The United States has regularly killed journalists across the world. Its police forces have consistently beaten and arrested journalists in the US. None of this started with Trump. But Trump has used his powerful platform to encourage and celebrate this violence.

— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) May 31, 2020

Police forces have regularly attacked and arrested journalists at protests in this country. But often it has been unfamous journalists from non-corporate outlets, so no one paid attention to it. Now, the police are deliberately & consistently attacking corporate journalists too.

— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) May 31, 2020

DeBlasio had an opportunity to be on the right side of history. Instead he chose to align himself with the brutality and injustice. He chooses to further empower the militias with badges and guns who ram SUVs into crowds of civilians. Through his actions, he stands with Trump.

— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) May 31, 2020

As in most failed states, the authoritarians running the show in the US spend vast sums of money on their militias, armies, spies, weapons of war, surveillance structures and prisons while neglecting the basic needs of the people. They murder and target the most vulnerable.

— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) May 31, 2020

I get Joanne Leon tweets on my gmail on the Social tab because when getting started on gmail I corresponded with her. I don’t recall how many years ago I last corresponded with her. I followed her on twitter years ago but she tweeted too many items so I unfollowed her.

For years she ran a diary on DK/TOP dailykos, called “what’s Happenin’?’ which was one of the best things there. She was part of the DFH, Dirty Fucking Hippies group there.

I found some of the old diaries by searching on google with the name of the diary and her name. I could not find her on a search of DK. It also looks like all references to bobswern have been deleted from there.

A couple of important voices run off the site and deleted.

Joanne was one of the movers with Joesixpack (sp), and many of those folks founded caucus99percent which is doing well.

Joanne and her partner are running a blog and do interviews. As noted above because she showed up on my Social tab on gmail.

here is her tab with an interview this time of Aaron Mate

http://aroundtheempire.com/

she is on twitter

twitter joanneleon

I clicked Follow and found that Max Bluemnthal and Kevin Gostala. You might have seen Kevin’s work over the years – focus on foreign policy, security, Chicago, etc.

**
This is just a curiosity update of a former major contributor to DK who was run out of dodge

and part of the various groups attempting to change the course of that blob

as long as they have their Kos leader and allow shits like DOV to continue there and the dem establishment can survive, they will continue to have their slice

Fire, pestilence and a country at war with itself: the Trump presidency is over
Robert Reich

why did a well known person take a job as Labor Scty in the Clinton admin? Because many government statistics are tied to that department so you have that kind of power.

I picked up his book to look at some years ago in a bookstore as I recall or maybe at a remainder sale, or somewhere. “Trapped in The Cabinet” He sounded like a self rightious ass hole so I have for the most part ignored him for years.

Reich has been doing better as in this article

In reality, Donald Trump doesn’t run the government of the United States. He doesn’t manage anything. He doesn’t organize anyone. He doesn’t administer or oversee or supervise. He doesn’t read memos. He hates meetings. He has no patience for briefings. His White House is in perpetual chaos.

America must listen to its wounds. They will tell us where to look for hope
Reverend William Barber
Read more
His advisers aren’t truth-tellers. They’re toadies, lackeys, sycophants and relatives.

Since moving into the Oval Office in January 2017, Trump hasn’t shown an ounce of interest in governing. He obsesses only about himself.

But it has taken the present set of crises to reveal the depths of his self-absorbed abdication – his utter contempt for his job, his total repudiation of his office.

Trump’s nonfeasance goes far beyond an absence of leadership or inattention to traditional norms and roles. In a time of national trauma, he has relinquished the core duties and responsibilities of the presidency.

He is no longer president. The sooner we stop treating him as if he were, the better.

T and R, wi61!! Skipped the launch cos of the fat orange maroon and his equally idiotic Religious Righty VP.🤮 Watched the hookup with the ISS live on NASA this am. It felt good to feel proud even if it was only for a few nanoseconds.🪐🪐🚀🇺🇸😊👍

https://twitter.com/shujaxhaider/status/1267111416735154176?s=20

One of the things that I thought about after the lockdowns began was how convenient it was for TPTB having most people stay home and not be able to go to rallies and/or protests.

But now that restrictions are loosening, the downside for making everyone wear masks in public is quite ironic. Masks at protests went from being forbidden to required.

Here’s a take by writer Lili Loofbourow (whom I do not know anything about other than I love her name).

How the Pandemic May Have Readied Us for This Protest

Mask-wearing used to read as disobedient. Now it reads as dutiful and protective.

It’s hard to gauge how exactly the coronavirus has changed us, especially while we’re still in the middle of the mess. But as I watched the protests for George Floyd get more widespread sympathy than I expected, even after the fires and broken windows, I started wondering about masks. I wondered, specifically, whether their widespread use during the pandemic might have somehow amplified the public’s tolerance for protest. Yes, there are a million bigger factors here, including and not limited to: the visceral horror of police officer Derek Chauvin’s cruelty; the president echoing white supremacists as he threatened to kill Americans; the jaw-dropping spectacle of police arresting a black CNN reporter while he was live on the air, even as he asked them where he should move and presented his credentials. Then there’s just the fact that this is the millionth time this awful cycle has happened. But I can’t help but think that the culture wars over mask-wearing might have had a funny side effect: Americans not known for tolerating civic unrest may have accidentally learned to visually process mask-wearers not as sinister actors concealing their identities, but as obedient do-gooders trying their best.

the only way protests of this sort show up on television is if the protesters are doing something this last group (skeptics) might find outrageous. Peaceful protests sink like a stone, unobserved and unremarked. If something controversial happens, airtime is the reward. If a protest shows up on TV, it is almost never positively presented. There’s usually some armchair quarterbacking about how injudicious the protesters were to act hastily, before all the information was out (police departments and city governments frequently ration out information to produce exactly this effect). They’re criticized for damaging their communities, for resisting the wrong way. The endpoint is always the same: When the escalation happens, disapproval ripens into fear. Perhaps some windows are broken. Perhaps something is set on fire. Maybe they’re antifa! Maybe they’re wearing masks.

That cycle has been slower to build this time, though there’s still certainly time for it. But a tiny part of that delay might owe something to the fact that mask-wearers are (even to their political enemies) silly but well-intentioned helpers now. They are seen as cautious, deliberate, and concerned with public health. At worst, they’re dupes of an overbearing nanny state. It’s just harder to read them in the old malicious way, and—now that American have watched police murder a black man on camera and arrest a black journalist for no reason—it’s just a little harder to default to those old familiar rhythms. Trickier to see the police as neutral enforcers of the law who simply react to protesters when they get out of control. Easier to see the cops as, well, the instigators. Now that most of us have become part-time mask-wearers, the mask-wearers look like what protesters usually are, despite the iterations of these old scripts we’ve all seen time and again: people stuck in a system that was never designed to keep them safe, doing their best with what little they have.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/masks-read-differently.html