Midnight Meme Of The Day!

-by Noah

Given to us as a gift, the Statue Of Liberty was designed by French sculptor Frederic August Bartholdi and built by Gustave Eiffel. It arrived in New York in 1884, was assembled, and dedicated on October 28, 1886. Since then it has been exactly what it was meant to be; a beacon of liberty and a welcome to all immigrants. Liberty herself is Libertas, the Roman Goddess of Liberty. She holds a torch, not of the republican Tiki variety, but a symbol of "Liberty enlightening the world." The book Liberty holds is inscribed with the date of our Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776. The most powerful, and, sadly, most ignored symbol lies at her feet. It is a broken chain.

Recently, Donald Trump's Senior Policy Advisor, Stephen Miller, made a sick, twisted effort to neuter the words "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" by saying the words were added to the statue after it was dedicated. In fact, the words were added 17 years later in 1903 but, what the bigoted to his core Miller conveniently neglected to mention was that the words are the most crucial part of a sonnet written by Emma Lazarus to help raise the funding for the statue itself in 1883. Miller's statement amounts to just one more example of the White House attitude toward immigrants.

In past sad eras of our American history, lots of countries have been considered shitholes by our most strident and disgusting bigots. In the mid-19th century, one of those countries was Ireland. Businesses looking for people to employ made a habit of putting signs in their windows that read "Irish Need Not Apply." As we entered the 20th century, the same conservative types regarded Italians as coming from a shithole country. Even as late as the 1930s, the great baseball player Joe DiMaggio was called a "The Dago Yankee" by Life magazine, right on its cover. Later, Nixon's tapes revealed his hate for Jews. In more recent times, not much has changed, only the ethnic targets. What is different is that we have an overtly fascist president who is not just cheerleading this hate and emboldening other bigots, but also trying to make his hate into law; counter to the meanings of our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and the words that we can find on the Statue of Liberty.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party backs Trump's language and actions. On Friday, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Senator David Perdue (R-GA) issued a joint statement saying that, although they were at the White House meeting where Trump issued his shithole statement, they just "couldn't recall" hearing it. Really? Wouldn't you? Thankfully, both Democratic Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) and, surprisingly, Republican Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) made it clear that they could confirm that Trump said the words that have been attributed to him, although Graham did so more indirectly. And, really, given Trump's past statements, we should, in no way, be surprised he said what he said? Trump, of course, denied it all. Perhaps, he can't handle the truth.

Sadly, this whole incident shows us that the feelings or the Republican Party and it's leadership represent a perversion of what the Statue of Liberty is supposed to represent.

The Shithole "President" Is Illegitimate And Always Will Be

I just went through a couple of very intense years of cancer treatment. My doctor is an award-winning researcher and my cancer is extremely rare and extremely difficult to manage. She was one of the world's experts in it and she saved my life. She was born in China and I consider myself very lucky that her family immigrated to America, to California, where I live. Another specialist who my primary care physician suggested I also talk to suggested a much less intense treatment for the disease, much less stressful treatment. Everyone dies within a couple of years who goes that route. He's just a few years behind the times.

My China-born doctor wasn't the only one who treated me though. The hospital had a lot of very skilled nurses working on me on a day ti day basis. One who I came to absolutely love is a woman named Cindy. My heart leaps when I go see her every three months for my on-going treatment. Cindy's family immigrated from the Philippines. Other nurses who worked on me were from Latin America and Asia and they all made me feel wonderful and all contributed to my recovery. But in California it seems like most of the nurses are from the Philippines.

In South Florida, though, it appears that most of the nurses at from Haiti. While I was going through my ordeal, one of my oldest friends was dealing with his mothers passing. His mother was very wealthy and didn't want to die in a facility. So she lived out the last years of her life at home in Miami in her palatial home. My friend lives in New York and he tried to go down to see her every week or so, She needed pretty intense 24/7 treatment and her head nurse, a Haitian woman, was in charge. I'll tell you how great of a job she did-- a woman with her own life and her own troubles. When my friend's mom eventually died, me friend gave the nurse $250,000. Nice tip. He sometimes wonders if he gave her-- this Haitian immigrant-- enough. "Take them out," said the worthless piece of shit head of the kakistocracy this week. Up top is a commentary from American Alisha Laventure, a Dallas TV news anchor whose parents immigrated from Haiti, a "shithole country" according to the racist slob sitting and stuffing his ugly face with McDonald's in the Oval Office. Below is a much more overtly emotional commentary from MSNBC's Joy Reid, one of who's parents came from Haiti and one from the Congo, another "shithole country" according to Trump. Please find the time to watch both.

I spent the holidays in Thailand. Thais are too polite to bring up Trump, but Europeans we met there-- there are far more Europeans traveling these days than there are Americans-- always brought up Trump, none, at least none that we met, admiringly, the way they talked about Obama. "How could you?" they all asked, almost accusingly. What do you think Africans think about our ignorant racist slob of a leader?

The African Group of UN ambassadors is "extremely appalled at, and strongly condemns the outrageous, racist and xenophobic remarks by the president of the United States of America as widely reported by the media," a statement said.

After an emergency session to weigh Trump's remarks, the group said it was "concerned at the continuing and growing trend from the US administration toward Africa and people of African descent to denigrate the continent and people of color."

While demanding a "retraction and an apology" from Trump, the 54 countries also thanked those Americans "from all walks of life who have condemned the remarks."

The resolution was passed unanimously after four hours of discussions.

Why hasn't Speaker Paul Ryan or Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy introduced a resolution in Congress disassociating the United States from Trump's vile comments? Really-- why haven't they?

NPR's Karen Grisby Bates tried figuring out what's going on with all this Republican racism and xenophobia. "He's saying exactly what he wants to say," she wrote about Trump. "As the Congressional Black Caucus pointed out, 'Make America Great Again' really means Make America White Again."

One way to do that is to cut back on people from the aforementioned "shithole countries"-- countries that, coincidentally, are full of black and brown people-- to make room for immigrants from countries the president deems more desirable. He seems to like Norway. (Although as one Twitter user asked, why would most Scandinavians, who have higher education rates than their U.S. counterparts and a far more extensive social service system, want to trade that for what we have here?)

People from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean are who Trump doesn't want. But he cannot turn back time. The country is getting browner, and America 2018 is never going to look like America 1918. Interracial marriages continue to increase; the bi- and multiracial population steadily grows. And the world has not stopped spinning.

So yes, calling most of Africa and the Western world's oldest independent black nation the institutional equivalent of a latrine is a new low in racial vulgarity for this president. But we probably haven't reached an absolute nadir yet.

Nevertheless, we should worry at the constant stream of racist, crude remarks this president unleashes on the public. Normalizing that kind of behavior leads to what sociologists call "otherization"-- making the subject of one's remarks different from one's self to the point that it is easier to neglect, harm, even kill people one doesn't see as people. It happened in Germany in 1939. It happened in Rwanda in the '90s. It's happening now in Myanmar.

Donald Trump's relegation of whole nations filled with black and brown people to an undesirable inconvenience is another step down a slippery slope. If it's not called out and stopped, it could lead to something far worse than hurt feelings.

Which is why we should still take a moment to be shocked when the president of the United States says racist things. Even if you know his history.

This weekend, a NY Times editorial reminded its readers, few of whom need reminding, that "Trump is not just racist, ignorant, incompetent and undignified. He’s also a liar." In a new notorious meeting with congressional leaders he asked "why the United States should accept people from places like Haiti or Africa instead of nice Nordic countries like Norway, and then tweeting his tiresome demands for a 'Great Wall' along the Mexican border... The president of the United States is a racist. And another: The United States has a long and ugly history of excluding immigrants based on race or national origin. Mr. Trump seems determined to undo efforts taken by presidents of both parties in recent decades to overcome that history."

No one is denying that Haiti and some of these other countries have profound problems today. Of course, those problems are often a direct result of policies and actions of the United States and European nations: to name just a few, kidnapping and enslaving their citizens; plundering their natural resources; propping up their dictators and corrupt regimes; and holding them financially hostage for generations

The United States has long held itself out as a light among nations based on the American ideal of equality. But the deeper history tells a different story.

The sociologists David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martin have shown that the United States pioneered racially based exclusionary immigration policies in the Americas in the late 18th and 19th centuries. (Not long before he was elected president, for example, Theodore Roosevelt asserted the bigoted but then-common view that the Chinese should be kept out of America because they were “racially inferior.”)

It should sober Americans to know that authoritarian governments in Chile, Cuba and Uruguay ended racist immigration policies decades before the United States.

...What is concerning is not the wall, or the word “shithole” or the vacillation on the Dreamers or the Salvadorans. It’s what ties all of these things together: the bigoted worldview of the man behind them.

Anyone who has followed Mr. Trump over the years knows this. We knew it in the 1970s, when he and his father were twice sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments to black people. We knew it in 1989, when he took out a full-page newspaper ad calling for the execution of five black and Latino teenagers charged with the brutal rape of a white woman in Central Park. (The men were convicted but later exonerated by DNA and other evidence, but Mr. Trump never apologized, and he continued to argue as late as 2016 that the men were guilty.) We knew it when he built a presidential campaign by demonizing Mexicans and Muslims while promoting the lie that America’s first black president wasn’t born here. Or when, last summer, he defended marchers in a neo-Nazi parade as “very fine people.”

Just last month, The Times reported on an Oval Office meeting on immigration during which Mr. Trump said that the 15,000 Haitians now living in the United States “all have AIDS,” and that Nigerian immigrants would never “go back to their huts” in Africa once they had seen the United States. See a pattern yet?

...Republicans in Congress are spending most of their time finding ways to avoid talking about their openly bigoted chief executive. Some claimed not to have heard what Mr. Trump said. Others offered tepid defenses of his “salty” talk. House Speaker Paul Ryan called Mr. Trump’s comments “unhelpful,” clearly wishing he could return to his daily schedule of enriching the wealthiest Americans.

Mr. Trump has made clear that he has no useful answers on immigration. It’s up to Congress to fashion long-term, humane solutions. A comprehensive immigration bill that resolves all these issues would be best. But if that is not possible, given the resistance of hard-core anti-immigration activists in Congress, legislators should at least join forces to protect the Dreamers, Salvadorans, Haitians and others threatened by the administration’s cruel and chaotic actions.

Up to Congress? That means it's up to us, the citizens of this country to defeat every Republican-- and every Democrat who enables Republicans (corrupt, paid off Blue Dogs and New Dems like Dan Lipinski and Debbie Wasserman Schultz) this year so Congress can deal with the shit Trump and the GOP are clogging up the system with.

The Top Story In The Country Is Our "President’s" Unhinged Racism-- A Guest Post By Michael Keegan

Michael Keegan is the president of People for the American Way. He sent a letter to his board members today and I asked him if I could run parts of it as a guest post and he agreed. The subject line of his e-mail was "shithole countries." And the story isn't just the top story in America; it's the top story worldwide. "There is no other word one can use but 'racist,'" the U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights, Rupert Colville, said at a briefing in Geneva. "You cannot dismiss entire countries and continents as 'shitholes,' whose entire populations, who are not white, are therefore not welcome." You can't? I bet Trump's base was... not offended, not even a little. Michael Keegan:

Trump ranted against protections for immigrants from "shithole countries" countries, referring to Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations, while lamenting that we didn’t have more immigration from countries like Norway.

The reports come near the end of a week in which Trump’s ignorance and petulance were glaringly on display.

In response to the release of Fire and Fury, a book that seriously challenges his fitness for office and ability to do the job of president, Trump held a meeting with lawmakers from both sides to discuss immigration which was clearly nothing more than a PR stunt to convince the press that he was up for the job … afterwards, Trump talked about how the meeting and, more specifically, his performance in the meeting received great "reviews" by the press as "incredibly good," and said that he’d received letters from news anchors calling it "one of the greatest meetings they’ve ever witnessed."

And yesterday, as the House of Representatives was gearing up to vote on the extension of government surveillance powers, Trump tweeted his disdain for the bill, which his White House actually supports, citing it as the basis for supposed Obama administration spying on the Trump campaign-- itself another wild Trump claim that has never been backed up by any evidence.

Quite simply, what we are witnessing from this president is truly terrifying. But perhaps even more terrifying is that as Trump continues to shock the country by sinking to new lows, the loyalty of his core supporters seems unshakable. The sentiments expressed by Trump supporters last night and today around the Internet, in response to the “shithole” comments, all seem to hit the same notes:

• Trump is only saying what "REAL Americans" are all thinking…
• At least he’s honest, which is better than typical politicians…
• Trump is just telling the un-sugarcoated truth and shunning political correctness…
• Hillary would still have been way worse, and is guilty of worse…
• The immigrants from those countries are not contributors to the US-- they only suck up tax-funded services and are hostile to our values…

We’re seeing the dangerous impact of a president that openly demonizes immigrants and communities of color-- even the countries their ancestors came from … the policies of the Trump administration and the Department of Justice under Jeff Sessions are disastrous enough, but when the president is so reckless with his words, it emboldens and gives license to potentially violent racists and hatemongers.

We’ve already seen what happened in Charlottesville and elsewhere, and some might wonder how it is possible that Trump has not learned his lesson by now. But that’s the thing, Trump has learned … when the president disparages immigrants, calls Nazis "fine people," or tweets Islamophobic propaganda from far-right hate groups, these are not gaffes or mistakes-- they’re his true beliefs and his strategy.

Norway-- Not Flattered By Trumpanzee's Crude Comments

Norways' Prime Minister Erna Solberg with Señor Trumpanzee

Norway is a very prosperous country and a very happy one-- but the birthrate is among the lowest in the world. The half-dozen countries with the highest birthrates are all countries that Trump lumped in among the "shithole countries." I bet Trump couldn't find one of them on a map. Births per woman:

• Niger- 7.3
• Chad- 6.4
• Somalia- 6.4
• Congo- 6.3
• Angola- 6.2
• Mali- 6.0

And here are some other countries' birthrates-- a couple dozen countries that have been in the news for one reason or another, randomly

• Nigeria- 5.5
• Afghanistan- 5.3
• Ethiopia- 4.6
• Iraq- 4.1
• Pakistan- 3.6
• Egypt- 3.3
• Israel- 3.1
• Syria- 2.9
• Mexico- 2.2
• North Korea- 1.9
• France- 1.9
• iran- 1.8
• China- 1.8
• U.S.- 1.8
• U.K.- 1.8
• Russia- 1.7
• Norway- 1.7
• Cuba- 1.7
• Canada- 1.6
• Germany- 1.5
• Greece- 1.3
• Spain- 1.3
• Italy- 1.3
• South Korea- 1.2

Population replacement is 2.1, which means without immigration, all the countries on the above list below Mexico will have shrinking populations. That includes the U.S.-- and Norway.

Birth rates in Norway have decreased for the seventh year in a row. Social pressure is causing women to wait longer and longer before starting families, says one expert. Birth rates of 2.1 per woman are needed to keep population numbers constant. In Norway, the figure is now down to 1.71, having dropped every year since 2009. Many women in their 20s prefer to wait until they have finished studying and have stable, higher-paid jobs before starting families. In fact it's not until after the age of 30 that people in many wealthy western countries-- like Norway-- feel they have enough economic security to start having children. Populations aren't falling, primarily because of Trump's bugaboo: immigration.

According to Statistics Norway, Norway's immigrant population makes up 16.8% of the country's total population as of 2017. This includes immigrants and children born in Norway to two immigrant parents. The ten most common countries of origin of immigrants residing in Norway are Poland (97,196), Lithuania (37,638), Sweden (36,315), Somalia (28,696), Germany (24,601), Iraq (22,493), Syria (20,823), Philippines (20,537), Pakistan (19,973), and Eritrea (19,957). And Norwegians aren't emigrating to the U.S. the way they used to. Trump's comments Thursday isn't going to turn that around either.

The Nordic country, one of the richest in the world by GDP per capita, was last year named the happiest nation on the planet and is known for a cradle-to-grave welfare state funded in part by large reserves of oil and natural gas.

...“On behalf of Norway: Thanks, but no thanks,” tweeted Torbjoern Saetre, a politician representing Norway’s Conservative Party in a municipality near Oslo.

Others condemned the U.S. president’s comments as inappropriate or racist.

“We are not coming. Cheers from Norway,” one woman wrote.

While hundreds of thousands of Norwegians emigrated to the U.S. in the 19th century, just 502 out of a population of 5.3 million people moved there in 2016, down 59 from the previous year, according to Statistics Norway.

“Will there be more now?” the statistics agency asked in a tweet.

Government officials, seeking to deflect attention, turned down a chance to comment. “We respectfully decline the opportunity,” one government official said when contacted by Reuters.

The reference to Norway may have been prompted by Prime Minister Erna Solberg who visited the White House on Wednesday when the president praised Norway for running a trade deficit with the United States and for buying U.S. military equipment.

Christian Christensen, an American professor of journalism at Stockholm University in neighboring Sweden, tweeted: “Of course people from #Norway would love to move to a country where people are far more likely to be shot, live in poverty, get no healthcare because they’re poor, get no paid parental leave or subsidized daycare and see fewer women in political power. #Shithole”

Before the “shithole” controversy, former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt tweeted that, judging by Solberg’s visit, “keys to success with Trump is personal charm, a solid trade deficit with the U.S. and buying tons of U.S. military hardware.”

Solberg, whose office also declined to comment on Trump’s remarks, is expected to announce soon an expansion of her cabinet to include Norway’s Liberal Party, a centrist group that favors strong environmental policies and more immigration.

“The first point of order in the new government declaration: Norway will still not be a shithole country,” tweeted Kjetil Alstadheim, the political editor of financial daily Dagens Naeringsliv.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

-by Noah

Hey everybody! Trump and his supporters have two brand new hat choices! Just in time for Martin Luther King Day! Republicans everywhere will want one! Perfect gift for Valentines Day, too (and they'll never get the irony).