had finally renegotiated the prenup to her liking. She had already been looking out for Barron’s future by making sure he had dual citizenship in Slovenia, which will position him to work in Europe for the Trump Organization when he comes of age.AD
Now, she had made sure he was not shut out of the family business. Jordan writes: “She wanted proof in writing that when it came to financial opportunities and inheritance, Barron would be treated as more of an equal to Trump’s oldest three children.”
Oh man, I don’t think those older Trumps are going to go along with that. They will likely even break into fights among themselves when Daddy finally checks out. Barron wouldn’t have a chance on his own. But with Mommy on his side it will be a formidable battle.
The big question is whether there will be anything worth fighting for.
