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GEORGE HERBERT WALKER BUSH 1924 – 2018, 41ST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: A Throwback To A Time When Our President Was A Decent & Honorable Human Being, Regardless Of Whether One Agreed With His Policies!

Cokie Roberts for ABC News:

Decency — that’s the first word that comes to mind when thinking of George H.W. Bush. He was a decent, self-effacing, funny, nice man. And he brought those traits to the presidency.

In a long interview I conducted with him as part of a series on former presidents reflecting on the Constitution, he said something like “I don’t want to namedrop” at several points, when telling a story about visiting his own son in the White House. When recounting an anecdote about the fall of the Soviet Union, which he helped engineer, he would say, “I don’t want to brag.”

He took very much to heart his mother’s dictum to “be a good sport,” and not blame others for your own shortcomings. He said he thanked God for that motherly advice when he suffered defeat in 1992 because “it hurts to lose, it feels wonderful to win.”

.&lid=view[Slideshow]” target=”_blank”>

SLIDESHOW: Photos:George H. W. Bush through the years

It was tough for Bush to score many wins in his presidency as he faced a Congress run by a large and increasingly partisan Democratic majority. He did squeak out votes of approval to use the U.S. military to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait and felt strongly that it would have been wrong to pursue the invader back to Baghdad.

Taking issue with the “Monday morning quarterbacks” who questioned that decision, he stated firmly, “I don’t believe in mission creep and I don’t believe in going back on your word to Congress and I don’t believe in going back on your word to the United Nations.”

Greg Mathieson/REX/Shutterstock

Decency.

Bush disagreed often with members of Congress, but he never demonized them. Many were his friends. One of his best buddies was Bob Strauss, a fellow Texan, who served as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, while Bush held the same role at the Republican National Committee.

(MORE: Former President George H.W. Bush dead at 94)

It was during the Watergate scandal and Bush thought he deserved combat pay, “it was the worst job in the world.”

Strauss called him and told him that his position was like “making love to a gorilla,” the former president told me in the cleaned-up version.

“You can’t stop until the gorilla wants to.” The party chairman soon found himself faced with the dicey task of advising the Republican president to resign. It was the decent thing to do.

Gregory Rec/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images, file
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When the Soviet Union disintegrated, Bush appointed Strauss as the first ambassador to the new Russia though, as the Democrat told the president, he had never voted for him for anything.

In those difficult years in the White House Bush knew there was one person who always had his back — his wife Barbara. When I said to him that first ladies are often unsung heroes he laughed, “She’s sung. And you know what the boys call her? The Enforcer, even the president calls her that.”

(MORE: George H.W. Bush through the years)

Reveling in the fact that his wife was “100 percent behind anything I did,” Bush did admit that he was reamed out for loudly declaring that he hated broccoli, though his stance “liberated every 4 year old.”

The affection that the Bushes felt for each other in their 73 year marriage heartened the nation when Mrs. Bush died but it was not just her affection that her husband appreciated, it was also her wisdom. Presidential wives “play a very influential role…they can make an enormous difference,” according to the husband of one First Lady and the father-in-law of another.

Patrick Smith/Getty Images, FILE
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In his long career serving the country, President Bush came to know many of the people who chose his path. His view: “I believe public service is a noble calling and most members of Congress are honorable people.” He added, “I’ve found that most people serve for the right reasons.”

He certainly did, whether you agree or disagree with his policies, he served because he thought it was the right thing, the decent thing, for a dedicated American citizen to do.

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Amen.

PWS

12-01-18

THE NEW YORKER: “Satire from The Borowitz Report: Cindy Hyde-Smith Says She Never Lost Faith in Mississippi’s Racists”

Cindy Hyde-Smith Says She Never Lost Faith in Mississippi’s Racists

By Andy Borowitz

10:56 A.M.

Photograph by Drew Angerer / Getty

JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI (The Borowitz Report)—Celebrating her election victory on Tuesday night, U.S. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith said that, despite predictions that her state was ready to turn the page on its shameful past, “I never lost faith in Mississippi’s racists.”

“For weeks, we’ve been hearing national pundits say that Mississippi was ready to enter the twenty-first century,” Hyde-Smith told a crowd of supporters at her victory rally. “Tonight, with your help, we proved them wrong.”

Hyde-Smith said that, despite the media’s unearthing of a cavalcade of embarrassing comments and actions from her past, “I never doubted that, at the end of the day, the people of Mississippi would listen to the racist voices in their heads.”

Choking back tears, Hyde-Smith thanked her supporters for honoring Mississippi’s storied heritage of hatred and cruelty.

“Mississippi voters do not want to tear down the relics of our Confederate past,” she said. “As such a relic, I am eternally grateful.”

Exit polls showed that Hyde-Smith performed extremely well with voters who described themselves as bigots, and dominated among those who could not correctly spell “Mississippi.”

GOP BIGOTS “OUTED” IN MIDTERMS — Message Of Hate & Intolerance Directed @ LGBTQ Americans Being Rejected By Voters Across The Nation!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-gop-antigay-candidates-midterms_us_

Michelangelo Signorile writes for HuffPost:

Dana Rohrabacher, the 15-term Republican incumbent washed away by Democratic challenger Harley Rouda when the blue wave came ashore in Southern California’s 48th Congressional District last week, isn’t your average homophobic extremist.

He is, in fact, an architect of the decades-long battle against LGBTQ rights and a politician, among many others, whose bigotry is partly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people from AIDS.

Rohrabacher was a lieutenant of President Ronald Reagan throughout his two terms as a speechwriter and special assistant, helping Reagan court the evangelical right, which Reagan has been credited with bringing into politics. Reagan, bowing to the zealots from whom he helped amass enormous power (power they still wield with President Donald Trump), was among the most anti-gay presidents in history, ignoring the AIDS epidemic until far too late.

Rohrabacher was first elected to Congress in 1988, at the end of the Reagan administration, representing a district in Orange County, a bastion of conservatism in the ’80s and beyond. He was among a trio of California right-wing Republican congressmen ― including Bob Dornan and William Dannemeyer ― who demonized people with AIDS in that era, voted against efforts to stem the epidemic and battle discrimination and pushed legislation that was discriminatory against LGBTQ people.

Rohrabacher also teamed up with the virulently anti-gay Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina in attacking government grants to queer artists. Rohrabacher railed against the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990 ― even as George H.W. Bush’s White House tried behind the scenes to get him to pull back ― for supporting artists who created “drawings of homosexual orgies, bestiality and a Statue of Liberty turned into a transvestite, complete with male sex organs.”

Over the years, Rohrabacher twice backed a federal amendment to ban same-sex marriage, voted against preventing anti-LGBTQ discrimination in employment and voted against legislation extending hate crime coverage to LGBTQ people. In 2009 he said allowing people with HIV to enter the country, even on tourist visas, was “humanitarianism gone wild.” And this year, Rohrabacher, who became a national embarrassment as a Vladimir Putin apologist in the Trump era, caused a national uproar when he supported allowing homeowners to turn away gay buyers.

Now, after 30 years, this bigot has finally been booted.

And he’s not the only one.

There has been much discussion in the aftermath of last week’s midterms about the rainbow wave, a record number of LGBTQ candidates elected in races across the country ― over 150 at last count. But on the other side of the coin, many ardent homophobes and anti-gay candidates were taken down too.

In Minnesota, Rep. Jason Lewis, a Republican who equated gay couples with rapists, lost his House seat to Democrat Angie Craig ― the first lesbian mom elected to Congress.

In another case of poetic justice, openly bisexual California Democrat Katie Hill defeated Republican House member Steve Knight, who supported Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California, and voted against banning “ex-gay” therapy during his time in the California Senate. His father, Pete Knight, spearheaded a precursor to Prop 8 ― the anti-gay Knight Initiative, a 2000 ballot measure — as a state senator. Even after his own brother, David Knight, came out as gay, Steve Knight carried on his dad’s hateful tradition.

In Georgia’s now-famous 6th Congressional District, short-lived GOP incumbent Karen Handel, who said last year while running in a special election against Democrat Jon Ossoff that she didn’t support allowing adoption by gay and lesbian couples, was beaten by African-American Democrat and gun reform advocate Lucy McBath.

Texas GOP Rep. Pete Sessions, who claimed the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida ― the site of a 2016 gun massacre ― wasn’t actually a gay club (and who voted anti-gay every chance he got in his more than 20 years in Congress, garnering a score of zero every year from the Human Rights Campaign) was defeated by African-American civil rights lawyer Colin Allred.

In a huge upset in Oklahoma, Republican Steve Russell, who in 2016 introduced a bill that would have provided religious exemptions to President Barack Obama’s executive order banning anti-LGBTQ discrimination among federal contractors, lost to Kendra Horn, the first Democrat to win the state’s 5th Congressional District in 44 years.

Former CIA analyst Elissa Slotkin took down Republican Rep. Mike Bishop in Michigan. He voted last year to deny transgender service members medically necessary transition-related health care and was an ardent opponent of marriage equality, seeking religious exemptions.

In fact, the list of GOP House members opposed to marriage equality who came crashing down last week goes on and on: Dave Brat and Barbara Comstock in Virginia, Iowa’s Rod Blum, Illinois’ Randy Hultgren, Mike Coffman in Colorado and Keith Rothfus in Pennsylvania.

In races that have yet to be called but where Democrats seem likely to prevail, GOP marriage equality opponents include New York’s Claudia Tenney, New Jersey’s Tom MacArthur and Utah’s Mia Love, who even sent out anti-gay emails during the campaign attacking her opponent’s support of marriage equality.

In the Senate, GOP marriage equality opponent Dean Heller went down in Nevada against Jacky Rosen. And in Arizona, Martha McSally, another equality opponent, lost in the fight for the open seat to replace marriage equality opponent Jeff Flake ― to openly bisexual Democratic candidate Kyrsten Sinema.

Far-right Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who once compared homosexuality to polygamy, was stopped from taking the governor’s seat and continuing the Kansas GOP’s anti-LGBTQ agenda. Democrat Laura Kelly flipped the state and has already vowed to reinstate protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender government employees, which were rescinded in 2015 by then-Gov. Sam Brownback.

In Wisconsin, anti-LGBTQ Republican Scott Walker lost his governorship to Tony Evers, after nearly eight years, in a major win for equality.

Democrat Gretchen Whitmer flipped Michigan in its governor’s race, preventing Republican Attorney General Bill Schuette ― who rejected the Michigan Civil Rights Commission’s expansion of state law to protect LGBTQ people ― from continuing GOP Gov. Rick Snyder’s hostile agenda. (In another boost, openly lesbian civil rights attorney Dana Nessel, who fought Snyder to overturn the state’s same-sex marriage ban in a case among those that eventually prevailed at the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2015 Obergefell ruling ― was elected Michigan’s new attorney general.)

And in the open governor’s race in Maine, Democrat Janet Mills flipped the state, ensuring right-wing extremist Gov. Paul LePage’s horrifically anti-LGBTQ agenda won’t continue under Shawn Moody, who similarly opposed marriage equality.

In many state legislatures, the blue wave washed away the hate last week. In Texas, where anti-LGBTQ Republicans in recent years introduced more than a dozen bills harmful to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people each session, Democrats flipped 12 House seats, in the biggest shift since 2010. In an upset, Ron Simmons, who authored an infamous anti-transgender “bathroom” bill ― which died in the Texas House last session but which conservatives vowed to bring back next year ― was defeated by Michelle Beckley.

There are more ― and I’m sure there are still others about whom I haven’t yet become aware. Just a couple of years ago, many queer activists and LGBTQ leaders would have grudgingly denied that these enemies of equality, several of whom they’ve fought for a decade or more, could have been defeated.

But the 2018 midterms showed that when progressives work together and organize with enormous drive, the possibilities are endless.

Michelangelo Signorile is an editor-at-large for HuffPost. Follow him on Twitter at @msignorile.

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Some of the slimiest politicians in America are on this list: Kris Kobach, Scott Walker, and Paul LePage are particularly “good riddance!” Intolerance seems to live in the GOP.

Another notorious GOP bigot, former AG Jeff Sessions, also was “outed,” in a somewhat different way, ironically by the “Bigot-in-Chief.”

PWS

11-13-18

ON WISCONSIN: Badger State FINALLY Rids Itself Of One Of America’s Worst, Most Corrupt, & Most Intentionally Divisive Governors, Scott Walker, Before He Can Completely Destroy The State!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/scott-walker-wisconsin-failure_us_5be4626fe4b0dbe871a86030

Emma Roller writes in HuffPost:

In the fall of 2011, I was an unemployed recent journalism school graduate in a country still clawing its way back from recession. At a family reunion, my grandma pulled out a piece of paper with a list of signatures — signatures required to trigger a recall election against Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R), who’d just inspired massive protests by ramming through a bill that stripped public sector employees of their right to bargain collectively.

She asked me to sign the recall petition, and I did.

Three years later, while I was working for a small political magazine in D.C., I wrote an innocuous blog post about Walker. The Walker campaign called the magazine’s managing editor — my boss’s boss — and complained that I couldn’t write about the governor because I had signed the recall petition three years earlier. The managing editor was furious with me for failing to disclose my actions as an unemployed 22-year-old. I was terrified, sure that I was going to get fired.

That’s the type of guy Walker is. He governed Wisconsin with the same vindictive pettiness, transparent corruption and laser-like focus on further oppressing already marginalized people that we now see in the Trump administration (there’s a word for this style of governance.) He was the sad, preservative-laced ham sandwich in the otherwise unassuming brown paper bag of Wisconsin politics. He would tell you, unconvincingly, that he needs his black and orange Harley Davidson jacket when he is about to go into a controlled slide on his hog. He is Miracle Whip personified. He’s the kind of guy who’d call your boss’ boss to try to get you fired.

Now he’s the one out of a job.

Beneath his corn-fed, “aw shucks” facade, Walker is one of the most conniving figures to emerge from conservative politics in the past decade.

Walker’s loss on Tuesday night had a sort of poetic justice: After the 2016 election, Walker and Republicans in the state legislature passed a rule tightening the state’s recount law. The new law requires that candidates must lose by 1 percent or less to ask for a recount. On Tuesday, Walker lost the governorship to State Superintendent Tony Evers by 1.1 percentage points.

Walker and his allies will surely consider the devastation he brought to Wisconsin over the past eight years a success. Taken together, Walker’s legacy adds up to eight years of ruin for Wisconsin’s working classes, for people of color and for the environment — all in service of further enriching the already-rich.

Beneath his corn-fed, “aw shucks” facade, Walker is one of the most conniving figures to emerge from conservative politics in the past decade. It will take decades to repair the damage he and his allies did to my home state. And much of what he broke can never be made whole again.

Throughout his two terms as governor, Walker has remained consistent in his core political strategy: promising jobs that will never appear. Look at Walker’s election-year gambit: to bring Taiwanese electronics manufacturer FoxConn to Wisconsin with promises of well-paying, high-tech jobs for Wisconsin workers.

Reality has not lived up to those expectations. FoxConn promised to create 13,000 jobs at its Wisconsin factory at an average salary of $53,875. In exchange, Walker’s administration awarded FoxConn more than $3 billion in state tax breaks and credits — equaling more than $230,000 per job the company promised. Walker could have used that money to fund a public works program to employ more than four times as many people, at the same salary, for the same cost of the FoxConn deal.

That sort of failure is emblematic of Walker’s record. My editor made me cut 1,000 words from this story listing a fraction of all the bad stuff Walker has done to Wisconsin.

Let’s just say that, under Walker, Wisconsin underperformed its Democrat-run cousin, Minnesota, on nearly every meaningful metric: Non-farm job growth. Median income. Population growth. Median hourly wages. The share of people with health insurance.

I suspect that one reason Walker failed so badly is that although he is conniving to his core, he is not smart. Think back to when he took a prank call from someone pretending to be David Koch. Or when, as Milwaukee County executive, he signed a letter to a Jewish constituent with, “Thank you again and Molotov.” Or when he claimed he got his bald spot from bumping his head on a kitchen cabinet door. Walker has a Ph.D. in power lust and an “I tried!” sticker in political acumen.

He wasn’t even good at hiding his corruption. During his campaign for governor, while serving as county executive, Walker’s staff set up a secret wireless router in his public office to communicate about the campaign using taxpayer resources. One of Walker’s aides at the time was sentenced to six months in prison for felony misconduct.

Walker was a cheap date for corporate executives in search of friendlier laws. A John Doe investigation revealed that after a billionaire lead producer gave $750,000 to a conservative group supporting Walker and his party in the 2012 recall elections, Walker and his party passed a measure that retroactively shielded paint makers from liability.

So, on Tuesday night, Walker did what he has always done, from the moment he decided to pursue a career in politics: He failed. I hope some of his supporters, including some of my own family members, will now wake up to the fact that they were duped.

Scott Walker failed as a governor. On Tuesday, he failed as a politician. The schmuck even failed at getting me fired. Good riddance.

Congrats, Wisconsin voters on returning decency, honesty, and competency to your Governor’s office!

PWS

11-09=18

ROQUE PLANAS @ HUFFPOST: TRUMP’S BOGUS CARAVAN THREAT MIGHT BE HIS MOST OUTRAGEOUS SCAM YET! — GOP’S Racist Commercial So Vile That Even Fox Pulls It!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-fabricating-border-crisis-before-election_us_5be0a522e4b09d43e321d731

Roque Planas writes in HuffPost:

Almost every day last week, the White House thrust immigration to the center of national politics. The Pentagon announced plans to dispatch some 5,200 troops to the border with Mexico. Trump said he planned to eliminate the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship by executive fiat. He announced a coming plan to bar migrants who cross illegally from claiming asylum and to detain them indefinitely in tent cities. To hear him speak at a press conference on Thursday, it would appear the United States faces an onslaught of illegal immigration.

None of this reflects reality. For the last eight years, arrests for illegal border crossing have been at their lowest levels since the 1970s.

But it does jibe with the strategy of a president who propelled himself to the White House by making specious immigration claims. Facing an election cycle that imperils the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, the president’s message is clear: Voters should blame Democrats for a nonexistent catastrophe at the border.

The ad — which NBC abandoned, along with Fox and Facebook, after a major backlash — is part of Trump’s strategy to drum up fears of the caravan among his base. CNN declined to air it, calling it “racist.”

It’s also flatly false.

Luis Bracamontes, the unauthorized immigrant in Trump’s ad, was convicted in 2014 for killing two Sacramento police officers and has nothing to do with the caravan.

The original version of the ad that Trump posted to Twitter was even more blatantly dishonest. After showing clips of a deranged Bracamontes ranting in court about how he would escape and kill others, it claimed that Democrats let him into the country and that they let him stay. It then it cuts to video of the caravan, giving the impression that it’s composed of similar fiends.

In fact, no one let Bracamontes in. He was deported twice, once in 1997 and again in 2001.

Some critics of the ad have noted that the last time he entered the country illegally appears to have been during the presidency of George W. Bush. He didn’t let Bracamontes in either, though. The fact is that Bracamontes evaded law enforcement, which is not in itself noteworthy. The rate of success for people who attempt to enter the country illegally multiple times never dipped below 96 percent until 2008, according to the Mexico Migration Project, the most comprehensive sociological database to track migration across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Implying that the migrant caravan is consists of dangerous criminals like Bracamontes is just as untenable as the claim that Democrats let him in. Among the several thousand people traveling through Mexico in the main caravan are 2,300 kids, according to UNICEF USA. The migrants are banding together in caravans not as some kind of invading force but as a way to seek protection in numbers from human traffickers.

The major challenge that the U.S. faces at the border is how to process efficiently an uptick in the number of Central American families and children who make asylum claims or ask for other forms of humanitarian relief from deportation. But that trend dates from 2014, so it’s hardly new.

It won’t be clear until after the midterm elections whether Trump will follow through on his barrage of immigration promises. But with less than 24 hours to Election Day, the more immediate question is how voters will react to his statements.

Mass migration from Mexico had petered out seven years before Trump launched his campaign for the presidency by vilifying Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists and blaming “open border” Democrats for an immigration crisis that didn’t exist. The strategy helped get him elected in 2016. On Tuesday, we’ll see if it works for him again.

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Lies, knowingly false narratives, corruption, scams on the American people, racism, intolerance, disrespect for millions of Americans and our Constitution — that’s just business as usual for the Trump Administration.

Truth is, the “Caravans” are doing favors for the US Government in a number of ways:

Easy to track;
Plenty of advance notice;
Reduces danger and deaths along the way;
Takes business away from professional smugglers;
Almost all “Caravan” members who actually reach the border (only a fraction of those who begin the thousand mile plus journey) are processed in an orderly fashion, either waiting patiently at ports of entry or turning themselves in to the Border Patrol immediately upon entry;
There is no evidence of significant numbers of “Caravan” members disappearing into the interior of the US without some type of inspection and screening — almost all those who are not summarily returned have gone through credible fear screenings and are either detained or released on bond after the Government confirms their identity and reasons for coming, and determines that they have credible cases for protection under our laws;
There is no record that I’m aware of that any “Caravan” has attempted to “storm the border” or violently attacked US border authorities en masse — why would they, since their only chance for survival is to hope and pray that the US authorities will actually live up to our legal responsibilities and give them a chance to seek legal protection under our laws?

However, if the Trump Administration continues to ignore our laws and to mount bogus attacks on fleeing refugees, they probably will be able to convince many of those folks that our legal system is a fraud and they had best employ the services of a professional smuggler to get them into the interior of the US where they can lose themselves in the crowd and probably save their lives — a sort of “do it yourself asylum.” And, while wasting taxpayer money on the “border hoax,” this Administration is failing to fund and intentionally ignoring international efforts to address the dangerous and chaotic conditions in the Northern Triangle that causes these refugee flows in the first place — and will continue to cause them until we put wiser and more honest policies into effect.

The real threat to our country’s security and future is Trump and his willfully blind or in some cases outright White Nationalist, racist, or purposefully racially tone-deaf supporters and enablers.

If that’s not the America you want and want for future generations, get out the vote to start regaining control of our country from a misguided yet loud and active minority trying to shove their lack of values down the rest of our throats! America is for all Americans, not just the “Trump Base” and their fellow travelers!

PWS

11-06-18

MAX BOOT WITH SOME GREAT ADVICE FOR SAVING AMERICA: VOTE AGAINST EVERY GOP CANDIDATE!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/sick-and-tired-of-trump-heres-what-to-do/2018/10/31/72d9021e-dd26-11e8-b3f0-62607289efee_story.html

“I am sick and tired of this administration. I’m sick and tired of what’s going on. I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I hope you are, too.”

— Joe Biden

I’m sick and tired, too.

I’m sick and tired of a president who pretends that a caravan of impoverished refugees is an “invasion” by “unknown Middle Easterners” and “bad thugs” — and whose followers on Fox News pretend the refugees are bringing leprosy and smallpox to the United States. (Smallpox was eliminated about 40 years ago.)

I’m sick and tired of a president who misuses his office to demagogue on immigration — by unnecessarily sending 5,200 troops to the border and by threatening to rescind by executive order the 14th Amendment guarantee of citizenship to anyone born in the United States.

I’m sick and tired of a president who is so self-absorbed that he thinkshe is the real victim of mail-bomb attacks on his political opponents — and who, after visiting Pittsburgh despite being asked by local leaders to stay away, tweeted about how he was treated, not about the victims of the synagogue massacre.

Opinion | Trump owns the Republican Party, and there’s no going back

Donald Trump has irreversibly changed the Republican Party. The upheaval might seem unusual, but political transformations crop up throughout U.S. history. (Adriana Usero, Danielle Kunitz, Robert Gebelhoff/The Washington Post)

I’m sick and tired of a president who cheers a congressman for his physical assault of a reporter, calls the press the “enemy of the people” and won’t stop or apologize even after bombs were sent to CNN in the mail.

I’m sick and tired of a president who employs the language of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish financier George Soros and “globalists,” and won’t apologize or retract even after what is believed to be the worst attack on Jews in U.S. history.

[Americans will head to the polls in less than a week. Here’s why some won’t.]

I’m sick and tired of a president who won’t stop engaging in crazed partisanship, denouncing Democrats as “evil,” “un-American” and “treasonous” subversives who are in league with criminals.

I’m sick and tired of a president who cares so little about right-wing terrorism that, on the very day of the synagogue shooting, he proceeded with a campaign rally, telling his supporters, “Let’s have a good time.”

I’m sick and tired of a president who presides over one of the most unethical administrations in U.S. history — with three Cabinet members resigning for reported ethical infractions and the secretary of the interior the subject of at least 18 federal investigations.

I’m sick and tired of a president who flouts norms of accountability by refusing to release his tax returns or place his business holdings in a blind trust.

I’m sick and tired of a president who lies outrageously and incessantly — an average of eight times a day — claiming recently that there are riots in California and that a bill that passed the Senate 98 to 1 had “very little Democrat support.”

I’m sick and tired of a president who can’t be bothered to work hardand instead prefers to spend his time watching Fox News and acting like a Twitter troll.

And I’m sick and tired of Republicans who go along with Trump — defending, abetting and imitating his egregious excesses.

I’m sick and tired of Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) acting like a caddie for the man he once denounced as a “kook” — just this week, Graham endorsed Trump’s call for rescinding “birthright citizenship,” a kooky idea if ever there was one.

I’m sick and tired of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who got his start in politics as a protege of the “bleeding-heart conservative” Jack Kemp, refusing to call out Trump’s race-baiting.

I’m sick and tired of Republicans who once complained about the federal debt adding $113 billion to the debt just in fiscal year 2018.

I’m sick and tired of Republicans who once championed free trade refusing to stop Trump as he launches trade wars with all of our major trade partners.

I’m sick and tired of Republicans who not only refuse to investigate Trump’s alleged ethical violations but who also help him to obstruct justice by maligning the FBI, the special counsel and the Justice Department.

Most of all, I’m sick and tired of Republicans who feel that Trump’s blatant bigotry gives them license to do the same — with Rep. Pete Olson (R-Tex.) denouncing his opponent as an “Indo-American carpetbagger,” Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis warning voters not to “monkey this up” by electing his African American opponent, Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.) labeling his “Palestinian Mexican” opponent a “security risk” who is “working to infiltrate Congress,” and Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) accusing his opponent, who is of Indian Tibetan heritage, of “selling out Americans” because he once worked at a law firm that settled terrorism-related cases against Libya.

If you’re sick and tired, too, here is what you can do. Vote for Democrats on Tuesday. For every office. Regardless of who they are. And I say that as a former Republican. Some Republicans in suburban districts may claim they aren’t for Trump. Don’t believe them. Whatever their private qualms, no Republicans have consistently held Trump to account. They are too scared that doing so will hurt their chances of reelection. If you’re as sick and tired as I am of being sick and tired about what’s going on, vote against all Republicans. Every single one. That’s the only message they will understand.

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Right on, Max! Take back our country!

PWS

11-01-18

JRUBE @ WASHPOST: Misogynists Rule, Propped Up By Their Women!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2018/10/07/they-left-no-doubt-what-they-think-of-women/

Jennifer Rubin writes in the WashPost:

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) barked at female sex-crime victims, “Grow up!” He called Christine Blasey Ford a “pleasing” witness. He shooed women away with a flick of his wrist. Hatch also posted “an uncorroborated account from a Utah man questioning the legitimacy and sexual preferences” of Julie Swetnick, one of Brett M. Kavanaugh’s accusers. The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board raked him over the coals:

The despicable attack launched by Sen. Orrin Hatch and the Senate Judiciary Committee — more precisely, the Republicans on that committee — on one of the women who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault is a textbook example of why more victims do not come forward.

Worse, it betrays a positively medieval attitude toward all women as sex objects who cannot be believed or taken seriously.

Not a single Republican spoke up to criticize him. One would think someone would point out that he brought dishonor on himself, his party and the Senate. But clearly Republicans take no umbrage at such conduct.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley(R-Iowa) attempted to excuse the lack of a single Republican woman — ever — on the Judiciary Committee. “It’s a lot of work — maybe they don’t want to do it.”Kavanaugh snapped and sneered at female senators on the Judiciary Committee. Republicans didn’t bat an eye or hold it against him. He was just mad, you see.

President Trump repeated the calumny that if the attack was “as bad” as Ford said she’d have gone to the police. He declared it was a “scary time” for young men. He openly mocked Ford at a rally to gin up his base’s anger. Republican apologists said he was just explaining the facts. He actually misrepresented her testimony, falsely claiming she couldn’t recall many facts — the neighborhood of the house where she was attacked. William Saletan called out Trump and his defenders: “It’s true that Ford can’t recall important details about place and time. It’s true that she can’t recall how she got to the house or how she left. It’s true that every accused person is entitled to a presumption of innocence. But Trump’s portrayal of Ford’s testimony wasn’t true. It was a pack of lies. And people who defend it, like Lindsey Graham, are liars too.”

Trump and other Republicans accused sex-crime victims protesting Kavanaugh as protesters paid by George Soros (a Jewish left-wing billionaire whose name is routinely invoked in anti-Semitic attacks). The GOP Senate whip, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), called the victims a “mob” and echoed the bogus claim that they were paid protesters. They deny victims’ very existence; they are non-persons — props sent by opponents to ruin a man’s life.

Graham snorted that he’d hear what “the lady has to say” and then vote Kavanaugh in. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he’d “plow right through” (more like plow over) Ford’s testimony and confirm Kavanaugh. Republicans’ defense of Kavanaugh — that Ford and others were props of a left-wing plot and therefore lacked agency of their own — evidences the party’s attitude toward women.

You cannot say a party that embraces a deeply misogynistic president who bragged about sexually assaulting women and mocked and taunted a sex-crime victim; accepted a blatantly insufficient investigation of credible sex crimes against women in lieu of a serious one that the White House counsel knew would be disastrous; repeatedly insulted and dismissed sex-crime victims exercising their constitutional rights; has never put a single woman on the Judiciary Committee (and then blames its own female members for being too lazy); and whips up male resentment of female accusers is a party that respects women. Its members resent women. They scorn women. They exclude women. They use women to maintain their grip on power. But they do not respect them.

What’s worse is that Republicans who would never engage in this cruel and demeaning behavior themselves don’t bat an eye when their party’s leaders do so. Acceptance of Trump’s misogyny — like their rationalization of the president’s overt racism — becomes a necessity for loyal Republicans. If it bothers a Republican, he or she dare not say so. One either agrees or ignores or rationalizes such conduct, or one decide it’s a small price to pay (“it” being the humiliation of women) for tax cuts and judges. It’s just words, you know.

The Republican Party no longer bothers to conceal its loathing of immigrants, its contempt for a free press, its disdain for the rule of law or its views on women. Indeed, these things now define a party that survives by inflaming white male resentment. Without women to kick around, how would they get their judge on the court or their guys to the polls?

Women with this ordeal seared into the hippocampus of their brains will vote in November. Women are expected to forget or move on? I don’t think so.

*************************************

Yup! Need to vote!

The “Club” is in power because too many non-members failed to vote. And, those young men who DON’T aspire to grow up to be Trump, Sessions, Hatch, Kavanaugh, Graham, Grassley, Steve King, Kobach, or Stephen Miller had better unite with their “non-Club sisters” to vote the Good Old Boys (and their women supporters and enablers) out of office.

If nothing else, last week shows the futility of demonstrating, public opinion polls, writing op-Ed’s, running commercials, and protesting when you don’t have the votes. Put the energy into winning elections! That’s what the Club does. And, it might be the only thing they are right about.

PWS

10-08-19

ADAM SERWER IN THE ATLANTIC: The Trump/Sessions/Miller White Nationalist Policies: It’s All About Cruelty & Hate!

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/

Adam Serwer writes in The Atlantic:

The Museum of African-American History and Culture is in part a catalog of cruelty. Amid all the stories of perseverance, tragedy, and unlikely triumph are the artifacts of inhumanity and barbarism: the child-size slave shackles, the bright red robes of the wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, the recordings of civil-rights protesters being brutalized by police.

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The artifacts that persist in my memory, the way a bright flash does when you close your eyes, are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, in which grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street—one of the white men is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the photo of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burned to death; one of them is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile.

Their names have mostly been lost to time. But these grinning men were someone’s brother, son, husband, father. They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.

The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track. This week alone, the news broke that the Trump administration was seeking to ethnically cleanse more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked by the administration, that the Department of Homeland Security had lied about creating a database of children that would make it possible to unite them with the families the Trump administration had arbitrarily destroyed, that the White House was considering a blanket ban on visas for Chinese students, and that it would deny visas to the same-sex partners of foreign officials. At a rally in Mississippi, a crowd of Trump supporters cheered as the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who has said that Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, attempted to rape her when she was a teenager. “Lock her up!” they shouted.Ford testified to the Senate, utilizing her professional expertise to describe the encounter, that one of the parts of the incident she remembered most was Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge laughing at her as Kavanaugh fumbled at her clothing. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Ford said, referring to the part of the brain that processes emotion and memory, “the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” And then at Tuesday’s rally, the president made his supporters laugh at her.

Further reading: The most striking thing about Trump’s mockery of Christine Blasey Ford

Even those who believe that Ford fabricated her account, or was mistaken in its details, can see that the president’s mocking of her testimony renders all sexual-assault survivors collateral damage. Anyone afraid of coming forward, afraid that she would not be believed, can now look to the president to see her fears realized. Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.

The cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters, are intimately connected. As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty toward women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt. The white men in the lynching photos are smiling not merely because of what they have done, but because they have done it together.

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant childrenseparated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the #MeToomovement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.

Read Adam Serwer on why the white nationalists are winning

Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.

The laughter undergirds the daily spectacle of insincerity, as the president and his aides pledge fealty to bedrock democratic principles they have no intention of respecting. The president who demanded the execution of five black and Latino teenagers for a crime they didn’t commit decrying “false accusations,” when his Supreme Court nominee stands accused; his supporters who fancy themselves champions of free speech meet references to Hillary Clinton or a woman whose only crime was coming forward to offer her own story of abuse with screams of “Lock her up!” The political movement that elected a president who wanted to ban immigration by adherents of an entire religion, who encourages police to brutalize suspects, and who has destroyed thousands of immigrant families for violations of the law less serious than those of which he and his coterie stand accused, now laments the state of due process.

This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.

Further reading: I know Brett Kavanaugh, but I wouldn’t confirm him

A blockbuster New York Times investigation on Tuesday reported that President Trump’s wealth was largely inherited through fraudulent schemes, that he became a millionaire while still a child, and that his fortune persists in spite of his fumbling entrepreneurship, not because of it. The stories are not unconnected. The president and his advisers have sought to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense; they have attempted to corrupt federal law-enforcement agencies to protect themselves and their cohorts, and they have exploited the nation’s darkest impulses in the pursuit of profit. But their ability to get away with this fraud is tied to cruelty.

Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.

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I could see it in the mindless clapping, revolting laughter, and sickening glee in the eyes of the ugly, overwhelmingly White crowd (many of them women, although a few of the women didn’t seem amused) behind Trump as he denigrated and mocked Christine Blasey Ford this week.

Also in the angry, distorted snarl of Sen. Lindsey Graham as he absurdly called the Kavanaugh hearings “the most unethical” performance (LG, my man, where were you when Mitch, you, and your colleagues totally stiffed a much better qualified Obama appointment, , without even giving him the courtesy of a hearing?).

Also in the incredibly arrogant, partisan, rude, condescending, and openly misogynistic way that Kavanaugh treated Senator Amy Klobuchar’s totally reasonable inquiry. Would Senator Susan Collins still have voted for “BKavs” if he had treated her that way? I doubt it! But, I guess her women colleagues don’t matter. And, it appears that “Chairman Chuckie” Grassley doesn’t really need or want any GOP women on his “Old Boys Club” (a/k/a Senate Judiciary Committee.) Only Democrat women can hack the stress and workload of serving on a daily basis with the GOP misogynists.

What do you call a party whose “base” glories in the pain and suffering of others? The 21st Century GOP!

It’s an existential threat to the future of our country! If decent folks don’t start using the ballot box to remove the GOP from power at every level, it might be too late for the majority of us to take our country back from the misguided minority who have taken power! Get out the vote in November!

PWS

10-07-18

HISTORY: THOSE OF US WHO CAME OF AGE IN THE 1960’S THOUGHT THAT OUR COUNTRY HAD LONG AGO MOVED BEYOND THE HATEFUL, DIVISIVE, RACIST MESSAGE OF GEORGE WALLACE — We Didn’t Anticipate The 21st Century GOP & Their White Nationalist Wallace Revival! — “Transcending racism is essential if our government is to break out of its current paralysis. If we do not succeed and Wallace’s legacy of dividing us by race continues to shape American political life, then perhaps he won after all.”

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-carter-stekler-wallace-racial-language-20180923-story.html

Dan Carter and Paul Stekler write in the LA Times:

George Wallace stoked the fire of racial division that Trump carried all the way to the White House — Then Alabama Gov. George Wallace, wearing suit at left, is shown on June 11, 1963, standing at the door of Foster Auditorium in Tuscaloosa, Ala., as he tries to block the admission of two black students to the then- all-white University of Alabama. (Calvin Hannah / Associated Press)

In late September 1968, presidential election polls showed that third-party candidate George Wallace’s campaign was surging. With the support of a quarter of white voters, Wallace was within single digits of the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Wallace’s dominance in Southern states threatened to prevent any candidate from securing an electoral college majority, throwing the November election into the House of Representatives.

His was an extraordinary rise. In his inaugural speech as Alabama governor just five years earlier, Wallace had promised “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” He then gained national attention by personally standing in a schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama to block the admission of two black students.

By 1968, he seldom used explicitly racist language, but instead demanded “law and order” and railed against “crime,” “drugs,” “welfare mothers,” “forced busing” and “big city thugs.” He created the racially encoded language that still haunt our politics.

So when President Trump whips up rallies with his thinly veiled racist attacks on brown-skinned immigrants, Muslims and unpatriotic blacks, it is not a new development. The racial divide has been a political tool for those willing to use it for 50 years. As former President Obama pointed out in his Sept. 7 speech, “It did not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause. He’s just capitalizing on resentments that politicians have been fanning for years.”

In 1968, the white backlash to the Civil Rights movement and the ’60s urban riots drew voters to Wallace. But others took note — particularly Richard Nixon’s campaign advisor Kevin Phillips, who, in his book “The Emerging Republican Majority,” saw the potential of a major partisan realignment. Over the next six years, President Nixon adapted a more subtle version of the Wallace message, appealing to what he called “the silent majority.” In the years that followed, white voters in the once solidly Democratic South became the bedrock of the Republican Party.

The Republican Party’s Southern Strategy initially focused on shifting voters with a segregationist bent to the party, but it proved adaptable to other whites uneasy with the increasing role of minorities in American life and politics. These appeals resurfaced many times over the years, most memorably in the infamous Willie Horton ad during George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign, but also in the symbolism of Ronald Reagan’s decision to make his first 1980 campaign appearance at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Miss. — where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. With the election of Obama and a growing awareness that whites will eventually be a minority in America, the ground for such appeals has stayed quite fertile.

When Trump descended from Trump Tower in 2015, he immediately set himself apart from the gaggle of GOP presidential contenders by replacing the coy racial language of his predecessors with an unfiltered bullhorn. He has railed against prominent black leaders and athletes, talked about brown-skinned immigrants as murderers and rapists, and insisted dark-skinned Muslims constitute such a threat that we need to ban travel from entire countries.

Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute from L.A. Times Opinion »

Wallace’s bid for the presidency faltered in its final weeks, but a very small shift of voters in four states would have deadlocked the race. Wallace poured gasoline on the fire of racial division first, but Trump managed to carry that flame all the way into the White House. Who would have predicted that 50 years after the 1968 election, polls would show that more than half of Americans think their president is a racist?

Many factors have contributed to today’s tribalistic politics, but race remains the bedrock of that division. Transcending racism is essential if our government is to break out of its current paralysis. If we do not succeed and Wallace’s legacy of dividing us by race continues to shape American political life, then perhaps he won after all.

Historian Dan Carter, author of the George Wallace biography “The Politics of Rage,” and University of Texas filmmaker Paul Stekler collaborated on the PBS documentary “George Wallace: Settin’ the Woods on Fire.”

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Folks like Trump, Sessions. Miller, Bannon, and the GOP enablers, are not “Making American Great Again.” No, they’re bringing back one of the darkest chapters in our post-WW II history: “Making America Racist Again.”

“Just Say No” to the Trump White Nationalists!

PWS

09-23-18

WHY DON’T TEENAGE GIRLS REPORT SEXUAL ASSAULTS? — Elizabeth Bruenig @ WashPost Tells Us The Ugly Answer!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/opinions/arlington-texas/

Elizabeth writes:

. . . .

Leaving school one autumn day in 2006, I stood at the top of the concrete stairs at the back exit, with the senior parking lot spread out before me, cars gleaming in the still afternoon sun. Several of them bore a message scrawled in chalk-paint: FAITH. They looked to me like gravestones, brief and cryptic in neat rows.

The next day, people whispered about the word in the halls. It was an acronym, I learned, meaning “f— Amber in the head,” or “f— Amber in three holes,” which I awkwardly explained to my parents when they asked me one evening why so many cars around town were thus marked. The idea struck me as brutally, unspeakably ugly, and it was the ugliness that came to mind each time I saw some rear windshield dripping the word in streaky chalk at the local Jack in the Box or Sonic Drive-In. Eventually I heard the girl had recanted her allegations and then had gone away; the writing on the cars, too, went away, and the question of what had happened that night.

. . . .

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Please note that the guys spouting the “why didn’t she report it” nonsense are 1) a known liar, misogynist, bully, philanderer, and coward who happens to be our unqualified President, and 2) a bunch of old, white, tired, amoral GOP legislators who, although nominally adults, are too cowardly and morally corrupt to stand up to the aforesaid unqualified President who is destroying America, and who prefer instead to pick on the vulnerable and courageous.

Ballot boxes exist to, over time, remove all of these intentionally tone-deaf folks from our national Government. Use it, or we’ll all lose it!

PWS

09-21-18

HARRY CHEADLE @ VICE NEWS: “The White Nationalists in the Trump Administration Aren’t There by Accident”

http://flip.it/ryui8h

Harry Cheadle at Vice News:

The White Nationalists in the Trump Administration Aren’t There by Accident

Given what the president says and does, it’s no surprise that some of his underlings have links to outright white nationalists.

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One of the Trump administration’s main projects has been to keep as many non-white people out of the country as possible. It has banned travel from several African and Middle Eastern countries, drastically reduced the number of Muslim and Syrian refugees being let into the country, emboldened ICE to go after all undocumented immigrants rather than just those accused of committing serious crimes, pushed for cuts to legal immigration, and is considering making it impossible for any immigrants who received public benefits—including Affordable Care Act subsidies—to become citizens. Under Donald Trump, the US has separated migrant children from their parents and is now denying passports to some Americans who were born near the border with Mexico.

In all these cases, the administration has pointed to a national security or economic justification: Trump says the travel ban targeted countries the Obama administration deemed security risks, that instead of helping refugees the US should help native-born Americans, and that immigrants bring crime. If you buy into this view, the fact that all these moves have led to the prosecuting, deporting, and banning of non-white people is just a side effect of putting America first. But it’s increasingly obvious that for some in charge of making and selling these policies, those justifications are just a fig leaf for an aggressive attempt to make America white again.

This week, The Atlantic uncovered emails from Department of Homeland official Ian M. Smith showing that he was friendly with white nationalists in DC. Smith subsequently resigned, but the Washington Post reported that as an immigration policy analyst he had worked on some of the administration’s most high-profile and controversial initiatives, including refugees and penalizing immigrants who used public assistance. This follows the resignation of a Trump speechwriter who attended a conference with white nationalist and news that Trump’s top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, had the publisher of a white nationalist website as a guest at his birthday party. Last month, the chairperson of the Republican Party of Spokane, Washington, resigned after inviting a white nationalist to speak at a gathering. Pro-Confederacy candidate Corey Stewart won a GOP Senate primary in Virginia.

The right’s rhetoric on race has moved far beyond dog whistles. Trump himself has called African countries “shitholes” and asked why the US couldn’t bring in more immigrants from countries like Norway. He defended the racists who marched in Charlottesville. More recently, he tweeted about white South African farmers’ land being seized, an obscure issue that the alt-right has rallied around and that was highlighted by Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Fellow Fox News host Laura Ingraham went on a rant earlier this month about how “demographic change” is “destroying the America we know and love.”

Racist is such a powerful word that the press routinely tiptoes around it—”White anxiety finds a home at Fox News” was a euphemistic headline atop an August CNN piece about Carlson and Ingraham. The argument against deploying the word is that it seems to peer into a person’s heart. Can we definitively say that another person’s words were motivated by raw prejudice and not economic anxiety, or whatever? The charge of racism is always met by blanket denials, no matter how contradictory those denials seem. After former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke praised Ingraham, the host said that her monologue “had nothing to do with race or ethnicity, but rather a shared goal of keeping America safe and her citizens safe and prosperous.”

Avoiding the R-word is often a form of political correctness, a way for people who disagree strongly on issues like immigration to have a conversation without descending into mutual recrimination and name-calling. It’s often unproductive to accuse people of racism—if a voter is genuinely worried that immigrants will take his job, people who favor more immigration have more to gain by trying to convince him he’s mistaken than by calling him out as a deplorable. And as a rule of thumb we should assume the opposition is acting in good faith, that the other side is not concealing some awful ulterior motive. Surely many people who support Trump’s policies are not outright racists.

But it’s not a coincidence that a significant chunk of anti-immigrant sentiment is undeniably racist, or that administration officials continually find themselves rubbing elbows with white nationalists, or that Trump is simultaneously pushing policies that target immigrants and saying things that you wouldn’t hesitate to call racist if you heard them at a bar. Trump’s aides would no doubt bristle at the suggestion that they are white nationalists. I’m sure the vast majority are not on email chains that contain jokes about dinner parties being “judenfrei,” as Smith was. But it’s impossible to deny that they aren’t allied with white nationalists on a very basic level.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

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MAWA, MARA, MAGA, they’re all the same at heart.

PWS

09-04-18

GRIFTER-IN-CHIEF STICKS IT TO FEDERAL WORKERS! – “Today’s announcement has nothing to do with making government more cost-efficient — it’s just the latest attack in the Trump administration’s war on federal employees.”

https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/30/opinions/donald-trump-is-shafting-federal-workers-begala/index.html

Paul Begala writes @ CNN:

Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist and CNN political commentator, was a political consultant for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992 and was counselor to Clinton in the White House. He was a consultant to Priorities USA Action, which was a pro-Obama super PAC before it was a pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his. View more opinion articles on CNN.

(CNN)President Donald Trump ran for office as a populist. He swore to fight for the “forgotten men and women,” a phrase he stole from FDR. But under his presidency, the middle class remains forgotten — hammered is more like it.

President Trump’s announcement that he wants to cancel the 2.1% pay raise for federal workersis just the latest assault on the middle class.

He sent a statement to Congress on Thursday saying we can’t afford to give our people a measly 2.1% bump because — are you ready for this? — “We must maintain efforts to put our nation on a fiscally sustainable course, and federal agency budgets cannot sustain such increases.”

Donald Trump is now worried about the debt. Are you kidding me? That’s like John Dillinger worrying about gun violence. Like Kim Kardashian worrying about being overexposed. Like Donald Trump worrying about spray-tanning and pathological lying.

President Trump championed a tax cut that spends $1.5 trillion on the forgotten corporate class. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, when the GOP tax bill is fully implemented, an astonishing 83% of its benefit will flow to the top 1%.

The President’s answer to the fiscal meltdown he is causing is not to ask those who’ve gotten the most to pay a little more. It’s to hurt the folks who are already serving us.

Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, home to numerous federal workers, both in the D.C. area and the Norfolk naval region, called BS on Trump’s newfound fiscal prudence.

“Let’s be clear,” Warner wrote in a statement, “the President’s decision to cancel any pay increase for federal employees is not motivated by a sudden onset of fiscal responsibility. Today’s announcement has nothing to do with making government more cost-efficient — it’s just the latest attack in the Trump administration’s war on federal employees.”

The American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents 700,000 of the 2 million federal workers, is vowing to fight. “Federal employees have had their pay and benefits cut by over $200 billion since 2011, and they are earning nearly 5% less today than they did at the start of the decade,” said AFGE President J. David Cox Sr. in a press release. He plans to push Congress to go over President Trump’s head and mandate the pay hike.

I hope they win. After all, you get what you pay for. Do you want your overworked air traffic controller to be missing meals and feeling faint? Do you want your Social Security check being handled by someone who’s holding three jobs? How about bridge inspectors and meat inspectors and the folks who fight forest fires? Or the scientists and doctors who are working around the clock to find cures for Alzheimer’s and cancer and HIV/AIDS?

Should they get a pay cut? Do you want the men and women who take on the drug cartels to be worried about making their rent payment? Really?

Worse still, President Trump wants to end what’s known as the “locality pay increase” — an annual adjustment to assist federal workers in parts of the country where the cost of living is high — like, say, the neighborhood Trump Tower is in. So TSA agents at LaGuardia Airport in New York, medical researchers in Atlanta, Drug Enforcement Administration agents in Los Angeles, homeland security professionals in D.C. — all will suffer.

Of course, while federal workers struggle, President Trump has made a fortune from government assistance. One analysis by The New York Times estimates Trump received $885 million in tax breaks from New York alone. And that doesn’t count the millions he’ll get from the tax cut he signed.

You might even say they’ve been forgotten.

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A deficit exploding $1.5 trillion for tax cuts for the upper 1% who don’t need them! But, in the middle of a booming economy, our Government can’t afford any money for its hard-working employees who are keeping the country running despite Trump’s “Clown Kakistocracy!” Come on man! It’s all a part of Trump’s war on the United States and his scheme to destroy our Government. Sadly, it’s consistent with various proposals from the “Bakuninist Wing” of the GOP over the years.

The solution for those who want our republic to continue: get out to the vote and throw the grifters and their fellow travelers out of office, starting this November!

PWS

08-31-18

CATHERINE RAMPELL @ WASHPOST: “Cruelty and unconstitutionality: the platform of today’s Republican Party.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/republicans-inhumanity-at-the-border-reveals-their-grand-scam/2018/05/28/b3b18d9c-62b0-11e8-a768-ed043e33f1dc_story.html?utm_term=.38485dbb9b85

Republicans’ inhumanity at the border reveals their grand scam

By Catherine Rampell

Since October, more than 700 minor children have been separated from their parents at the border. More than 100 have been under 4 years old.

Some, like an 18-month-old Honduran boy torn from his mother in February, are just toddlers.

“The immigration officers made me walk out with my son to a government vehicle and place my son in a car seat in the vehicle. My son was crying as I put him in the seat,” the boy’s mother said in a sworn statement. “I did not even have a chance to try to comfort my son, because the officers slammed the door shut as soon as he was in his seat. I was crying, too. I cry even now when I think about that moment when the border officers took my son away.”

This mom was not trying to “sneak across” the border, by the way. She had crossed an international bridge into Brownsville, Tex., and presented herself to immigration authorities to request asylum from political violence.

Instead of receiving refuge, she lost her child. It was months before they were reunited.

Such stories are enraging and shameful. They also put the lie to sacred principles that Republican politicians have long claimed to stand for, chiefly: family values and rule of law.

For decades, Republicans have championed traditional family values and having parents, rather than the state, take responsibility for their children.

This Republican administration’s inhumane treatment of helpless children — who are ripped from their mothers’ arms, detained in human warehouses and drop-kicked into “foster care or whatever” — reveals such rhetoric to have been a scam.

The Trump administration’s goal is to inflict pain upon these families. Cruelty is not an unfortunate, unintended consequence of White House immigration policy; it is the objective.

After all, if forced separations are sufficiently agonizing, fewer families will try to come here, no matter how dangerous their home countries are. Administration members have argued as much.

Last year, then-Homeland Security secretary John F. Kelly acknowledged he was considering separating children from their parents at the border “to deter” potential border-crossers. Again this month, he said “a big name of the game is deterrence.”

This vile and unpopular policy has been roundly condemned, including by prominent conservatives. So President Trump did what he always does when facing backlash for using children (remember the “dreamers” and children’s health insurance?) as a bargaining chip: Blame the Dems.

“Put pressure on the Democrats to end the horrible law that separates children from there [sic] parents once they cross the Border into the U.S.,” Trump tweeted Saturday.

Got that? Our law-and-order-obsessed president is merely enforcing an evil Democratic law!

There is, however, no statute — supported by Democrats or otherwise — that requires immigrant families to be torn apart.

The most cogent possible point Trump could have been making is one that other Republicans have made: that crossing the border unlawfully is a crime. If you prosecute every border crossing criminally — as Trump’s administration says it now does, even for asylum seekers — that means parents will go to jail.

And as Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen put it, when parents go to jail, whether for unlawful entry or another crime, that requires separating them from their children.

Which is true, to a point; prisons generally can’t house children.

But here’s the part Trump apologists neglect to mention: The government is keeping immigrant families forcibly separated even after criminal proceedings are over and the parents get released from jail.

Take the case of a Brazilian family that also crossed the border to seek asylum.

The mother, named in court documents as “Ms. C.,” was prosecuted for entering the country illegally in August 2017, a misdemeanor for which she spent 25 days in jail. Her 14-year-old son was sent to a facility in Chicago.

After she was released, she passed a “credible fear interview” and began the process of applying for asylum. She was sent first to an immigration detention center, then released to a nonprofit shelter in El Paso. This shelter is willing to take in her son.

But the government still refuses to release him. She has been out of detention for five weeks and still hasn’t been allowed to see her boy.

“What they’re really basically saying is that these people don’t have a due-process right to remain with their child,” says American Civil Liberties Union Immigrants’ Rights Project Deputy Director Lee Gelernt, who is representing Ms. C. and other asylum-seeking immigrants challenging Trump’s family separation policy. The Constitution, of course, guarantees due process for all, regardless of immigration status.

Cruelty and unconstitutionality: the platform of today’s Republican Party.

**************************************

Yup.

PWS

05-30-18

HERESY IN THE HOUSE?: DID RYAN AX CHAPLAIN FOLLOWING UNWELCOME REMINDER THAT “THE POOR ARE CHILDREN OF GOD?” – Is He Seeking WASP Male Evangelical Replacement Qualified To Minister To Needs Of House GOP Kleptocracy!👹👹👹

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/04/paul-ryan-patrick-conroy?mbid=nl_th_5ae255955bf9e03bdb5e6fd3&CNDID=48297443&spMailingID=13395516&spUserID=MjMzNDQ1MzU1ODE2S0&spJobID=1382357241&spReportId=MTM4MjM1NzI0MQS2

Bess Levin writes in Vanity Fair:

Levin Report

DID PAUL RYAN FIRE THE HOUSE CHAPLAIN FOR TAX-CUT BLASPHEMY?

It sure seems like something he’d do.

BY

BESS LEVIN

APRIL 26, 2018 6:27 PM

“I don’t care who you are, you bite your god damn tongue!”

By Alex Edelman/Getty Images.

The December 2017 passage of the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” was thrilling to a great many people, among them Donald Trump, corporate America, and the uber-rich, whom the legislation was structured to disproportionately benefit. But in truth, the day belonged to one man: CrossFit devoteeand Eddie Munster doppelgängerPaul Ryan, who had fantasized about redistributing wealth to those at the top since his boyhood days in Wisconsin, devoted his entire career to making it happen, and promptly announced his retirement when it became clear that his other lifelong dream—dismantling the social safety net and cutting off the lazy takers—wasn’t going to happen ’til at least 2021. So we imagine it must have really frosted Ryan’s cookies when, in the midst of many a late night and early morning on the Hill devoted to dragging this sucker across the finish line, Reverend Patrick Conroy, the House chaplain since 2011, had the stones to include these outrageous lines in one of his prayers:

“God of the universe, we give You thanks for giving us another day. Bless the Members of this assembly as they set upon the work of these hours, of these days. . . . As legislation on taxes continues to be debated this week and next, may all Members be mindful that the institutions and structures of our great Nation guarantee the opportunities that have allowed some to achieve great success, while others continue to struggle. May their efforts these days guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.”

Ryan, one assumes, had never heard such sacrilegious words from a man of the cloth and was probably of a mind to drag Conroy out of the room by his collar and throw him out on the Capitol steps then and there. But because he is a disciplined lawmaker whose Holy Grail was so close he could taste it, he stayed focused and decided to deal with the blasphemy at a later time. And apparently that time came earlier this month, per The Hill:

House Chaplain Patrick Conroy’s sudden resignation has sparked a furor on Capitol Hill, with sources in both parties saying he was pushed out by Speaker Paul Ryan. Conroy’s own resignation announcement stated that it was done at Ryan’s request.

“As you have requested, I hereby offer my resignation as the 60th Chaplain of the United States House of Representatives,” the April 15 letter to Ryan, obtained by The Hill, states.

While one source claimed that “some of the more conservative evangelical Republicans didn’t like that the Father had invited a Muslim person to give the opening prayer,” others offered a more compelling reason: Ryan “took issue with a prayer on the House floor that could have been perceived as being critical of the G.O.P. tax cut bill.” According to a Democratic aide, Conroy’s ouster was “largely driven by [the] speech on the tax bill that the speaker didn’t like.” The New York Times notes that a week after his sermon, a staffer from Ryan’s office told Conroy “We are upset with this prayer; you are getting too political,” and that the next time he saw the Reverend in person, Ryan told him “Padre, you just got to stay out of politics.” AshLee Strong, a spokesperson for the speaker, declined to explain the personnel decision, noting only Minority Leader Nancy Pelosiand her office “were fully read in and did not object.”

Now, could Ryan have forced the guy to resign for completely legitimate reasons? Sure! But it also seems entirely plausible that this is exactly the sort of thing that would constitute a bridge too far in his book. Stand up for neo-Nazis? Water off a duck’s back. But suggest that a $1.5 trillion tax cut should help all Americans and not just the already-rich? That’s obviously a (potentially!) fireable offense right there. And don’t bother saying sorry after the fact to Ryan, Reverend. Say sorry to God. As a major corporate shareholder and beneficiary of the legislation, you’re in the doghouse with him, too.

*************************************

Read the rest of the “Levin Report” at the link!

Obviously, it takes a very special type of pastor to provide spiritual counseling to a bunch of guys who have devoted their entire careers to taking from the underprivileged and giving to the over-privileged. It also takes a very special kind of theological scholarship, since almost all of Christian theology suggests that exactly the opposite is required and that greed, promoting inequality, and abusing the less fortunate are actually sins that could have serious repercussions in eternal life.

These dudes have to face the very real chance that they will pass into an another world where those whom they have dispossessed, mistreated, mocked, dumped on, and scorned in life will be the “honored ones” and the GOP lifetime grifters will be at their mercy. The day of reckoning for today’s GOP and their evangelical backers could get ugly — they almost have to hope that there is no God, or if there is, that She is not a “Just God” or they will have “Hell to Pay” so to speak! No wonder they are in need of serious spiritual help!

Ryan apparently had to act quickly to scotch the blasphemous rumors floating around the Hill: JESUS WASN’T REALLY A RICH WASP. HE WASN’T EVEN A CHRISTIAN, AND HE DIDN’T BELONG TO ANY CHURCH AT ALL. HE SUPPOSEDLY TURNED FISH INTO LOAVES OF BREAD AND DIDN’T EVEN DENY BREAD (let alone cake) TO THE LGBTQ GUYS IN THE CROWD!

Some misguided souls are even claiming that ”our very own” Jesus Christ actually was an indigent swarthy Palestinian disgruntled Jew who led a ragtag band of vagrants — some of whom had quit gainful employment and abandoned their families — around Palestine undermining legal authority, failing to respect THE LAW, and spreading seditious lies like “The meek shall inherit the earth,” “Blessed are the poor,” and “Fat Cats riding camels will never make it through the eye of a needle or pass through the gates of Heaven!” They were “takers” — non-self-supporting, non-contributors to the community, and lived on handouts and public charity!

Some apparently have the audacity to claim that Jesus spoke of a “spiritual kingdom” unrelated to material possessions and tax breaks where rich White Guys would be judged equally with everyone else. Shucks, what’s the purpose of being rich & White if it won’t even buy you preferential treatment? Heck, even a poor guy who wasn’t a lobbyist would have direct access to Mick Mulvaney under that scenario!

This obviously false Prophet reputedly was so poor that he couldn’t afford a lawyer for his trial, not even Rudy Guiliani. He tried to represent himself, and the result was pretty ugly.

False news, false news, false news! Gotta find a true minister who preaches the gospel according to Fox & Friends!

PWS

04-28-18

GONZO’S WORLD: AG’S ASSAULT ON CONSTITUTION & SEPARATION OF POWERS TOO MUCH FOR SOME GOP-APPOINTED ARTICLE IIIs!

James Hohmann writes in the Washington Post:

THE BIG IDEA:

A panel of three judges, each appointed by a Republican president to the federal appeals court in Chicago, ruled unanimously on Thursday against President Trump’s effort to withhold money from “sanctuary cities.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit upheld a nationwide injunction that blocks the Justice Department from using “the sword of federal funding to conscript state and local authorities to aid in federal civil immigration enforcement.”

Trump’s latest courtroom defeat offers yet another civics lesson about checks and balances for the first president in American history who lacks any prior governing or military experience. Unlike congressional Republicans who have by and large kowtowed and capitulated to Trumpism, despite private uneasiness and grumbling in many cases, Republican-appointed judges are free not to care about the wrath of the president or blowback from his loyalists. This gives them the breathing room to worry more about the rule of law than partisanship. That was the point of an independent judiciary and giving lifetime appointments. It’s how the Constitution is supposed to work.

Judge Ilana Rovner, who was appointed to a district judgeship by Ronald Reagan and elevated to the circuit by George H.W. Bush, offers a remarkable rebuke of the Trump administration in a 35-page opinion that can be read as a tutorial on the separation of powers. She even throws around words like “tyranny” that you don’t often see in opinions of this nature:

“Our role in this case is not to assess the optimal immigration policies for our country,” she writes. “Rather, the issue before us strikes at one of the bedrock principles of our nation, the protection of which transcends political party affiliation and rests at the heart of our system of government …

“The founders of our country well understood that the concentration of power threatens individual liberty and established a bulwark against such tyranny by creating a separation of powers among the branches of government. If the Executive Branch can determine policy, and then use the power of the purse to mandate compliance with that policy by the state and local governments, all without the authorization or even acquiescence of elected legislators, that check against tyranny is forsaken …

“Congress repeatedly refused to approve of measures that would tie funding to state and local immigration policies. Nor … did Congress authorize the Attorney General to impose such conditions. It falls to us, the judiciary, as the remaining branch of the government, to act as a check on such usurpation of power. We are a country that jealously guards the separation of powers, and we must be ever‐vigilant in that endeavor.”

Rovner, 79, and her parents fled Latvia, and the Nazis, when she was an infant. She lost family members in the Holocaust. She often says that she decided to become a lawyer to stop anything like that genocide from happening again. Displayed in her chambers are the green card she was issued when she arrived in America in 1939 and her mother’s passport. “These are the things that saved my life,” she told the Chicago Tribune for a 2011 profile.

Her scathing opinion was joined by Judge William Bauer, who was appointed by Gerald Ford. Judge Daniel Manion, who Reagan put on the bench, wrote a concurrence saying he would have narrowed the injunction to protect only Chicago, rather than keeping it national.

The injunction was ordered last September by District Judge Harry Leinenweber, who was also appointed by Reagan.

2:02

Sessions in 2017: ‘Sanctuary’ cities lead to crime

Attorney General Jeff Sessions criticized Chicago’s sanctuary city policy while speaking in Miami on Aug. 16, 2017. (Reuters)

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has tried to require that cities give federal immigration agents access to undocumented immigrants who are in their jails in order to get certain public safety grants. This effort has already been blocked in separate lawsuits by federal judges in California and Pennsylvania. The judge who blocked the administration from holding back money from Philadelphia, Michael Baylson, was appointed by George W. Bush and wrote an unusually long 128-page ruling against the administration in November.

The 7th Circuit opinion yesterday complains that the term sanctuary cities “is commonly misunderstood” and “a red herring.” Contrary to popular understanding, the judges explain, “the federal government can and does freely operate in ‘sanctuary’ localities.”

— The Justice Department quickly criticized the ruling, saying the administration continues to believe it has the power to attach strings to money appropriated by Congress and complaining that courts keep issuing broad injunctions that thwart Trump. “Many in the legal community have expressed concern that the use of nationwide injunctions is inconsistent with the separation of powers, and that their increased use creates a dangerous precedent,” DOJ spokesman Devin O’Malley said in a statement. “We will continue to fight to carry out the department’s commitment to the rule of law, protecting public safety, and keeping criminal aliens off the streets to further perpetrate crimes.”

— Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel held an afternoon news conference to blast Trump as petty for refusing to hand over the grant money while the case continues to play out in the courts. “The Trump Justice Department could actually say ‘OK, we’re going to go forward with these grants, and let’s fight the case out in court,’” said the Democrat, who was Barack Obama’s first White House chief of staff. “But they refuse to give municipalities like Chicago and other cities around the country the resources to fight crime and gun violence, because they think fighting us on the principle of being a sanctuary, welcoming city, is more important than helping the police departments get the technology they need to do a better job in public safety.”

1:00

Supreme Court restricts deportations of immigrant felons

The Supreme Court ruled on April 17 that an immigration statute requiring the deportation of noncitizens who commit felonies is unlawfully vague. (Reuters)

— This is just the latest legal setback for Trump when it comes to his far-reaching immigration agenda.

On Tuesday, Justice Neil Gorsuch joined the Supreme Court’s four liberal members to strike down part of a federal law used to deport noncitizens who commit felonies on the grounds that it was unconstitutionally vague. The 5-to-4 decision could limit the government’s ability to deport people with criminal records, a Trump priority.

“Vague laws invite arbitrary power,” Gorsuch wrote in a concurring opinion. “Today’s vague laws … can invite the exercise of arbitrary power all the same — by leaving the people in the dark about what the law demands and allowing prosecutors and courts to make it up.”

“For the conservative Gorsuch to align with the liberals might seem a surprise, but his vote was in keeping with questions he asked during oral argument in October. And he was in part following in the footsteps of the justice he replaced, the late Antonin Scalia,” explains Supreme Court beat reporter Robert Barnes. “In 2015, Scalia wrote the court’s decision in Johnson v. United States, which struck down a similarly vague description of violent felony in the Armed Career Criminal Act.”

— Trump is incensed about Gorsuch’s vote. Administration officials say the president has been complaining to them that the justice “had proved too liberal in recent cases,” Robert Costa, Josh Dawsey and Rosalind S. Helderman report. “Associates … said it renewed his doubts that Gorsuch would be a reliable conservative. One top Trump adviser played down the comments as unhappiness with Gorsuch’s decision rather than with Gorsuch broadly.”

— In February, the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s request to immediately review the lower court decisions that prevent him from ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA). Getting cert. would have only taken four votes, which means at least one GOP appointee opposed the administration’s request. The litigation over the fate of the “dreamers” will now follow the normal process, winding through the circuit courts.

1:35

President-elect Donald Trump pledged to end “sanctuary cities” while campaigning for the White House. Washington, D.C., is one such city. (Claritza Jimenez/The Washington Post)

— The courts have proved vexing for Trump since his first days in office. District Judge James Robart in Washington state, who was nominated by George W. Bush in 2004, halted the president’s first travel ban, which blocked citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States.

“The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!” Trump tweeted angrily.

But it wasn’t. A three-judge panel on the 9th Circuit, which included another Bush 43 nominee, unanimously agreed. The administration withdrew the ban and issued another watered-down version.

— Barack Obama also lost cases in the courts, including on immigration. But he typically failed before conservative judges who had been appointed by Republicans more than judges appointed by his Democratic predecessors. The Harvard-educated former constitutional law professor had a much better record. To be sure, most judges appointed by Republicans are still siding with the administration most of the time. And Trump is remaking the judicial branch by appointing nominees who share his worldview.

*********************************

We should remember that it actually was GOP appointees like Judge Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit and Chief Judge John Walker of the 2nd Circuit (a cousin of President George W. Bush) who led the “Charge of Judicial Outrage” that eventually shut down the “assembly line removal system” set up by Ashcroft following his infamous “BIA Purge.”

PWS

04-20-18

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