A few months ago, I was at an airport, everyone around me had their masks on, or just about everyone, and I turn around to see someone on their laptop and I swear to goodness, it was a Tumblr dashboard, and I was like, “OMG, are people still DOING that?” And I just remembered that that had happened, and I came back to my Tumblr tab, et voila, and hello.
Please please please, let’s continue to not let the stupid in this country dictate how things are going to be.
Things are bleak right now to be sure. Just a few days ago we had some dumbass opining about the efficacy of “injecting” disinfectants and shining “really strong light” at people to stop this coronavirus thing.
That’s not the way it works, “stable genius.”
Besides the moron-in-chief’s continuing effort to undermine both the public health and our democracy, I say this:
Don’t let stupid rule. Keep doing what we’re doing instead: stay home. Stay healthy. Don’t be a vector for this pernicious disease. Continue to flatten the curve.
The end of this terrible thing won’t get here immediately. But please don’t delay its arrival by listening to ANYTHING that fucking idiot in the White House has to say.
Care for each other. Be kind. We will get through this together.
President Trump has relentlessly used his bully pulpit to decry Latino migration as 'an invasion of our country.' He has demonized undocumented immigrants as 'thugs' and 'animals.' He has defended the detention of migrant children, hundreds of whom have been held in squalor. And he has warned that without a wall to prevent people from crossing the border from Mexico, America would no longer be America.
'How do you stop these people? You can’t,' Trump lamented at a May rally in Panama City Beach, Fla. Someone in the crowd yelled back one idea: “Shoot them.” The audience of thousands cheered and Trump smiled. Shrugging off the suggestion, he quipped, “Only in the Panhandle can you get away with that statement.”
On Saturday, a 21-year-old white man entered a shopping center in El Paso, according to police, and allegedly decided to 'shoot them.' Inside a crowded Walmart in a vibrant border city visited daily by thousands of Mexicans, a late-morning back-to-school shopping scene turned into a pool of blood. Twenty people died, and dozens were wounded.
After yet another mass slaying, the question surrounding the president is no longer whether he will respond as other presidents once did, but whether his words contributed to the carnage.
Since the moment Trump rode down his gold-plated escalator four years ago to start his renegade run for the White House, us-against-them language about immigrants has been a consistent and defining feature of his campaign and now of his presidency. Absent from his repertoire has been a forceful repudiation of the white nationalism taking rise on his watch.
Authorities in El Paso have not announced a motive in what they call an act of domestic terrorism, but at the center of their investigation is an anti-immigrant manifesto. Officials believe the shooter posted it shortly before he opened fire but continue to investigate.
The Washington Post, “’How Do You Stop These People?’ Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric Looms Over El Paso Massacre.”
Smells like complicity to me.
Just so we’re clear: a bunch of white, male Republicans are hell bent on pushing through a rapist to the Supreme Court based solely on the fact that, once there, he’d overturn a woman’s right to choose.
A man armed with a shotgun and smoke grenades stormed into the newsroom of a community newspaper chain in Maryland’s capital on Thursday afternoon, killing five staff members, injuring two others and prompting law enforcement agencies across the country to provide protection at the headquarters of media organizations.
The suspect, Jarrod W. Ramos, 38, was taken into custody at the scene and was charged on Friday morning with five counts of first-degree murder. He had a long history of conflict with the Capital Gazette, which produces a number of local newspapers along Maryland’s shore, suing journalists there for defamation and waging a social media campaign against them.
“This was a targeted attack on the Capital Gazette,” said William Krampf, acting chief of the Anne Arundel County Police Department. “This person was prepared to shoot people. His intent was to cause harm.”
A bail hearing for Mr. Ramos was scheduled for 10:30 a.m. Friday in Annapolis, according to Maryland court records, which did not list a lawyer for him but said Mr. Ramos was eligible to be represented by a public defender.
The chilling attack was covered in real time by some of the journalists who found themselves under siege. A summer intern, Anthony Messenger, tweeted out the address of the office building where the newsroom is based, saying, “please help us.” A crime reporter, Phil Davis, described how the gunman “shot through the glass door to the office” before opening fire on employees.
“There is nothing more terrifying than hearing multiple people get shot while you’re under your desk and then hear the gunman reload,” Mr. Davis wrote.
Even as the authorities continued to pore over the newsroom for clues, the Capital Gazette announced Thursday that it would be publishing an edition on Friday.
Shortly after 9 p.m., several tired reporters and a photographer from the Capital Gazette were filing stories and photographs from their laptops, set up in the back of a silver pickup truck in the parking lot of the Westfield Annapolis Mall, across the street from their newsroom.
E. B. Furgurson III, a reporter, stood in a blue shirt and khaki pants with his colleagues. He had decided to go get lunch around the time the shooting happened, so he was not in the building at the time.
When asked if they were putting out a paper on Friday, he said fiercely: “Hell, yes.”
His colleague Joshua McKerrow, a photographer, said he was going to pick his daughter up for her birthday when he was called about the shooting. He rushed back. He had a hard time finishing sentences.
“Our newspaper is one of the oldest newspapers in the U.S.,” he said. “It’s a real newspaper and like every newspaper, it is a family.” He began to cry. Then he added:
“We will be here tomorrow. We are not going anywhere.”
The New York Times, “5 People Dead in Shooting at Maryland’s Capital Gazette Newsroom.”
A reminder that 1) Guns are still being used in mass murders, and 2) our president has labeled journalists as “the real enemy.”
Front page, The Capital-Gazette, Annapolis, MD, Friday 29 June 2018.
When asked if the paper was going to print today -- following the massacre of five of its journalists and staffers -- one reporter answered “Hell, yes.”
(via the Newseum)
It sure looks as if President Trump was hoodwinked in Singapore.
Trump made a huge concession — the suspension of military exercises with South Korea. That’s on top of the broader concession of the summit meeting itself, security guarantees he gave North Korea and the legitimacy that the summit provides his counterpart, Kim Jong-un.
Within North Korea, the “very special bond” that Trump claimed to have formed with Kim will be portrayed this way: Kim forced the American president, through his nuclear and missile tests, to accept North Korea as a nuclear equal, to provide security guarantees to North Korea, and to cancel war games with South Korea that the North has protested for decades.
In exchange for these concessions, Trump seems to have won astonishingly little. In a joint statement, Kim merely “reaffirmed” the same commitment to denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula that North Korea has repeatedly made since 1992.
“They were willing to de-nuke,” Trump crowed at his news conference after his meetings with Kim. Trump seemed to believe he had achieved some remarkable agreement, but the concessions were all his own.
The most remarkable aspect of the joint statement was what it didn’t contain. There was nothing about North Korea freezing plutonium and uranium programs, nothing about destroying intercontinental ballistic missiles, nothing about allowing inspectors to return to nuclear sites, nothing about North Korea making a full declaration of its nuclear program, nothing about a timetable, nothing about verification, not even any clear pledge to permanently halt testing of nuclear weapons or long-range missiles.
Kim seems to have completely out-negotiated Trump, and it’s scary that Trump doesn’t seem to realize this. For now Trump has much less to show than past negotiators who hammered out deals with North Korea like the 1994 Agreed Framework, which completely froze the country’s plutonium program with a rigorous monitoring system.
Trump made a big deal in his news conference about recovering the remains of American soldiers from the Korean War, but this is nothing new. Back in 1989, on my first trip to North Korea, officials there made similar pledges about returning remains, and indeed North Korea has returned some remains over the years. It’s not clear how many more remain.
Trump claimed an “excellent relationship” with Kim, and it certainly is better for the two leaders to be exchanging compliments rather than missiles. In a sense, Trump has eased the tensions that he himself created when he threatened last fall to “totally destroy” North Korea. I’m just not sure a leader should get credit for defusing a crisis that he himself created.
There’s still plenty we don’t know and lots of uncertainty about the future. But for now, the bottom line is that there’s no indication that North Korea is prepared to give up its nuclear weapons, and Trump didn’t achieve anything remotely as good as the Iran nuclear deal, which led Iran to eliminate 98 percent of its enriched uranium.
There was also something frankly weird about an American president savaging Canada’s prime minister one day and then embracing the leader of the most totalitarian country in the world.
“He’s a very talented man,” Trump said of Kim. “I also learned that he loves his country very much.”
In an interview with Voice of America, Trump said “I like him” and added: “He’s smart, loves his people, he loves his country.”
Trump praised Kim in the news conference and, astonishingly, even adopted North Korean positions as his own, saying that the United States military exercises in the region are “provocative.” That’s a standard North Korean propaganda line. Likewise, Trump acknowledged that human rights in North Korea constituted a “rough situation,” but quickly added that “it’s rough in a lot of places, by the way.” (Note that a 2014 United Nations report stated that North Korean human rights violations do “not have any parallel in the contemporary world.”)
Incredibly, Trump told Voice of America that he had this message for the North Korean people: “I think you have somebody that has a great feeling for them. He wants to do right by them and we got along really well.”
It’s breathtaking to see an American president emerge as a spokesman for the dictator of North Korea.
NICHOLAS KRISTOF, writing in the New York Times, “Trump Was Outfoxed In Singapore.”
Kristof is correct and no one at all is surprised.
THE DICTATORS DANCE President Trump met Kim Jong-un in a carefully choreographed encounter in Singapore on Monday, opening a new chapter between the United States and North Korea. The two are expected to... well, no one quite knows what to expect. (Photo: Doug Mills / The New York Times)
Wisdom comes from the unlikeliest places. And on Saturday, Ben Bowling, the valedictorian of Bell County High School in Pineville, Ky., made an inspirational appeal that left his graduating classmates and their parents dumbstruck.
“This is the part of my speech where I share some inspirational quotes I found on Google,” he told the packed auditorium. “‘Don’t just get involved. Fight for your seat at the table. Better yet, fight for a seat at the head of the table’ — Donald J. Trump.”
The crowd burst into applause. President Trump is quite popular in Pineville and the surrounding area, which is the heart of coal country and overwhelmingly supported the president in the 2016 election after he promised to bring coal jobs back to America.
Mr. Bowling, though, wasn’t finished.
“Just kidding,” he said. “That was Barack Obama.”
The cheering abruptly stopped. The crowd went mostly silent. There was a lone boo.
Mr. Bowling was quoting a May 2012 commencement speech President Obama gave to the graduating class of Barnard College in New York City. He offered this message to graduates of the women’s college then: “Women shape not only their own destiny but the destiny of this nation and of this world.”
“He’s very politically aware,” Richard Gambrel, the principal of Bell County High School, said of Mr. Bowling.
Mr. Bowling, 18, and his parents, who live in Middlesboro, Ky., declined to be interviewed.
The valedictorian, though, told The Louisville Courier Journal on Saturday that he quoted Mr. Obama because the president offered a good message. He was aware how the crowd would react, even if he shared it in a lighthearted and funny way.
“Most people wouldn’t like it if I used it,” he told The Courier Journal. “So I thought I’d use Donald Trump’s name. It is southeastern Kentucky after all.”
The New York Times, “Kentucky Crowds Cheers Valedictorian’s Trump Quote, Then Learns Obama Said It”
Gavin Newsom, the Democratic lieutenant governor and former mayor of San Francisco, took a major step Tuesday in his bid to become California’s next governor, capturing one of two spots on the November ballot as the state moved closer to the end of the era of Gov. Jerry Brown.
John Cox, a Republican businessman backed by President Trump, captured the other spot, setting up what is — at best — a very long-shot bid for Mr. Cox in a decidedly Democratic state where Mr. Trump lost by nearly four million votes.
Mr. Cox’s showing represented a major tactical victory for national Republicans as they seek to protect seven Republican-held congressional seats in California that Democrats are targeting as they try to recapture the House. Republican leaders, including Kevin McCarthy, the House majority leader who comes from central California, had feared that having no Republicans running for a high-profile statewide office would diminish turnout among party voters in the fall.
Importantly, Democrats seemed poised to avoid the disaster they feared in House races: Being shut out of the November balloting under the state’s so-called “top-two’’ primary system, in which only the top two finishers advance to the general election. But many of the districts had crowded primaries and in some of them votes were still being counted early Wednesday morning.
The most-watched races here were seven congressional districts that Hillary Clinton carried in 2016 and that are now held by Republicans. Democrats are aiming to capture those seats in November, a linchpin of their strategy to take back control of the House.
The November race between Mr. Newsom and Mr. Cox promises to be, in part, a fight over Mr. Trump, and one in which the liberal Democrats who embraced Mr. Newsom have a clear advantage. The election is taking place at a critical time as California is enmeshed in a protracted fight with the Trump administration on range of battlefields, including environmental protections, immigration and offshore oil drilling. And on Tuesday night, both candidates invoked Mr. Trump in dueling remarks to supporters.
“It looks like voters will have a real choice this November — between a governor who is going to stand up to Donald Trump and a foot soldier in his war on California,” Mr. Newsom told hundreds of supporters at a San Francisco nightclub, as he pledged to push for guaranteed health care for all and “a Marshall Plan for affordable housing.”
The New York Times, “Gavin Newsom and John Cox to Compete in California for Governor”