Leslie Odom Jr. - Auld Lang Syne

Next Episode on TrumpWorld

Trump's Year in Review

Goodbye Kayleigh (and belatedly to Sarah and Sean)!

A farewell message to the White House press secretaries, from the brilliant team at Slate.com:

Goodbye, Trump spokesmen and spokeswomen!

Goodbye, making farcically absurd claims about the size of the inauguration crowd at the first press conference of the presidency!

Goodbye, referring to German death camps as “Holocaust centers” for some reason!

Goodbye, creating a weeks-long story about being abused and victimized because you were politely asked to leave a restaurant while your colleagues were separating young children from their parents permanently at the southern border!

And goodbye, lying about whether separating children from their parents was the intent of your border policy (it was).

Goodbye, going more than a year (!) without holding a press briefing!

Goodbye, claiming indignantly that the president wasn’t doing some terrible thing only for him to brag explicitly about doing it like 10 minutes later (I don’t have a specific example for this one because it happened about a thousand times!).

Goodbye, speaking to reporters without a mask on during a workplacewide coronavirus outbreak!

Goodbye, getting your job as White House press secretary in the first place by asserting on cable news that there was no danger the coronavirus would spread to the United States!

And finally, goodbye to making ludicrous statements about the size of the crowd at the Million MAGA March!

We’d say we wish you success in your future endeavors, but that would be lying.  And nobody likes a liar!

Bye!

 

2019 vs. 2020

 

Christmas Bombing in Nashville

At 4:30, in the pre-dawn hours on Christmas day, there was first what appeared to be several bursts of very rapid gunfire.  Whether these were actual gunshots, or a recording of the same, they were loud enough to wake several people and generate calls to the police describing what seemed to be fire from automatic weapons. Soon after, a loud voice began to deliver a repeating message.

“This vehicle will explode in 15 minutes. This area must be evacuated now. This area must be evacuated now. If you can hear this message, evacuate now.” The voice came from a white RV parked on the side of the street. The message repeated over and over, punctuated by a countdown. “This vehicle will explode in 14 minutes." 

Police, who had responded to the reports of shots fired, worked quickly to help get people out of the area, limiting the known casualties to three. But police are also reporting that among the debris is “tissue” that could be human remains. Whether those remains come from someone who was in the RV at the time of the explosion is unclear.

The RV itself appears to have been based on a Ford truck. There were no plates either visible in the images released, or found in the debris. CCTV footage shows that the RV arrived on the scene at 1:22 AM Christmas, three hours before the sounds of gunshots and announcements began. There has been no news of whether anyone was seen exiting the RV after it arrived. It’s unknown if the police have found VIN numbers or anything else that would help in identifying the RV.

The gunshot sounds came in three bursts, a short time apart, and were apparently designed to draw attention. The voice coming from the RV was computerized, and may have been generated from a system onboard the RV rather than being a recording. The type of explosive used has not been made public, though it seems unlikely that it was ammonium nitrate, as in the Oklahoma City bombing. That bomb contained 13 large barrels, each of which contained nearly five hundred pounds of material. There is some suspicion, based on the size of the fireball and heat generated by the blast, that the Nashville bomber (or bombers) had access to the kind of high explosives materials that cannot be readily purchased for mining, agriculture, etc. On the other hand, it may have been the result of something more commonly available, carefully packaged and exploded.

In the meantime, another 1,129 Americans died from the coronavirus and the COVID relief bill passed by Congress remains unsigned.  Donald Trump continued to play golf at his Florida resort for the second straight day.

 

So True

 

Christmas Episode on TrumpWorld

Tori Kelly - 25th

Oh Yes, We Need a Little Christmas

 

Coronavirus Art - Melbourne, Australia

Christmas for 2020

Goodbye, Chad!

A farewell message to Chad Wolf, from the brilliant team at Slate.com:

Goodbye, Chad Wolf!  This guy, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, is one of the most dangerous types of Trump administration official: a former bottom-of-the-barrel functionary, who’s worked his way up through his willingness to echo Trump’s rhetoric and do Trump’s bidding.  Wolf is exactly the kind of person who would have become even scarier in a second Trump term—which is why it’s so great that he’s not going to get a chance.

Wolf worked as a bureaucrat in the Transportation Security Administration during the Bush years, then spent a decade as a lobbyist, swimming happily in the infamous Swamp.  When he started working for the Trump administration, he began again at the TSA, working there for four months before moving to DHS.  He was an aide to the acting Secretary Elaine Duke, then chief of staff to Kirstjen Nielsen; he then became an undersecretary and moved to the acting secretary job last year

Wolf was not Trump’s choice for the acting secretary job, Abigail Tracy wrote in a recent assessment of Wolf’s rise for Vanity Fair.  But due to a lack of other choices, and a perception that Wolf might be willing to toe the line, he got the nod.  Senior adviser Stephen Miller, in particular, saw Wolf as a willing tool for his policies.  “Stephen really tried to be the shadow secretary of Homeland Security, and his vessel for doing that was Chad,” a former DHS official told Tracy.

Tracy also interviewed several former colleagues of Wolf’s, who said that when they worked with him, he was “an effective but milquetoast bureaucrat.”  But after getting onto the ladder at Trump’s DHS, Wolf became something else—something Trumpier.  In public statements, he has been quite willing to advance Trumpian arguments: This past summer, he told ABC’s This Week that there was no “systemic racism” problem in law enforcement; in early September, he used the occasion of a “State of the Homeland” address to blame China and the World Health Organization for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Behind the scenes, Wolf has also been willing to use the department to advance sinister policies on Trump’s and Miller’s behalf.  It was Wolf who, in December 2017, drafted the memo of policy recommendations that proposed the separation of “family units” (how cold that sounds) at the border.  He then lied to Congress, during his confirmation for his undersecretary job, about his knowledge of the family separation policy.  More recently, under his leadership, expedited deportation programs have been hustling migrant asylum-seekers out of the country without benefit of legal counsel, using COVID-19 as cover.

And it was Wolf who decided to send federal agents to Portland, Oregon, this summer, to quell protests there, though the governor and mayor of the state and city in question informed him they’d rather not have his “help.” Those terrifying unmarked agents hustling protesters into vans were acting on his behest. Summing up Wolf’s recent actions in July, my colleague Jeremy Stahl wrote that Wolf had “graduated from advocating kidnapping children from their parents at the border to kidnapping grown adults on American streets.”

Lately, there have been more garden-variety—at least for this Administration—whispers of rule-bending and corruption.  The Government Accountability Office found in August that Wolf and fellow DHS official Ken Cuccinelli may not have been serving in their roles lawfully.  Also in August, CNBC reported that several former lobbying clients of Wolf’s had won DHS contracts during his tenure.  Then, news broke that a consulting firm where Wolf’s wife works had been awarded more than $6 million in DHS contracts in the past two years.  Then, a whistleblower filed a complaint alleging that the Trump administration had tried to “censor or manipulate” intelligence, including intelligence about possible election interference.  At a Senate hearing, Wolf called this allegation “patently false.”

Despite everything, Wolf’s nomination to become secretary for real advanced in late September, after a Senate Homeland Security Committee vote split along party lines.  But with a Trump loss, it looks like this jumped-up swamp creature, whose fingerprints are on some of the worst offenses against humanity and civil rights that this administration has concocted, may finally be out of luck.  To which we say: Too bad, so sad! Goodbye!

 

Today's Episode of Trumpworld

 

Grinchy Christmas

Dolly Parton & Michael Bublé - Cuddle Up, Cozy Down Christmas

Trump Supporters Still Benefitting From White Privilege

Two historic Black churches in Washington DC were attacked during pro-Trump rallies last Saturday. Videos posted on Twitter show a group of people identified as Proud Boys marching with a Black Lives Matter banner held above their heads, then cheering as it is set on fire.  The banner was taken from Asbury United Methodist Church, one of the oldest Black churches in the city, having been established in 1836. 

“Last night demonstrators who were part of the MAGA gatherings tore down our Black Lives Matter sign and literally burned it in the street,” the Rev. Ianther M. Mills, the church’s senior pastor, said in a statement. “It pained me especially to see our name, Asbury, in flames. For me it was reminiscent of cross burnings.”

Another video, posted by @BGOnTheScene, shows protesters trespassing on private property and then tearing down a Black Lives Matter sign from in front of Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church. The group is heard chanting, “Whose streets? Our streets!” as they destroy the sign in front of the church where worshipers have included historic leaders, such as Frederick Douglass and U.S. Presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and William Howard Taft.  In a powerful editorial in the Washington Post, pastor William H. Lamar IV wrote:

The Black Lives Matter banner in front of Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, where I am privileged to serve as pastor, was removed and destroyed on Saturday evening. I am deeply disturbed by this incident (one of several incidents targeting houses of worship), but I am more disturbed by the continued mythology of imperial America. This mythology supports those who commit violence against human beings for political ends, deny citizens their right to vote, denigrate sacred spaces and claim as their own whatever they survey.

It mattered not that the land was ours. It mattered not that the sign was ours. The mythology that motivated the perpetrators on Saturday night was the underbelly of the American narrative — that White men can employ violence to take what they want and do what they want and call their criminality justice, freedom and liberty. 

There has been no recrimination from Trump or any Republicans.  Yet, when black protesters take to the streets over injustices they have suffered for hundreds of years-- and engage in very similar behavior-- the calls from the GOP for prosecution and jail time are swift and sure.  

D.C. Council member-elect Janeese Lewis George said the incident showed there are two justice systems in this country.   “Tonight, violent white supremacists stole and burned a Black Lives Matter banner from Asbury United Methodist, the oldest Black Methodist church in DC,” she tweeted. “But yet no militarized police force [was] used against them. There are two justice systems in this country, separate and unequal.”

 

Coronavirus Art - Madrid, Spain

Wear the Mask - Even a Child Can Learn To Do It!

 

Goodbye, Rudy!

A farewell message to Rudy Giuliani, from the brilliant team at Slate.com:

I can’t say I’ll miss you, but I will say I appreciated our time together. I wasn’t living in New York City when you implemented the broken windows theory, but I was around afterward to be stopped and frisked in Manhattan enough times to know which subway stations to avoid.

I moved in from New Jersey, where I wasn’t aware that the New York Police Department was already spying on Muslims.  You later bragged, “I was the mayor who put police officers in mosques, in New York and New Jersey.”  You made being Muslim probable cause. But that was cool, too, because a suspicion of police brought Black and brown communities together against the shared perceived foe in our neighborhoods.

You made 9/11, and the fear of Muslims, kind of your thing. I was in Cleveland at the Republican National Convention the night you endorsed Donald Trump’s candidacy by screaming about “ISLAMIC EXTREMIST TERRORISM.”  The people outside clearly heard you; they came up to me unpromoted, eyes wide, and asked, “Are you Muslim?”  I did get a kick out of that.

I was across the river in New Jersey when 9/11 happened, by the way.  When Trump said that “thousands and thousands” of us were celebrating, you said it was just an “exaggeration.”  I remember that day a little differently.  My dad, who drove a black car taxi in Manhattan, somehow made it home.  Many of the Muslims in my community had family who didn’t.  Still, it’s impressive that you made walking around ground zero a career-defining political accomplishment.

Later, the president asked you to figure out a way to make his Muslim ban legal.  We know that because you blurted it out yourself.  Many of Trump’s supporters still use your argument to defend the travel ban as having “nothing to do with Muslims.”  I guess that makes you a decent lawyer.

You had other moments recently.  The Trump administration was a pretty hilarious place for you to go out in such spectacular fashion.  In fact, the president may have avoided being impeached if not for your shady trips to Ukraine, so I guess we owe you for that too.  Oh, and that time you went to an Apple Store last year because you couldn’t figure out how to open your iPhone?  Whew, a good one.

I do have one question: What did you mean when you said, “I’m more of a Jew than Soros is”?  I never got that. Oh well, it’s time to go.