In place for fire (v3)

Just go sit in the rubbered uncirculated air

a step or two down from the cold terrazzo landing

where yellow pipes run up the cinder block wall.

Where water smolders behind red valves

with brass gauges ready to erupt throughout

the institution. I don’t go into the cave to hide

from wolves. I go for this: no whirring motors;

no leaking earbuds; no one reciting from their

collected injustices.  I can wait years for the words

sheltered from those thoughts of others.

The Nationalist's Delusion, by Adam Serwer

We are in the middle of a political civil war over our soul--America's soul--on two fronts: racism and sexism. This article in The Atlantic lays out the racism front. (I'd also like to note American isn't alone in this.)

Political and Media elites create other explanations for the 2016 election, because, this one, racism, is too destructive, perhaps even to their own personal esteem.

These supporters will not change their minds, because this is what they always wanted: a president who embodies the rage they feel toward those they hate and fear, while reassuring them that that rage is nothing to be ashamed of.

The specific dissonance of Trumpism—advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such policies are racially motivated—provides the emotional core of its appeal. It is the most recent manifestation of a contradiction as old as the United States, a society founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal.

The idea that economic suffering could lead people to support either Trump or Sanders, two candidates with little in common, illustrates the salience of an ideological frame. Suffering alone doesn’t impel such choices; what does is how the causes of such hardship are understood.

Which scapegoat is more attractive: Wall Street and corporate America or that others (minorities, immigrants) are getting help that you deserve?

... what Trump’s supporters refer to as political correctness is largely the result of marginalized communities gaining sufficient political power to project their prerogatives onto society at large. What a society finds offensive is not a function of fact or truth, but of power. It is why unpunished murders of black Americans by agents of the state draw less outrage than black football players’ kneeling for the National Anthem in protest against them. It is no coincidence that Trump himself frequently uses the term to belittle what he sees as unnecessary restrictions on state force.

Birtherism is a synthesis of the prejudice toward blacks, immigrants, and Muslims that swelled on the right during the Obama era: Obama was not merely black but also a foreigner, not just black and foreign but also a secret Muslim. Birtherism was not simply racism, but nationalism—a statement of values and a definition of who belongs in America. By embracing the conspiracy theory of Obama’s faith and foreign birth, Trump was also endorsing a definition of being American that excluded the first black president. Birtherism, and then Trumpism, united all three rising strains of prejudice on the right in opposition to the man who had become the sum of their fears.

In this sense only, the Calamity Thesis is correct. The great cataclysm in white America that led to Donald Trump was the election of Barack Obama.

Abraham Lincoln began the Civil War believing that former slaves would have to be transported to West Africa. Lyndon Johnson began his political career as a segregationist. Both came to realize that the question of black rights in America is not mere identity politics—not a peripheral matter, but the central, existential question of the republic. Nothing is inevitable, people can change. No one is irredeemable. But recognition precedes enlightenment.

Who is George Papadoupolos? Updated 11/9/17

Who is George Papadopoulos? Tuesday from the Washington Post:

The court documents do not answer a key question: whether Papadopoulos also told his superiors that he had met a London-based professor who claimed to know that the Russians had "dirt" on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, including thousands of her emails.

Also Tuesday, NYT reports on Trump campaign's foreign policy team starting with Flynn. We get to Papadopoulos about halfway through. He is a minor player, but many prosecutions start low and work their way up.

Trump's whole team was marginal; he personally could care less about foreign policy. But it was oddly pro-Russian, and Trump did care a great deal about building a Trump property in Moscow. (At this time in the campaign (when he called Papadopoulos an "excellent" guy), I personally don't believe he thought he'd win, and was just enjoying himself, thumbing his nose (polite way to put it) at everyone and believing his was increasing the value of his brand.

More reporting Friday by Caldwell and Thorp of NBC:

• foreign policy panelist at Republican National Convention
• September 2016 interviewed by Russian Interfax as Trump campaign representative
• January 2017 met Israeli leaders

Papadopoulos's "Professor" Mifsud has gone to ground.

Her name is Olga Vinogradova.

Smoking Guns

What did Russia get? What is it still getting? from Trump campaign and administration?

• Softened RNC plank on arming Ukraine
• Trump Tower Meeting: Reconsidering the Magnitsky law
• Not implementing the new Russian sanctions that Trumped signed into law August 2, 2017

And this doesn't count the more macro (but less attributable directly to Trump) like softening the NATO alliance or an angry, bitter, divided American electorate.

United we stand; divided we fall. E pluribus unum.

Gun Safety

I drafted one my posts, collecting information and analysis on gun control, and then read Kristof's oped in today's NYT, How to Reduce Shootings. A great summary. I'm going ahead and publishing this post, even though it is a work in progress, because Kristof's piece is thorough and a great starting place. He frames the issue as a public health issue, like automobile safety, and tries to avoid the  moralistic and inflammatory rhetoric of liberals and conservative--the left and the right.

His oped is comprehensive. And near his conclusion he writes:

If you’re wondering how we managed to crank out all these charts and data in the immediate aftermath of the Texas shooting, here’s the secret: We didn’t. We spent weeks gathering the information and preparing the charts, because we knew that there would be a tragedy like this one to make it all relevant.

In October, 538's Julia Azari also summarizes the current data on gun violence, and advises us not to focus on mass killings to drive policy. She includes a good data visualization of gun deaths:

• suicide vs homicide vs accident
• men vs women
• age
• ethnicity

Different solutions are required for different causes. (I'm waiting to see another domain added to the visualization: type of gun (handgun, rifle, assault rifle ...)

Everytown For Gun Safety reports that 54 per cent of mass shootings involve domestic or family violence:

But there’s a loophole in the federal system. Federal law only requires background checks for gun sales at licensed dealers—a gap referred to as the unlicensed sale loophole. Nineteen states and Washington, DC have acted to close this dangerous loophole by requiring background checks on all handgun sales.13 There is strong evidence that closing this loophole saves lives. In states that have done so, 47 percent fewer women are shot to death by their intimate partners, 53 percent fewer law enforcement officers are killed with guns, and there is 48 percent less gun trafficking in cities.14

Only 10 per cent of mass shootings took place in gun-free zones:

Take, for example, the October 1, 2015 mass shooting in which Christopher Harper-Mercer fatally shot nine people in an attack at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, OR. At the time of the shooting, there were several students carrying concealed handguns on campus. But they recognized that an attempt to provide help may have confused law enforcement and decided not to intervene. As one student, a military veteran who was carrying a concealed gun at the time, explained: “Luckily, we made the choice not to get involved…not knowing where SWAT was on their response time, they wouldn’t know who we were, and if we had our guns ready to shoot, they’d think we were the bad guys.”15

Everytown For Gun Safety is backed, in part, by independent and former NYC mayor, Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg's Independence USA PAC is also active on gun control.

Good summary of NRA vs Bloomberg's PAC campaign spending in 2016 election.

A 2014 report, by Propublica, on Myth vs Fact: Violence and Mental Health. I hadn't seen this concept before of a "gun violence restraining order"--this seems like a tool the judicial system should have access to.

Smoking Gun

If today's reporting from Reznik and Meyer of Bloomberg is true, this is the quid pro quo: Trump's campaign wanted evidence of Clinton campaign getting donations from off-shore, tax-evaded accounts in exchange for reconsidering the Magnitsky law.

Yes the source is the Russian attorney, Veselnitskaya, who met Donald Trump Jr, Kushner, Manafort in June 2016 Trump tower--and must be taken with a grain of salt.

Who is Rick Gates?

In this post, I'll keep ongoing notes on Rick Gates, whose indictment by the Mueller investigation was unsealed today.

Monday afternoon, Allegra Kirkland of Talking Points Memo gave us an introduction:

Manafort’s business partner [Rick Gates] remained a key player in Trumpworld long after Manafort himself was forced out of the campaign over concerns about his work abroad. Gates coordinated behind-the-scenes preparations for Trump’s inauguration and served on a pro-Trump super PAC in the early months of 2017.

And as the Miami Herald reported Monday, a domestic entity listed in the indictment as one of the corporations Manafort and Gates used to hide foreign earnings even accepted a total of $70,000 from the Republican National Committee for “political strategy services” it provided in coordination with the Trump campaign, suggesting the line between Gates’ work for the campaign and his illicit dealings wasn’t quite so bright.

Greed giving us a nice paper trail.