Baltimore Sun | August 18, 2017
Op-Ed: Torch-lit Charlottesville images, Vice News report ignited a moral fire - "It's been almost a week since the torch-lit white supremacists rally at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, but the images of those Tiki flames illuminating hate-filled, white faces are still very much with me. They are permanently burned into my memory -- and, I suspect, much of the nation's shared consciousness. And that's a good thing. I believe these images triggered a moral awakening in some white viewers, which led to moral outrage when President Donald Trump refused to categorically denounce the people carrying those torches and the violence they generated that turned deadly."

... arrest warrants have apparently been issued for several of those unapologetic white nationalists who were featured so prominently in Elle Reeve's riveting -- and frightening -- Vice News documentary "Charlottesville: Race and Terror," which was produced by Vice News and aired Monday night on HBO. Good.

And congratulations to Ms. Reeve and her Vice News crew, whose Pulitzer Prize-worthy journalistic coup is garnering the sort of mainstream public attention and praise that they truly deserve. Maybe they didn't fully realize it at the time they were filming, but given what happened, it's pretty evident that they undertook significant personal risk to tell this story. If you haven't yet seen "Charlottesville: Race and Terror," it's now posted on YouTube.

It was nice to read tweets that Boston proudly stood her ground and easily overcame.

Some history we cannot afford to repeat.

We will wait a few days before going to the Museum of Warsaw Uprising. Our friends here suggest we give our hearts a rest first. It can be too much they say. This museum unlike today's is dedicated to only 40 days in Warsaw's history.

Pay a decent wage, then pay for 35 hours, so that an hour lunch is an actual restorative and opportunity to act like a human being with other human beings, and not a financial or time burden on the American worker. I would predict productivity would go up.

And if you're in the middle of a serious comment thread, throwing in something that would be more appropriate at open-mic night at the local karaoke bar isn't just jarring, it's distracting and leaves people wondering how serious the rest of your comment can be.

At the same time, I'm sure you feel like you are under a microscope and no matter what you say, someone is calling you out on it.  I get that.  Don't know if it makes you feel better, but it happens to all of us.  

From the article (which is long, and I haven't read all the way through):

Civil libertarians see a bright line in terms of law -- they have to protect a particular legal principle unconditionally, because otherwise the principle will disappear. Meanwhile, their critics see a bright line in terms of power. To many progressives, the question of who needs to be protected is much more important than the ideas being used to justify it -- and they feel it's simply not all that difficult to step in when a principle is being used to benefit the powerless, and step back when it's used to benefit the powerful.

When Trump was here the government power bussed in rural people hundreds of miles from Warsaw to be his "crowd". They chanted Trump and screamed like he was a rock star. It was not Warsaw that welcomed Donald though.

They don't know anyone who voted for their President. It was all rural more uneducated voters. But the propaganda is working. Polling showed the existing government has a 60% approval rating.

Their past President Tusk is who is to blame current President claims...for everything. Tusk now heads the EU, Poland was the only country in the EU to not vote for him this last election because the propaganda is working.

History is being "rewritten". Lech Walesa is now a criminal who colloborated with communists.

This is just a bit of what is going on here.

"This question isn't important because it's worthwhile to relitigate 2016 forever, but because it matters for the future. The press got badly played on the Clinton Foundation story, which was almost completely baseless, and they got played only slightly less on the email story, which was kept alive by a calculated campaign to drip information to the press every week--mostly from sources that should have set alarm bells ringing instead.

"Pointing out the failures of Hillary Clinton's campaign is fine but nonresponsive. The question isn't whether there were lots of things that decided the 2016 race -- there were -- or whether Clinton's emails should have been covered at all--of course they should have been. The question is about editorial judgment in an era of widespread media manipulation. If we don't want 2020 to be like 2016, political reporters should be willing to ask some hard questions about how and why Hillary Clinton's emails got such massively outsized attention." (Emphasis is mine.)

"Dear B*tch:

1) your poor grand parents got put into a concentration camp by the USA? Boo hoo hoo--you J@ps murdered thousands of servicemen at Pearl Harbor--did you forget that detail.

2) you know how many refugees got accepted by Japan last year? 27 total. But....America should open their doors to millions of parasites.

Pull you head out of your a$$ loser. We Trump people hate illegals, black thugs, Muslims and bombs, and gays who do nothing but b*tch 24 hours a day--and bleeding heart traitor morons like you who 'condone' it--Go to Hell.

Now everyone knows what Rep. Fukumoto has been dealing with on an almost daily basis, ever since the now-former House Minority Leader became one of the very few Republican elected officials in the entire country to join the Women's March last January 21. Another was her Hawaii colleague, 83-year-old State Rep. Cynthia Thielen.

Fukumoto was formally censured by the RNC the following week for her public remarks from the podium that day, in which she denounced Trump by name as "a bully" for his hatred, racism and sexism, and she was removed from her leadership post over Thielen's vociferous objections on the State House floor.

Police in Finland say a knifeman who killed two people in the south-western city of Turku on Friday appeared to choose women as targets. They are treating the attack as a terrorist incident.

The suspect, arrested after being shot by police, is an 18-year-old Moroccan. Four other Moroccans have been held.

The two women stabbed to death were both Finnish. Eight people were also injured, among them a Briton, a Swede and an Italian. ...

Friday, a team of civilian researchers led by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen discovered the cruiser's wreckage on the floor of the North Pacific Ocean, 18,000 feet below the surface. The discovery brings a measure of closure to one of most tragic maritime disasters in US naval history.

One that especially caught my eye was the Stone Mountain carving in Georgia. Quite impressive, the motive and symbolism apart, and with an interesting and somewhat hilarious backstory.

This is the strategy his generals have been calling for, and is not the one Bannon favored.  Can't say as it made any sense to me at all to put this in the hands of Erik Prince and his mercenaries.

The White House appeared to keep a tight hold on the details of what exactly Trump will say, but he is expected to approve sending more troops to Afghanistan, deepening U.S. involvement in the region and indicating a more traditional approach to foreign policy than he promised on the campaign trail.

The move comes after the dismissal Friday of chief strategist Steve Bannon, who voiced skepticism about an increased military footprint in the region and preferred outsourcing some of the duties to private contractors. Vice President Mike Pence and national security adviser H.R. McMaster were said to have encouraged Trump to accept his commanders' proposals to send more troops, though Pence's office said he remained neutral.

Trump has refused to commit to a specific strategy for months, causing angst among U.S. and Afghan military commanders who wanted to boost the 8,400 American troops now in the country. The Taliban have grown in strength in Afghanistan, and Al Qaeda and the Islamic State terrorist groups have gained footholds that have caused the military concern.

What's the over/under on how far into the speech Trump blames Obama for this horrible mess?

Professor Foner notes that before the Civil War, citizenship was largely defined by individual states. Some recognzed blacks born within their boundaries as citizens, but many did not.  National law, as held in the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, written by Chief Justice Taney, was that blacks were and would always be aliens in America.

This was the law of the land when the Civil War broke out and that is the tradition that the Confederacy embodied and sought to preserve. It is this tradition that Trump identifies with by equating the Confederacy with "our history and culture."

Many Americans rejected this situation at the time and offered a different vision for America. Foremost among them were the abolitionists.  After the Civil War, anybody born in the US was a citizen (birthright citizenship). Not just the end of slavery, but also, the incorporating of the freed people as equal members of American society. These egalitarian views,  were, for the first time, written into laws and the Constitution.

The idea of a multiracial democracy inspired terrorism by the KKK, antecedents of the "very fine people" who marched in Charlottesville.

Professor Foner states that when trump identifies statues commemorating Confederate leaders as essential parts of "our" history and culture, he is honoring that dark period. And, the rash of monument erections came years after the end of the Civil War, 1910 and the 1920s--the height of black disenfranchisement, segregation, and lynchings. Statues were part of the legitimation of the racist regimen and of an exclusionary America.