When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
Archives for July 2019
A Revolution of Diversity
This was a nice, if brief, reminder of how America was built, spoiler alert, it wasn’t all white dudes…this museum is on my list of places to see.
Love NPR’s yearly reading – here’s the only video I could find:
Here is a link to this year’s reading (I couldn’t find a way to embed it).
2019 NPR reading of the Declaration of Independence
I’ll be watching my favorite movie today:
Off to walk the dogs before it gets too hot.
Happy 4th! Open thread
Happy 4th
Up early and got the charcoal running and the grill warmed up to 205 degrees and ready for a long smoke of this baby:
In other news, it appears that none of the networks are going to be covering Cheeto Benito’s parade, and I have been doing rain dances all fucking day and checking the DC weather like my life depended on it:
I’m not ashamed to admit I am so petty that I am literally dying for it to rain on his fucking parade. How bout y’all?
On the Road and In Your Backyard
Good Morning All,
Have a safe and happy Fourth of July, everyone!
Don’t let this Trumpy martial bs drag down your celebration of this amazing country and our intellectual and constitutional inheritance. Celebrate and live the Enlightenment values of our founding, but never be satisfied with how far we’ve come when we have so much further to go.
When our values were forged, it was on the bones and breathing, resisting, ignored bodies of natives, slaves, women, the poor, and the different, but we have slowly managed to re-define “us” to include ever-more types of people. This great challenge is not complete as we now work to entrench and expand our new understandings of race, gender, sexuality, culture, and class, and to discover and free those who’ve been kept down or extinguished but are invisible to “ the whole”.
We have to win 2020 and win big, there is no choice but to defend ourselves from this cancerous Confederate resurgence. Rule or Ruin is weakening our partisan side, yes, but that ideology is really hobbling us as a Nation in our most challenging and consequential battle, Climate Change. We all stand to lose from this lost opportunity, especially if other countries figure out a solution and leave our industry in the dust of our mined-coal mountains.
Instead of watching anything political or related to the shonda in DC, I’m going to donate some money to a some charities: ACLU, NAACP, AI, MSF, WWF, and a few more.
Lost in all our focus on political donations and activity is the good work that these and so many other charities and non-profits do everyday. I know that the changes in tax laws has affected charitable giving negatively in many cases, so I encourage you to think global, national, state, and local today, and find a few good causes to donate a little scratch.
Should we lose in 2020 and our nightmares substantiate, we need these other forces in our world, big and small, to be empowered and supported. Celebrate our Nation’s birthday by strengthening it!
Have a great 4th, see you tomorrow.
Thursday Morning Open Thread: Now More Than Ever, Happy Independence Day
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Mr. Pierce, at Esquire:
… This thing has the potential to be the biggest, chewiest cluster of fck in Washington since the last time Louie Gohmert dined alone. And an infinitely more perilous one.
This is out-and-out banana republic authoritarian performance art. That it also is obviously a multimillion-dollar exercise in low comedy is sadly beside the point. It should be mocked, relentlessly and everywhere, by every American who still has a sense of dignity and a vague memory of what an actual celebration of patriotism feels like…
MAKE. IT. SO:
So Trump’s Fourth of July speech is happening during the time when most people will be eating and not watching TV. Oh, and the networks won’t cover it. This is working out great. https://t.co/4Ga7aUfwsT
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) July 4, 2019
What if the GOP threw a military extravaganza, and only the Fox News shut-ins watched? Per Deadline:
… PBS and C-SPAN will join Fox News in providing live coverage of “Salute to America,” while CNN and MSNBC have said they will only break in to regular programming as news warrants.
The broadcasts networks will rely mostly on their streaming channels for Trump’s portion of the event — ABC News Live, CBSN and NBC News Digital will all provide live coverage — and report stories for use on their respective evening newscasts.
NBC has its own July 4 celebration, its annual Macy’s 4th of July Fireworks Spectacular, which will air from 8-10 PM ET/PT, with a one-hour encore at 10 PM.
All other broadcast networks are airing regular programming in primetime…
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Answer: pretty much zero.
The Declaration of Independence is an extraordinary political act. Not a military one. Get your tanks off my goddamn lawn.
— EM Simpson (@charlie_simpson) July 1, 2019
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ICYMI Foreign Affairs Open Thread: Jared’s Middle East ‘Hot I.P.O.’ ‘Charm Offensive’
While we were otherwise occupied, Young Prince Jared’s ‘Give Me Your Funding, I Speak MBA’ piece of the action Prosperity to Peace initiative has come and gone. All Very Serious Persons agree: It would be a cakewalk, if only there was a completely different set of Facts On the Ground!
The ever-hopeful NYTimes:
MANAMA, Bahrain — Judged on its own terms, the White House-led conference on improving the lives of Palestinians, staged this week in Bahrain as the first step toward a long-promised American peace plan, was a smashing success.
It proved that the Israel-Palestinian conflict “actually is a solvable problem, economically,” Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, declared proudly — though that proposition was never actually in doubt.
It put the conflict back near the top of the international agenda, at least for a day and a half. And it may have also created a powerful new constituency for a resolution, by bringing together billionaire fund managers and the heads of banks and multinational corporations like AT&T, who seemed to be grappling with the subject for the first time.
Investors expressed such excitement about someday pouring money into projects on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said, “it’s going to be like a hot I.P.O.”
But if the goal of the two-day conference was to persuade Palestinians to give the Trump administration’s approach to solving the conflict the benefit of the doubt, there were few signs of that.
For all the self-congratulation by Mr. Kushner, Mr. Mnuchin and their guests, the Palestinian Authority government, which deeply mistrusts the Trump administration, boycotted the event. Most Palestinian business leaders shunned it. Hamas, the militant organization that controls Gaza, was not even invited…
… [S]peaker after speaker in Manama — including ministers from several Arab countries of the Persian Gulf — made a point to argue that the Palestinians’ natural entrepreneurship, strong literacy and educational attainment levels could all be unleashed but for the poor “governance” and the absence of “transparency” and of the “rule of law” that they said afflict the West Bank and Gaza…
The ever-irreverent Bess Levin, at Vanity Fair:
Last week, Jared Kushner held his big Peace to Prosperity conference in Bahrain. And if we’re evaluating from a standpoint of actually helping to bring peace to the Middle East, i.e. the stated goal, things did not go well. For starters, Palestinian leadership boycotted the whole thing, saying that the notion of unveiling an economic plan prior to presenting a political one made no sense, as it did not address major points of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, such as control of the West Bank and Palestinian statehood. Kushner, who views this whole thing as just another real estate deal, reportedly gave a speech in which he “envisaged the impoverished Gaza Strip as a tourist destination, omitting mention of Israel and Egypt’s 12-year blockade of the Hamas-controlled territory, as well as Israel’s 52-year-long occupation of the West Bank, which restricts trade and labor movements.” When he did reference politics, it was to offer the sophisticated take that if “there’s not a fear of people doing terrorism”—emphasis ours—it’ll “allow for much faster flow of goods and people,” without offering, y’know, a proposal for how to stop terrorism in the region…
… On Wednesday [Kushner] held a conference call with Arab and Israeli reporters to announce that the White House would provide “new steps” next week regarding his big plan, and, in an apparent effort to convince Palestinian leaders to get on board, he really laid on the charm:
[Kushner] criticized the Palestinian leadership’s behavior around the Bahrain conference and called it “hysterical and stupid.” He stressed that Palestinian leadership has made “a strategic mistake” not participating in the conference and not discussing a plan that is focused on prosperity for the Palestinian people.
Then, trying a little one-man good-cop-bad-cop routine, Kushner insisted that Donald Trump likes Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and wants to work with him—provided Abbas pulls his head out of his ass. “The door is always open for the Palestinian leadership,” Kushner told reporters. “If they stop saying crazy things and engage, they will see there is an opportunity here. We respect President Abbas and we believe he wants to make peace, and we want to give him the opportunity to try and do it.” Answering a question from a Lebanese reporter, Kushner said the political portion of his peace plan would include “a pragmatic, fair, and workable solution to the refugees issue,” without providing any actual details…
Wall Street, we are told, likes predictability. And ya gotta give Kushner full credit — he’s very predictable.
Repub Venality Open Thread: Impeach Bill “Very Low” Barr?
May be nothing more important right now than impeaching Barr. He needs to be taken out for many reasons, maybe none more significant than he’s about the only person around Trump who’s as malevolent &btraitorous who’s also somewhat competent
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) July 4, 2019
IMO, this is not a bad idea — Barr’s extremely skittery about having to explain his legal ‘reasoning’ beyond ‘If the President does it, it is not illegal, that’s for sure’. There’s plenty of skeletons we know about in Barr’s closet(s), going back to his participation in the Great Clenis Hunt if not earlier…
But that’s the thing; there actually isn’t a deep pool of people who are traitorous, willing to work for a mercurial narcissistic asshole, and who are competent. https://t.co/44BYKJx7Lo
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) July 4, 2019
And imagine Barr in a hearing; he’s such an insufferable ass that there would be few who would find him sympathetic. And it’s plausible that if it’s causing bad press for Trump that he’d do what he always does: throw Barr under the bus.
We need to a conflict btwn Barr & Javanka
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) July 4, 2019
With him it’s less about removing him than about rattling the crap out of the administration, and maybe prompting Trump to push out Barr. (And don’t say Trump won’t do that, his entire life he’s tossed people overboard for being an inconvenience to him) https://t.co/BtunxJTp36
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) July 4, 2019
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