monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Ta-Nehisi Coates

AMY GOODMAN: And your response to those who are focusing on the Confederate statues around the South right now and actually physically, as in Durham yesterday, taking them down?

TA-NEHISI COATES: I’m happy to see it. I think I’m happy to see them. I’m happy to see that sort of awareness.

I came up in a period where a show like Dukes of Hazzard was on TV, and people just basically accepted the Confederate flag in a sort of way, even as African Americans knew deep in their heart there were something deeply wrong with that.

It’s good to see, you know, that there’s some sort of mass movement moving in that direction.

I will say that there is some danger if it simply stops at taking down statues. I think the basic problem—and I think, honestly, this country has proved to itself over and over again—is a real lack of understanding of what the Civil War was and what its consequences were and the fact that we live with it, you know, even today.



And so, I just—you know, I support the removal of the statues, but I just want to make sure that we’re not skipping over a conversation, you know, by taking down symbols and saying, "OK, that’s nice. That’s over."

As of August 2016, there were still more than 1,500 public commemorations of the Confederacy, even excluding the battlefields and cemeteries: 718 monuments and statutes still stood, and 109 public schools, 80 counties and cities, and 10 U.S. military bases bore the names of Lee, Jefferson Davis, and other Confederate icons, according to a tally by the Southern Poverty Law Center. More than 200 of these were in Virginia alone.

And one sits in the center of Charlottesville. It was commissioned exactly 100 years ago, a gift to the city from a local philanthropist, to honor his parents with a physical incarnation of Southern ideals. But the statue was hardly the only contemporary effort to enshrine and defend these ideals. As it was being commissioned, sculpted, and erected, the second Ku Klux Klan was surging through the country. In Charlottesville, the local Klan gave $1,000 to the University of Virginia’s Centennial Endowment Fund in 1921, funds it gratefully received; there was a second Klan chapter for the students on campus.

Nor was the Gettysburg campaign an anomaly; slave raids were a persistent feature of Confederate campaigns out of Virginia. At the Battle of the Crater, Lee’s army slaughtered black prisoners; one soldier lamented that some survived because “we could not kill them as fast as they [passed] us.” This is what the uniform Lee wore represented; this is what the army he commanded did; this is the pose in which he is immortalized in the center of Charlottesville.

There is a reason why statues of Confederate generals are still powerful political symbols; a reason why a candidate came a hair’s breadth from securing the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Virginia by campaigning to preserve them. The statues in public squares, the names on street signs, the generals honored with military bases—these are the ways in which we, as a society, tell each other what we value, and build the common heritage around which we construct a nation.

The white nationalists who gathered in Charlottesville saw this perhaps more clearly than the rest of us. They understood the stakes of what they were defending. They knew that Lee was honored not for making peace per se, but for defending a society built upon white supremacy—first by taking up arms, and then when the war was lost, by laying them down in such a way as to preserve what he could.

But the swift backlash against the president’s remarks by leaders of his own party and leading figures of his own administration signaled that the United States of 2017 is not the same nation it was in 1924. Republicans and Democrats alike saw the white nationalists in the streets of Charlottesville for what they were, and rejected their vision of a nation built on white supremacism.

This is why the city council of Charlottesville voted, a century after it was commissioned, to remove the statue of Robert Edward Lee.

And ultimately, it is why the others will come down, too. The statues will be moved, the streets renamed, and the military bases will honor patriots who fought for their country and not against it. Because a century and a half after Reconstruction began, America is still working on the project of constructing a more equal society, and reinvesting in the experiment of a multi-ethnic democracy.

The white nationalists in Charlottesville hoped to halt this project. Instead, they have simply given it fiercer, redoubled urgency.

I would have preferred more statues went up, celebrating freedom and freedom fighters and abolitionists and game-changers ...

(Reuters) - Republican lawmaker Devin Nunes’ investigation into whether Obama administration officials used classified intelligence reports to discredit Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign team could backfire on the congressman - and the president, sources familiar with the reports said.

The reports contain no evidence that any aides to former Democratic President Barack Obama acted improperly, the sources said, but they do indicate some Trump associates may have violated an obscure 1799 law, the Logan Act, which prohibits unauthorized U.S. citizens from negotiating with a foreign government that has a dispute with the United States.

The spying reports also are relevant to the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into conclusions by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia worked to tilt last November’s election in Republican Trump’s favor, said the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Mueller’s office declined to comment.

Trump promised not to work with foreign entities. His company just did


A major construction company owned by the Chinese government was hired to work on the latest Trump golf club development in Dubai despite a pledge from Donald Trump that his family business would not engage in any transactions with foreign government entities while he serves as president.

Trump’s partner, DAMAC Properties, awarded a $32-million contract to the Middle East subsidiary of China State Construction Engineering Corporation to build a six-lane road as part of the residential piece of the Trump World Golf Club Dubai project called Akoya Oxygen, according to news releases released by both companies. It is scheduled to open next year.

The companies’ statements do not detail the exact timing of the contract except to note it was sometime in the first two months of 2017, just as Trump was inaugurated and questions were raised about a slew of potential conflicts of interest between his presidency and his vast real estate empire.

The Chinese company, known as CSCEC, is majority government-owned — according to Bloomberg and Moody’s, among others — an arrangement that generally encourages growth and drives out competition. It was listed as the 7th largest company in China and 37th worldwide with nearly $130 billion in revenues in 2014, according to Fortune’s Global 500 list.

The company, which has had a presence in the United States since the mid-1980s, was one of several accused by the World Bank of corruption for its role in the bidding process for a roads project in the Philippines and banned in 2009 from World Bank-financed contracts for several years

Meredith McGehee, chief of policy, programs and strategy at Issue One, which works to reduce the role of money in politics, said doing business with a foreign entity poses several potential problems for a president, including accusations that a foreign government is enriching him, gaining access to or building goodwill with him and becoming a factor in foreign policy.

The Trump Organization agreed to not engage in any new foreign deals or new transactions with a foreign entity — country, agency or official — other than “normal and customary arrangements” made before his election.

But Trump ignored calls to fully separate from his business interests when he became president. Instead, he placed his holdings in a trust designed to hold assets for his “exclusive benefit,” which he can receive at any time. He retains the authority to revoke the trust.

McGehee said Trump clearly knew foreign arrangements could be problematic because he outlined a list of restrictions, although vague ones, for his company to follow while he served as president. But more importantly, she said, the writers of the U.S. Constitution knew they could be too.

The Emoluments Clause in the U.S. Constitution says officials may not accept gifts, titles of nobility or emoluments from foreign governments with respect to their office, and that no benefit should be derived by holding office.

“This is not just a concern of good government organizations,” she said. “It was a fundamental concern of the founding fathers.”

So was there not an American company who could have been hired to work on the latest Trump golf club development in Dubai?

In May, Sam Benningfield, a general sessions judge in Tennessee, announced that he would offer shorter prison sentences to inmates — a population largely impacted by the nation's ongoing opioid crisis — who would undergo vasectomies or receive the birth control implant Nexplanon. "I'm trying to help these folks begin to think about taking responsibility for their life and giving them a leg up — you know, when they get out of jail — to perhaps rehabilitate themselves and not be burdened again with unwanted children and all that comes with that," Benningfield told CBS News. In July, the judge pulled the offer following protest from health officials and civil rights attorneys, according to The Washington Post.

Nine decades after Carrie Buck was sterilized, white nationalists, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and the so-called "alt-right" gathered in her hometown for "Unite the Right" rallies on August 11 and 12. Many of those present called for a "purer" race of human beings and chanted phrases like, "You will not replace us." The weekend ended in violence and the death of Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old woman who was killed when a driver slammed into a crowd of anti-racism counterprotesters.

(CNN) — The Justice Department said in a court filing Friday evening that it has no evidence to support President Donald Trump's assertion in March that his predecessor, Barack Obama, wiretapped the phones in Trump Tower before last year's election.

"Both FBI and NSD confirm that they have no records related to wiretaps as described by the March 4, 2017 tweets," the department's motion reads. NSD refers to the department's national security division.

The motion came in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by a group pushing for government transparency, American Oversight.

On March 4, Trump tweeted: "Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!"

"How low has President Obama gone to tap my phones during the very sacred election process," Trump also tweeted. "This is Nixon/Watergate."

Then-FBI Director James Comey told Congress in March there was no evidence to support the contention that Trump Tower had been wiretapped. "We have no information to support those tweets," he said at a House intelligence committee hearing.

American Oversight said in a statement following the Justice Department's motion: "The FBI and Department of Justice have now sided with former Director Comey and confirmed in writing that President Trump lied when he tweeted the former President Obama 'wiretapped' him at Trump Tower."

The Washington Examiner first reported the department's motion.

The Justice Department also said in the motion that it and the FBI "do not confirm or deny the existence" of any other records that are responsive to the group's request, which was broader than the alleged wiretaps of Trump Tower. The disclosure of the existence or nonexistence of other responsive records "would cause harm to national security" and is therefore exempted under the law, the motion said.

A spokesman for Obama, Kevin Lewis, said at the time Trump tweeted the wiretapping allegations that the suggestion that Obama or any White House official ordered surveillance against Trump was "simply false."

"A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice," Lewis said in a statement at the time. "As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any US citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false."

Justice Department: No evidence Trump Tower was wiretapped
Updated 5:50 PM ET, Sun September 3, 2017

(CNN) — The Justice Department said in a court filing Friday evening that it has no evidence to support President Donald Trump's assertion in March that his predecessor, Barack Obama, wiretapped the phones in Trump Tower before last year's election.

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Is not CNN the famous "fake news"?

Yes and no. It's the propaganda arm of the CIA, but also deals in mundane news.

Their key anchor has zero journalism experience, but two years with the mob.

Look into operation mockingbird. Fingers in every pie.