monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Televangelist Pat Robertson spoke at a special prayer service at his Christian Broadcasting Network today, ordering Hurricane Florence not to harm any of his facilities and to turn back out to sea.

At the moment, Hurricane Florence is a Category 4 storm that is expected to hit the eastern coast of the United States sometime later this week. In preparation, Robertson is declaring a “shield of protection” over his CBN network and Regent University and calling on God to intervene and turn the storm away from land.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) privately commended some of the CEOs who departed President Trump's business councils over his handling of the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., according to a newly published excerpt from Bob Woodward's book.

Business Insider reported Monday that Woodward's book on the Trump White House, which comes out Tuesday, contains a passage about the fallout from Trump's press conference in which he declared "both sides" were to blame for the violence that left one counter-protester dead.

While both Ryan and McConnell expressed disapproval at the time with Trump's handling of the Charlottesville incident, Woodward reported that they took another step behind the scenes.

"Most significant, however, were the private reactions from House Speaker Ryan and Senate Majority Leader McConnell. Both Republicans called some of the CEOs and privately praised them for standing up," Woodward writes, according to Business Insider.

Consider the brutal clarity of Paul Weyrich, a founder of the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council, which eventually helped write voter suppression legislation that spread like a cancer across the country: “I don’t want everybody to vote,” he said in a 1980 speech to conservative preachers in Dallas. “Our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.” The Republican Party learned that voter suppression, done ruthlessly and relentlessly, could deliver victory.

Scott — who was frequently by Trump’s side at the White House and at his resorts in Palm Beach and Bedminster, New Jersey, in 2017 — began putting more distance between himself and the unpopular president this year as he geared up for a Senate run that Trump himself had repeatedly urged him to make. Scott also chaired the super PAC backing Trump’s 2016 presidential bid.

Now Scott seldom mentions the president and won’t commit to having an event with him specifically.

In contrast to his closeness to Trump in 2017, Scott’s distance from the president this year as the midterm election comes into focus provides a glimpse into Trump’s standing in the nation’s largest swing state, which he won by just 1.2 percentage points.

Compared to his underwater national polling average, Trump is more popular in Florida — but that’s not saying much. His net favorability rating is still a negative 4 points in Florida (and negative 16 points nationally) according to Quinnipiac University’s polling.

I'm worried about this.

President Donald Trump is rapidly losing favor among independent voters and has a low approval rating in general despite a strong economy, two new polls show, providing fresh warning signals for the president and the Republican Party ahead of the midterm elections.

A new CNN poll found Trump's approval rating at just 36% and put his approval among independents at 31%, a new low and dropped all the way from 47% last month.

Recent reports have suggested independents could comprise up to 30% of the electorate in this year's midterms, meaning they could make or break the GOP's grip on its majority in Congress in November.

A separate poll from Quinnipiac University, also released Monday, showed Trump's approval rating at 38% and found 54% of American voters disapprove of the job he's doing. It also found just 36% of independent voters approve of Trump.

The poll did show, however, that Trump's approval with his base remains strong. Overall, 84% of Republicans approve of the job Trump is doing, the poll found.

Strong economic growth also doesn't seem to be winning over new voters for Trump, however.

"The economy booms, but President Donald Trump's numbers are a bust. An anemic 38% approval rating is compounded by lows on honesty, strength and intelligence," Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University poll, said in a statement.

The Quinnipiac poll found just 32% of Americans feel the president is honest, which it said was his lowest grade for honesty since he was elected. In addition, Trump received low grades from American voters on an array of character traits.

Trump's low approval ratings nationwide come as his administration fights off allegations of chaos within his administration in Bob Woodward's new book, "Fear," as well as claims in a recent anonymous New York Times op-ed of a "quiet resistance" against the president in the White House.

Historically, midterm elections often serve as referendums on the incumbent president, which makes Trump's overall unpopularity a liability for Republicans.

Kinda self explanatory to me; but, oh well......

Here's a cartoon of Serena Williams from Australia's The Herald Sun

An Australian cartoonist has defended his depiction of Serena Williams at the US Open, after the image went viral and was criticised as racist and sexist.

Mark Knight's newspaper cartoon showed Williams jumping above a broken racquet next to a baby's dummy. Critics said it portrayed racist stereotypes.

The cartoonist denied it was racist, saying he had intended to depict only the tennis player's "poor behaviour".

Some also said Knight had "whitewashed" Japanese player Naomi Osaka.

Williams sparked controversy during her loss to Osaka when she accused the umpire of sexism and being a "thief".

Knight's drawing, published in the Herald Sun newspaper on Monday, referenced Williams's outburst and showed the umpire asking Osaka: "Can you just let her win?"

It has been strongly defended by Knight and the newspaper's editor, Damon Johnston.

But critics, including author JK Rowling, compared the cartoon to past racist caricatures of African-American people.

Others on social media pointed out that Osaka appeared to have been drawn as a "white woman" with a blonde hair.

The National Association of Black Journalists in the US denounced the cartoon as "repugnant on many levels".

"[It] not only exudes racist, sexist caricatures of both women, but Williams' depiction is unnecessarily sambo-like," it said in a statement.

The 1899 children's book, The Story of Little Black Sambo, featured derogatory racial depictions - such as characters with thick red lips.

Knight said he had "no knowledge of those cartoons or that period", saying on Tuesday that "the world has just gone crazy".

"The cartoon was just about Serena on the day having a tantrum. That's basically it," he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Knight also rejected a suggestion that he would not draw a similar image of a man. As evidence, he tweeted his recent cartoon of tennis player Nick Kyrgios.

One sociology expert told the BBC that Knight had used "a genre that has a long history of racist impact".

"The author may not even realise their own framing of the world has been shaped by history of racism in Australia," said emeritus Prof Andrew Jakubowicz from the University of Technology, Sydney.

He said there had been "a tradition" in many Australian cartoons to exaggerate physical characteristics of minority groups, including indigenous Australians, to "trigger a reaction" - such as humour.

Knight was also accused of racism last month for a cartoon which showed faceless black figures fighting in a Melbourne subway, a reference to a debate about African-Australian street gangs.

North Korea's Kim Jong-un has written to US President Donald Trump asking for a follow-up to their historic summit, the White House says.

The US says it is already looking at scheduling a new meeting.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said the "very warm" letter showed Pyongyang's "continued commitment to focus on denuclearisation".

Negotiations on the topic appeared to have stalled after the two leaders' historic summit in Singapore in June.

"The primary purpose of the letter was to request and look to schedule another meeting with the president, which we are open to and are already in the process of co-ordinating that," Ms Sanders said.

She gave no indication of when a second meeting between the two leaders could potentially take place.

he(Trump) keeps outsmarting almost everyone, you are included in that group. The release of the FISA documents will be another win.

It can’t happen here. That’s an avowal I have been hearing from Americans ever since my family and I, fleeing a dictatorship in our native Chile, finally came to settle in the United States in 1980.

What happened to you in Chile can’t happen here. Democracy in the US is too stable, the institutions too deeply rooted, the people too much in love with liberty.

Weary of wandering, desperate for refuge, I wanted to believe that the American experiment would not abide tyranny. And yet I remained sceptical, stubbornly wary. I had pronounced similar words about Chile, and had also once succumbed to the illusion that democracy in the land I called my own could never be destroyed, that it “couldn’t happen here”.

Chilean democracy in the early 1970s, like that in the US, was imperfect: we had our share of civil strife, the persecution of minorities and workers, disproportionate influence of big money, restrictions of voting rights and women’s empowerment and purging of immigrants and foreigners. But the system was robust enough for the left, led by Salvador Allende, to envisage the possibility of building socialism through peaceful, electoral means rather than violence – a unique experiment in social justice that, for the three years of Allende’s government from 1970 to 1973, opened the doors to the dream of a Chile free of exploitation and injustice.

And then came the military coup of 11 September 1973 that, with the active backing of President Richard Nixon’s intelligence agencies, overthrew Chile’s constitutional government. The reign of terror that followed was to last for almost 17 years, comprising extrajudicial executions and disappearances, torture and imprisonment on a vast scale, exile and widespread hounding of dissidents. The repression that afflicted those victims was not accidental. It was a way of teaching millions of Allende’s followers that they should never again dare to question the way power was organised and wealth was distributed in the world.

Such deliberate savagery was only feasible and normalised because millions of Chileans who had felt threatened to their core by the Allende revolution accepted this war on their compatriots as necessary to save the nation from communism – even if there had been no human rights abuses by Allende’s government and absolute freedom of assembly and the press. Whipped into a frenzy by a campaign of hate-filled lies, the supporters of General Augusto Pinochet were persuaded, as in Franco’s Spain, that democracy was a cancer that had to be eradicated in the name of western civilisation.

In time, enough Chileans came to their senses and, through popular mobilisations and at great cost in lives and pain, created a coalition that restored democratic rule in 1990. But the consequences of those traumatic events, the division of the country against itself, persist today, 45 years after the military takeover. We also, however, emerged from that tragedy with insights that might be relevant to this current moment in history, when democracy is under siege in the US and across the globe, with countless citizens enthralled by strongmen who manipulate their frustrations and resentments and play to their worst nativist instincts.

There are, of course, significant differences between the situations in Chile almost half a century ago and in the US today. And yet the similarities are sobering. Having once lost democracy in Chile, I can recognise the signs of malignancy that fester in the US, a country of which I am now a citizen. I reluctantly note in my adopted homeland the same sort of polarisation that contaminated Chile before the coup; the same weakening of the bonds of a shared, inclusive national community; the same sense of victimhood among large swaths of the populace, troubled that their command over the traditional contours of their identity is slipping away; the same faulting of intruders, upstarts and aliens for that loss; the same tensions and rage exacerbated by shameful disparities in wealth and power. And, alas, the same seduction by authoritarian, simplistic solutions that promise to restore order to a complex, difficult, menacing reality.

Blaming this on a president contemptuous of the rule of law, who inflames confrontation in a country urgently needing consensus and dialogue, or the cowardice of leaders of his party who have enabled such intemperance, or a foreign power for intervening to stir havoc, misses the crucial point and does not answer the question of how to stem such a tide of rising illiberalism.

Again, Chile provides a blueprint, warning us that democracy can be subverted only if large multitudes stand by and look away while it is corroded and demolished. Our deepest values are in most danger when people feel defenceless and despairing, mere spectators watching a nightmare slowly unfold as if there was nothing they could do to stop it, ready to abrogate their responsibility. It is ultimately the passivity of those silent accomplices that eats away at the fabric and foundations of a republic, leaves it vulnerable to demagoguery and dread.

The main lesson that the Chilean cataclysm bequeaths us is to never forget that the rights we take for granted are fragile and revocable, protected only by the unceasing, vigilant, vigorous struggle of millions upon millions of ordinary citizens. Salvation can’t be outsourced to some sort of heroic figure who will ride to the rescue. The only real saviours are the people themselves.

Unless we understand this, we risk awakening one day in a land that is unrecognisable, with consequences that will be paid for by generations to come. My message to my fellow Americans, and to many others abroad, is alarmingly simple: do not cry tomorrow for what you did not have the courage and the wisdom to defend today.