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20 Nov 20 2:32 am
+ The Thanksgiving Myth Gets a Deeper Look This Year
Brett Anderson
Wed, November 18, 2020, 1:58 PM CST
FORT PECK INDIAN RESERVATION, Mont. — On a frigid November morning inside a tractor barn in northeast Montana, 10 members of the Sioux and Assiniboine tribes joined in song to bless a thirty-aught-six hunting rifle, and to lift up the spirit of a buffalo they were preparing to kill. One man played a painted hand drum. Others passed around burning sage.
The hunt that followed took place on Turtle Mound Buffalo Ranch, 27,000 acres of rolling pasture on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. Every stage of the hunt was marked by a ceremony to give thanks for a buffalo that descends from animals killed to near-extinction by white settlers in the late 19th century.
The mass killing was part of a government-approved effort to seize land from Native Americans who depended on the animal to survive. The brutality of settlers’ expansion into the Great Plains and American West has been drastically underplayed in popular myths about the founding and growth of the United States.
Arguably the best-known of those myths is the story of the first Thanksgiving, a holiday Robert Magnan, who led the buffalo hunt at Fort Peck, does not observe. “Thanksgiving is kind of like Columbus Day for Native people,” he said. “Why would we celebrate people who tried to destroy us?”
It is now widely accepted that the story of a friendship-sealing repast between white colonists and Native Americans is inaccurate. Articles debunking the tale have become as reliable an annual media ritual as recipes for cornbread stuffing.
But this year should be different, say Native American leaders, scholars and teachers.
The holiday arrives in the midst of a national struggle over racial justice, and a pandemic that has landed with particular force on marginalized communities of color. The crises have fueled an intense reexamination of the roots of persistent inequities in American life.
This Thanksgiving also comes on the heels of an election in which 110 American Indian and Alaska Native candidates ran for office, according to the National Congress of American Indians, and on the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower voyage.
Winona LaDuke, the Native American activist and writer who ran for vice president in 1996 and 2000 as Ralph Nader’s running mate, believes that the country is primed to reenvision Thanksgiving as an occasion to come to terms with the cruelty Native Americans have experienced throughout history.
“I’ve seen a growing awareness, a wake-up, to the systemic oppression of people of color,” said LaDuke, an enrolled member of the White Earth Ojibwe Nation. “There is a movement toward justice for Native people. People want to listen.”
Thanksgiving, of course, is a time for listening, a welcome opportunity for prayer, reflection and looking back, and many Indigenous people celebrate it in their own way. But the problem with its origin story, LaDuke and others say, goes beyond misrepresentations about what was served on Cape Cod in 1621. (There is no evidence that turkey was on the menu, and pie couldn’t have been, because there was no flour or butter available for crust.)
Linda Coombs is a Wampanoag historian and a member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Wampanoag people attended the harvest ceremony that later became known as the first Thanksgiving.
“There was an event that happened in 1621,” Coombs said. “But the whole story about what occurred on that first Thanksgiving was a myth created to make white people feel comfortable.”
The caricature of friendly Indians handing over food, knowledge and land to kindhearted Pilgrims was reinforced for generations by school curricula, holiday pageants and children’s books. These stories were among the few appearances made by Native Americans in popular historical narratives, effectively erasing history-altering crimes, like the killing of tens of millions of buffalo, from the country’s consciousness. That massacre led to the mass starvation of Indigenous people.
“Erasure isn’t taking down a conquistador statue,” said LaDuke, 61. “Erasure is when you don’t even know the name of the people who own the land where you live.”
Work to reverse this historical amnesia has spanned decades. The National Day of Mourning dates back to 1970, established on Thanksgiving by activists in New England to recognize the suffering of Native Americans. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia now celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day instead of Columbus Day, recasting a holiday that honored an explorer who presided over the enslaving and killing of Indigenous people.
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17 Nov 20 12:02 pm
+ Perdue backs out of debate after being called a “crook," Ossoff will face off against empty podium
Igor Derysh
Mon, November 16, 2020, 5:02 PM CST
Democratic Senate candidate Jon Ossoff called Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., a "coward" on Sunday for refusing to participate in any debates ahead of their January runoff election in Georgia.
Perdue will be "represented by an empty podium" at the Atlanta Press Club's Dec. 6 debate, according to Georgia Public Broadcasting. The debate organizer said the move was not its "preference," but Perdue had "decided not to participate."
Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., is scheduled to debate her Democratic challenger Raphael Warnock in Georgia's other runoff race on Dec. 6, the Atlanta Press Club said. The two runoffs will determine which party controls the U.S. Senate for the next two years. Democrats will retain control of the House of Representatives as they reclaim control of the White House under President-elect Joe Biden.
Perdue likewise withdrew from his previously scheduled final debate with Ossoff before Election Day after a clip of the Democrat calling the incumbent a "crook" went viral.
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"It's not just that you're a crook, senator. It's that you're attacking the health of the people that you represent. You did say COVID-19 was no deadlier than the flu. You did say there would be no significant uptick in cases. All the while, you were looking after your own assets and your own portfolio," Ossoff said as he brought up the senator's stock trades.
As the Associated Press reported, "Perdue was among a group of senators whose stock trades came under scrutiny. Perdue denied any wrongdoing, saying the trades were handled by outside advisers and that he was cleared by a Senate Ethics Committee investigation."
After Perdue declined to participate in the Dec. 6 debate, Ossoff said, "Perdue isn't just a crook -- he's a coward too."
"David 'empty podium' Perdue," Ossoff also tweeted, adding that the Republican "can't defend his lies about COVID-19, self-dealing stock trades, his bigotry, or his votes to take away Georgians' health care."
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17 Nov 20 2:56 am
+ Trump, Trying to Cling to Power, Fans Unrest and Conspiracies
Michael D. Shear
Mon, November 16, 2020, 7:07 AM CST
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s refusal to concede the election has entered a more dangerous phase as he stokes resistance and unrest among his supporters and spreads falsehoods aimed at undermining the integrity of the American voting system.
More than a week after President-elect Joe Biden was declared the winner, Trump continues to block his successor’s transition, withholding intelligence briefings, critical information about the coronavirus pandemic and access to the vast machinery of government that Biden will soon oversee.
Some former top advisers to Trump have said that his refusal to cooperate is reckless and unwise. John F. Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, called it “crazy” on Friday. John R. Bolton, the president’s former national security adviser who wrote a scathing memoir about his time in the administration, said the refusal “harms the country.”
“Every day that he delays under the pretense that he’s simply asking for his legal remedies ultimately is to the country’s disadvantage,” Bolton said on ABC’s “This Week” program on Sunday morning.
The president’s attempt to cling to power played out against a backdrop of protests by Trump supporters and opponents late Saturday, with sporadic clashes near the White House. The police arrested 21 people as one protester was stabbed and four officers were injured. Rather than seek to calm tensions, Trump lashed out.
“ANTIFA SCUM ran for the hills,” he posted on Twitter on Saturday as he urged the police to move in aggressively. “DC Police, get going — do your job and don’t hold back!!!”
By Sunday morning, the president seemed to briefly acknowledge defeat, but he quickly reversed himself, declaring “I concede NOTHING!” He repeated lies about the vote-counting process, falsely insisting that Biden’s victory was the result of a “RIGGED ELECTION” orchestrated by the “Fake & Silent” news media.
Facing his final 65 days in office, Trump appears unwilling to break from the gut instincts that have guided his pursuit of the presidency and his exercise of authority in the past 5-1/2 years: a fierce determination to act only in his self-interest and a near-total refusal to accept blame or responsibility for his failures.
As the total number of coronavirus cases in the United States soared past 11 million and deaths neared 250,000, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease specialist, warned that 200,000 more people could die by spring if Americans did not more fully embrace public health measures, even with an effective vaccine.
“We are not going to turn it on and off, going from where we are to completely normal,” Fauci said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, challenging Trump’s claims that the virus would go away quickly once a vaccine was ready. “It’s going to be a gradual accrual of more normality as the weeks and the months go by, as we get well into 2021.”
Fauci said health officials had not begun working with Biden’s transition team. He also said the president had not attended a meeting of his coronavirus task force in “several months,” vanishing from participation in the panel.
But anyone hoping for a similarly quiet withdrawal from Trump as he leaves the presidency appears destined not to get it. He continues to deny facts and science in favor of baseless conspiracy theories and has moved aggressively to remove anyone he views as disloyal: a fact underscored by a purge of top officials at the Pentagon last week that was followed by an implicit rebuke by the military’s top general.
“We do not take an oath to a king or a queen, a tyrant or a dictator. We do not take an oath to an individual,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a speech on Wednesday. “We take an oath to the Constitution.”
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16 Nov 20 2:34 pm
+ Her Abuse Was a 'Family Matter,' Until It Went Live
Elsie Chen
Sun, November 15, 2020, 10:38 AM CST
Screenshot from Lhamo’s Douyin, the Chinese version of the TikTok app.
Lhamo, a Tibetan farmer in southwestern China, lived her life mostly outdoors and shared it online, posting videos of herself cooking, singing and picking herbs in the mountains around her village. By this fall, she had about 200,000 followers, many of whom praised her as cheerful and hardworking.
Over 400 of them were watching one evening in mid-September as Lhamo, 30, streamed a video live from her kitchen on Douyin, the Chinese version of the TikTok app. Suddenly, a man stormed in and Lhamo screamed. Then the screen went dark.
When Lhamo’s sister Dolma arrived at the hospital a few hours later, she found Lhamo struggling to breathe, her body covered with burns. The police in Jinchuan County, where she lived, are investigating Lhamo’s ex-husband on suspicion that he doused her with gasoline and set her on fire.
“She looked like a piece of charcoal,” said Dolma, who, along with her sister and many other Tibetans, goes by one name. “He burned almost all her skin off.”
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15 Nov 20 4:58 am
+ Trumpworld's faux-intellectual grifters are helping him debase democracy with bogus 'voter fraud' claims. And Republicans rake in the cash.
Anthony L. Fisher
Sat, November 14, 2020, 7:28 AM CST
CARSON, NEVADA, UNITED STATES - 2020/11/08
Trump lost the election, by a lot. Because he's too weak to admit he's a loser, he's damaging democracy.
Internet "skeptics" are amplifying his fake voter fraud claims by engaging in baseless speculation couched in faux intellectual inquiry.
The skeptics created smoke in search of a fire, but these gullible simpletons are just helping Republicans raise money, while GOP voters' faith in the democratic process plummets.
This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
Trump seems intent on not admitting that he lost the election. He seems doubly intent on ignoring the fact that he will lose the election by slightly more than the electoral college margin by which he defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 — while also losing the popular vote by twice that election's margin.
Instead of accepting the plain reality staring him in the face, Trump insists there has been widespread voter fraud, while providing zero compelling evidence.
He's been peppering his base with voter fraud allegations for years (remember his shameless lie about caravans of illegal 2016 voters in New Hampshire?). And the president spent months pre-emptively subverting public confidence in the election to keep his base exorcised if he were to lose (which he has, decisively).
Meanwhile, the facts are not in Trump's favor. The right-wing Heritage Foundation tried to prove an epidemic of voter fraud in the US and came up with 1,298 cases of alleged election misconduct. But that was spread out over 36 years and 1,826,807,464 ballots. Heritage effectively proved voter fraud is a negligible issue.
And in a joint statement by the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council Executive Committee and Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Council, the non-partisan government election watchdogs stated plainly: "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised."
"The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history," the agencies declared.
Republicans refuse to push back
But all that "evidence" is just Deep State hooey to the "very stable genius" in the White House. Trump still won't accept the message that he's been fired — with good cause — by the American people.
The president's disdain for the will of the people goes hand in glove with his idealization of "tough" authoritarian tactics and "strong" authoritarian leaders. Trump's never going to be a dictator, but when it comes down to it, he's just not that into democracy.
Also not being much of a reader or law-abider, it's conceivable that Trump may legitimately not know he can't illegally occupy the White House after January. And most of his fellow Republicans don't seem inclined to tell him, so they're sitting back while he smashes the retweet button on every berserk internet fabrication that comes across his screen.
(In a thread that spans hundreds of tweets —with more coming every few hours! — the journalist Issac Saul has attempted to assemble a comprehensive debunking depot for suspicious-sounding but ultimately baseless voter fraud claims spreading across the internet.)
To be sure, there are a few Republicans willing to "bravely" demonstrate that they live in a reality-based world.
George W. Bush's political mastermind Karl Rove wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that there's "no evidence" of voter fraud.
The Trump-appointed Election Assistance Commission Chairman Benjamin Hovland told Insider that the president's claims of voter fraud are "shameful," they "hurt the fabric of our nation," and the "undermining of confidence in our elections and our democracy" is "exactly what our foreign adversaries want to see."
Republican Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt — who sits on the board that oversees elections — probably put it best to CNN: "I have seen the most fantastical things on social media, making completely ridiculous allegations that have no basis in fact at all ... One thing I can't comprehend is how hungry people are to consume lies."
There'd be less to worry about if most of Trump's fellow Republicans similarly cared enough about the country's future as a liberal democracy to insist that he accept the will of the people, graciously concede, and help provide a stable transition of power to the next democratically-elected administration.
If the GOP stepped up and denounced the president's wild theories, then Trump could continue to be a clown who debases the country to enrich himself — but he'd just be an increasingly irrelevant one.
Unfortunately for our democracy, there's money to be raised, and two runoff elections in Georgia that will determine the balance of power in the Senate.
So the GOP tacitly supports Trump's very lame but very dangerous assault on democracy. They're ok with poisoning their party's voters' faith in a fair US presidential election. According to a Politico/Morning Consult poll, almost 70% of Republican voters said the election was not "free and fair," a figure which doubled in the week after the election.
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15 Nov 20 12:03 am
+ Tens of thousands rally in DC to support outgoing President Trump; 10 arrested as protesters clash with counter-protesters
Christal Hayes, N'dea Yancey-Bragg and Grace Hauck, USA TODAY
Sat, November 14, 2020, 5:39 PM CST
WASHINGTON — Tens of thousands of people clad in red, white and blue rallied and marched in support of outgoing President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., on Saturday afternoon to protest supposed "voter fraud" in the 2020 presidential election. But as night fell, skirmishes between protesters and counter-protesters broke out across the city.
At least 10 people had been arrested as of Saturday evening, according to the Metropolitan Police Department. Four people were arrested for firearm violations, two for assault, one for not having a permit, one for assaulting a police officer and two for disorderly conduct, according to public affairs officer Alaina Gertz.
The daytime rally – advertised by several names including Million MAGA March, Stop the Steal and March for Trump – started at Freedom Plaza, where the crowd's chants of "four more years" and "stop the steal" largely drowned out event speakers. Part of the group then marched to the Capitol.
The crowd was largely protesting "voter fraud," to "show support for our President" and to "preserve the integrity of the vote," according to various event pages. Trump has refused to concede and leveled baseless allegations of voter fraud to falsely claim the election was stolen from him.
Most of the rally participants were not wearing face masks, which help prevent the spread of COVID-19. The massive crowd, filled with red Make America Great Again hats and large flags with Trump’s name, was an unusual site in the nation’s capital, a liberal city. Biden won D.C with 93% of the vote, according to the Associated Press.
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14 Nov 20 10:50 am
+ As Soon as Trump Leaves Office, He Faces Greater Risk of Prosecution
William K. Rashbaum and Benjamin Weiser
Fri, November 13, 2020, 7:13 AM CST
President Donald Trump lost more than an election last week. When he leaves the White House in January, he will also lose the constitutional protection from prosecution afforded to a sitting president.
After Jan. 20, Trump, who has refused to concede and is fighting to hold onto his office, will be more vulnerable than ever to a pending grand jury investigation by the Manhattan district attorney into the president’s family business and its practices, as well as his taxes.
The two-year inquiry, the only known active criminal investigation of Trump, has been stalled since last fall, when the president sued to block a subpoena for his tax returns and other records, a bitter dispute that for the second time is before the U.S. Supreme Court. A ruling is expected soon.
Trump has contended that the investigation by the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., a Democrat, is a politically motivated fishing expedition. But if the Supreme Court rules that Vance is entitled to the records, and he uncovers possible crimes, Trump could face a reckoning with law enforcement — further inflaming political tensions and raising the startling specter of a criminal conviction, or even prison, for a former president.
“He’ll never have more protection from Vance than he has right now,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas.
