February 19, 2019

I refuse to honor George Washington, and other 'founders' who enslaved and sold human beings

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/2/17/1833757/-I-refuse-to-honor-George-Washington-and-other-founders-who-enslaved-and-sold-human-beings?detail=emaildkre


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Every year when ‘President’s Day’ rolls around (which is really an excuse for people to have a three-day weekend and go to mattress sales), I light a candle and recite the names I know of those people who were held in slavery by U.S. presidents, and other ‘revered’ founders.
I pray for those whose names I will never know, as well.
The ugly history of kidnapping, enslavement, breeding farms, torture, disfigurement, rape, and the forced and coerced deportation of black human beings is personal for me, as a direct descendant of people held in bondage. In their name, I wanted to see Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam resign after photos surfaced from his medical school yearbook depicting students in blackface and KKK robes. I still do, and he has made things worse with his ill-informed “indentured servant” remarks.
From my perspective, enslavement should be personal for every person who lives here. It makes no difference when your folks arrived on these shores. I don’t give a damn if your ancestors never ‘owned’ a person.

February 18, 2019

In appointing Robert Mueller, Rod Rosenstein may have saved the republic--but also Donald Trump?

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/2/14/1834679/-In-appointing-Robert-Mueller-Rod-Rosenstein-may-have-saved-the-republic-but-also-Donald-Trump?detail=emaildksp

The pending release of a book from former acting Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe, and an interview with 60 Minutes McCabe has done to promote the book, have placed fresh emphasis on a few days in the middle of May 2017—days in which the Justice Department seriously considered mounting an effort to dislodge Trump from office. For eight days, between the time FBI Director James Comey was fired and the time special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed, it appears that the threat of the government being ripped in half was very real.

What’s emerging is a picture in which the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller by Rosenstein on May 17, 2017, was not at all an attack on Trump, but a desperate compromise; a bid to hold the nation’s leadership together by offering a means for going forward rather than sinking into competing star-chamber factions. As strange as it may seem, the appointment of Mueller may have actually kept Trump in office, at least temporarily, and it almost certainly saved the nation from even greater chaos.

Robert Mueller’s appointment has been widely seen as the biggest threat to Trump’s presidency—and it may still be. However, it seems clear at this point that Rod Rosenstein had a role in both opening and sealing a rift that threatened to genuinely rip the executive branch apart at the seams. The resulting chaos could have seen Trump removed. It might have also been the Reichstag fire that Trump needed to prove a “deep-state conspiracy” and to impose draconian changes in order to cement his power. Even two years later, it’s difficult to game out the possible consequences—but the idea that Trump would have been neatly packed up and sent away, with the government continuing on in some semblance of order, seems, at best, remote.

Check out the timeline at the link.