Steve W. Thrasher at The Guardian writes—The terror of lynching haunts black Americans again:
Lynching is back in America’s headlines. On Saturday, an African American student, Richard Collins III, was stabbed and killed on the campus of the University of Maryland in what was widely – and rightly – called a lynching. That same day, the Mississippi state representative Karl Oliver wrote on Facebook that people who supported the removal of Confederate memorials “should be LYNCHED”. [...]
The man who reportedly killed Collins was a white student named Sean Ubanski, who is said to have been involved with a Facebook group called Alt-Reich: Nation.
A lynching is a spectacular murder that serves as a warning to a whole group, as did Jim Crow-era hangings and 2015’s murders at Emanuel AME Church. The Collins killing reinforces the fear in African Americans that there is no space or activity—not buying Skittles in a suburb, buying a toy in a store, or going to a party—which is safe for us.
State representative Oliver’s call to lynch those standing up to Confederate hagiography is a warning to people fighting anti-blackness that we’re in danger. Regardless of intent, Collins’ lynching assaulted African Americans everywhere, as did Oliver’s threat.
The Editorial Board of The New York Times concludes—As Statues Fall, the Specter of the Noose Rises:
More African-American men, women and children were hanged, burned and dismembered per capita in Mississippi between the Civil War and World War II than in any other Southern state. This bloody sacrifice to white supremacy sprang immediately to mind over the weekend when a white Mississippi state representative, Karl Oliver, railed in a Facebook post that elected officials in New Orleans deserved to be “lynched” for arranging to have four Confederate memorials removed from the city. Mr. Oliver’s grotesque remark reminds us yet again that the era of racial terror that spawned these memorials still casts a shadow over American life. [...]
Mississippi’s governor condemned Mr. Oliver’s statement, and the state’s House speaker stripped Mr. Oliver of a committee leadership position. The Legislative Black Caucus, however, is unwilling to let the matter go. It has called on Mr. Oliver to resign and has renewed its demand for the Legislature to finally dispatch the Confederate emblem from the state flag, which should have been done years ago.
Anne Applebaum at The Washington Post writes—There is no one right way to react to terror. There is a wrong way:
There is no correct reaction to terrorism. The cruelty, fanaticism and madness of a man who explodes a powerful bomb in a crowd of young girls inspires all kinds of feelings: horror, anger, sadness, fear, revulsion. [...]
But if those powerful emotions are politicized, or if they are used to fuel popular hysteria that will make the situation worse and not better, then they cease to be neutral or natural. The Manchester bombing was an act of extreme evil, and so it has inspired a number of British writers, politicians and celebrities to call for an extreme response.
One journalist demanded “internment of thousands of terror suspects now to protect our children.” An ex-politician called for the government to bring back the death penalty. [...]
Each one of those statements is both emotionally charged and practically pointless. The death penalty? Hard to see why it would deter a suicide bomber who wanted to die anyway. The “internment of thousands of terror suspects”? Britain tried to fight the Irish Republican Army that way, ordering a mass arrest of nearly 350 “terror suspects” in 1971. The result was catastrophic: Real damage was done to the credibility of the British state and the legal system in Northern Ireland, since many of those interned didn’t have IRA links. The mass arrest radicalized more people and led to a sharp increase in violence.
Neal Gabler at Moyers & Company writes—Roger Ailes: The Man Who Destroyed Objectivity:
It seems a lot to put on one man, but Roger Ailes destroyed the idea of media objectivity in the name of media objectivity, the way a phony evangelist might destroy virtue in the name of virtue. Things have never been the same since.
Ailes was a political acolyte of Richard Nixon, and Nixon was a media acolyte of Ailes. It was a perfect and powerful alliance — two outcasts seeking retribution. [...]
It was no accident that Nixon and Ailes not only shared grievances, but also constituencies. The base of conservatism — especially those angry old white men who had supported Nixon — would be the viewership of Fox News, too. These were people who felt the world slipping away from them in the tumult of civil rights, feminism, counter-culturalism and multiculturalism; people who abhorred change; people who felt the political system was stacked against them; and more. The vector of history was pointed in the wrong direction: forward. Politically, they blamed Democrats, who seemed sympathetic to change. Culturally, they would come to blame the media, which reported on this new narrative of a changing world without expressing disapproval of it.
Exploiting the latter was Ailes’ job. He constructed a snarling counter-narrative in the media in which social change was not a sign of progress but rather a sign of decadence and decay. If you boil Fox News down to one basic idea, this is it: White people are losing the world, the world is going to hell as a result, and liberal elites, including the liberal media, ought to pay.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—The Trump scandal that has nothing to do with Russia:
Trump’s fiscal plan was described as dead before arrival, but approaching it this way is a mistake. Many of the steep cuts in programs for low-income Americans mimic reductions passed before by Republicans in the House of Representatives. There’s more life in this document than the easy dismissals would suggest.
Particularly astounding from a president who promised better health care for Americans who can’t afford it is the $1.85 trillion reduction over a decade from Medicaid and subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. But didn’t Trump promise not to cut Medicaid? Never mind, budget director Mick Mulvaney told CNBC’s John Harwood. That pledge, Mulvaney explained, had been overridden by Trump’s promise to repeal and replace Obamacare.
Right, and my commitment to losing weight was overridden by my insistence on eating anything I wanted. We demean ourselves if we cynically normalize the reality that every Trump promise is meaningless claptrap aimed at closing a deal — and that the vows will be forgotten even before the ink on the agreement is dry. Many who did business with Trump learned the hard way not to trust anything he said. His supporters are being forced to learn the same dreary wisdom.
Meaghan LaSala at In These Times writes—Trumpcare 2.0 Is a Death Bill. It’s Time to Fight for the System We Want:
New figures from the Congressional Budget Office show that, if passed into law, the so-called “Trumpcare” bill would spike the number of people without health insurance by 23 million in 2026. While the GOP pushes deadly healthcare rollbacks in Washington, communities from Pennsylvania to Maine are ramping up their organizing for universal health care at the state level. New York and California are celebrating major progress in their campaigns for state-based, single-payer systems, setting the tone for grassroots campaigns sweeping the country.
The Healthy California Act and the New York Health Act would establish improved Medicare-for-all-style systems in each state, eliminating out-of-pocket costs and guaranteeing comprehensive care to all residents. The California bill won approval from the Senate Health Committee in late April, and the Appropriations Committee is expected to vote on Thursday. Meanwhile, the New York Health Act has sailed through the Assembly and now awaits action in the Senate.
According to Ursula Rozum, upstate campaign coordinator for the Campaign for New York Health, the list of endorsing state senators has jumped from 20 to 31 since the start of the legislative session, bringing it just one vote shy of a majority. [...]
These victories constitute a positive sign that state-based campaigns for universal health care ramping up across the country—and not just in states with progressive legislatures. In Maine, where Republicans maintain control of the Senate and voters have twice elected the far-right, proto-Trump governor Paul LePage, organizers are demonstrating non-partisan, grassroots political unity on the issue of health care.
Emily Atkin at The New Republic writes—Why Are Environmental Agencies Celebrating Trump’s Devastating Cuts?
The Environmental Protection Agency is thrilled with Donald Trump’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2018. According to an agency press release on Tuesday, the budget “provides $5.655 billion to help the agency protect human health and the environment.” It “aims to reduce redundancies and inefficiencies and prioritize EPA’s core statutory mission of providing Americans with clean air, land, and water,” and it allocates millions of dollars for clean air programs, Superfund and Brownfield site cleanups, and safe drinking water.
Given such rosy language, one would be forgiven for missing the fact that Trump’s budget would reduce the EPA’s funding by 31 percent—the highest percentage cut to any federal agency—and ax 3,200 employees. The Superfund program would get cut by 25 percent, the Brownfields program by 36 percent. And while the agency says the budget is “improving America’s air quality” and “ensuring clean and safe drinking water,” it ignores the dramatic cuts to programs that aim to do both things.
The EPA isn’t alone. Several other agencies with scientific and environmental missions would also be decimated by Trump’s budget, and they’re putting an equally positive spin on the proposed cuts—using conspicuously similar, euphemistic language.
Gail Collins at The New York Times writes—Trump Can’t Add Things Up:
We’re being run like a bad Atlantic City casino. It’s only a matter of time before the government will be trying to make ends meet by selling its name to golf course developers and marketing USA Steaks.
The budget came out while Trump was overseas, talking about peace with Pope Francis, who occasionally looked as cheerful as if he was watching his car being towed away.
Meanwhile at home, the detailed presidential spending plan was being unveiled, like the magic show at a mismanaged gambling house tottering toward bankruptcy court.
Jessica Valenti at The Guardian writes—Facebook is too lenient on those peddling hate speech:
...who we are is very much about how we treat others – whether it’s on the street, in our homes or, yes, on the internet. That’s why I was so concerned to see the broad latitude given to online abusers in Facebook’s guidelines for dealing with harassment and hate speech. Their baseline approach appears to give harassers the benefit of the doubt at every turn.
For example, it’s perfectly allowable for someone on Facebook to write: “To snap a bitch’s neck, make sure to apply all your pressure to the middle of her throat,” because it’s not an example of “credible” violence that is a “call to action” – just a venting of frustration, they say.
Similarly, if someone were to send the message, “unless you stop bitching I’ll have to cut your tongue out,” it would be classified as an “aspirational” or “conditional” statement. So this direct threat would be permitted on the site.
Why would Facebook believe that this kind of abuse is not a real threat to people? Well, because it’s online
Heather Digby Parton at Salon writes—Donald Trump must be getting desperate: Does he really think thuggish Corey Lewandowski can save him?
The administration seems to understand that it should create a “war room” in order to concentrate the scandal management in one place instead of sucking in everyone in the White House at each new turn. But if people in the GOP hierarchy thought Trump might be getting serious about hiring some professionals to handle that, they should probably think again. Apparently Trump plans to house this operation outside the White House and, according to Politico, he wants to bring back his original campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, along with his deputy campaign manager, David Bossie, to run it. [...]
According to CNN, despite the fact that even Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump don’t like him, Lewandowski still has the president’s trust. He’s a thuggish sort best remembered for roughing up protesters and assaulting reporters, so that makes sense. Lewandowski was finally let go after losing a power struggle with the short-lived second campaign manager Paul Manafort, who is now very much in the doghouse over his obvious ties to Russia. Trump probably remembers those early days of the campaign as his glory days, and thinks Lewandowski has a special talent that can help him weather the storms. But Lewandowski is a D.C. novice who couldn’t even get his attempt to cash in as a lobbyist off the ground. It’s unlikely that he has the skills required to deal with something as serious as this Russia investigation.
Bossie, on the other hand, is a longtime GOP insider who has a couple of decades of experience in working more or less behind the scenes both for his own dirt-digging opposition research organization Citizens United (yes, that Citizens United) as a congressional investigator and a producer of conservative propaganda films.
Michael Paarlberg at The Guardian writes—Donald Trump is playing 'bad cop' with his extremist budget proposal:
An ambitious opening bid is a basic tactic of negotiation, basic enough that Donald Trump (or his ghostwriter, at least) wrote about it in The Art of the Deal: “My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing … Sometimes I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases I still end up with what I want.”
Trump’s draconian budget proposal has all the signs of a gambit designed to get what Trump, and his negotiating partners in Congress, really want, which is a slightly less draconian budget. So it’s cold comfort to its intended targets—the poor, the sick, many in rural red states Trump won—that the budget plan won’t pass in its current form. No president’s budget plan ever does. “Dead on arrival” is how John McCain described it, though his objection was that it does not shift enough money from welfare recipients to defense contractors.
The White House’s proposal, full of cuts to major programs, aims to balance the federal budget in a decade – benefitting the rich as it clobbers the poor.
Make no mistake: Trump’s budget will be horrific no matter what form it takes in an eventual appropriations bill.
Alex Shepard at The New Republic writes—Why Democrats in 2018 Shouldn’t Campaign to Impeach Trump:
[Democrats] are poised for massive gains in the 2018, thanks to the fact that the president is an incompetent idiot who keeps doing self-destructive and possibly criminal things. His behavior in office has been shameful and scandalous, and his White House perpetually seems on the verge of collapse. Less than four months into his presidency, calls for impeachment have become deafening. And to be fair, these calls are eminently reasonable.
In this environment, running on impeachment—on pledging to take back Congress and prosecute Trump—will be tempting for Democrats in 2018. Midterm elections are always referendums on the president, so why not turn 2018 into the biggest referendum of all? Elect us, Democrats can say, and we’ll take the president down. But while the legal arguments for impeaching Trump are strong—and they will probably only get stronger—there are serious pitfalls to impeachment as an electoral approach. [...]
The question facing Democrats is similar to the dilemma faced by the Clinton campaign in 2016: Do you try to make an inspiring, big-picture policy argument, or do you focus your campaign on the fact that Trump is a nut? The Clinton campaign focused on the latter, a decision that certainly played a role in her loss. The difference is that Democrats now have a wealth of material to work from: Trump’s disastrous health care bill, as well as budget and tax proposals that would favor the interests of the extremely wealthy over everyone else.