She was born as Alice Ruth Moore on July 19, 1875, in New Orleans LA. Her heritage was a complex mix: Creole, which in her city meant descendants of early French and Spanish inhabitants; African American, Native American, and white.
The lightness of her skin and hair influenced both black and white society. Her longing to be accepted as a member of the African American community was hindered by sometimes being seen as white, allowing her to “pass.”
Alice Dunbar Nelson (1875–1935) was a light-skinned multi-race woman, viewed with envy or suspicion by some African Americans, while still facing racial prejudice from Anglos.
She published her first book, Violets and Other Tales, in 1895 when she was just 20 years old. Like her heritage, it was a mix, of both short stories and poetry.
I had not thought of violets late, The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet In wistful April days, when lovers mate And wander through the fields in raptures sweet. The thought of violets meant florists’ shops, And bows and pins, and perfumed papers fine; And garish lights, and mincing little fops And cabarets and soaps, and deadening wines. So far from sweet real things my thoughts had strayed, I had forgot wide fields; and clear brown streams; The perfect loveliness that God has made,— Wild violets shy and Heaven-mounting dreams. . . . . And now—unwittingly, you’ve made me dream . . . . Of violets, and my soul’s forgotten gleam.
Much like the GOP and Trump have peddled the meme that PBO/HRC “created” ISIS, now DJT* has decided to capitulate (bend over backward, Ben Dover) to Putin, where the Syrian conflict will generate new memes for 45*, giving new life to trans-national terrorism.
Like outsourcing his suits to Indonesia and Mexico, the 2020 election this time will be outsourced to Malorossiya, Chechnya, ISIS, or Al-Q.
Trump has weighed in on the power struggle among Gulf States in ways that will have unintended consequences for decades. Hooray for Steve Bannon, dime-store Hegelian.
All that needs happen is a US flag carrying oil tanker to be sunk (with the attendant eco-spill to co-opt US liberals) in the Hormuz strait by “terrorists”; heck, do some Hollywood casting and make them an ISIS/Al-Q hybrid even if their identity is never determined because as the GOP likes to say, “nobody knows”.
We’ve seen this in several Trump trial balloons for US-Russian collaboration proposals, because if nobody knows, then Russian collusion/collaboration is OK, whether counter-terrorism and cyber-security, or propping up Assad for no real reason.
With three Hollywood executive producers in the WH, “nobody knows” is the national brand strategy.
Agent Orange does have that 007 fantasy, considering his “secret” meeting with Vlad, so becoming a global super-villain is only one minor step above being a WWE protagonist at least at the script level.
An Erik Prince wetwork team subcontracted to Chechens to execute one of these Trumpian projects would be boffo media historiography, even if the more spectacular media-worthy event would be airplanes crashing into the Istanbul Trump Tower Mall.
Trump will produce more conflict and never consider peace or peacekeeping, even as PBO policy has ensured the defeat of ISIS while withdrawing US troops. There will be more US troops somewhere, regardless of gender, soon with more private mercenaries
Trump ends the CIAâÂÂs covert program of arming anti-Assad rebels in Syria, a move likely to please Russia https://t.co/wvguaf8GvQ
â Washington Post (@washingtonpost) July 19, 2017
Joshua Green’s book Devils Bargain contains a hypothetical about Bannon’s failure to drive yet another wedge in the Democrats is a bit fantastic because the havoc aimed at immigration was always a much easier lift at the beginning considering how poorly Trump handled the GOP establishment.
Where it failed was not doing the implementation preparation which put a “Muslim Ban” in place as RW message but lacking tactical plannning. It was enacted without the operational work that could smoothly get the CBP/ICE as an administrative agency to operate efficiently, It obfuscated the reality that Trump was merely protecting his specific Muslim-nation business interests. Bannon truly believed or at least had Trump believe that he could use Executive Orders to rule by fiat and/or magical thinking.
Trump’s stupidity about the Southern Wall and domestic manufacturing and mining jobs has shown how that would never have worked out considering he doesn’t even know how many people work in some sectors, as in the mythical 45,000 jobs he never created. RW fantasies of anti-climate change resource policy ignorant of science have been assimilated uncritically because the world can be made into Trump golf courses, as long as there’s enough cops to keep poor people at bay.
The GOP Congress has acted like free-riders and wreaked the same bit of dishonest foolishness they tried in their constant attempts to repeal/replace ACA, since their goal has always been to dismantle all such programs in order to maximize short-term profit.
Their squabbling has proven to be their greatest weakness, since they have been reduced to making less confident and less consistent ideological defenses of Trumpism as Lord Dampnut can be expected to always screw up his initiatives whether as staff work or as messaging. It is Trumpism by Proxy, in the midst of a TrumpRussia cover-up.
The biggest linchpin failure has come from the Priebus side of the operation, whose fear of Bannonist RW extremism has made GOP legislative initiatives weak, demonstrated by today’s 48-4 “loss” assumed by Trump and probably among others, that Democrats don’t exist. 2018 should prove that delusion false.
According to reporter Joshua Green’s new book Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, Democrats were initially worried that Trump might actually fulfill the populist promise of his campaign, shattering decades-long voting coalitions and ushering in a political realignment that could cement the G.O.P. as the party of working people for a generation.
Key to the plan, as outlined by Bannon, was to combine a raft of nationalist policies—including restricting immigration and imposing tariffs—with a populist platform of increased government spending on military and infrastructure.
The result, Bannon predicted, would make conservatives “go crazy,” forging an “economic nationalist movement” that would be “greater than the Reagan Revolution.”
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer was among the Democrats worried that the administration would actually follow through with its pledge to make Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan its first big initiative, potentially driving a wedge through the party base between the “resistance” and blue-collar, union voters. “I know what you’re doing, and I’m not going to let it happen,” he warned Bannon, according to Green’s book.
Of course, as it turns out, Schumer didn’t need to worry. For one, Trump decided instead to expand his initial political capital on a deeply divisive effort to ban immigrants from several majority-Muslim countries from entering the U.S., sparking a major protest movement that effectively guaranteed he would not have meaningful Democratic support for the remainder of his presidency.
For another, Trump severely miscalculated how difficult it would be to govern, leading him to make a number of political missteps. “I deal with people that are very extraordinarily talented people,” Trump told Green, per Axios. “I deal with Steve Wynn. I deal with Carl Icahn.
I deal with killers that blow these [politicians] away. It’s not even the same category. This”—politics—“is a category that’s like 19 levels lower. You understand what I’m saying? Brilliant killers.”
As Trump’s failure to pass any major legislation in his first six months in office proves, politics, like health care, turned out to be more “complicated” than he thought.
His first infrastructure initiative, an unexciting measure to privatize the air-traffic control system—hardly the “revolution” Bannon anticipated—has already run into trouble in Congress, in what could end up being a major embarrassment for the administration.
Instead of moving forward with the trillion-dollar infrastructure investment Trump promised, Republicans are back to squabbling over whether and how to keep the lights on when the government runs out of money this fall.
If Schumer had known this is what Trump had up his sleeve, he wouldn’t have confronted Bannon about letting it happen.
Glenn Greenwald writes another warning of the fundamental problems of the Democratic party and its foreign policy history as rooted in neoconservative ideologies, or at least a susceptibility to them. It may seem oxymoronic to consider that there are neoconservative Democrats, but that is a line of thought that goes back through the Cold War where Democrats could endorse and implement hawkish policies in the name of some rationalized technocracy.
While Greenwald identifies the policy contours, he fails to consider how it is a political economy problem that must delimit the fundamental failure of any neoconservative/Democratic party alliance. Centrist policy lacks any critique that delegitimizes neoliberalism and inequality manifested by corporatism and kleptocracy. Changing MIC foreign sales policy alone could make the difference in selected regions and sectors.
Trump’s feckless version of capitalist creative destruction is symptomatic of a political economy of anti-democratic chaos which must end. The perfect storm of 2016 demonstrated how disastrous US politics can become, and Democrats cannot ally themselves with otherwise RW groups. Democrats cannot blind themselves to their inherent contradictions and absurdities like Bill Kristol’s one-time support of Sarah Palin.
Where the problems occur for Democrats are the maintenance of class/social division rather than seeing possibilities that do not return the world to marginalist attempts at monetizing all of its crises and maintaining an unequal and inhumane status quo.
Greenwald’s warning is timely but whether it makes a difference is best left for more direct and decisive action beyond accommodating neoconservatives and veering towards a center all too willing to submit to compromise in the name of a deluded bipartisanship. Policy that favors the center in “center-left” will inevitably submit to initiatives that run counter to progressive solutions in areas like economic growth, education reform, and regulatory reform.
Democrats’ time is better spent negotiating progressive policy solutions that have structural implications even if the interim is fraught with the realistic challenges of GOP malevolence.
One of the most under-discussed yet consequential changes in the American political landscape is the reunion between the Democratic Party and the country’s most extreme and discredited neocons.
While the rise of Donald Trump, whom neocons loathe, has accelerated this realignment, it began long before the ascension of Trump and is driven by far more common beliefs than contempt for the current president.
A newly formed and, by all appearances, well-funded national security advocacy group, devoted to more hawkish U.S. policies toward Russia and other adversaries, provides the most vivid evidence yet of this alliance.
Calling itself the Alliance for Securing Democracy, the group describes itself as “a bipartisan, transatlantic initiative” that “will develop comprehensive strategies to defend against, deter, and raise the costs on Russian and other state actors’ efforts to undermine democracy and democratic institutions,” and also “will work to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin’s ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe.”
This Democrat/neocon reunion has been developing long before anyone believed Donald Trump could ascend to power. https://t.co/exL11fn2ui
It is, in fact, the ultimate union of mainstream Democratic foreign policy officials and the world’s most militant, and militaristic, neocons. The group is led by two longtime Washington foreign policy hands, one from the establishment Democratic wing and the other a key figure among leading GOP neocons.
The Democrat, Laura Rosenberger, served as a foreign policy adviser for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and chief of staff to two Obama national security officials. The Republican is Jamie Fly, who spent the last four years as counselor for foreign and national security affairs to one of the Senate’s most hawkish members, Marco Rubio; prior to that, he served in various capacities in the Bush Pentagon and National Security Council…
In sum — just as was true of the first Cold War, when neocons made their home among the Cold Warriors of the Democratic Party — on the key foreign policy controversies, there is now little to no daylight between leading Democratic Party foreign policy gurus and the Bush-era neocons who had wallowed in disgrace following the debacle of Iraq and the broader abuses of the war on terror. That’s why they are able so comfortably to unify this way in support of common foreign policy objectives and beliefs…
What we see instead are leading Democratic foreign policy experts joining hands with the world’s worst neocons to form new, broad-based policy advocacy groups to re-shape U.S. foreign policy toward a more hostile, belligerent and hawkish posture. We see not isolated agreement with neocons in opposition to Trump or on single-issue debates, but a full-scale embrace of them that is rehabilitating their standing, empowering their worst elements, and reintegrating them back into the Democratic Party power structure…
All of that has changed, thanks to the eagerness of Democrats to embrace them, form alliances with them, and thus rehabilitate their reputations and resurrect their power and influence. That leading Democratic Party foreign policy officials are willing to form new Beltway advocacy groups in collaboration with Bill Kristol, Mike Rogers, and Mike Chertoff, join arms with those who caused the invasion of Iraq and tried to launch a bombing campaign against Tehran, has repercussions that will easily survive the Trump presidency.
Its technically very easy, depending on how secure the equipment is stored when it is not in use. To be effective, the hack would only work on machines that will not produce a record of input from the voter and the final result. Machine like thus are called direct-recording electronic (DRE) machines. Such machines are manufactured by a number of companies and are available in a number of different models. One such machine is the Diebold AccuVote TS, and a newer version of the AccuVote known as the TSX. Georgia, Delaware, Louisiana, New Jersey and South Carolina still use the AccuVote TS. Altogether, fifteen states use DRE voting machines of several makes and models, all with no audit trail.
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