Life With Peggy

It Never Gets Old

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Start of the Berlin blockade during the early Cold War; Boxing champ Jack Dempsey born; Comedian and actor Jackie Gleason of ‘The Honeymooners’ fame dies

There are infinite shades of grey. Writing often appears so black and white.

Rebecca Solnit

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Erdogan’s party suffers blow after Istanbul re-run poll defeat

Turkey’s ruling AK Party has lost control of Istanbul after a re-run of the city’s mayoral election, delivering a stinging blow to President Erdogan.

With nearly all ballots counted, main opposition party candidate Ekrem Imamoglu had a lead of 775,000 votes, a huge increase on the margin of 13,000 he achieved in the earlier election.

That victory in March was annulled after the AKP alleged irregularities.

The result ends 25 years of AKP rule in Istanbul.

The AKP’s candidate, former Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, conceded to his opponent.

The new drug highway: Pacific islands at centre of cocaine trafficking boom

Explosion in number of boats carrying cocaine and meth from Latin America to Australia is causing havoc for islands on the way

• Cocaine used as washing powder: police struggle with Pacific drug influx

by Kate Lyons in Nadi, Fiji

It is the drug route you’ve never heard of: a multibillion-dollar operation involving cocaine and methamphetamines being packed into the hulls of sailing boats in the US and Latin America and transported to Australia via South Pacific islands more often thought of as holiday destinations than narcotics hubs.

In the past five years there has been an explosion in the number of boats, sometimes carrying more than a tonne of cocaine, making the journey across the Pacific Ocean to feed Australia’s growing and very lucrative drug habit.

Muslim man ‘killed by mob who tied him to tree, beat him and forced him to recite Hindu chants’ in India

Twenty-two-year-old tied to tree and ‘mercilessly beaten’, family says

Zamira Rahim @ZamiraRahim

A young Indian Muslim man has died days after reportedly being beaten by a crowd who forced him to perform Hindu chants.

Tabrez Ansari was assaulted by the mob on 18 June, after being accused of breaking into a house and stealing a motorbike in the eastern state of Jharkand.

Several videos, which appear to be of the assault, spread quickly online in the aftermath of Ansari’s death.

Australian media sue police after raids over leaked documents

Australia’s national broadcaster went to court Monday to challenge a police raid on its offices and demand the return of files seized during the controversial operation.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) demanded an injunction to prevent police from accessing the seized files, which concern a two-year-old investigative report on war crimes by Australian special forces in Afghanistan.

ABC managing director David Anderson said the suit also challenged the constitutionality of the search warrant used by police to conduct the raid “on the basis that it hinders our implied freedom of political communication.”

‘I don’t want to be considered as an ex-slave or just a survivor’

Some Yazidi women have found the strength to go back and live in Sinjar, years after ISIL carried out a genocide.

by Marta Bellingreri & Alessio Mamo

“There is no Sinjar without Yazidis; and there are no Yazidis without Sinjar,” says 25-year-old Shreen, referring to her land of origin, the northern Iraqi province in the Nineveh region.

She survived two years and eight months of sex slavery in the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS)-occupied Mosul, but during the battle for the city she managed to escape and later went to Syria to rescue her sister, who had also been taken by ISIL.

“But I don’t want to be considered as an ex-slave or just a survivor. I am now an activist for the Yazidi cause and I will not leave Iraq until I have the corpse of my father.”

As immigrant children go without soap and toothbrushes, Trump and Pence say Congress is to blame

Lawyers visiting a detention center in Texas found children there lacked basic necessities. Trump and Pence blame Congress.

By Anya van Wagtendonk 

President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence responded separately to criticism over reports that the government is not providing detained immigrant children with adequate food, water, soap, toothbrushes, or blankets. In three interviews that aired Sunday, both men blamed Democrats for the conditions at detention facilities.

Questions about the conditions detained minors are in began to arise following the publication of an Associated Press report that detailed the findings of a team of lawyers that toured a detention facility in Clint, Texas. The lawyers reported they found 250 infants, children, and teenagers being held without adequate access to food, water, or medicine. They also said they saw babies and toddlers being left in the care of slightly older children, and that there was poor access to areas for bathing, places to sleep, and to fresh clothes.

Writing Clio always has the same problem, where do you start? Asking for a date Democrats started supporting Race Slavery is useless because they always supported Race Slavery, from their inception. Indeed the prospective loss of Slave Property was one of the precipitating causes of the Revolution we elide by talking about Yankee Smugglers who smuggled…

Well, Slaves. Also Tea and Rum.

The Republican Party on the other hand was constructed on a specifically anti-Slavery Agenda (one of the reasons it’s still so popular in the Mid-West) and the decline in their morality is much more amusing to deride because Democrats never professed it.

But this is one of those cases where the hypocrisy of your opposition does not mitigate culpability and Racist Democrats were Racist and everyone knew it at the time. It was their ‘brand’.

That Joe Carson was willing to work with them and still thinks that’s a good idea says volumes about the “pragmatist” “electoral victory” Party- Never met a constituency they wouldn’t betray or a policy too blindingly beneficial to sell-out.

He opposed School Integration, heart and soul. I hope the African-American vote deserts him in droves.

‘Segregationist’ barely begins to describe the racist Dixiecrats that Joe Biden worked with in the Senate
By Wil Haygood, Washington Post
June 23, 2019

Several days later, Joe Biden is still contending with the blowback that greeted his remarks at a fundraiser in New York City on Tuesday night extolling the “civility” of the Senate in the 1970s. The former vice president, now seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, illustrated his point by talking about working cooperatively with segregationist Democratic senators James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman E. Talmadge of Georgia. Even if he “didn’t agree on much of anything” with those senators, Biden said, “we got things done.”
…
It might be helpful to know a bit more about “Dixiecrats,” the Southern Democratic politicians at mid-century whose numbers included Eastland and Talmadge. My journeys as a biographer have often taken me through the South, where I’ve combed archives of Dixiecrat politicians and met eyewitnesses to their reign. Referring to Dixiecrats as “segregationists,” as they have been called throughout the Biden controversy, doesn’t capture the ugliness of these white supremacists.

Dixiecrats were powerful men — some appeared on the covers of national magazines — and used their offices and distinguished titles to spread racial fear and thwart the aspirations of black Americans. And they did it relentlessly.

The term “Dixiecrat” emerged from the 1948 States’ Rights Democratic Party, a breakaway group of Southern Democrats who loathed the appeal to civil rights in the Democratic platform at the party’s national convention in Philadelphia in July 1948. The Dixiecrats held their own convention in Birmingham, Ala., a few days later, with 6,000 people attending from 13 Southern states. The goal was to win their states’ 127 electoral votes, deny a victory to Republican Thomas Dewey or the Democratic incumbent, Harry Truman, throw the election to the House and use their power to force the major parties to jettison their civil rights planks.

A taste of the Dixiecrats’ platform: “We oppose the elimination of segregation, the repeal of miscegenation statutes, the control of private employment by Federal bureaucrats called for by the misnamed civil rights program.”

The party’s presidential and vice presidential candidates were South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond and Mississippi Gov. Fielding Wright. Eastland, Biden’s future Senate collaborator, escorted Wright to the convention and earned Thurmond’s admiration. This from a letter I found in the Eastland archives, written to him by Thurmond: “You gave freely of your time and talents and I wish you to know that I am deeply grateful to you for the magnificent contribution you made to this great cause.” Actually, it was a lost cause, though the Dixiecrats did win four Southern states.

Though Talmadge was a repellent racist, whatever his civility as a senatorial colleague, Eastland was a particularly odious character. He made his reputation in Mississippi and in Washington by attacking black servicemen in World War II. Their medals for bravery meant nothing to him. “The Negro soldier was an utter and dismal failure in combat,” Eastland said at war’s end.

In 1967, Eastland was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee when just the sort of nightmare the Dixiecrats envisioned in 1948 loomed before him: Thurgood Marshall, an African American, had been nominated to the Supreme Court by President Lyndon Johnson. Eastland immediately began scheming with a powerful Democratic colleague and fellow segregationist, John McClellan of Arkansas, to sink Marshall’s prospects. Eastland leaned on McClellan during the confirmation hearings, believing that as a former racketeer-busting prosecutor, McClellan would be able to trip Marshall up during questioning. Eastland also hoped McClellan would use his law enforcement contacts to dig up dirt on the nominee.

Both strategies failed, though, and the aging Dixiecrats were outfoxed by Johnson as he shrewdly used the levers of the Senate to win Marshall’s confirmation, just as the president had maneuvered civil rights legislation through Congress.

When Biden joined the Senate in 1973, only a handful of Dixiecrats remained — Eastland would leave in 1978, Talmadge in 1981. Thurmond, the former States’ Rights Democratic presidential nominee, held on until 2003.

Yet today, few would deny that all the dust of the Dixiecrat movement has left this nation. The battles over the Confederate battle flag and Civil War monuments are reminders of a racist past that the Dixiecrats fervently defended. As Joe Biden discovered with his clumsy remarks last week, the history is still raw.

No Joe. Just. No.

The Magic – Lola Blanc

Do It All The Time – I Don’t Know How But They Found me

Take a Walk – Passion Pit

Ethiopia army chief shot dead in Ethiopia attacks

The chief of staff of the Ethiopian army, Gen Seare Mekonnen, has been shot dead in the capital, Addis Ababa, state media confirm.

He and another officer died trying to prevent a coup attempt against the administration in Ethiopia’s northern Amhara region, PM Abiy Ahmed said.

In Amhara itself, the regional governor, Ambachew Mekonnen, was killed along with an adviser.

Ethnic violence has hit Amhara and other regions in recent years.

The prime minister went on TV dressed in military fatigues to denounce the attacks.

Great Pacific garbage patch: giant plastic trap put to sea again

Feeling a little Whiplash? In the last week Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio has brought us within minutes of War with Iran (if you believe his story which is squirrely as hell) and also a Pogrom against Brown People which is now umm…, postponed.

Trump says he will hold off on planned ICE raids for now
By Kayla Epstein, Washington Post
June 22, 2019

Hours after defending his plan to deport undocumented immigrants Saturday, President Trump changed course, tweeting that he had “delayed the Illegal Immigration Removal Process (Deportation) for two weeks to see if the Democrats and Republicans can get together and work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border.”

“If not, Deportations start!” he warned.
…
The tweet comes after immigration advocates and officials in some major U.S. cities condemned plans for Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids aimed at rounding up thousands of families facing deportation orders, which were to begin Sunday.

Speaking to reporters at the White House lawn before departing for Camp David on Saturday morning, Trump said that “exportation raids are groups of very, very good law enforcement people going by the law, going by our court system taking people out who came in illegally and out legally.”

He anticipated that “some cities are going to fight it,” but claimed that the resistance was from sanctuary cities, which, along with some states, have policies aimed at protecting undocumented immigrants from deportation.

But hours later he tweeted the delay.

The Washington Post reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement planned to target about 2,000 families who had received deportation orders in up to 10 cities — including Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston — starting on Sunday, even though the president had originally claimed on Monday that “millions” would be removed.

My Junior Woodchuck Guidebook recommends field immobilization and trained assistance. That dizziness? That’s where your brain kind of exploded. ER and CAT scans for you my friend.