monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

while the police stood by with their thumbs up their ass, watching and hoping to see the protesters crushed?

The day before President Trump’s inauguration, the top executive of the Sinclair Broadcast Group, the nation’s largest owner of television stations, invited an important guest to the headquarters of the company’s Washington-area ABC affiliate.

The trip was, in the parlance of the business world, a deal closer.

The invitation from David D. Smith, the chairman of Sinclair, went to Ajit V. Pai, a commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission who was about to be named the broadcast industry’s chief regulator. Mr. Smith wanted Mr. Pai to ease up on efforts under President Barack Obama to crack down on media consolidation, which were threatening Sinclair’s ambitions to grow even bigger.

Mr. Smith did not have to wait long.

Within days of their meeting, Mr. Pai was named chairman of the F.C.C. And during his first 10 days on the job, he relaxed a restriction on television stations’ sharing of advertising revenue and other resources — the exact topic that Mr. Pai discussed with Mr. Smith and one of his business partners, according to records examined by The New York Times.

Massive fire leads Montana ranchers to weigh wariness about government against need for federal help

Homophobic, sexist, anti-white language abundant in Charlottesville vice mayor's tweets
by Anna Higgins and Tim Dodson | Nov 28 2016 | 11/28/16 2:50am

Charlottesville Vice Mayor Wes Bellamy published several tweets between 2009 and 2014 using gay slurs, comments against white people, lewd slang for female genitalia and other profanities. Many of the old tweets show a stark contrast between his more recent posts lauding women’s and LGBTQ rights. Bellamy made his Twitter account private this Saturday.

Tweets that expressed criticism of white people led Kessler to label Bellamy as an “anti-white racist.”

“I DONT LIK WHIT PEOPLE SO I HATE WHITE SNOW!!!!! FML!!!!” he tweeted in Dec. 2009.

In an October 2011 tweet, Bellamy answered a question prompted by another user, “Does it make males uncomfortable wen girls are so upfront about sex??” with “It only makes faggots uncomfortable.

In February 2016, for example, after Trump balked at denouncing David Duke and the KKK, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said, "We cannot be a party [that] nominates someone who refuses to condemn white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan."

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) explained yesterday, “These groups seem to believe they have a friend in Donald Trump in the White House.”

A picture has been emerging of the main suspect in the killing of a woman near a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday.
James Alex Fields Jnr, who is 20 years old and originally from Kentucky, was arrested and charged after a car was deliberately driven into a crowd of anti-fascism protesters.
His mother told local media that he did not openly express extreme views.
But evidence is emerging of a "very misguided and disillusioned" young man.
Mr Fields' former teacher characterised him as such to the Cinnicinati Tribune, and said his high school research made it clear he had beliefs that were "very much along the lines of the neo-Nazi movement".
"A lot of boys get interested in the Germans and Nazis because they're interested in World War II. But James took it to another level."
After enlisting in the military, Mr Fields was released in December 2015 for "failing to make training" standards.
Buzzfeed reports that a now deleted Facebook account appearing to belong to him had overt references to Nazism and a "Make America Great again"
banner.
It also had a photograph of the 20-year-old posing with a car resembling the one used in the attack and a variety of memes popular with the alt-right, including Pepe the Frog.
Buzzfeed also posted Youtube footage appearing to show Mr Fields chanting homophobic slurs at counter-protesters at the "Unite the Right" rally hours before the attack.
He was pictured at the event (second from left) carrying a shield with the logo of an openly fascist group: Vanguard America.
The group's website declares "America is under attack" and says: "If current trends continue, White Americans will be a minority in the nation they built. It's time to take a stand."
They released a statement on Twitter denying James Fields had been a member.
He has been charged with one count of second degree murder, three counts of malicious wounding and one count of failing to stop after a hit and run.
Republican senator Ted Cruz called on the Department of Justice to prosecute the suspect for domestic terrorism.
The FBI confirmed they had opened a civil rights investigation into the incident.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said on Monday that the “evil attack” in Charlottesville, Va., over the weekend meets the legal definition of an act of domestic terrorism, an early declaration in an investigation after a car plowed into a crowd of protesters.

“It does meet the definition of domestic terrorism in our statute,” Mr. Sessions said on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” referring to a fatal attack on Saturday when a vehicle drove into a crowd protesting white nationalists, killing one woman and injuring others. A 20-year-old man has been arrested and charged with second-degree murder, three counts of malicious wounding and failing to stop at the scene of a crash that resulted in a death.

“You can be sure we will charge and advance the investigation toward the most serious charges that can be brought because this is unequivocally an unacceptable evil attack,” Mr. Sessions said, adding that terrorism and civil rights investigators were working on the case.

The “domestic terrorism” language is largely symbolic — many of the law's stiffest penalties are for international terrorism that do not apply domestically. But the debate over language has raged for more than a decade, as Muslim groups in particular argue that the word terrorism is used only when the attackers are Muslim.
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anti-south bigotry

The Charlottesville driver did not "plow into the crowd" as universally reported

I already cited the NYT as correcting this error, but I figure it will be overlooked so I'm giving it a headline here to draw some attention to this fact.

https://able2know.org/topic/355218-1400#post-6483756

Turns out that video has now emerged showing an antifa thug hitting this guy's car with a baseball bat right before he accelerated. Hell, he may be guilty of nothing more than panicking when attacked.

There are a lot of reasons why I came to despise Maureen Dowd. Here's just one.

(CNN) — With one dead and 19 others injured in Charlottesville, Virginia, President Donald Trump has responded to his first domestic crisis with the cowardice of the bully he has always been. Instead of standing up to the violent white nationalists who terrorized a peaceful city, he made them morally equal to those who allied against the hate.

"We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides" said our President as civil unrest shocked the country.

By repeating the last phrase -- "on many sides" -- Trump made certain we understood he believes those who courageously opposed the racists were no better than the white nationalists who put their bigotry on display in an otherwise peaceful Virginia city.

Those who are shocked by Trump's equivocation are left to consider two explanations for his weakness. Either he favors those on the fringe who incited the violence or he is afraid of losing their support. That he is caught in this trap is made obvious by the notorious bigot and former head of the racist Ku Klux Klan David Duke who tweeted at Trump: "I would recommend you take a good look in the mirror & remember it was White Americans who put you in the presidency, not radical leftists."

Trump's slogan -- "Make America Great Again" -- taps into the feelings of victimhood experienced by whites, especially white males, who fantasize about a better day, before civil rights and women's rights eroded the advantages that came with being born white, Christian and male. With this slogan, and Trump's hateful rhetoric about immigrants, the President emboldened these individuals to mobilize into a political force.

Candidate Trump was familiar with the dangerous game of racial rage because he had dabbled with this many times before. Indeed, many who flocked toward him during the campaign season assumed he shared their prejudices because he has been trailed, throughout his adult life, by the obvious scent of bigotry.

As a young man, Trump raised the card of "reverse discrimination" when the Trump Organization was forced to follow fair housing practices. Next came his counter-factual observation on national TV that because of affirmative action policies young black men enjoyed unfair advantages in life. This kind of talk continued until Trump attached himself to the racist "Birther" movement, which was a thinly disguised effort to delegitimize the first black man to win the presidency.

For five straight years, long after other politicians abandoned the unsavory cause, Trump falsely insinuated that Barack Obama had not been born in the United States and was thus ineligible for the office he held. To this he added the unwarranted suggestion that the President's academic record was suspect.

People concerned with facts were puzzled by Trump's Birtherism. Those who hated Obama because of his race understood it well. Trump was signaling that he shared their anxiety about having a black man in the White House and considered him an unworthy, un-American pretender.

Trump then famously kicked-off his campaign with unhinged attacks on immigrants and proceeded, throughout the election season, to foment prejudice on the basis of ethnicity and religion. He complained that an American-born federal judge who ruled against him did so because he's "a Mexican."

Long a practicing bully, Trump fed the violent impulses lurking in his most rabid followers by openly calling for them to beat the protesters in their midst. He even excused as "passionate" two men who talked about Trump as they used a pipe to beat a homeless man they thought was a Hispanic immigrant.

Among Trump's first acts at President was a crude ban on travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries, which was quickly struck down by the lower federal courts. When a white man incensed by immigration shot up a bar in Kansas, killing one, Trump didn't speak up immediately. He was similarly silent when a Muslim mosque in Minnesota was recently attacked.

Given the chance to stand against hate, Trump has consistently stayed silent and appears to lacks the heart required to do the right thing. Everyone knows that the only appropriate response to bigotry and bullying is courageous opposition. The only ones who can be counted on to fail in such a circumstance are the bullies and the bigots themselves.

Trump could change if he recognizes his own failure and steps away from the hard-right crowd he holds close. When he recently bragged that he is the most "presidential" person ever to occupy the Oval Office, he allowed for one "exception" in the example of "the late, great Abraham Lincoln."

Endowed with a powerful conscience and sense of history, the Great Emancipator couldn't have been more different from Trump. But perhaps the President can take a cue from his predecessor and stand up to racism next time he sees it.