35 thoughts on “Congratulations Red Sox Nation”

  1. ‘He is not welcome here’: Thousands support Pittsburgh Jewish leaders calling on Trump to ‘denounce white nationalism’

     

    More than 16,000 people have signed an open letter to President Trump from the leaders of a Pittsburgh-based Jewish group who say the president will not be welcome in the city unless he denounces white nationalism and stops “targeting” minorities after a mass shooting Saturday at a local synagogue left 11 dead.

    […]

    “For the past three years your words and your policies have emboldened a growing white nationalist movement,” the Jewish leaders wrote. “You yourself called the murderer evil, but yesterday’s violence is the direct culmination of your influence.”

    The letter continued: “Our Jewish community is not the only group you have targeted. You have also deliberately undermined the safety of people of color, Muslims, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities. Yesterday’s massacre is not the first act of terror you incited against a minority group in our country.”

    […]
    Four boldfaced lines stand out from the rest of the letter’s 338 words.
     
    “President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you fully denounce white nationalism.”
     
    “President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you stop targeting and endangering all minorities.”
     
    “President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you cease your assault on immigrants and refugees.”
     
    “President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you commit yourself to compassionate, democratic policies that recognize the dignity of all of us.”
    [….]
    If the president still decides to visit Pittsburgh without meeting the letter’s demands, Friedman said he expects Trump will “only be met with derision.”
     
    “We will let him know how unhappy we are with his presence, with his lack of leadership,” he said. “He will see all of Pittsburgh in the streets. It’s not just going to be the people that signed on to the letter. It’s going to be everybody.”
     
    Friedman added: “If he’s going to come to our city, he’s going to come on our terms.”
     

  2. regarding faux news flies false flags and other things that happened last week


    Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) 10/28/2018

  3. wapo:
    A crowdfunding campaign organized by the Muslim American community has raised more than $90,000 for the victims of the mass shooting at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.
     
    The shooting, which claimed the lives of 11 people Saturday during a morning service, “made me sick to my stomach,” said Tarek El-Messidi, a Muslim American speaker and activist who started the fundraising effort as soon as he heard about the attack. In the first six hours, the effort, called Muslims Unite for Pittsburgh Synagogue, reached its initial goal of $25,000.
     
    “When I saw the news, I thought, ‘This could have very well been at a mosque or a Hindu temple,’ ” he said. “We live in a time where so much bigoted rhetoric is being amplified.”
     
    On the fundraising page, he wrote: “We wish to respond to evil with good, as our faith instructs us, and send a powerful message of compassion through action.” He also quotes the Koran as saying, “Repel evil by that which is better.”

    The fundraiser, which at some points was taking in about $2,000 per hour on Sunday, is an effort to offset immediate short-term needs of the injured victims and grieving families. It also will go toward funeral expenses and medical bills. El-Messidi is partnering with the Islamic Center of Pittsburgh to disburse the money.

    “No amount of money will bring back their loved ones, but we do hope to lessen their burden in some way,” wrote El-Messidi.
    [….continues…]
     

  4. From the Atlantic article Jamie linked:

    As for those who aided the president in his propaganda campaign, who enabled him to prey on racist fears to fabricate a national emergency, who said to themselves, “This is the play”? Every single one of them bears some responsibility for what followed. Their condemnations of anti-Semitism are meaningless. Their thoughts and prayers are worthless. Their condolences are irrelevant. They can never undo what they have done, and what they have done will never be forgotten.  

    Couldn’t have said it better.

  5. Patti Davis has a poignant piece at WaPo this morning.  She points out how inadequate IMPOTUS is in the wake of tragedies committed by his followers.

    In 1999, after Columbine, Clinton spokeabout teaching our children “to resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons.”

     
    After 9/11, Bush said, “America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. And no one will keep that light from shining.”

    In 2012, after Sandy Hook, Obama said, “all across this land of ours, we have wept with you. We’ve pulled our children tight.”

    After the Challenger disaster, my father said, “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’ ”

    After 11 worshippers were gunned down, massacred because they were Jewish, Trump said there should have been an armed guard inside. He said the death penalty should be toughened. And then, later, he made his joke about having a bad hair day and tweeted about a baseball game.

    This president will never offer comfort, compassion or empathy to a grieving nation. It’s not in him. When questioned after a tragedy, he will always be glib and inappropriate. So I have a wild suggestion: Let’s stop asking him. His words are only salt in our wounds.

    She went on briefly, but did she really need to?  What she said above sums it up perfectly.

  6. Our president sucks.

     

    Congratulations Boston Red Sox Fans  thank you Sox for beating LA

  7. People in Pittsburgh already didn’t like him when he claimed they wanted out of the Climate Change agreement when in fact they support it.

  8. Craig… thanks for the this thread and that picture.

    I know most of you think talking about sports on a political blog is frivolous.  But in these times we can all learn a bit from true sports fans.  I’ve been a fan since childhood.  I played sports in school…  earned letters in basketball, softball, and field hockey.  The biggest thing that playing sports has taught me is how to win magnanimously… and how to lose magnanimously.  The other team isn’t your enemy… it’s your opponent.   I learnt that our fans and the other teams fans are all fans of whatever sport I happened to be playing.  And in that, we all shared something in common.

    If we as Americans can’t learn these simple lessons….  then we are Trump.

  9. RR – Thanks for that. It’s never easy being a fan of the losing side, particularly when there is a population element that revels in being nasty to anyone that isn’t them.

    My Dodgers had a weird season, yet managed to win a 6th NL West Division in a row followed by a second consecutive trip to the World Series. Then they came up short again. I’m disappointed, again, but I’ll get over it because come February we get to start over and try again.

    So, 31 years and counting. One of these times, our turn will be more cosmically karmic than the other guy’s.

  10. I’ll bid three No Trump.

    What did the announcer say about the Sox?That only one of the starting line-up had been on the team at the start of the Season? Makes me think of the Boston Tea Party. Renee, I hope you enjoyed every minute of that magnificent season. Travis, my Indians took the World Series from Brooklyn in 1920. I’m looking for a repeat in 2020.

  11. Later Sunday, Trump lashed out again on Twitter, this time at the media: “The Fake News is doing everything in their power to blame Republicans, Conservatives and me for the division and hatred that has been going on for so long in our Country.”

     

    as a good man once said to another demagogue “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” 

    in times like this last week, this is what presidents are expected to say:

     
    We must never remain silent in the face of bigotry. We must condemn those who seek to divide us. In all quarters and at all times, we must teach tolerance and denounce racism, anti-Semitism and all ethnic or religious bigotry wherever they exist as unacceptable evils. We have no place for haters in America — none, whatsoever.
     
    Ronald Reagan
     

  12. but no, you went on today per wapo to say:

    “There is great anger in our Country caused in part by inaccurate, and even fraudulent, reporting of the news,” Trump wrote. “The Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People, must stop the open & obvious hostility & report the news accurately & fairly. That will do much to put out the flame … of Anger and Outrage and we will then be able to bring all sides together in Peace and Harmony. Fake News Must End!”

     

    again, I ask: have you no sense of decency?

  13. If the words, “enemy of the people” don’t chill you then nothing will.There was never a dictator born who did not require an enemy of the people. Trump is no different. His enemy is the media, and he wants it to be ours as well.  Forty some percent of the country is ok with it. This is a very dangerous time in our country, and I don’t think that I am being overly dramatic when I say that. Please God let me be wrong.

  14. My condolences to the Dodgers & their family.

    However, it was a great season, and there is always next year. Winter leagues begin any day now. And, when winter leagues are playing, spring training must be right around the corner.

  15. ny times:
    A new lawsuit accuses President Trump, his company and three of his children of using the Trump name to entice vulnerable people to invest in sham business opportunities.
    Filed in federal court in Manhattan on Monday, the lawsuit comes just days before the midterm elections, raising questions about whether its timing is politically motivated. It is being underwritten by a nonprofit whose chairman has been a donor to Democratic candidates.
    The allegations take aim at the heart of Mr. Trump’s personal narrative that he is a successful deal-maker who built a durable business, charging he and his family lent their name to a series of scams.
    The 160-page complaint alleges that Mr. Trump and his family received secret payments from three business entities in exchange for promoting them as legitimate opportunities, when in reality they were get-rich-quick schemes that harmed investors, many of whom were unsophisticated and struggling financially.
    Those business entities were ACN, a telecommunications marketing company that paid Mr. Trump millions of dollars to endorse its products; the Trump Network, a vitamin marketing enterprise; and the Trump Institute, which the suit said offered “extravagantly priced multiday training seminars” on Mr. Trump’s real estate “secrets.”
    The four plaintiffs, who were identified only with pseudonyms like Jane Doe, depict the Trump Organization as a racketeering enterprise that defrauded thousands of people for years as the president turned from construction to licensing his name for profit. The suit also names Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump as defendants.
    A White House spokeswoman for Mr. Trump and two lawyers for the Trump Organization did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
    The suit is not the first to accuse Mr. Trump of fraud. Shortly after his election in November 2016, he agreed to pay $25 million to settle a series of lawsuits, including one by New York State’s attorney general, that alleged unscrupulous practices by Trump University, another venture that claimed to sell access to his real estate secrets. Mr. Trump settled without acknowledging fault or liability, his lawyer said at the time.
    And in June, the New York attorney general’s office filed a lawsuit seeking to dissolve the Donald J. Trump Foundation, claiming the charity had engaged in self-dealing and other violations. The foundation’s lawyers called the suit a political attack.
    But the new suit alleges “a pattern of racketeering activity” involving three other organizations. Roberta A. Kaplan and Andrew G. Celli Jr., two lawyers for the plaintiffs, said in a statement that they were not aware of “any prior case against the Trumps alleging consumer fraud on this scale.”
    “This case connects the dots at the Trump Organization and involves systematic fraud that spanned more than a decade, involved multiple Trump businesses and caused tremendous harm to thousands of hardworking Americans,” the statement said.
    Asked about the suit’s timing, Ms. Kaplan and Mr. Celli said their firms — Kaplan, Hecker & Fink and Emery, Celli, Brinckerhoff & Abady — had conducted a lengthy investigation and the plaintiffs were eager to file. “The case is being brought now because it is ready now,” the lawyers said.
    The lawyers said a nonprofit organization, the Tesseract Research Center, was funding the lawsuit by paying attorney’s fees and costs.

    Morris Pearl, the Democratic donor who is the nonprofit’s chairman, said in a statement that his organization hoped to draw attention to the challenges faced by people who sustain losses but cannot seek redress through the courts “ because of the extreme wealth and power on the other side.”
    The lawyers said they were asking the court to allow the plaintiffs to proceed using pseudonyms because of “serious and legitimate security concerns given the heated political environment.” The lawyers also declined to make their clients available for interviews.
    The four plaintiffs each invested in ACN after watching promotional videos featuring Mr. Trump.
    According to the lawsuit, ACN required investors to pay $499 to sign up to sell its products, like a videophone and other services, with the promise of additional profits if they recruited others to join.
    Mr. Trump described the phone in an ACN news release as “amazing” but failed to disclose he was being “paid lavishly for his endorsement,” the suit says.
    One plaintiff, a hospice worker from California identified as “Jane Doe,” decided to join ACN in 2014 after attending a recruitment meeting at a Los Angeles hotel where she listened to speakers and watched Mr. Trump on video extol the investment opportunity.
    For her, the video was the “turning point,” the lawsuit said.
    “Doe believed that Trump had her best interests at heart,” the suit said.
    Jane Doe then signed up for a larger ACN meeting in Palm Springs, Calif., which cost almost $1,500, and she later spent thousands more traveling to conventions in Cleveland and Detroit, according to the suit.
    In the end, she earned $38 — the only income she would ever receive from the company, the suit said.

  16.  A RICO charge is a nice way of surviving SFB latest out bursts of racial and Jewish hatred over the weekend and the slaughter in the Synagogue.  Life can be a lot better than this.

     

  17. If the reporting is correct and there are 30,000 people in Pittsburgh that have signed letters or petitions saying IMPOTUS is not welcome at this time that constitutes 10% of the population of the ‘burgh, and the mayor has said don’t come – they can’t spare the security necessary for a presidential visit.  And yet the emotionally tone deaf prick insists on going there while Pittsburgh buries its dead, traverse through town in his motorcade and try to focus the spotlight on himself after being called out being insensitive to the ‘burghers.  Write a letter, make a speech, but fuhchrissake honor the wishes of the people who are grieving.

  18. POGO – yup. That is SFB.  Going to the heart of the Synagogue is demonstrating to his hate mongers and white supremacists, racist and general assh*(s, that he is kicking the Jews when they are hurting.  If there was anyway to get in his brain that him going to Pitt would be admitting the Jewish people are winning him over to their side, he would scrap the trip.

  19. So, a query.    If it were you there living in Squirrel Hill, and you were a member with some influence in the synagogue what would your response be to this circumstance of of his coming there?

    ie How should they handle it?
     

  20. An invitation by the city of Pittsburgh to all our former presidents would be a nice touch. Trump on the outside looking in.

    Hate to politicize such an event but since Trump is insisting he might as well be shown how real presidents act and respond in times of tragedy.

  21. Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

    With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
    Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
    A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
    Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
    Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
    Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
    The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
    ‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ cries she
    With silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor,
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
    I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’”
    -Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”, 1883

    “We’re going to put tents up all over the place… they’re going to wait, and, if they don’t get asylum, they’re going to get out.”
    -Donald Trump, “Fox News”, 2018

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