Dancing Machine

Out of Order: Yesterday the House voted to condemn Trump’s language as racist but not before a major delay, the result of Nancy Pelosi calling Trump a racist on the House floor, a statement that so offended Republican leadership that one of them, Congressman Doug Collins, called her out of order for violating protocol. To be clear, Trump making racist statements and calling for women of color to go back to where they came from, not a problem for Trump enabler Collins but Pelosi pointing out those statements as racist, a bigly problem.  Four Republican Representatives, including Will Hurd, Fred Upton, Brian Fitzpatrick and Susan Brooks together with the newly Independent Justin Amash voted alongside all of the Democrats in support of the resolution.  Hurd, the Republican party’s only Black congressman had already gone on record calling Trump’s language racist.  He, Upton and Fitzpatrick are all from swing districts where blindly supporting Trump puts their seats in as much jeopardy as going against him, Brooks has already announced plans to retire and Amash, already in the Trump doghouse has nothing further to lose. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy made it clear that he does not believe that Trump is a racist, adding gratuitously that he also doesn’t believe that Pelosi is one saying that the whole dispute was about philosophy, a matter of socialism versus freedom. Going forward, every time Trump says something inappropriate it will be justified as part of his fight against those “socialist Dems.”  For his part when asked whether it would bother him if someone told his wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, who came to the US from Taiwan as a child to go back home, he ignored the question, instead launching into a soliloquy about his wife’s success and the contribution of legal immigrants.  Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway managed to grab some limelight too, but not in a good way.  When a reporter asked her about Trump’s “racist” statement, she responded by asking him about his heritage. The stunned reporter, who happened to be Jewish, responded “why is that relevant.”  Conway snarled back “because I’m asking a question.”  The visibly angry Conway then babbled "a lot of us are sick and tired of this country, of America coming last to people who swore an oath of office," but not before revealing that she was of Irish and Italian ancestry, not that anyone asked.  Later in the day, once she realized that the optics of asking a Jewish reporter about his ethnicity conjured up memories of WW II era Germany, she feebly justified her question as fair, just her way of pointing out that most Americans had immigrant roots.  Anyway, one thing was clear, not only does she disagree with her husband’s op-ed, the one where he called Trump out as a racist, but she probably missed his point about the challenges of growing up “different” in her lily white world.  Kind of makes you wonder how they ever connected and what their children think about her defensive position. While the “is he or is he not a racist” battle was being waged on the House floor and on the White House lawn, Trump was inside holding one of his cabinet meetings, or a cabinet meeting full of acting members.  Keeping to form, everyone told him he was great ignoring that his speech of the day was full of his usual lies and exaggerations, including some of those old time favorites about migrant caravans full of criminals, gang members and trafficked women.  As to trafficked women, a lawyer representing one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims asserted that Epstein was frequently visited by one or more of those possibly too young “masseuse girlfriends” while serving his absurdly lenient sentence in Florida, the one that allowed him to spend his days in his office “working” only returning to his cell during the evening hours.  Though Epstein is richer than most people, financial forms filed with the Southern District of New York reveal that he’s only a half billionaire, and that expired passport found among his loose diamonds, his lawyers say that it had been intended to provide him with protection in case he was ever on a plane hijacked by Arab terrorists.  Though there’s no evidence that Epstein was ever hijacked, this morning MSNBC’s Morning Joe show played an old tape of him chatting it up with his old friend Donald J Trump as the two of them watched and, at least in Trump’s case, joined a group of very blonde NFL cheerleaders dancing at Mar a Lago back in the 1990s.  Young Trump was such a dancing machine.  

Etcetera:  As expected the ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s attempt to circumvent asylum law protections by requiring refugees to make their asylum requests to the first country they step into after fleeing their homes.  Planned Parenthood fired Dr. Leanna Wan, their newish president who had succeeded the very dynamic Cecile Richards and had  been on the job for less than a year, saying that in tough times with reproductive rights under constant assault the organization needs someone more adept at focusing on both health care and politics, something that they say she wasn’t very good at.  Apparently her management style and changes that she’d imposed had led to an outflow of experienced professionals.  Yesterday Planned Parenthood also said that they plan to defy a newly imposed Trump Administration gag rule banning clinics that obtain any federal funding from referring women for abortions, because that amounts to keeping patients in the dark about legitimate health care options. Lastly, retired Justice John Paul Stevens who over the course of his 35 year term became the leader of the Supreme Court’s liberal wing, died last night.  Notably, the 99 year old Stevens was appointed by a Republican, Gerald Ford, back in the day when Judges didn’t need the Federalist Society stamp of approval to be nominated by Republicans.