Retiring Guy's Digest

Sunday, June 12, 2022

GET ME REWRITE: Trump fuels surge in white nationalism

Top headline: Capital News Service, 4/2/2020

Bottom headline: Washington Post, 6/11/2022

Police in Idaho arrested 31 people who had face coverings, white-supremacist insignia, shields and an “operations plan” to riot near an LGBTQ Pride event on Saturday afternoon. Police said they were affiliated with Patriot Front, a white-supremacist group whose founder was among those arrested.
Authorities received a tip about a “little army” loading into a U-Haul truck at a hotel Saturday afternoon, said Lee White, the police chief in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, a city of about 50,000 near the border with Washington. Local and state law enforcement pulled over the truck about 10 minutes later, White said at a news conference.
Many of those arrested were wearing logos representing Patriot Front, which rebranded after one of its members plowed his car into a crowd of people protesting a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens.

5/30/2022 update, "Donald Trump: When the looting starts, the shooting starts", starts here.

‘Looting’ Comment From Trump Dates Back to Racial Unrest of the 1960s. (The New York Times, 5/28/2020)

The phrase was used prominently by Walter E. Headley, Miami’s former police chief, in 1967 as he pledged a no-holds-barred response to a Christmas-season outbreak of violent crime in black neighborhoods that had left three people dead in attempted robberies.

Mr. Headley suggested that his department’s tough tactics had kept Miami calm that year, even as race riots were convulsing dozens of other cities and leaving scores dead.

3/18/2020 update starts here.

Photo credit: Center for Strategic and International Studies

Reported in Trump Defends Using ‘Chinese Virus’ Label, Ignoring Growing Criticism. (The New York Times, 3/18/2020)

Original 3/18/2020 post, "Perhaps this is the reason why Donald Trump is resorting to heavy use of a nativist dog whistle", starts here.

Voice of America, 3/17/2020

Illustration from The Economist

Hello, Iowa! Your gerontocracy exhibit, Charles Grassley, is a career politician who long ago overstayed his welcome

If re-elected in November, Charles Grassley will be 95 if he completes his 7th term in the U.S. Senate.

Top headline: The Guardian, 10/6/2018

Bottom headline: Des Moines Register, 6/10/2022

"Sitting under the same glass bell jar", Jessica Taylor spouts the conventional wisdom, "stewing in [her] own sour air".

"Even if people might be ready to move on from Chuck Grassley … I just have a very hard time, in this type of environment and year, seeing that they would vote for somebody else who's a Democrat,” said Jessica Taylor, the Senate and governors editor for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “The ‘D’ next to your name is what can doom you in Iowa.”

Iowa Republicans are similarly confident in Grassley’s chances, though some privately acknowledge that Franken could be a tougher matchup for him than Finkenauer would have been.

9/24/2022 update starts here

62 years and counting

Wikipedia

Des Moines Register, 9/24/2021

The Iowa GOP has no bench.

His decision is a victory for national Republicans who have made it clear they wanted Grassley — who has repeatedly been reelected by double-digit margins — to run for an eighth term. A Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll released this week showed him leading Democratic challenger Abby Finkenauer by 18 percentage points, 55% to 37%, in an early test of the race.

7/21/2021 update starts here

Des Moines Register, 7/20/2021

Grassley, who has held elected office since the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, hasn't publicly declared if he will run for an eighth term in the U.S. Senate. That general election would still be about 16 months away, but his decision has captivated the political world. The decision comes far later than in previous years; he announced in 2013 he would seek reelection in 2016.

Original 5/15/2021 post, "GET ME REWRITE: The despicable, decrepit Charles Grassley praises Governor Kim Reynolds for Iowa's heartless withdrawal from federal pandemic unemployment program", starts here.

Headline from KPVI, 5/12/2020

If Grassley even understands the need for access to child care throughout his state, he gives us no indication ot it. He just spouts the usual GOP anti-worker talking points.

"Wherever you went in Iowa, you found 'Help wanted' signs," Grassley said of his travels to 13 counties last week while Congress was recessed. "There's a major problem out there. They can't get workers. ... And I don't want to in any way insinuate that people don't want to work, but when they make more money not working than if they were working, and they want to enhance their economic viability, what would you expect them to do?"

Democratics understand.

Democrats and labor groups have criticized Reynolds' decisions as an uncaring political stunt that will make it more difficult for Iowans to stay housed, clothed and fed and to care for their children as the pandemic stretches on.

And so do Iowa's working parents with young children.

Des Moines Register, 5/14/2021

"Everybody, collectively, has been hanging on by a thread for at least a year," said Laing, 36. "Not knowing what's around the corner. Not knowing what that final thing is that breaks that thread and sends us into a spiral that we can't get out of."
"My thread," she continued. "That may be the one that breaks it."

Washington Post: 1955 book foretold January 6 insurrection

Headline: Washington Post, 6/11/2022

Bell enlisted an academic dream team that included historian Richard Hofstadter and sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset. A year later, the group of seven intellectuals published their findings as an essay collection, edited by Bell. “The New American Right” argued that McCarthy’s conspiratorial anti-communism was here to stay.

By then, the Senate had censured McCarthy, and McCarthyism had collapsed. The book looked dead on arrival.

But nearly 70 years later, as a congressional committee investigates the far-right attack on the U.S. government on Jan. 6, 2021, the forgotten text has never looked more prescient. [emphasis added]

The authors wrote that far-right activists who wrapped themselves in the American flag actually posed a grave threat to the country’s core principles. In the name of protecting U.S. democracy, they warned, the radical right would employ the language and methods of authoritarianism.