Category: American Empire

President Donald Trump will not be unveiling his predecessor Barack Obama’s official White House portrait, a report says. So, taking the cue from others, we are posting one official portrait of Obama (but not the “official White House” one).

NBC first reported that the event to unveil Obama’s official portrait wasn’t currently on the calendar, and may not even occur while Trump is in office, including potentially throughout the duration of a second term if he wins re-election. This would mean “it could be 2025” before Obama’s portrait unveiling happens, the report states, despite Obama leaving office in 2017.

Here’s one portrait of Obama also shared on social media as if it were the portrait scheduled to be unveiled at the White House in 2020.

This painting of Obama was done by Kehinde Wiley and was unveiled at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in February 2018. While this an official portrait of Obama, it is not the official White House portrait that would have been unveiled at the White House ceremony in 2020.

By Peter Wade / Rolling Stone / May 25, 2020

While the U.S. pandemic death toll approaches 100,000, the president left the White House for one of his personal golf courses.

President Trump, who has faced mounting criticism for his administration’s mishandling of the coronavirus crisis and his lack of empathy throughout, decided to leave the White House on Saturday to play golf.

By Colleen O’Connor / Times of San Diego / April 8, 2020

The British went to bed proud on Sunday night. We Americans woke up sad, again, on Monday.

Why? Because of the stark, contrasting coronavirus appearances, over the weekend, by President Trump and Queen Elizabeth II. Trump in his repetitive daily briefing; Elizabeth in a rare public address.

One was full of blame, accusations, impatience, falsehoods and bravado. The other was full of gratitude, praise and encouragement.

The Queen’s address was broadcast just hours before Prime Minister Boris Johnson was hospitalized with COVID-19 and less than a week after her son, the Prince of Wales, finished quarantine following his own coronavirus diagnosis.

It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain.

Peter Wehner at The Atlantic has made this declaration and he’s a Republican. Here’s his conclusion:

Taken together, this is a massive failure in leadership that stems from a massive defect in character. Trump is such a habitual liar that he is incapable of being honest, even when being honest would serve his interests. He is so impulsive, shortsighted, and undisciplined that he is unable to plan or even think beyond the moment.

He is such a divisive and polarizing figure that he long ago lost the ability to unite the nation under any circumstances and for any cause. And he is so narcissistic and unreflective that he is completely incapable of learning from his mistakes. The president’s disordered personality makes him as ill-equipped to deal with a crisis as any president has ever been. With few exceptions, what Trump has said is not just useless; it is downright injurious.

From The Washington Post

President Trump plans to declare a national emergency Friday, as public life in America continues to grind to a halt. Concerns about the coronavirus pandemic rippled across the globe, as more events were canceled and more landmarks were shuttered; U.S. schools closed to millions of students; Louisiana delayed its presidential primary until summer; and the Group of Seven leaders planned a virtual crisis conference.

Here are some other significant developments:

All eyes are now trained on Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine who told a local hometown newspaper on Friday that she was working with a small group of Republican Senators to ensure there are witnesses during Trump’s trial in the Senate.

The House just voted today to send the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate and Speaker Nancy Pelosi just named the seven House members who will be “managers” during the Senate trial. The trial is expected to begin next Tuesday, January 21.

According to the Bangor Daily News:

U.S. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine told reporters on Friday that she is working with a “fairly small group” of fellow Republican senators toward a goal of ensuring witnesses can be called in the chamber’s impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.

By Thomas Ultican / Tultican

This may be the finest book thus far in the twenty-first century. Kochland; The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America is the second book by former agribusiness reporter for the Associated Press, Christopher Leonard.
Kochland is uniquely special. It is an economic history of America since 1967 that shows the deep changes in our economy that have given rise to a new kind of capitalism. Kochland is told through the lens of Koch Industries whose “annual revenue is larger than that of Facebook, Goldman Sachs, and US Steel combined.”

A world in which war is normal and peace is out of reach is no more survivable or sustainable than a world where the atmosphere gets hotter every year.

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies / Nation of Change / December 20, 2019

The trove of U.S. “Lessons Learned” documents on Afghanistan published by the Washington Post portrays, in excruciating detail, the anatomy of a failed policy, scandalously hidden from the public for 18 years. The “Lessons Learned” papers, however, are based on the premise that the U.S. and its allies will keep intervening militarily in other countries, and that they must, therefore, learn the lessons of Afghanistan to avoid making the same mistakes in future military occupations.

A new poll released on Christmas Day shows record-level support among U.S. voters for the ouster of President Donald Trump. Public support for Donald Trump’s removal from office is the highest it has ever been.

The daily tracking poll from Microsoft News published Wednesday, Dec. 25, asked respondents if they “support or oppose the Senate voting to remove President from office?” It found that while 55% of people support and only 40% oppose — a dramatic surge for those backing Trump’s ouster and a record for the poll that has been asking that same question since late September of this year.

“Today, in service to our duty to the Constitution and to our country, the House Committee on the Judiciary is introducing two articles of impeachment, charging the President of the United States Donald J. Trump with committing high crimes and misdemeanors,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler said Tuesday morning, December 10. CNN reported:

Democratic leaders announced they will bring two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, charging him with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress to set in motion the third impeachment of a US president in history.

By Jim Miller

Her Heart Stopped for 6 hours. Now She’s Ready to go Back to Work

Fractured Forests Are Endangering Wildlife, Scientists Find

Killer Heat: US Cities’ Plans for Coming Heatwaves Fail to Protect the Vulnerable

Eight-Year-Old Girl Strip-Searched Before Visiting Father at Prison

No Sex in the Bunkbeds!: Tales from the Most Intimate Sharing Economy Start Up Yet

Google’s Anti-Worker Actions Evoke IBM’s Racist Past

This Has Been the Warmest Decade in Earth’s History

By Marjorie Cohn / TruthOut / Nov. 28, 2019

Once again, the United States is complicit in an illegal coup d’état in Latin America, this time in Bolivia. On November 10, a right-wing, anti-Indigenous group seized power after the Bolivian military’s removal of President Evo Morales, who had declared victory in the October 20 presidential election.

The United States’ fingerprints are all over the coup. Advisers from the U.S. Southern Command have been stationed on Bolivia’s border with Argentina, Ivanka Trump made a surprising visit to an Argentine province near the Bolivian border in September, the pro-U.S. Organization of American States (OAS) cast unfounded doubt on Morales’s election victory, and the U.S.’s National Endowment for Democracy provided suspicious grants to Bolivia.

At least 32 people have been killed and hundreds injured since the coup began.