And you go boy…
… is QAnon believer, Marjorie Taylor Green:
Conspiracy theorists won a major victory on Tuesday as a Republican supporter of the convoluted pro-Trump movement QAnon triumphed in her House primary runoff election in Georgia, all but ensuring that she will represent a deep-red district in Congress.
The ascension of Marjorie Taylor Greene, who embraces a conspiracy theory that the F.B.I. has labeled a potential domestic terrorism threat, came as six states held primary and runoff elections on Tuesday…
In Georgia, Ms. Greene defeated John Cowan, a neurosurgeon who is no less conservative or pro-Trump, according to The Associated Press, holding a lead of roughly 15 percentage points early Wednesday. The result is likely to unsettle mainstream Republicans, who have sought to publicly distance themselves from QAnon supporters running for congressional office this cycle even as they quietly support some of them.
Now, with Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, one of the most Republican in the country, likely to vote red in November, Ms. Greene is all but assured of getting the chance to put into action her talk of rooting out an imagined deep-state cabal of pedophile Satanists who are trying to take down President Trump.
QAnon, a conspiracy theory that has attracted a fervent following since it emerged from the troll-infested fringes of the internet nearly three years ago, has already inspired real-world violence, including the killing of a mob boss. Its supporters are slowly becoming a political force that some Republicans feel they cannot afford to alienate, even as the party struggles to distance itself from racist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
More than a dozen candidates who have expressed some degree of support for QAnon are running for Congress as Republicans, their path cleared by Mr. Trump’s own espousal of conspiracy theories.
Most are going to lose. But a few, Ms. Greene foremost among them, have managed to win. Declaring victory on Tuesday night, she said she was “just as fed up with what I’ve seen from spineless Republicans” as she was with Democrats.
“The Republican establishment was against me,” Ms. Greene said. “The D.C. swamp is against me. And the lying fake news media hates my guts. It’s a badge of honor. It’s not about me winning. This is a referendum on every single one of us, on our beliefs.”
She seems nice:
In other words, she’s an average Fox News viewer.
Just in case you need a quick primer on what exactly QAnon is, I thought this was pretty good:
It’s pretty obvious that the right is following the Russian playbook (or is it the other way around?) thinking it can win by splitting the Democrats. They are a little confused at the moment with Kamal Harris, trying to say that she’s a far-left liberal while at the same time claiming that she isn’t really black so it’s unclear exactly how they think this is going to work.
We know it didn’t work with Obama. Recall that in 2007 when he announced his run for the presidency this came up:
[I]t’s clear that Obama’s racial identity gives pause to some. He is not the descendant of African slaves, but is the son of a white mother and a Kenyan father, so he alone gets questions about just who he is.
“My black activist friends from here to Boston say that you are not black, you are multiracial, and I want to know how you self-identify?” he was asked at a recent event.
Obama replies: “I self-identify as African American – that’s how I’m treated and that’s how I’m viewed. I’m proud of it.”
Obama was hugely popular with the black community who all, obviously, did see him as one of their own. Many Black Americans have a mixed race heritage, going all the way back to slave days and more recently as a result of the culture being much more accepting of interracial relationships. I would imagine there is still some discussion of all this in the black community which is, of course, fine. But as an electoral issue, it’s not particularly potent.
Never ones to fail to misunderstand the electorate, Trump’s GOP thinks it’s being cute by questioning Harris’s Black bona fides in exactly the same way (as if they have any standing to question it or even pretend like it matters to them.) Apparently, they believe they can get African Americans to vote for Trump by saying that this Black woman isn’t really black. I don’t think it’s going to work.
Harris’s father was Jamaican and her mother is Indian. They were both professors and civil right activists in California. Harris herself went to Howard University and has identified as Black her whole life. But these right-wingers are actually saying that because Harris’s father had a white ancestor he isn’t really Black! Seriously!
This thead from Mary Beth Williams is very informative on Jamaica’s racial history. Kamala Harris is Black and she is Indian-American, she is the child of immigrants and she is an educated, accomplished woman. She is the future of America.
The right can try to divide on this, but I doubt it will work. They are living in the past.
Update: More ratfucking from the Trump campaign:
President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, met privately last weekend with Kanye West, the rapper who has filed petitions to get on the November ballots for president in several states.
The meeting took place in Colorado, where Mr. Kushner was traveling with his wife, Ivanka Trump, those familiar with the meeting said. Mr. West had been camping in Colorado with his family, and afterward flew to Telluride to meet with Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump, but was not accompanied by his wife, Kim Kardashian West, those with knowledge of the meeting said.
After an inquiry, Mr. West tweeted Tuesday evening: “I’m willing to do a live interview with the New York Time about my meeting with Jared,” adding that they had discussed a book about Black empowerment called “PowerNomics.” He did not elaborate on his meeting with Mr. Kushner in a brief follow-up interview. He instead expressed anger about abortion rates among Black women and said he didn’t reflexively support Democrats.
A White House spokesman did not respond to an email seeking comment.
The meeting came at a notable time. Mr. West recently criticized Joseph R. Biden Jr. in an interview with Forbes. He did not deny that he is acting as a spoiler to damage the Biden campaign with his effort to get on several ballots in states like Colorado, where he will appear. It’s less clear that his name will be on the ballot in Wisconsin, where his signature petitions are being challenged.
By the way …
The story behind it:
*And yes, I know that Harris’s story of the foreclosure crisis is distorted in that ad. — she was very late to the party. She will no doubt have to answer for her mixed record on criminal justice. One hopes that the last few years have finally wrung out the compulsion in the Democratic Party to split the difference on these issues and that this generation of leaders has seen the light.
According to Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman, they think today’s suburban women will look at …(checks notes) Kamala Harris and freak out in terror. They are more out of touch than even I thought they were:
Donald Trump didn’t expect Joe Biden to pick Kamala Harris as his running mate. “He thought Biden would choose Karen Bass,” a Republican briefed on Trump’s thinking said. Trump’s view, according to sources close to the White House, was that Biden would prefer a candidate with Bass’s low national profile and one who wouldn’t outshine him. Trump was also hopeful that Bass, a California congresswoman, would join the ticket given her record of making positive comments about the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. “Trump thought Bass would help him with the Cubans in Florida,” the source said.
Trump advisers are split over Biden’s decision to nominate Harris, the first Black and South Asian woman on a major party ticket. Some see the California senator as a Barack Obama–level star and skilled debater who will appeal to a changing America. “The demographics favor the Democrats. Trump still thinks this is Ronald Reagan’s America, and it’s not,” said the Republican source. “The other problem is the campaign risks a backlash in the #MeToo age if they attack her too personally.”
Other Trumpworld insiders are thrilled at the opportunity to define Harris as a radical leftist, a portrayal echoed Tuesday night on Fox News. “She’s going to help with the base, and that’s where it ends,” a Trump adviser predicted. “She’ll scare the shit out of suburban women. How great is this?” Trump has taken to stoking fears that a Biden victory will fuel unrest in “Democrat-run cities,” a barely disguised racist appeal that he picked up again on Wednesday morning following the Harris announcement. “The ‘suburban housewife’ will be voting for me,” he tweeted. The adviser added that Biden would soon regret choosing a high-wattage running mate. “This is not Mike Pence to Donald Trump or Joe Biden to Obama. Kamala is going to be the candidate. She’ll be constantly overshadowing him. In three to four weeks, Biden is going to realize he made a dumb move.”
At his press briefing on Tuesday, Trump called Harris “nasty,” a preview of the misogynist playbook he’s likely to follow in the months ahead. According to sources who have spoken with Trump, his view of the race is increasingly optimistic. Sources said he’s been pleased so far with new campaign manager Bill Stepien and senior strategist Jason Miller, and sees the numbers in swing states improving. “Trump thinks the polls are tightening,” a Republican close to the campaign told me.
One reason for Trump’s optimism may be that he’s living in a right-wing-media bubble where Biden is presented as a cartoon of a doddering old man controlled by antifa, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—and now Harris. (“Slow Joe” and “Phony Kamala” is how the campaign is already framing the pair.) “Trump keeps asking people, when are voters going to realize Biden is mentally out to lunch?” a Republican briefed on the conversations told me. “But he’s only seeing clips of Biden screwing up.”
As Trump blasts Biden’s age and absence from the trail, Trump campaign staffers are privately frustrated that the president is refusing to get out there himself. Since his disastrous and sparsely attended Tulsa rally in June, Trump has largely cocooned himself inside the White House, leaving only for a few public events and visits to his private clubs. “Trump has told the campaign he only wants to do one or two events a week. They keep putting ideas in front of him, and he is telling them ‘no,’” a Republican close to the campaign told me. One Republican close to the West Wing speculated that Trump doesn’t like doing small events like factory visits because they promote other people’s companies. “He thinks, Why should I do that?” the Republican said.
What would get Trump out of the White House, of course, are rallies. Trump has been fuming to aides about the coronavirus surge, lately blaming Florida governor Ron DeSantis for the exploding numbers. “He thinks Ron has made it a lot worse,” said a Republican who spoke to Trump about the Sunshine State. According to a campaign adviser, Trump is pushing the campaign to figure out a way for him to hold rallies. The current thinking is to plan them outdoors. On Monday, Trump floated that he might hold his convention acceptance speech at Gettysburg. “Rallies are his jam,” the adviser said. “Trump won’t be happy until he is doing multiple rallies a day.”
Trump and his sycophants are all insecure men who are terrified of feeling emasculated in the presence of an accomplished woman. They assume all men are just like them and they assume that all white women are racists just as they are. They are incorrect.
Trump’s shock that Biden could possibly choose a rival shows, once again, how historically ignorant he is. There’s actually a tradition of doing that. Even aside from Lincoln’s famous team of rivals, more recently there’s Kennedy and Johnson, Reagan and Bush, Obama and Clinton and many others. A good politician tries to bring their rivals into the fold and consolidate the party’s factions. Trump, being a narcissistic moron, doesn’t understand that and frankly, doesn’t care about doing that.
And can we take just a moment to enjoy the knife in Ron DeSantis’s back? Poor Ron. He does exactly what Dear Leader tells him to do and when it makes everything worse, as it was destined to do, he gets blamed for the failure. This is how it works.
The White House chief of staff is one of the most powerful jobs in a presidential administration. According to Chris Whipple, author of “The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency,” the “responsibilities of the chief of staff are both managerial and advisory and can include the following duties”:
One would expect that such a job would require someone with managerial experience and a knowledge of government functions, as well as the trust of the president and other powerful political players. It’s obviously a tough, demanding position.Advertisement:
President Trump has gone through almost as many chiefs of staff in three and a half years as Barack Obama did in two terms. His first was former Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus, who was in so far over his head he didn’t make it past the first six months. He was replaced by retired Gen. John Kelly, who had first been appointed as Trump’s secretary of homeland security. The hope was that a skilled leader with management experience could instill discipline and tame the palace intrigue, but in the end, Kelly found that Trump was uncontrollable and all else flowed from that so he was out as well.
Then came the former Tea Party congressman from South Carolina, Mick Mulvaney, who had been serving simultaneously as head of the Office of Management and Budget and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. (Multiple appointments, often of people who serve only in an “acting” capacity, are a hallmark of the Trump administration.) This past spring, with the coronavirus pandemic raging in the Northeast, Trump lost faith in Mulvaney too and he was “moved” to the job of special envoy for Northern Ireland. His replacement was another Republican congressman, former Freedom Caucus leader Mark Meadows of North Carolina. As shocking as this may be, it appears he may be the worst one yet.
Meadows entered Congress in 2012, two years after Mulvaney, and both were part of the Tea Party surge. But while Mulvaney has an impressive CV from Georgetown and the University of North Carolina, practiced law for many years and held statewide office in South Carolina before running for Congress, Meadows was pretty much a cipher before he was elected.
In 2018, Meadows was revealed to have exaggerated his college career — he only received an AA degree rather than a BA, as he had claimed. He ran a restaurant in North Carolina for a while and has owned real estate development companies both in Florida and North Carolina. His previous political experience came as a county-level Republican chairman and as a member of North Carolina’s economic development board. That was pretty much it until he ran for Congress eight years ago.
He won that first race in a recently gerrymandered district with little trouble, since he had an R after his name. Meadows roared into Congress carrying the Tea Party banner and started making waves almost immediately. Like the rest of his class, which felt they had a mandate to do everything humanly possible to obstruct the Obama administration’s agenda, he became a leader of the right-wing faction that later branded itself the Freedom Caucus.
After being in office for only eight months, Meadows made a name for himself as the author of a letter demanding that the Republican House majority zero out all funding for Obamacare in the must-pass spending bill, threatening to shut down the government otherwise. He got 79 of his colleagues to sign the letter and it squeezed then-Speaker John Boehner into holding a vote on it, which Boehner did not want to do amid already delicate budget negotiations. Meadows was not a team player:Advertisement:
“This type of vote could potentially hurt our long term goals. I understand that,” he said. But he said that’s not his concern.”My job first is to make sure I represent the people back home,” Meadows said. “I don’t believe that when I get here that people expect me to look at the political implications. That’s for somebody else to focus on.”For him, getting rid of Obamacare is priority No. 1. “[T]o ignore that would be to ignore our duty to represent the people back home,” he said.
He said his constituents wanted him to fight against Obamacare “regardless of consequences.” That gambit was just the first of many more attempts to ditch the Affordable Care Act, shut down the government, wreck the U.S. credit rating and otherwise cause untold damage to the country.
Meadows was 100% a creation of the Tea Party at the height of its power. Activists in the movement interviewed him, vetted him and got him elected. His comments above reflected the movement’s simpleminded arrogance that represented the final, steep decline of what had once been a functioning political party.Advertisement:
By 2015, Meadows was a major power in the House Freedom Caucus — essentially a creation or offshoot of the Tea Party movement — which successfully ousted Boehner for failing to deliver enough of the Tea Party agenda. He soon became a major thorn in the side of Boehner’s successor, Paul Ryan, for exactly the same reason.
So it was somewhat surprising to see Meadows embrace Donald Trump wholeheartedly in 2016, even joining him on stage and leading the crowd in exuberant chants of “Lock her up!” chants. Whatever else Trump may be, he’s not much of a Tea Partier. But Meadows made it clear from the beginning that he sees his job as giving his far-right voters exactly what they want, no matter what, and they wanted Trump. It wasn’t long before he was backing primary challenges to recalcitrant GOP representatives who failed to show sufficient fealty to the president.
By 2019, Meadows was so deeply bound to Trump that he announced he wouldn’t run for re-election and made it known that he would love to be his chief of staff. A few months later the prize was his, and according to this report from the Washington Post he has — unsurprisingly — not only failed to quell the White House chaos but reinforced the president’s worst instincts. Meadows reduces everything to partisan politics, is openly contemptuous of scientists, doctors and other experts and eggs on Trump to play hardball no matter what, in the middle of the pandemic crisis and the ensuing economic disaster.Advertisement:
In other words, just as he blindly did the bidding of the Tea Party without regard to the consequences, Meadows is now channeling their new leader, with the same disastrous results for his party and the country. It’s ironic that the man who founded a group that was often called the “Caucus of No” has turned out to be the perfect yes-man — the last thing America needs in Donald Trump’s White House.
Acting President Donald Trump has not decided where he will accept the Republican Party’s nomination for president two weeks from now. Trump having bungled/sabotaged/forfeited the national response to the coronavirus, the pandemic has raged all year. By now, 165,000 Americans are dead with millions infected and both major party conventions largely virtual.
Trump suggested he might give his speech from the White House lawn, placing executive branch staffers and cabinet members at legal risk for Hatch Act violations. (Not that he cares.) Should that location prove too problematic, Trump suggested using the Gettysburg battlefield from which President Abraham Lincoln gave his famous address.
I like the Gettysburg idea. The Devil’s Den below Little Round Top seems fitting. Or if that spot is too inaccessible, Trump could speak from Seminary Ridge where Gen. Robert E. Lee launched Pickett’s Charge effectively ending the Confederacy.
After over a century and a half, the nation is still processing the legacy of the Civil War. The North won that war, but the South won Reconstruction. Defeated Southerners imposed Jim Crow on freed slaves, reestablishing white domination for another hundred years enforced through a reign of terror. Monuments erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy to whitewash treason as a noble fight for states’ rights (the “cult of the lost cause”) are only lately coming down across the country. America just laid to rest Rep. John Lewis of Georgia who was beaten unconscious by Alabama state troopers at Selma, Alabama, on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965 in the fight to overturn Jim Crow. The Edmund Pettus Bridge there still bears the name of a former Confederate brigadier general, U.S. senator, and leader of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan.
Trump’s revanchism, his racism, his know-nothingism, and his contempt for democratic rule is the end-product of half a century of movement conservatism and white reactionaries’ response to the election of the country’s first black president one hundred and forty-three years after the end of the Civil War. trump speaking from the deathbed of the Confederacy would be a fitting coda to enduring institutional racism, and long overdue. Let his presidency and the Confederacy die once and for all.
Tuesday night, the Democrats’ presumptive nominee for president, former Vice President Joe Biden, announced his pick of running mate: Senator Kamala Harris of California. Her mother from India and her father from Jamaica, Harris represents a transition from the elite, white male culture that has controlled this country for its entire history.
The transition that began with the Civil War and took a hiatus for 100 years advanced again with the Civil Rights movement and passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. It took nearly half a century more before Barack Obama won the presidency. Biden offers himself not as a breakthrough figure, but as a transitional president: racial, cultural, and generational. The left may feel the transition is not coming fast enough, but whatever policy faults it finds in Biden and Harris, Obama’s vice president recognizes change in this country is inevitable, desirable, and essential to progress. There is no turning back. There is no great “again.”
David Von Drehle of the Washington Post gives us a taste of what a Trump acceptance speech might sound like delivered from the Confederate side of the Gettysburg battlefield:
“Four score and seven years ago. Not everyone knows a score. People ask me, they say, ‘What’s a score?’ Fauci the other day. What’s a score? Not everyone knows. The score is the best it’s ever been. Under Trump, 87. Under Obama, not so much.
“Eighty-seven tremendous, tremendous years ago — and some years that were not so great, frankly — our fathers brought forth; also the mothers, the great suburban mothers. Biden wants to take away their dream. Our fathers and our mothers brought forth a new nation. How they did it: not so good. Not so perfect. A lot of people got hurt. Some were bad people, but a lot of them were good. The king of England, not everyone agrees he was so bad, but now they have a queen. Very few people know this.
“Someone told me Thomas Jefferson ate by himself at the White House and was the smartest one ever. I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I frankly think my IQ — people tell me it is tremendous. The doctors see and they can’t believe it. They say, ‘Mr. President, this is unbelievable!’ It’s called a ‘cognitive test.’ Biden’s afraid to take it. Sleepy Joe.
“My people, the best people, they tell me Thomas Jefferson made a good deal when he bought Louisiana, the great state of Louisiana, for 3 cents an acre. I say he must have read my book.
It is time to close the book on Trump’s misrule and on the anti-American zombie culture behind him. It was over a century and a half ago.
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Medical science may cure COVID eventually but for right now, the old ways still work:
In the 1300s, Europeans lived in fear of the plague claiming lives across the continent. In 2020, Europeans face the threat of the coronavirus, a pandemic that has killed more than 728,000 worldwide.
While much about life has changed between the two cataclysmic health crises, one thing has not: mankind’s thirst for wine.
Between the wrath of the Black Death in the 1300s and the Italian Plague in the 1600s, wine merchants in the Italian region of Tuscany built “wine windows” to protect buyers and sellers from coming into close contact.
The socially distant precaution was ahead of its time.
“It’s kind of amazing because people didn’t know about germs in those days,” said Mary Forrest, one of the founding members of the Associazione Buchette del Vino, or Wine Windows Association. The association is a nonprofit established five years ago to document and protect the historic structures. “People didn’t know where the plague came from, they didn’t discover that till much later,” she says.
The windows fell out of fashion over the centuries, but the coronavirus outbreak has inspired their comeback. Businesses in Florence are opening their wine windows once again to sell wine, cocktails, gelato and coffee, Lonely Planet reported.
In May, Osteria Delle Brache restaurant and bar posted photos on its Facebook page of an employee passing an Aperol spritz through its wine window, marked with an Associazione Buchette del Vino bronze plaque confirming its authenticity. “We continue the traditions,” the post reads.
Travelers looking for the historic wine windows can use the Associazione Buchette del Vino’s interactive map that marks the locations of known landmarks. The map updates nearly every week, as people hear about their project and reach out to contribute. Forrest says they’ve documented at least 150 in downtown Florence alone.
Forrest says she’s unsure whether the trend will be able to keep growing as many of the wine windows aren’t located on businesses, but in former palaces that are now offices and private family residences. But whether or not wine windows continue to remain functional after the pandemic, travelers can admire them for their individuality.
“There aren’t any two alike it seems,” Forrest says. “There’s this infinite variation in this very simple thing and [it] makes you realize the human imagination knows no bounds.”
Some things never change … not even pandemics.
Aaaaand:
The response? Get ready:
Meh… You’d think they could have come up with something better than this out of the box.
Even if she wasn’t your first choice, you’ve gotta love this: