Trump TINY Coachella Speech GOES SIDEWAYS Quickly

 

+ 8,300 COMMENTS WORTH READING!

'I'm going to punish you and refuse to help you because I don't like your Governor" - Crowd cheers and applauds. There's something seriously wrong with these people

When my friends/family gang up on me for voting for Kamala (I'm a Republican from Utah) your videos always let me know I'm making an easy decision voting democrat. Thank you!!

I'm in California. While this traitor was in my backyard spewing garbage I was busy voting for Kamala Harris and every Democrat on my ballot. Dropped it in the mail and excited to vote against this sorry excuse of a human being.

Those are outsiders who came in to Coachella to cheer that man on. We normal people know better and WILL DO BETTER!!!!

I live in the Coachella Valley. In honor of his visit today I proudly cast my ballot and voted all the way!

He is a dangerous lunatic. Sending love from England, vote blue to save America from this madman.

So you tell the people that live in a fire area, you won't give them money to help them. And some cheered. Can't fix stupid.

People really leave their house to go and listen to such rubbish?

My god he is so loathsome…. And those people in the crowd, full of hate and cruelty…. The Republican Party is very seriously sick

No "brown outs" or "black outs" here in California. I've lived here for 50 years. No such thing.. he's making up lies.

He makes bad people feel good about themselves and decent folks sick to their stomachs.

What a shameless, inveterate liar.. He's sickening,

What makes me sick are the idiots who are cheering! OMG heaven help us!!!

MeidasTouch

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MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on Donald Trump’s disastrous Coachella speech which he pretended had 100,000 people when it was less than 1/10 of that and people were passing out and getting sick before the speech even started. Visit https://meidastouch.com for more! Support the MeidasTouch Network:   / meidastouch   Add the MeidasTouch Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Buy MeidasTouch Merch: https://store.meidastouch.com Follow MeidasTouch on Twitter:   / meidastouch   Follow MeidasTouch on Facebook:   / meidastouch   Follow MeidasTouch on Instagram:   / meidastouch   Follow MeidasTouch on TikTok:   / meidastouch  

RSN: FOCUS: Frank Rich | Against Harris, Trump Tries to Run the Birther Playbook

 

 

15 August 20

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FOCUS: Frank Rich | Against Harris, Trump Tries to Run the Birther Playbook

Frank Rich, New York Magazine
Rich writes: "The actual fact of Harris on the ticket - a woman of color with a multicultural background as various as the nation's and a record of ceaseless accomplishment despite all the racial obstacles along the way - is deeply moving. Context counts." 

Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today, what Kamala Harris means for the Biden campaign, Donald Trump’s racist attacks against her, and conspiracists in Congress.

fter months of speculation, Joe Biden announced that his running mate will be Kamala Harris. Is she the right choice for his campaign?

The low bar for vice-presidential candidates is that they not be the wrong choice. In retrospect Harris was the safest and perhaps the inevitable choice, which is also why she was the most frequently predicted choice. And yet, when the announcement came, there was genuine elation among Democrats — and perhaps some non-Democrats, too — that is already reflected in polling. The actual fact of Harris on the ticket — a woman of color with a multicultural background as various as the nation’s and a record of ceaseless accomplishment despite all the racial obstacles along the way — is deeply moving. Context counts. The Harris story may be more moving now, in this year of Black Lives Matter protests and a raging pandemic, than it was destined to be during her presidential campaign, which imploded in what now seems like the prehistoric year of 2019.

Harris was a safe choice because, of all the veep finalists, she was one of only two who had been ruthlessly vetted during a national political campaign. Given the bipartisan conviction that Biden’s age is a political vulnerability, it always seemed unlikely he’d pick the other, his fellow septuagenarian Elizabeth Warren, even if he and Warren came to an ideological truce. Nor did it seem likely that Biden would pick a white woman after Black women contributed so mightily to his primary triumph. In retrospect, even Harris’s demerits are compatible with Biden’s: her ideological blurriness, her mixed record on criminal justice, and a presidential run that matched Biden’s failed earlier runs in its haplessness. As for her fierce attack on Biden in that first debate, count it as a plus: After nearly four years of the oleaginous sycophancy of Mike Pence, a vice-president who would tell off her boss is a refreshing novelty.

Almost as soon as Harris had been named to the ticket, she became the target of increased attacks from Donald Trump and others on the right, focused largely on her race and gender. Will these comments energize Trump’s base, or are they a sign of a flailing campaign not sure of what might stick?

It would seem that the only ones who didn’t anticipate that Harris might land on the ticket were Trump and his campaign. It didn’t take 48 hours to see that they are panicked by her. Trump stepped up his threat to sabotage the election by sabotaging the post office, and he embraced a ludicrous birther theory that Harris is ineligible to run for vice-president because her parents were immigrants.

He made these moves after the usual misogynistic and racist insults failed to move the needle anywhere except among his own base and Fox News. His sad attempt at coining a nickname — “Phony Kamala” — fell flat, even as “Sleepy Joe” is also losing whatever zing it had. (The contrast between Biden’s public bike riding and Trump’s shaky walk down a shallow ramp at West Point has been duly noted on Twitter.)

The deploying of race and gender to try to diminish Harris’s stature and achievements is not the sole province of Trump, his sons, and the Fox prime-time thugs who go right for the jugular. There’s also a subtler form of this animus among conservative commentators who almost to a man and a woman use the same locution. “She checks all the boxes,” writes Ramesh Ponnuru at Bloomberg, a necessity because “a white woman would have been a disappointment to too many Democrats.” Or as the Journal summed it up in an editorial in which it also wielded the Trump-favored adjective nasty at Harris, Biden “checked the essential boxes his party had demanded — a woman, a minority, and a progressive who has moved left as the Democratic Party has.”

To which one might respond, Pence checked the essential boxes his party demanded — a man, white, and a reactionary who has moved to the right as the Republican Party has. No wonder so many are looking forward to seeing these two very different representations of America go at it in the vice-presidential debate.

But will that debate happen? The rumors that Trump might replace Pence on the ticket with Nikki Haley or someone else he thinks might appeal to the “suburban housewife” persist. (The White House denials have no more credibility than any other statements from an administration that lies more often than not.) Clearly Trump has to do something to shake up his failing campaign, and, whether it involves Pence or not, what better time to do it than next week, as counterprogramming to the Biden-Harris convention? It would be entirely in character for the desperate, out-of-control Trump to spring an October surprise in August.

In Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won her House primary in Georgia this week, Congress is likely to have its first open supporter of QAnon, the conspiracist pro-Trump movement. Some GOP House members tried to stop or slow her campaign — will they accept her as a colleague?

The simple fact is that Greene has already been welcomed to Washington by both Trump (who applauded her as a “future Republican star”) and the House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, whose office released a statement embracing her after this week’s primary victory. Other GOP House leaders, Steve Scalise and Liz Cheney, who once spoke out against her views, retreated into silence once she won the primary. Trump’s most visible House advocate, the Ohio congressman Jim Jordan, helped raise thousands of dollars for her campaign. 

What does it mean to be a follower of QAnon, a conspiracy theory proliferating on the darkest reaches of the internet? In addition to the by-the-book racism and Islamophobia, Greene has endorsed the central QAnon premise accusing the Democrats of officiating over a “global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles,” has accused Hillary Clinton of murder and George Soros of being a Nazi, and supported a truther theory that no plane crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.

In a deep-red district, Greene is all but certain to win her House seat. She is only one of “at least 70 Republican candidates” who ran for Congress this cycle and expressed support for QAnon, in the calculation of Media Matters, with 19 of them on the November ballot. As the former GOP political operative turned Never Trumper Tim Miller has said, this coming House Republican caucus “is going to have more QAnon believers than Trump skeptics.”

Miller’s point cuts to the heart of the debate going on right now between disaffected Never Trumpers and other conservative Republicans about the fate of the party post-Trump. Some Never Trumpers argue that the GOP must be burned down. As the longtime Republican strategist Stuart Stevens argues in his new book, It Was All a Lie, the GOP is irredeemable. Trump is the culmination of a party that has been built on white grievance and racism for decades. Other anti-Trump conservatives see hope for rebuilding the GOP after Trump is gone. David Brooks, for instance, sees a future built around the likes of current Senators Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Ben Sasse, and Josh Hawley, even as he posits in passing that Republicans must “deracialize their appeal.”

Back on planet Earth, that seems highly unlikely. Racism is a cancer that has been metastasizing for half a century in the GOP. If Vichy Republicans like Rubio, et al. can’t bring themselves even now to mobilize against a QAnon candidate like Greene, there’s no reason to believe that they have the will or the power to fight the next iteration of Trumpism any more than they’ve been able to stand up to Trump.

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Roots of Anger: Top 3 Reasons African-Americans have Lost Most in the Coronavirus Depression

Beverly Watson

The shocking crucifixion of a defenseless George Floyd was not only painful to him, but painful to watch.

His hands were handcuffed, and his feet and legs were nailed to the ground by two or three cops kneeling on his body, while another one kept the horrified crowd from intervening. With calm, malicious intent, they were no doubt applying pressurized sharp jabs of their knees at strategic points of his prone body. George didn’t curse his killers with his last breath. Instead, as he was being asphyxiated by racial hatred, he sought strength in the only unconditioned love that he knew– his mother’s love. Just like Jesus called out to his mother while he was dying, so did George Floyd.

Even prisoners sentenced to capital punishment are protected from cruel and unusual punishment. But not George. His execution was extremely painful.

I’m pretty sure that just like these killers kneeled on George Floyd, they will probably kneel in their church services, worshiping God from their murderous hearts.

TomDispatch

Juan Cole on the deep racism that rules this society and how it's playing out in the age of Trump. Tom

"Even before the nation-wide demonstrations that have racked the nation and led to arrests in 17 cities, over the wrongful death at the hands of a Minneapolis policeman of George Floyd, the situation of African-Americans in this country was cratering because of the pandemic and its associated economic Depression.

"Some of the anger we see in US cities is a revolution of rising expectations. African-Americans were just beginning to experience some wage growth in recent years. That has just been wiped out.

1. Black unemployment has risen to over 16 percent.

The Guardian reported that

“40% of households earning less than $40,000 have experienced job losses, according to the Federal Reserve.”

The Guardian continues

“Only 20% of black workers reported being eligible to work from home, compared with about 30% of their white counterparts, according to the Economic Policy Institute.”

2. The Black middle class is being hollowed out, with hundreds of thousands of businesses going under:

The novel coronavirus and the shutdown have devastated the small new Black middle class. The number of working black business owners has fallen 41 percent since February. That is, nearly half of Black businesses are mothballed, and some of them will never come back.

The country has lost 450,000 Black businesses. They were disproportionately in sectors of the economy worst-hit by closures– hair and nail salons, taxis, restaurants, daycare centers. Moreover, WaPo’s Hannah Knowles writes, they don’t have deep pockets and were likely just scraping by to begin with. They also have more difficulty accessing government aid (much of which was scooped up by white chains). They are often too tiny, or don’t have employees, and so don’t meet the criteria set by Congress.

3. Covid-19 has hit African-Americans twice as hard as other groups.

By May 20, some 20,000 African-Americans had died of Covid-19, compared to 92,128 total deaths as of a week and a half ago. That is nearly 22%. African-Americans are 12% of the population, so they are dying at almost twice the proportional rate. Ed Pilkington of the Guardian writes,

“Across the country, African Americans have died at a rate of 50.3 per 100,000 people, compared with 20.7 for whites, 22.9 for Latinos and 22.7 for Asian Americans.”

Since a lot of poor elderly people have died in their beds without ever being diagnosed, the numbers are likely even worse than the CDC is reporting.

The reasons for which African-Americans have died at such disproportionate rates are rooted in the systematic racism practiced against them by the majority white society.

African-Americans are more likely to work in “essential” industries– many work in grocery stores, and many are medics and nurses. That they fill these niches has prevented their unemployment from rising even more than it has. But the downside is that they are exposed to a greater viral load.

They are also less likely to have good health care insurance.

I wrote earlier,

“ 11.5% of African-Americans are still without health care coverage, compared to 7.5% for whites. This statistic means that some 5 and a half million African-Americans are uninsured and probably just don’t go to a doctor much. It would be as though all of Minnesota or all of Colorado was without health insurance.”

Some 43 million Americans are expected to lose their health insurance, and some 7 million don’t have a prospect of replacing it. This loss will hit African-Americans at least a little harder than other groups.

Republican governors refused to pitch in to Obamacare with Medicare expansion even though it did not cost them anything in the initial years, which made it too expensive for the poor. Over-all, before the present crisis 28 million Americans were not covered. African-Americans bulked large in that percentage.

Even where they manage to see a doctor, African-Americans with Covid-19 were substantially less likely to be diagnosed than white patients. Physicians were less likely to refer them for testing. Earlier in the pandemic, testing sites tended to be in affluent white neighborhoods. Hospitals in poor neighborhoods were less likely to have proper personal protective equipment for medical personnel, which reduced the amount of testing offered.

African-Americans are also often shunted off to residential areas near coal plants and other hazards for particulate matter, giving them asthma and other lung problems that are known risks for death by coronavirus. They often live in food deserts and buy high-calorie but inexpensive foods from the few convenience stores and so have problems with obesity, another comorbidity factor increasing coronavirus lethality.

Many experts believe that Trump’s reluctance to shut down the country at the end of February when many government scientists wanted to do it much increased the death toll, and that Trump’s policies are responsible for about 40% of our more than 103,000 deaths. (CDC scientists were determined to ask him to close the country down while he was in India in late February, but one of them spoke publicly and caused the market to fall and Trump came back from New Delhi angry that a falling market would hurt his reelection, so the scientists had to back off; Trump did not act until mid-March.)

That means that through malign neglect Trump has killed over 9,000 African-Americans with the coronavirus."

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  Roots of Anger: Top 3 Reasons African-Americans have Lost Most in the Coronavirus Depression

  Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) - Even before the nation-wide demonstrations that have racked the nation and led to arrests in …

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