#@jrduquette

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Jesse Duquette :: @JRDuquette :: Of Inhuman Bandage

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 31, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 01, 2024

Yesterday, from a Harris campaign event in Atlanta, Georgia, Atlanta reporter Tariro Mzezewa noted that the crowd of 10,000 people “was ecstatic. There was chanting, cheering, singing, and dancing for hours in the lead-up to and throughout the event,” Mzezewa wrote today in Slate. 

Mzezewa reported that rapper Megan Thee Stallion told the audience “I know my ladies in the crowd love their body. And if you want to keep loving your body, you know who to vote for,” before performing her hit “Body.” Georgia Democratic politicians showed up in force: voting rights advocate and former state representative Stacey Abrams, senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, state Democratic Party chair Representative  Nikema Williams, and Atlanta mayor Andre Dickens. 

“What you’re seeing is very real,” Mzezewa wrote, and she quoted an attendee who said: “it’s nice to witness history, but getting to be a part of it from the ground up is a whole other level.” Certainly, the grassroots enthusiasm for Harris’s presidential candidacy is palpable. More and more self-identified groups are launching fundraising calls for Harris; yesterday the Latter-day Saints for Harris—Mormons—announced that they, too, are “putting [their] shoulders to the wheel!” Today the executive board of the United Auto Workers also endorsed Harris.

At last night’s event, Vice President Harris noted that Trump has pulled out of the September debate to which he had previously agreed. “Here’s the funny thing about that,” she said. “He won’t debate, but he and his running mate sure seem to have a lot to say about me,” After hitting the campaign’s refrain that marks MAGA Republican behavior as “weird,” she added to applause: “Well, Donald, I do hope you’ll reconsider to meet me on the debate stage because, as the saying goes, if you’ve got something to say, say it to my face.”

Trump did not say it to her face, but today he unloaded spectacularly on three Black female interviewers at a meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) in Chicago.

When ABC News senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott began the interview by quoting a number of his racist statements about Black Americans and asking why, given that history, Black voters should trust him, he lost it. “I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner,” he began. “You don’t even say ‘Hello, how are you?’ Are you with ABC? Because I think they’re a fake news network, a terrible network.” 

He went on to try to dominate Scott, listing the policies he claimed to have put into place, and to attack the people who organized the event before saying, “I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln. That’s my answer….  And for you to start off a question and answer period…in such a hostile manner, I think it’s a disgrace.”   

As the session began, so it continued, with Trump questioning Harris’s Black identity—while also mispronouncing her name—and warning the attendees that they need “to stop people from invading our country that are…taking Black jobs.” NBC News correspondent Yamiche Alcindor told MSNBC that during the interview, “people were stunned, people were gasping, there were some people who were shouting back at him saying ‘That's a lie!’” Attendees laughed and jeered at Trump throughout the 37-minute session; his handlers made him leave early. 

Scott accurately summed up Trump’s long history of racism, but lately he has been advertising it. In an interview with Fox News Channel personality Laura Ingraham aired last night, Trump said that Harris would be “like a play toy” for world leaders. “They look at her and they say we can’t believe we got so lucky. They’re gonna walk all over her.” “I don’t want to say as to why,” he said to the camera, “but a lot of people understand it.”

It is unlikely that his insults and naked racism will appeal to anyone but his base, making his performance, as Jessica Tarlov put it on the Fox News Channel, “a complete, absolute dumpster fire.” It is possible that Trump has lost the ability to read a room and reassure his audience that he’s a good bet. But it is also possible that Trump cannot bear to see the enthusiasm building behind Harris, not only because of its electoral meaning, but also because it reveals how small his own following is and how much people loathe him.  

Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who produces wonderful video threads of important events, “put together an 11-minute supercut of Trump angrily self-immolating at the NABJ before his handlers pulled him from the stage.” 

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo analyzed Trump’s meltdown in Chicago this way: “I think we’re getting the first view of imploding Donald Trump as he realizes that what was his for the taking ten days ago is slipping away and he’s likely to go to prison rather than the White House. He [is] being dominated and humiliated by Harris and he’s losing it.” His post after the interview, in which he boasted “[t]he questions were Rude and Nasty, often in the form of a statement, but we CRUSHED IT!” seemed an attempt to reassert his old pattern of simply declaring things to be true that…aren’t. 

Indeed, one of Trump’s answers to the journalists in Chicago revealed that he cares only about getting elected, rather than governing. It also suggested that his camp is trying to reassure him that his pick of Ohio senator J.D. Vance to be his running mate will not hurt their chances, even as more and more videos of Vance attacking women become public and as he is historically bad in front of television cameras.

Vance has only 18 months of experience in elected office, making him one of the least qualified candidates for vice president in U.S. history. When asked if Vance would be ready “on day one,” to assume the duties of the presidency if necessary, Trump answered a different question altogether, revealing what is uppermost in his mind. “I’ve always had great respect for him…but…historically, the vice president in terms of the election does not have any impact, I mean, virtually no impact. You have two or three days where there’s a lot of commotion…and then that dies down and it’s all about the presidential thing. Virtually never has it mattered…. Historically, the choice of a vice president makes no difference.”   

The Harris campaign responded to Trump’s performance by saying: "The hostility Donald Trump showed on stage today is the same hostility he has shown throughout his life, throughout his term in office, and throughout his campaign for president as he seeks to regain power and inflict his harmful Project 2025 agenda on the American people…. Today's tirade is simply a taste of the chaos and division that has been a hallmark of Trump's MAGA rallies this entire campaign,” while “Vice President Harris offers a vision of opportunity and freedom for all Americans.” 

It urged Trump again to “stop playing games and actually show up to the debate on September 10."

Trump’s petulant fury at the Black journalists today suggests just how dangerous it would be to put him in control of the nation’s law enforcement and military capabilities a second time. We were given a glimpse of how eager he was to turn those capabilities against American citizens in his first term when the Department of Justice today released the report of the department’s inspector general concerning the Trump administration’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, D.C., in summer 2020.

The authors of the report emphasized that they were unable to compel the testimony of officials including then–attorney general William Barr, his chief of staff William Levi, FBI deputy director David Bowdich, and FBI Washington Field Office assistant director in charge Timothy Slater. 

But what they were able to put together even without their information was that, although the protests were largely peaceful, Trump was desperate to get 2,000 federal officers into the area around the White House on June 1, 2020, to increase federal control of the city. To the frustration of the people in charge of the agencies, he could not articulate a mission, only that he wanted 2,000 people around him. With only about 90 officers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Bureau of Prisons, and the U.S. Marshals Service on hand early on the morning of June 1, Barr told a conference call with Justice Department leadership that  Trump wanted “max strength” on the streets, and to “dominate the streets.” 

Trump then echoed that language in a call with the nation’s governors, saying, “If you don’t dominate your city and your state, they’re [going to] walk away with you. And we’re doing it in Washington, in D.C., we’re going to do something that people haven’t seen before. But you’re going to have total domination.”

Then, the report says, the administration began to prepare to invoke the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that authorizes the president to deploy the U.S. military and federalized National Guard troops within the United States to suppress civil disorder, insurrection, or rebellion. At 4:48 that evening, lawyers from the Office of Legal Counsel, who advise the president, received an email that the president was going to address the nation at 6:00 and that a proclamation invoking the Insurrection Act should be “ready for signing” before then.

Shortly after, additional officers from the Bureau of Prisons—without names on their uniforms because they do not usually wear them, if you remember the concern over those nameless uniforms—arrived at the White House. Barr was in charge of clearing the streets, and ultimately, by about 9:00 he felt things were calm enough that he advised Trump against invoking the Insurrection Act. 

But it was evidently a close thing.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[furryalligator]

Source: http://twitter.com/JRDuquette/status/1028284544884125696

One year later and the dogs are more emboldened than ever. #charlottesville #heatherheyer #resist #magaisformorons #bigotinbronzer #shitholepresident #dumptrump #repost #thedailydon pic.twitter.com/LLsp7A94tO

— TheDailyDon (@JRDuquette) August 11, 2018

[immigrationnewsdigest]

Right wing extremism and Blue Lives cop fetishists are the virus we need to talk about. #defundthepolice #thedailydon pic.twitter.com/g1kUJB2Xiq

— TheDailyDon (@JRDuquette) August 27, 2020

[onetwofeb]

TheDailyDon @JRDuquette

[tattooed-alchemist]

Illustration of a crying child, beneath the heading “2019 = 1943″ and above the quote from Holocaust victim Anne Frank which reads, “Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.”

[mongoose232323]

#ExecutiveTime

#LaziestPresidentEver

Day 744:

How Sadly Unsurprising That This Hair Curious

Honeywagon Puts As Much Work Into His Job

As He Does His Third Grade Vocabulary.

#shitholepresident #magaisformorons #thedailydon

The Daily Don

@JRDuquette

[thingsmk1120sayz]

https://twitter.com/JRDuquette/status/1252942682214760449?s=19

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Jesse Duquette :: @JRDuquette:: The US is a gun fetish cosplaying a country not overtaken by the death fantasies of inadequate men.

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 14, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 15, 2024

Today, former president Trump turned 78. For his birthday, Representative Greg Steube (R-FL) introduced a bill to name 4,383,000 square miles of the coastal waters off the United States over which the U.S. has sole authority, a region called the exclusive economic zone, the “Donald John Trump Exclusive Economic Zone of the United States.” 

A less welcome present was that the chief executive officers who attended a meeting with Trump in Washington yesterday told reporters they found him uninformed and unfocused. Christina Wilkie and Brian Schwartz of CNBC noted that the attendees dislike the Biden administration’s enforcement of antitrust laws, its price caps on drugs and medical products, and its promise of progressive tax policy and like Trump’s promise to slash regulations and cut taxes, so they went into the meeting hoping to support him.

One CEO left the meeting with the takeaway that “Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” and several, Andrew Ross Sorkin of CNBC reported, said that he “was remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought [and] was all over the map.” He could not explain how he planned to accomplish any of the policies he was proposing. When asked why he had chosen a policy of bringing the corporate tax rate down to 20%, he allegedly answered: “Well, it’s a round number.” 

No one applauded Trump, attendees reported, in striking contrast to reports of the enthusiasm of Republican lawmakers yesterday. This difference underscores that Trump likely intended yesterday’s grandstanding to send a political message that Republican members of Congress support him despite his criminal convictions, while the lawmakers themselves were trying to show party unity at a time when they are bitterly divided. 

Also today, the Supreme Court handed down the Garland v. Cargill decision, which considered whether the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) correctly determined that a device that dramatically increases the speed at which a semiautomatic weapon fires bullets, called a bump stock, could be prohibited under the law, originally passed in 1934, that outlawed machine guns. 

By a 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court said the ATF did not make that decision correctly and that bump stocks were not banned under the law.

After the Parkland, Florida, shooting of February 14, 2018, when Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people and injured 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, then-president Trump told reporters that he had been studying the issue of gun safety. This was his first articulated policy on that issue, and although the Parkland shooter did not use a bump stock, Trump said he had told then–attorney general Jeff Sessions to write regulations to ban bump stocks in October of the previous year, after a gunman using them had fired up to 1,000 rounds of ammunition in 11 minutes, killing 58 people and wounding about 500—two died later—at a Las Vegas music festival. 

By the time the ATF finalized a new rule on December 18, 2018, Sessions was gone and it was Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker who announced that bump stocks would be classified as a “machinegun” under federal law. The rule went into effect on March 26, 2019. People who owned bump stocks had to get rid of them, either by destroying them or by taking them to an ATF office. The ATF estimated that about 520,000 bump stocks needed to be destroyed. 

A Texas gun store owner, Michael Cargill, handed over his two bump stocks under protest and then sued the ATF, saying it did not have the authority to reclassify bump stocks. 

Today, in a majority opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court dove deep into the mechanics of bump stocks to try to establish that they were not physically machine guns and that because of differences in the mechanical operations between true machine guns and bump stocks, the law did not prohibit bump stocks. ATF officials thus had no business defining bump stocks as they did in 2018, and those who want them can own them.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote: “There is a simple remedy for the disparate treatment of bump stocks and machineguns. Congress can amend the law—and perhaps would have done so already if ATF had stuck with its earlier interpretation. Now that the situation is clear, Congress can act.” 

Indeed, if Congress truly reflected the will of the people, it would have acted on this issue years ago. A Pew poll from June 2023—when bump stocks were illegal—showed that 64% of Americans want assault-style weapons banned altogether, as they were between 1994 and 2004. But Republicans have increasingly fetishized guns as a symbol of individualism, and Republican senators have kept most gun safety legislation at bay by weaponizing the filibuster, which means that any legislation must have not simply a 51-vote majority to pass the Senate, but 60 votes.  

In other Supreme Court news, yesterday Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) released documents showing that Justice Thomas accepted at least three more trips from billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow than had previously been known. 

And in other news concerning our nation’s horrific history of mass shootings and the political meaning of guns, today a federal judge ordered the liquidation of the personal assets of conspiracy theorist and InfoWars host Alex Jones to begin the payment he owes to the families of those murdered at Sandy Hook. For years, Jones told his followers that the shooting was a hoax to encourage restrictions on gun ownership, prompting harassment of the victims’ families. 

A jury in Texas and a jury in Connecticut awarded the families $1.5 billion in damages for defamation; Jones owns about $9 million of personal assets but will keep his $2.8 million home in Texas. The judge threw out an attempted reorganization of Jones’s company, Free Speech Systems, saying Jones’s creditors would recover more money in state courts. The families have sued Jones for hiding millions of dollars in assets. 

Reacting to the news of the Supreme Court’s decision in Garland v. Cargill, gun safety advocate David Hogg, who survived the Parkland shooting, wrote: “Ah yes because who doesn’t need the ability to freely turn a semiautomatic AR-15 into what in effect is a machine gun. This is f*cking insane.”

“We know thoughts and prayers are not enough,” President Biden said in his own statement about the Supreme Court’s decision, referring to the usual response of Republicans after a mass shooting. “I call on Congress to ban bump stocks, pass an assault weapon ban, and take additional action to save lives—send me a bill and I will sign it immediately.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[furryalligator]

Source: http://twitter.com/JRDuquette/status/1024433501167345664

Day 557: In which professional basketball players do more for students than a glad-handed neophyte billionaire “Education” Secretary. @kingjames #betsydevos #resist #magaisformorons #shitholeadministration #donthecon #notmypresident #cartoon #dailydrawing #thedailydon pic.twitter.com/pn3RNGlBL5

— TheDailyDon (@JRDuquette) July 31, 2018

[furryalligator]

Source: http://twitter.com/JRDuquette/status/1023013063426027521

Day 553: In which a falsehood fetishist banks on being more believable than his prevaricating Padawan. #resist #magaisformorons #shitholepresident #dumptrump #donthecon #cartoon #dailydrawing #thedailydon pic.twitter.com/lmCdhOc7E1

— TheDailyDon (@JRDuquette) July 28, 2018

[furryalligator]

Source: http://twitter.com/JRDuquette/status/1022283293562155011

Day 551.1: In which the Party of Geriatric Ideals continues to find ways to dissociate themselves from the 21st century. #resist #magaisformorons #dumptrump #donthecon #shitholepresident #treasonweasel #dailydrawing #cartoon #thedailydon pic.twitter.com/svJ2CDiuYJ

— TheDailyDon (@JRDuquette) July 26, 2018

[furryalligator]

Source: http://twitter.com/JRDuquette/status/1020834704046592000

Day 547: In which a stable genius prefers his questions in the vein of a Highlights Magazine word jumble. #resist #magaisformorons #shitholepresident #treasonweasel #dumptrump #donthecon #cartoon #dailydrawing #thedailydon pic.twitter.com/0DKcZs4Gdl

— TheDailyDon (@JRDuquette) July 22, 2018

[furryalligator]

Source: http://twitter.com/JRDuquette/status/1024821020744671232

Day 558.1: Fancy book-learning is for coastal elite livin’ zeppelin merchants. #resist #magaisformorons #shitholepresident #donthecon #dumptrump #cartoon #dailydrawing #thedailydon pic.twitter.com/dz3znDXvDI

— TheDailyDon (@JRDuquette) August 2, 2018

[furryalligator]

Source: http://twitter.com/JRDuquette/status/1024815520816803840

Day 558: Toe-may-toe, criminal. #resist #magaisformorons #shitholepresident #trumpcrimefamily #muellertime #donthecon #dumptrump #cartoon #dailydrawing #thedailydon pic.twitter.com/Vya6vv2jUS

— TheDailyDon (@JRDuquette) August 2, 2018

[furryalligator]

Source: http://twitter.com/JRDuquette/status/1019190331890429952

#Repost of actual footage from yesterday’s Surrender Summit. #treasonweasel #surrendersummit #magaisformorons #resist #lockthemup #trumpcrimefamily #shitholepresident #putinpuppet #cartoon #thedailydon pic.twitter.com/bWS1P6XVAO

— TheDailyDon (@JRDuquette) July 17, 2018

[furryalligator]

Source: http://twitter.com/JRDuquette/status/1019334098354163717

Day 543: Double negative or not, I’m triply sure this #treasonweasel is a singular sham. #resist #magaisformorons #putinpuppet #dailydrawing #donthecon #dumptrump #shitholepresident #lockthemup #surrendersummit #cartoon #thedailydon pic.twitter.com/cFOHWpjPGp

— TheDailyDon (@JRDuquette) July 17, 2018