No We Can't Joe. No We Can't.
Quote of the Day
There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, and the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people." ~ Edward James Olmos as Admiral William Adama, Battlestar Galactica
That Would Be Epic
Ooh, That's a Tough One
What's the Appetizer?
This Gives Me Hope
In a show of solidarity, a massive tribute to Black Lives Matter has been painted on the street leading to the White House in Washington, D.C. Completed in permanent street paint, the message features bold, yellow letters that span more than a block of 16th Street and marks a historic moment in the United States after weeks of protests.
Mayor Muriel Bowser commissioned the banner-style piece, which city workers and volunteers began at 3 a.m. Friday morning ahead of weekend demonstrations. The new message is just two blocks north of Lafayette Square, where police charged peaceful protestors and released tear gas and flash-bang shells to clear the crowd for a photo-op for Trump earlier this week. It sits at the foot of St. John's Church.
[Source]
Pride Was Always a Protest
Here is a list of Black-led LGBTQ community organizations you can donate to, compiled by pfpicardi and RaquelWillis_:
Snapco – Builds power of Black trans and queer people to force systemic divestment from the prison industrial complex and invest in community support.
Black AIDS Institute – Working to end the Black HIV epidemic through policy, advocacy, and high-quality direct HIV services.
Trans Cultural District – The world's first-ever legally recognized trans district, which aims to stabilize and economically empower the trans community.
LGBTQ+ Freedom Fund – Posts bail for LGBTQ+ people held in jail or immigrant detention and raises awareness of the epidemic of LGBTQ overincarceration.
House of GG – Creating safe and transformative spaces for community to heal, and nurturing them into tomorrow's leaders, focusing on trans women of color in the South.
Trans Justice Funding Project – Community-led funding initiative to support grassroots trans justice groups run by and for trans people.
The Okra Project – Collective that seeks to address the global crisis faced by Black trans people by bringing home-cooked meals and resources to the community.
Youth Breakout – Works to end the criminalization of LGBTQ youth in New Orleans to build a safer and more just community.
Trump's Presidency is Over
From Robert Reich:
You'd be forgiven if you hadn't noticed. His verbal bombshells are louder than ever, but Donald J. Trump is no longer president of the United States.
By having no constructive response to any of the monumental crises now convulsing America, Trump has abdicated his office.
He is not governing. He's golfing, watching cable TV, and tweeting.
How has Trump responded to the widespread unrest following the murder in Minneapolis of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck for nine minutes as he was handcuffed on the ground?
He has incited more police violence. Trump called the protesters "thugs" and threatened to have them shot. "When the looting starts, the shooting starts," he tweeted, parroting a former Miami police chief whose words spurred race riots in the late 1960s.
The following day he encouraged more police violence, gloating about "the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons" awaiting protesters outside the White House, should they ever break through Secret Service lines. On Sunday he again resorted to incendiary tweets, instructing "Democrat Mayors and Governors" to "get tough" on the "ANARCHISTS."
Trump's response to George Floyd's murder has debased the presidency and squandered whatever moral authority remained.
Trump's response to the last three ghastly months of mounting disease and death has been just as heedless. Since claiming Covid-19 was a "Democratic hoax" and muzzling public health officials, he has punted management of the coronavirus to the states.
Governors have had to find ventilators to keep patients alive and protective equipment for hospital and other essential workers who lack it, often bidding against each other. They have had to decide how, when, and where to reopen their economies.
Trump has claimed "no responsibility at all" for testing and contact-tracing – the keys to containing the virus. His new "plan" places responsibility on states to do their own testing and contact-tracing.
Trump is also AWOL in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
More than 41 million Americans are jobless. In the coming weeks temporary eviction moratoriums are set to end in half of the states. One-fifth of Americans missed rent payments this month. Extra unemployment benefits are set to expire at the end of July.
What is Trump's response? Like Herbert Hoover, who in 1930 said "the worst is behind us" as thousands starved, Trump says the economy will improve and does nothing about the growing hardship. The Democratic-led House passed a $3 trillion relief package on May 15. Mitch McConnell has recessed the Senate without taking action and Trump calls the bill dead on arrival.
What about other pressing issues a real president would be addressing? The House has passed nearly 400 bills this term, including measures to reduce climate change, enhance election security, require background checks on gun sales, reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act and reform campaign finance. All are languishing in McConnell's inbox. Trump doesn't seem to be aware of any of them.
There is nothing inherently wrong with golfing, watching television and tweeting. But if that's pretty much all that a president does when the nation is engulfed in crises, he is not a president.
Trump's tweets are no substitute for governing. They are mostly about getting even.
When he's not fomenting violence against black protesters, he's accusing a media personality of committing murder, retweeting slurs about a black female politician's weight and the House speaker's looks, conjuring up conspiracies against himself supposedly organized by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and encouraging his followers to "liberate" their states from lockdown restrictions.
He tweets bogus threats that he has no power to carry out – withholding funds from states that expand absentee voting, "overruling" governors who don't allow places of worship to reopen "right away," designating anti-fascism activists as terrorists, and punishing Twitter for fact-checking him.
And he lies incessantly.
In reality, Donald Trump does not run the government of the United States. He doesn't manage anything. He doesn't organize anyone. He doesn't administer or oversee or supervise. He doesn't read memos. He hates meetings. He has no patience for briefings. His White House is in perpetual chaos.
His advisors aren't truth-tellers. They're toadies, lackeys, sycophants and relatives.
Since moving into the Oval Office in January 2017, Trump hasn't shown an ounce of interest in governing. He obsesses only about himself.
But it has taken the present set of crises to reveal the depths of his self-absorbed abdication – his utter contempt for his job, his total repudiation of his office.
Trump's nonfeasance goes far beyond an absence of leadership or inattention to traditional norms and roles. In a time of national trauma, he has relinquished the core duties and responsibilities of the presidency.
He is no longer president. The sooner we stop treating him as if he were, the better.
It Would Be a Shame…
It would also be really annoying if they wore heat resistant gloves to throw back the hot tear gas canisters and if this got shared to all those protesting…
It would be a further shame if people started covering cameras (as seen in Hong Kong, with protestors using poles and rakes to lift cardboard boxes over security cameras), blinding drone optics with laser pointers, and flooding police-run reporting apps with junk data.
It would also be a shame if the protesters noted that plainclothes cops can be identified a number of ways, such as wearing steel-toed boots; an armband or wristband of a particular color; driving white, black, or dark blue cars with concealed lights; or having the outline of cuffs visible in the back pocket or the bumps of an armor vest's shoulder straps under their shirt.
It would be a shame if the protesters began making their signs out of inch-thick plywood to stop rubber bullets,* forming a tight shield wall to prevent police from singling out and mobbing individual protesters. It would be a shame if the people behind the shield wall held up umbrellas so that tear gas canisters fired over the heads of the front line will be bounced away. It would be a shame if protesters began constructing improvised armor vests out of duct tape, hardback books, and ceramic tiles.
It would be a shame if protesters started wearing safety glasses, hard hats, respirators, and gardening gloves, all of which can be found at the same hardware stores as the plywood. It would be a shame if they started using traffic cones (the kind without the hole in the top) upside-down buckets, or other improvised lids to contain tear gas by placing them over the canisters.
It would be a shame if protesters learned that police scanners are legal to own in the US, allowing them to learn where police are moving and what routes they intend to take. It would be a shame if they discovered that these scanners can be used to send as well as receive, allowing them to flood the scanner frequencies with noise.
All this would be a terrible, terrible shame.
*I can't speak for the other things on this list but do not use plywood as a shield! It will not defend against rubber bullets and will splinter if hit.
Finally Some Good News
Steve King, one of Congress's biggest pieces of human excrement and openly and proudly racist members, gets beaten by Randy Feenstra in the GOP Iowa primary.
With that being said, this is a deeply-red district (4th District of Iowa) and it's a longshot that Democrat J.D. Scholten will win in November. Still, it will be refreshing not to hear remarks like, "Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization [than whites]." ~Steve King, July 2016