Another Bataclan?

The BBC reports:

Police are responding to a “serious incident” in Manchester amid reports of an “explosion” following a pop concert.

Witnesses reported hearing a “huge bang” following an Ariana Grande gig at Manchester Arena.

Network Rail said train lines out of Manchester Victoria station, which is close to the concert venue, were blocked.

Greater Manchester Police tweeted to urge people to stay away from the area.

I know where that station is. I got off one of the circulating buses there. I have friends in Manchester.

Apparently Amy Siskind does a weekly list of things to keep an eye on in Life Under Trump. The one she did for last week has 105 items on it. 105 items! That’s a full-time job. I’m finding a lot I missed. Hoping to track down some of the more startling ones – like # 9:

9. NY Magazine reported that candidates for FBI director were being screened for their loyalty to Trump.

What? But according to Sally Yates the DoJ is supposed to operate completely independently of the Executive Branch…although how that is possible when the executive chooses the top people I don’t know. Our supposed “checks and balances” aren’t.

So here is NY mag on that subject a week ago:

Last week, Donald Trump fired James Comey because the FBI director had lost the trust of the American people — and because he refused to comport himself as the president’s private detective. According to Comey’s confidantes, Trump asked his FBI director to pledge personal loyalty to him, seven days into his presidency. According to Trump, he was thinking about how much he despised the FBI’s investigation into his campaign when he “decided to just [fire Comey].”

These developments have led some to wonder if the Trump administration might be less-than-wholeheartedly committed to the independence of federal law enforcement. Democrats have responded to such concerns by calling for concrete actions to safeguard the independence of the probe into Trump’s campaign. Meanwhile some Republicans have issued statements assuring the American people that they are deeply concerned and principled (and not committed to doing anything, in particular).

This is what I’m saying. Checks and balances – what checks and balances? They’re not working.

Over the weekend, the White House demonstrated just how seriously it takes concerns about the erosion of public trust: To quell bipartisan fears about the politicization of the FBI, Attorney General Jeff Sessions — who had recused himself from all matters pertaining to the investigation of the Trump campaign (of which he was a member) — interviewed a sitting GOP Senator for the position of FBI director (and thus, for the role of leading the investigation into the Trump campaign).

That senator was Texas’s John Cornyn, a man so invested in an impartial investigation into the Trump campaign’s Russia ties, he didn’t ask a single question about that subject at last week’s Senate hearing with James Clapper and former acting attorney general Sally Yates. Instead, Cornyn devoted the entirety of his speaking time to echoing the Trump administration’s concerns about leaks, “unmasking,” the imaginary Susan Rice scandal, and Yates’s traitorous refusal to defend the president’s quasi-Muslim ban.

The Justice Department also interviewed former Republican congressman Mike Rogers for the position. Rogers served as an FBI special agent before leaving the bureau to enter politics in 1995. He held a House seat from 2001 to 2014. On Saturday, Rogers won the endorsement of the FBI Agents Association.

It’s hopeless.

The Supreme Court has put the kibosh on North Carolina’s attempt to sort voters by race.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature unlawfully relied on race when drawing two of the state’s congressional districts.

The decision continued a trend at the court, where justices have found that racial considerations improperly predominated in redistricting decisions by Republican-led legislatures in Virginia, Alabama and North Carolina. Some involved congressional districts, others legislative districts.

The states had contended their efforts were partisan attempts to protect their majorities, which the Supreme Court in the past has allowed, rather than attempts to diminish the impact of minority voters, which is forbidden.

But the justices declared North Carolina had relied too heavily on race in their efforts to “reshuffle,” in the words of Justice Elena Kagan, voters from one district to another. They were unanimous in rejecting one of the districts, and split 5 to 3 on the other.

Ari Berman wrote about racial redistricting in the Nation in 2012:

And it’s not just happening in North Carolina. In virtually every state in the South, at the Congressional and state level, Republicans—to protect and expand their gains in 2010—have increased the number of minority voters in majority-minority districts represented overwhelmingly by black Democrats while diluting the minority vote in swing or crossover districts held by white Democrats. “What’s uniform across the South is that Republicans are using race as a central basis in drawing districts for partisan advantage,” says Anita Earls, a prominent civil rights lawyer and executive director of the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice. “The bigger picture is to ultimately make the Democratic Party in the South be represented only by people of color.” The GOP’s long-term goal is to enshrine a system of racially polarized voting that will make it harder for Democrats to win races on local, state, federal and presidential levels. Four years after the election of Barack Obama, which offered the promise of a new day of postracial politics in states like North Carolina, Republicans are once again employing a Southern Strategy that would make Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater proud.

The consequences of redistricting in North Carolina—one of the most important swing states in the country—could determine who controls Congress and the presidency in 2012. Democrats hold seven of the state’s thirteen Congressional seats, but after redistricting they could control only three—the largest shift for Republicans at the Congressional level in any state this year. Though Obama won eight of the thirteen districts, under the new maps his vote would be contained in only three heavily Democratic districts—all of which would have voted 68 percent or higher for the president in 2008—while the rest of the districts would have favored John McCain by 55 percent or more. “GOP candidates could win just over half of the statewide vote for Congress and end up with 62 percent to 77 percent of the seats,” found John Hood, president of the conservative John Locke Foundation.

Did Trump win in North Carolina? Yes he did. We have racist gerrymandering in North Carolina to thank for this terrifying unhinged narcissist in the White House.

Princess Ivanka is doing her bit to patronize the people of Saudi Arabia, a Lady Catherine de Bourgh in stilettos.

Ivanka Trump brought her message of female empowerment Sunday to the world’s most repressive society for women, a place where women are not allowed to drive, must cover themselves from head to toe in public and require permission from a “male guardian” to travel outside their homes.

What “message of female empowerment”? Certainly not the one that says women should not have to deal with men grabbing them by the pussy and bragging about it to their bros. Certainly not the one that says powerful men who publicly call women names are misogynist shits. Certainly not the one that defends abortion rights. Princess Ivanka is a marketer of sorts, who uses her father’s notoriety to boost her mediocre merch. That’s it, that’s all there is to her. “Be the daughter of a rich con man” – that’s not a very empowering message.

“In every country, including the United States, women and girls face challenges,” Trump told a small group of accomplished Saudi women gathered for a dialogue with her about how to build on their successes. “Saudi Arabia’s progress, especially in recent years, is very encouraging,” she said, “but there’s still a lot of work to be done.”

Saudi Arabia’s “progress” is not the least bit encouraging. She should never say such things.

In her meeting with the women, Ivanka Trump described herself as a “female leader within the Trump administration” and said her focus was “to help empower women in the United States and around the globe.”

Leader of what, to what? Leading to ever-greater heights of ethics violations and nepotism?

Throughout the president’s two-day visit to the kingdom, neither he nor any other U.S. official has publicly mentioned human rights here, although he briefly mentioned women’s empowerment in his keynote speech to Muslim leaders Sunday. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, in a Saturday news conference, did not respond to a question about whether human rights was raised in private talks.

Yeah. They don’t care. They’re in it for the money; that’s all they know.

Trump’s message did not appear to resonate with at least some Saudi women.

“All the women that Ivanka Trump met have a guardian,” said Aziza al-Yousef, a 58-year-old Saudi activist who has campaigned to abolish the guardianship rules. A retired computer science professor at King Saud University, she was recently rebuffed when she tried to deliver to the government a 14,700-signature petition on eliminating the guardian system.

“All these achievements depend on whether you’re lucky to be born in a family where your guardian will be understanding, will help you,” Yousef said. “If Ivanka is interested in women empowerment and human rights, she should see activists, and not just officials.”

But Ivanka is not interested in that. Ivanka is an empty suit.

“It’s not about Ivanka speaking at the meeting,” said activist Loujain al-Hathloul, “but is it actually useful for these women from Saudi Arabia to speak as well? Is their contribution in such events helpful to us Saudi women in general, not princesses or business owners or rich women? Does it actually help us? I doubt it.

“For instance, Princess Reema has her own business; she’s hiring a lot of Saudi women,” Hathloul said. “Thank you for this.” But as a member of the global advisory board for Uber, “she hasn’t pushed for women to drive,” the activist said.

Hathloul, 27, was jailed in 2014 for daring to drive in Saudi Arabia, an event she chronicled on social media. “I haven’t tried since then,” she said, noting that she has a Persian Gulf-wide license that allows her to drive in every other country on the Arabian Peninsula.

“My issue with these events,” she said of Ivanka Trump’s discussion, “is that they show these women as powerful and making an impact, making a change. But in real life, they’ve been given these opportunities by the men. They did not fight for them.”

Exactly. Ivanka Trump is the opposite of “empowering.” She’s more like enweakening.

16 feet tall Robert E. Lee no longer towers over downtown Nawlins.

The New Orleans City Council had declared the city’s four Confederate monuments a public nuisance.

On Friday police cars circled the last one standing, the imposing statue of General Robert E. Lee, a 16-foot-tall bronze figure mounted on a 60-foot pedestal in the center of Lee Circle near downtown. Live news trucks were parked on side streets, and cameramen watched from the windows of nearby hotel rooms. The air was muggy and tense.

It’s a funny thing, but contemporary Germany doesn’t much fancy having giant statues of Hitler in downtown Frankfurt and Berlin and Heidelberg. It doesn’t see the period from 1933 to 1945 as a heroic age. Some Germans do, to be sure, but they’re 1. a minority and 2. wrong.

Three monuments already had come down in what represented a sharp cultural changing of the guard: First it was the Liberty Place monument, an obelisk tucked on a back street near the French Quarter that commemorated a Reconstruction Era white supremacist attack on the city’s integrated police force; next, Confederate Jefferson Davis — a bronze statue of the only president of the Confederacy, mounted on a pedestal in the working-class Mid-City area of town; then, Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard, mounted high on a horse in a roundabout at the entrance to City Park.

Isn’t it a funny coincidence that the US Attorney General’s middle name is Beauregard? Haha no, it’s not, because it’s not a coincidence, it’s deliberate. Jefferson Beauregard – parents making a statement there, which Jeff has lived up to all his life.

Statue supporters say they represent an important part of the state’s identity and culture — but in a city where 60 percent of the residents are African-American, many see the monuments as an offensive celebration of the Confederacy and the system of slavery it sought to preserve.

Good old NPR, too chickenshit to say the monuments are in fact a celebration of the Confederacy and the violent fight against Reconstruction. They have to pretend it’s just hearsay, just opinion.

The Post:

The law enforcement investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign has identified a current White House official as a significant person of interest, showing that the probe is reaching into the highest levels of government, according to people familiar with the matter.

The senior White House adviser under scrutiny by investigators is someone close to the president, according to these people, who would not further identify the official.

My guess is Kushner.

The investigation is moving into the more visible interviews and grand jury subpoenas now.

Although the case began quietly last July as an effort to determine whether any Trump associates coordinated with Russian operatives to meddle in the presidential election campaign, the investigative work now being done by the FBI also includes determining whether any financial crimes were committed by people close to the president. The people familiar with the matter said the probe has sharpened into something more fraught for the White House, the FBI and the Justice Department — particularly because of the public steps investigators know they now need to take, the people said.

This is how all presidencies go, right? No? This is unusual, and bad? Maybe next time we shouldn’t elect an obvious liar and crook.

The White House also has acknowledged that Kushner met with Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States, in late November. Kushner also has acknowledged that he met with the head of a Russian development bank, Vnesheconombank, which has been under U.S. sanctions since July 2014. The president’s son-in-law initially omitted contacts with foreign leaders from a national security questionnaire, though his lawyer has said publicly he submitted the form prematurely and informed the FBI soon after that he would provide an update.

Yep, my guess is Kushner.