Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

The Trump regime is terrified.  They know they are going to lose and lose badly.

One week ago President Donald Trump met with advisers from his 2020 re-election campaign, who greeted him with bad news.

The campaign's internal poll numbers showed the president down in swing states, and down with key demographics of voters including women and independents.
The messaging from the White House on the coronavirus pandemic and the growing anger about the brutal killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis was fueling a drop in his numbers. Top aides warned that former Vice President Joe Biden, now the presumptive Democratic nominee, was positioned to defeat the president by a significant number of electoral votes based on the campaign's analysis, according to multiple sources familiar with the meeting.

While some of the president’s advisers insisted the current campaign internal poll numbers aren’t relevant in gauging Trump’s re-election chances this far from November, others among his most loyal and longest serving advisers have developed a new posture: one of increasing alarm. They fear that without a course correction -- and quickly -- Donald Trump could lose the 2020 presidential election.

This account of the president and his advisers' struggle to respond to the ongoing crises and the political fallout is based on conversations with 17 sources including White House officials, campaign advisers and sources close to the president. 

As I've said in the last week, Trump is trapped and he's up against three foes that he has no clue how to deal with: a financial depression, a pandemic that he can't gaslight away, and a population that no longer fears his power.

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd on May 25, some White House officials have been lobbying the president to give a formal address to the nation from the Oval Office to show he was taking the death and the growing protests around the country seriously. White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was in favor of the idea. Meadows believed it was a moment for the president to deliver a message of unity, according to sources familiar with his thinking.

Others, like the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, were against such an address, arguing it could do more harm than good, according to four sources. A source close to Kushner disputed that categorization, saying instead the goal has been to announce a policy initiative that will have an impact.

The president has also been encouraged to participate in listening sessions with African American leaders, as he has hosted previously at the White House. But that idea was rejected by the commander-in-chief, according to sources.

A person who has attended similar events as a guest of the president previously told ABC News they heard from a White House official to "be on standby" for an event with the president, but then nothing ever materialized.

Trump is "not capable of showing empathy here," said the source, who is still a loyal supporter of the president.

Trump is probably the least capable chief executive in the country's history, and he cannot resolve this issue himself using the only tactics he knows.  So, he's going to ignore both and head out back on the road next week.

President Donald Trump’s signature campaign rallies are back in business, after a gap of more than three months because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump announced on Wednesday that his reelection campaign would be holding a rally in Tulsa, Okla., on June 19 and would also be holding rallies in Florida, Texas and Arizona — as well as an event in North Carolina “at an appropriate time.”
The president made the announcement at a roundtable with African American leaders at the White House, hailing the “great job” that Oklahoma has done combating coronavirus. As of Tuesday, Oklahoma had recorded 353 coronavirus deaths and 7,363 positive cases.

The Tulsa rally next week will be held on Juneteenth, a national commemoration of the end of slavery in the U.S.

Tulsa.  On Juneteenth.  A century ago, the site of Black Wall Street, destroyed by white racists in one of the deadliest mass lynchings in American history.

Trump will flaunt both COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter with a two-for-one asshole special. I smell Trump Minister of Racial Purity Stephen Miller's taint behind this little maneuver.

And it will be arguably the worst speech of Trump's career.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

This time really is different.

Attitudes about Black Lives Matter after the death of George Floyd, especially among white Americans, has changed since the Obama years and has seismically shifted in just the last two weeks.

American public opinion can sometimes seem stubborn. Voters haven’t really changed their views on abortion in 50 years. Donald J. Trump’s approval rating among registered voters has fallen within a five-point range for just about every day of his presidency.

But the Black Lives Matter movement has been an exception from the start.

Public opinion on race and criminal justice issues has been steadily moving left since the first protests ignited over the fatal shootings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. And since the death of George Floyd in police custody on May 25, public opinion on race, criminal justice and the Black Lives Matter movement has leaped leftward.

Over the last two weeks, support for Black Lives Matter increased by nearly as much as it had over the previous two years, according to data from Civiqs, an online survey research firm. By a 28-point margin, Civiqs finds that a majority of Americans support the movement, up from a 17-point margin before the most recent wave of protests began.
The survey is not the only one to suggest that recent protests enjoy broad public support. Weekly polling for the Democracy Fund’s U.C.L.A./Nationscape survey shows a significant increase in unfavorable views of the police, and an increase in the belief that African-Americans face a lot of discrimination.

Perhaps most significant, the Civiqs data is not alone in suggesting that an outright majority of Americans agree with the central arguments of Black Lives Matter.

A Monmouth University poll found that 76 percent of Americans consider racism and discrimination a “big problem,” up 26 points from 2015. The poll found that 57 percent of voters thought the anger behind the demonstrations was fully justified, while a further 21 percent called it somewhat justified. Polls show that a majority of Americans believe that the police are more likely to use deadly force against African-Americans, and that there’s a lot of discrimination against black Americans in society. Back in 2013, when Black Lives Matter began, a majority of voters disagreed with all of these statements.

I've openly said that Obama's support for Black Lives Matter turned many white voters against the Democratic party in his second term, and Hillary Clinton's support for it basically doomed her 2016 candidacy in the Rust Belt and Sun Belt. White voters did not want to hear or think about police brutality and racism still existing after Obama's election, having fully bought into the historic nature of the nation's first black president being proof that racism had been conquered and was no longer a problem.

When that turned out to not be the case, white voters got angry.  And they turned to Trump in order to punish the Obama coalition of voters. The rest is our dark history of the last four years.

But if these numbers are right, white voters have seen so much police brutality on TV against everyone that they're now supporting Black Lives Matter and finally realized we were right all along and that cops are out of control.

In other words, Donald Trump's collapse in the last three months has been so complete that white voters think Black Lives Matter liberalism and Joe Biden are better by comparison.

Good job, Donny.

Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The white supremacist domestic terrorists arrested last week in Las Vegas were absolutely on board to kill as many people of color as possible and fomenting a race war in the wake of George Floyd's death, and they had a very good plan for getting it done.

FBI agents found rags, gasoline, aerosol cans and weapons along with booby traps, fireworks and handwritten notes of military and survival tactics while serving search warrants on three Nevada men who authorities say sought to spark violence during recent Las Vegas protests, according to police reports obtained Monday.

U.S. prosecutors say Stephen T. Parshall, 35, Andrew T. Lynam Jr., 23, and William L. Loomis, 40, have ties to a loose movement of right-wing extremists advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government. Authorities said the men hoped to carry out a plan to create civic unrest by capitalizing on protests over businesses closed due to the coronavirus and later, the death of George Floyd, a black man who died in Minneapolis after a white officer pressed his knee into his neck for several minutes.

Parshall, Lynam and Loomis, all white men with U.S. military experience, each currently face two federal charges: conspiracy to damage and destroy by fire and explosive, and possession of unregistered firearms. They also face charges of felony conspiracy, terrorism and explosives possession in state court.

They were arrested May 30 as they prepared to attend a protest of Floyd's death after filling gas cans at a parking lot and making Molotov cocktails in glass bottles, prosecutors said in charging documents.
In the bed of Parshall's truck, the FBI found strips of red rags and gasoline, according to a police arrest report. Inside the truck were aerosol cans and weapons.

Inside Loomis' home, the FBI found handwritten notes of military tactics, possible scouting routes and locations outside the city limits. They also found “kill boxes, survival tactics, fireworks as distractions," an explosive made of material used primarily for target practice and other traps, according to a police report.

The FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Nevada did not respond to messages seeking more information about the “kill boxes.”

Attorney Robert Draskovich, representing Parshall, said his client intends to plead not guilty and will fight the charges.

“This case is based primarily on a confidential informant, which is inherently unreliable,” Draskovich said Monday. “I’m concerned about what this person has to gain by telling this story.”

Lawyers for Loomis and Lynam did not immediately respond Monday to messages seeking comment.

The complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas last week said the men self-identified as part of the anti-government “boogaloo” movement, a loose, internet-rooted network of gun enthusiasts who often express support for overthrowing the U.S. government. Its name, a reference to a 1984 movie sequel called “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo,” is a code word for a second civil war.

The men are being held on $1 million bond each in the Clark County jail. They're due to make court appearances next week.

I guarantee you a whole lot more of these jackasses are out there, waiting to strike.  The FBI keeps finding these guys, but eventually that luck will run out.

StupidiNews!

• After 30 years, popular television show "Cops" has been canceled after advertisers and critics blasted the show's portrayal of police violence as entertainment in the era of Black Lives Matter.
• A Florida judge has dismissed the Palm Beach Post's lawsuit to unseal prosecutorial misconduct evidence in the case of the late accused child molester Jeffrey Epstein.
• Family members of black victims of police killings gathered for the funeral of George Floyd in Houston on Tuesday, Floyd's death at the hands of four Minneapolis police sparked global protests.
• Republican senators claim that May's job numbers eliminate the need for any further stimulus legislation as Democrats point out the Labor Department admits its calculations were flawed.
• Automaker Honda has halted production at several plants around the globe as the company's computer systems were hit with a ransomware attack.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Yes, Trump nearly fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper last week for not putting troops in America's streets but he was talked out of it.

President Trump reportedly wanted to dismiss Defense Secretary Mark Esper last week over conflicting views on the use of active-duty troops to quell nationwide protests but was talked out of it by advisers and lawmakers.

Officials told The Wall Street Journal that Trump — angry with Esper for not backing his threats to use active-duty forces to quash unrest in Washington, D.C., Minneapolis and other cities — was focused on sacking the Pentagon chief last Wednesday.

But when Trump asked several advisers for their opinions on the matter, he was reportedly counseled to shelve such a plan.

Esper at the same time had started to prepare a letter of resignation, as he was aware of Trump’s anger, but he stopped after aides and other advisers recommended against it, some of the officials told the Journal.

Earlier that day, Esper had said he did not support invoking the Insurrection Act — an 1807 law that allows the president to use the military for domestic law enforcement — over protests following the police killing of George Floyd, unarmed black man, in Minneapolis on May 25. He said such a move should be done only as a “last resort” and that the protests did not warrant such a response.

The stance was a break in messaging from Trump, who had urged governors to deploy National Guard troops to “dominate the streets” and stop any unrest, threatening to dispatch U.S. military forces to states and cities that did not meet his demands.

The Pentagon declined to comment, and the White House failed to respond to requests for comment.

So yes, Trump has no problem with open tyranny.  And eventually, people will stop talking him out of it.

The Country Goes Viral, Con't

Memorial Day reopenings and the end of social distancing over the last two weeks has led to, surprise, a major spike in new COVID-19 cases in over a dozen states including here in Kentucky.

As rates of coronavirus infections ease in places such as New York and Illinois and onetime hot spots move into new phases of reopening, parts of the country that had previously avoided being hit hard by the outbreak are now tallying record-high new infections.

Since the start of June, 14 states and Puerto Rico have recorded their highest-ever seven-day average of new coronavirus cases since the pandemic began, according to data tracked by The Washington Post: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Kentucky, New Mexico, North Carolina, Mississippi, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah.

If the pandemic’s first wave burned through dense metro hubs such as New York City, Chicago and Detroit, the highest percentages of new cases are coming from places with much smaller populations: Lincoln County, Ore., an area of less than 50,000, has averaged 20 new daily cases; the Bear River Health District in northern Utah has averaged 78 new cases a day in the past week, most of them tied to an outbreak at a meat processing plant in the small town of Hyrum.

The increase of coronavirus cases in counties with fewer than 60,000 people is part of the trend of new infections surging across the rural United States. Health experts worry those areas, already short of resources before the pandemic, will struggle to track new cases with the infrastructure that remains.

Adding to the disparity in health-care support, residents in states such as Mississippi, Florida and South Carolina are living under only minor-to-moderate restrictions — even as their average daily infection rate is rising.

The past two weeks of protests against police brutality will be yet another variable in how the virus spreads in the country. Protesters flooded the streets of major cities but gathered in small towns across the country, too. Though the widespread protests are a boon for the movement, health officials have warned about the impact so many people closely packed with one another could have on transmission rates.

As of Monday, at least 109,000 people in the United States have died of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, with more than 1.95 million cases of the virus reported.

In other words, we're almost guaranteed a massive rise in COVID-19 cases by the end of the month, and in rural areas without the infrastructure to contain the spread or to handle a lot of ICU patients at once, especially in states like Texas.

Texas reported a record number of coronavirus hospitalizations Monday — weeks after Gov. Greg Abbott took the lead among governors in easing social distancing measures to help bring jobs back.

There are currently 1,935 Covid-19 patients in hospitals across the state, topping the previous hospitalization record of 1,888 patients on May 5, according to new data from the Texas Department of State Health Services.

Texas was among the first states to relax its statewide stay-at-home order, allowing it to expire April 30 and some businesses to resume operations May 1.

The coronavirus has infected more than 75,400 people in Texas, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The positivity rate for Covid-19 tests in Texas reached a low of 4.27% toward the end of May but has since jumped to 7.55%, according to the state’s health department.

While hospitalizations are increasing, there are more than 1,600 open intensive-care beds and more than 5,800 ventilators available for critically ill patients.

Some infectious disease experts say hospitalization numbers could be a better way to track a state’s reopening performance since it’s more difficult to skew than testing data, which fluctuates depending on how many tests are being run.

Houston, Dallas/Fort Worth, and San Antonio represent most of that capacity.  Rural Texas, not so much.

110,000 dead and rising daily, COVID-19 hasn't gone away just because the news has focused on police brutality and Black Lives Matter protests worldwide.

Be careful out there, folks.

It's Unsound And They're Police

Whoop Whoop! That's the sound of the beast!

Two law enforcement agencies acknowledged Monday that officers patrolling Minneapolis during the height of recent protests knifed the tires of numerous vehicles parked and unoccupied in at least two locations in the midst of the unrest.

Video and photo images posted on the news outlet Mother Jones show officers in military-style uniforms puncturing tires in the Kmart parking lot at Lake Street and Nicollet Avenue on May 30.

Images from S. Washington Avenue at Interstate 35W also showed officers with knives deflating the tires of two unoccupied cars with repeated jabs on May 31. Department of Public Safety spokesman Bruce Gordon confirmed that tires were cut in "a few locations."

"State Patrol troopers strategically deflated tires … in order to stop behaviors such as vehicles driving dangerously and at high speeds in and around protesters and law enforcement," Gordon said.

Gordon said the patrol also targeted vehicles "that contained items used to cause harm during violent protests" such as rocks, concrete and sticks.

"While not a typical tactic, vehicles were being used as dangerous weapons and inhibited our ability to clear areas and keep areas safe where violent protests were occurring," he said. As in all operations of this size, there will be a review about how these decisions were made."

Deputies from Anoka County followed state orders and joined the patrol and also cut the tires on vehicles on Washington Avenue, said Anoka County Sheriff's Lt. Andy Knotz.

Knotz said the deputies got their directions from the state-led Multiagency Command Center [MACC], which was coordinating law enforcement during the protests connected to the death on May 25 of George Floyd.

Towing the vehicles was not an option, Knotz said, because "you could not get any tow trucks in there" because of the mass of people in the area.

Val Ebertz, who was at the protests, witnessed police slashing tires in the Kmart parking lot at Lake Street and Nicollet Avenue in the midst of protests on May 30.

She added these were the same officers who "were tear-gassing and shooting us with rubber bullets to try to push us farther back into the Kmart parking lot."

To recap, cops knifed tires of protesters, got caught on video, turns out they were told to do it.

Who was going to hold them responsible for that, the goddamn cops?  It's all games to them, and we're all the bad guys to abuse freely.

Long before former officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck, the Third Precinct in south Minneapolis had a reputation for being home to police officers who played by their own rules.

One officer kicked a handcuffed suspect in the face, leaving his jaw in pieces. Officers beat and pistol-whipped a suspect in a parking lot on suspicion of low-level drug charges. Others harassed residents of a south Minneapolis housing project as they headed to work, and allowed prostitution suspects to touch their genitals for several minutes before arresting them in vice stings.
These and more substantiated incidents, detailed in court records and police reports, help explain a saying often used by fellow cops to describe the style of policing practiced in the Third: There’s the way that the Minneapolis Police Department does things, and then there’s the way they do it “in Threes.”

Between 2007 and 2017, the city paid out $2.1 million to settle misconduct lawsuits involving Third Precinct officers. Judges have thrown out cases for “outrageous” conduct of the officers, and prosecutors have been forced to drop charges for searches found to be illegal, according to court records.

The brand of aggressive policing on display in the Floyd video has long been standard practice for some Third Precinct officers when dealing with suspects of nonviolent, low-level crimes, often involving people of color, said Abigail Cerra, a commissioner for Minneapolis’ Police Conduct Oversight Commission.

“My clients were constantly getting anal searches,” said Cerra, who also has been a public defender. “Not at the hospital. At the Third Precinct.”

Professional bullies with badges, and the bad cops get enabled by the "good cops". who cover for them.

Yes, maybe their funding needs to be cut and the bad cops need to go.

Last Call For Trump Goes Viral, Con't

Remember folks, the shutdowns over COVID-19 were not only necessary, but they saved countless lives and prevented literally tens of millions of infections.

Shutdown orders prevented about 60 million novel coronavirus infections in the United States and 285 million in China, according to a research study published Monday that examined how stay-at-home orders and other restrictions limited the spread of the contagion.

A separate study from epidemiologists at Imperial College London estimated the shutdowns saved about 3.1 million lives in 11 European countries, including 500,000 in the United Kingdom, and dropped infection rates by an average of 82 percent, sufficient to drive the contagion well below epidemic levels.

The two reports, published simultaneously Monday in the journal Nature, used completely different methods to reach similar conclusions. They suggest that the aggressive and unprecedented shutdowns, which caused massive economic disruptions and job losses, were effective at halting the exponential spread of the novel coronavirus.

“Without these policies employed, we would have lived through a very different April and May,” said Solomon Hsiang, director of the Global Policy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley, and the leader of the research team that surveyed how six countries — China, the United States, France, Italy, Iran and South Korea — responded to the pandemic.

He called the global response to covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, “an extraordinary moment in human history when the world had to come together,” and said the shutdowns and other mitigation measures resulted in “saving more lives in a shorter period of time than ever before.”

The two reports on the effectiveness of the shutdowns come with a clear warning that the pandemic, even if in retreat in some of the places hardest hit, is far from over. The overwhelming majority of people remain susceptible to the virus. Only about 3 percent to 4 percent of people in the countries being studied have been infected to date, said Samir Bhatt, senior author of the Imperial College London study. 

“This is just the beginning of the epidemic: we’re very far from herd immunity,” Bhatt said Monday in an email. “The risk of a second wave happening if all interventions and precautions are abandoned is very real.” 

COVID-19 remains a marathon effort, not a sprint, but 60 million COVID-19 cases, nearly a fifth of the US population, would have resulted in millions of deaths and the collapse of our health care system as a whole.

Thankfully, America's governors (mostly) did the right thing and saves lives.  Lord knows Trump would have let us all die if it were up to him.

Stay safe out there.

 

The Heir To The Golden Toilet

The Wall Street Journal's Siobhan Hughes seems really keen on Arkansas GOP Sen. Tom Cotton's "fascism without Trump's bungling criminality getting in the way" and believes he might be the man to carry the burning banner of white supremacist America in the years ahead.

Sen. Tom Cotton has been a longtime adviser to President Trump, both echoing the chief executive’s bare-knuckled rhetoric on subjects like immigration and China and at times pushing him to take even more aggressive positions.

Last week, the Arkansas Republican and the president were again making different versions of the same argument amid protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd while in police custody. While Mr. Trump weighed whether to invoke an 1807 law to send active-duty military in response to largely peaceful demonstrations that included bursts of looting and other violence, Mr. Cotton was more definitive, explicitly calling in a New York Times op-ed for an “overwhelming show of force” by federal troops and local law enforcement. That column led to the resignation Sunday of the news organization’s editorial page editor James Bennet.

Mr. Cotton’s willingness to court controversy by backing—or exceeding—the president’s agenda puts him in the spotlight as Republicans jockey to influence Mr. Trump, and as a potential carrier of the president’s banner when he eventually leaves the White House.

“Tom Cotton is indeed setting himself up to be the heir to Trumpism,” said Geoffrey Kabaservice, director of political studies at the Washington-based think tank Niskanen Center, who studies Republican politics. “In some ways, I think his case to lead the Trump wing of the party after this era has only been strengthened by this past week.”

Back in Arkansas, Mr. Cotton’s supporters believe he is destined for bigger things. In 2015, Republican Bart Hester, a state legislator, helped put into state law a measure to enable Mr. Cotton, 43, to run for the presidency while simultaneously serving in the Senate.

“He always has a very valid basis for what he believes and why he believes it, and I think he has the best for all Americans in mind at all the time,” Mr. Hester said.

Although the senator and president have foreign-policy differences—Mr. Cotton is more hawkish and in favor of keeping troops in northern Syria, while Mr. Trump ordered a withdrawal, for example—they are frequently on the same page. Mr. Cotton’s op-ed calling for the president to invoke the Insurrection Act was just the latest example of the two men running on parallel tracks.

Oh good, all the straight cartoon fascism without the cuddly senior events and wacky temper tantrums. As I keep saying, Trump is the worst president since the Civil War mainly because there are other, worse Republicans who haven't become president yet, and Tom Cotton is definitely on the top of that particular list.

Oh, and Cotton is up for reelection this November.  The lone Democratic candidate in the primary dropped out six months ago, so Cotton is basically running unopposed.

Keep an eye on this guy.

He's dangerous as all hell. A competent version of Trump would absolutely be the end of America.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

The country to melting down along with Trump, and Trump is considering...rebranding!

Amid nationwide protests and a historic economic contraction, President Trump is running for reelection to “Keep America Great” — at least according to the hats he sells on his campaign website, the signs waved by his supporters and the television ads he’s airing in key states.

But in recent weeks he has retreated to contradictory slogans with a less triumphant ring, repeatedly reviving his 2016 motto “Make America Great Again!” and trying out new catchphrases like “Transition to Greatness!” and “The Best Is Yet to Come,” a Frank Sinatra lyric etched on the crooner’s tombstone.

Phrases such as “Promises Made, Promise Kept,” once a cornerstone of the reelection campaign, have been subsumed by current events. Economic messaging still used by the campaign online, including boasts about low unemployment, is now woefully out of date.

The search for a slogan, which Trump confidants say he is likely to resolve in the coming weeks, is a symptom of the president’s larger problem: The booming economy that he assumed would be his chief argument for reelection has foundered for the moment, a casualty of a coronavirus crisis he initially downplayed and more recently has sought to move beyond.

On issues compelling to most Americans — health, economy and national unrest about police violence — Trump has offered few new proposals, relying on pointed warnings that Democrats and their liberal ideas would make the country worse. On Friday, asked whether he had a plan to address systemic racism that has sent millions of Americans to the streets — some in view of the White House — he replied: “That’s what my plan is: We’re going to have the strongest economy in the world.”

The president and his top political advisers met Thursday afternoon to discuss how Trump should make his case and how he could improve his standing among voters, a person familiar with the meeting said. Participants included senior White House adviser Jared Kushner, Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, campaign manager Brad Parscale, his recently elevated deputy Bill Stepien and campaign pollsters. Trump was also presented with “tough” swing state polls from his political team in the Oval Office.

How about "Hitler, Only Better!"

I'm sure that will resonate with the base.

Trump even wants to address the nation, but because he can't help but make things about himself, I'm hoping he'll be talked out of it.

After a weekend of massive peaceful protests around the country, White House officials are currently deliberating a plan for President Donald Trump to address the nation this week on issues related to race and national unity, as Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson hinted in an interview with CNN on Sunday and a senior administration official said was under serious consideration. 

Many allies of the President spent the last week distraught as they watched Trump fumble his response to the police killing of George Floyd, only to follow his perceived silence on the resulting racial tensions with a federal law enforcement crackdown on the protesters near his fortified doorstep. 

Aides and allies were not comforted by the backlash over his decision to have federal officers aggressively clear Lafayette Park in front of the White House to facilitate a widely-panned attempt at a photo-op in front of St. John's Church. And the rest of the week continued on a downward spiral, as protests across the country grew and Trump faced an onslaught of well-known conservatives, generals and former Trump administration officials who excoriated his response and called for new leadership come November. 

Carson suggested during an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union" that the President this week would further address Floyd's killing and the tensions it exposed. 

"I believe you're going to be hearing from the President this week on this topic in some detail. And I would ask you maybe to reserve judgment until after that time," Carson said.

If you need time still to judge Trump, you're part of the damn problem.

The Biden folks on the other hand should be using "Trump is Out of Control".

80% of the country now think things are completely out of control in America.

Eight out of 10 voters believe that things are out of control in the United States, with majorities still concerned about the spread of the coronavirus, pessimistic about the economy's returning to normal before next year and down on President Donald Trump's ability to unite the nation.

Those are the major findings of a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that was conducted May 28 to June 2, during the aftermath of George Floyd's death in Minneapolis, as the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus surpassed 100,000 and after millions of people have lost their jobs.

But the survey was conducted before Friday's surprising jobs report, which found the unemployment rate declining to 13.3 percent and the economy adding 2.5 million jobs in May.

"Out of control — that's America in 2020," said Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates, who helped conduct the survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff and his GOP colleagues at Public Opinion Strategies.

Rebrand all you want, Don. Things are going very badly for you.

As protesters gather daily near the White House and the coronavirus pandemic rages on, the American public is souring on President Donald Trump. A new CNN Poll conducted by SSRS finds Trump's approval rating down 7 points in the last month as the President falls further behind presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, whose support now stands at its highest level in CNN polling. 

The survey also finds a growing majority of Americans feel racism is a big problem in the country today and that the criminal justice system in America favors whites over blacks. More than 8 in 10 also say that the peaceful protests that have spread throughout the nation following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers are justified. Americans now consider race relations as important a campaign issue as the economy and health care, according to the survey. 

Overall 38% approve of the way Trump is handling the presidency, while 57% disapprove. That's his worst approval rating since January 2019, and roughly on par with approval ratings for Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush at this point in their reelection years. Both went on to lose the presidency after one term. 

In the race for the White House, among registered voters, Trump stands 14 points behind Biden, who officially secured enough delegates to win the Democratic nomination in CNN's delegate estimate on Saturday. The 41% who say they back the President is the lowest in CNN's tracking on this question back to April 2019, and Biden's 55% support is his highest mark yet.

Joe Biden's going to need to be ahead by double digits to win and top Trump's cheating, Russian interference, and voter suppression efforts.  This election can't be close, because Trump will never leave the White House voluntarily. He has to be forced out, and that means he has to lose so badly that Republicans finally abandon him.

But having said all that...Biden is well on his way.

StupidiNews: Birthday Bash Edition

It's my birthday today, and while I don't ask much from ZVTS readers at all and that some of you have been very generous over the years, if you could click on the PayPal donation button today it would be really appreciated.

Times are tough all around, I know, believe me.

Even a couple bucks would be useful right now if you can.

If you can't, that's perfectly okay. Thanks for being a reader after all these years.  It's been a wild ride since 2008, hasn't it?

Really wild.

Thanks for being here, guys. I don't say that nearly enough.

Last Call For Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Steve M. asks if the debate over demilitarizing the police is going to cost Biden his lead among suburban women.

Biden is lucky, because while Trump and his allies have the opportunity to portray themselves as the sensible center, and to portray the demonstrators as the extremists, they're misreading the public mood. Trump's team has sprinkled his speeches with pro forma defenses of peaceful protest and expressions of dismay about injustice, and if he could persuade us that that's what he really believes, he might be able to position himself as the reasonable man in the middle. Instead, it's clear that what really gets Trump's juices flowing is the idea of violently crushing protests. Shouts of "LAW AND ORDER!" worked in 1968, but this isn't 1968.

First, Trump is the incumbent -- if there's unrest, it's happening on his watch. In 1968, when Richard Nixon ran as a law-and-order candidate, Lyndon Johnson was president. (Nixon also had George Wallace on his right, which made him appear more moderate. Trump has no one on his right.)

Beyond that, political unrest in 2020 isn't accompanied by an uptick in crime; the two were linked in many people's minds in 1968. I also suspect that more Americans felt ties to the cities where protests and property destruction were taking place. Early in the George Floyd protests, I saw many right-wingers decrying the damage in Manhattan -- "They're looting Macy's!" In 1968, many people from suburban New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut regularly shopped at Macy's. Now they barely shop at local malls. (No one's looting Amazon.)

The downside:

But the slogan will make life harder for Biden. He'll lose the support of young progressives when, inevitably, he makes a statement like Frey's, saying that he supports serious reform but not "defunding" or "dismantling" police departments -- even though some who use that language are describing reforms Biden might be willing to endorse (and many Americans might approve of), as in Minneapolis:

Council Member Jeremiah Ellison, one of the most vocal critics of the city’s response to the protests and riots that followed Floyd’s death, tweeted Thursday: “We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department.”

[City Council president Lisa] Bender, a few hours later, issued her own tweet repeating that message and adding that they will “replace it with a transformative new model of public safety.” ...

Speaking only for herself and not for the council as whole, Bender said [in an interview that] she would support shifting from a traditional police department to a wider public safety department oriented toward violence prevention and community-based services.

In that kind of scenario, it’s possible that social workers or medics could respond to some calls now being handled by police. 

But the slogan will sound dangerous to a portion of the electorate, the way "Abolish ICE" sounded dangerous even to many people who oppose the Trump administration's immigration policies. On the other hand, "Abolish ICE" didn't prevent Democrats from scoring big victories in the 2018 midterms, so let's hope this slogan isn't too much of a drag on Biden in November.

I don't think it'll hurt Biden at all for the reasons Steve laid out at the top.  Trump will find a way to blast his own foot off with a mortar by, I don't know, demanding military troops patrol the streets.

In a heated and contentious debate in the Oval Office last Monday morning, President Trump demanded the military put 10,000 active duty troops into the streets immediately, a senior administration official told CBS News. Attorney General William Barr, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley objected to the demand, the official said.

In an attempt to satisfy Mr. Trump's demand, Esper and Milley used a call with the nation's governors later that morning to implore them to call up the National Guard in their own states, the official said. If these governors didn't "call up the Guard, we'd have (active duty) troops all over the country," this official said.

That same day, the Pentagon started bringing in 1,600 active-duty troops to bases just outside the District of Columbia. Late that afternoon, Esper and Milley were on their way to the FBI's Washington Field Office, where the command center for the military and law enforcement response to the protests was located, the official said. En route, they received a call to come to the White House to give the President an update.

"Demilitarize the police" is something that should have taken place years ago, and under Obama it did.  It was immediately reversed by Trump. But Trump, as Steve said, is going to hang "get rid of the cops and let the thugs and the criminals get your women" on Biden no matter what.

Biden shouldn't be afraid.

Sunday Long Read: The Cool Revolution

More than ever, Esquire Magazine's 1968 interview with James Baldwin on race relations is prescient, relevant, and distressingly frustrating in what little has changed in the last fifty years.

Can we still cool it? 

That depends on a great many factors. It's a very serious question in my mind whether or not the people of this country, the bulk of population of this country, have enough sense of what is really happening to their black co-citizens to understand why they're in the streets. I know of this moment they maybe don't know it, and this is proved by the reaction to the civil disorders. It came as no revelation to me or to any other black cat that white racism is at the bottom of the civil disorders. It came as a great shock apparently to a great many other people, including the President of the United States. And now you ask me if we can cool it. I think the President goofed by not telling the nation what the civil-disorders report was all about. And I accuse him and the entire administration, in fact, of being largely responsible for this tremendous waste and damage. It was up to him and the Vice-President to interpret that report and tell the American people what it meant and what the American people should now begin to think of it. Now!It is already, very very late even to begin to think of it. What causes the eruptions, the riots, the revolts- whatever you want to call them- is the despair of being in a static position, absolutely static, of watching your father, your brother, your uncle, or your cousin- no matter how old the black cat is or how young- who has no future. And when the summer comes, both fathers and sons are in the streets- they can't stay in the houses. I was born in those houses and I know. And it's not their fault. 

From a very short-range approach, what should the federal government do, right now, to cool it off? 

What do you mean by the federal government? The federal government has come to be, in the eyes of all Negroes anyway, a myth. When you say the federal government, you're referring to Washington, and that means you're referring to a great many people. You're referring to Senator Eastland and many people in Washington who out of apathy, ignorance or fear have no intention of making a move at all. You're talking about the people who have the power, who intend to keep the power. And all they can think of are things like swimming pools, you know, in the summertime, and sort of made up jobs to simply protect peace and the public property. But they show no sign whatsoever of understanding what the root of the problem really is, what the dangers really are. They have made no attempt, whatever, any of them, as far as I know, really to explain to the American people that the black cat in the streets wants to protect his house, his wife and children. And if he is going to be able to do this he has to be given his autonomy, his own schools, a revision of the police force in a very radical way. It means, in short, that if the American Negro, the American black man, is going to become a free person in this country, the people of this country have to give up something. If they don't give it up, it will be taken from them. 

You say that existing jobs are just make-work jobs. What kind of job program should be adopted? 

It's very difficult to answer that question since the American Republic has created a surplus population. You know it's created not only people who are unemployable but who no longer wish to be employed in this system. A job program involves, first of all, I would think, a real attack on all American industries and on all American labor unions. For example, you're sitting in Hollywood. And there are not any Negroes, as far as I know, in any of the Hollywood craft unions: there is no Negro grip, no Negro crew member, no Negro works in Hollywood on that level or in any higher level either. There are some famous Negroes who work out here for a structure which keeps Negroes out of a union. Now it's not an Act of God that there aren't any Negroes in the unions. It's not something that is handed down from some mountain; it's a deliberate act on the part of the American people. They don't want the unions broken, because they are afraid of the Negro as a source of competition in the economic market. Of course what they've made him is something much worse than that. You can't talk about job programs unless you're willing to talk about what is really holding the structure together. Eastman Kodak, General Motors, General Electric- all the people who really have the power in this country. It's up to them to open up their factories, their unions, to let us begin to work.

They would have to begin, say, on-the-job training programs for those... 

Yes, and by the way, I know a whole lot of Negroes on the streets, baby, that are much brighter that a lot of cats dictating the policies of Pan American. You know what this country really means when it says on-the-job training programs is not what they are teaching Negroes skills, though there's that, too; what they're afraid of is that when the Negro comes into the factory, into the union, when he comes, in fact, into the American institution, he will change these institutions because no Negro in this country really lives by American middle-class standards. That's why they pick up half-dozen Negroes here and there, and polish them up, polish them off, and put them in some ass-hole college someplace, and expect those cats to be able to go back to the streets and cool the other cats. They can't. The price in this country to survive at all still is to become a white man. More and more people are refusing to become a white man. That's the bottom of what they mean by on-the-job training. They mean they want to fit you in. And furthermore, let's tell it like it is. The American white man does not really want to have autonomous Negro male anywhere near him. 

In on-the-job training programs, the white American structure wants a worker who is trained, who shows up regularly at eight-thirty in the morning and works till five in the afternoon. 

Yeah, well I know an awful lot of cats that did that for a long, long time. We haven't got to be trained to do that. We don't even have to be given an incentive to do that. 

Would you say, then, that many black people have been able to go nowhere, so they've lost any feeling that it's worth working regularly? 

That is part of what we're talking about. Though it goes deeper than that, I think. It's not only that. What is happening in this country among the young, and not only the black young, is an overwhelming suspicion that it's not worth it. You know if you watched your father's life like I watched my father's life, as a kid much younger than I watches his father's life; his father does work from eight to five every day and ends up with nothing. He can't protect anything. He has nothing. As he goes to the grave, having worked his fingers to the bone for years and years and years, he still has nothing and the kid doesn't either. But what's worse than that is that one has begun to conclude from the fact that maybe in this Republic- judging now on the evidence of its own performance- maybe there isn't anything. It's easy to see on the other hand what happens to the white people who make it. And that's not a very attractive spectacle either. I mean I'm questioning the values on which this country thinks of itself as being based. 

What you are calling for, then, is a radical change in thinking by government and industry. 

Yes. 

And given the inertia plus... 

Fear. 

…and fear and whatever else there may be, any such changes seem… 

…seem improbable. 

Certainly they will come slow. A union will not throw open its doors and bring on several hundred people from the black community right away. Now my question is… 

You've answered your question.

There are some differences between 1968 and now, but for the life of me the same basic problem that existed then is why we're in the streets again now, finally.

Zee Germans Are Nervous

Trump continues to do everything possible to make Vladimir Putin ecstatic, and it's coming at the cost of every other nation on earth, including the US. The latest obvious pro-Russian move: Trump is withdrawing a third of our troops in Germany to punish Chancellor Merkel and the EU.

President Donald Trump’s directive to pull 9,500 troops from Germany hits home hard for friends of America like Edgar Knobloch, whose Bavarian town has been home to U.S. service members for seven decades.

Like Chancellor Angela Merkel, the mayor of Grafenwoehr was caught off guard. It’s the latest sign of the U.S.’s deterioration of ties with a loyal ally, one that not only hosts most of its troops in Europe but also has seen them fuel the local economy.

This medieval town, with a tiny population dwarfed by the size of the American military presence, shows just what a shadow the U.S. has cast over Europe after World War II and what its retreat symbolizes in the eyes of locals and international observers. Another troop cut would signal a further break with a legacy of two generations.

Located near the former East German border, Grafenwoehr is a place where overseas U.S. military infrastructure and community bonds survived the end of the Cold War. Locals celebrate Thanksgiving and enjoy spare ribs. Every year, they turn out by the thousands for the German-American Folk Festival to share beer, bratwurst and country music with the roughly 11,000 U.S. troops based at NATO’s biggest training area in Europe.

“They’re completely integrated here,” Knobloch, 55, said in an interview. “Restaurants are bilingual. There are mixed marriages, mixed families. You often hear from the older members of the community: ‘The Americans liberated us.’”

There hasn’t been much nostalgia between Trump and Merkel, who have clashed repeatedly over trade and Germany’s slow timetable for meeting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s defense spending target. Last month, Merkel snubbed Trump on his plan to hold an in-person Group of Seven summit in June which he’d like Russian President Vladimir Putin to attend.

While Trump has taken aim at Germany’s economic might, Merkel — the longest-serving G-7 leader after 15 years in power — has stared him down across a broad front, from defending the rules-based global economy to policy disputes such as defense spending. A physicist by training, Merkel also contrasted with Trump in her science-based approach to reopening Germany from its coronavirus lockdown.

Lawmakers and government officials in Berlin criticized Trump’s troop decision, which would cut U.S. forces in Germany by slightly more than a quarter, as a snub.

“These plans demonstrate once again that the Trump administration neglects a central element of leadership: the involvement of alliance partners in the decision-making process,” Johann Wadephul, deputy head of Merkel’s parliamentary caucus, said in an emailed statement.

Trump’s decision and the way it was communicated hint at how much Germany’s relations have cooled with a U.S. president who has publicly questioned NATO’s value. By mid-day Saturday, the German government had no official word from Washington on the drawdown plan.

There's no doubt that the withdrawal is 100% related to Merkel rejecting Trump's ask to give Putin what he wants more than anything: back into the G-7 as the eighth member with his dictatorship given all the legitimacy in the world. Merkel said no, and Putin had juuuuuust the perfect suggestion to Donald if she turned him down, which of course Putin knew she would.  Let's not forget that when Donny was hiding in his bunker earlier this week, the person he called for advice was Vlad himself.

That's where the G-8 idea came from, and this is where the withdrawal idea came from, an idea to remind Germany that Russia is a lousy neighbor with the largest army in Europe still.

Besides, Vlad definitely wants a disgruntled German youth to question why the US is there, and maybe ask why Russia shouldn't be closer.

German neo-Nazis have been getting military-style training at camps run by a far-right Russian terrorist organization, German media reported Friday, in the latest sign of deepening international cooperation between white supremacist networks.

Citing intelligence sources, German news magazine Focus reported that the extremists had attended a camp held near Saint Petersburg, where they were shown how to use weapons and explosives, and received close combat training.

The training camp, known as Partizan, is run by the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM), an ultranationalist, quasi-paramilitary organization which claims to be fighting for the “predominance of the white race.”

The U.S. government added RIM to its list of specially designated global terrorist groups in April — the first time it had taken such action against a white supremacist organization — saying it had “provided paramilitary-style training to white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Europe.”

The Russian government considers RIM to be extremist, but has not banned the group.

The German extremists who attended the camp belonged to the youth wings of two fringe German political parties widely considered to be neo-Nazi movements: the National Democratic Party and The Third Path. The Focus report did not provide further details of their attendance at the camp, but said that extremists from Sweden and Finland had previously attended the camps and gone on to fight in pro-separatist militias in eastern Ukraine.

Experts told VICE News that the German attendance at the camp highlighted the growing cooperation between white supremacist groups internationally, as they sought to build relationships with allies in other countries.

“It signals that RIM is a critical node in the transnational white supremacy extremist movement,” said Mollie Saltskog, intelligence analyst at The Soufan Group. “RIM is going beyond networking and ideology, and is actually providing paramilitary training to individuals who adhere to this violent ideology."

Vlad is playing a very long game here and he figures he'll be around for a long, long time in order to see it through. And at the end of that game?

Well, let's just say a reconstituted Soviet Union is the least of our worries.

Hickenlooper's Huge Hiccup

Colorado Democratic candidate and former governor John Hickenlooper has been nailed on ethics violations while in office as the state's chief executive in 2018, and that's not good news on the "retke the Senate" front for Team Blue.

Former Gov. John Hickenlooper violated state ethics laws when he allowed large corporations to cover the cost of a private jet trip to Connecticut, a Maserati limousine ride, and several ritzy dinners in 2018, the Colorado Independent Ethics Commission ruled Friday.

The commission considered six allegations against Hickenlooper. The Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate was found to have not violated Amendment 41, the state’s ban on gifts to public officials, in four instances.

Hickenlooper testified for several hours Friday morning after the commission found him to be in contempt Thursday for refusing to comply with a subpoena. His attorney had argued that the subpoena was a violation of his due process rights, in part because the video conferencing program is glitchy, but Friday’s testimony occurred without technical difficulty.

The commission agreed unanimously that that Hickenlooper violated the gift ban in June 2018 when he attended secretive Bilderberg meetings in Italy. He paid a flat fee of $1,500 that he said he believed covered the cost of a hotel stay, limousine transportation, meals and more. The event’s sponsor, Fiat-Chrysler, has said the $1,500 fee did not include the limousine rides.

“At that time, I felt I was paying the full cost and complying in every way with Amendment 41,” Hickenlooper testified before the vote Friday.

The commission voted 4-1 to find Hickenlooper violated Amendment 41 when he accepted a flight and exclusive high-end dinners from MDC Holdings in March 2018.

“I’m concerned that if we allow this kind of special, privately financed treatment for elected officials, it just accentuates the cynicism that led to Amendment 41,” Commissioner Bill Leone said before that vote.

The commission will meet June 12 to consider what penalties to place on Hickenlooper for the two ethics violations, as well as his contempt citation.

Four of the six allegations were discarded due to exceptions to the ban for gifts from friends and gifts on special occasions. The commission voted 5-0 that Hickenlooper’s acceptance of a flight from billionaire friend Ken Tuchman was not a violation. It also unanimously determined flights on his chief of staff’s private jet on two occasions were not violations. 

Now, the good news for Democrats is that the Senate primary is at the end of the month on June 30. Hickenlooper has a massive poll lead in both the general election against Cory Gardner and in the primary against Democrat Andrew Romanoff, the former State Speaker of the House. Romanoff and Hicklooper face off on Tuesday in a debate.

How the ethics violations will affect Hickenlooper's chances in the primary and in the general, I don't know. I do know however that if this were a Republican, I'd be predicting their demise in this climate.

Having said that, the Democrats still have a number of paths to 51 seats (or 50 + Biden's VP) to take back the Senate, even without Gardner's seat. It just becomes a lot easier with a win here.

We'll see how he answers this week.