Last Call For The First Flight To Milwaukee

Tom Perez and the DNC will be holding the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee in 2020, and I'm really not sure how I feel about that.

Democrats picked Milwaukee on Monday to host their 2020 national convention, setting up the party's standard-bearer to accept the presidential nomination in the heart of the old industrial belt that delivered Donald Trump to the White House.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez chose Milwaukee over Houston and Miami after deliberations lingered longer than party leaders or officials from the three finalist cities had expected.

"This choice is a statement of our values," Perez said in a statement. "The Democratic Party is the party of working people, and Milwaukee is a city of working people."

The convention is scheduled for July 13-16, 2020.

It will be the first time in over a century that Democrats will be in a Midwest city other than Chicago to nominate their presidential candidate. Instead, the political spotlight will shine for a week on a metro area of about 1.6 million people. Once dubbed as "The Machine Shop of the World," the famously working-class city also is known for its long love affair with beer and as the birthplace of Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

On one hand, Democrats need the upper Midwest to beat Trump in 2020.  I understand the message this sends, that Democrats are serious about winning Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania back and making a serious try at Ohio.

On the other hand, there's no denying that Milwaukee is the most segregated large city in America.

Milwaukee is the most racially segregated metro area in the United States, a new Brookings Institution study found.

The report, which the nonprofit think tank based on an analysis of U.S. census data, also found that black-white neighborhood segregation nationally "has declined only modestly since the beginning of the century."

"Most white residents of large metropolitan areas live in neighborhoods that remain overwhelmingly white, and while black neighborhoods have become more diverse, this is largely due to an increase in Hispanic rather than white residents," wrote William H. Frey, the study's author.

Milwaukee has for years been considered to be one of the most racially segregated metropolitan areas in the country. And it's frequently been at or near the top of the list of highly segregated areas in past Brookings studies.

Brookings found most of the areas with the highest levels of segregation are in northern parts of the country, with Milwaukee, New York, Chicago and Detroit leading the list.

"At least three in four black residents in Milwaukee, New York, and Chicago would need to relocate in order to live in fully integrated neighborhoods with whites," Frey wrote. "In another four areas — Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and St. Louis — seven in ten blacks would have to relocate to live in a completely integrated neighborhood with whites."

NYC, Detroit, and Chicago are doing things about their decades of redlining and racial segregation.  Milwaukee is pointedly not lifting a finger.  And to me, the choice of Milwaukee means Democrats are trying to win back white Trump voters, and frankly I don't want anyone who voted for Trump in this party at all.  They were okay with Trump's racism.  It wasn't a dealbreaker for them.

Why would we want them back?

 

The Question Of Impeachment

House Democrats are still extremely leery of bringing articles of impeachment against Donald Trump and are still waiting on the Mueller report before they make their move.

For House Democrats, impeaching President Donald Trump is both inevitable and impossible.

Democrats anticipate they will gather plenty of evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors on the president’s part, but they’re torn over what to do with it — fearful that their efforts will backfire and end up helping Trump.

“You don’t want to divide the country, so you have to think you have such a case that once the case is finished being presented, enough people understand you had to do it,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), whose committee has the power to launch impeachment proceedings, said in an interview.

While Nadler cautioned that his standard for impeachment “doesn’t mean you have to have Republican votes,” he said Democrats need to win over at least some voters who backed Trump in the 2016 election — a difficult feat for Democrats as Republicans have remained loyal to the president and have largely backed his criticisms of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and other probes ensnaring the president and his associates.

“[Mueller], plus the hearings we have, might produce enough information where some people will open their minds — but right now, a can opener couldn’t get ‘em open,” Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), a senior member of the Judiciary panel, said of Republicans.
That reality underscores Democrats’ conundrum as they interview witnesses and demand documents as part of the sprawling oversight arsenal they’ve set into motion. Interviews with more than a dozen key Democratic lawmakers revealed deep divisions within the caucus about whether their efforts could end up helping Trump win a second term in office.

They’ve set the bar for impeachment so high that lawmakers are skeptical that removing Trump from office with bipartisan support would be achievable, leaving many Democrats pondering their endgame.

For that reason, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and committee chairs have broached the impeachment topic cautiously, arguing it should be considered only after the various federal and congressional investigations of the president are complete. A notable exception is Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who chairs the House Financial Services Committee and has said there is already enough evidence to impeach Trump.

But even as senior Democrats resist the prospect of impeachment, demands from the caucus’ progressive wing and liberal grassroots groups to remove Trump from office are only rising. Pelosi will come under enormous pressure if the committees uncover sufficient evidence of wrongdoing.

But Democrats are torn over whether they should rely on Republicans and risk an uproar from their left flank, or impeach Trump in the House and risk the political backlash.

The choice will be made for Democrats soon, I would think.  Ideally they would want a Mueller Report so damning that bipartisan impeachment is a done deal.  If there was any other Republican senator other than Mitch McConnell leading the GOP, I would even say there's a mathematical possibility that could work.

This country will burn when it happens though.  It will be 1973-4 all over again.

Race To The Bottom, Con't

Three-quarters of Republicans say white Americans are openly discriminated against, but they are far from alone...

A majority of Independents, 55 percent, sided with Republicans and said white Americans are discriminated against. Meanwhile, only 38 percent Democrats agreed, and sixty-two percent of Democrats said that white Americans face little or no discrimination at all.  

However, the poll did find some agreement among the different political spectrums. Seventy-eight percent of Republicans, 82 percent of Independents and 95 percent of Democrats said that African-Americans are discriminated against. And, in total, 81 percent of the registered voters polled said Hispanics also face discrimination.  

Interestingly, only 19 percent of white respondents said they personally faced racial discrimination, proving the point that the fear tactics of Fox News and other conservative media who sell the myth of “reverse racism” are working.

In other words, white Republicans believe they are just as much victims of discrimination as black and Hispanic people are, because that's how Republican logic works. They know they hate people of color, so they assume we hate white people back and do things like refuse to hire them and don't give them loans and spit in their food when preparing it and won't let them join the NAACP, because it's what they do to us.

But if you're still wondering how Donald Trump won, selling "white discrimination" still works with an overwhelming majority of Republicans, a solid majority of Independents, and almost 40% of Democrats.

StupidiNews!

• US Olympic silver-medal cyclist Kelly Catlin has died at age 23, She placed second in the 2016 Rio games in women's team pursuit.
• An Ethiopian Airlines flight bound for Nairobi crashed just minutes after takeoff, killing all 157 people on board, it's the second fatal Boeing 737 MAX crash in six months.
• A nationwide blackout in Venezuela has entered its fifth day as the country remains largely without power for clear water, refrigeration, and communications.
• The White House is expected to release its budget blueprint Monday, calling for massive cuts to most federal agencies as House Democrats are expected to reject the plan.
• An email marketing agency has exposed hundreds of millions of email addresses online, which could lead to major identity theft breaches.