76 thoughts on “Trump’s America”

  2. vox:

    Speaking from the convention stage in Cleveland in 2016, Donald Trump made a solemn promise to the American people: that “the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end. Beginning on January 20, 2017, safety will be restored.”

    It was, at the time, a striking promise. Starting in 1994, the US murder rate had fallen consistently for 20 years. Violent crime had fallen so much that nobody talked about it anymore as a political issue, and the “tough on crime” politics of the 1980s and 1990s was widely viewed as embarrassing.

    […]

    It’s not entirely clear how many voters found this particular gambit persuasive and appealing, but obviously Trump thinks it works because he’s saying the same stuff again. And if Trump were just some guy on Twitter, that would make sense: Murder is on the rise again after ticking down for a few years, and acts of looting and vandalism are occurring in cities across the country.

    But Donald Trump is the president of the United States.

    He promised four years ago to restore safety and bring law and order to our streets. He never bothered to articulate a message about how he would do that, but it didn’t matter. He was the “law and order” candidate. But today he’s a candidate with a record. A record of rising crime and urban disorder, and a record that makes it clear he has no idea how to make any of it better — and is intervening in several ways to make it worse.

    [continues]

  3. The pictures from Kenosha are striking.  In fact they show SFB in the middle of his alternative universe, one that might cover a block or two of the U.S.  For normal people we do not see what the orange rind sees.  His universe is populated with Nazis,  KKK, and fascists attacking any and all who are not white male condo owners.  Reality does not intrude with blue skies and happy people.
     
    The show his staff planned has once again fallen apart with a orange blob doing a walk reminiscent of Hermann Wilhelm Göring strutting around.

  8. cuban heels, lifts, whatever.  making up for the height loss one usually has as he ages.  much like the makeup, the plants and elaborate hair do, some work around the eyebrows and probably a girdle when not wearing kevlar protective vest.  not exactly the bionic-man but more like a badly enhanced cyborg.  on his way to being one of those russian bots perhaps?

     

  10. that cyborg D’ump reference isn’t an original thought of mine – here’s something from jewishphilosophyplace written back in 2016:

    As a creature that marks the “breakdown of clean distinctions between organism and machine,” the cyborg was theorized by Dona Harraway as a way out of the dualistic antinomies of our late capitalism moment. One could just as well argue that the cyborg does no such thing. In ways that Donna Haraway could not anticipate in 1985, one could invert her famous manifesto. By her own account, Donald Trump is a cyborg. He is partial, ironic and utterly perverse. Oppositonal and utopian without a shred of innocence, he has effectively destructured the polarity of public and private creating, in the process a technological polis and a revolution of social relations.
    Here’s the source from Haraway:
    “The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. […] Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection- they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. …”

  15. Jamie – NY Traffic  & Necker Island 

    Renee / XR – Tiz The Law 

    Patd – Finnick the Fierce 

    Sturgeone – NY Traffic 

    BiD – NY Traffic 

    Pogo – Storm The Court 

    KGC – Authentic 

  16. Dana Mlibank – WaPo.  

    President Trump took off on Air Force One on Tuesday morning on his way to Kenosha, Wis. He landed on Planet Zog.

    In real life, protests (some peaceful, some violent) erupted after police shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, seven times in the back. A Trump-supporting militia member allegedly gunned down three of the protesters, killing two of them.

    But in the imaginary Kenosha that Trump created Tuesday afternoon at an invitation-only “roundtable” — in a high school cafeteria serving as a government “command center” — things were quite different.

    There was no pandemic in this Kenosha; at his suggestion, everybody in the roundtable took off their face masks. There was no right-wing violence. (I heard no mention of the killings by the Trump-backing extremist.) There was no such thing as police brutality (Trump quickly swept aside any such notion). And there were hardly any Black people (only two of the 23 in the room).

    It quickly became clear that the pair, a pastor and his wife, were to be seen rather than heard. James Ward, who said he is the pastor to Blake’s mother, was asked by Trump to offer a prayer, then offered to discuss “the real pain that hurts Black Americans.” Trump wasn’t interested.

    When Trump opened the roundtable to questions, a reporter asked the pastor whether he believed that there is systemic racism in law enforcement.

    Before Ward could answer, Trump broke in to say there were only “some bad apples” among police, of which “I have the endorsement of so many, maybe everybody.”

    The reporter tried again. “Could the pastor answer my question, please?”

    Trump called on another questioner.

    Then, shutting down the session, Trump turned to the muted pastor he had just used as a prop. “Fantastic job,” he said.

    (Continues)

    And so it goes.

  18. Hey… I heard back from Carol.  She did evacuate with her 2 friends.  She didn’t say where they went.
     
    xrep…   welcome aboard.
     
    Craig… time to name your horse.
     

  19. NPR interview this morning:

    A former top Department of Homeland Security official who resigned in April says the Trump administration is creating the conditions for domestic extremism to flourish in the United States.
    Elizabeth Neumann left her position as assistant secretary of counterterrorism and threat prevention after three years at DHS. In an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep, she offers a candid assessment of the counter-terrorism community’s failure to address the threat posed by domestic extremism.
    She says the administration is paving the way for even more violence.
    The life-long Republican voted for Trump in 2016, albeit, she says, “very reluctantly.” She shared some of the concerns that others in national security had expressed publiclyabout his fitness for office, but decided to join DHS with her nearly 20 years of experience in homeland security issues to help the new administration.
    […]
    “They borrowed from ISIS’s playbook and they learned how to radicalize people online,” she says. In the post-Sept. 11 United States, domestic extremists also adopted an emphasis on smaller attacks that could be carried out quickly with limited planning. What Neumann saw was “the pivot to bring your own weapon to the fight, use whatever you have: a knife, a gun, a vehicle, vehicle ramming,” she says. “We’ve seen a number of vehicle rammings this summer, in fact.”
    But unlike the urgent inter-agency response to ISIS, Neumann says there was no clear effort to combat violent extremists on the right.
    “If you had a very clear voice at the top, from the president, from other senior leaders in the Republican Party, denouncing this and warning conservatives — warning Republicans — that these groups are trying to recruit you based on things that might sound like a typical conservative belief, but behind it is this insidious, ugly, evil thing, if we had more clear voices talking about it — it would somewhat inoculate people from that recruitment and that radicalization,” she says. “But instead, we have the opposite effect. We have the president not only pretty much refusing to condemn, but throwing fuel on the fire, creating opportunities for more recruitment through his rhetoric.”
    […]
    “He uses rhetoric to scare people. This is a known psychological tactic that if you get people to fear, they tend to follow you to the solution of ‘How are we going to save ourselves?’ And his answer is, ‘It’s me. If you vote for me, I will save you,’ ” she says. “Well, for some people, the way that they think that they need to protect themselves, it’s more than just a vote for a president. It’s ‘let me go kill people.’ “
    [continues]

  20. alexandra petri in wapo:

    Who, Laura Ingraham asked the president, is behind Joe Biden?
    “People that you’ve never heard of. People that are in the dark shadows. . . . People that you haven’t heard of. They’re people that are on the streets. They’re people that are controlling the streets.”
    Who are these people that are in the dark shadows?
    “>Not so loud!
    Are they different from the sex demons who are somehow to blame for covid-19?
    We think they are different. We have never seen them in the same place. To be completely fair, we have never seen either of them. Once I thought I saw what I was sure was a Shadow Person but it turned out to be Stephen Miller in bright daylight.
    […]
    Why haven’t I heard of them?
    To know any more detail about them would destroy your mind; only a mind such as Donald Trump’s can comprehend exactly what they do in the shadows, can behold the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
    How can President Trump identify these Shadow People?
    Donald Trump was born with a gift that allowed him to see the Shadow People and avoid them. It is because of this gift that he surrounds himself only with such luminous beings as Paul Manafort and Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, who shine with a pure radiance and merit absolute trust.
    Does Bill Barr know about the Shadow People?
    He does now, and he is working on a way of accepting spectral evidence so that they can be properly brought to justice — as their allies were in Salem nearly 400 years ago!
    […]
    Donald Trump has it on good authority that someone saw them on a plane!
    What?
    Yes, a plane, and it was definitely something Donald Trump heard from a person who experienced it and not a loose meme that got caught in the clogged drain of his mind.
    […]
    Donald Trump is going around saying that Shadow People are controlling Joe Biden and he knows someone who saw lots of these Shadow People getting on planes with lots of sinister intent. Whom should I worry about in this sentence?
    Joe Biden, why do you ask?

    BTW, some of the above was actually said by D’ump in the real fox interview with Laura

  26. Pogo – did you see it?  I did not until the replay. 

    Adam Yates (Mitchelton-Scott) is the new race leader of the Tour de France, after race commissaires handed down a time penalty to Julian Alaphilippe (Deceuninck-QuickStep) for an illegal feed in the final 20km of stage 5 to Privas.
    Post-stage replays showed Alaphilippe taking a bidon from a Deceuninck-QuickStep soigneur with 17.1km to go during an otherwise quiet stage 5.

  28. Hey if you watch the above video…  about 2:45 into it, there’s a poker game.  It’s men with one woman…  the one woman is my sister, Michelle.

  32. I look at all those people climbing mountains, skiing down them, racing fast bicycles, etc.  and all I can think is: Them people crazy.  And that old thing about “Why you climb that mountain?  Because it’s there.”  Well, that’s bullshit.   There’s a lot of damn things which are “there” but it don’t mean I wanna challenge em to a duel.

     Why’d you fight that grizzly with nothing but a stick?
    Because he was there.

    But if they’s gonna do it anyway, I guess it don’t hurt to watch em do it.

  33. Bink…  my sister said he was super sweet and she was surprised he picked her to be the gangster moll.
    She’s done off Broadway plays and a few commercials… but hasn’t done much lately.   She was the art teacher at the private Catholic school in Harlem where the Pope visited a few yrs ago.  The church closed the school this past spring.  She was kinda at loose ends…  this is good for her.
     
    So I’m proud of my baby sister….    so sue me!

  36. BB, I only saw the first half hour then came into the office.  I put the LeTour.fr live feed on, but it’s not visual – just lets me know about breakaways, sprints, mountain passes and who’s ahead after the stage concludes.  I’m not willing to pay NBCSports $54 to watch it on streaming video.  I’ll watch the condensed highlights this evening.
     
    So Alaphilippe took a water bottle within the last 20km and got a 20 second penalty.  Dropped him from 1st to 16th in the General Classification.  That’s inexcusable – there will be one highly furious team director eating out some ass of a support car staff.  Just dumb.  

  37. Bink, you must be thinking of someone else – the last injury Alaphilippe had was a knee injury in 2017.  He completed the tour last year and got the combative rider award. 

  39. You’re right, it was Gilbert that broke his leg, and that was two years, ago🤷‍♂️

    (i’d post the pic but it’s disgusting)

    Don’t watch TDF as much since Paul Sherwin died, those NBC sports “Bros” annoy me.

  43. Hey, we agree on something, Mr. F!  i make sure everyone i meet is hydrated to their preference.
     
    Who is depriving whom of water?

    Oh, Le Tour. Alaphilipe knows the rules. He had 100km to hydrate properly. It’s against the rules because while a rider is holding onto the water bottle being held by a team manager in a speeding car, he is gaining an advantage by not having to pedal as hard because the car is pulling him.

  45. renee, what commercials has sis been in? 

    be great if she could snag a flo gig or in a limu emu or geico  ad then we could see her more often.

  46. Damnit, for a brief moment, i thought we agreed on something.
     
    Well, one thing: Vote Biden

    (Funny thing is: Le Tour is popular because it is inherently inhumane; riders sign themselves up for elective torture. Sometimes their hearts give out and they just drop dead.)

  47. re tour, couldn’t they just squirt some water at the cyclist, slaking the thirst but avoiding the penalty by not providing a tow? 

  49. You mean how some ICE holding facilities (jails) had no water after Hurricane Laura went though?  Those folks didn’t sign up for it.  

  52. I am So glad that Biden is pointing out the obvious…this chaos IS trumpity’s Amerika.   For those who fall for the gas lighting…believe what I say not what you see.

  53. patd… she used to do voice overs in commercials… but hasn’t done one in over 10 yrs.  She has told me that people who land gigs as spokespeople… such as Flo… etc. make really big bucks.  

  56. https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/01/texas-census-ad/
    TX is spending a lot of money to count heads.  You’ve gotta spend it, to get it.

    Some places even want to register heads to vote. Go, figure. My best friend in Dallas has always said that her community doesn’t vote. I hope that changes this year.

    Cleveland Is Taking Its Voter Registration Drive Literally

    Funny how counting heads and potential voters could go hand-in-hand…and scare the willie out of some folks.

    https://www.thelandcle.org/stories/grounded-by-the-pandemic-community-groups-are-working-to-save-the-census?utm_source=Solutions Story Tracker

  58. Nate Silver (538):

    CNN just out with Biden +8, which gives us a pretty good consensus among live-caller telephone polls.

    IBD/TIPP: Biden +8

    CNN: Biden +8

    Quinnipiac: Biden +10

    Suffolk: Biden +5/+7 (with/without third parties)

    Selzer & Co.: Biden +8

  59. The  body count from tRUMP’s events might help lead to his demise.  
    I’m just waiting to see if  those in his base who want their wee ones to go back to the classrooms will turn on him.  
    I don’t want their kids to get sick, but they will.  One school started in-person classes last Wednesday.   Fifth grade is now online only.  It’s just a matter of time before the rest if the school closes down. 

  60. Notice that SFB is pointing at the one POC who just happens to be standing in the front row.  Paid actor? 

  62. That’s HIS POC.  How did he term it on that occasion when he couldn’t locate one – Where’s my black guy?  

  66. OM/CB – I look at the poll numbers a little differently than Nate or the RCP bunch.  Averages are nice but outliers skew the results disproportionately (or at least that ‘s what my stats professor told us).  When I look at the poll results I see that Biden has only one poll result that is less than 49% and SFB has only one that is above 43%.  Throw out the outliers in the 9 poll current list at RCP and you get 50 – 41.8. (Biden + 8.2) Throw out the high and low score from each and you get 49.7 – 42.1 (Biden + 7.6).  Those were two techniques Stat guy taught us to raise the likely accuracy of a result from multiple polls – or at least that’s what I remember from Stat 501 class 46 years ago.  I’d ask the prof but I’m sure he’s as alive as my parents now – which is to say he ain’t.

  72. Let’s see how tRUMP did  getting folks healthcare coverage?  If they could go for a yearly physical, get checked out for underlying conditions, afford meds that they may need, get flu shots…and then, when there is a SAFE vaccine…

  74. What it will look like when we don’t have a traitor in the White House

    Biden: Time and time again, President Trump has refused to stand up to Putin. His silence on the poisoning of Mr. Navalny is just the latest example.

    As president, I’ll do what Trump won’t: hold the Putin regime accountable for its crimes. https://t.co/z11YyV6lq0

  75. been reading hiaasen’s new book “squeeze me” that amazon describes as

    a hilarious new novel of social and political intrigue, set against the glittering backdrop of Florida’s gold coast.

    am enjoying his lightly disguised references to D’ump,  like mal a ego is called casa bellicosa in book, a maga-ettes group called POTussies and behavior of all concerned spot on palm beach.  

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