Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy, with a high of eighty-one. Sunrise is 5:46 AM and sunset 8:16 PM, for 14h 29m 59s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 87.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1941, Göring orders Heydrich to prepare for the genocide of Jews in Europe (translated text):
submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution of the Jewish question.
Recommended for reading in full —
Chuck Quirmbach reports Advocates Target Milwaukee County Sheriff For Remarks On Domestic Violence:The criticism surfaced Monday about comments Schmidt made last year during a podcast interview. Schmidt told domestic violence victims who are Christians to submit themselves to the Holy Spirit, adding that God would restore their relationships.
Schmidt also failed to criticize the podcast host, a minister who said the victim should change, not the abuser.
….
Sarah Pearson of Women’s March Wisconsin said the remarks are alarming.
“They suggest he is not the kind of sheriff that women in Milwaukee County need to take a solutions-based, violence-ending approach to domestic abuse,” Pearson said at a Monday news conference in Milwaukee.
(It’s worth noting – as often as one can – that countless Christians would reject both Schmidt’s scriptural interpretation and his unwillingness during the podcast to describe the duties of his office toward victims of domestic violence.)
Michael Gerson writes, about Trumpism and Alex Jones, This will never be normal:Any political movement is defined not just by what it aspires to, but also by whom it excludes. And the alt-right, the Alex Jones right, the white nationalist right know that they are fully included in Trump’s definition of his movement. They have become experts in tacking to the shifting winds of his whims. They know that their loyalty to him has been rewarded with a legitimacy they have craved for decades. And they are full, enthusiastic partners in the Trump project — to delegitimize any source of authority and information but his own.
Back in the world of actual morality, there is serious collateral damage. Congressional Republicans are further tainted by their association with right-wing extremism. Genuine populists are discredited by consorting with people who accuse elites of arming for mass murder. The religious right is caught in bed with a diseased, seeping moral relativism. And Fox anchors come to the defense of a man who verbally defiles the graves of murdered children.
Despite attempts at utilitarian justification — despite outrage-dulling repetition — this is not normal or moral. It will never be normal or moral.
Brandi Buchman reports All Eyes on Paul Manafort Trial This Week:U.S. spy agencies are seeing signs that North Korea is constructing new missiles at a factory that produced the country’s first intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States, according to officials familiar with the intelligence.
Newly obtained evidence, including satellite photos taken in recent weeks, indicates that work is underway on at least one and possibly two liquid-fueled ICBMs at a large research facility in Sanumdong, on the outskirts of Pyongyang, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe classified intelligence.
Octopus Saved After Diver Removes Fishing Wire:The trial of Paul Manafort is not about Donald Trump nor is it directly about possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin but it is the first time a member of the president’s campaign inner-circle faces a judge and jury stemming from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s year-long investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
In the run-up to Tuesday’s opening arguments at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, prosecutors on Mueller’s team have repeatedly told U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III there would no mention of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign or Russian collusion during the trial.
Instead, prosecutors say, that will focus on evidence the probe turned up allegedly showing the former Trump campaign chairman was engaged in a complex international money laundering scheme in which more than $30 million flowed through offshore accounts in Cyprus, Saint Vincent, the Seychelles and elsewhere.
The mist is burning off. I’m old, feeble, and qualified for cataract surgery, but I don’t have to see like an eagle to understand what is going on in our national politics.
The Republicans have long treated politics as an existential fight for survival, worthy of any and all tactics necessary, regardless of any traditional norms. I cite everything McConnell has done in the last 9.5 years as an irrefutable exemplar. The election of Obama made it clear to Republicans that the “Golden Age” of white hegemony in American politics was ageing out. The Republican response to this was to form an alliance with another all-white autocratic country, Russia, to eke out a few more years of power.
The extent of the Russian operation to take over America is astonishing. They clearly own Trump. No rational observer could come to any other conclusion. What is also becoming clear is that they also were doing a left-flank attack. Tad Devine, Bernie’s “close advisor” worked for Manafort in Ukraine for years. We are just finding out, thanks to Manafort’s trial, how deeply he was in bed with the Russians. Jill Stein, who arguably diluted the left vote enough to get Trump elected, has long ties with the Russians, and has refused to turn over docs pertaining to her involvement.
The entire Republican party is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Russians. Russians, with the active collaboration of the NRA, dumped $30M into Trump’s campaign and sugared a number of other Republican politicians, too. The Wisco-Kid, who is desperately trying to keep his head down until he times out of office, was a happy recipient of millions of shady Russian-connected dollars. Walker got $1.1M. Rubio got $1.5M. Yertle got $3.5M. Huckleberry Graham got $800K. that is just what we know…
The result of all of that is that The Republicans are actively sabotaging any investigation of what went on in the last election. Devin Nunes is a transparent puppet. One wonders what the Russians have on him that prompts him to be so flagrantly treasonous. The Republicans are refusing to allocate any money for election vote security, with the lame excuse that they are being fiscally responsible. The trillion-dollar bunker-buster of an unfunded tax-cut that they passed makes the concept that the party is in any way devoted to fiscal responsibility ludicrous. Ryan is actively abetting the Russians by refusing to rein-in Nunes or consider any measures that in any way could be considered anti-Russian, or more tellingly, pro-American.
Putin is skilled, without doubt. He, without firing a shot, now owns the US presidency, the Republican Party, and has a massive presence in the US media (Fox, Breitbart, Drudge, Infowars, hate-radio, etc). He has co-opted US social media platforms. He has taken over the NRA and turned them into an organization actively dedicated to facilitating the armed overthrow of any US government left of Wayne Pierre.
It’s time for the Republican Party to stop waving their flags and claiming uber-patriotic status, and contemplate what they have become. They have morphed into a white-supremacist cult allied with the autocratic leader of a hostile country to overthrow our democracy. It’s not pretty, but it is now reality.
We never actually reconstructed after the civil war. We are fighting it all over. It is an enduring, and ugly, sub-current in American politics. We are at a point of inflection in America.
Who are we??
Although I’ve no medical training, and have nothing to say about a physical condition, I will suggest that those who see the dangers in these times have an admirable clarity of vision, suitable for any time.
America has seen many internal challenges, but none in our lifetimes like this. Imagine an earlier time, let’s say ’36 or ’37, in which the German American Bund wasn’t merely a racist movement, but a racist movement that acquired federal power. It’s a herrenvolk they wanted then, and it’s a herrenvolk that Trump and his ilk want now.
One might have said in that imagined era of the ’30s that, before the Bund came to power, there were fine Republicans (Lincoln, Grant, Roosevelt, Taft, Coolidge, etc.). True enough, but those very Republicans would have rejected the Bund, had they lived to see it.
Here were are now, with a GOP that’s not grand, and more an ethnic nationalist movement than conventional American political party. Whatever better parts came before are irrecuperable to us.
No reasonable person would have wanted this conflict, this politically existential struggle; having been forced on us, no reasonable person would fail to see the need for opposition & resistance.
You rightly ask ‘who are we?’ – by this I assume you mean all of us, that some seem lost to liberal democracy and the American political order.
I’ll answer, here, more particularly — about those of us (you and I and millions more) in opposition & resistance. We are those who will prove victorious in this conflict, and afterward having emerged victorious, those who will be the architects of a restored and secure democratic order.
It’s daunting, of course: the only task harder than the work ahead will be allowing it to go undone.