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The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category Archives: Culture Wars

The Supreme Court Goes Back to Work

The Daily Escape:

Pyramids viewed from Cairo Street, Egypt – photo by Hossam Abbas

The Supreme Court’s new term begins next Monday, and much of America’s culture wars will move in front of the bench for adjudication. Some of the issues being litigated include abortion, gay rights and gun control. It’s no secret that conservatives control the court, and its liberal wing is in retreat. This could be a momentous year in shaping the country’s socio-cultural future.

On Monday, October 7th, the justices will hear arguments in the case Kahler v. Kansas, regarding whether the 8th and 14th Amendments allow a state to abolish the insanity defense. Four states, Kansas, Utah, Idaho and Montana have abolished the insanity defense. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Kansas says yes, and so does the Trump administration.

Also on Monday, they will hear Ramos v. Louisiana, regarding whether the 6th Amendment guarantee of a unanimous jury verdict to convict someone applies to the states. Currently, Louisiana and Oregon permit non-unanimous juries.

On Tuesday, the court hears a case concerning whether gay and transgender people are protected by federal civil rights laws that bar employment discrimination. Three workplace discrimination cases will be heard. Two of the three cases ask whether “because of sex” in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prevents an employer from disadvantaging employees on the basis of their gender identity or sexual orientation. Fewer than half the states have laws against firing workers because they are gay or transgender. Now the Supremes will decide if the federal civil-rights laws protect the 8.1 million LGBT workers in America.

It may not surprise you that the Trump administration says Title VII doesn’t apply to gay and transgender workers, contrary to the view of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

On November 12th, they will visit Trump’s effort to end DACA, the Obama program that protects mostly Hispanic young adults from deportation. The case is Department of Homeland Security v. Regents, University of California, where three cases were consolidated for argument in which lower courts decided that the Trump action violated the federal Administrative Procedures Act.

Also scheduled for Nov. 12 is a case in which a US border patrol officer shot and killed an unarmed Mexican teenager who was not on US soil, but hiding in a culvert between the US and Mexico. The question is whether federal courts can award damages to the family for the agent’s actions.

On December 2nd, they are scheduled to hear a major gun rights case. The case is NY State Rifle and Pistol Assn. v. City of New York. The challenge is to the city’s ban on the transport of licensed and unloaded guns outside the city limits. But the city amended the law, and is arguing that the case is now moot, since it has given the challengers what they sought. The case may be dismissed.

Among possible cases that have not yet been scheduled are two appeals regarding Republican-backed abortion restrictions enacted in Louisiana and Indiana. If the court were to take either or both of those cases, it would raise the possibility of a ruling that further curbs abortion rights.

The Louisiana case concerns a challenge by an abortion clinic to state requirements that doctors who perform the procedure must have “admitting privileges” with local hospitals. It is similar to a Texas law that the Supreme Court struck down in 2016, when Justice Anthony Kennedy sided with the court’s liberals. But last year, Kennedy retired and was replaced by Bret Kavanaugh.

It would be extraordinary if they take up this case and then overrule a precedent set just three years ago. The only thing that’s different is the composition of the court.

Looking further ahead, we may see contentious arguments on the limitations of presidential power. Likely subjects include the president’s push for the power to remove the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; executive privilege in battles over Trump’s tax returns; and use of a national emergency designation to use money appropriated elsewhere to fund the border wall.

And finally, there’s impeachment. In April, Trump tweeted that if “the partisan Dems ever tried to impeach”, he would “first head to the US Supreme Court”. There is little doubt that the Supremes would move quickly to hear such a case.

It wouldn’t be smart for Trump to expect them to come to his rescue during impending impeachment proceedings. In 1993 Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote for a unanimous court that impeachment authority “is reposed” in Congress, “and nowhere else”.

Then, if the House of Representatives actually impeached Trump, Chief Justice John Roberts will find himself playing a constitutionally required role: presiding over the president’s removal trial in the Senate.

All in, a pivotal term for the Supremes and for America.

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – August 25, 2019

From the WaPo:

“The Justice Department has canceled a news-clip service for employees in its immigration review office after Monday’s edition included a link to and a summary of a blog post from a white-nationalist website that used an anti-Semitic slur…”

The Justice Department said the articles came from a third-party internet service that scanned the internet based on keywords and automatically delivered the DOJ articles from “various sources”.  It wasn’t a surprise that the DOJ canceled the service, blaming the third-party.

DOJ spokesperson Kathryn Mattingly said:

 “Those hateful beliefs do not reflect the views of EOIR employees and the Department of Justice.”

BuzzFeed spoke with the third-party service (TechMIS) and found out that the Trump administration has been regularly sending out articles from some far right-wing and white supremacist sites. And they’ve been doing it for months:

“Similar newsletters sent to the Labor Department, ICE, HUD, and the Department of Homeland Security included links and content from hyper partisan and conspiracy-oriented publishers.”

TechMIS sometimes included links to VDare, an anti-Semitic and racist site whose editor has claimed that American culture is under threat from nonwhite peoples. While these newsletters shared articles from local and mainstream national news outlets, they also regularly delivered content from partisan publications touting anti-immigration rhetoric and conspiracy theories. Among these publications: the Western Journal, a hyper partisan publisher whose founder once questioned if then-presidential candidate Barack Obama was Muslim.

And to say that the DOJ was blindsided by the contractor was debunked by TechMIS CEO Steven Mains:

“That’s absolutely incorrect…Mains added that EOIR {division of DOJ} was the most specific and particular of the company’s clients. The agency’s staff would review its work “down to misspellings” if there was anything wrong before sending.”

So, they reflect the beliefs of the entire administration.

Whenever you hear Trump apologists say that the Donald isn’t racist, or that the administration takes an even-handed approach to the brown and black people, remind them that White supremacists are running the government, and sharing racist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and radical conspiracy links across the federal bureaucracy.

You would be a fool to believe that these links aren’t being approved by someone high up in the various administration cabinet departments. This is absolutely being done on purpose to radicalize the government against those people. On to cartoons:

The buck never stops at HIS desk:

Trump may have been chosen, but he’s just the Mess-iah

He did say that he wanted suspicious characters off the streets:

This weekend’s G-7 meeting will be more of the same:

Let’s hope that Justice Ginsburg is with us for some time to come:

Bidens seem nice, but they represent a time that has passed:

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Take Away Trump’s Legitimacy

The Daily Escape:

Wildflowers at St. Marys Lake, Glacier NP – July 2019 photo by zjpurdy

Wrongo arises from his sick bed to discuss Trump’s war on the four Democratic Congresswomen. Saying “America, love it or leave it”, or, “Go back where you came from” are almost as old as the country itself.

“Love it or leave it” was a popular bumper sticker during the late 1960s. It was aimed at the anti-Vietnam War protesters who claimed that America was wrong to be fighting in Vietnam. The slogan possessed an internal logic. If you really hate where you are, why don’t you go someplace else?

The reality is that wanting policy change isn’t the equivalent of hating your country. Nixon and his supporters said that the (largely) student protesters believed that America itself was evil. That justified the slogan for the right, and we saw it everywhere.

Fighting for policy change today is perfectly acceptable. It says nothing about your love of country. Despite Trump’s shouting, dissent in no way equals hate of country.

By using “Go back where you came from”, Trump is tapping into one of the old reliable political tools, the fear and vilification of immigrants and their descendants. He’s using deeply entrenched roots in American history: Why don’t you just go back where you came from?

Or, as Trump’s North Carolina crowd said, “Send her back”. Send her back doesn’t just apply to Rep. Ilhan Omar. It means your black neighbors, the Guatemalan family at church, and the Hmong kids your son plays soccer with. It means your Indian co-workers; it means the Chinese couple in the park.

But it doesn’t include any of the roughly 580,000 illegal migrants from Europe.

From the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 to “No Irish Need Apply” signs in the 1830s, to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, America has loved to hate immigrants. They were not only seen as competing for jobs, but as threatening the social, cultural and political order. Even in the 1830s people thought that they were taking jobs that should belong to Americans, and that they clung to their native language and refused to assimilate.

Sound familiar?

And once we stopped allowing Chinese immigrants, some of the jobs denied to the Chinese were subsequently filled by Mexicans. They were also viewed as different, clannish and hard to assimilate.

It’s good to remember that the US government has rules against saying to its workers “go back where you came from”. Here’s a quote from the Equal Opportunity Commission’s regulations:

“Examples of potentially unlawful conduct include insults, taunting, or ethnic epithets, such as making fun of a person’s foreign accent or comments like, ‘Go back to where you came from,’ whether made by supervisors or by co-workers…”

Isn’t Trump a government supervisor? Sure, but these rules don’t apply in Republican administrations. Robert Kagan in the WaPo:

“Trump has given us a binary choice: Either stand with American principles, which in this case means standing in defense of the Squad, or equivocate, which means standing with Trump and white nationalism. It doesn’t matter how you feel about Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). The truth is, they have done nothing and said nothing about the United States or about an ally (in this case, Israel) that has not been done or said thousands of times.”

Now, he’s going up against the entire Democratic Party. They’re quoting him directly. And the pit bulls at Fox News are saying that calling him out is grossly unfair.

It’s time for Democrats to stop debating Trump about whether he’s a racist. They simply need to keep saying it. Every day. Until November 2020. Along the way, which ever Democrat is nominated should say they have no intention of debating the liar and racist Trump. He doesn’t deserve the dignity and respect that the debate forum implies.

Instead, the Democratic nominee should buy time on all networks including Fox, and on all social media outlets in 5, to not-longer-than 10 minute pieces. In each, they can point out what Trump said he would do, and what actually happened.

Think how it might work for domestic policy: Trump gutted Obamacare with no plan for helping the people who lost insurance. His tax cuts helped corporations and the 1%, while doing nearly nothing for the rest of us. His tax cuts also blew a hole in our budget. He’s weakened our education department, and our environmental regulations.

The candidate would then present the solutions. Clearly, without the need for any ninety second rebuttals by the liar and racist Trump. The GOP will say we’re not following the rules, but Trump never follows “rules” of presidential behavior, why should Democrats?

He’s already proven that he will say anything (and possibly do anything) to get elected.

Stop legitimizing him.

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Megan Rapinoe

The Daily Escape:

Going to the Sun Road, Glacier NP – 2016 photo by Wrongo

Megan Rapinoe, after the Women’s Soccer Team ticker tape parade in NYC on Wednesday:

“This is my charge to everyone: We have to be better. We have to love more. Hate less. We got to listen more and talk less….It’s our responsibility to make the world a better place.” https://t.co/7LJHPDVRm9 pic.twitter.com/5s5OuS4Gsx

— CBS News (@CBSNews) July 10, 2019

America knows by now that Megan Rapinoe is the outspoken co-captain of the USA Women’s Soccer team. She was the high scorer in the Women’s team’s march to their fourth World Cup victory. She’s also the person who said earlier in the tournament that she would not visit the White House if Trump extended an invitation.

Trump responded by criticizing Rapinoe on Twitter. He later congratulated the team on their win, but also vacillated on whether the team would be asked to visit. On Monday, Rapinoe said the team would visit Congress, but not the White House, even if Trump asked.

On Tuesday, Public Policy Polling conducted a poll about “Megan Rapinoe vs. Donald Trump, 2020”. It said:

“We found that Rapinoe gets 42% to 41% for Trump.”

The new poll numbers are humorous, if not dispositive. After all, she’s not running for president. But she has some of the leadership concepts down:

When asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper what she would say to Trump, Rapinoe looked into the camera and said, “Your message is excluding people. You’re excluding me, you’re excluding people that look like me, you’re excluding people of color, and you’re excluding Americans that maybe support you.”

Rapinoe is openly gay. She’s advocating for equal pay for equal work for women. Like AOC, she’s Trump’s equal on twitter. The back-to-back World Cup champion added:

“we need to have a reckoning with the implications of Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan, because “you’re harking back to an era that was not great for everyone – it might have been great for a few people, and maybe America is great for a few people right now, but it’s not great for enough Americans in this world….You have an incredible responsibility as the chief of this country to take care of every single person, and you need to do better for everyone…”

More from Rapinoe to CNN’s Anderson Cooper:

“I don’t think anyone on the team has any interest in lending the platform that we’ve worked so hard to build, and the things that we fight for, and the way that we live our life – I don’t think that we want that to be co-opted or corrupted by this administration,”

Rapinoe accepted an invitation on behalf of the team from Democratic lawmakers, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), House Speaker Pelosi, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). She added:

“This is such a special moment for us, and to be able to sort of leverage this moment and talk about the things that we want to talk about and to celebrate like this with the leaders of our country is an incredible moment….So yes to AOC, yes to Nancy Pelosi, yes to the bipartisan Congress, yes to Chuck Schumer – yes to anyone else that wants to invite us and have a real substantive conversation, and that believes in the same things that we believe in.”

She’s a proud American who understands that despite Trump wanting to go back in time, it’s never again going to be 1953 in America. These women aren’t ornamental, they’re not trophies.

They win trophies.

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Monday Wake Up Call – May 6, 2019

The Daily Escape:

Torres del Paine NP, Chile – 2016 photo by Andrea Pozzi

After our granddaughter’s graduation in PA (summa cum laude), we had a few wines and beers, and talk turned to politics and the mess America is in now. Son-in-law Miles, (dad of next week’s grad) asked a very good question. “Is now really the worst of times? What about when Martin Luther King was assassinated?”

Wrongo immediately flashed back to JFK’s assassination. He was a DC college student when JFK died. But his focus wasn’t on the loss of a president, or what that meant to the country. His focus was on what the loss of JFK meant personally.

That changed in 1968 with the assassinations of MLK and RFK. Wrongo was in the Army, stationed in Germany when Dr. King was killed. There was great tension in the enlisted men’s barracks. For a few days, it took a lot of effort in our small, isolated unit to keep anger from boiling over into outright fighting between the races.

By the time we lost RFK, it was clear that the Vietnam War would drag on, killing many of Wrongo’s friends. But, Wrongo’s job was to defend America from the Russians, with nuclear weapons if necessary.

It was difficult to see how or when Vietnam would end. It was hard to imagine Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, or Robert McNamara doing much to stop young Americans from dying in Asia.

The year 1968 also included the Tet Offensive. Mark Bowen in his book, Hue 1968, says:

“For decades….the mainstream press and, for that matter, most of the American public, believed their leaders, political and military. Tet was the first of many blows to that faith in coming years, Americans would never again be so trusting.” (p. 507)

When Americans finally saw the Pentagon Papers in 1971, they learned that America’s leaders had been systematically lying about the scope and progress of the war for years, in spite of their doubts that the effort could succeed. The assassinations, Vietnam, and Watergate changed us forever.

Our leaders failed us, it was clearly the worst of times. We were in worse shape in 1968 than we are in 2019. Back then, it felt like the country was coming apart at the seams, society’s fabric was pulling apart. Then, May 4th 1970 brought the killings of college kids at Kent State, which was probably the lowest point in our history, at least during Wrongo’s life time.

Last week, we acknowledged the 49th anniversary of America’s military killing American students on US soil. We vaguely remember the Neil Young song “Ohio” with its opening lyrics:

“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, we’re finally on our own…”

That’s why the decade from 1960-1970 was the worst of times. We got through it, but we have never been the same.

In 1968, we saw that change can arrive suddenly, fundamentally, and violently, even in America. Bob Woodward spoke at Kent State last week, on Saturday, May 4th. He offered some brand-new information about Nixon’s reaction to the student shootings: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“In a conversation with his chief of staff H.R. Haldeman in September 1971, Nixon suggested shooting prisoners at New York’s Attica Prison riot in a reference to the Kent State tragedy. “You know what stops them? Kill a few,” Nixon says on a tape of the conversation.”

Woodward continued:

“We now know what really was on Nixon’s mind as he reflected…on Kent State after 17 months….Kent State and the protest movement was an incubator for Richard Nixon and his illegal wars.”

Woodward meant that what was coming was a war on the news media, creation of the “Plumbers” unit to track down leaks, and attempts to obstruct justice with the Watergate cover-up.

Many of us see 2020 shaping up as another 1968. Some see Nixon reincarnated in Trump.

We haven’t faced this particular set of circumstances before, so we can’t know just how it will go. Will it be worse than the 1960s, or just another terrible American decade? Is it the best of times, or the worst of times?

Are we willing to fight to preserve what we have anymore?

Wake up America, you have to fight for what America means to us. Constitutional liberties are under attack. The right to vote is being undermined. Extreme Nationalism has been emboldened.

To help you wake up, listen once again to “Ohio” by Neil Young in a new solo performance from October, 2018. He’s added some documentary footage and a strong anti-gun message:

You may not know that Chrissie Hynde, the future lead singer of The Pretenders was a Kent State student, and was on the scene at the time.

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

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Monday Wake Up Call – April 29, 2019

The Daily Escape: (In recognition of Poway, CA)

There’s no escape, we’re staying on the hamster wheel

And this:

All these killers used the same weapon, the AR-15 (or a knock-off of the AR-15). And just how many “lone wolf” killers will it take before America realizes they’re a pack? Do you have any hope that the Congress will rein in assault-type weapons?

Time to wake up, America. This weekend we saw two more acts of domestic terrorism against non-Christians. One by an Islamophobic Christian who mistakenly thought Sikhs are Muslim, and another by an anti-Semitic white supremacist who targeted Jews.

In the first case, a white man drove into a family of Sikhs in Sunnyvale, California, believing they were Muslims. He was allegedly on his way to a Bible study group, and was praising Jesus when authorities caught him.

In the second, another white man, gunned down several people in a synagogue in Poway CA, killing one and injuring three. He apparently wrote an anti-Semitic manifesto. The letter talks about planning for the attack. The letter writer also claims responsibility for an arson fire that blackened the walls of the Islamic Center in Escondido on March 24th, but no one was injured.

The Poway suspect also championed Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people and wounded six others in the Tree of Life synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh six months ago.

None of this is to downplay the ISIS killings of Christians in Sri Lanka. But today, we’re focusing on America, and two converging trends: The ubiquity of guns in America, and the growing and unbridled domestic racism that has returned to daylight.

We can blame Republicans for some of the escalating number of US white terrorist acts against non-Christians and non-whites. We all know that Trump has in many cases, encouraged hate to come out of the closet. This from David Atkins:

“White supremacist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and misogynist rhetoric runs rampant across the entirety of the conservative movement. The transformation of the Republican Party into a vehicle of violent white male grievance has rapidly accelerated its longtime trend under Trump.”

Atkins notes that the weekend attacks came one day after Trump congratulated the white player picked second in the NFL draft while ignoring the black player picked first. In 2016, Trump won both states that the two players played for, so it wasn’t politics. That’s who he is, and he doesn’t care who knows it.

We on the liberal side of the ledger continue to debate whether the “reachable” Trump voters are as racist as the rest of the MAGAs. Some Democratic pols wonder how many of them could be persuaded to vote for a Democrat in 2020. It’s unlikely that the “reachable” Trump voters are more than 4% of the electorate, but that could well swing what shapes up as a very close presidential election.

Can Democrats appeal to their base and to the persuadable Republicans by hammering on the moral repugnance of these white terrorists, while downplaying any program to weaken the Second Amendment?

At the same time, what will Republicans do? We can be sure that Trump will double down, but will the rest of the Party follow him? More, from Atkins:

“…violent acts of terrorism by their own base are much harder to sweep under the rug. Vague statements of general condemnation against violence won’t cut it as these despicable acts continue to increase, and as the Republican Party becomes increasingly associated with them.”

The thing is, the fires of hatred are not a tool you can use only to fire up your voters to do what you want. Once ignited, it’s not your kitchen stove, where you can turn the heat up, down, or off at your choosing. These are wildfires. You can ignite them, and use them to heat things up, but they can take on a life of their own, burning whatever they reach.

We’re told over and over that we have a civility crisis in this country. That the Democrats aren’t being polite enough to the right.

We do have a civility crisis in this country. We are far too civil to bigots. We are far too tolerant of those who would oppress, or kill others.

The right wing needs to pay a price for its toleration and cultivation of bigotry. It has no right to demand civility when it allows some of its base to treat people with contempt just for being who they are.

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Saturday Soother – April 13, 2019

The Daily Escape:

Angel’s Rest, Columbia River Gorge, OR – 2019 photo by Thenervouspoops

(Sunday cartoons will be published on Monday, as Wrongo and Ms. Right are visiting a granddaughter in Buffalo NY)

Busy week at the Mansion of Wrong, as Wrongo prepared the Wrong family taxes for presentation to the Swamp on Monday.

His town responsibilities led to interviewing three interns for a part-time (paid) construction accounting position at the Department of Public Works. All three were accounting majors at Western Connecticut State University, and all were smart, articulate and working in multiple jobs while attending college full-time.

Those students made Wrongo feel hopeful about the next generation. That maybe America will avoid being consumed in the dumpster fire that the previous generations are leaving them.

Possibly lost in the news about Assange and William Barr was this from CNN, who reported on the bizarre words by former Pope Benedict XVI. He “retired” just before the current Pope, Francis II was elevated. Benedict wrote an essay on the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church that was published this week in a German magazine for priests. In the article, Benedict claims that the sexual abuse of children by priests was caused in part by the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the liberalization of the church’s moral teaching:

“Part of the physiognomy of the Revolution of ’68…was that pedophilia was then also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate…Benedict says that this mentality also affected bishops and Catholic seminaries and caused, the extensive collapse of the next generation of priests….here were — not only in the United States of America — individual bishops who rejected the Catholic tradition as a whole and sought to bring about a kind of new, modern Catholicity….In various seminaries homosexual cliques were established… which acted more or less openly and significantly changed the climate in the seminaries.”

His Awfulness. Benedict blames clerical pedophilia on the swinging sixties. He blames pedophilia on homosexuality.

It’s too bad the Catholic Church didn’t have a guy who is completely and unquestioningly in charge, like some sort of a “Super Bishop” who could have told everyone what to do. Someone who could have put a stop to all the child raping. Yes, that would have been Benedict, or those who came before him, or after.

The sexual revolution wasn’t about raping kids. What kind of moral failure is it on the part of the Catholic Church for the former Pope to say: “But they were doing it too!” Coming from an institution that prides itself on being the arbiter of morality, this is an historic failure.

There are tons of records of priestly pedophilia that predate the 1960’s, including plenty of cases of churchly cover-ups. Why is this retired guy entitled to speak about anything?

Enough! It’s time for our Saturday Soothing! Let’s start by checking out Vancouver, BC’s Notch Coffee’s flagship coffee, Sumatra Boru Batak (C$18.00/340 grams). Expect notes of Baker’s Chocolate, dried mango and tobacco, says the brewer.

Now, contemplate all of your to-be-done yard work while you sip this coffee and listen to “Simple Gifts” from Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” played in 1962 by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein. You’ll remember the melody, and maybe, you will think of the simple gifts that are missing from your life today:

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

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DHS Disbanded Its Domestic Terrorism Group

The Daily Escape:

Detail of the Dome at Qasr Al Watan Palace, Abu Dhabi – 2019 photo by Ottho Heldring

(Wrongo apologizes for the lack of articles, as other priorities have intervened. He has responsibilities on his town’s Municipal Road Committee. We are preparing to spend about $10 Million on improving our roads. There are very tight deadlines for finishing our analysis, getting approval of the town council, holding a referendum, and then going to the bond market for the funds. This is a huge time sink. So, for the next 10 days, posting may be intermittent.)

From The Daily Beast: (parenthesis by Wrongo)

“The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has disbanded a group of intelligence analysts who focused on domestic terrorism, The Daily Beast has learned. Numerous current and former DHS officials say they find the development concerning, as the threat of homegrown terrorism—including white supremacist terrorism—is growing.”

The group in question was a branch of DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A). They focused on the threat from homegrown extremists and domestic terrorists. Their analysts shared information with state and local law enforcement to help them protect communities from these threats. According to the Daily Beast, the reorganization happened last year, and had not been previously reported.

DHS defended the reorganization. Pressed by The Daily Beast, a senior DHS official pushed back:

 “The same people are working on the issues….We just restructured things to be more responsive to the…customers within DHS and in local communities while reducing overlap with what the FBI does. We actually believe we are far more effective now.”

Ok. But one local community “client” is Los Angeles, and Sgt. Mike Abdeen with the LA County Sheriff’s Department told The Daily Beast:

“It’s been very quiet lately….It’s changed with the new administration. It doesn’t seem to be as robust, as active, as important…it’s not a priority. It doesn’t seem like engagement, outreach, and prevention are seen as a priority as we used to see in the past. There were roundtable meetings in the past…more training, more seminars. Now it seems like it’s gone away.”

Nobody would say that domestic terrorism has been declining, so you have to decide whether this is an unintended consequence of another Trump appointee trying to streamline a government process, or whether it is an intentional effort to bury bad news about elements within Trump’s base of support.

Is Trump’s ability to appoint people who will undermine the efforts of our civil service better, or worse than his use of the judges’ roster provided by the Federalist Society to pack the courts?

Wrongo votes that it’s a tie.

Trump has said repeatedly that he doesn’t consider white nationalist groups to be an actual threat. So out goes the white nationalist task force.

Is this merely DHS accepting the viewpoint that when a disgruntled white male takes an assault rifle and kills people in a school or Synagogue, he isn’t committing an act of terror, he’s merely a troubled person expressing concern about the fragility of the few remaining white people in America?

This is a GOP problem. There’s been a consistent drumbeat to sweep right-wing terrorism under the rug, and it predates Trump. Consider that in 2009, the Obama administration’s DHS released a report warning about Rightwing Extremism. The report warned that “rightwing extremists may be gaining new recruits by playing on their fears about several emergent issues.” It also predicted that the possibility of new gun restrictions and the return of “military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities” might mean “emergence of terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks.”

That report called this convergence of factors the “most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States”. Republicans went ballistic:

“Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) said the administration was “awfully willing to paint law-abiding Americans, including war veterans, as ‘extremists.’” Then-Rep. Steve Buyer (R-IN) — the top Republican on the House Veterans’ Affairs committee at the time — called it “inconceivable” that some veterans could pose a threat.”

John Boehner (Former GOP Speaker of the House) said:

“The Secretary of Homeland Security owes the American people an explanation for why…her own Department is using [“terrorist”] to describe American citizens who disagree with the direction Washington Democrats are taking our nation…”

Then-DHS head Janet Napolitano was forced to apologize, and she soon buried the report.

FWIW, Christopher Hasson, the Coast Guard officer who was a “domestic terrorist” and self-described white nationalist was arrested in February. But he’s not Muslim, so no worries, nothing more to see here.

Wrongo is old-school enough to believe that Republicans used to care about all of America. That they had different (and usually wrong-headed) approaches to our priorities and the solutions to problems, but they wanted what’s good for the country in general.

It’s gone. Trump-Republicans only want good things for people in their in-crowd. That excludes the majority of Americans.

Trump doesn’t want to stop domestic terrorism by white nationalists. He wants to harness it.

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Monday Wake Up Call – MLK Jr. Edition, January 21, 2019

The Daily Escape:

El Capitan in winter, Yosemite NP, CA – photo by Jonkooo

From Tom Sullivan:

Those of us of a certain age, but not quite old enough, were too young to attend the 1963 March on Washington. The march and Rev. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech influenced our era, our views, and changed the country. There are times one wishes, if only I could have been there for that moment in history. Then again, such thinking fixes the civil rights movement in time. The truth is, that struggle never ended.

Wrongo was in Washington in 1963. Dr. King is one of his heroes. And, as Tom Sullivan says, the struggle has never ended. Wrongo spent the 1960s and 1970s convinced that America would turn a corner, see the wrong in slavery, and know that racism was holding us back.

He thought that we would achieve a point of equilibrium where Americans of all stripes would accept each other as part of a larger tribe, one that shared common beliefs about democracy and equality for all.

Wrongo was wrong. We’re not there. We’ve made some progress, but then we fell back on old beliefs.

Today we are 51 years removed from Dr. King’s assassination, and while America is better and fairer than it was then, we will enter the 2020’s needing to do much to improve society.

This brings me to MLK’s last book, “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?” published the year before he died. In it, King lays out a vision for America’s future, including the need for both better jobs and housing, higher pay and quality education. King called for an end to global suffering, saying that for the first time, humankind had the resources and technology to eradicate poverty.

He wrote about how Civil Rights reforms had fallen short, but he couldn’t have envisioned what the Supreme Court did in gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 with its 2013 decision in Shelby County vs. Holder.

So here we are in 2019 with white kids mocking Native Americans at the Lincoln Memorial, chanting “Build that wall, build that wall.” This happened days after Trump made light of the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee to mock Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

And for context, we live in a time when chanting the president’s name has become a tool of racial intimidation.

Here we are: Income inequality is the highest it’s been since the 1940s.Our federal government is shut down because we can’t agree about the threat posed by illegal immigrants asking for asylum at the US southern border. And racism is marching back into the light from under rocks all across the country.

Time to wake up America! Racism is the wound that won’t heal. We have much to do, and the work won’t be easy.

To help you wake up here is a 2019 song by The Killers, “Land of the Free”. It is broadly about America and the intolerance holding us back. Listen to it, and reflect on what it makes you feel. Depending on what about it makes you angry, it is a reflection of who you are. The video is very powerful. Please take the time to watch it.

Think about what’s at the heart of this song. People who want the same things we do:

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

Finally, a quote from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time:

“White men have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know.”

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Religious Right Praying Justice Ginsburg Dies

The Daily Escape:

Winter, Yosemite Valley, Yosemite NP, CA – photo via wallpaper studio

 This week Right Wing Watch, who follow America’s least attractive thinkers so that we don’t have to, had a column about how Evangelical Christians are circling around Ruth Bader Ginsburg like vultures. The article included this tweet from anti-abortion and anti-gay activist Matt Barber:

We know that RBG just had cancerous tumors removed from her lungs. Yet, what has been made public so far is that RBG was given a clean bill of health, and is expected to make a full recovery. That diagnosis seems to be a big disappointment to many on the Christian Right.

They were extremely happy with Donald Trump’s choice of Neil Gorsuch. They weren’t so thrilled with Brett Kavanaugh, preferring Amy Coney Barrett, who they saw as totally committed to overturning Roe v. Wade. And they want more. In addition to overturning Roe v. Wade, they want prayers back in schools, and they want same-sex marriage abolished.

Things get interesting when you consider just how much Evangelicals truly, deeply hate RBG:

  • In October, pastor Rodney Howard-Brown, who has prayed over Trump in the Oval Office, guest-hosted The Alex Jones Show on Infowars, where he said that Ginsburg should be shot for treason.
  • Lou Engle, a dominionist organizer of stadium-sized prayer rallies, urged Americans to engage in three days of fasting and prayer over the Supreme Court. Earlier, he led prayers asking God to “sweep away the judges” who support the right to abortion.
  • A few weeks ago, Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagles re-distributed a 1993 Phyllis Schlafly attack on Ginsburg’s feminist philosophy.
  • Liberty Counsel President Mat Staver has argued that Congress should have impeached justices who supported Roe v. Wade and Obergefell vs. Hodges (the case that legalized same-sex marriage). (BTW, Liberty Counsel opposed the Senate’s bill that would outlaw lynching in the US because the bill extends the right not to be lynched to gays and transgender people.)
  • Earlier this month, former Trump campaign adviser Frank Amedia insisted that Chief Justice John Roberts has not proven to be sufficiently reliable to the Religious Right. That means God has to remove more justices so that Trump can fill Roberts’s seat with another justice whose “values and morality” reflect a “kingdom enlightenment as to what is required by God to change the law of this land now.”
  • Heritage Foundation Senior Legal Fellow John Malcolm told the Daily Caller that Trump would be under pressure to replace Ginsburg with a woman, and named Amy Coney Barrett as a preferred successor.

You may not believe that God spends much time thinking about who sits on the Supreme Court, but these people are deadly serious. They think God is a “family values” Republican. They believe that they know who God wants on the Supreme Court.

America needs to look very closely at any group that argues for followers of a specific religion as a test of who is worthy to sit on the Supreme Court, or who should head our government.

Praying for the death of RBG ought to repugnant to all Americans, but sadly, it isn’t particularly surprising that some “Christians” exhibit such callous inhumanity. They, and their kind of thinking, should be repudiated by all Christians.

There’s some consolation in the fact that RBG has worked to make America a more fair and equitable place. She has made that her life’s calling.

Contrast that to these phony Christians who are working to make America a one-party political entity that follows Jesus Christ.

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