Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will see thundershowers with a high of ninety. Sunrise is 5:33 AM and sunset 8:29 PM, for 14h 55m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 97.3% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the nine hundred eighty-second day.
Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets at 5:30 PM, and the Police & Fire Commission also meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1865, four Wisconsin regiments (3rd and 18th Wisconsin Infantry regiments and the 1st and 6th Wisconsin Light Artillery batteries) muster out.
Recommended for reading in full:
Patrick Marley reports Deputy prison warden posts Facebook meme that compares Muslim children to garbage:
A top official in Wisconsin’s minimum-security prison system in recent weeks posted a string of Facebook memes that compared Muslim children to garbage, equated flying the LGBTQ rainbow flag with hoisting the Confederate flag and laughed off accusations of racism.
In one, Deputy Warden Richard “Sam” Schneiter posted a photo of two full black garbage bags next to a Muslim woman and child in black burqas that covered their faces and bodies. “I saw her standing there and told her she had three beautiful children,” text pasted onto the photo says.
Another post contrasted the rainbow flag with the Confederate flag and included the words, “If they have the right to fly theirs, we Deserve the Right to Fly Ours.”
In an interview Wednesday, Schneiter said he posted the images to bring attention to messages that zip through the internet — including ones he disagrees with.
(That’s some defense: One is supposed to believe that the bigoted posts Schneiter published uncritically were simply talking points. No, and no again.)
Conor Friedersdorf writes ‘Send Her Back’: The Bigoted Rallying Cry of Trump 2020 (‘The president’s supporters at a North Carolina rally showed contempt for naturalized citizens and the Constitution’):
On Wednesday night in North Carolina, Donald Trump agitated rally-goers with inflammatory rhetoric about Representative Ilhan Omar, a naturalized American born in Somalia, until his supporters began chanting “send her back”––as if a legal immigrant who became a U.S. citizen can or should be denied equal treatment under the law and extra-constitutionally deported by the president.
Burning a copy of the U.S. Constitution would show no more contempt for it than the crowd’s bigoted, nativist reverie about tyrannically deposing an elected member of Congress. No opinion expressed by the congresswoman, no matter how wrongheaded, could excuse the un-American mob.
The crowd’s authoritarian outburst and the purposefully divisive, irresponsible presidential rhetoric that prompted it portends an ugly Trump campaign for reelection. Like “lock her up,” the chant that Trump rally-goers directed at Hillary Clinton in 2016, “send her back” is poised to travel the country with the president.
Already, the civic poison of the chant has been televised and celebrated on social media by Trump supporters.
It has become depressingly clear that Trump is running an explicitly racist campaign. He is not running to win an election, as even he has to understand that his odds are low. What he is doing is inciting a second civil war in the hope that, when he loses in 2020, his supporters will turn to rebellion to keep him in power.
He is completely effed once out of office, and knows that. His goal is to not let that happen, whatever that takes.
He has turned to the most reliable of insurrection-mongering techniques, racial animus. It’s all he has left. I’d like to say that he dragged the Republican party along with him, but that would assign responsibility where it is not. The Republican party, despite all the high-minded rhetoric about family values, fiscal responsibility, and personal responsibility, has been there for 50+ years. Trump was just loud and proud about his true feelings. All of the pious natterings the R-Team have been spouting since 1965 have been merkins covering the syphilitic scabs of their true beliefs.
Trump will not leave voluntarily. He is rallying his shock-troops now. I see no way this ends happily. Another civil war is becoming increasingly, albeit depressingly, likely.
Agreed, all around.
Who, while leading the United States, has ever been so explicit in his bigotry? Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson? Who, while an enemy of the United States, does Trump match so well? Jefferson Davis?
You know, when Sarah Kendzior, with a formal training in post-Soviet authoritarianism, first began to suggest that Trump would not go voluntarily from power, some thought she was being extreme.
She was not being extreme – she was considering history’s examples thoughtfully.
It’s also true, apart from any practical desire to foment rejection of the next election’s results, that Trump enjoys these statements, takes pleasure in them, and delights himself with every worse statement and envy worse policy.
He has no evident sense of normal humor, no evident normal happiness, but he does have a disordered delight in others’ misery — an extreme schadenfreude, complete and demanding of gratification.