Tag Archives: President Donald Trump

Joel Clement Resigned today

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You will remember Clement as the whistle blower at the Department of the Interior who was harassed for showing how climate change affects communities in Alaska. He was removed from his job by Fake Interior Secretory Zinke and given a new job removing staples from paperwork or something similar. Zinke similarly reassigned several others at around the same time. The inspector general has been investigating this but nothing has come of that yet.

Clement hung on for a long time but today he left his position. According to the Washington Post:

“Keeping my voice is more important than keeping my job,” he said. “I have not found another job yet. I have vast contacts inside the agency and outside. I do believe I can be a strong voice to resisting what the Zinke team is doing.”

Clement said workers at Interior are outraged by Zinke’s comment in a speech slightly more than a week ago that they are disloyal. “I got 30 percent of the crew that’s not loyal to the flag,” Zinke said, adding that policy-decision positions should be shipped from Washington to Western cities, such as Denver.

“Everyone is pissed here about his comments about loyalty. It’s the buzz in the building. You hear snide remarks all day long at how ludicrous that was. They clearly have lost respect for the leadership of that organization,” Clement said.

Why Donald Trump Is Being So Bad To Puerto Rico

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Visiting Arkansas, hanging around briefly with some people in the Real Estate business, I found a lot of hatred of Mexicans, whom they unimaginatively referred to as “spics” but making it clear they were talking about Mexicans, not some other spics. Sitting with a group of people talking about racism in an urban neighborhood in near Minneapolis, I found zero mention of dislike between whites per se and blacks per se. But Poles and Tibetans, they were very much disliked by people who were mostly but not all white. Years ago I remember being shocked by a fellow anthropologist who expressed a hatred of Cubans. This hatred stemmed from the death of a friend, gunned down by a Cuban criminal, who was in the US because of Mariel, in the Milwaukee area, a significant ultimate destination for Cuban refugees at that time. Where I grew up, all the white people sorted out and looked down upon each other by closely defined European ethnicity, and all the white people feared and distrusted all the black people, and there was one Japanese guy. But, we knew about, were told about, Puerto Ricans. That was in upstate New York, and New York City had a lot of Puerto Ricans, to the extent that as a child I thought Puerto Rico was an island just a few miles off New York City (because I was told that, don’t know why). White New Yorkers historically disdain Puerto Ricans because people from Puerto Rico represent one of the largest Hispanic groups in that area, or at least, did for many decades, while certain people were growing up and doing business.

It is not true that racism is random, arbitrary, or non deterministic. It is not build in, it is not always the same. Racism emerges with a strong historical context and different racisms look different for discernible reasons. American racism is special in its own way, with its own history, not the same as other racism, and there is an interesting characteristic to it. Most everybody who is white dislikes, distrusts, or disdains, the people of color, mainly African Americans. Recent immigrants of any ethnicity or geographic origins are generally disdained. That is all expected. But, since The Americas are a complex web of mostly Hispanic cultures with diverse and sometimes very complicated histories (Who knew history was so complicated? Nobody knew!) that part of American racism tends to have very specific parameters. Arkansas landowners rent to Mexican migrants. Minnesota city dwellers have a long menu of immigrants from diverse places across Eurasia and Africa, and multiple New World countries. It is a good thing Minnesota has a good educational system, because racists here have to know a LOT just to know whom to disdain. My Anthro colleague was from the Milwaukee area, where anti-Cuban sentiment had festered. If you were not from a Mariel recipient area, or near the mysterious Puerto Rican Islands of New York Harbor, or a Landlord to the Mexicans, you might not know much, or care much, about those specific groups. In short, white anti-other feelings are not uniform or consistent, and vary with the place the particular white person grew up and the particular way history has shaped their hatred.

All this is a long way of saying that Donald Trump hates Puerto Ricans because he is a white dude from Queens of a certain age, who was involved in real estaate, and also most would say, a white supremacist. I’m not sure if the rest of the country, outside of New York, is quite seeing this or understanding it. A hurricane during a Trump administration could happen anywhere other than Puerto Rico, and Trump would respond less disdainfully and stupidly. A hurricane hitting Puerto Rico during the Trump administration is not so much of a disaster in Donald Trump’s eyes. It isn’t just that Trump likes other people better, or is getting Puerto Rico wrong. No. Trump is a pretty right wing privileged real-estate connected white guy from Queens. Dollars to donuts says he likes that a hurricane hit Puerto Rico. Keep that in mind while listening to what he says and watching his body language. It will all make sense, in a sick and demented sort of way, if you do.

Trump: Puerto Rico Did Not Suffer A Real Catastrophe, And It Is All Fixed Anyway

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Today, Donald Trump told Puerto Rico that they dodged a bullet, that the hurricane that hit them was not a real catastrophe, that only a couple of people died, that he, Trump, is doing a great job, but would Puerto Rico please try to spend less money on fixing things up.

Well, I’m certainly glad that problem is managed. Great work!

Oh wait …

Is it too early to lighten the mood a bit?

People who voted for Jill Stein were tricked, and we are all paying for it

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Or so it seems.

Donald Trump won the 2016 election with 306 votes to Hillary Clinton’s 232 votes. That is a spread of 74 votes.

Clinton was likely to win in several states in which she lost, including Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, maybe Ohio, etc. In three states that could have gone either way, Jill Stein’s vote count was larger than the difference between Clinton and Trump. In Michigan, Trump won by 10,704 votes, Stein got 51,463 votes. In Pennsylvania, Trump won by 46,765 votes, Stein got 49,678 votes. In Wisconsin, Trump won by 22,177 votes, Stein got 31,006 votes.

If every Jill Stein vote would have been a Clinton Vote, it is likely that Clinton would have had 49 electoral votes more than she did have.

That alone would have put Clinton in the white house.

We now know that Russian hackers worked hard on getting people to vote for Stein. They spread around the idea that it was “safe” to vote for a third party candidate in states where the outcome was obvious anyway.

I told people this many times. I said, again and again, the logic that you can vote “safely” in a general election for a third party candidate in certain states is flawed for several reasons. One of those reasons, I said, is that you might only think the state is safe, and perhaps it is not.

Using Stein, who is known to have hobnobbed with Putin (which may or may not be relevant here), and I’m sure a few other trick here and there, the Russians may have given their guy Trump the three electoral college wins that put him in the White House.

We’ve learned this as part of the recent expose of Facebook’s blind cooperation with the Russians in the 2016 election. (Or maybe not all blind? We just don’t know yet. How hard might it have been for the Russians to play Zuckerberg?) We are about to find out if Twitter played a similar role.

It is valid, as well as lazy, to argue that, “but but it was other things too you can’t say this etc.” but the truth is that Stein hardly even ran in most states, got overall less than 1% of the vote.

So yes, it is possible to erase the Stein votes in three key states, and manage for Clinton to still lose in those states, but highly unlikely. It is very likely that the Stein vote was a significant contributor to what ultimately happened.

Putin would not be able to control US elections if two things were true. 1) Americans actually showed up to vote and 2) The percentage of gullible special snowflake ignorant voters was about half of what it apparently is.

Watch this:

How Twitter Starts The Next Big War, Unless You Act To Stop Them

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A pair of American B-1 Lancer bombers is flying north northeast along the border of North Korean air space. Accompanying the bombers is a squadron of F-15C Eagle fighter jets. The crews are aware of the fact that North Korea may have a policy of shoot first and ask questions later, as a response to a tweet by the Russian-installed president of the United States, in which he threatened to kill the psychopathic leader of North Korea.

(I fear for a big drop in Tom Clancy novels, as they are no longer challenging or outlandish. But I digress. Back to the bombers.)

There was never any intent for these bombers to move into North Korean air space. In fact, the bombers are not armed. This is an annoyance mission, mere saber rattling in response to North Korean rhetoric that was, in turn, a response to the tweet by the President.

Suddenly, a nearby RQ-4 Global Hawk Drone detects a pair of MiG-29s moving at high speed on an intercept path with the bombers and their accompanying F-15Cs. The MiGs are armed but they are under orders to harass but not fire on the American planes. However, the American fighters do not know their intentions, but they do know that there will be no opportunity to stop the MiGs from destroying the bombers if they chose to fire missiles over the next minute or so, unless they act now. So, the fighters turn towards the MiGs, lock on, and fire their AMRAAM misles.

The bombers change to a defensive course, and even as the last bits of the MiGs float at various speeds down to the sea after being exploded in mid air, American and North Korean fighter aircraft are scrambling on both sides of the demilitarized zone. More ominously, senior officers in the North Korean People’s Army Air Force, the United States Strategic Air Command, and the US Navy Pacific Command automatically move their missile firing units to ready alert and arm a variety of conventional and nuclear missiles, ready to launch in seconds.

While all this is happening, American President Donald Trump is in the White House. It is late at night, and he is in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet. At first, he just needed to pee, as is often the case with men of his age, with their increasingly swollen prostrates. But then he decided he wanted to spend a little more time in the privacy of his bathroom. With the door locked, he has had his smart phone out, and has been scrolling through the tweets from the special list he calls “Enemies_of_me,” and he is becoming increasingly agitated at the negativity. Many of the nasty tweets are about his handling of North Korea, since his earlier tweet that the North Koreans took, reasonably, as a declaration of war.

There is a knock at the bathroom door. It is Trump’s personal assistant.

“You have to go to the situation room, sir,” calls John. “They say they need you now.”

“Tell them I’ll come by in the morning,” the President responds.

“Sir, they say they need you now, I need you to buck up and come down the the situation room. They say it is urgent.”

“OK, OK, I’ll be there in the very near future. Did they say what is about?”

“Sir, they didn’t say but I think it is about Korea. North Korea.”

“OK, just one second. I’m coming.”

Time for one tweet, he thinks. But I’m going to make it a good one. How about this ….

Over the next hour, the era of nuclear threat ends and the beginning of the age of nuclear war begins.

Let’s pause for a moment and consider a couple of other stories.

In August, 2017, a Twitter user in Japan was bitten by a mosquito. He tweeted, “Bastard! Where do you get off biting me all over while I’m just trying to relax and watch TV? Die! (Actually you’re already dead).”

He was then banned by twitter.

Milo Yiannopoulos, white supremacist troll, was banned by Twitter for making racist comments.

Back in mid 2016, it was revealed that at least a couple of major companies decided to not buy Twitter (presumably at a high price) because they did not want to own a social networking venue in which bullies and bullying were so common. Perhaps in response to concern about this, Twitter may have increased its tendency to ban bullies, despite the fact that there manages to be an increasing number of certain kinds of accounts, notably those that are racist or white supremacist.

Yesterday, a friend of mine sent Trump a tweet that implied that Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump, had won the election. She was banned from Twitter.

So, clearly, the banning practices of Twitter have economic meaning. Clearly, Twitter can be very bad at making decisions about banning individuals, and has no clear or reasonable policy. (As I write this Twitter is promising to let everyone know what its policies really are, and how those policies allow Donald Trump to threaten to kill people to keep their accounts, while someone who gets snarky at the President gets banned.)

My point here is that Twitter is at sea, and Twitter is allowing something very dangerous to develop. Twitter is the vehicle by which Donald Trump has isolated America among world powers, it is the vehicle by which Trump has made repeated racist and sexist attacks on our own citizens, and now, it is the vehcile by which Trump is bringing the United States to the brink of war. One highly respected expert on US-North Korea relations puts our chance of conventional war with North Korea at about 50%, and the chance of nuclear war with North Korea at about 10%. Other experts see those numbers as low.

Because of Trump tweeting. And Trump gets to tweet because Twitter lets him.

Let it be said today, and remembered for all time, that every person who dies in any upcoming conflict with North Korea will have died in no small part because Twitter does not ban Donald Trump’s account.

Watch the following overview of US and North Korea conflict provided as context to the situation of this very morning:

Now, go to this tweet. Click on the little down arrow in the upper right, and chose “Report Tweet,” if you understand and agree with why this is a problem.

Note: the above tweet about blowing up Kim Jong-un is a fake tweet. Hard to tell, though, isn’t it?

How to understand the Trump-Russia scandal

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To understand the Trump-Russia scandal, I believe it is necessary to step way back and take the very long view. I’m not talking about going back to early 2016, or even the year before. Much farther.

I’m not going to make a claim in this post as to what happened and who did what. Rather, I’d like to present a hypothesis, a single interpretation of events, that may or may not be correct, but that is based on this long view.

Whatever did actually happen, it did involve, or somehow exclude, Donald Trump and a number of individuals with whom he has had long term relationships, and Vladimir Putin and individuals with whom he has had long term relationships, and of course, an overlapping set of individuals who fit in both categories.

The Trump real estate business, centered mainly on Donald Trump itself, involved Roger Stone, Paul Manafort,and others. There are allegations of connections between Trump and the mob, sufficient to get at least one project denied in 1987. Manafort and Stone had long time connections with Russian interests and individuals, going way back in time, and there were numerous Trump-family-Russian deals over a long period of time, not just recently.

Deutche Bank, which apparently has served as a Russian Oligarch money laundering facility, took on Trump’s business as far back as 1998, when Trump started to run out of places to borrow money. Subsequently, the Russian state owned bank, Putin’s personal facility bailed the troubled Trump enterprise out of at least one financial hole.

Carter Page, Jeff Sessions, Michael Flynn, and several others are relative newcomers to the drama, and because their involvement and possible activities is both recent and confused, it is easy to miss the forest for the trees.

The short version is this. According to this entirely hypothetical model, Trump was involved with a wide range of shady characters doing shady deals for decades. Putin and his Oligarch friends were involved with a wide range of shady characters doing shady deals for decades. There was significant overlap between the two groups.

Somewhere along the way, Putin, with Manafort’s help, started to become increasingly engaged in messing with the politics of other countries, and at some point developed, or came upon, a method of using emerging social media to hack elections. It was probably not difficult for Putin to make the shift from collecting American billionaires to using one of them specifically, Trump, to develop a US presidential campaign, on the off chance that this could disrupt American politics, back around 2015. It was then not too difficult to take the next step, realizing that Trump might actually win, to hack the election and put a man he had worked with, indirectly and possibly directly, and on whom (we hypothesize) he held considerable Kompromat, in the white house.

While these latter moves are perhaps the most important, and most urgent, they are small steps from what seems to have been going on all along, constituting minor adjustments in a larger over-arching program of money making, money laundering, and manipulation oligarch style.

And the engine that drove this process, the methodology by which Putin ultimately came to own several American operatives including, according to this model,Trump, was something out of a movie based on a Tom Clancy novel. In order to understand that engine, I offer a parable.

The Parable of Mark

Imagine an evil drug dealer named Alexey. He has a customer named Mark. Mark doesn’t think he is an addict, but he is, and that gets worse for him over time. Mark likes to buy 10 bags of product, then he marks them up and sells eight to his friends so that he can do two bags and use the profit on the other eight to cover his costs of each buy. Most of the time. Sometimes he parties with friends Nastia and Sasha, and they go through three or four bags. But that’s OK, because his other friend, Dima always loans Mark money when he needs it, so he can get more drugs from Alexey. And Alexey always has product.

Over time, if Mark was more smart and less obsessed with meeting his own desires to party and get stoned, he could have kept himself in drugs and made a steady profit over time. After a few years, Mark did manage to stash away about $500 bucks, but not the few thousand bucks he might have made had he made the right moves.

Meanehile,Mark became deeper and deeper in debt to Dima, and by the way, also to Alexey, who also helped Mark out now and then when he was down on cash. There was also that time when Mark got busted because someone claimed to see him dealing on a street corner, and Alexey provided an alibi for him. That court case was still pending, and Mark was hoping Alexey would remember to show up and give his alibi to the judge next month. Oh, and by the way, Nastia and Sasha also loaned Mark some money now and then. Oh, and the person who dropped the dime on Mark? Mark does not know it, but it was Sasha.

So, after a few years, Mark had that 500 bucks stashed away, had been having plenty of fun, and just barely, stayed out of trouble.

But, he also owes Dima about $42,000, and another 15,000 or so to the others. He is in trouble with the law and reliant on Alexey to help him out, and lately Sasha and Nastia had been snubbing him.

Turns out that Dima, Mark’s banker, was Alexey’s brother. Sasha and Nastia were Alexey’s cousins. The judge in that open court case was Alexey’s father. And, they were all members of the same organized criminal gang with Alexey in charge.

Putting this another way, Mark was in the business of buying and selling a product, and financing the deals, and staying out of trouble, by interacting with the same exact person at every level and in every direction. Over time, with every transaction, instead of Mark having the opportunity to make a little money here, and a little product there, and to develop a reasonable if unsavory business model, at every juncture of events, Alexey turned the screw and brought Mark deeper and deeper into debt and dependency. Everybody was in on it, and Mark was the unwitting mark. As it were.

What is to be learned from this parable?

This is what Vladimir Putin and a handful of his associates, according to this hypothetical model, may have done to Donald Trump. Early on, Paul Manafort developed a relationship with Trump, and not long after, with Putin’s gang. His business with Russia was to develop ways for Putin to influence foreign governments, and eventually, elections. As early as 2000, Trump was being looked at by American conservatives as a potential presidential candidate. Over time Trump engaged in a considerable amount of Obama bashing, which served his white supremacist tendencies. Putin must have seen Trump as a potential asset, with the added bonus that they shared a racist view of life.

During this entire time multiple seemingly independent Russian entities engaged in business with Trump and his family, including a wide range of “Trump Tower” like projects, and other land deals. This also included banking and loaning money. Trump and his family were fully engaged in a money making machine much like the fictional Mark’s, buying and selling and borrowing and having fun, and Putin and his oligarch associates, using Manafort and other Americans as professional manipulators, were behind most of it, possibly all of it. Trump was buying and selling and borrowing, and meeting various prurient needs, all with the same guy, Puppet Master Putin. Or, so the theory goes.

So, when mid 2016 came along, Trump looked like a viable candidate. Republicans started to manage their role in the possible Trump presidency. Putin turned on his machine, manufactured and modeled out by Manafort and others, with the hope of electing Trump as President, and even before the election, manipulated the Republican platform. Members of the Trump Team were generally in contact with Russian agents, and various members of Washington’s Republican political elite, including multiple elected officials, became first transition advisers, then cabinet members or senior white house advisers after the election, and were brought into Club Russia to varying degrees. .

Much of the news that has developed over the last several months has focused on this period, from mid 2016 to the present. It has been difficult to understand what it all means. But if one steps back and starts by examining Trump and his associates in the 1980s, and Putin and his associates, some of which were already long time Trump associates, in the 2000’s, much of that confusion seems to melt away. Putin and Trump have both been playing a sort of long game, but with Putin much more in charge and, I would guess, with the much larger vision.

Trump looks like a chump through much of this, and he probably is. But he has had his own objectives mainly having to do with making money and being a bully, which Putin was able to garner into deep debt and probably blackmail. According to this hypothesis.

So in sum, three elements make up the model:

1) Trump plus American mob plus Russian mob plus Real Estate

2) Putin plus foreign political hacking and eventually election hacking

3) Decades old overlap between these two groups.

And, not entirely by chance but with a little luck for Putin, Trump rides the racist post Obama wave and becomes a viable candidate, then Putin puts him in.

If you want to go into the weeds on this, and you should, aside from watching every edition of the Rachel Maddow show for the last year or so, check out this handy dandy timeline.

The Wildlife of Nambia

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The new Collins Nambia Wildlife guide is the perfect companion for travelers from the US who are trying to get away from it all. Quickly and quietly.

This handy field guide provides the usual information about the alt-Animals one finds in this remote African country, such as the Vote Suppressing Guerrilla, the Red Butted Baboon and the most common animal, the Wild Ass, and of course, the R.I.N.O.

But beyond that, this guide also provides useful information for the Indicted Tourist traveling to Nambia.

Find out where to get your laundry done, even if it is mainly small bills you want to clean. Find out which local restaurants have every chair backed up against an interior wall, so you can face the door with a rear exit nearby (in the “Escaping to Escape” section). Learn important information like, that you don’t need a passport to travel to Nambia, but once you are there, you can buy one and even specify what name should be on it!

Nambia has very few tourists these days, but business is expected to pick up any time now.

Published by Mueller and Comey Inc and Printed in Minsk, this title is available as a hardcover, softcover, Kindle, or printed on flash paper with disappearing ink.

The Wildlife of Nambia: What We Knew and When We Knew It is written by George GB Liddy, and has a forward by Vladimir Putin.

Is the Trump-Russia scandal a decade long plan just now unraveling?

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From the Washington Post:

The special counsel investigating Russian election meddling has requested extensive records and email correspondence from the White House, covering everything from the president’s private discussions about firing his FBI director to his White House’s handling of a warning that President Trump’s then-national security adviser was under investigation, according to two people briefed on the requests.

White House lawyers are now working to turn over internal documents that span 13 categories investigators for the special counsel have identified as critical to their probe…

The requests broadly ask for any document or email related to a series of highly publicized incidents since Trump became president, including the firing of national security adviser Michael Flynn and Comey…

…

Mueller also asked for any email or document the White House holds that relates to Manafort…

Mueller has requested that the White House turn over all internal communications and documents related to the FBI interview of Flynn in January, days after he took office, as well as any document that discusses Flynn’s conversations with Russia’s then-ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, in December. Mueller has also asked for records about meetings then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates held with White House counsel Don McGahn in late January …

Sources also stated that Mueller is moving very quickly and is vigorously engaging a grand jury to carry out this aggressive phase of the investigation.

Meanwhile, also from the Washington Post, Manafort is said to have offered a Russian Oligarch and Aluminum Magnate Oleg Deripaska, who has been discussed at length before, private briefings pertaining to the 2016 presidential campaign. The Associated Press reported some time ago that prior to

… signing up with Donald Trump, former campaign manager Paul Manafort secretly worked for a Russian billionaire with a plan to “greatly benefit the Putin Government,”…

Manafort proposed in a confidential strategy plan as early as June 2005 that he would influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and former Soviet republics to benefit President Vladimir Putin’s government, even as U.S.-Russia relations under Republican President George W. Bush grew worse.

Manafort pitched the plans to aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, a close Putin ally with whom Manafort eventually signed a $10 million annual contract beginning in 2006, according to interviews with several people familiar with payments to Manafort and business records obtained by the AP. Manafort and Deripaska maintained a business relationship until at least 2009, according to one person familiar with the work.

“We are now of the belief that this model can greatly benefit the Putin Government if employed at the correct levels with the appropriate commitment to success,” Manafort wrote in the 2005 memo to Deripaska. The effort, Manafort wrote, “will be offering a great service that can re-focus, both internally and externally, the policies of the Putin government.”

It has been looking for a long time like Manafort is behind much of what we see. It is even conceivable that Trump and his clan have been idiot-puppets either under the threat of extortion or out for the money. One could even suspect that Trump et al would have been essentially broke were it not for Faustian deals organized by the Russians, as prelude to Putin’s bloodless coup. Of sorts.

Looks like this is going to happen any time now:

Coates: Donald Trump and his Supporters Are White Supremacists

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A lot of people will object to the title of this post. I will be told to take the post down. I will be told to modify the title or to change what I say in the post.

Nope.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is correct, and his presentation is brilliant. Watch the following interview (in two parts) and read his book We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy.

Chris Hayes is correct to point out that the historical source of Coates title is critically important and deeply disturbing (this is something we’ve talked about here in the recent past). He is incorrect, as Coates points out near the end of the second segment, that there will be a future in which we debate the relative merits of the Trump vs the Obama presidency. I have no idea what possessed him to day that (I see Hayes slip into the false balance mode now and then when he’s tired, maybe that’s what he did there for just a moment).

On the book:

“We were eight years in power” was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. In this sweeping collection of new and selected essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America’s “first white president.”

But the story of these present-day eight years is not just about presidential politics. This book also examines the new voices, ideas, and movements for justice that emerged over this period—and the effects of the persistent, haunting shadow of our nation’s old and unreconciled history. Coates powerfully examines the events of the Obama era from his intimate and revealing perspective—the point of view of a young writer who begins the journey in an unemployment office in Harlem and ends it in the Oval Office, interviewing a president.

We Were Eight Years in Power features Coates’s iconic essays first published in The Atlantic, including “Fear of a Black President,” “The Case for Reparations,” and “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” along with eight fresh essays that revisit each year of the Obama administration through Coates’s own experiences, observations, and intellectual development, capped by a bracingly original assessment of the election that fully illuminated the tragedy of the Obama era. We Were Eight Years in Power is a vital account of modern America, from one of the definitive voices of this historic moment.

Trump White House New Policy: Fire reporters the White House does not like

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The policy of the Republican Trump White House is that if a reporter or commenter says something that the White House strongly disagrees with, the reporter or commenter should be fired.

It remains to be seen how the Trump White House will enforce this newly articulated policy.

The policy was provided as a response to a question about an African American reporter identifying Trump and the White House as being aligned with white supremacy, which is a widely held and well documented truth.

Cindy Boren at the Washington Post has more here.

The Link between Russia and White Supremacy in the White House

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It is very rare that I find myself yelling at the TV when Rachel Maddow is on. She is very good at historically contextualized nuanced well informed analyses. But when I watched a segment of last night’s show (on the Internet, I have no cable) I was shocked to see that she missed something really important. If, that is, it is real.

In the segment below, she makes the point that there are two “clear through lines” in the whole Trump thing. One is the love of Russia and Putin by Trump, his unwavering stance that Russia and Putin can do no wrong. The other is the consistent “vehement antipathy towards immigrants”, clearly part of a white supremacists strategy, with respect to who has been appointed to various positions, the things Trump has said, and the policies attempted. The difference, Rachel notes, between these two separate through lines is the apparent novelty and strangeness of the Russia theme, while the racist trope has deep roots with Trump.

Here, I think, is what she missed: They are not two separate through lines. They are two faces of the same coin. The Russian oligarchs are white supremacists too.

This is underscored by the news that just came out that Russian entities had purchased ads on Facebook during the last election, described this way: “Most of the ads focused on pumping politically divisive issues such as gun rights and immigration fears, as well as gay rights and racial discrimination.”

There are all sorts of reasons Russia wants to control the US presidency and state department. There seem to be some great economic benefits to Trump for selling the government to Putin, something we will be forced to assume happened if even a small number of the accusations emerging are true. But, there is also the potential of the two main actors and their associates having a common philosophy about race. This would not be the first time dictators or would be dictators bonded over such things.

I could be wrong. Am I wrong? I suppose time will tell.

Anti-Science Political Hack Named To Run NASA

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First, please take two minutes to watch and listen to this, in order to calibrate:

Now, remove all liquid containing vessels from the vicinity, put on your head-desk helmet gear, and watch this:

Then, behold the fact that Jim Bridenstine, who has demanded that President Obama apologize for believing that global warming is real and important, is being appointed to run NASA.

By the way, global warming did not stop in 2003

See this post at Think Progress and this post at Get Energy Smart for more.

Feel like signing a petition? This is the one you should sign.

Is The Friday News Dump A Pernicious Falsehood?

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Member of the press are so cute. They evolve so slowly. They are like monotremes or something.

It is said again and again that a) government agencies and other entities, especially things like the White House, dump their news late on Fridays because this avoids the normal five-day news cycle and allows hot stories to cool off, and possibly be ignored by Monday and, b) that doesn’t really work any more because of social media and cable news, but still c) we will repeat meme one endlessly anyway so that we can look very smart by then repeating memes b) which brings us to d) rinse and repeat.

Got that?

If not, just turn on any news show and watch it happening every few minutes before your very eyes.

This last Friday, during the encroachment by Harvey on Texas, there seemed to be a lager and stinkier than average Trump Dump in which a white supremacist mysteriously left the white house, Trump signed the official order to totally screw over transsexual people in (or planning to join) the military, and he issued the most controversial presidential pardon ever issued, even more controversial than the pardoning of Nixon (because at least Ford had an excuse for doing that, however lame).

Dear The Press: No. Three major (or at least one important and two major) news stories at once do not in fact get buried under a hurricane, or ignore because friday. Rather, the dump itself becomes a facilitating story. This compels all the news story to the proverbial front page, and it makes the front page as big as it needs to be to hold them. There is no diminution of the individual stories, but rather, they grow even bigger than they ever were.

So what is going on? Something that is right in front of the press but that the press has not yet noticed, amazingly.

I won’t say that Trump is a mater of media. He is a master of nothing. He lacks the qualities people have to become a master of something, and he lacks the intelligence to retain mastery even if he gets close by practicing something a lot for half an afternoon.

But, he does have a lot of experience in media, and he knows how a media cycle works. It works like this: You work all week on a show, then the show goes on as scheduled, then you go on vacation for a couple of days (golfing), then you go back to work. For some reason, that he does not understand, the cycle in the White House has him working on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. So, show time is on Friday late PM, and you go golfing on Saturday and Sunday.

That’s it. No strategic dumping, no planning, no outsmarting. Just a simple pretty close to Pavlovian process. Reminder: Almost all the Friday Trump Dumps are his, not from his staff or any group of thoughtful media managers. Even the description I give above is more planned out than that. Trump just builds up some material, and over time the urge to dispense with it comes and goes a little, then comes and goes a bit more urgency, then gets to a kind of point of no return and ….

Trump Dump.

And, it usually happens on Friday, and after he dumps, he feels like going golfing.

That’s it. Nothing less simple. No mind at work here. Please stop assuming there is a mind at work here. There is not one.

How to clean coal

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It suddenly became apparent, just a couple of days ago when President Trump was ranting and raving at a political rally, that the man does not know what clean coal is.

This is a concern because his entire energy policy stems from the assumption that we can mine lots of coal in West Virginia and use that for energy, that this is OK because it will be clean coal.

The term clean coal has been used in three ways, but really, is correctly used in only one way (number 2 of the three below), and when used that way, it is still bogus.

1) The term clean coal, or phrases very close to it, have been used by the energy industry to refer to their cleaning up of coal plants to have them put fewer nasty particulates and chemicals into the air. Clean plants produce clean effluence while burning coal. This is nice and all, but it has nothing to do with the fundamental problem that burning coal is a major contribution to global warming, because when you burn coal you take Carbon that is attached mainly to other Carbon atoms in solid form, and combine it with Oxygen, to make heat and CO2. The CO2 is the greenhouse gas.

2) The term clean coal refers to burning coal and somehow making the CO2 not go into the atmosphere. A method that makes the Carbon not become CO2 is essentially impossible because it is the oxidation of the Carbon that is the energy production process. You can not turn coal into heat energy without making CO2. It. Is. Not. Possible. But, some say it is possible to make the CO2 go away or not be a problem in some other way. If we were talking about a small amount of CO2, that might be possible. We could store it underground or something (never mind that this takes energy too). But for burning a lot of coal, for keeping coal as a major part of our energy policy, we simply can’t do that. You cant store away a gazillaton of a gas every year and expect it to stay stored.

3) This is the newest definition. This is Trump’s definition. You dig the coal up, then you wash it so it is clean. Then you burn it and everything is fine.

Nope.

By the way, the photo above is of the harvesting of sea coal in Hartepool. That, apparently, was a thing.