A vehicle lies stranded on a collapsed roadway near the airport after an #earthquake took place near #Anchorage, #Alaska on Friday. 📸: Nathaniel Wilder/Reuters (at Anchorage, Alaska)
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NY Politician: We Need to Block $3 Billion Handout for Amazon & Use Money to Forgive Student Debt
As Jeff Bezos Earns $191K Per Minute, Why is NY & VA Giving Amazon $3 Billion in Corporate Welfare?
#DearNonNatives happened yesterday. Signal boost this and support! This hashtag needs more traction.
This is so important. I wish more people would educate themselves on Native American history.
Chief Justice John Roberts Orders New Investigation Into Kavanaugh
Are you talking about Deborah Ramirez? People have known about her for almost a week.
Part of the reason the Kavanaugh news cycle has been such a flashpoint—part of the reason that so many conservatives have fanatically defended his right to have hypothetically committed the crime he’s been accused of, and that so many women have been spending the last two weeks in a haze of resurfaced trauma—is that it illuminates the centrality of sexual assault in the matrix of male power in America. In high schools, in colleges, at law schools, and in the halls of Washington, men perform for one another and ascend to positions of power. Watching it happen is a deadening reminder, for victims of sexual assault and harassment, that, in many cases, you were about as meaningful as a chess piece, one of a long procession of objects in the lifelong game that men play with other men.
“I think it’s giving courage just to other women to speak about their stories in general. It’s been very triggering for women, triggering for some of us who are not ready to share, so being here today for us is very important, we feel like we’ve created a movement of people who see what’s at stake here and are willing to put it all on the line.”
How the Kavanaugh Nomination Has Intensified the Feminist Protest Movement
Bravery.
DEAR ANONYMOUS TRUMP OFFICIAL,
You claim, on the opinion pages of the “failing” New York Times no less, that senior officials working for the president of the United States “are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”
“I would know,” you add dramatically. “I am one of them.”
Sorry, what was the point of this particular piece? And what is it that you want from the rest of us? A thank-you card? A round of applause? The nation’s undying gratitude?
Screw. You.
There is no redemption; no exoneration for you or your colleagues inside this shit-show of an administration. You think an op-ed in the paper of record is going to cut it? Gimme a break. You cannot write an article admitting to the president’s “anti-democratic” impulses while also saying you want his administration “to succeed.” You cannot publish a 965-word piece excoriating Donald Trump’s “worst inclinations” while omitting any and all references to his racism, bigotry, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and white nationalism.
You did find space, however, to heap praise on yourself and your fellow officials. “Unsung heroes.” “Adults in the room.” “Quiet resistance.” “Steady state.”
Are you kidding me? Where were your “unsung heroes” when this administration was snatching kids from their parents and locking them in cages? Drugging them and denying them drinking water?
Where were your “adults in the room” when this administration left 3,000 Americans in Puerto Rico to die because, apparently, it is an island “surrounded by water, big water, ocean water”? Where were they when the president was denying that Hurricane Maria was a “real catastrophe” and lobbing paper towels at the survivors?
Where was your “quiet resistance” when the president was extolling far-right racists as “very fine people” and blaming the violence in Charlottesville on “both sides”? How “quiet” were you when he later disowned his half-hearted and belated denunciation of the “KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups” as “the biggest fucking mistake I’ve made”?
Where was your “steady state” when the president fired the director of the FBI because, he told NBC News, “this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story”? Or when he sacked Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Sally Yates, the acting attorney general? Or when he tweeted, earlier this week, that Attorney General Jeff Sessions shouldn’t have indicted two Republican allies of his over alleged financial crimes?
The reality is that you and your fellow officials are enablers of Trump; you are his protectors and defenders. You say it yourself. Why were there only “whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment,” which provides for the cabinet to remove the president from office if he is unable to do the job? Why not invoke it and let Mike Pence take over? (Are you, by the way, Mike Pence?)
If as you claim — and we all agree! — that the president you serve “continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic” with “misguided impulses,” then how can you advocate for anything other than his swift removal from office?
Your defense is that “no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis.” Seriously? You don’t agree with former Secretary of State John Kerry that we’re already in the midst of “a genuine constitutional crisis,” given your own op-ed outlining his “erratic behavior” and “reckless decisions” and Bob Woodward’s new book describing “an administrative coup d’etat” and a “nervous breakdown” at the center of the Trump White House?
You are keen to remind the liberal readers of the New York Times that yours “is not the popular ‘resistance’ of the left” and that you believe this administration’s policies have “already made America safer and more prosperous.” You cite “historic tax reform” and “effective deregulation” as the supposed “bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture.” But by tax reform, do you mean the Trump tax cuts that give the richest 1 percent of Americans almost half of the benefits? And by deregulation, do you mean the rescinding of Obama-era protections for the oceans; the lifting of controls on toxic air pollution; and the green light to Wall Street to once again cause havoc in the financial markets?
What is it, then, that you object to? Well, it seems, your biggest concern is “not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency,” but how Americans have “sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.”
You’re joking, right? The widespread dishonesty, the rampant corruption, the brazen racism, the growing authoritarianism, the accusations of collusion — none of that tops your list of Trumpian abuses and infractions? But the “civility” of our discourse does? Fuck civility.
Also, what did you think would happen when you signed up to work for a reality TV star who was accused of sexual assault by more than a dozen women, and of rape by his first wife? Who stiffed hundreds of contractors, ripped off Trump University students, cheated on his third wife just months after she gave birth, and cut off health care coverage to his own nephew’s sick baby in a fit of rage?
You knew all of this and yet you still chose to work for him at the highest level of government. You now acknowledge that “the root of the problem is the president’s amorality.” But how about your own amorality? I hate to agree with your boss, but you are “gutless.” You’re a shameless coward, a cynical opportunist.
Don’t hide behind anonymity. Don’t pretend that you have “gone to great lengths” to restrain Trump and “put country first.”
Tell us your name. Quit your job. Call out this president in public.
Call him out for his bigotry, his mendacity, his sheer mental and emotional unfitness for the office he occupies. Call him out in front of a congressional committee. Or a court of law.
Otherwise, I say again: Screw. You.
Sincerely,
Mehdi Hasan
Dear Anonymous Trump Official, There Is No Redemption in Your Cowardly Op-Ed
How Monsanto Plants Stories, Suppresses Science & Silences Dissent to Sell a Cancer-Linked Chemical
Jails are accelerants of human misery, and what they often do… is take very difficult, complicated life circumstances and exacerbate challenges that individuals and families and communities are facing. The idea that the default system should be money bail or jail for a broad range of offenses is not normatively defensible, or does it necessarily promote public safety.
A Threat to Global Democracy: How Facebook & Surveillance Capitalism Empower Authoritarianism
Climate Scientist: California Wildfires Are Faster, Stronger, Deadlier & Will Continue to Intensify
Rob Nixon: Gov’t Inaction on Climate Change Is “Slow Violence” That Hits World’s Poor the Hardest
“Losing Earth”: How Humanity Came to Understand Climate Change & Failed to Act in Time
Extreme Weather Is Exploding Around the World. Why Isn’t the Media Talking About Climate Change?
For decades, American historians have viewed the summit between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, in 1961, as the worst ever between the U.S. and Moscow. That disastrous bit of summitry has now been topped by Trump.
I’ve been meeting women who are crying so violently they can barely speak. I’m meeting women whose hands are shaking, who look at me with kind of a vacant gaze. It’s extremely upsetting to see.
Last week, it emerged that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (U.S.C.I.S.) had formed a task force in order to identify people who lied on their citizenship applications and to denaturalize them. Amid the overwhelming flow of reports of families being separated at the border and children being warehoused, this bit of bureaucratic news went largely unnoticed. But it adds an important piece to our understanding of how American politics and culture are changing.
In America, Naturalized Citizens No Longer Have an Assumption of Permanence
Meet the Migrant Child Detention Center Whistleblower Now Speaking Out Against Family Separations
A youth care worker who quit his job at a Tucson detention center for unaccompanied minors is speaking out about inadequate facilities, untrained staff and inhumane policies, after witnessing the devastation of family separations firsthand. Antar Davidson says he quit after he was forced to tell three tearful children who were separated from their mother not to hug one another. The facility is run by Southwest Key, a nonprofit that operates 27 facilities and has recently signed a lease to detain hundreds of separated children, including many who are a younger than 12 years old, in what’s being called a “baby jail” in a former warehouse and homeless shelter in Houston.
Antar Davidson told Democracy Now!:
“I realized that if I were to continue with Southwest Key, at least here in this facility, that I’d be told to do things that were… against the code of all humans’ morality… We’re not talking about an organization that was good. We’re talking about an organization that, for the past five years, has made millions of dollars in basically the detention of youth.”
Everybody wants to think that if they were alive during slavery, they’d be an abolitionist. Everybody wants to think that if they were active during the time of lynching, they’d be rallying against and trying to prevent lynchings. Most of us believe that if we were alive and in a position to march in the 1950s, we’d be on the side of Dr. King. But today, we are in the face of all of these problems. One in three black male babies is expected to go to jail or prison. There are these constant shootings of unarmed black people. And the question is: If we’re not prepared to respond to these issues, if we’re not prepared to act today, then I don’t think we can claim that we would have acted any differently during slavery and lynching and segregation.
Is Sinclair sneaking conservative spin into your local news? Find out on our map at FindSinclair.com.
House of Brat 