Spicey & The Mooch: Surrealism At 1600

Anthony "The Mooch" Scaramucci & Sean Spicer

Last week as I watched the strange, and lengthy, introductory press conference of newly-tapped White House Director of Communications Anthony Scaramucci, it seemed as if I was watching the presidency slip even further down the rabbit hole live on CNN.

It was during my lunch break at the gym so I was on an exercise bike watching on a screen with closed captions instead of sound.

Even still, Scaramucci's statements came off like a deafening confirmation that Donald Trump is determined to further insulate himself from reality by hiring yet another overbearing sycophant slash-Washington outsider who's willing to pledge loyalty to a widely-despised president saddled with a 35% approval rating - and no major legislative or policy accomplishments.

One whose administration is defined by crisis, incompetence and unprecedented political buffoonery.

Just hours after the embattled press secretary Sean Spicer submitted his resignation, Anthony Scaramucci stepped to the podium of the White House press room before the cameras and gathered press like some contestant plucked from a reality show audition.

Here's a guy who left law school to take a job at Goldman-Sachs before starting two different Wall Street firms (who's known affectionately to his peers as "The Mooch"), waving his hands and gesticulating and literally professing his love for Donald Trump in the press room of the White House.

It was like a Salvador Dali painting (with sound) come to life in a White House that was already considered surreal by many observers.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders glowering as The
Mooch gets chatty at his press conference 

The Mooch's hiring was openly chided by multiple members of the top White House staff because of his lack of communications or political experience and his reputation as a slick salesman.

Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, senior strategist Stephen Bannon and the now ex-press secretary Sean Spicer all opposed Scaramucci's hiring.

As the Daily Beast reported last Friday, "other top aides worried that the Scaramucci hiring would perpetuate the notion of 'Amateur hour' in the West Wing."

But The Mooch seemed genuinely intoxicated by being in front of the cameras, and as he gleefully took question after question and preened, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders actually walked out to the podium and stood a few feet from him with a scowl on her face to politely try and hint that he needed to wrap it up.

Probably because she reportedly wasn't happy that Trump hired him as her new boss, but also
because his press conference was stretching into 30 minutes, and because his slick camera style and easy banter was making her seem like the humorless, overly-confrontational, one-note right-wing partisan hack that she is.

The Mooch isn't stupid, and he's probably aware that Huckabee Sanders considers herself "Republican royalty" and above him because her right-wing talk radio host-Christian minister father Mike Huckabee ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 and 2016 - and she worked for the campaign.

But Scaramucci made his own bones as they say, and as he made the rounds of the Sunday morning news shows like a glowing 17-year-old at a debutante ball, he seemed to fire off a shot at Huckabee Sanders towards the end of an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN's State of the Union, saying: 

"Sarah, if your watching I love the hair and makeup person we used on Friday, so I'd like to continue to use the hair and makeup person." 

Obviously it's not hard to see why Trump likes The Mooch.

Farewell Spicey

Say what you want about Sean Spicer (and I've said plenty), he's always been a committed conservative Republican who is committed to the party, whereas Scaramucci has basically served Scaramucci, opportunistically allowing the winds of change to take him wherever they lead.

He was a finance guy for President Obama's campaign who openly eviscerated Trump on Fox News back in 2015.

Think all that crap he said about "loving" Donald Trump in his White House press conference was genuine?

Just take a couple minutes and listen to some of the things Scaramucci said about Trump in a Fox News interview - what a difference 24 months makes.

The only unfortunate thing was that this transition happened during the summer when Saturday Night Live is on summer hiatus and can't do a skit about this shakeup at the White House.

If I was an SNL writer, I'd play on the obvious tension between Scaramucci and Spicer by pitching one of those faux-SNL commercials for a fictional TV cop series called "Spicey and The Mooch". 

It would be a send up of one of those old buddy cop TV series like Starsky and Hutch.

Spicey would play the hard-nosed always-plays-it-by-the-book cop, married to his high school sweetheart for 20 years who's forced to partner up with The Mooch - the slick wise-guy cop with perfect teeth who never stops talking, plays by his own rules, has been married three times and now lives with his lovable old Italian mother in Brooklyn.

But alas, as amusing as it would have been to have both Spicey and The Mooch in the same White House communications department trying to unite their talents like the Wonder Twins to spin Trump's constant stream of lies, baseless accusations and incomprehensible nonsense ("Covfefe"?), Spicer decided that was enough.

Trump acting like an ass at the BSA Jamboree

While I thought Spicer did a real disservice to his professional reputation by being willing to stand up and defend what he knew were outrageous lies by Trump, he was loyal to him - and Trump may come to miss Spicey in the dark days ahead.

Since the shakeup on Friday, Trump seems to have gone off his rocker, with his blathering display of partisan idiocy in front of thousands of Boy Scouts gathered at the Jamboree in West Virginia.

Where among other things, he mocked President Obama (who actually was a Boy Scout), babbled incoherently about his healthcare initiative and, remarkably, talked about a cocktail party he attended.

The BSA has, justifiably, found itself facing a huge backlash from current and former Scouters as well as members of the public outraged that Trump would use such an occasion to act like a narcissistic jackass in front of thousands of young men.

Of course, as we all know, Trump intentionally says such asinine things to deflect media attention from his son-in-law Jared Kushner testifying behind close doors in front of Senate staffers, as demonstrated by his latest Tweets attacking his own Attorney General for not investigating Hillary Clinton's emails.

Seriously, did he forget that she lost the election in 2016?

Trump is like an elephant rampaging through a crowded mall, only now the job of defending this kind of quasi-delusional behavior falls on the shoulders of The Mooch.

A controversial figure with no communications or political experience, climbing aboard a sinking ship where he is openly despised by top members of an already-divided White House where chaos is the norm, accomplishments are few and the shadow of investigations related to administration ties to the Russian government loom like one of those erie distorted figures in a Salvador Dali painting.

Can this train-wreck presidency possibly get any more surreal?

Probably.

Cruise Missiles For Kids? Or Distraction From Russian Meddling?

5-year-old Syrian boy Omran Daqneesh in 2016 [AP]

Listening to Trump express his contrived personal agony over viewing photos of "beautiful babies" from Syria killed in the heinous chemical weapons attack on Tuesday strained the boundaries of hypocrisy.

As he used his fake moral outrage over Syrian children as justification to order U.S. Navy ships to launch 59 cruise missiles at the Al Sharyat airfield in Syria, the EPA announced plans to cut $17 million from two programs intended to protect American children from the effects of lead poisoning.

Back in August 2016, as the world reacted in horror to the photograph of shellshocked five-year-old Syrian boy Omran Daqneesh sitting in an ambulance covered in blood and dust after an airstrike on the Syrian city of Aleppo, the puffed-up anti-immigrant xenophobia that defined Trump's nationalistic presidential campaign rhetoric, made no mention of the hundreds of Syrian children being injured and killed.

One of Trump's very first bungled initiatives as president was the executive order banning Muslims from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. - a ban that included Syrian refugees fleeing the same horror of war that the erratic POTUS used as an excuse to bomb Syria on Thursday.

So was Trump really motivated by his concern for the welfare of children?

Or was his military order simply an excuse to try and shift public focus from the ongoing Congressional and intelligence probes into he and his top advisor's ties to Russia and Putin's interference in the 2016 elections?

Ethically-compromised GOP Rep. David Nunes

Remember folks, there were two major news stories released hours before the cruise missile attacks that cast even more clouds over the Trump administration's conspiring with Russia.

It was during the day on Thursday that the House Intelligence Committee Chairman, Republican Congressman David Nunes, finally announced that he was stepping down from his role in investigating Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

Over the past two weeks, the Republican Party has taken serious heat over Nunes' role.

It's actually remarkable that it's taken Republican leaders so long to understand that the ethical minefield of a Trump advocate leading a bi-partisan Congressional investigation of Russian meddling has exponentially increased suspicion that the White House is engaged in a massive coverup.  

From a strategic political perspective, the Trump administration has been on the defensive in the wake of the failure of the Republican-controlled Congress to even vote on repealing the Affordable Care Act.

The monumental conflict of interest from Nunes having secretly travelled to the White House to brief Trump on intelligence information about the investigation, classified information that he had not shared with Democratic members of the Intelligence Committee investigating the White House, only seemed to magnify the political dysfunction of a Republican Party that controls the Senate, House and White House - but has yet to pass one single significant piece of legislation.

Remarkable? It gets even better.

As TheHill.com reported on Thursday: "(Nunes') announcement came moments before the House Ethics Committee announce an investigation into Nunes over potential 'unauthorized disclosures of classified information'."

On the very same day, Jo Becker and Matthew Rosenberg published an article in the New York Times about Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner having committed a felony by lying about meetings he had with foreign leaders on a questionnaire he filled out to grant him top-secret clearance for national security.

Were the cruise missile attacks a cover for
Kushner's lie about meeting with Kislyak?

As the Times reported, those meetings include two meetings in December "with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, and one with the head of a Russian state-owned bank, Vnesheconomobank, arranged at Mr. Kislyak's behest."

So after both the Nunes and Kushner stories were preparing to dominate the weekend news cycle, by Thursday evening, at a hastily-arranged press conference at his Mar-A-Lago resort in Florida, Trump announced his decision to order the cruise missile attacks on Al Sharyat airfield just south of the Syrian city of Homs.
 Coincidence?

Knowing Trump's well-known propensity for showing a willingness to do or say almost anything to deflect negative press coverage, I'd say no.

Shocking atrocities against Syrian children didn't start with Tuesday's chemical attack - and Trump's own policies haven't exactly made concern for children's welfare a priority of his administration.

As Yvette Cabrera reported in an article for ThinkProgress.org on Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services conducted a survey in 2011 that showed that up to a third of the approximately 106 million homes in the U.S. are contaminated with lead-based paint.

Contamination that will have an adverse impact on poor children, especially poor children of color.

The EPA voted to lift restrictions on
the pesticide chlorpyrifos last week

As Cabrera noted, the Washington Post first published a copy of an EPA memorandum sent by the agency's acting chief financial officer David A. Bloom outlining a 31% cut in the EPA's budget for fiscal year 2018.

Cuts which include the two programs intended to educate Americans about the dangers of lead poisoning, as well as 54 other programs targeting issues like pesticide safety.

Those cuts also include a 25% cut in staffing at EPA, cuts which will have a direct affect on the health and well being of the "beautiful babies" Trump suddenly seems so concerned about.

The EPA's own research showed the pesticide chlorpyrifos poses a risk to babies, but they lifted restrictions on it last week.

Where is Trump's concern about the babies whose neurological health will be impacted by the presence of chlorpyrifos on the fruit and vegetables they eat?

Most people would agree on a unilateral UN-supported global effort to stop the civil war in Syria, just as most people are outraged and horrified over using chemical weapons on civilians.

But launching 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield isn't going to stop Bashar Al-Assad from killing his own people - with chemical or other weapons.

Nor will a cruise missile attack quell the American people's demand for a thorough Congressional investigation into links between Trump and his top advisers, and Russian efforts to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential elections.

Syrian refugees arriving in Lesbos, Greece

Frankly if Trump really cares about the "beautiful babies" in Syria or anywhere for that matter, he should stop gutting the budgets of the Department of Education, HHS, EPA and cutting U.S. contributions to the United Nations.

If he hadn't signed executive orders banning Syrian families from coming to the U.S. in the first place, maybe some of those "beautiful babies" killed in chemical attacks in a rebel-controlled province in northern Syria would be alive today.

After all, Assad's decision to use chemicals against civilians in his own country (again) last Tuesday may well have been motivated, in part, by the White House's own decision last week to publicly announce that it had ditched the goal of removing Assad from power as part of its ambiguous "America first" foreign policy.

As White House press secretary Sean Spicer said just last Friday, "With respect to Assad, there is a political reality that we have to accept,"

What a sad and tragic difference a week makes.

Oh and by the way, Reuters is reporting that the $90 million worth of cruise missiles that were fired at Al Sharyat airfield did very little damage since Trump informed Putin before the attack and Putin in turn informed Assad - so the Syrians actually moved planes and other equipment before the cruise missiles hit.

As the British-based Syrian Observatory For Human Rights reported, Syrian planes took off from the base on Friday and attacked rebel-held areas in the northern Homs province.

$90 million to make a point and the airfield is still operational - par for the Trump presidency and bogey for the American people.

O'Reilly & Spicey's Uncool Week

Sean "Spicey" Spicer and Bill O'Reilly 

Remember back in the fall of 2007 when Fox host Bill O'Reilly went to the famous Harlem restaurant Sylvia's for dinner with Al Sharpton?

He made headlines when he went on his syndicated radio show and marveled at "the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City...There wasn't one person in Sylvia's screaming, 'M-Fer I want more iced tea.'"

Now there were an awful lot of people back then, of different races and ethnicities, who sort of shook their heads in disbelief and realized that O'Reilly had in all likelihood, never eaten in a room with black folks before.

Of course that was simply O'Reilly's way of trying to be magnanimous in a cultural sense (and it was sooooo awkward).

But the fact that he was harboring the impression that black restaurant patrons who want something else to drink just scream out 'M-Fer I want more iced tea!' to their waitress or waiter offered valuable insight into the mindset of the hyper-conservative Fox News audience.

In particular the ways in which they tend to perceive, and portray African American people.

O'Reilly's comment to 78-year-old Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters during a segment on Fox and Friends last week proved that the prickly curmudgeon hasn't really changed a whole lot in ten years.

Or maybe he's simply feeling more free to tap into his "inner Bill" in the era of Trump when the Republican Party has mainstreamed bigotry and intolerance.

If there's any one trait consistently shared by the leading media or political figures of 21st century American conservatism, it's a startling inability (or unwillingness?) to grasp the basic subtleties of race and ethnicity.

Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters

Based on the smirky O'Reilly's snide comment about Waters' hair looking like a "James Brown wig",  it's painfully obvious that the complex issues surrounding black women's hair elude him.

That's not surprising given that he works in a televised ideological vacuum where he doesn't actually have to confront criticism and controls who gets the chance to question him.

After all let's be honest, at this point O'Reilly is basically Rush Limbaugh for TV.

Now in no way am I suggesting that O'Reilly is under some kind of obligation to understand or delve into the elusive complexities of black women's hair, but if he's going to make outlandish and dismissive pronouncements about a female African American Congresswoman's hair on national television, then he damned well better have some idea of what the hell he's talking about.

Maybe a good start for Bill would be to pop open a cold beer, sit down and watch the brilliant 2009 Chris Rock-produced documentary 'Good Hair' - a fascinating look into the $ 9 billion-plus (yes, $9 billion with a B) black hair industry - and, particularly for black women, how hair style is so closely linked with self esteem.

Or, if he prefers reading, Lena Williams' 2000 nonfiction book "It's the Little Things: The Everyday Interactions That Get Under the Skin of Blacks and Whites" offers some really interesting real-life snippets on the issues related to hair that really set black women off.

Check out this excerpt from the book that was published in the New York Times in 1997.

But I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for O'Reilly to do either of those things, he seems far more interested (and invested) in tweaking the racial anxieties, assumptions and fears of his Fox News audience.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer on the other hand should know better.

April Ryan (left) during exchange with Spicey

On Tuesday he too made headlines when he somewhat rudely talked over African American reporter April Ryan during a White House press briefing.

With the State Department in a state of chaos, rumors in DC are flying that Trump is considering replacing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with former Bush National Security adviser Condoleeza Rice, Ryan justifiably asked Spicer about Rice's scheduled visit to the White House.


As a Politico.com article detailed on Wednesday, Spicer got testy and defensive and after sort of talking over Ryan, he then told her to stop shaking her head.

The exchange had clear racial undertones in terms of how it looked - a perception magnified by the tone of Trump's campaign and presidency.

Spicer's comments also must be viewed in the context of the glaring silence from the White House and Trump on the various incidents of anti-Semitism and racism that have taken place across the U.S. since the start of the year.

Trump, who tweets ceaselessly about Muslim terrorist acts, was virtually silent about a 51-year-old white man named Adam Purinton shooting and killing an Indian man named Srinivas Kuchibhotla (and wounding another Indian man and a white man who came to their defense too) in a Kansas bar as he yelled "get out of my country".

Victim Timothy Caughman & James Jackson

When reporters in the White House briefing room recently asked Spicer about 66-year-old Timothy Caughman being stabbed and killed with a sword in New York by a racist killer from Baltimore who'd planned to murder black men to stop interracial dating, Spicer ducked the question by saying "I don't know all the details." 

People around the globe knew the details of that incident - why didn't he or Trump?

Let's be clear.

In 21st century America "I don't know all the details" is not a sufficient answer from the White House press secretary when a deranged racist killer stabs a black man on the streets of New York.

Spicer and his boss still don't seem to have grasped the role of the White House in staking out a clear and defined position on the issues that matter most to Americans.

It was Trump's decision to run for one of the most complex jobs on the planet based on his being an "outsider", and then surround himself with a cadre of senior advisers who have more rigid ideological world views and loyalty to Trump than they do experience in politics.

So in my view, the inability of the White House to stake out some kind of position on anti-Semitism, racism and intolerance demonstrates that they really don't yet collectively understand the role and function of the executive branch of the U.S. government outside of the external trappings and "prestige" of the office.

That's just one of the reasons why the decision to pull the Republican healthcare bill last week was such a rude awakening for the Trump administration - he's so consumed with the concept and appearance of power that he doesn't understand how presidential power actually works.

Will Republicans ever have this kind of cool?

Modern American Presidents like FDR, JFK, Reagan and Clinton and most recently Obama did.

They were all shrewd political communicators who understood that presidential power is a limited mandate rooted in the ability to effectively communicate and persuade the voters who grant that mandate once every four years.

The power of the presidency lies in the bully pulpit and the soapbox - the ability to persuade and move the needle to nudge Congress to act.

Not in sitting in the Oval Office signing executive orders in front of cameras and holding them up to be photographed like a fourth grader bringing home a pop quiz with a star on it from school to show his or her parents.

Like it or not Trump is the de facto head of the Republican Party, his poor communication skills combined with a press secretary who simply doesn't discuss issues related to race or ethnicity because he knows it will come back to hurt his boss, is affecting their ability to get their message out.

When you throw in a guy like Bill O'Reilly making bigoted comments about Maxine Waters' hair on Fox News, it paints the Republican Party and conservatives in general as cultural idiots.

Trump campaigns in Macomb County, Michigan

JFK had a "cool factor". So did Reagan, Clinton and Obama.

As we've seen this week, there's just nothing cool about the Republican Party today.

They just come off as angry, spiteful, denigrating, ignorant and overtly intolerant.

Unwelcoming and hostile to the bulk of the American populace.

As I've tried to understand the toxic hatred they've uncorked, which I experienced in my office first-hand three weeks ago, one of the things that's helped me to understand the mindset of the aggrieved working class whites in this country has been Mark Binelli's recent article in Rolling Stone, "Inside Trump County, USA".

His analysis of why the mostly-white, heavily Catholic Michigan county of Macomb voted overwhelmingly for Trump last November despite the region's strong union ties to Michigan's auto and manufacturing industry, has helped me to gain perspective on what's happening in this country.

At the least, it's given me more insight into who Bill O'Reilly was talking to when he insulted Maxine Waters - and why Sean Spicer is afraid to even talk about race.

Chad Robertson, The DOJ's "Pull Back" & Trump's Blind Eye

Shot in the back: Chad Robertson with his family

With each day, it seems as if the Republican politicians frantically tugging at the strings of power in Washington are turning the clock backwards to a darker place.

Attorney general Jeff Sessions has already indicated that the Justice Department under the Trump administration will "pull back" on using the power of the federal government to hold members of law enforcement responsible for the unjustified killing of innocent unarmed U.S. citizens.

While that is reflective of Session's history as an opponent of civil rights activists and voting rights (for people of color and immigrants), it certainly doesn't bode well for Chad Roberston's family to obtain justice from the legal system.

Amidst all the confusing clutter of mainstream media attention focused upon America's resident Deporter-in-Chief over the past few weeks, the deadly shooting of Chad Robertson by Amtrak police in Chicago did not garner the level of media attention it probably merited.

You certainly haven't heard Sean Spicer whining about "under reporting" over THAT particular case in any of his contentious, invitation-only White House briefings lately.

(But it's a safe bet that Spicey won't be complaining about the media "under reporting" tonight's bombshell Washington Post story about records showing Sessions lied under oath during his Senate confirmation hearings about his having been in contact with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential race...)

Any number of local Chicago and midwestern media outlets ran the AP text of the story about Robertson's death, but it felt like the questionable circumstances warranted more extensive mainstream media attention given the ongoing epidemic of members of law enforcement making the decision to shoot at unarmed African-American and Hispanic men for no justifiable reason.

Sadly, Robertson's death was yet another case of a member of law enforcement making a deadly decision to fire a handgun at a person based on a false allegation of the victim having a weapon that never actually existed.

Amtrak transit officer LaRoyce Tankson

According to an article posted two weeks ago on the Chicago Sun-Times Website, Robertson, 25, and two travelling companions were on a one-hour layover stop at Chicago's Union Station during a February 8th Megabus trip from Memphis to Robertson's home town of Minneapolis.

As the three of them were walking around inside Union Station, they were approached in what the Robertson family attorney Douglas Hopson called an "aggressive" manner by two Amtrak transit officers.

Robertson and his friends then exited Union Station to walk to a nearby restaurant to get something to eat.

When the two Amtrak transit officers followed the three men to the restaurant, they continued to harass the three passengers and demanded to search them - when Robertson, who feared for his life, began to run away at about 8:45pm, officer LaRoyce Tankson dropped to one knee and fired a shot and missed.

He fired a second shot that struck Robertson in the back, the bullet lodged in his spine and left the father of two a quadriplegic.

He died in the hospital seven days later.

Tankson was subsequently charged with first-degree murder by Cook County prosecutors and was held on $250,000 bail - but he was released pending a March 9th court appearance.

Now Tankson's attorney claims Robertson and his two friends were confronted by Tankson and his partner for smoking some marijuana in public - and a small amount was found on him after he was shot.

But does that really justify shooting the guy in the back while he was running away?

Attorney General Jeff Sessions

But remarkably, yesterday, as the New York Times reported, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Department of Justice would begin to pull back from efforts to monitor police departments and officers accused of the excessive use of deadly force.  

Despite the Justice Department's own report that identified racially biased policing as widespread and systematic in Chicago.


And despite unarmed 25-year-old Chad Robertson having been shot in the back by a federal transit officer while running away less than a month ago, Sessions, now the nation's top law enforcement official, reasons that:

"We need (to), so far as we can, in my view, help police departments get better, not diminish their effectiveness."

So in Sessions' mind, decreasing Justice Department scrutiny of overt cases of unarmed people being shot by police is the way to help them "get better"?

Does that make sense to you?

In the hermetically-sealed ideological bubble of Trump-world, that kind of asinine thinking, codified by the unapologetically white supremacist worldview held by the White House's top domestic policy advisers including Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller, it does makes sense.

In the real world it doesn't.

Jewish tombstones overturned in Philadelphia [Getty]

In the real world that kind of thinking essentially condones criminal conduct by some members of law enforcement.

And worse, it also reassures them that if they "make a mistake" and shoot and kill an unarmed person for no real reason at all, the Department of Justice under Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions won't hold them accountable for their actions.

Sound absurd?

It is, but it's part of the Republican vision for the American landscape.

And remember folks, that's the approach to police reform of a president who yesterday actually had the gall to publicly insinuate that the horrifying wave of recent bomb threats to Jewish schools and community centers, and the heinous and offensive desecration of Jewish cemeteries were the fault of Trump's "opponents".

Not the cowardly devotees of Breitbart News who openly play footsies with anti-Semitic and white supremacist beliefs like some kind of sick religion.

Nope. The delusional ass-clown who currently occupies the Oval Office would have you believe that his "opponents" were the ones who entered a Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia the other night and spent hours toppling over hundreds of tombstones.

 The same president who last night asked the members of Congress and the American people to "embrace this renewal of the American spirit." willfully turns a blind eye to the anti-Semitism his own campaign brought out of the shadows.

Repulsive acts of hate that are taking place around the country in front of our own eyes.

Sadly, we can also expect the current attorney general to turn a blind eye towards the epidemic of racially biased policing in America which violently and unfairly condemned Chad Robertson to the unfortunate ranks of The Counted.

Who's Ignoring Domestic Terrorism Based On Race?

One of the faces of domestic American terrorism:
racist killer Adam W. Purinton

Earlier today Donald Trump was quick to take the stage at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Oxon Hill, Maryland to rant about deporting brown-skinned immigrants.

As the New York Times reported, Trump's rambling CPAC speech "included a promise to throw illegal immigrants 'the hell out of the country' and a recitation of his law-and-order campaign promises." 

Right-wing hot-air rhetoric custom tailored to his overwhelmingly white conservative audiences that are replete with coded racist overtones and the intentional vilification and "othering" of people with dark skin.


45 has been big on pedantic inflammatory blathering about kicking people off welfare, simplistically characterizing cities like Chicago as vast post-apocalyptic wastelands and his incessant finger pointing at terrorist attacks abroad; both real or, as in the case of Sweden, imagined.

But interestingly, the White House has been virtually silent about a recent act of violent domestic terror that resulted in the shooting death of an innocent person of color and the wounding of two other people.  

On Wednesday night patrons at a popular sports bar in the affluent suburb of Olathe, Kansas called Austin's Bar and Grill were watching a Kansas Jayhawks basketball game on TV when witnesses heard 51-year old Adam Purinton yell out "get out of my country" before he pulled out a gun and began shooting at two Indian men.

According to an article on the Huffington Post, 32-year-old Alok R. Masadani and 24-year-old Ian P. Grillot both suffered gunshot wounds, and a third man of Indian descent named Srinivas Kuchibhotla was shot and killed.

Grillot, who is white, did not know the the two locally-employed engineers from Hyderabad, India, but according to an Aljazeera.com article bartender Garret Bohnen said in an interview, "From what I understand, when he [the gunman] was throwing racial slurs at the two gentlemen, Ian stood up for them." 

Like other terrified patrons Grillot hid as Purinton fired nine shots, but then he attempted to subdue the gunman as he tried to escape, but was shot in the chest.

Victims Masadani, Kuchibhotla (center) and Grillot

Purinton fled across state lines and eventually found his way to an Applebees 70 miles away in Clinton, Missouri where he allegedly told a bartender that he'd "just killed two Middle Eastern men."

It took the White House two whole days to comment on the shooting, by the time Sean Spicer offered a statement about the incident earlier today, it was to insist the shooting was not related to Trump's anti-immigrant fear-mongering.

At a press conference on Thursday an FBI spokesman said the agency is still trying to determine if the senseless attack was motivated by racial bias.

By any definition the shooting that took place in a crowded bar on Wednesday night has all the characteristics of a terrorist attack.

So where's the heated condemnation and muscular anti-terrorism rhetoric from the White House?

Maybe that righteous indignation only applies when the attacker is Muslim and has dark skin.

Perhaps the problem for the White House in this case is one of perception since Purinton, a 51-year-old white American male who looks exactly like a textbook definition of a Trump supporter, doesn't fit into the current White House definition of "other."

Regardless, what's becoming clear about the High-Chair President is that sometimes his silences can be just as revealing as his endless Twitter messages and rambling speeches.

For the past two weeks he's done little but blather on about terrorism and the danger that unprovoked attacks based on hatred pose to innocent people.

But for 48 hours this week the same guy who watches television all the time and Tweets about crap as meaningless as a retail chain not carrying his daughter Ivanka's fashion accessories, says nothing about a white American man hurling racial slurs at and then shooting two innocent Indian men minding their own business at a crowded bar full of patrons - while yelling "get out of my country"?

I mean honestly, who does that sound like? Same guy who told the audience at CPAC earlier today that he planned to throw illegal immigrants "the hell out of the country"?

Why don't Trump and Spicer mention domestic terror
attacks against people of color in America?

Remember a few weeks ago when Trump stood in front of an audience at the U.S. Central Command and leveled false accusations about the media underreporting incidents of terrorism?

Specifically he said:

"It's gotten to the point where it's not even being reported. And in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn't want to report it."


Later that day, in what can only be described as a case of the chaotic Trump administration trying to coordinate their flagrant (and frequent) lies, White House press secretary Sean Spicer cited "several instances" where he claimed the media had not adequately reported terrorist acts committed or supported by the Islamic State.

The White House released a list of 78 terrorist attacks that it claimed were underreported.

In response to those wildly unsubstantiated accusations leveled by the White House, on February 7th the BBC published a list of the 78 incidents and carefully detailed the ones they had reported on - all but 12.

Well the media is reporting on the terror attack that took place in Olathe, Kansas - but this time it's Trump who isn't talking about it.

Srinivas Kuchibhotla and his wife Sunayana Dumala

Last week Trump spent at least three days talking about a terror attack in Sweden that never happened, but in three days he's said nothing substantive about an actual terror attack that actually did happen on American soil where one person was killed and two injured?

He's got some balls using ten minutes of his CPAC speech earlier today talking about "fake news media" being the "enemy of the people".

And thus Srinivas Kuchibhotla, yet another unarmed innocent person, joins the ranks of The Counted.

According to the latest statistics from GunViolence.org that number now stands at 2,320 for 2017.

2,320 human lives, and it's only February 24th.

Just remember folks, one of the first pieces of legislation the Republican-majority House and Senate went after was overturning an Obama administration order that made it tougher for people with mental illnesses to obtain firearms - think about that when Purinton tries to plead insanity.

Who's the real "enemy of the people" in this country?

Poisonous Illusions In the White House

Creepy fascist thinker Julius Evola

My stomach is still hurting from laughing at Melissa McCarthy's second outing last night on the opening segment of Saturday Night Live as she once again skewered White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.

But Jason Horowitz's enlightening must-read article in this morning's New York Times about senior White House advisor Stephen Bannon being influenced by the fascist Italian thinker Julius Evola was no laughing matter.

As Horowitz's article notes, Evola has influenced 20th century Italian facists, far-right thinkers and modern day European Neo-Nazis with his bizarre mix of pre-Christian theology, white supremacy and 'Traditionalism':

"...a worldview popular in far-right and alternative religious circles that believes that progress and equality are poisonous illusions."


Unfortunately for this nation, Bannon is not the only White House advisor shaping foreign and domestic policy with established ties to Neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

As Michael F. Brown reported in an article posted on ElectronicIntifada.com, a 2007 email from Peter Laufer, a senior professor of journalism at the University of Oregon, shows that current White House advisor Stephen Miller worked closely with alt-right Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer while the two worked together to organize a debate on anti-immigrant policy when they both attended Duke University.

Spencer has become familiar to many as the speaker leading a crowd of white supremacists in a disturbing "Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!" chant as audience members gave Nazi salutes during an alt-right conference in Washington, D.C. back in November celebrating 45's election victory.

This morning the White House trotted out Spencer's conservative college homey Stephen Miller on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos where the anti-immigrant ideologue criticized the federal judges who struck down the legality of 45's disastrous ban on Muslims entering the United States.

White House policy advisor Stephen Miller

If you really want to get a sense of the depth and scope of the nationalist anti-immigrant hysteria at the core of 45's domestic agenda, take a few minutes to listen to Miller being interviewed with Stephanopoulos this morning on ABC.

He also tried to justify the current wave of ICE agents forcefully removing illegal immigrants, some of them working parents who've been in the U.S. for years, in an unprecedented wave of deportation.

Those targets include the heartbreaking case of 35-year-old Mexican immigrant Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos, which made global headlines last week.

As CNN.com reported, the working mother of two, who snuck into the U.S. illegally 20 years ago and was arrested and convicted by immigration officials in 2008 for using a fake Social Security number, had gone to an immigration center in Phoenix, Arizona (as she'd done regularly for the past eight years) to check in with government officials.

But despite that fact that she complied with the law, this time she was detained and deported back to Mexico within 24 hours.

During his interview on ABC this morning Stephen Miller defended such actions as necessary to national security and called these efforts "magnificent"even though the rollout of 45's immigration plan is almost universally viewed as a disaster.

(Did you hear about the American-born NASA scientist Sidd Bikkannavar being detained by U.S. Customs agents at a Houston airport and being forced to unlock his phone?)

Now I can't speak for everyone, but Ms. Garcia de Rayos' presence here in the U.S. doesn't strike me as threatening anything other than the Republican Party's narrow-minded vision for the cultural fabric of this nation.

Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos being deported 

Some critics immigrants rights advocates point out that this boost in the rapid deportation of illegal immigrants taking place across the U.S. is part of broader strategy by some Republican leaders to channel taxpayer dollars to the private prison contractors who will profit off of the sudden spike in arrests and detentions.

Miller also repeated 45's wildly-ridiculed claims that his proposed Mexican border wall "will pay for itself over and over".

Despite statistics from organizations like the Pew Research Center showing that net illegal immigration from Mexico into the U.S. has declined steadily since the Great Recession in 2009, and estimates that construction costs could cost American taxpayers over $21 billion since the Mexican government is on record as saying there's no way they'll pay for it.

To top all that off, remarkably Miller also had the gall to repeat 45's outrageous unsubstantiated claims of massive voter fraud in the New Hampshire primaries; and like 45 himself, offered no actual proof.

Predictably, 45 Tweeted his congratulations to Miller for eloquently spreading even more fake news, unproven claims and shaky promises.

One of the disturbing aspects about people like Bannon and Miller advising the the man with no political experience who now occupies the Oval Office is that here in the 21st century, the influence of far right extremist thinkers and those who openly advocate white supremacist ideology have utilized fear, ignorance, lies and misinformation to allow hate and bigotry to infect the highest political office in the land like a virus.

After all the suffering, persecution, horror and death that devastated Europe as a result of the rise and eventual fall of the Third Reich in in Nazi Germany, that dark flame still burns inside the hearts of some here in the US.

Including those who whisper in the ears of the erratic man who was Tweeting his anger over retailer Nordstrom's decision to stop selling his daughter Ivanka's accessories as North Korea was test firing a ballistic missile.

Men who, as Jason Horowitz noted, believe "that progress and equality are poisonous illusions."

Millions March & Spicer's "Alternative Facts"

500,000+ marchers gathered on the National Mall in D.C.

Throughout the course of the 2016 presidential campaign Donald Trump spent a lot of time boasting about having built a populist movement.

But yesterday was a rude awakening for The Grabber-in-Chief as he and other conservatives got a first-hand lesson in just what a genuine populist movement really looks like.

One that couldn't simply be dismissed with fake news.


Less than 24 hours after being sworn into office in front of a crowd estimated to be less than half of the 1.8 million who came out to see President Obama sworn in back in 2009, millions of people around the world took to the streets of cities and towns large and small to march in support of women and express opposition to Trump's election, conduct, statements, policies and Cabinet choices.

Aside from major American cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and Washington D.C., cities like Atlanta, Austin, Seattle, Sacramento, Nashville all saw sizable turnout that some estimate could be as high as four to five million people nationally.

It could be higher, there were over 600 different marches in the U.S., including 51 in California alone - there were marches on every continent of the globe in places like Paris, London, Berlin, Melbourne, Australia as well as in New Zealand and Nigeria as well.

And contrary to commonly held assumptions about America being divided by conservatives in the mid-west and south, and pockets of "liberals" ensconced in large urban cities and on both coasts, as a Twitter user named Mel noted in a Tweet, "Don't ever tell me that Arkansas doesn't care. Don't write us all off as ignorant rednecks. We are out here. #Women'sMarch" reminding people that folks in "Red States" like Arkansas also came out to march on Saturday.

Another Twitter user named Diane Kaplan from Anchorage, Alaska observed, "Largest crowd I've ever seen in 33 years in Anchorage and it's 15 degrees out and white-out conditions."

Thousands gather in front of the State House in
Trenton, NJ on Saturday morning.

It wasn't nearly as cold as that on Saturday morning in Trenton, New Jersey but it was still a cool and damp January morning.

I was up at 7am and picked up my 82-year-old mother and two of her friends from Princeton, an elderly Jewish couple, as well as my mother's neighbor from across the hall - an elderly Jewish woman.

We found ample parking in the lots outside the state office complexes and it was about a five-minute walk to the Trenton War Memorial where the march began with a rally and some speeches.

The march was orderly, well-planned and peaceful; it was the epitome of textbook non-violent resistance.

On the sidewalk as we followed the crowds to the War Memorial, a representative from the ACLU was handing out small blue cards with instructions on what to do if in case of being stopped by the police; which proved unnecessary as everyone was peaceful.

Marchers, including me, actually went out of their way to wave at the Trenton police officers who were guarding various intersections, and greet them and thank them.

By the time we reached the steps in front of the Trenton War Memorial, over 1,900 people had already packed the theater inside where the speeches took place.

An overflow room inside was also filled to capacity with another 1,000 marchers, but large speakers had been set up outside the building where the stairs and plaza in front were packed with marchers.

Crowds listen to speeches at the Trenton War
Memorial before marching.

While my mother did manage to make it inside the theater, I ended up outside on the plaza in front of the building as I'd lingered outside to take some photos of the crowd.

You can see my vantage point from the photo I took at the left where I stood near the rear of the plaza balcony next to the flagpole.

To my right and left hundreds of other people stood packed together listening to the speeches, and behind and below the plaza were thousands of more people stretching back over five hundred yards.

It's not easy to describe the feeling that I had being shoulder to shoulder with people of different ages, races, religions, sexual orientations and socio-economic backgrounds.

Any such differences were instantly rendered meaningless in the face of our common mission, not just to march.

But to stand up for women's rights and express our collective opposition to Trump.

There was a common sense of purpose, a feeling of optimism and reassurance after weeks of anxiety about Trump's winning the election.

While it was a March for Women, that issue was like a solid platform that held a wide range of progressive issues including climate change, mass incarceration, immigration policy, voting rights and racial equality.

I was standing behind a blond-haired white guy in his 20's wearing a gray sweatshirt with "Black Lives Matter" hand-written in black marker on the back - I was actually surprised at how many white people I saw wearing messages or holding signs supporting Black Lives Matter.

(Remember the elderly Jewish couple I drove to the march? They told me they had a Black Lives Matter sign alongside a Hillary Clinton sign outside their Princeton home - both signs were defaced.)

Sign I got from New Jersey Working Families

But there was also a feeling of humor and wit at the march too as people used creativity to channel their frustrations and anger over Trump and the extremist Republicans who've coopted our government through misinformation, voter suppression, character slander, fake news and gerrymandering onto signs.

But perhaps the most important thing about the march was that it was real and it was happening less than 24 hours after the inauguration ceremony.

During the speeches, which included Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman and representatives from the National Organization for Women (NOW), Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the Democratic Party and various local grass roots organizations, people in the crowd were sharing updates on other marches taking place around the world.

It was a living, breathing expression of Democracy in it's purest form.

It was an unmistakable message, and a clear warning, letting the Republicans who control the White House, Senate and House know that they do NOT have some kind of blank mandate to do anything they want - and a reminder that Trump lost the popular vote by millions.

It was also a visual reminder to Republicans that Congressional mid-term elections are only two years away, and while Trump won the presidential election, his reprehensible behavior, massive conflicts of interest, refusal to release his tax returns, open embrace of bigotry and vilification of the press have ignited the progressive independent and Democratic voter base and brought them closer together.

As Madonna noted during a fiery speech from Washington:

"It took this darkness to wake us the f*** up."

Sean Spicer's "Alternative Facts" - MAGA!

It's common knowledge that the Republican Party, in cooperation with the Russian government under the orders of Vladimir Putin used intentionally fake online news stories as part of a broader effort to manipulate the outcome of the presidential election.

So it was laughable that new White House press secretary Sean Spicer had the gall to come to the White House briefing room on Saturday and literally lie.

Not just about Trump's inauguration attendance numbers being far less than President Obama's, but as the New York Times noted, he also lied about total Metro ridership on Trump's inauguration day and tried to dismiss the turnout for the Marches for Women that took place all over the globe.

Faced with widespread criticism from the media in the face of overwhelming photographic evidence and facts that exposed Spicer's claims as lies, quasi-delusional White House spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway was quickly dispatched to appear on NBC's Meet the Press this morning where she doubled down on the Trump administration's policy of ignoring truth and facts and defending Spicer by saying that he didn't lie, he "gave alternative facts."

Trump and his top aides can try and justify their lying all they want, they can even introduce a new term for it into the lexicon as Conway did this morning - but the millions of people around the globe who marched on Saturday know the smell of a lie when they hear or read it.

As the Trump administration begins it's first Monday in office tomorrow, you can be sure they'll be slinging a lot of "alternative facts" in the coming days as they try to downplay that fact that a majority of Americans (and millions around the globe) soundly rejected Trump on Saturday.
 
As Trump likes to Tweet, "So sad".

PEOTUS Falls Flat In Front of the Fourth Estate

Trump & props at the podium   [Photo - Getty Images]

From the moment incoming White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer took the stage Wednesday morning to vent righteous conservative outrage over "fake news" I knew I wasn't going to make it through Donald Trump's first press conference since July.

It wasn't easy trying to swallow my lingering resentment and listen, but I gave it my best shot.

Hell it was a crapshoot whether the newly crowned PEOTUS would even show up.

His transition team abruptly cancelled a press conference back on December 15th that was intended to quell the growing unease about the unprecedented conflicts of interests his wide-ranging business interests would represent.

But as many pundits noted, there was no way that Trump's gargantuan ego and paper-thin skin could resist doing something to try and seize the media headlines from President Obama after he delivered an eloquent, stirring and emotional farewell address on Tuesday night in Chicago that made many pine for the class, intelligence, thoughtfulness and grace of the 44th President even before he departs the White House after two terms.

So after Spicer's angry repudiation of BuzzFeed's release of as-yet unverified documents allegedly written by a British intelligence agent showing that Russian intelligence has proof of PEOTUS in some disturbing compromising situations (think R-Kelly...), and a wet dishrag introduction by incoming VP Mike Pence - there Trump was at the podium.

Don Jr. & Eric get the keys to the business? Really?

In just the latest example of the orange-haired one's bogarting of Ronald Reagan's best moves, Trump stood next to a table theatrically piled high with folders of documents that we can only assume are his version of "proof" of his cutting his ties to his businesses.

It was meant to ape Reagan's use of big stacks of continuing resolutions as props as he did in the 1988 State of the Union address.


But for Trump it looked like a really cheap stunt, made worse by his assertion that he won't sell his assets, but instead put his two sons Don Jr. and Eric in charge of his hundreds of businesses.

(Funny, I don't seem to recall the indignant Sean Spicer expressing outrage over "fake news" when Eric Trump was re-Tweeting a phony story back in October about a man who claimed he was paid to protest at a Trump rally...)

In a scathing op-ed posted on The Guardian's Website Richard Wolffe eloquently summed up the impressions of many who watched some, or all of today's press conference.

He pronounced it an unequivocal "train wreck." 

Trump's tax attorney Sheri Dillon

As Wolffe observed, "After a rambling introduction about carmakers, veterans affairs and his inaugural celebrations, Trump finally arrived at his desired topic of the day: the non-resolution of the conflicts of interest that will embroil his presidency from now until he leaves the Oval Office."

When Trump said, "I will be the greatest jobs creator God ever created.", I considered turning it off.


Then when he brought attorney Sheri Dillon up to the podium to outline the plans for him to cut his ties to his business interests by placing his assets into a trust to be managed by his sons and executive Allen Weisselberg, I started shaking my head in disbelief.

Moments later when Trump returned to the podium and said he would have no conversations with his sons about any aspect of his businesses during his presidency, I just turned it off.

Overall my impression of Trump's performance at his press conference today is best summed up by a quote from a really interesting essay written a month ago by Sarah Kendzior on the Website TheCorrespondent.com that looks at how his controversial cabinet picks are shaping up to form a kleptocracy in the White House.

As she observed of Trump:

"He has a look I see on a lot of faces these days as people take in the news: the raw panic from knowing both too little and too much."