STOKING VIOLENCE

So, it has come to this.

Monumentally inept in confronting the coronavirus crisis, impeached for trying to bribe a foreign government, commuting the prison sentence of the felon who might have sunk him, confirmed as Russia's colluder-in-chief by a bi-partisan Senate panel, trailing in every poll taken for most of this year, illegally staging the Republican National Convention at the White House, obtaining no bounce from that week-long lie-fest in any case, narcissistically programmed  to care only and always for himself, and able to look evil in the eye and welcome it so long as evil returns the favor . . .

Donald Trump has now settled on the only means left to create a possibility of re-election.

He has decided to stoke violence.

As anyone with a functioning news feed knows, Portland, Oregon has been in the headlines for the past three months.  After the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police last May, protesters took to the streets of Portland as they did almost everywhere else.  For the most part, and as was also the case everywhere else, those protests were peaceful.   Less than two months in, however,  the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deployed irregularly uniformed officers to the city.  There were no names on their brown cammo fatigues and no insignia designating their federal department or service.  They were armed with Trump's egotistical weapon of choice, the over-sized, sharpie-signed Executive Order suitable for framing, and were told to protect Portland's federal courthouse from ostensibly violent anarchists.  

The federal force was neither invited by the state and local authorities nor needed in view of the actual threat.  Indeed, inasmuch as what Trump, Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf and Attorney General William Barr called "anarchy" was principally vandalism in the form of spray-painted graffiti on the courthouse's walls, the threat was de minimis.  Comprised of some customs and border patrol agents along with personnel from the US Marshalls Service, the force also wasn't trained in crowd control or in policing would-be riots.  Their  presence  predictably resulted in larger protests but instead of de-esclating tension, which is more or less Policing 101 when faced with hostile or emotional crowds, Trump's troops exacerbated it.  

Protesters were arrested without probable cause and then ferried away in unmarked vans to makeshift holding facilities.  

When the famous "Wall of Moms" stood between  federal officers and the protesters, the mothers were tear gassed.  

When a Navy veteran approached just to talk, the feds beat him.  

And when one protester merely stood  up . . .

They shot him.

Eventually, Trump's ersatz cops had to leave. The sideshow of their presence hadn't goosed the President's numbers (which was really all he wanted in any case), and Oregon Gov. Brown had state police guard the federal courthouse and shoo away the graffiti artists. Though DHS denied it was leaving, it stood down nonetheless.  Though the protests continued, their size shrank and none were violent.

Then came Kenosha.

There's a -- and now, it seems, almost inevitably -- "bad dream" quality to the events in Kenosha this past week and a half.  I do not know what happened as the police shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back on August 24. All I have seen is the video taken by an on-looker.  In it, Blake is running around a car and moving into the open passenger-side back door toward the rear seats.  One of the cops is grabbing his shirt, holding it tightly enough so that it rises off Blake's lower back.  None of us -- the great unwashed and uninformed -- knows what, if anything, Blake is saying, why he is doing what he is doing, or what the police are telling him, and investigators are saying nothing other than "be patient". His family attorney  has issued  a statement, and in it he asserts that Blake was de-escalating a domestic disturbance, was tasered by police, and was circling the car to check on his children when he was shot.  

Their view is that the shooter should be arrested.

But  even if that is not the whole story . . .

Can we do a reality check here?

Blake was surrounded by police, one of whom had his hands on him.

Did they have to shoot him seven times in the back?  Were they in imminent danger? 

Lots of folks who afterward took to the steets -- yet again --  think not.

And that is not unreasonable.

What happened in Kenosha thereafter, however, most assuredly is.  

Police vehicles were vandalized.  The windows of Kenosha's  public library were smashed.  Dump trucks were set on fire and Wisconsin's Governor had to call out the National Guard.  When the city's Mayor tried to hold a press conference with community leaders outside the city's Public Safety Building, he couldn't.  When he tried to get back inside, protesters blocked the door.  A cufew was imposed but looters burned stores even as Blake's family called for peace.  And then, in the middle of it all, 17 year-old Kyle Rittenhouse drove from Illinois with his AR-15 assault rifle, joined other armed individuals and self-appointed militia in the streets of Kenosha, and killed two people while  injuring a third. Afterward, he walked by police, hands high and assault rifle akimbo.  Though it is illegal for a minor to openly carry a firearm in  Wisconsin, he was not arrested.

Rittenhouse claims he went to Kenosha to protect property and help any who were injured.  He arrived with a friend (who was also armed).  On the night of their arrival, they stood outside a mechanic shop that he claimed had called for help. "Our job," he explained, "is to protect this business". That, of course, isn't his job at all. His lawyer claims Rittenhouse opened fire in self defense after being accosted by "multiple rioters".  The criminal complaint filed once Rittenhouse actually was arrested back in Illinois the next day says he opened fire after a plastic bag was thrown at him.  He has been charged with homicide.

Four days later, back in Portland, there was another killing.  This time, as a caravan of armed Trump supporters rolled through the city confronting BLM protesters,  one of those supporters was shot and killed.  The shooter has not yet been identified or arrested.

A normal President faced with all these tragedies would call for calm, implore people to leave their guns -- as well as any armed adolescents -- under lock and key at home, let the police protect whatever and whoever needs protecting, and deplore violence in whatever political garb it comes clothed.

Trump, however, is not normal.

In the past two weeks,  he has (falsely) accused the "radical left" of being responsible for the on-going protests in Portland and those in Kenosha, and regularly exaggerrates (to the point of caricature) the extent of violence in the nationwide BLM protests as a whole.  He has praised uninvited militia and the armed Trump supporters who have shown up in both towns ostensibly to protect property and restore order, neither of which they accomplish or are in any way good at.  He defended Kyle Rittenhouse, claiming -- with no evidence whatsoever -- that the teen acted in self-defense, and during last week's RNC, his now former counselor, Kellyanne Conway, made his real views explicit. "The more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns," said Conway, "the better it is for the very clear choice on who's best on public safety and law and order."

So, reduced to a bumper sticker, Trump's campaign  is simple -- "If the streets burn, Trump wins."

Yesterday, Joe Biden went to Pittsburgh to speak in a converted steel mill.

He condemned violence: "Rioting is not protesting," said Biden.  "Looting is not protesting.  Setting fires is not protesting.  It's lawlessness, plain and simple. And those who do it should be prosecuted. Violence will not bring change.  It will only bring destruction.  It's wrong in every way."

He condemned Trump:  "The president long ago forfeited any moral leadership in this country.  He can't stop the violence because for years he has fomented it."

And then he made clear the difference between the two:  "I look at violence and and I see lives and communities and the dreams of small businesses being destroyed . . . Donald Trump looks at violence and sees a political lifeline."

At this point, roughly 60 days before the election, the choice is pretty simple.

There's Joe Biden,  the man who would be President.

And then there's Donald Trump, the man-child . . .

Who can't act like one.

NEW DEAL MEETS NEW REAL

It's the middle of August 2020.

And we're in the dog days of summer.

Probably the "doggiest" summer in years.

Many of us are unemployed.

All of us are stressed and tired . . .

And clearly challenged.

Boy are we challenged.

A world-wide pandemic has resulted in over 5.3 million cases here in the United States and 165,000 deaths.  Worldwide, there have been over 21 million cases and over 759,000 have died.  Though our population of 330 million is about 4.3% of the world's inhabitants, 25% of its coronavirous infections have found their way to our shores, as have more than 20% of its related deaths.

Over the pandemic's course, Presidential leadership has for the most part been absent and in many instances inept.  Early intelligence was ignored when following it could have been determinative.  Expertise was sidelined when embracing it would have saved lives.  The amount of denial -- it'll all go away "miraculously" -- and delusion --  ingesting bleach, for example -- and sheer idiocy -- wear  a mask, it's not a political statement -- has been breathtaking. 

Fifty governors, most of them now broke, have tried to put together effective responses. Their approaches have varied, as has their effectiveness.  The stars of the show -- Governors in the northeast and northwest -- quarantined earlier than many others, were guided by science, and were disciplined in phasing in re-openings.  That is the reason New York, once America's coronovirous capital and still the jurisdiction with the highest number of total  infections and deaths in the young life of this disease, reduced its daily new cases from a high of 6,377 on April 6 to 69 just a few days ago.  The state's rate of positive test results has also declined, from a high  of 70% of those tested in April to below 1.4% now.

The current unemployment rate, all due to the pandemic, is 10.2%. Though the springtime CARES Act put needed money in the hands of small business, the unemployed and state governments, and thus prevented an incipient depression, that aid has now ended or run out.  Senate Republicans, meanwhile, refuse to pass a new bill.  About twenty GOP Senators are opposed to appropriating any additional money at all, and the rest are insistent that any supplemental not exceed $1 trillion, which is about a third of what the Democrats initially proposed and only half of where they agreed to go to as a compromise.  

As is typical of much of the GOP, their stinginess is heralded as concern over the ballooning deficit, a concern never expressed -- indeed, assiduously ignored  -- whenever they propose tax cuts for their rich friends and donors.  Not to be outdone, Trump entered the fray last weekend, signing an Executive Order ostensibly raising unemployment payments by $400/week. Because, however, a President cannot appropriate money and state governments cannot afford to throw in their required share, it is not clear where the additional funds would come from or whether any of it will ever actually wind up in America's household accounts.

In this morass, national politics has played out along our now-standard tribal lines. Though crises usually unite Americans, even if only for their duration, this pandemic has been an exception. For that, President Trump is principally to blame.  It is difficult in the best of circumstances to navigate the sea of lies, half-truths, vulgarities, neuroses, inanities and sheer stupidity that Trump and his band of grifters and C-minus enablers unleash on any given day.  But it becomes dangerous when the products of these transparently flawed characters are the prisms through which ostensible policy, if not actually made, must still travel. 

Trump's nakedly coarse take on all this is that "it is what it is".

The Democrats take is that what "is"  need not be much longer.

Joe Biden announced his Vice Presidential running mate this week, California Sen. Kamala Harris. Both Harris and Biden are center-left members of the Democratic Party and both have lengthy political resumes.  Biden was a Senator for thirty-five years and Vice-President for eight.  Harris is in her first term in the Senate but previously served as California's Attorney General for six years and San Francisco's District Attorney just shy of seven.

That, however, is where the similarities end.

Biden is old school.  He was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1942, which is New Deal, not new wave.  He lived there for ten years until his family moved to Delaware, where his father found work.  He wasn't poor but his family knew economic struggle.  They had moved in with his grandparents while in Scranton after his father lost work and in Delaware they lived in a crowded apartment until they could afford another home.  In school, he was an athlete, not a scholar.  And the part of him that is Irish, from his mother's Finnegan side of the family, is loyal, sentimental and, in the tradition of most Irish pols, flexible.

Harris is not New Deal, she's America's New Real. Born in Oakland, California to an Indian-immigrant mother and Jamaican-immigrant father in 1964, there's an echo of Obama in her background -- mixed race, educational over-achievers (her father is an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford; her mother, who died in 2009, had a PhD and was a renowned biological researcher ), adolescence abroad (she attended and graduated from high school in Montreal where she, her Mom and her sister lived for a time following her parents' divorce), followed by college (Howard), law school (UC Hastings) and a climb up America's greasy political pole (ADA, state board member and then commissioner, DA, AG, Senator).  Along the way, she had an important boyfriend in Willie Brown, but that help only got her in two doors; the performance afterward was all hers.

Biden and Harris are a unique combination of competence, boredom and reflection.  Each of them knows how to run a government, something Trump doesn't even pretend to do (see Pandemic).

In his Senate career and as VP, Biden shepherded important legislation through Congress (the Violence Against Women Act), helped pass and manage much of Obama's critical stimulus and recovery program in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, and was bi-partisan (John McCain was one of his closest friends).  His ability to navigate the complicated ideological minefield that has been the Democratic Party over the last forty years, which some see as evidence of unprincipled hypocrisy, is actually the sort of pragmatism from which incremental progress is in fact wrought.

It's not always exciting.

But it gets the job done.

Harris is where, at least demographically, America is going.  By mid-century, white Americans will be less than 50% of the country.  The rest will be Black, non-white Hispanic, Asian (including Indian) American and mixed, and today, those groups already constitute a majority of young Americans.  These changes have already had political effects, turning solidly red states like North Carolina and Arizona into swing states  and even creating the possibility of additional swings in places like Texas.

Choosing running mates because they help you carry their state or region is a thing of the past (last effectively done, in fact, by JFK in 1960).

But choosing one who helps you appeal to the changing face of America is not.

And Harris helps Biden do that.

(Note to the Lingering Unsatisfied: Indian-Americans are the second largest immigrant group in the country, and there are more of them in each of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania than Trump won those states by in 2016.)

At the same time, however, Kamala (pronouced "comma-la" even if Tucker Carlson doesn't care) is much more than a face, something that was lost in her erstwhile Presidential campaign and is not being sufficiently emphasized even now.

As a prosecutor, she significantly  improved the San Franscisco District Attorney's office, helping the City drastically reduce violent crime while also pushing for bail reform and and a novel re-entry program focused on education and community service that materially reduced recidivism.  As California's AG, she created a Mortgage Fraud Strike Force in 2010 in the wake of foreclosures brought on by the financial crisis, and in 2012 she successfully fought to increase (by 400%) California's share of the National Mortgage Settlement with the nation's five largest servicers.  In the Senate, tapping her inner-Clarence Darrow, she rendered  at least one of Trump's enablers -- Attorney General Barr -- more or less speechless.

Though paramount, the 2020 election has to be about more than getting rid Trump.

It has to be about more than that because Trump  has done more than any president in my lifetime to destroy governmental capacity.

Some examples:

Two crown jewels of American government -- the Department of Justice and the intelligence agencies -- have been decimated in an effort to make them either a vehicle of Trump's personal  pay-back (in the case of DOJ) or one in which facts take a back seat to presidential disposition (in the case of the intel agencies).  For its part, the State Department literally has dozens of critical positions that have remained unfilled for the past three plus years, and mindless deregulation has turned the environmental agencies into pollution machines. As for the Department of Education under Betsy DeVos, it is  basically a misnomer, more an adjunct of the NRA, corporate leeches and private schools as it has sought to arm teachers, defend lenders and phony on-line colleges, and cut public school funding.

On January 20, 2021, the nation's To-Do list will be overwhelming.

By then, we are likely to be well into our winter's pandemic of discontent.  At best, the economy will be struggling to regain its former exuberance, as will America's middle class, lower middle class and poor. At worst, if nothing has been done by way of relief beforehand, their position will be dire.

Whatever intelligence minefields have been kept from or ignored by Trump will have to be immediately tended to by Biden.  The rule of law will need to be restored at Justice  and under-secretaries and staff found to re-people State. A whole host of Executive Orders will keep an army of typists at work day and night repealing Trump's assaults on immigrants and the environment.

Unless the GOP has some sort of heart transplant (or mind meld with the ever-affable Biden), the Senate filibuster will have to go (lest, literally, nothing gets done).  And voting rights will have to be protected for the tens of thousands Trump and his state supporters have thrown off the rolls.

New York's Mario Cuomo once remarked that America's elected officials "campaign in poetry but govern in prose".  Trump, of course, is the exception.  He campaigns and governs more or less in a perpetual state of spite.  As for Biden and Harris, neither is particularly poetic as a matter of course, though Biden clearly recognizes it when he sees it  and Harris by dint of background has actually lived it even if she appears loathe to give public voice to it.

All that, however, is of no moment right now.

America is not starving for poetry.

It is starving for competence.

It wants a President who shows up for work before noon, doesn't think midnight tweets are part of the job description, deals in facts and truth, listens to experts, reads the daily intelligence brief, won't defend foreign fascists (or home-gown ones either), obeys the law, avoids impeachment, checks a good part of his ego at the door, and gets things done.

The last time the country faced such a daunting challenge, Franklin Roosevelt was President.

When Joe Biden was born.

The last time it produced a transformative sea of legislative progress was in the mid-1960s.

When Kamala Harris was born.

He's the New Deal.

She's the New Real.

And it's time for a couple of encores.

THE LEWIS LEGACY

After a three and a half hour funeral, civil rights icon and Georgia Congressman John Lewis was laid to rest yesterday in Atlanta.

What is his legacy?

At college in the late '50s, Lewis became a serious student of non-violence. In 1960, he  launched successful  sit-ins to desegregate Nashville's downtown lunch counters.  In 1961, he was one of the thirteen original Freedom Riders, refusing to sit in the back of buses as they rode from Washington DC to New Orleans.  In the course of those rides,  he was beaten in South Carolina and Birmingham, left unconscious from a beating at a bus station in Montgomery,  and regularly arrested. 

In Mississippl, he spent forty days in that state's Sunflower County penitentiary.

In 1963, at the age of 23 and as head of the nationwide Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),  he was the youngest speaker to address the crowd of a quarter million from the Lincoln Memorial, demanding voting rights at the celebrated March on Washington.  In 1965, on Bloody Sunday, he was planning to walk from Selma to Montgomery in support of those same rights and expected to be arrested. 

Instead, he marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge right into the skull fracturing baton of an Alabama state trooper.

And wound up in the hospital.

In the 1970s, he ran the  Voter Education Project, adding four million minority voters to the rolls.  In 1981, he became a member of the Atlanta City Council, and in 1986 he was elected to Congress. Until his death earlier this month, he served there for thirty-three years.  He was regularly returned to his seat in the House by two-thirds of his constituents.

At yesterday's funeral,  three former Presidents -- George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama -- eulogized him.

In those eulogies,  they recounted the emergence of a poor sharecropper's son from Troy, Alabama.    Preaching to his chickens, running for the school bus, becoming an ordained Baptist minister, and so ignited by Dr. King's Biblical call to non-violence and justice that he made it his life's work. 

"It is a great honor to be back at Ebenezer Baptist Church in the pulpit of its greatest pastor, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.," said Barack Obama, "to pay my respects to perhaps his finest disciple."

"He insist[ed]," said George W. Bush, "that hate and fear had to be answered with love and hope." He was so insistent, said Bill Clinton, that in 1966 he lost the leadership of SNCC to Stokely Carmichael,  refusing to believe that aggression and exclusion would be more effective than Dr. King's non-violent universality. "[I]t must have been painful to lose," said Clinton, "but he showed as a young man there are some things you cannot do to hang on to a position,  because if you do them, you won't be who you are anymore."

John Lewis never stopped being who he was.

In his eighty years, he fought discrimination in all forms . . . in all forums . . . against anyone . . . and at any time.

Even as an old man . . .

When he sat all night on the floor of the House of Representatives demanding a vote on legislation to end gun violence.

Even as a dying man . . .

When he stood on that street in DC on which  Black Lives Matter had been written, the street where protesters of all colors daily gathered in the wake of the death of George Floyd , the one from which US soldiers were illegally ordered to remove them.

What is his legacy?

It is, as Bill Clinton put it, "to suit up and march on."

"Bull Connor may be gone," said Barack Obama, "But today we witness with our own eyes police officers kneeling on the necks of Black Americans.  George Wallace may be gone.  But we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators."

"We may no longer have to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar in order to cast a ballot," he continued, "[b]ut even as we sit here, there are those in power doing their darndest to discourage people from voting -- by closing polling locations, and targeting minorities and students with restrtrictive ID laws, and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision, even undermining the postal service in the run-up to an election that is going to be dependent on mailed-in ballots so people don't get sick."

There's a lot to do.

"The story that began in Troy," said President Bush, "isn't ending today, nor is the work."  

On the morning of the funeral, aware of the praise that would come Lewis's way and therefore more or less on (psychological) cue, Donald Trump raised the possibility of delaying this November's election.  The ostensible purpose, according to Trump, would be to avoid mail-in ballot fraud, a fear he and Attorney General Barr have repeatedly stoked of late but one that lacks any basis in fact.

Almost immediately, Trump's latest trip to the altar of anti-democratic authoritarianism was rejected en masse.  

Democrats were predictably aghast but even stalwart right wingers thought this a bridge too far.  Prof. Steven Calabresi, a founder of the conservative Federalist Society, called the suggestion "fascistic",  and historian Michael Beschloss noted that during the Civil War President Lincoln had categorically rejected it.  Closer to home, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said it wouldn't happen, and legal experts far and wide asserted that it couldn't anyway, the November 3 election date having been set by statute and unchangeable absent a new one.

But is it?

There have been numerous reports over the last two years of unknown emergency powers available to the president.  Last week, former Sen. Gary Hart penned an op-ed in The New York Times.  "We have recently come to learn," he wrote, "of at least a hundred documents authorizing extraordinary presidential powers in the case of a national emergency, virtually dictatorial powers without congressional or judicial checks and balances."  No one, according to Hart, knows what these powers are or what specifically they permit, and delaying or otherwise avoiding elections may easily be one of them.   

For any who think Hart another Democratic Cassandra, he served on the Church Committee that investigated and laid bare the abuses of the CIA in the 1970s. He also co-chaired the Hart-Rudman Commission that predicted the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  

We ignore him at out peril.

And though, as President Clinton noted yesterday, "there are some things" his deceased hero would not do "to hang on to a position",  the same cannot be said of Donald Trump.

So . . .

What would John Lewis do?

I don't know precisely.  

But what he would not do is sit idly by assuming the worst was not possible or the best was likely.  He would not assume that past is necessarily prologue.  "We cannot treat voting as an errand to run if we have some time," said Barack Obama yesterday, "We have to treat it as the most important action we can take on behalf of democracy."  

At the funeral yesterday, the strains of "We Shall Overcome", that ancient anthem of hope,  reverberated through Dr. King's church.  It was sung to celebrate a man who was beaten within inches of his life because he insisted that all Americans had the right to vote.

Thanks to him, and others like him, we do.

We all do.

We still do.

And Trump better not fuck with it.

REFLECTIONS

REFLECTIONS

America has never in my lifetime confronted a crisis like the one it faces now.

The closest we came was with the Watergate scandal in the 1970s.

In that scandal, then-President Richard Nixon possibly authorized and definitely covered-up his re-election committee's burglary of the offices of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).  The objective of the burglary was to photograph documents and install listening devices so that the President's re-election committee had on-going intelligence on the stategy and tactics of its opponents. On at least two occasions  -- May 28, 1972 and June 17, 1972 -- the burglars broke into the DNC's offices, the first time to install wiretaps and the second to photograph documents. On the second, they were arrested while committing their crime.

In September 1972, the five burglars were indicted.  A Republican judge made sure the case did not die with phony, low-level pleas and stonewalling, and Woodward and Bernstein met sources in their homes (and the best one in a parking garage), unearthing the truth that the burglary and subsequent cover-up went all the way to the White House. A  joint special committee of the House and Senate was empanelled to determine, in the famous words of Tennessee Sen. Howard Baker, "what . . . the President [knew] and when . . . he [knew] it", and a Special Prosecutor was created to investigate the crimes and prosecute those responsible.   When Nixon directed his then Attorney General to fire the Special Prosecutor, that Attorney General refused and resigned, as did his deputy on whom the order fell.  After the third in command at the Department of Justice carried out the order,  a new -- and equally independent -- Special Prosecutor was appointed .

The Supreme Court ordered Nixon to disclose his tapes, which confirmed his guilt. The House Judiciary Committee voted to send Articles of Impeachment to the floor for a vote.  Seven of the seventeen Republican members of that Committee had voted "Aye". Republican Senators Goldwater and Scott and House Minority Leader Rhodes, also a Republican,  then marched to the Oval Office and told Nixon he would be impeached and convicted.

No one was pardoned.

Nixon resigned.

Crisis averted.

Things are different today.

In the early evening this past Friday, President Trump commuted the forty (40) month prison sentence of his friend Roger Stone. Just beforehand, Stone -- who would have had to report to prison this week -- suggested this would be appropriate payback for his silence.

Last November, a jury found Stone guilty  on seven felony counts of obstructing Congress's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election.  The charges included lying to Congressional investigators and intimidating a witness into not testifying. In particular, Stone lied about conversations in which he reported to Trump the imminent publication by Wikileaks of the emails Russia stole from the Clinton campaign, lied about his contacts and conversations with intermediaries who had knowledge of Wikileaks' plans, falsely denied that he had any emails or text messages concerning these contacts and communications, and threatened a witness with death if that witness testified.  

Had Stone not lied, there's no telling what he might have said to implicate Trump.  

At the very least, truthful testimony probably would  have proven that Trump himself committed perjury when he told Robert Mueller that he could not recall any communications with Stone concerning Wikileaks' dumps of the stolen Clinton emails.  At most, that testimony might have demonstrated that Trump and Stone in fact participated in a conspiracy to aid and abet Russian interference in the 2016 election. Instead, Mueller could not prove that conspiracy and Trump has thereafter regularly -- and loudly --  proclaimed his innocence, all the while denigrating any notion that Russia helped him win his election in the first place, and despite having regularly obstructed the investigation that tried to hold him to account, ten likely examples of which, the Stone case aside, were set forth in Mueller's report.

The commutation was widely condemned.  Mitt Romney explained that "an American president commut[ing] the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president"  amounts to an act of "historic, unprecedented corruption." Rep. Adam Schiff said it was a "body blow to the rule of law."  Vice President Biden's contempt was reduced to one word -- "Enough"-- and even some of the President's ususal  enablers demurred.  Attorney General Barr, who previously called the Stone prosecution "righteous",  said he recommended against commutation, and on the Sunday talk shows former Governor Chris Christie said he wouldn't have done it. 

The man who prosecuted Stone, Robert Mueller, was having none of Trump's  phony claim that Stone had been an innocent victim of overzealous prosecutors.  "Stone was prosecuted and convicted," said Mueller, "because he committed federal crimes.  He remains a convicted felon, and rightly so." Noting that "Russia's actions were a threat to America's democracy" and that Stone himself "had communicated in 2016 with individuals known . . . to be Russian intelligence officers", Mueller then made the obvious point:  "When a subject lies to investigators, it strikes at the core of the government's efforts to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable. It may ultimately impede those efforts."

Ya think?

All of this, however  was only Trump's latest outrage.

In June, he assailed nationwide protests of the death of George Floyd while in police custody.  Lumping the relatively few who vandalized or looted in with the otherwise vast majority who peacefully demanded an end to brutaity, he labelled governors "fools" who had to get "tougher", threatened to (illegally) send in the military to clear the streets, and then did so in DC so he could stage a photo-op.  This was more or less the reverse of his reaction to protests in Charlottesville in 2017, where a group of neo-Nazi protesters were counted as including some "fine people".

Last December and earlier this year, he ignored intelligence reports warning of the Covid-19 pandemic and never adopted a cohesive national program to acknowledge the danger and create the needed testing, tracing and treatment capacity to confront it.  Instead, he regularly encouraged premature re-openings, sympathized with militants who assailed state governors and legislators for ordering quarantines, and even turned the act of wearing a mask into a loyalty test. The product of  this colossal incompetence has been 138,000 dead and  a continuing pandemic that is now growing at alarming rates  in places where it had either abated or not been all that extensive.

Last Summer, he tried to bribe Ukraine's president, withholding already appropriated aid in an effort to get Ukraine to start a phony investigation of Joe Biden.  For that crime -- confirmed at the time by multiple witnesses, including one eye witness, and later by his own National Security Adviser --  he became the third president in US history to be impeached.

In addition to Stone, he has during his term in office (i) pardoned Arizona's ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio, convicted on federal criminal contempt charges of refusing to obey court orders banning racial profiling; (ii) pardoned NYC's ex-Police Commissioner Bernie Kerick, convicted of tax evasion in connection with trading on his connections to the response to the 9/11 attacks; and (iii) commuted the sentence of  Illinois' ex-Governor Rod Blagojevitch, convicted of extortion and  soliciting bribes in exchange for filling Barack Obama's Senate seat.

Unlike Nixon, Trump perpetually gives the middle finger to the law, to norms that have allowed American government to function for more than two centuries, and even to settled practices of civility and comity that make life liveable at something less than the level of a nervous breakdown.  As a matter of life-long habit, he doesn't even try to tell the truth, and over the course of his administration, he has lied so often and so outrageously that the media keep  a running tally.  It now stands at more than 20,000 lies or misrepresentations (and counting).  If the President were Pinocchio, he'd regularly trip on his own nose.

Congress will not save us.

Senate Repubican have already refused to do so.

Prosecutors will not save us.

They think a President cannot be prosecuted while in office.

The press and media will not save us.

They have published or broadcast his every outrage, lie, curse, crime, failure and pathology.

So have Comey, Bolton and Anonymous.

So has his niece.

No tweet has been left behind.

But the President marches on.

Often unglued, uninformed and  untethered.

Always unembarrassable,

Who will save us?

Look in the mirror.

That's who.

HOW LATE BECOMES NEVER

HOW LATE BECOMES NEVER

There was one thing I liked about former President George W. Bush.

He was always on time.

Politicians have a habit of being late.  In August 2014, The Washington Post calculated that Barack Obama had been "a cumulative 2,021 minutes late for events".  Bill Clinton was  perpetually tardy. NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio  has been so late so often that, when he announced his presidential candidacy last year, one wag sported a campaign button that said  "Make America Late Again".  In 2015, he was even an hour and twenty minutes  late for a speech he delivered on climate change at the Vatican.

Donald Trump is his own kind of late.  Like other pols, he routinely shows up late to events and announcements. As is usually the case,  he was hours late to his campaign rally in Oklahoma two weeks ago.  During the spring and winter, his afternoon coronavirus pressers started late, often by more than an hour.  In 2017, 2018 and  2019, he was late to meetings of the G-7.

Unlike other presidents, Trump also doesn't show up in the Oval Office on most days until  11am.  In other words, he is generally . . .

Late for work.

Explanations (or excuses) for being late abound.  Polticians typically over-schedule themselves and this creates multiple opportunities for delay; one event or meeting goes over (they love to talk) and everything thereafter can't start or finish on time.  They could, of course, pack less into a single day or stay rigorously on the clock. But the first option  is never tried and the second is (genetically) impossible (Bush II excepted).

In the archive of consequence, being late is rarely fatal. Clinton, Obama and Trump won their elections in spite of their allergy to time, and George W. Bush did not leave office any more loved because he respected it. For some, late is an opportunity. Think bankers who have turned it into a profit center with all their late fees.  For others, it's the excuse for a low-rent penalty. Think the IRS . . .

Or the NFL.

It's also a widely shared belief that late beats not-at-all.

Better late than never . . .

They say.

But is it?

Is late merely annoying?

Or can it be fatal?

The two biggest crises in America today are Covid-19 and racism, the latter manifest most obviously at this time in  the deaths of blacks in police custody, and with both, delay has been the enemy of progress.

With coronavirus, an early unwillingness to acknowledge the potential severity of the problem left America flat-footed when the pandemic was upon us. Denial at the top gave away precious months that should have been used to stock up on supplies, develop a competent testing and tracing regime, and implement early quarantines that could have signifiantly lowered both the rate of infection and death.  And today, months into the crisis, premature re-openings coupled with an unwilllingness in certain precincts to require masks or enforce distancing and tracing has allowed the epidemic to spread and grow exponentially in areas that had been spared or were less severely affected.

With racism, a head-in-the-sand approach has defined reality for centuries.  From 1619 until 1865, we were explicit (violently so) in our devotion to the notion that blacks were inferior, and in the 155 years hence, our progress in resolving that problem has been intermittent, always divisive and often non-existent.

Following the Civil War, it took a hundred years to pass and enforce the civil rights laws.  While we were waiting, Jim Crow, lynchings and discrimination were the order of the day for most of that time.  In the later years, Brown v. Board of Education, desegregation, the 1960s Voting and Civil Right Acts and Obama represented undoubted progress.  But each was met with backlash and retreat.  One result is that, with police today, a formal opposition to brutality (which is illegal everywhere) runs aground on a consistent unwillingness to fire the relatively few bad cops who cause repeated problems. Protected by culture and contract, they remain on the beat.

This past Saturday, July 4, America celebrated Independence Day.

As with many things American, the day itself is bathed in paradox.  It's the day we celebrate the Declaration of Independence, a document which endorsed Revolution based on the simple truth that "all men are created equal" but whose prinicpal author owned more than 600 slaves during his lifetime. As it turns out, that large paradox was joined by a host of minor ones.  Independence was actally declared on July 2 and the docment was not fully signed until August 2.  All that happened on July 4 is that the Continential Congress approved the final text.  In other words, what we are celebrating on July 4 is really . . .

The day we stopped editing the Declaration.

Which is fitting.

Because we have been caught in a sort of editing trap for the last 244 years . . .

Embracing the document's fundamental principle but unable to write it into our actual history.

Even today.

On Friday, President Trump went to Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota.  Before about 7,000 maskless supporters, he kicked off the naton's Independence Day weekend with an attack on those who have been protesting the killng of George Floyd under the banner of Black Lives Matter.  He called them "angy mobs . . . trying to . . . unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities", supporters of the "new far-left fascism" in "our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms" that ""sham[es] dissenters and demand[s] total submission from anyone who disagrees."  "If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantra, and follow its commandments," said the President, "then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished."

None of this is true.

The vast majority of protests over the past months have been peaceful and non-violent.  In many cases where property destruction appeared imminent, protesters themselves stepped in to de-escalate any violence.  This was particularly true in Newark, NJ, where police and protesters together stared down those whose intentions were either unclear or were veering in the wrong direction. Moreover, the notion that "schools, newsrooms and even . . . corporate boardrooms" have now been infected with "far-left fascism" is comical.  Tell that to Fox, the Wall Street Journal,  Falwwell's Liberty University or the entire SEC.  None have been shuttered nor are any less than free to pursue whatever interests they perceive as their own.  For years, blacks couldn't sit at lunch counters with whites, but boycotting Walmart is now  "the very definition of totalitarianism"?

Wrong, Donald.

It's actually the very definition of capitalism.

Trump is an Orwellian farce.  He pins labels (e.g., fascist, a/k/a a fact-free authoritarian who demonizes minority races, immigrants, and a free press while seizing extra-legal and/or illegal powers) on opponents that don't at all describe them but come pretty close to describing him.  He governs by fear when he governs at all, routinely lies, and literally tries to destroy any who dissent, a large portion of whom are the Mattises, Kellys, McMasters, Scaramuccis and Boltons who once worked for and supported him.  At Mt. Rushmore, he created a fictive universe of violent counter-culturalists bent on "destroying" American "civilization", all the while ignoring the one reality, Covid-19, that has already killed 130,000 of us.

The virus is unmoved by Trump's agitprop.  It creates its own deadline with reality.  You can ignore him, wear a mask, socially distance and live.  Or you can stand shoulder-to-shoulder, unmasked,  in a newly re-opened bar, get sick, and either die or give it to someone who may.  You can even be undecided and uncertain, masked one day, maskless the next; properly distanced on Tuesday but tired of it all by Friday; one day cocky in the face of a President who refuses to model good behavior, the next suitably brought to shore when you meet someone who is sick.

The President doesn't care.

You, however, might.

Because with Covid-19,  late may not be better than never.

It may be never.

The same is true with police brutality.

It is no accident that the Black Lives Matter movement arose in  2013.  These were the latter years of the Obama administration, and Obama himself was the personification of progress on civil rights.  Many thought that if he could be elected -- and he obviously could because he was --  our worst racial sins were behind us.

Late, it seemed, had finally  beaten never.

But it hadn't.

And the "all lives matter" opposition actually proves it.

One would think that a nation over Jim Crow and lynchings, and able to put a black man in the Oval Office, would not have a terribly difficult time rooting out the small number of police who cause problems, that the fact that "all lives matter" would have by now produced a reality in which blacks no longer have to worry about their own being in peril at the hands of the state, that "they" are in fact treated as part of and not apart from the "all".

But it hasn't.

And they haven't been.

In 2013, George Zimmerman disobeyed police orders that he cease following Trayvon Martin, killed him after doing so, and was acquitted.  In 2014, Michael Brown was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner was killed by the NYPD. Neither officer was charged.  Between then and now, more than a dozen unarmed blacks  have similarly been killed while in police custody or pursuit or by de facto vigilantes.

In 2016, Donald Trump called immigrant Mexicans rapists and became President.

In 2020, to win again, he is calling Black Live Matters protesters totalitarian fascists.

Trump dresses up his racism in stylized artifacts designed to deflect the charge before it can be made. At Mt. Rushmore, he lumped all the post-George Floyd protesters -- black and white, violent and non-violent -- into one undifferentiated "totalitarian" and "far-left fascis[t]" camp.  He did the same to those who have called for removal of Confederate monuments and statues.  They became  an undifferentiated  part of the "angry mobs . . . trying to tear down statues of our Founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities."

In his world, non-violent protesters who want cops held to account stand accused (falsely) of "attack[ing] . . . our magnificent liberty", and those who want Generals Lee or Stonewall Jackson taken off their public pedestals stand accused (falsely) of wanting George Washington removed fom his as well.

Staw men erected, the bad cops go unpunished,  the statues still stand . . .

And late once again becomes never.

STATUES OF LIMITATION

STATUES OF LIMITATION

There are more than 1500 monuments to the Confederacy in the United States, over 700 of which are  statues. 

Five of those statues -- including those of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens -- are in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol building.  In the Hall, each  of the fifty states is allowed to designate two of its citizens for sculptured immortality.  Mississippi long ago designated Davis as one of its honorees, and the Stephens statue was given by Georgia in 1927.   For years, one of Virginia's heroes, Robert E. Lee, had a statue in the Hall.  It is now in the Capitol crypt, still part of the government's collection and on display, but at a remove from the glory of the rotunda's Hall.

Over the course of the last twenty years, there have been regular efforts to remove Confederate statues and monuments from public places and to re-name highways, streets, parks, buildings and colleges  named for Confederate leaders.  Those efforts wax and wane and in any case are both monumental (pun intended) and disjointed given the sheer number of memorials and the fact that they exist in pretty much every corner of the country. 

As of the summer of 2017, more than a hundred roads in eleven states were named for Jefferson Davis.  Since then,  countless memorials or designations of one sort or another have come down or been changed thoughout the old south, many of the Davis highways foremost  among them. The same has also occurred in New York, Vermont, Wisconsin, Montana, Washington and  California -- decidedly non-Confederate precincts that nevertheless were moved to remember for one reason or another the south's putative heroes.

Removal, however,  has not been universally approved.

In a 2017 Reuters poll, 54% said the monuments should remain, 24% said they should be removed, and 19% were undecided. Though the recent killing of George Floyd sparked renewed removal efforts, public opinion remains more or less unchanged.  In this month's HuffPost/YouGov poll, 51% oppose flying the Confederate flag but 49% also oppose removing the monuments.  This indecision is also reflected in legislative efforts.  Virginia, with more Confederate monuments than any other state, just repealed a law protecting them, and Congressional Democrats want to introduce legislation to have the Capitol remove them. The Virginia law, however,  gives localities the final say on the issue, and the Congressional  effort is a long-shot and not remotely bi-partisan. 

So most of the statues still stand.

And the question arises . . .

What gives?

Why are monuments to slavery and treason fit symbols for public art?

In our naming and sculpting, what are we trying to remember?

Or forget?

To begin, the monument craze wasn't a natural or inevitable outcome of the Civil War.  Robert E. Lee himself opposed the whole notion, rejecting any memorials other than cemetary headstones and explaining to any who asked that monuments would keep divisions alive and retard development in the south.  He refused to fly the Confederate flag at the college over which he presided.  He was not buried in his military uniform, and the southern Civil War veterans who walked him to his final rest were similarly non-uniformed. His alternative, a form of suppressed acceptance, may not have been any better inasmuch as it counseled the sort of stiff-upper-lip denial that often mistakes a vacuum of ignorance for tolerance and progress.

But it was certainly a far cry from the "lost cause" mythology that came in its place.

And come it did.

In 1866, Edward A. Pollard, a Virginia journalist, published The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates and laid the first of the myth's two foundations. The south's erstwhile "system of servitude", Pollard announced,  was "the mildest in the world", did not "rest on acts of debasement", "elevated the African", and was therefore one in which "that odious term 'slavery'" could not be "properly applied". Two years later, Pollard followed up with The Lost Cause Regained and laid the second foundation -- state sovereignty.  Thereafter, the warriors in this just fight were said to have lost only because of the north's "overwhelming numbers and resources" (according to Lee) and uncivilized "ferocity" (according Jefferson Davis).

New ideology announced, the defeated south eventually re-made itself into the segregated, white supremacist, Jim Crow post-bellum south.

And valorized Confederate veterans.

If there is any group that spearheaded monument making, it was the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC).  Formed in 1894, the UDC's object was to commemorate Confederate soldiers and erect monuments to them.  To the UDC, the rebellion had been "a glorious fight" and those who undertook it "hallowed" veterans.  Out of the universe of statues and monuments, only a small number were erected shortly after the war or in the three decades that followed it.  The vast majority went up with UDC support (and often on account of the group's prodigious fundraising) in the first decades of the 20th century.  Their dedications, moreover, were major community events, Confederate flag-festooned pageants that attracted long speeches and large crowds.  In 1907, somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand showed up at a dedication in Newton, North Carolina.

The UDC aggressively promoted the myth of the lost cause and enthusuastically supported the south's post-bellum regime.  In its world, slavery had been benign (because it civilized blacks) , segregation was legitimate (because Reconstruction had made former slaves savage and immoral),  and noble Confederate soldiers had simply been overrun (by the uncivilized hordes that were the enemy's army).  In 1896, according to one historian, the group established an auxiliary Children of the Confederacy (COC) in order "to  impart to the rising generations their own white-supremacist vision of the future." To do so,  according to another, it made sure public schools  "perpetuate[d] Confederate mythology" by vetting text books and setting curricula.

It also venerated the Ku Klux Klan. 

In fact, in 1926, in North Carolina, the UDC even put up a memorial to the KKK.

None of this was done absent northern complicity. 

To the contrary, having left the south to its own devices after federal troops departed in 1877,  white northerners for the most part accepted Jim Crow and segregation, the latter of which the Supreme Court legalized in 1896 and northerners themselves practiced for much of the next century with only slightly more subtlety.  As for  lost cause mythology, they treated it like a palliative.  Without curing the underlying disease, it allowed peace to replace rebellion,  promoting reconciliation  by suppressing memory.   

And the statues and monuments to that lost cause,  dotting the American landscape in increasing numbers?

They stood as . . .

Silent sentinels to that suppression.

It's unclear what would have happended had the myth not taken hold in the south or been ignored in the north.  We might have become honest sooner, and in any case the racism that infected all corners of the nation could have been confronted earlier.  Alternative history is always speculative, but the south of Reconstruction (from 1865 to the early 1870s) was one where former slaves voted and held office,  the Ku Klux Klan was eliminated (it re-emerged much later), and vigilante justice was for the most part avoided.  Had it survived and matured, there might have been no Jim Crow and, with space and time, a peaceful and multi-racial polity.

But it didn't.

And there wasn't.

The UDC never erected a statue of Harriet Beecher Stowe or Frederick Douglass or the dozens of  black law-makers who initially served in the newly re-admitted Confederate states along with the freedmen who put them there.  Their stories were central to the Civil War but had no place in the myth of the lost cause.

And the statues and monuments remind us of that too. 

In Charlottesville in 2017, neo-Nazis marched in opposition to plans in that city to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee from Emancipation (formerly Lee) Park.  The proposed removal had been spurred by the shootings of Trayvon Martin in Orlando and Michael Brown in Missouri, and since then, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center,  114 Confederate monuments have come down. Today, in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, there are renewed efforts to remove even more.  

The deaths of Floyd and Taylor and Arbery are tragedies.

But the real tragedy is that . . .

The same thing keeps happening.

You can drive almost anywhere in the United States these days --  big and small cities, mid-sized suburbs, rural backroads,  red states and blue --  and see signs that say "Black Lives Matter".  

They do.  

They always have.  

But the statues and monuments say . . .

They don't.

It's time . . . beyond time . . . for them to go.

HOW NEWARK HONORED GEORGE FLOYD . . . AND SCHOOLED AMERICA

HOW NEWARK HONORED GEORGE FLOYD . . .
AND SCHOOLED AMERICA

George Floyd was killed on Monday evening a week ago.

When he died laid out on a street in Minneapolis with a knee on his neck and two on his back, Floyd was a forty-six year old father, grandfather, and restaurant security guard. He had lived in Minnesota for five years.  He was born in North Carolina and raised in Houston, where he had been a star high school athlete.  He was also a black man.  Among his last words were "I can't breathe," "my neck hurts," "everything hurts," "I'm about to die,"  and "Don't kill me."

None of them mattered.

At the time Floyd died, three cops were on top of him.  One, Derek Chauvin, had his knee on Floyd's neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. Two others were kneeling on Floyd's back and legs.  Another stood alongside Chauvin.  At some point, a bystander told the police to "get [Floyd] off the ground," and complained that "You could have put him in the car by now.  He's not resisting arrest or nothing."

Those words didn't matter either.

When EMS arrived, Floyd was non-responsive.  He was taken to a local hospital and pronounced dead at 9:25 pm.  The four cops were fired the next day,  and three days after that, Chauvin was arrested on charges of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.  He now sits in a maximum security jail with bail set at $500,000 but apparently not met, and is scheduled to appear in court for the first time on June 8.  The other three are at large and have not been charged at this time.

A county medical examiner  ruled Floyd’s death a homicide and an autopsy performed by Dr. Michael Baden, the world renowned forensic pathologist and NYC's one-time chief medical examiner, concluded that Floyd's death was caused by the three policemen who held him down.

In the week since, protests have broken out in 141 American cities and a handful of foreign ones. The protests were multi-racial and bi-partisan.  In many cases, the police themelves either participated or were openly supportive.  And they should have been.  Floyd's death is only the latest in a long line of blue on black excessive force that stretches back over the decades and too frequently results in the deaths of black men.

Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Amadou Diallo, et al.

The list is long.

It's also part of a systemic problem that plagues law enforcement.  There's a reason for "the conversation" every black parent has with his or her child; the one warning the kids to keep their hands visible and their mouths shut whenever a cop approaches.

The alternative can be death.

Though large numbers of the protests -- and protesters -- were peaceful, a not insignificant number were not.

A Minneapolis police precinct was torched on Thursday and in cities throughout the country rioters  have overturned and set police cars and utility vehicles ablaze; in New York City, two lawyers  threw a molotov cocktail into a police car in Brooklyn.  Looting is commonplace, with property damage running into the millions, and as of Monday, four thousand had been arrested.  In twenty-one states, the National Guard has been called up.  At least five people have died and dozens of mayors have imposed curfews.

One city, however, did not burn.

Newark, New Jersey lies fifteen miles west of Manhattan as the crow flies and is home to 282,000, 84% of whom are black or Hispanic.  This past Saturday afternoon, 12,000 of them took to the streets to protest George Floyd's death at the hands of three of Minnesota's supposed finest.  Among the protesters was the poet's son and city's Mayor, Ras Baraka.

During the protest, no one was arrested, no police cars were torched, no looting occurred, and (save for a few slashed tires) no property was damaged.  The police chief, a white guy, decided that the cops monitoring the protesters' march would not be wearing SWAT or riot gear, and a citizen-manned, fifty person community street team created six years ago self-deployed to de-escalate any tension.

And de-escalate they did.

At one point, a white protester started smashing the window of a Dunkin Donuts.  At another, a group moved toward buildings owned by Prudential Financial, a business anchor that has been in Newark for over 145 years. The street team stopped both. Later that night, outside the First Precinct where riots had begun in the 1960s, an angry crowd of close to a thousand apparently bent on destroying or  trashing the place was faced down by a line of cops . . .

And the hundreds of citizens who stood with them.

By 10:30 pm, the crowd began to disperse as the street team told any who didn't actually live in the city to leave.

Newark's official historian, Junus Williams,  was a law student in the '60s when Newark burned.  Over the weekend, he praised the Mayor. Said Williams: "[T]he people . . . don't see [Baraka] as an obstacle to their righteous anger.  They know that he's angry, too."  Prudential's CEO was even more direct. "You can't underestimate [Baraka's] influence in this. It's . . . an overall image . . .  that we can do more together than we can do apart."  The best praise, however, came from the Rev. Louise Scott-Rountree, the head of Newark's Interfaith Alliance,  and was extended to her flock.  "You better not mess with my family," said the Reverend,  "That's Newark."

No kidding.

Call it Ghandi and Dr. King's non-violence . . .

On steroids.

Yesterday, a little more than two hundred miles south of Newark, the President of the United States had a different idea.

In a conference call, he told the nation's governors that they were "fools" who had "to get much tougher" with the protesters.  "You have to dominate," said Trump.  "If you don't dominate, you're wasting your time.  They're going to run all over you, you'll look like a bunch of jerks."

Attorney General Bill Barr and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper were also on the call and echoed the president. Barr told them they needed "adequate force" to "dominate" and "control" the protesters.  Esper war-gamed the whole problem, telling the governors that they had to "dominate the battle space."  Following the call, and driving his point home, the President then announced that, if the governors didn't get tougher, he would invoke the Insurrection Act and send in the military to do the job "for them."

As with all things Trump, it's not at all clear that he has the power to do what he is now threatening to do.

The Insurrection Act was passed in 1807 and empowers the President to use the military to quell insurrection, civil disorder and rebellion in any state; to enforce federal law and protect Constitutional rights where the state cannot or refuses to do so; or when requested by a state's governor. None of those conditions have been met here, nor are they likely to be.  And a later law, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, expressly bars the use of the military to enforce any  president's domestic policies.

So, bluster aside, Trump either doesn't possess the power he so brazenly claims is his or that power has by no means been triggered.  Though he did order the military to  move a peaceful protest in DC's Lafayette Park yesterday so that he could walk across the street for a photo-op in front of St. John's church, he could do that only because DC is not a state.

From where I sit, if the governors want advice, they now have a choice.

They can call Cadet Bone Spurs -- the man-child  president who  never met a problem involving race that he didn't make worse (see, e.g., Charlottesville) -- and have him send in the marines . . . 

Or they can call Newark's Mayor Baraka.

I'd start with the Mayor.

His plan actually worked.