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Friday, August 18, 2017

# 3 Updates: Charlottesville: Bannon Is Out & Confederate Statues Are Coming Down

One person asked me, "...with this crisis of the rise of the neo-nazi movement and the division in the United States, does this mean you are not going to be blogging about the executions in Baja California anymore"? No, one of the problems I am having is that the local press has not been reporting an up to date August number of the homicidios dolosos as they have in the past, and at this point we are somewhere over 50 this month just in Tijuana not counting Rosarito Beach, Mexicali and Ensenada but that is not official.  So, stay tuned.

Finally from Zeta  a report on the departure of Steve Bannon:

Zeta - 08/18/17

Bannon, su Estratega En Jefe
por, Carlos Alvarez



DOES IT MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE?

Bannon will simply return to Breitbart and mobilize the neo-nazis which Trump has emboldened and enabled.  The White House  & Government of the United States will still have an abundant number of racists in control while Bannon musters the troops. Well at least French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted support for the protesters against Fascism and Nazis yesterday in his response to the terrorist attack in Spain:

From The Guardian:

"The French president, Emmanuel Macron, appeared to take on Trump in his Twitter reaction to the Barcelona attack. An initial tweet offered solidarity for the victims of and the pledge: “We remain united and determined.” But in a follow-up, Macron – who has repeatedly acted as a foil to Trump on the world stage – said: “We stand beside those who fight racism and xenophobia. It is our common fight, in past and present.” He added the hashtag: #Charlottesville."

Full Report here:

The Guardian 
08/17/17

"Trump Responds to Barcelona Attack By Reviving Debunked Myth"


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This just in moments after I typed that -  from The Intercept comes this report, with super tweet from Glenn thrush of the New York Times:
"The answer is pretty simple and straightforward: Trump shares Bannon’s worldview. Or as the New York Times’ Glenn Thrush tweeted: “Ultimately you don’t need a Bannon when you are a Bannon.”



The Intercept

Steve Bannon Is Gone But His Bigotry Stays In the White House 
by, Mehdi Hasan 

Steve Bannon Is Gone But His Bigotry Stays in the White House


August 18 2017, 1:18 p.m.

The writing was on the wall for Steve Bannon on Tuesday afternoon. Speaking in the gilded lobby of the Trump Tower in New York, the president of the United States took a short break from defending neo-Nazis and attacking “fake news” to comment on the future of his chief strategist -—who he pointedly refused to call “Steve.”


“Look, I like Mr. Bannon,” Trump told reporters. “He is a friend of mine, but Mr. Bannon came on very late. You know that. I went through 17 senators, governors and I won all the primaries. Mr. Bannon came on very much later than that, and I like him.” Trump added: “We’ll see what happens with Mr. Bannon.”


Well, it didn’t take long: Bannon, as of Friday morning, is out, six months after his controversial switchover from Trump campaign CEO to White House chief strategist. He joins Gen. Michael Flynn, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, Kate Walsh and Anthony Scaramucci on the outside. As Oscar Wilde nearly remarked, to lose one member of your inner circle may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose six in six months looks like sheer chaos.


Let’s be clear: Trump’s sacking of “Mr. Bannon” is not a repudiation of Bannon-esque, or Breitbartian, white nationalism. Rather, it is a clear consequence of Bannon, like Icarus flying too close to the sun. As his remarks on Tuesday indicated, Trump wanted to make clear to the world that he is his own man — or as he once declaimed in an early-morning tweet: “I call my own shots.” For the thin-skinned, egomaniacal and attention-hungry president, White House staffers have only one mission: to boost him, not themselves.


Thanks to the relentless leaking from inside the White House, we have known for some time that Trump has been bothered by the rise and rise of Bannon. He was annoyed by the Time magazine cover story that asked whether the chief strategist was now “the second most powerful man in the world.” He was irritated by the #PresidentBannon hashtag on Twitter and upset over the SNL sketch showing Bannon running the White House while the president sits at a kid’s desk playing with toys. And, in recent days, Trump was angered by the much-discussed new book by Joshua Green, “Devil’s Bargain,” which suggests that it was the former Breitbart boss who paved the way for Trump’s shock victory over Hillary Clinton. “That fucking Steve Bannon taking credit for my election,” Trump recently told a friend, according to Buzzfeed News.


For the Narcissist-in Chief, who perhaps values and cherishes his electoral college win more than he does four of his own five children, it was the final nail in Bannon’s coffin. Whatever else you say or do, don’t you dare take credit from The Donald!


History, however, will remember the hiring, not the firing, of Bannon. How on God’s green earth did a president of the United States bring into his White House as chief strategist a man who proudly called his Breitbart News website “the platform for the alt-right”; published pieces on Breitbart, during his tenure as executive chairman, with headlines such as “Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?” and “Political Correctness Protects Muslim Rape Culture”; allegedly objected to the number of “whiny” Jews at his daughters’ school; took inspiration from notorious Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl; produced a closing ad for the Trump presidential campaign that, according to the Anti-Defamation League, used “images and rhetoric” that “anti-Semites have used for ages”; suggested disenfranchising black voters might not be “such a bad thing”; said he wanted women who “lead this country” to “be feminine” rather than “a bunch of dykes… from the 7 Sisters schools”; declared “Islam is not a religion of peace” but “a religion of submission” and also called it “the most radical” religion in the world; warned the U.S. could turn into the “Islamic States of America” and dubbed American Muslim organizations a “Fifth Column”; seemed to approvingly cite Italian fascist thinker Julius Evola; repeatedly nodded to a “stunningly racist French novel” called “The Camp of the Saints” which warns of a migrant invasion of the West; expressed admiration for the anti-Semitic French philosopher, and hero to the European far right, Charles Maurras; joined the controversial and secretive Council for National Policy, or CNP, alongside extremists, who according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “regularly defame LGBT people with utter falsehoods” and “describe Latino immigrants as… rapists and disease-carriers”; and whose White House appointment in January was welcomed by America’s leading white nationalists and neo-Nazis, including David Duke and Peter Brimelow, who called it “excellent” and “amazing”?


The answer is pretty simple and straightforward: Trump shares Bannon’s worldview. Or as the New York Times’ Glenn Thrush tweeted: “Ultimately you don’t need a Bannon when you are a Bannon.”


Look, the Great Manipulator, as Time called Bannon, may have encouraged Trump’s worst, most crude, most bigoted tendencies — but they were Trump’s tendencies to begin with. The White House chief strategist, for instance, was reportedly one of the key architects of the “Muslim Ban” but does anyone seriously expect that ban to be lifted now he is gone? Remember: the president was promising a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” in December 2015, long before Bannon joined Team Trump.


The Leader of the Free World has form on nativism, xenophobia and racism, as I have pointed out before. Consider the past few days: Bannon may have influenced Trump’s response to the domestic terror attack in Charlottesville but he did not force Trump to provoke howls of outrage across Capitol Hill, the business community and the wider West on Tuesday by referring to the “very fine people” on the neo-Nazi, KKK-aligned side; nor did Bannon dictate Trump’s dog-whistling tweet on Thursday praising the “beauty” of Confederate monuments.


Yes, Bannon has finally gone and we can all rejoice. Sebastian Gorka and maybe even Stephen Miller might eventually follow him out of the White House doors. But Trump remains. That’s the inescapable, unavoidable, undeniable problem; that’s the orange-skinned gorilla in the room. I hate to agree with Trump but Bannon or no Bannon, Gen. John Kelly or no Gen. Kelly, the president does indeed call his own shots. Especially the racist ones."





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Meanwhile from The Hill:



"Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) said he was happy that Bannon would be gone but that the departure "cannot wash away the harm he and the president have done."


"It can't reverse the Muslim Ban. It can't reverse the President's inappropriate attacks on a Federal judge of Mexican heritage. And it can't reverse the White House's reluctance to denounce white supremacists," Cicilline said in a statement. "


More reactions from The Hill:

Dems celebrate Bannon's exit

By Julia Manchester - 08/18/17 01:54 PM EDT
 



Dems celebrate Bannon's exit
© Greg Nash

Democrats are cheering the news that Stephen Bannon is out as White House chief strategist.
Bannon has long been one of the least-liked figures in the White House on the left, and many Democrats have criticized his influence.
Democrats have ripped the former leader of Breitbart News for promoting nationalist policies that they see as thinly disguised racism.
Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) said Bannon should never have been given his position by President Trump.

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At the same time, several Democrats questioned whether Bannon's ouster would really change the White House or Trump's policies.
"Steve Bannon's firing is welcome news, but it doesn’t disguise where President Trump himself stands on white supremacists and the bigoted beliefs they advance," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement.

"President Trump's growing record of repulsive statements is matched by his repulsive policies. Personnel changes are worthless so long as President Trump continues to advance policies that disgrace our cherished American values," she said.

Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) said he was happy that Bannon would be gone but that the departure "cannot wash away the harm he and the president have done."
"It can't reverse the Muslim Ban. It can't reverse the President's inappropriate attacks on a Federal judge of Mexican heritage. And it can't reverse the White House's reluctance to denounce white supremacists," Cicilline said in a statement.
Other House Democrats chimed in with similar messages.


Bannon's departure comes nearly a week after white supremacists and neo-Nazis rallied in Charlottesville, Va., to protest the removal of a Confederate statue, spurring violence with counterprotesters.
Various Democrats were quick to incorporate the events in Charlottesville in their reactions to Bannon, who was seen as a prominent voice in the white supremacist community, leaving.
Bannon's departure comes after speculation swirled that his future at the White House was up in the air.
The president garnered backlash from Republicans and Democrats alike for his reaction to Charlottesville, which was seen as an attempt to appease white nationalists and other far-right extremist groups. "

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Excellent report on the confederate statues and memorabilia from Robert Mackey of The Intercept with links:

The Intercept don't miss all of the reports !

As Trump Adds Fuel to the Fire, Baltimore Removes Confederate Statues in Dead of Night


August 16 2017, 6:39 a.m.


After President Donald Trump inflamed the national debate over monuments to the Confederacy on Tuesday, telling reporters that white supremacists willing to use deadly violence to defend a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville included some “very fine people,” the City of Baltimore removed four statues honoring the defenders of slavery in the early hours of Wednesday.
Witnesses to the late-night operation, which was completed by 5:30 a.m. local time, shared images and video of workers removing the statues, including a massive one of Lee and Stonewall Jackson in Baltimore’s Wyman Park Dell.
Baltimore’s mayor, Catherine Pugh, was spotted overseeing the operation just before 3 a.m. by Alec MacGillis, a Pro Publica reporter.
Pugh told The Baltimore Sun that her decision to act quickly was partly an effort to avoid the kind of violence sparked by neo-Nazi protests in Charlottesville, where an antiracist protester, Heather Heyer, was killed by a white supremacist.
A mayoral commission appointed by Pugh’s predecessor had recommended last year that the statues of Lee and Jackson be removed, along with a monument to Roger Taney, the Supreme Court justice who wrote the notorious Dred Scott decision in 1857, ruling that African-Americans could not be American citizens.
Both of those monuments were removed overnight, along with one dedicated to Confederate women and another honoring Confederate soldiers and sailors, which had been doused in blood-red paint over the weekend.
Pugh acted after activists had vowed to destroy the monuments if the city delayed any longer.
Officials in Durham County, North Carolina, were less inclined to share the viewpoint of antiracist protesters, arresting a 22-year-old woman accused of helping to topple a Confederate statue there, and charging her with rioting and vandalism.
Trump’s intemperate defense of the white supremacists at a news conference in Trump Tower on Tuesday was widely condemned, but seemed to delight his neo-Nazi supporters, including David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, and Richard Spencer, who coined the term “alt-right” to rebrand white supremacy.
Trump’s latest defense of white supremacists reminded many close observers of his career that his father, Fred Trump, was reportedly arrested at a KKK rally in Queens in 1927.

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And of course the best interviews and latest updates from:


Democracy Now !


Democracy Now - Charlottesville 


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More links on the sidebar.  See you guys later.




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