Not happy this morning with merely defending the “history and culture of our great country” in the form of “beautiful” Confederate statues, President Trump decided a few minutes ago to respond to the terrorist attack in Barcelona by explicitly condoning war crimes and mass executions:
Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!
There’s no evidence that Pershing actually did any of the stuff Trump thinks he did, but that’s hardly surprising. Trump is just doubling down on the bloodthirsty yahoo vote this week.
A NOTE TO THE YAHOOS: Those of you who think the Pershing Method is great might want to think about why we still aren’t using it. Trump has been president for seven months now. Why hasn’t he ordered the army to start dipping bullets in pig’s blood and then massacring everyone in sight? It’s almost like he’s just talking big to impress you, isn’t it?
Known as the “Silent Sentinel,” “Single Soldier” or similar names, the figure tops many of the thousands of Civil War monuments to be found in more than 30 states….Estimates of Confederate monuments range between 500 and 1,000, including hundreds of the rebel version of the solitary soldier.
“In Georgia, there must be one in practically every county in every town square and cemetery, and it’s facing north, by the way,” said Ben Jones, a former Georgia congressman who played the role of Cooter on “The Dukes of Hazzard.”
One of the leading manufacturers was the Monumental Bronze Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, which specialized in a cast zinc it called “white bronze” (a light gray or pale blue color)….It sold life-size statues for just $450 and larger eight-and-a-half foot versions for $750. Commissioning marble or granite statues, meanwhile, would have cost tens of thousands of dollars.
“It’s like going to Wal-Mart,” Timothy S. Sedore, who wrote An Illustrated Guide to Virginia’s Confederate Monuments, told the news wire. “It’s less expensive.”
The Monumental Bronze Company mostly made cemetery headstones and markers, but they did public statuary as well. There was a version of the Silent Sentinal for northern towns and a different one for Southern towns:
“You can argue that any sculpture is art in some way, but it’s a loose argument,” Schoonmaker said Tuesday. “I don’t know that these statues are worthy of preservation as art objects so much as historical objects – made to preserve a lost cause, a lost war. They weren’t made with great artistic intent, but with political intent. And intent matters in this case.”
As for intent, timing plays a part in that, too. “To Our Confederate Dead” on Hillsborough Street is less a relic of the Civil War than of the Jim Crow era of segregation, erected in 1897. That’s more than three decades after the war’s end. The statue that was taken down in Durham went up even later, in 1924.
“Look at any memorial or monument, and it’s always more about the time it was put up than the time it celebrates,” said Catherine Bishir, an architecture historian at NC State libraries. “As long as you can see when a monument was done and who did it, you have a clue what it’s all about.”
As for the bigger statues of Robert E. Lee and other Confederate heroes, they were pretty much churned off an assembly line too. They just cost more.
The Tax Policy Center has published a new estimate of Donald Trump’s tax plan. But wait! Don’t go away yet! You’re right that the results are pretty much the same thing we’ve seen from every Trump tax plan—and, for that matter, from every Republican tax plan over the past few decades:
The poor and the middle class get a teensy little benefit while the rich get a huge benefit. But then TPC asked another question: eventually this tax cut will be paid for, either in spending cuts or future tax increases. Spending cuts seem most likely as long as Republicans are in charge. If we generously assume that everyone shoulders an equal share of the spending cuts—as opposed to the more likely scenario of the poor shouldering most of the cuts—what does the Trump tax plan look like then?
Over the long term, this is most likely what Trump’s tax plan will look like. The poor, the middle class, and even the upper middle class see their incomes go down, while the top 10 percent see an increase and the top 1 percent see a huge increase. Welcome to Trumpland.
After losing her engagement ring on her family farm more than a decade ago, Canadian Mary Grams resigned herself to the idea she would never see it again. That is, until the diamond ring showed up this week – 13 years after she lost it –wrapped tightly around a misshapen carrot that had been freshly plucked from the garden.
Last night I posted a chart showing when all those Confederate statues were erected. Here it is again:
I wouldn’t normally bother with this, but I got a bunch of pushback from folks offering non-racist explanations for why these bursts of monument building happened to coincide with periods of white terror campaigns against blacks. For your entertainment, here are the three most popular arguments:
This is right around the 50th and 100th anniversaries of the Civil War. No. The first spike starts in 1895, the second in 1955. Those are the 35th and 95th anniversaries. Maybe those numbers have some special significance in the South?
The Civil War generation was dying right around 1895. The average Confederate trooper would have been about 55 then. They weren’t dying off. As for the Confederate leaders who seem to attract the most statue attention, I looked them up. Robert E. Lee died in 1870, Stonewall Jackson in 1863, Nathan Bedford Forrest in 1877, Roger Taney in 1864, and Jefferson Davis in 1889. Of the eight full generals in the Confederate army, only three died later than 1880.
Maybe there was just a big explosion of statue building right around then. Anything is possible, I guess. Knock yourself out if you want to dig up evidence for this.
A lot of people desperately want to find some reason why these statues aren’t actually symbols of white terror against blacks. And you know what? There are always multiple motivations for everything. But honestly, the primary motivation here is pretty clear. They were only incidentally meant as commemorations of honorable men in a brutal war. Far more often they were erected as very deliberate messages of white supremacy to brutalized blacks.
POSTSCRIPT: One other thing. I’ve heard a few liberal friends pick up on the slippery slope argument. Where do we draw the line? Which statues should we tear down? Did you hear what Al Sharpton said about the Jefferson Memorial? Just stop it. There are times for airy arguments like this, but this isn’t one of them. How about if we just start at the top with all the statues of Confederate leaders and then decide what to do next?
Apparently having learned nothing from Moochgate, Steve Bannon decided to call up the editor of the American Prospect yesterday to chew the fat. Mostly he wanted to shoot off his mouth about North Korea (nothing we can do, just have to live with it) and China (Sina delenda est). But he also had something to say about the news of the day. What do you think about combating racism and white supremacy, Steve?
“The Democrats,” he said, “the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”
We sure have a charming bunch of folks in the White House these days, don’t we?
POSTSCRIPT: I can’t keep up with this stuff. It appears that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer got an email last night and decided to forward it to a bunch of administration officials and conservative journalists. According to the New York Times, it “echoed secessionist Civil War propaganda and declared that the group Black Lives Matter ‘has been totally infiltrated by terrorist groups.’ ” Plus this:
The email forwarded by John Dowd, who is leading the president’s legal team, painted the Confederate general Robert E. Lee in glowing terms and equated the South’s rebellion to that of the American Revolution against England. Its subject line — “The Information that Validates President Trump on Charlottesville” — was a reference to comments Mr. Trump made earlier this week in the aftermath of protests in the Virginia college town.
….The email’s author, Jerome Almon, runs several websites alleging government conspiracies and arguing that the F.B.I. has been infiltrated by Islamic terrorists….In a telephone interview, Mr. Almon said he sent the email to follow up on a phone call he had last week with Mr. Dowd.
FFS. Is there anyone close to Trump who isn’t a racist?
Fox & Friends got a little more than it bargained for today when it invited a couple of guests to talk about Confederate statues. Abby Huntsman thought it would be fun to debate Donald Trump’s fascinating question about whether George Washington would be next if we started tearing down statues of Robert E. Lee. Her two guests were decidedly not interested in that. Instead they nearly broke down in tears:
I don’t think Huntsman was prepared for this display of raw emotion. I guess next time the Fox bookers will screen their black guests a little more closely.
The Berkman Klein Center at Harvard has just released a new report of the role of online media in the 2016 election. Some of it is stuff we’ve seen before: for example, coverage of Hillary Clinton was massively weighted toward her emails and other “scandals,” while coverage of Trump was weighted toward the issues.
Generally speaking, however, the big thread that runs through the whole report is the asymmetry of social media. Liberals tend to share items about equally from centrist sites and far-left sites. Conservatives, however, almost literally have no interest in centrist sites. They only share items from extremely partisan sites:
Here’s what the report has to say:
Prominent media on the left are well distributed across the center, center-left, and left. On the right, prominent media are highly partisan. From all of these perspectives, conservative media is more partisan and more insular than the left….Breitbart emerges as the nexus of conservative media….Seven sources, all from the partisan right or partisan left, receive substantially more attention on social media than links from other media outlets….In this group, Gateway Pundit is in a class of its own, known for “publishing falsehoods and spreading hoaxes.”
The report also includes a detailed analysis of how the media got played on the story of the Clinton Foundation. I may have more on that later.
NAFTA talks begin this week. Just to set the stage, here’s a history of US trade deficits with Canada and Mexico for the past 15 years:
Our trade deficit with Canada is pretty much all oil. When you look at the trade deficit ex energy, it’s actually positive: we export more to Canada than we import.
In the case of Mexico, we import practically no oil anymore, so excluding energy makes little difference. In 2016, the trade deficit ex energy reached $70.8 billion.
For the past week or so I’ve been playing around with long exposures of our orchid tree when the wind is blowing. I wanted to let the breeze paint a sort of abstract image, but I wasn’t especially taken with the results, even after letting the camera operate on autopilot for a while and getting a couple hundred shots. This is the best of the bunch, I think. You’ll have to decide for yourself if you like it.
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