Andrea Germanos at CommonDreams writes—Ellison's Advice to Confront Racist Trump Agenda in 2018: 'Organize, Organize, Organize':
As fallout continues over the president's offensive language during a closed-door meeting in the Oval Office, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) argued that Donald Trump's specific word choice is irrelevant—"he has a long history of racism"—and that in the year ahead the public must "organize, organize, organize" to defeat his agenda.
Speaking to MSNBC's "All In" on Monday, Ellison, who also serves as co-chair of the DNC, said that "whether [Trump] said 'shithole' or 'shithouse,' he has deprecated people and people of color, people who are Muslim, people who are Mexican. He has done it for literally years."
The task at hand should be to decide "what are we going to do about it," he said.
Given that "this guy is a commander-in-chief...[and] controls the largest military economy and surveillance in the world," Ellison said Trump's "racism is dangerous to people. And we've all got to step up and deal with that."
"All we see out of this president is that he's doing mean, hateful things to people, or he's demanding his vanity be assuaged. We are in a constitutional crisis right now," Ellison warned, and said, "2018 is a year where if you love this country and the people in, it everybody has got to organize, organize, organize and get very busy. Figure out how you can be involved to restore the proper balance in our country."
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BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2010—MA-Sen: Campaign Frenzy:
The first conversation you have with people in Massachusetts these days is about what phone calls they've gotten. "I was home today," my father told me on Friday, "and the bulk of the phone calls we got were about the election: Bill Clinton, the DNC, a Coakley volunteer, the Brown campaign, my union president..." Saturday, it was a robocall from Scott Brown's daughter complaining about the negative attacks against her father. (That is, against disclosure of his record and positions.) Today, my mother answered the phone and was asked if she believed that marriage was between a man and a woman. When she replied no, the National Organization for Marriage thanked her and signed off. Moments later, the phone rang. It was MassEquality calling to let people know NOM was making calls.
At Coakley campaign headquarters, and nearby at the Massachusetts Democratic Party, volunteer phonebankers often apologize for the volume of calls people are getting. But they keep calling, and the stacks of completed call sheets are added to as fast as they can be entered in the computers. The complacency that plagued us just a week ago has been thoroughly punctured and volunteers have flooded in.
No, Massachusetts is not accustomed to this kind of campaign.
Massachusetts is also not accustomed to a candidate as low-down and scum-sucking as Scott Brown, and once again the compressed schedule of what you might call the real campaign is an issue, forcing voters to absorb the rapid-fire succession of stories only now coming out about Brown, after he's spent months defining himself as that telegenic guy who never says the word "Republican."
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin is on hand for the spin cycle on Trump’s physical. Joan McCarter was here for shutdown talk. Plus CHIP, DACA & Net Neutrality! And Trump-Russia! And Fire and Fury! And patiently waiting through another 5 lost minutes on Trump’s height.
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