More Christmas Male Beauty

 

Standing Against the Coming Tidal Wave of Deceit

Personally, I will not find total relief until Congress certifies the Electoral College results and Joe Biden is shown into office on January 20, 2021.  These events will end the imminent threat Donald Trump continues to pose to America's democracy, world peace and morality.  But for total healing for the majority of Americans to occur, the crimes and misdeeds of the Trump/Pence regime must be exposed, legislation passed to prevent them from ever occurring again, and Trump being confirmed as the most corrupt and lawless occupant of the White House in American history. This may not sway Trump's white supremacist and Christofascist supporters (the two, in my view, are largely the same people), but an accurate history is critical, especially in the face of the tidal wave of lies Trump will continue to spin.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at why this is importance.  Here are highlights:

President Donald Trump uses his pardon power as an instrument of personal ambition. He pardons people who have lied to protect him, and people who have expressed loyalty to him. Yesterday, he pardoned Charles Kushner, whose son is married to one of Trump’s daughters. More Trump-family pardons may soon be coming.

Public-spirited citizens are understandably angry about these abuses. As the former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, once a leading member of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, wrote, “The pardons from [Trump] this President are what you would expect to get if you gave the pardon power to a mob boss.”

Trump used the pardon power as a tool of self-defense against a criminal investigation. Potential witnesses were induced to keep silent—or to lie outright. To quote Weissmann again, Mueller had to structure his plea-bargain agreements with former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort “in anticipation of a pardon” by President Trump.

In partial consequence of Trump’s pardon power, the most important questions assigned to Mueller remain unanswered: What exactly was the relationship between Russian intelligence, Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks, and the Trump campaign? . . . . Why has Trump remained so curiously deferential to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and so reluctant to ever criticize him?

If public-spirited citizens rightly feel fierce anger against the abuse of office that Trump’s pardons represent, the story need not end here.

The prospect of Trump’s pardons hindered the prosecution of his associates—and their arrival has now overturned some of the convictions. But the country has much less need to punish the Trump associates than to know exactly what happened. . . . What the country needed was the truth, and that truth is still waiting to be told.

After Trump leaves office, the country will need more than ever an independent investigation that can document the corruption of the Trump era. The truth is needed especially because Trump’s manufacturing of lies will not end with his presidency.

[T]he effort to exonerate Russia for helping Trump in 2016 will continue, and possibly accelerate with Trump out of office. With Trump and the pro-Trump media, it’s never enough to prove the truth once. The truth needs to be as persistent as the lie. Even now, Trump defenders continue to describe the proven fact of Russian assistance as a “hoax,” and the guilty pleas of Trump associates as them being “framed.” The imperative to defend reality against Trumpism will not cease with the Trump presidency.

And so it will be with all the other mythological elements of the Trump dreamworld. They will continue to propagate in ways that poison the American mindscape. The massive corruption of the Trump family will be obscured by false accusations against everybody else—a job of obfuscation that Trump allies may find easier once the Trump family is no longer subject to any kind of official disclosure requirements.

Trump attempted to pervert the 2020 election by sabotaging mail-in voting—so essential amid a pandemic.

When that failed, Trump tried to overturn the outcome of the election in courts he had staffed for that very purpose.

When the courts balked, Trump demanded that Republican state legislators discard the wishes of their voters.

When the legislators refused, he turned to plots for a military coup to seize voting records.

What’s needed post-Trump is a fact-finding commission that can engrave this history on the national conscience. It cannot be a truly bipartisan commission, because one of the two parties is so tragically complicit in Trump’s misdeeds. But it can be nonpartisan: its chairpersons and staff chosen from among those with eminent legal and national-security backgrounds outside the party system.

The commission could be granted access to government records and whatever private records are produced by congressional subpoena. Its job would be to report, not prosecute. Congress can enact new laws, if those seem called for. The executive branch can adopt new rules too. But what America needs is a definitive record, backed by all the prestige of the most trusted American institutions, in order to stand strong, firm, and clear against the coming tidal wave of deceit.

Christmas Morning Male Beauty

 

The Lost Message of Christmas and Christ

Like many LGBT Americans I have an uneasy relationship with religion, especially Christianity, which for so many of us is not a message of hope but instead the source of years of self-hatred and condemnation by the modern day Pharisees of our day, particularly leaders of the Catholic Church in which I was raised and evangelical Christians who seem more like the villains of the Bible than followers of Christ.  Sadly, on this pandemic year Christmas, the message of Christmas and Christ seeming remains lost on far too many Americans, especially the Trump base of evangelicals who continue to swear fealty to an individual who is the antithesis of Christ's inclusive message and who continues to preach division and hatred of others. Ironically, these same individuals will likely participate in church services today either in person or virtually as they utterly ignore the example of Christ. It's little wonder that so many of the younger generations have joined the ranks of the "Nones."  A column in the New York Times by Peter Wehner, a never Trumper and what might some might call a "principled conservative," Looks at the phenomena and how Christ was the radical opposite of so many of his self-proclaimed modern-day follower.  Here are column excerpts:

First-century Christians weren’t prepared for what a truly radical and radically inclusive figure Jesus was, and neither are today’s Christians. We want to tame and domesticate who he was, but Jesus’ life and ministry don’t really allow for it. He shattered barrier after barrier.

One example is Jesus’ encounter, in the fourth chapter of the gospel of John, with the Samaritan woman at the well. Jesus and the woman talked about Jesus being the Messiah, why he was even deigning to talk with her, and the unnamed woman’s past and present, which she initially sought to hide from Jesus. (It included her five previous husbands, according to the account in John, and the fact that “the one whom you now have is not your husband.”) Yet not a word of condemnation passed the lips of Jesus; the woman felt heard, understood, cared for.

This story is a striking example of Jesus’ rejection of conventional religious and cultural thinking — in this case because Jesus, a man, was talking earnestly to a woman in a world in which women were often demeaned and treated as second-class citizens; and because Jesus, a Jew, was talking to a Samaritan, who were despised by the Jews for reasons going back centuries. According to Professor Bailey, “A Samaritan woman and her community are sought out and welcomed by Jesus. In the process, ancient racial, theological and historical barriers are breached. His message and his community are for all.”

This happened time and again with Jesus.

Jesus was repeatedly attacked for hanging out with the wrong crowd and recruited his disciples from the lower rungs of society.

And Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan, a story about a man who helps a wounded traveler on the road to Jericho, made the hero of the story not an influential priest, not a person of social rank or privilege but a hated foreigner.

Jesus was most drawn to the forsaken and despised, the marginalized, those who had stumbled and fallen. He was beloved by them, even as he was targeted and eventually killed by the politically and religiously powerful, who viewed Jesus as a grave threat to their dominance.

Over the course of my faith journey, I have wondered: Why was a hallmark of Jesus’s ministry intimacy with and the inclusion of the unwanted and the outcast, men and women living in the shadow of society, more likely to be dismissed than noticed, more likely to be mocked than revered?

Part of the explanation surely has to do with the belief in the imago Dei, that Jesus sees indelible dignity and inestimable worth in every person, even “the least of these.” If no one else would esteem them, Jesus would.

Among the people who best articulated this ethic was Abraham Lincoln, who in a 1858 speech in Lewiston, Ill., in which he explained the true meaning of the Declaration of Independence, said, “Nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows.”

Yet another reason for Jesus’ connection with outcasts undoubtedly had to do with his compassion and empathy, his desire to relieve their pain and lift the soul-crushing shame that accompanies being a social pariah and an untouchable.

Jesus must have understood that we human beings battle with exclusion, self-righteousness and arrogance, and have a quick trigger finger when it comes to judging others. Jesus knew how easily we could fall into the trap of turning “the other” — those of other races, ethnicities, classes, genders and nations — into enemies. We place loyalty to the tribe over compassion and human connection. We view differences as threatening; the result is we become isolated, rigid in our thinking, harsh and unforgiving.

Jesus clearly believed that outcasts had a lot to teach the privileged and the powerful, including the virtues of humility and the vice of supreme certitude.

It’s easy for us to look back 20 centuries and see how religious authorities were too severe and unforgiving in how they treated the outcasts of their time. The wisest question those of us who are Christians could ask ourselves isn’t why we are so much more humane and enlightened than they were; rather, it is to ask ourselves who the modern outcasts are and whether we’re mistreating them.

“How Christians, including me, responded to the AIDS crisis in the ’80s haunts me,” my longtime friend Scott Dudley, senior pastor of Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Wash., recently told me. “Had we, like the first Christians, cared first and cared most for modern day ‘plague’ victims, I think we’d be in a whole different conversation with the L.G.B.T.Q. community.

Jesus’ teachings are so challenging, so distinct from normal human reactions and behaviors, that we constantly have to renew our commitment to them. Every generation of Christians need to think through how his example applies to the times in which they live. We need our sensibilities to align more with his. Otherwise, we drift into self-righteousness and legalism, even to the point that we corrupt the very institution, the church, which was created to worship him and to love others.

The lesson from Jesus’ life and ministry is that understanding people’s stories and struggles requires much more time and effort than condemning them, but it is vastly more rewarding. And the lesson of Christmas and the incarnation, at least for those of us of the Christian faith, is that all of us were once outcasts, broken yet loved, and worth reaching out to and redeeming.

If God did that for us, why do we find it so hard to do it for each other?

Merry Christmas to all.  May we follow Christ's example be we Christian or not.

More Christmas Eve Male Beauty

 

Military on Red Alert Over Trump's Talk of Illegal Use of Martial Law

Members of the military take an oath to defend the nation and the U.S. Constitution, not an oath of personal fealty to the president. This concept and reality is lost on Donald Trump who appears to view himself the equivalent of some Roman emperor or absolute monarch.  As Trump grasps at ways to remains in office to avoid criminal prosecution and hold off creditors, senior members of the U.S. military worry that he may attempt some illegal act involving a declaration of martial law as a last ditch effort to avoid leaving office.  Should such an attempt occur, hopefully, members of the military will recognize the illegality of any such action and refuse to act (the more likely scenario would be the military having to put down a revolt by Trumpists and far right militias). That Trump is even contemplating such actions underscores his unfitness for office and the reality that he should never hold any political office in the future. A piece in Newsweek looks at the military's unease with a insane would be despot in the the White House for less than a month.  Here are excerpts:

Pentagon and Washington-area military leaders are on red alert, wary of what President Donald Trump might do in his remaining days in office. Though far-fetched, ranking officers have discussed what they would do if the president declared martial law. And military commands responsible for Washington DC are engaged in secret contingency planning in case the armed forces are called upon to maintain or restore civil order during the inauguration and transition period. According to one officer who spoke to Newsweek on condition of anonymity, the planning is being kept out of sight of the White House and Trump loyalists in the Pentagon for fear that it would be shut down.

"I've been associated with the military for over 40 years and I've never seen the discussions that are being had right now, the need for such discussions," says a retired flag officer, currently a defense contractor who has mentored and advised his service's senior leaders. He was granted anonymity in order to speak without fear of reprisal.

A half-dozen officers in similar positions agree that while there is zero chance that the uniformed leadership would involve itself in any scheme to create an election-related reversal, they worry that the military could get sucked into a crisis of Trump's making, particularly if the president tries to rally private militias and pro-Trump paramilitaries in an effort to disrupt the transition and bring violence to the capital.

“But martial law," says the lawyer, "is the wrong paradigm to think about the dangers ahead." Though such a presidential proclamation could flow from his order as commander-in-chief, an essential missing ingredient is the martial side: the involvement and connivance of some cabal of officers who would support the president's illegal move.

Such a group doesn't exist, he and other experts agree, but there could still be room for mischief, confusion, and even use of military force. It would just not be in the way Trump might intend, particularly if he continues his quest to destabilize the democratic process.

[O]fficers who were willing to speak about the subject insisted on anonymity, fearful that use of their names might provoke the ire of the president. They feared that publicly stated opposition to the president's scheme to undermine the election—whether that is to proclaim martial law, to seize voting machines, or even to halt Congress from ratifying state elector's results on January 6—could actually embolden Donald Trump to act.

"At this point there's no telling what [Trump] the president might do in the next month," says a former Northern Command (NORTHCOM) commander, one who has been intimately involved in the development of domestic civil planning. "Though I'm confident that the uniformed military leadership has their heads screwed on right, the craziness is unprecedented and the possibilities are endless."

Military lawyers say that threats to public safety and order have to exist beyond the capacity of the federal government or state and local government to resolve. But they point out that in Portland, Oregon, and other cities across America, the Department of Homeland Security has already declared that the local governments have lost control, necessitating federal intervention, even without the state's permission. That precedent could embolden the White House to believe it has the right to act.

So it's also conceivable that in the District of Columbia a commander could independently invoke martial law to restore order were there a complete breakdown. All the sources Newsweek spoke to, from the Pentagon military leadership down to the Joint Task Force already activated for coronavirus and used to suppress the George Floyd riots, agree that such a declaration is unlikely—that is, unless there is an armed rebellion undertaken on behalf of Donald Trump.

"The greatest danger is that the very existence of these layers of secret directives might convey the impression of powers and authorities that don't really exist in peacetime," the former Justice Department lawyer says.

In years of writing on this subject, I have never heard so many officers—active and retired—willing to talk openly about the need for professional military officers to review their sacred obligations to refuse to follow unlawful orders and to think through their roles and duties given the Donald Trump wild card, even though he is still president.

"You've got to recognize an illegal order when it comes your way," says another retired flag officer, saying he has been involved in unprecedented internal discussions going on right now about this subject. The officer, who declined to speak on the record, says that though lawful and unlawful orders are a part of officer training from the beginning, "the principles of loyalty to the Constitution hammered home from the start of every career, ... we've never had the real thing, never someone who occupied the White House who conducted themselves anything like President Trump."

Should Trump try any such illegal move, he needs to be charged with treason, convicted and given the harshest penalty available. 

Christmas Eve Male Beauty

 

Republicans Just Voted to Defund the Police

What Republicans claim to support and what they actually support are typically two very different things. They claim to support working Americans, yet their agenda is all about helping the rich and huge corporations and policies ]that shift wealth from the working and middle class to the rich. They claim to support the military yet send our troops off to unwinnable wars. And they claim to support the police even as they refuse to help state and local governments in dire financial need due to the pandemic with the direct result that many police forces will have to furlough officers for lack of funding. A case in point is the new Covid-19 pandemic relief bill - assuming Trump doesn't scuttle it - which fails to give sufficient aid to states and localities. The lesson?  Never believe Republican rhetoric and bloviating.  Instead, watch their actions.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the GOP's de facto defunding of police departments across the country:

President Trump and Republicans campaigned in 2020 by scaring Americans into thinking Democrats would “defund the police” and unleash a crime spree.

This helped Republicans keep control of the Senate (for now) and grow their numbers in the House. So what are they doing to celebrate? Why, they’re defunding the police — as violent crime surges.

GOP leaders over the past week defeated efforts to help states and cities that are facing cutbacks to public safety and other services because of the pandemic-caused budget crisis. They claimed this would amount to what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) called a “blue state bailout.” In reality, it was more of a “blue bailout” — and police in blue and red states alike are now on the chopping block.

[T]he bipartisan U.S. Conference of Mayors protested this week, “Congress chose to turn its back on first responders, police, firefighters and other essential workers.”

This isn’t theoretical. In large part because of the federal government’s months-long refusal to help, localities across the country are involuntarily defunding the police in real time.

Dayton, Ohio, is no longer planning to hire a new class of police in 2021 because of the budget crisis. Though trying to protect public safety, Dayton reportedly plans a small reduction in existing police jobs.

This week, 12 local elected officials in Georgia wrote the state’s two U.S. senators (who both face runoff elections) to say the covid-19 package “fails to provide vital funds for essential workers in local governments: workers like teachers, firefighters and law enforcement.”

Oakland, Calif., announced Sunday that it was cutting “$20 million in public safety expenditure.” The city’s police chief had warned that “each of these critical overtime and program cuts reduce vital prevention, intervention, and safety services.”

Los Angeles has been wrestling with possible cuts to the LAPD of more than 600 officers and employees. The city is reducing policing programs — not, primarily, because of “defund” activists but because the city is broke.

Pittsburgh has considered cutting 200 police officers. Jurisdictions ranging from sprawling Dallas to little Hazelton, Pa., have moved toward reducing police pay and overtime. Illinois is contemplating $71 million in cuts to public safety. In Michigan, cities are begging the state for help avoiding cuts to police.

Compounding the problem, he told me, is “you have this huge spike in violent crime” after decades of decline. Though federal statistics lag, PERF calculates that homicides were up 28 percent in the first nine months of 2020. (Aggravated assaults increased, too — though, happily, rapes and robberies declined.)

There are various explanations: economic collapse, closed schools, police holding back because of police-misconduct criticism or numbers stretched thin by demonstrations. Whatever the cause, “the reality on the ground is significant spikes in homicides across the country, and that just seems to be being missed,” Wexler said.

It’s easy to miss as Trump and his aides stir up chaos in the final weeks of his presidency: throwing the just-passed covid relief bill into doubt, risking a government shutdown, pardoning lawbreaking former aides and Republican lawmakers, handcuffing the Federal Reserve, undermining faith in the election, and winking at a Russian cyberattack on the United States.

Washington’s refusal to help states and localities is, ironically, doing more to defund the police than the left’s “defund” movement could. Though there are exceptions (New York, Austin, Seattle), a Bloomberg News study in September concluded that, overall, the defund “rallying cry hasn’t translated into reality.”

Trump and Republicans were correct when they warned of a threat to public safety. But the perpetrators weren’t “leftist” militants or Black Lives Matter activists. The culprits are Republicans who promised “law and order” but, with their votes, defunded the police.

Wednesday Male Beauty

 

Trump is Betraying is Republican Enablers In The 11th Hour

If one follows Donald Trump's business career one readily find a pattern of behavior  that is a cross between a school yard bully and a Mafia crime boss, with threats and extortions the norm and a sea of unpaid creditors. Somehow many Congressional Republicans insanely believed they would be able to control Trump - just as they insanely thought they would be able to control Christofascists allowed into the party - only to discover that Trump would knife them in the back in a heart beat and that only a fool or demented idiot would ever trust the man.  Now, Trump is poised to derail the Covid relief bill approved by Congress and perhaps tank the GOP senatorial campaigns in Georgia as he tries to blackmail Congressional Republicans to basically find a way to engage in a coup to overturn the 2020 election results.  But for the harm done to Americans in need of another round of pandemic relief and the threat Trump comprises to American democracy as long as he continues to draw breath, the situation would be comical and would cheer seeing the likes of Mitch "Moscow Mitch" McConnell getting screwed over by Der Trumpenfuhrer.  A piece in Salon looks at the self-created situation Republicans find themselves in:

Trump really does believe that Republicans know some super secret method for nullifying the election he just lost, and that they're just not revealing it to him for some reason. In reality, Republicans probably would help him steal the election if they could, but they can't. But Trump refuses to accept this so he is constantly wheedling GOP officials to do more and whining publicly that they're holding out on him. He's even considering canceling a Mar-A-Lago trip and staying in D.C. for Christmas, probably because he's talked himself into believing he can strike a "deal" to nullify the election. 

Trump is particularly incensed at McConnell right now for not doing more to make Trump's failed coup successful. On Monday, Trump's office sent out emails to congressional Republicans in which Trump took credit (falsely) for McConnell's successful re-election, and implied that McConnell should show his gratitude by doing more to steal the presidential election for Trump. Trump believes that Congress will have an opportunity to overturn the election on January 6, by refusing to certify the Electoral College vote. We know he believes this, even though it's false because he's been scheming with House Republicans on how to do it. We also know — because Trump keeps tweeting about it — that Trump believes Senate Republicans are, for whatever reason, not doing enough to help him and need so more threats to get motivated to back his coup.

McConnell believes that this $900 billion coronavirus bill is needed to help Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, the two Georgia Republicans trying to retain their Senate seats in the January 5 run-offs. McConnell told Senate Republicans last week that "Kelly and David are getting hammered" by their Democratic opponents for not passing a bill. This $900 billion package, which is only a fraction of the spending Democrats in the House passed months ago, is the smallest bill McConnell can get away with while still saving those two Senate seats he needs to keep his majority. Trump's most ardent supporters have singled out the Republicans' desire to win in Georgia as a leverage point, and keep threatening to tank that race if Republicans don't do more to help Trump steal the election. 

To be clear, this isn't 11th level chess. It's actually Trump employing junior high school bully logic: McConnell wants a thing (this paltry coronavirus relief bill), and so Trump is threatening to take it away unless Trump gets what he wants (a successful coup).  Trump, being very dumb, has not considered the possibility that McConnell couldn't give in to the extortion if he tried because there's actually no secret file in McConnell's office labeled "How To Steal Any Election." Nor has Trump apparently given much consideration to how Democrats might react to him threatening McConnell by pretending that he wants a more generous bill. 

Democrats have called Trump's bluff.  Washington Post reporter Mike DeBonis confirmed that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is planning the unanimous consent vote Christmas Eve, which will force Republicans to go on the record against mailing $2,000 checks to Americans. Considering that McConnell is hoping $600 checks will be enough to buy off Georgia voters on January 5, a vote against a more generous bill is clearly something Republican politicians likely hope to avoid. 

In no way does this theory require believing Trump is crafty, clever, or heaven forbid, intelligent. Trump is a moron who is employing what he thinks is a clever Roy Cohn-style scheme to blackmail McConnell. It is, however, an idiotic misfire, because he's trying to extort something McConnell simply doesn't have, that is some deeply buried secret method to steal the election. 

The best part about this is that Democrats handed Republicans a chance to get rid of Trump a year ago, when the Democratic-controlled House impeached Trump for, yep, another one of Trump's many extortion schemes to keep himself in office. . . . . But rather than accept this golden opportunity to rid themselves of an erratic and disloyal narcissist in favor of a more easily controlled President Mike Pence, Senate Republicans chose to acquit Trump and keep him around. 

To thank them, Trump is now blowing up their spot on this coronavirus bill. Because Trump is loyal to no one and can only be failed. To him, you're only as good as the last illegal or unethical thing you did to help him. 

And boy, it's hard not to wonder if McConnell isn't regretting his choice to acquit Trump. Because if he'd just taken the chance Democrats gave him back then, he'd have President Pence happily just doing what he's told. But no, like so many discarded lawyers, staffers, and other Trump enablers, McConnell made the mistake of thinking he could somehow protect and enable Trump without Trump screwing him over. But Trump will always betray his allies in the end. It's like the moral of the story Trump loved telling at campaign rallies: Republicans knew Trump was a snake when they picked him up.