THE SCUM CONTINUES TO RISE

 

For Biden to Win, Listen to Minneapolis

 

For Biden to Win, Listen to Minneapolis

Not everyone is for defunding the police. Especially those in communities that would be most affected.

 

By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

·         Sept. 1, 2020, 7:58 p.m. ET

There’s one thing about the people on the Trump team that I almost admire: When they do blurt out the truth, they really tell you the truth — in a way that’s so raw you’re left asking, “Did they really say that out loud?”

That was certainly my thought when Kellyanne Conway declared last week, “The more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order.”

The better it is? How could anyone be “better” in America if we have more chaos, anarchy, vandalism and violence? It couldn’t be better — except for one man: Donald Trump.

Alas, it’s true: Every scene of rioting and looting is probably worth 10,000 votes for Trump’s re-election campaign. Just ask Kellyanne.

So, Joe Biden has a real challenge on his hands. To mobilize the majority he needs to credibly assure enough voters that he takes both the violence seriously and its social, policing and economic roots seriously. His “looting is not protesting” speech in Pittsburgh on Monday was a good start.

If you want to understand just what a challenge Biden faces in this election, though, study the struggle in my hometown, Minneapolis, over policing. It’s a face-off between some unlikely foes and, so, it reveals deep truths.

On one side are the super liberals on the Minneapolis City Council. They voted in June, after George Floyd’s death at the hands of the local police, to begin a process to remove the requirement of the City Charter to maintain a police department. It would be replaced with “a department of community safety and violence prevention,” with a director who would have “non-law enforcement experience in community safety services, including but not limited to public health and/or restorative justice approaches.” A division of “licensed peace officers” would answer to that director.

Among those opposing this change is a budding coalition of Black and white community leaders from North Minneapolis, the historical home of the Minneapolis Black community. (I was born in the Northside in 1953 when it was also the home of the Jewish community.) They are unnerved by the notion of dismantling the police force for a vague alternative at a time when their neighborhood has experienced a surge in gang shootings, lootings and drug dealing — all exacerbated by the pandemic, spiraling unemployment and demoralized police officers, who, after the Floyd killing, don’t always have the numbers or the will to show up.

 

On Aug. 18, this coalition — four Black and four white families from North Minneapolis — filed suit against the City Council and the mayor, Jacob Frey, to compel them to maintain the legal minimum of police officers on the Minneapolis force. The families contend that the Council’s actions have driven out too many police officers and curtailed the hiring of replacements, endangering their neighborhood.

Don’t get them wrong, the plaintiffs argue, they want thoughtful and deep police reform. But they want both a better police force and enough police officers to protect their kids and their streets — not either the present unreformed police or a disbanded police department and an uncertain replacement.

The Star Tribune of Minneapolis reported on Aug. 1 that since the killing of George Floyd in late May, the city’s police force is down at least 100 officers, more than 10 percent of the force, “straining department resources amid a wave of violence.” The department, the newspaper added, is budgeted for 888 officers this year, but could lose as much as a third of its work force by year’s end — through resignations, firings and medical leave for post-traumatic stress from the violence that followed Floyd’s death.

In an Aug. 24 op-ed in The Star Tribune, Sondra and Don Samuels, two of the Black plaintiffs, explained why they are suing. I know them both, and they are deeply involved in improving their Northside neighborhood. Sondra is the chief executive of the Northside Achievement Zone, and Don, her husband, is a former City Council member, former Minneapolis school board member and chief executive of Microgrants, a local nonprofit.

“We want radical police reform, where all citizens are treated as fully human by all cops, and not just by the ‘good ones’ we all know well,” they wrote. “We support the reform moves of the mayor and chief, which include community alternatives to policing that work hand-in-hand with our police force.”

The State Legislature, they also argued, “must change arbitration rules that too often demand bad cops be rehired after being fired for abusive policing.”

But, they added: “We will not sacrifice the safety of our community in the pursuit of the City Council’s lofty goals with no plan to back them up. In the months since George Floyd’s murder, we have seen an explosion in crime and homicides. Five of us live just a few houses apart. Four of us have children in our homes. Here’s what we’ve experienced on our block alone over the last two months:

“A mother’s car was shot up with eight bullets, with her infant on board. Another car was shot four times. A bullet went through the front door and a wall of our neighbor’s home. A woman was kicked and stomped within inches of her life in the middle of the street. The drug trade has been revived in two homes, to unprecedented levels, with conflicts resulting in fights and shootouts.”

Their neighbors, they warned, “are leaving their Northside homes to stay with relatives to keep their children safe. Neighbors have put their house up for sale and others are considering it for the first time.”

This is the bottom line: “By charter the Council must maintain a per capita force in the mid-700s of active duty officers. While this is not enough for our needs, we worry that the Council’s naïve intent is to take us well below this number. And we are not having it. If the leadership of the city cannot muster the wisdom to keep us safe, it must muster the compliance to obey the law that is designed to do so.”

Besides big stores, like Saks and Nordstrom, which were vandalized last week in downtown Minneapolis — after rumors spread that the police had shot a Black man, who, it turned out, had actually committed suicide — a slew of Northside businesses owned by people of color were looted or vandalized during the George Floyd protests, and many owners are now afraid to rebuild.

Think about the Northside Achievement Zone that Sondra runs. It’s working with parents, students and local partners in predominantly Black North Minneapolis to end multigenerational poverty through education and fostering family stability. It’s been a real engine for building healthy community and enabling Black Americans to realize their full potential. But it can’t work in chaos.

“We have to be able to say both that Black lives matter and that protests that turn violent cannot be allowed to tear up our city,” Sondra said to me.

But we have to say a third thing, she continued — it’s what Martin Luther King Jr. said in the late 1960s, and it’s as relevant today as it was then.

King decried riots as “self-defeating,” but he also pointed out that “a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. … It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. It has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquillity and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay.”

Economic progress and social justice, King argued, “are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.”

Which is why Biden, if he frames it right, can be the real “law and order” candidate in this election. Because he’s not for disbanding the police, but for improving them — which is how you build respect for the law from everyone — and because Biden knows that sustainable order can only come from a president who wants to build healthy and just communities, not from a president who thinks it’s “better” for him politically if they’re torn apart.

 

Trump Isn’t Here to Serve the People

 

Trump Isn’t Here to Serve the People

He has shown that we need new laws to constrain an executive who seeks unchecked power.

 

By Susan E. Rice

Ms. Rice is a former national security adviser.

·         Sept. 1, 2020, 7:36 p.m. ET

Desperate to salvage his presidency, Donald Trump is inciting racial violence by encouraging armed vigilantes to confront protesters angry over the killing and maiming of unarmed Black people by the police. The president is stoking civil conflict to distract voters from his failed leadership and strengthen his electoral prospects.

Deadly as it is, Mr. Trump’s latest tactic reflects his view of the presidency as the tool of one man. Rather than serve the people, Mr. Trump is trying to extend his time in office while undermining any constraints on his power.

Across the executive branch, Mr. Trump and his appointees have flouted long-honored norms and violated laws with relative impunity. They have succeeded largely because Senate Republicans have sacrificed oversight and accountability on the altar of subservience to this president so long as it preserves their majority control.

Under Donald Trump, the abuses have touched almost every corner of government, suggesting the president views democracy itself as his opponent.

Throughout the Republican National Convention, the president and senior officials blatantly violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits government officials from engaging in political activities on the job. From holding the event on White House grounds with cheering uniformed federal law enforcement officers in attendance, and staging a naturalization ceremony as a campaign event with participants used as unwitting political props, to his secretary of state violating departmental rules by delivering a campaign speech from Jerusalem, Mr. Trump has defiled the presidency for political gain.

Disdainful of the human consequences of the pandemic, Mr. Trump has demanded less testing, while the White House coronavirus task force recently pressured the C.D.C. to discourage testing asymptomatic persons exposed to the virus and to stop directly gathering critical data on Covid-related hospitalizations. Mr. Trump similarly bullied the F.D.A. administrator into hyping the benefits of convalescent plasma treatment and, potentially, rushing a European vaccine into use before completing standard Phase 3 trials in the United States.

Meanwhile, the State Department and numerous federal agencies routinely defy congressional subpoenas. Five departmental watchdogs have been fired for investigating accusations of administration malfeasance, while whistle-blowers like the Purple Heart recipient Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and his brother have been harassed and denied promotions.

The commander in chief intervenes improperly in military justice, redeeming war criminals at the expense of discipline and unit cohesion. Mr. Trump’s Commerce Department has curtailed the census amid a pandemic in an apparent attempt to undercount poor and minority communities. His crony managers have kneecapped the Post Office to undermine mail-in voting.

The president has also corrupted the sacred powers designed to protect the American people and our national security.

Attorney General William Barr coordinated the deployment of federal forces to violently disperse peaceful protesters in Washington. The Department of Homeland Security sent armed forces to Portland, Ore., and other cities over the objections of local officials under the guise of maintaining law and order. Their actions predictably provoked heightened violence.

These abuses of federal authority are so extreme that Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, rightly felt compelled to pledge that the military will play no role in the election or its aftermath.

To bolster Mr. Trump’s false narrative that Russia did not interfere on his behalf in the 2016 election and is not doing so now, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence misleadingly conflated the role of Russia with that of China and Iran and has refused to provide further oral briefings on election issues to congressional intelligence committees.

In the same vein, the intelligence community has been prevented from providing to Congress the annual worldwide threats briefing after Mr. Trump objected to some of its elements in prior years.

Mr. Trump has used the Justice Department to spare convicted associates like Michael Flynn and Roger Stone and to concoct a labyrinth of lies accusing the Obama administration of committing “treason” by “spying” on the Trump campaign.

From 2016 to the present, he has repeatedly solicited foreign electoral interference from Russia, Ukraine and China to harm his opponents, and sought to conceal his actions.

Mr. Trump’s pervasive efforts to turn the state into his personal protectorate not only reek of autocracy, they are also deeply corrosive to America’s democracy and national unity.

The last time America had a president who grossly abused his office, Richard Nixon, the people responded by electing overwhelming majorities of the opposing party to both the House and Senate, in 1974. That Congress enacted sweeping reforms to curtail executive power, mandate transparency and constrain potential corruption of the presidency.

Many of the norms and laws that Mr. Trump has shown contempt for were born of that era. His fresh abuses underscore both the insufficiency of existing law and the failure to enforce adequately those rules that remain on the books.

The country needs a president and a Congress committed to enacting far-reaching reforms to plug the gaps in Watergate-era legislation. New laws must ensure that the coequal branches of government effectively constrain a president who seeks unchecked power. Enforcement cannot remain dependent on the executive branch policing itself or vulnerable to the complicity of the president’s party in Congress.

As a lifelong Democrat and a senior official in the Obama administration, naturally I’d like to see a Democrat in the White House. But far more is at stake in this election than political party.

The last four years have revealed the fragility of our democratic institutions and our overreliance on norms rather than enforceable law. If American democracy is to endure, we need to strip a future demagogue of the power to abuse the presidency.

Unwitting Progressives Help Rump

 

Unwitting Progressives for Trump

Does Joe Biden have the nerve to stand up to the far left?

 

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

·         Aug. 31, 2020

On Thursday, as Donald Trump was about to accept the Republican nomination from the South Lawn of the White House with warnings that “No one will be safe in Biden’s America,” National Public Radio was doing its small part to make sure the president would be re-elected.

NPR’s assistance in this matter was surely unwitting. But that doesn’t make it any less effective.

The assist came in the form of a lengthy interview by NPR’s Natalie Escobar with Vicky Osterweil, author of “In Defense of Looting.” The book makes the case for looting because it “attacks some of the core beliefs and structures of cisheteropatriarchal racial capitalist society”; “rejects the legitimacy of ownership rights and property”; and “reveals all these for what they are: not natural facts, but social constructs benefiting a few at the expense of the many, upheld by ideology, economy and state violence.”

To judge by the NPR interview, “In Defense of Looting” is not an interesting book. It speaks for almost nobody beyond the fringe left — and certainly not for looters who hadn’t thought about “cisheteropatriarchalism.” The fact that the publisher is an imprint of the international conglomerate Hachette (2018 revenues, approximately $2.7 billion) compounds foolishness with hypocrisy.

Nonetheless, the book is symbolically important. I became aware of it when several friends separately forwarded to me the NPR interview. Many of these friends, I suspect, will reluctantly vote for Trump — not out of sympathy for him, but out of disgust with defenses of looting and other things they see too often on the left.

What else are they seeing? A CNN chyron from a burning Kenosha: “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting.” A video of an outdoor diner at a Washington, D.C., restaurant being yelled at by Black Lives Matter protesters because she won’t raise a fist in solidarity. Republican Senator Rand Paul and his wife getting harassed by a swarm of protesters as they left the White House.

And more: Trump being mocked in 2017 for warning that if statues of Robert E. Lee come down, then George Washington and Thomas Jefferson statues will be next — and then radical demonstrators doing exactly that three years later. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York scolding Orthodox Jews in April for appearing to flout social distancing rules at a Brooklyn funeral, but then making an exception for Black Lives Matter demonstrations a few months later. Seattle’s mayor, Jenny Durkan, celebrating a “summer of love” in the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” and then watching the area descend, with depressing predictability, into violent anarchy.

The list could be longer, but the question it leaves in the minds of wavering voters is exactly the question Trump most wants asked: Can the left be trusted with power?

Let me ask that question more specifically. Can the left be honest that the tragedies unfolding today in American cities are as much the story of insufficient policing as they are of abusive policing? Does it get that “law and order” is a precondition to civil liberty, not an impediment to it? Is it willing to say that the American founders who bequeathed us the institutions of liberal democracy should be honored, not despised? And does Joe Biden have the nerve to stand up to the extremes in his own party, or does he just mean to appease them?

Is he Bill Clinton, or George McGovern?

I’ve been fairly enthusiastic about Biden’s candidacy, largely because I think he represents the best chance for the moderate Democratic wing to prevail over its left one. But his wan and sometimes unsteady speech in Pittsburgh, with its brief defense of the police and its anodyne call for healing, isn’t going to assuage the voters he needs in swing states.

And need them he does. It’s always possible that Trump will overplay his hand on law and order. And Biden may still have a commanding lead in national polls. But he’s up by an average of just 2.7 points in battleground states, according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls. And the phenomenon of the “shy voter” is coming into sharper focus: Nearly 12 percent of Republicans and 11 percent of independents say they’re unlikely to give telephone pollsters their true opinion on how they’ll vote in November because they think “it’s dangerous to express an opinion outside of the current liberal viewpoint,” according to a study cited by Bloomberg. When did we hear that before?

Biden can do something about this. He can publicly call out far-left ugliness (not just violence) the next time he sees it. He can pay a visit to the people who’ve had their businesses burned to the ground in Kenosha and tell them that their grievances will be heard, and their property protected, in a Biden administration. He can even call the family of the right-wing activist killed on Saturday in Portland. What better way to prove that a Biden presidency stands for unity than to express sympathy for the victims of violence, regardless of their politics.

Too many progressives are unthinkingly helping Trump. Biden helps himself when he tells them, publicly, that their sort of help isn’t needed.

 

TOO LOONEY FOR LAURA

 

Trump is too loony even for Laura Ingraham

 

 

Opinion by 

Jennifer Rubin

Columnist

September 1, 2020 at 2:33 p.m. CDT

President Trump, during an interview on Monday with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, a spin artist for the president and a purveyor of anti-immigrant sentiment, claimed that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is controlled by mysterious people. (Disclaimer: I am an MSNBC contributor.)

 

In concocting his tale, Trump fantasized of “people that you’ve never heard of, people that are in the dark shadows.” Ingraham, as though trying her best to stop his self-immolation, responded, “That sounds like conspiracy theory.” No luck. Trump continued: “They are people that are on the streets, they’re people that are controlling the streets. We had somebody get on a plane from a certain city this weekend. And in the plane, it was almost completely loaded with thugs, wearing these dark uniforms, black uniforms, with gear and this and that.” This is simply bonkers.

 

Ingraham then stopped him from digging himself a deeper hole when he suggested police who kill unarmed people are akin to a golfer missing a three-foot putt. “But they choke, just like in a golf tournament, they miss a three-foot [putt],” Trump said.

 

Ingraham leaped in: “You’re not comparing it to golf, because that’s what the media [would say].” In other words, actual reporters would recognize what he was saying was morally offensive and so lacking in self-awareness as to suggest Trump cannot even fake normal behavior.

 

Trump had no one around him on Tuesday to stage an intervention, so he repeated his gibberish: "A person was on a plane, said there were about six people like that person, more or less, and what happened is the entire plane filled up with the looters, the anarchists, rioters — people that were obviously looking for trouble,” Trump insisted.

 

“And the person felt very uncomfortable on the plane.” He added: "This would be a person you know. So I will see whether or not I can get that person. I’ll let them know, and I can see whether or not I can get that person to speak to you,” he said. “This was a firsthand account of a plane going from Washington to wherever.” “Wherever” is the sort of filler you use when your lie becomes too absurd to add any more detail.

 

The unparalleled Daniel Dale from CNN dubbed Trump’s people-on-the-plane story as “almost too stupid to fact-check,” before issuing a reminder that Trump is infamous for his unfounded and bizarre conspiracy theories (e.g., former president Barack Obama wasn’t born in America; windmills cause cancer).

 

In a normal time, with a functioning Republican Party and a patriotic vice president, this might be the end of Trump’s campaign and an invitation to invoke the 25th Amendment. We, unfortunately, have spineless sycophants in the GOP and a zombie-like vice president who feels compelled to show allegiance to a president plainly unfit to hold office. Likewise, in most families, there would be a family meeting to stop him from embarrassing himself. (Perhaps not in families where its members stand to inherit millions of dollars.) No chance of that, but the thesis from the president’s niece, Mary Trump, that there is something seriously wrong with him looks pretty unassailable.

 

Surely, some excuse will emerge. Maybe Trump was “just joking." Maybe Republicans will actually insist the president was telling the truth, making them also sound like they’ve also gone around the bend. The real sin here is the right-wing media that keep protecting Trump, the pundits who will argue it does not matter what he says, and the Republicans too timid to stand up to someone incapable of doing the job. It does not help that the mainstream media pulls its punches.

 

Something is really, really wrong — and those pretending that it is not are endangering the country and our democracy.

MORE LIES FROM RUMP

 

Fauci debunks coronavirus death misinformation promoted by President Trump

White House coronavirus adviser Anthony S. Fauci on Tuesday refuted online misinformation amplified by President Trump that the virus’s death toll has been vastly overstated in the United States.

The claim was shared by the far-right website Gateway Pundit and a follower of the baseless QAnon theory in Twitter posts that Trump retweeted Sunday, one of which was removed for violating the company’s coronavirus misinformation policy. It falsely claimed that only 6 percent of the nation’s 180,000 reported covid-19 deaths are legitimate, pointing to a statement on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website saying that 94 percent of deaths involved co-morbidities.

“If you look at the people who died of covid disease, the point that the CDC was trying to make was that a certain percentage of them had nothing else but just covid,” Fauci said during an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “That does not mean that someone who has hypertension or diabetes who dies of covid didn’t die of covid-19. They did.”

Despite online claims, the CDC statement was not a departure from what has been known about the coronavirus. The CDC has said for months that people with underlying health issues are at greater risk of developing serious symptoms from coronavirus.

Co-morbidities reported on the CDC’s website include heart disease, obesity, diabetes and hypertension — conditions that can make a person more vulnerable to the virus. Each would appear on a person’s death certificate, along with covid-19. Death certificates may also list sepsis, respiratory arrest, kidney failure or other conditions as the immediate cause of death, but those are caused by the infection.

Many scientists, Fauci among them, think the virus’s true death toll has been undercounted, not overcounted, because of lack of access to testing at the start of the pandemic and deaths that happen at home.

“The numbers that you’ve been hearing, the 180,000-plus deaths, are real deaths from covid-19,” he said Tuesday. “Let there not be any confusion about that. It’s not 9,000 deaths from covid-19. It’s 180,000-plus deaths.”

HE'LL NEVER BE WELCOME BACK IN NYC - NOR WILL HIS SCUMMY KIDS

 

total utter bullshit - filthy lies abetted by sleazeball ingraham

 

IT'S THE RECURRING BIG LIE BY RUMP:

I’ll tell you sometime, but it’s under investigation right now

MAYBE FROM PRISON IN A FEW MONTHS 

Trump: And Biden—well Biden is—I don’t even like to mention Biden, because he’s not controlling anything. They control him…

Ingraham: Who do you think is pulling Biden’s strings? Is it former Obama officials…?

Trump: People that you’ve never heard of. People that are in the dark shadows. People that…

Ingraham: What does that mean? That sounds like conspiracy theory. Dark shadows, what is that?

Trump: No. People that you haven’t heard of. They’re people that are on the streets. They’re people that are controlling the streets. We had somebody get on a plane from a certain city this weekend, and in the plane it was almost completely loaded with thugs wearing these dark uniforms, black uniforms with gear and this and that. They’re on a plane…

Ingraham: Where—where was this?

Trump: I’ll tell you sometime, but it’s under investigation right now, but they came from a certain city, and this person was coming to the Republican National Convention, and there were like seven people on the plane like this person, and then a lot of people were on the plane to do big damage. They were coming for…

Ingraham: Planning for Washington?

Trump: Yes, this was all—this is all happening.