Much has been made – understandably – about an elderly golf-cart-riding resident of The Villages retirement community shouting ‘white power’ during a pro-Trump parade. (The man’s bigotry is wrong, but his grasp of the meaning of Trumpism is right on target.)
It’s impossible to excuse the bigotry, but one can look at other vices within The Villages without excusing or ignoring bigotry. The resident’s prejudice took place as he and other Trumpist residents were queuing for a pro-Trump golf-cart parade.
While for someone who is disabled a cart or scooter is an understandable tool, it’s unlikely that all of the golf-cart riding paraders needed golf carts for locomotion. Many of them should have been able to walk, and it would have done them good to have done so.
Long after Trump fades & falters, there will be a large audience for lumpen revanchists on Fox News. These dead-enders won’t quickly meet their end – they’ll be a faction, and so an audience, waiting for a someone to inspire them in their ethnic prejudices, economic ignorance, and conspiracy theories. Fox News will exist after 1.20.21.
There’s commercial ad space to sell, and the Murdochs have billions yet to make, so someone has to hold the MyPillow® audience in front of their televisions…
It won’t be Hannity (who might as well be Trump’s manservant); it will be Tucker Carlson. Carlson drinks thirstily from a culture-war jug; he will go on that way long after Trump is a former president.
(Carlson, himself, may be fascist curious; genuine fascists, however, have no hesitation about expressing their love for him.)
For today, from the Axios Today podcast with Niala Boodhoo, Carlson as a present (and future) culture warrior:
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of ninety-one. Sunrise is 5:24 AM and sunset 8:35 PM, for 15h 11m 21s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1885, Louis Pasteur successfully tests his vaccine against rabies on Joseph Meister, a boy who was bitten by a rabid dog.
For weeks, a mysterious figure on social media talked up plans for antifa protesters to converge on this historical site on Independence Day to burn American flags, an event that seemed at times to border on the farcical.
“Let’s get together and burn flags in protest of thugs and animals in blue,” the anonymous person behind a Facebook page called Left Behind USA wrote in mid-June. There would be antifa face paint, the person wrote, and organizers would “be giving away free small flags to children to safely throw into the fire.”
As word spread, self-proclaimed militias, bikers, skinheads and far-right groups from outside the state issued a call to action, pledging in online videos and posts to come to Gettysburg to protect the Civil War monuments and the nation’s flag from desecration. Some said they would bring firearms and use force if necessary.
On Saturday afternoon, in the hours before the flag burning was to start, they flooded in by the hundreds — heavily armed and unaware, it seemed, that the mysterious Internet poster was not who the person claimed to be.
Biographical details — some from the person’s Facebook page and others provided to The Washington Post in a series of messages — did not match official records. An image the person once posted on a profile page was a picture of a man taken by a German photographer for a stock photo service.
Why it matters: Malls are going belly up. Familiar names like J.C. Penney, Neiman Marcus and J. Crew have filed for bankruptcy. Increasingly, Americans’ shopping choices will boil down to a handful of internet Everything Stores and survival-of-the-fittest national chains.
Driving the news: A research report from UBS predicts that 100,000 brick-and-mortar U.S. retail stores will close by 2025, in a trend that started before the pandemic and has accelerated amid coronavirus-related shutdowns.
Indoor malls — which were turning into ghost towns even before the pandemic — are being converted into apartment complexes.
E-commerce has surged, even as stores reopen, as people are afraid of catching the virus in crowds and public spaces.
Hate incidents directed at Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are exploding this year, according to advocates pushing for California Gov. Gavin Newsom to boost funding for programs fighting bias and add a cultural representative to his new COVID-19 task force.
Supporters and organizers of Stop AAPI Hate have documented 832 incidents across the Golden State in the last three months,with assaults and verbal tirades “becoming the norm” since the pandemic started, instigated by people following the inflammatory rhetoric of the nation’s highest-profile leader, they say.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of ninety-one. Sunrise is 5:23 AM and sunset 8:35 PM, for 15h 12m 24s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1775, the Second Continental Congress adopts the Olive Branch Petition.
My country of origin [Venezuela] was torn apart by corruption, division and lack of leadership. We cannot let that happen — let alone encourage it — here. You could say I come from the future and know what pandering and misleading tactics can do to a prosperous, democratic nation, like Venezuela used to be.
We don’t need a president who tosses paper towels and poses with a Bible, but one that provides precise information and solutions and promotes empathy. During my reporting trips, I’ve seen Trump be insensitive, like on his visit to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, but I’ve also seen him be comforting, as he did in going to the Florida Panhandle after Hurricane Michael.
Despite all of these actions and the crises this country is going through, I still decided to become an American because I know this nation is bigger than any of these ills. I am choosing to live under Trump, even though he’s so disparaging of immigrants, because we are more than four or eight years of turmoil. America is still very young!
The numbers of American sick and dead are a source of wonder and marvel all over the world. They also inspire fear and anxiety. The European Union has decided to allow some foreigners to cross its borders now, but not Americans. Uruguayans and Rwandans can go to Italy and Spain, but not Americans. Moroccans and Tunisians can go to Germany and Greece, but not Americans. For the first time in living memory, Canada has kept its border closed with the United States. On July 3, the governor of the Mexican state of Sonora delivered the coup de grace: She announced the temporary closure of the border with Arizona and banned Americans from Sonoran beaches.
How will American nationalists cope with this new situation? I’m guessing many will pretend, like the president, that this isn’t happening: Months into the crisis, he has once again expressed the belief that the virus will magically “disappear.” But for some, it will be difficult to prevent the intrusion of reality: The stupid and pointless competition among nations continues in their heads—and they are losing. A major reckoning is coming. It can’t arrive too soon.
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of ninety. Sunrise is 5:22 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 13m 22s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 99.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
It’s the 244th year since America declared independence.
The Treasury Department and Small Businesses Administration appear unlikely to release information on hundreds of thousands of Paycheck Protection Program loans this week as planned, a setback in the Trump administration’s promises to be transparent about one of the largest economic stimulus packages ever created by the federal government.
After offering contradictory statements on how much information they would release about more than 4.8 million forgivable loans issued from the $660 billion program, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and SBA Administrator Jovita Carranza announced last week that they would release the names of borrowers who received at least $150,000 in funds before the holiday weekend.
But as of Friday afternoon — a government holiday — the Treasury Department and SBA did not indicate any plans to release the data. Congressional aides, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to brief the press, said they don’t expect the data to be released before Monday
The worst among American presidents prior to Trump—Buchanan, Johnson, and Pierce, for example—were all produced by the Democratic Party of the nineteenth century—a party that sought to defend or forgive slavery, and that tolerated and promoted a divided nation. Since President Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” the modern Republican Party increasingly taken on that mantle. Trump is often said to have commandeered the GOP. But properly viewed in historical terms, the reverse is also true: President Trump could not exist without the post-Nixonian GOP that has Mitch McConnell patrolling the Senate and Bill Barr providing legal cover for the virtually unlimited power of the “unitary executive.”
….
Ending Trump’s misrule and restoring confidence in the presidency demands the undoing of impediments to free and fair elections. That will entail root-and-branch campaign finance reform, an end to voter suppression, new defenses against foreign interference in elections, and reining in the digital disinformation engines. These are perhaps only the minimum demands for restoring American democracy.
Trump is a sign that we as a nation have lost our way. Just as Hamilton warned, a confusion of celebrity for leadership, fame for accomplishment, and popularity for genius has given us “a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune.” Seizing the opportunity, unscrupulous “insolent men” have pandered to the lowest common denominators of fear and greed to win power and exploit it for a small elite. November’s election is a judgment day for this nation’s form of republican government. Or else, only “civil commotion” awaits us.
“This is gaslighting on an enormous scale, and means until people eventually get sick or their family members get sick, the communities hit hard, they won’t believe it, and then it will be too late,” said [Dr. Celine] Grounder. “The problem is there’s a lag period from the time that somebody’s infected and starts to develop symptoms a couple days later. We don’t see people get severely sick and need to be hospitalized and in ICUs until a week into disease, and talking about probably one to two weeks of lag time from the time somebody’s exposed at least before you start to see hospitalizations and then another couple weeks before you start to see deaths.”
If you’re a cat parent and don’t mind pampering your furball silly, here’s what you need to lay your eyes on! The ultimate play toy cum lounge for your kitty – we’re talking about the mega-luxe “cat tower mansion” created by renowned Japanese construction firm – Mitsubishi Estate Residence.
Designed as a high-rise condo for a cat, the luxurious cat home is created by a team led by cat-lover and licensed architect Akiko Ishimaru. It features a tall scratching strip on one of the exterior walls and a window for your cat to peep out of. On the inside, it features several levels, each boasting a structure of its own.
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with scattered afternoon thundershowers and a high of eighty-nine. Sunrise is 5:22 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 14m 17s of daytime. The moon is waxing gibbous with 96.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1863, the Union is victorious on the final day of the Battle of Gettysburg.
First, even with these [June reported] gains, U.S. payrolls are still deeply in the hole. Second, these official government numbers are based on a snapshot from mid-June, and more recent data suggest the recovery has either stalled or deteriorated since then. And, third, a major fiscal time bomb is about to detonate.
You may have a sense that things are still quite bad, given that the unemployment rate remains higherthan it ever was during the Great Recession. To help visualize just how far in the red the country is, take a gander at the Scariest Jobs Chart You’ll See All Day. It plots the trajectory of job changes in this recession alongside those from previous postwar downturns (and subsequent recoveries).
The horizontal axis shows months since the most recent employment peak of a given business cycle. The teal line plots the Great Recession. Until recently, the depth, duration and sluggish recovery from the Great Recession had put all other postwar downturns to shame.
Now look at the red line, which represents the awful situation the country is experiencing.
Things are so much worse than even the Great Recession that the red line almost doesn’t fit on the same chart as the others. It starts with a near-vertical downward drop, followed by a short spike upward.
Again, it’s fantastic that the hiring trend has, in fact, turned upward. But there are still 14.7 million, or about 10 percent, fewer payroll jobs than there were at the start of the pandemic recession. And as you can see, even if job growth continues at what President Trump calls “rocket ship” pace, the economy still has a long way to go before reaching an acceptable altitude — that is, until U.S. payrolls are anywhere near pre-pandemic levels.
Tommy Fisher billed his new privately funded border wall as the future of deterrence, a quick-to-build steel fortress that spans 3 miles in one of the busiest Border Patrol sectors.
Unlike a generation of wall builders before him, he said he figured out how to build a structure directly on the banks of the Rio Grande, a risky but potentially game-changing step when it came to the nation’s border wall system.
Fisher has leveraged his self-described “Lamborghini” of walls to win more than $1.7 billion worth of federal contracts in Arizona.
But his showcase piece is showing signs of runoff erosion and, if it’s not fixed, could be in danger of falling into the Rio Grande, according to engineers and hydrologists who reviewed photos of the wall for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. It never should have been built so close to the river, they say.
The U.S. Census Bureau has just released its last batch of race-ethnic population estimates in advance of the 2020 census, with data indicating that the national headcount will reveal a more diverse nation than was previously expected. The new estimates show that nearly four of 10 Americans identify with a race or ethnic group other than white, and suggest that the 2010 to 2020 decade will be the first in the nation’s history in which the white population declined in numbers.
Over the decade’s first nine years, racial and ethnic minorities accounted for all of the nation’s population growth, and were responsible for population gains in many states, metropolitan areas, and counties that would have otherwise registered losses due to declines in their white populations. And while the U.S. and more than half of its states have shown absolute declines in populations under age 25, such declines were largely due to white losses among the youth population. These declines would have been even greater were it not for youthful gains among racial and ethnic minorities, especially the Latino or Hispanic population.
….
The new data shows that, by 2019, the white population share declined nearly nine more percentage points, to 60.1%. The Latino or Hispanic and Asian American population shares showed the most marked gains, at 18.5% and nearly 6%, respectively. While these groups fluctuated over the past 40 years, either upward (for Latinos or Hispanics and Asian Americans) or downward (for whites), the Black share of the population remained relatively constant.
These are big changes in a short time. The mere fact of these changes, and the mere acknowledgement of them, cannot possibly be all that is required in a just society. Karen Attiah’s observation that society should assure freedom of integration rather than simply acknowledging diversity remains a lodestone.
