Mitt Romney and his father

I wrote before how some Republicans are now starting to distance themselves from Donald Trump following his disgraceful response to the protests and demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd. I said that while we should welcome their defections, we should never let them forget their complicity in creating the kind of Republican party that enabled Trump to win the presidency, and have continued to support him on his rampage against basic norms and decency.
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Paula Jean Swearengin wins Democratic primary for WV senate seat

On Tuesday there were primary elections in several states and much media attention has rightly focused on the fiasco in Georgia where once again voters in De Kalb and Fulton counties, the latter where the city of Atlanta is, and where both have large black populations, faced lines that lasted for many hours to vote, a further example of how the Republican-controlled state government tries to suppress black votes by making it much harder for them than for white districts, by having far too few polling stations, malfunctioning equipment, and insufficient and inadequately trained poll workers.

But I want to focus on one good result that happened in a different state.
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Seth Meyers on Trump and the police reaction to the protests

He says that the police are lashing out violently because the protests have had an impact. More and more people are coming out for the demonstrations and public opinion is overwhelmingly in favor of the protestors.

He also emphasizes that the rising stock market reveals what many of us have been saying for years, that the stock market has no relationship to the lives of most people but is just something that measures the how well the wealthy are doing. And it appears that they are doing very well indeed despite the pandemic and the turmoil.

The pandemic may be the death of the coal industry

While the economy struggles to recover from the pandemic, an unexpected casualty that may not survive is the coal industry.

The global coal industry will “never recover” from the Covid-19 pandemic, industry observers predict, because the crisis has proved renewable energy is cheaper for consumers and a safer bet for investors.

A long-term shift away from dirty fossil fuels has accelerated during the lockdown, bringing forward power plant closures in several countries and providing new evidence that humanity’s coal use may finally have peaked after more than 200 years.
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The same old media misinformation story repeated in Bolivia

The pattern should be familiar to any observer of the US media. When the US government wants to discredit the leader of a nation that it dos not like, it trumps up some charge, gets some ostensibly neutral party (that is often covertly funded by the CIA or other US government agency) to support the charge, and much of the mainstream US media obediently snaps into line and parrots the charge, providing cover for those who want to overthrow that country’s leader. Then long after the overthrow has occurred, the US media that led the charge quietly acknowledge that the basis on which they called for the overthrow was wrong. But the damage has been done.
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Powerful show on police brutality

On Sunday’s episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver devoted the entire show to the need for police reform in the US and what the options are. It is an excellent show about what needs to be done to deal with the toxic police culture in the US that has led to so much brutality. One of the things he focuses on is the very negative role played by police unions.

I am really glad that so many white, Hispanic, and Asian groups have identified with and joined in the protests. That is a sign of hope because we need a broad multi-racial and multi-ethnic and multi-generational coalition to get real change.
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Video analysis of what happened before Trump’s photo op

One of the low but illustrative points during the last week was the massive show of force by the various branches of the US security forces, including the military, in Washington DC to clear demonstrators out of Lafayette Square just across from the White House. And for what? Just to enable Trump to walk a couple of blocks and stand in front of a church and wave a Bible. What it really showed was the level of militarization of US law enforcement as it acted like an army in occupied territory.
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Rats deserting the Trump ship

There are some signs that the solid Republican support that has enabled Trump to behave like a petulant tyrant is cracking after the appalling sights that we have witnessed in the past week or so following the murder of George Floyd. While we should welcome these defections, we should not start praising the defectors since these people were all Republicans and thus part of creating the rotten party that enabled Trump to become its leader. That is a stain that they cannot erase.

Alaska’s Republican senator Lisa Murkowski is publicly expressing her doubts about Trump. Mitt Romney and George W. Bush have reportedly said that they will not support Trump’s re-election. Bush has, however, denied reports published in the New York Times about his decision based on what some of his associates have told the media, though he has not said what he will do. His brother Jeb Bush has also not said what he will do, but both brothers and their parents said they did not vote for Trump in 2016. It is not clear if they would vote for Biden. Colin Powell has also said that he will vote for Biden, saying that Trump lies all the time, unlike of course Powell who only lies some of the time, like when he wanted to persuade the American public and the UN Security Council that Iraq should be invaded.
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Examining racism in the Asian community

Marina Fang writes about the fact that the current protests have been the occasion for many young Asian Americans to have sometimes uncomfortable conversations with their parents and other elders about racism in their community.

Anti-Black racism in Asian communities is tied to the “model minority” myth, which white political leaders, particularly in response to the civil rights movement in the 1960s, wielded in order to drive a wedge between Asian Americans and other people of color. Many Asian immigrants internalized that mentality, operating under the false impression that being a “good” immigrant could help them assimilate into whiteness and align themselves with white people.
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