Puerto Rico’s Uncounted Dead: Study Says Hurricane Maria Toll Far Higher Than Official Count

How Puerto Rico’s Death Toll Was Ignored, and Could Have Been Avoided

Deadlier than Katrina & 9/11: Hurricane Maria Killed 4,645 in Puerto Rico, 70 Times Official Toll

From The New York Times? More weak tea and underestimation.

Puerto Rico’s Hurricane Maria Death Toll Could Exceed 4,000, New Study Estimates
By Sheri Fink, The New York Times
May 29, 2018

Residents of Puerto Rico died at a significantly higher rate during the three months after the hurricane than they did in the previous year, according to the results of a new study by a group of independent researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and other institutions.

The researchers say their estimate, published Tuesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, remains imprecise, with more definitive studies still to come. But the findings, which used methods that have not been previously applied to this disaster, are important amid widespread concerns that the government’s tally of the dead, 64, was a dramatic undercount.

Winds, flooding and landslides swept away homes and knocked out power, water and cellular service, which remained largely unrepaired for months.

They are still largely unrepaired.

An analysis of vital statistics by The New York Times last December found that 1,052 more people than usual died across the island in the 42 days after the storm. Other news organizations, including Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism, CNN, Buzzfeed and Alexis Raúl Santos, a demographer at Penn State, have also challenged the government’s figure, finding evidence for hundreds of excess deaths in the weeks after the hurricane.

Researchers for this latest study visited more than 3,000 residences across the island and interviewed their occupants, who reported that 38 people living in their households had died between Sept. 20, when Hurricane Maria struck, and the end of 2017. That toll, converted into a mortality rate, was extrapolated to the larger population and compared with official statistics from the same period in 2016.

Because the number of households surveyed was relatively small in comparison to the population’s size, the true number of deaths beyond what was expected could range from about 800 to more than 8,000 people, the researchers’ calculations show. The toll exceeded previous estimates, researchers said, in part because they looked at a longer time period.

About 15 percent of the people interviewed reported that someone in their household was unable to get medicines for at least a day after the storm. Roughly 10 percent said that a household member had trouble using breathing equipment, which often relies on electricity. Fewer than 10 percent reported closed medical facilities and 6 percent said doctors were unavailable. The study estimates that about a third of the deaths were caused by a delay in medical care or the inability to obtain it.

Under pressure, the government announced in December that all deaths that occurred after Maria hit would be reviewed and that people who died either directly or indirectly from the storm and its aftermath would be included in a revised tally. The government commissioned a review by researchers at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University, who had promised an initial report in May. But that analysis has barely begun. “They’re still acquiring data,” said Dr. Lynn R. Goldman, the school’s dean. The study will use the territory’s vital records and information from funeral homes, the medical system and the larger public.

Dr. Goldman now says she expects to deliver the initial review, which will cost $305,000, sometime this summer, with a more definitive analysis involving interviews with survivors and requiring additional funding following perhaps nine months later. She said she and her colleagues were delayed because they had failed to anticipate the need for the university to navigate different tax laws in preparing their contract with the government of Puerto Rico.
…
Burnham said that despite the study’s limitations, including the difficulty of estimating Puerto Rico’s total population in light of migration, and the possible oversampling of smaller populations in more remote areas, such surveys “should become a standard activity in post-disaster situations,” because they help reveal vulnerabilities that can be addressed to save lives.

Dr. (Gilbert) Burnham (founder of the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins University) and another expert unaffiliated with the study agreed with the researchers that the toll could be even higher than estimated if adjusted for the fact that people who died alone could not be surveyed. “It just is stunning how poor our information was as to what was happening in Puerto Rico,” said Leslie Roberts, a professor and director of the program on forced migration and health at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.
…
“The situation is not over,” Dr. Marqués said. “We still have people without power, without running water, and it’s already hurricane season again.”

He added, “We hope our data helps the government develop some more specific continuity plans so they can prepare for proper general health and also mental health planning.”

Dream on Dr. Marqués, dream on.

Newspaper of record indeed. Suitable only for lining litterboxes.

Starship Icarus

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.

Highlights of this day in history: Clean-up ends at New York’s Ground Zero, months after the Sept. 11th attacks; France’s Joan of Arc burned at the stake; Baseball’s Cal Ripken, Jr. begins his games streak; Bandleader Benny Goodman born.

We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch – we are going back from whence we came.

John F. Kennedy

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Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.

Roseanne Barr, May 29th, 2:45 am

Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show.

ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey, May 29th 1.45 pm

What you have to remember is that your Racist, Bigot, Misogynist wants more than that you stop thwarting their Racist, Bigoted, Misogynistic actions.

They want more than that you stop pointing out in public their Racism, Bigotry, and Misogyny. They want more than your accusatory disapproving gaze, or even your stunned silence.

What they want is your approval. They want your applause. They want you to prove that you are just as Racist, just as Bigoted, just as Misogynistic as they are.

Nothing less will suffice.

Abraham Lincoln
Cooper Union, February 27, 1860

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone.
…
This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

Media giants slammed for hedging on racist Roseanne comments
by Tana Ganeva, Raw Story
29 May 2018

(M)ainstream media outlets reporting on the controversy caught flak for failing to describe her diatribe as racist.

When Roseanne apologized, the Associated Press tweeted out ‘Roseanne Barr apologizes for ‘bad joke’ about Obama aide’s looks and politics.’

Meanwhile, throughout the day, the Hill referred to her comments as ‘racially charged.’

After the New York Times was slammed for hedging by calling her remarks offensive, the Times changed their online headline from ‘offensive’ to ‘racist.’ Politico also changed their headline from ‘racially charged’ to ‘racist.’

:

Dictionary.com Fact-Checks News Reports Downplaying Roseanne’s ‘Bizarre’ Rant: The Word You’re Looking for Is ‘Racist’
By Chris Sosa, AlterNet
May 29, 2018

No one was impressed by the apology for only the latest in a long line of online bigotry, especially the folks over at Dictionary.com.

After CNNMoney called Barr’s tweet “bizarre,” the grammar giant tweeted back with a blunt description of its own.

“Bizarre is one word to describe Roseanne’s comments about Valerie Jarrett,” the official account for Dictionary.com wrote. “[O]r you could use this one: dictionary.com/browse/racist.”

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.
…
You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.
…
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
…
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn’t this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn’t this like condemning Jesus because his unique God consciousness and never ceasing devotion to God’s will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber. I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 16 April 1963, Birmingham City Jail

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Why Tom Steyer Doesn’t Care What Nancy Pelosi Thinks
By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE, Politico
May 29, 2018

Tom Steyer says the Democrats telling him to call off his impeachment crusade are like those who told civil rights activists to be patient, and says Nancy Pelosi and others holding back on calling for impeachment are “normalizing” Donald Trump’s presidency.

Steyer doesn’t care that Democratic leaders are worried that he could blow their chance at winning the House by talking up impeachment around the country and in his TV ads—though he argues he’s actually helping Democrats. He says he’s the only person willing to tell the truth. And the thing about a self-made billionaire with nothing to lose: it’s hard for anyone to convince him he might be wrong, or to get him to stop.

“Impeaching the president of the United States is upsetting the status quo. Anytime in American history that there has been an attempt to upset the status quo, there have been people within the status quo—within the establishment—saying, ‘It may be true, it may be something we should deal with, it may be important, but not now,’” Steyer told me in an interview for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast. “If you look at the civil rights movement, the pushback was not, ‘You’re not telling the truth,’ the pushback was, ‘We’re dealing with it in time. Stand down so we can deal with it in time.’”

Steyer believes he’s lighting up the votes that the Democrats need to flip the House, despite Pelosi’s pushback in both public and private. In a phone call late last fall, the House minority leader urged Steyer to pull the money he was putting into pro-impeachment TV ads and instead spend it on tanking the Republican tax bill.

She’s his congresswoman. They’re friendly. They’ve known each other for years.They agreed to disagree, said a person who was told about the call.

For Steyer, it’s not just Pelosi who’s wrong, it’s every Democrat who stands with her. They’re putting the country at risk right now, he said, and they’re destroying themselves in the long term.

“The Founders gave us impeachment to answer a reckless, lawless, and dangerous president and every day that his behavior is accepted, every day that you don’t oppose it, it becomes enshrined as the way things are done. You have normalized this presidency, you have normalized his behavior,” Steyer said. “And then at the end of four years when you come out and, you know it’s inevitable, ‘It’s outrageous what he’s done.’ Really? Because for the last 1300 days you’ve kind of gone along with it. … How much credibility—I think there’s a question here.”

A Pelosi spokesman declined to talk about Steyer. In the Democratic leader’s orbit, mentions of his name tend to set off a series of heard-it-all-before groans. She’s repeatedly said that she hasn’t yet seen a solid case for impeachment, and maintains that fewer people are talking about it now for Trump than were for George W. Bush in the heat of the Iraq War fallout in the run-up to the 2006 midterms romp she led, when Democrats picked up 31 seats and flipped both the House and Senate. Democratic leaders worry that even raising the topic of impeachment this year threatens to make swing House districts unwinnable and all but erases the chance of retaking control of the House.

Steyer, meanwhile, says he’d impeach Trump tomorrow if he could. He had 58 Constitutional experts put together eight arguments to boot the president before they even get to the Mueller probe, including for violating the emoluments clause, making the country less safe and attacking the press. And he suggests that the greater risk for Democrats—both as a matter of principles and electoral math—is in not talking about impeachment.

Steyer and his staff have crunched their own numbers off the nearly 5.4 million people who’ve signed up with his “Need to Impeach” initiative. By their count, there are 10,000 people in each of the 75 most hotly contested House districts who are on his list—enough to swing a close race—and two-thirds of them are sporadic voters. By shooting down every question about impeachment, Steyer says, Pelosi is writing those voters off.

“What we know is there are millions of Americans who don’t vote because they are not hearing the truth,” said Steyer, who starts every interview by drawing a Jerusalem-cross pattern on the back of his hand—it’s the international sign of humility, he said, and a reminder to tell the truth, even if they put you on a cross for it. “They don’t think that the existing political establishment wants to talk about the basic questions of the day.”

Another person who doesn’t want to talk about Steyer is Rep. Al Green, the Texas Democrat who, in December, got 57 colleagues to join him in support of impeachment—a vote that he says he’ll keep forcing, despite being publicly dismissed in a letter from Pelosi and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.). Green first filed articles of impeachment the day before Trump’s inauguration, and since then he’s only built upon his argument that Trump’s alleged bigotry makes him unfit to be president. Green is quick to remind people that according to the Constitution, “you don’t have to commit a crime to be impeached.”

Green says he’s been threatened, has a guard with a gun now sitting in his district office and has to have security at parades back home in Houston. But he says Democrats in the House—and one Republican colleague as well—have told him they want him to keep going. “It’s really about the republic, not about Republicans,” Green said. “It’s bigger than Democrats; it’s about democracy.”

Green will not say Steyer’s name, or that he’s been helpful to the cause. This is a civil rights fight to him too, and Green says he doesn’t want to make a wealthy person who’s for impeachment and has the money to run ads seem any more worth talking about than a man he said he met literally living under an overpass who talked to him about impeachment. “People who are rich and trying to accomplish goals are no better than people who are poor and indigent and trying to accomplish goals,” he said.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee still doesn’t want to talk about impeachment either, and a spokesman pointed out that that none of their candidates are running on it—but also said that DCCC chairman Rep. Ben Ray Luján wasn’t available for an interview on the topic.

Obstruction

Follow The Money

Kompromat

Emoluments

The National Republican Campaign Committee, which already sees this as a perfect way to warn of Democratic overreach and a party in hock to its demanding base, eagerly jumped in.

“Tom Steyer is stoking the flames of this ludicrous progressive pipe dream, further complicating Nancy Pelosi’s plan to regain the majority,” said NRCC press secretary Jesse Hunt. “The Democratic Party’s midterm messaging is being led by two out-of-touch San Francisco liberals whose only desire is to appeal to the progressive wing of the party—what could possibly go wrong for them?”

“I can’t watch a president race-bait on a regular basis and then pretend to not believe that he should be impeached,” said Todd Rutherford, the Democratic leader of the South Carolina statehouse, who attended a Steyer event in the state capital last week and pointed out it was attended by several identified Republicans who’d driven hours to be there. “If we say it, then they’re going to use it as a rallying cry, but I think even Republicans realize there’s something wrong with our president.”

In April, a NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll showed 47 percent of registered voters say they would definitely vote against a candidate who promised impeachment, while 42 percent would definitely vote for one, with 10 percent undecided, though the prospect of impeachment tracks much higher levels of support among the younger voters whom Steyer has been spending much of his time talking to and literally investing in.

That’s who Steyer says he’s hearing most from on the 30-city town hall tour he’s currently in the middle of, and looking at extending—and which some observers suspect is actually a trial run for a 2020 presidential campaign. He’s gone to Iowa and South Carolina in the last month, is headed to Nevada on June 13, spent $40 million so far on nine TV ads and 40 staffers working on impeachment from San Francisco, along with 500 more working on other issues for him around the country as part of his group NextGen.

That makes for the largest organization of any potential presidential candidate—though Steyer insists that anyone who thinks that’s what he’s up to should remember that they assumed he was running for governor or U.S. Senate in California when he got started last year.

As for whether he’s running in 2020, Steyer doesn’t say yes, and he doesn’t say no. Like a lot of people expected to run for president, he said he needs to see how the midterms shake out.

“I want to be part of the group of people working to push America back to a more positive vision that does not exist. I will work really hard to do that. I will do almost anything to do that.”

And that’s why they call it… acting

Intro

Intermediate

Expert

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.

Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay become the first to scale Mt. Everest’s peak; President John F. Kennedy born; Patrick Henry gives his “If this be treason” speech; Comedian Bob Hope born.

Unite liberality with a just frugality; always reserve something for the hand of charity; and never let your door be closed to the voice of suffering humanity.

Patrick Henry

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Among the most ironic, in the classic sense of highlighting a fatal flaw of which the audience is well aware but that eludes the grasp of the tragic protagonist, statements to emerge from the French Revolution is Louis XIV’s- “L’état, c’est moi” (I am the Nation). It exudes the hubris, the foolish pride and extreme arrogance, the near sexual sadism and theft of honor, and loss of contact with reality that precedes a justly deserved punishment.

In modern times Donald Trump is such a man, the examples are too numerous to catalog here, but Robert Reich illuminates some of them in the context of the North Korean Nuclear Summit.

America’s Megalomaniac
Robert Reich
Monday, May 28, 2018

I spent last week at a conference in South Korea, during which time Trump went from seeking a meeting with Kim Jong un to cancelling it, then suggesting it might be back on.

“What does Trump want?” South Korean officials at the conference kept asking me. Notably, no one asked what the United States wants. They knew it was all about Trump.

Trump’s goal has nothing to do with peace on the Korean peninsula, or even with making America great again. It’s all about making Trump feel great.

“They are respecting us again,” Trump exulted to graduating cadets at the Naval Academy last Friday. “Winning is such a great feeling, isn’t it? Nothing like winning. You got to win.”

In truth, the United States hasn’t won anything, in Korea or anywhere else. After fifteen months of Trump at the helm, America is far less respected around the world than it was before.

The only thing that’s happened is Trump is now making foreign policy on his own – without America’s allies, without Congress, even without the State Department. Trump may consider this a personal win but it hardly makes America safer.

Some earnest foreign policy experts are seeking to discover some bargaining strategy behind Trump’s moves on North Korea. Hint: There’s no strategy. Only a thin-skinned narcissist needing flattery and fearing ridicule.

Trump got excited about a summit with Kim when he thought it might win him praise, even possibly a Nobel Peace Prize. He got cold feet when he feared Kim might be setting Trump up for humiliating failure. Now he’s back to dreaming about the Prize.

The delicate balance in Trump’s brain between glorification and mortification can tip either way at any moment, depending on his hunches. All international relations become contests of personal dominance.

He rejected the 2015 Iran treaty for no apparent reason other than Obama had entered into it. Trump couldn’t care less that by doing so he has harmed relations with our traditional allies, who pleaded with him to stay in. And he’s undermined America’s future credibility. Why would any nation (including North Korea) enter into a treaty with the United States if it can break it on the whim of a president who wants to one-up his predecessor?

Ditto with the Paris climate accord. Obama got credit for it, so Trump wants credit for unilaterally sinking it.

Trump has demanded that America’s nuclear arsenal be upgraded. Why? Since 1970, the United States has been committed to nuclear nonproliferation. What changed? Trump. A more powerful arsenal makes him feel more powerful – “respected again.”

It’s not about American interests in the world. It’s about Trump’s interests.

Wonder why Trump promised to lift trade sanctions on ZTE, China’s giant telecom company? ZTE has been trading with North Korea and Iran, in violation of American policy. Everyone around Trump advised against lifting the sanctions.

Look no further than Trump’s personal needs. ZTE is important to China, and China recently pledged a half-billion-dollar loan to Trump’s family business.

While we’re on the subject of high tech, why has Trump pushed the Postal Service to double the shipping rate it charges Amazon? I mean, isn’t Amazon important to America’s high-tech race with the rest of the world?

The most likely explanation is that the CEO of Amazon is Jeff Bezos, who’s also far richer than Trump. Bezos also owns the Washington Post, and the Post has been critical of Trump.

As you may have noticed, the man doesn’t like to be criticized. As Trump recently explained to Leslie Stahl of “60 Minutes,” his aim is “to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.”

Any halfway responsible president of the United States would be worried about Russian meddling in U.S. elections. Protecting American democracy is just about the most important thing a president does.

But Trump has turned the inquiry about the Russians into a “dark state” conspiracy against him. And he’s demanded that the Justice Department investigate the people who are investigating him.

With Trump, there’s no longer American foreign policy. There’s only Trump’s ego.

Adventures in Jedi School

This is what is meant by a “Shermanesque Statement”.

You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it … Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth — right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.
…
You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices today than any of you to secure peace. But you cannot have peace and a division of our country. If the United States submits to a division now, it will not stop.
…
You might as well appeal against the thunder-storm as against these terrible hardships of war. They are inevitable, and the only way the people of Atlanta can hope once more to live in peace and quiet at home, is to stop the war, which can only be done by admitting that it began in error and is perpetuated in pride.
…
You have heretofore read public sentiment in your newspapers, that live by falsehood and excitement; and the quicker you seek for truth in other quarters, the better. I repeat then that, by the original compact of government, the United States had certain rights in Georgia, which have never been relinquished and never will be; that the South began the war by seizing forts, arsenals, mints, custom-houses, etc., etc., long before Mr. Lincoln was installed, and before the South had one jot or tittle of provocation. I myself have seen in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi, hundreds and thousands of women and children fleeing from your armies and desperadoes, hungry and with bleeding feet. In Memphis, Vicksburg, and Mississippi, we fed thousands and thousands of the families of rebel soldiers left on our hands, and whom we could not see starve. Now that war comes to you, you feel very different. You deprecate its horrors, but did not feel them when you sent car-loads of soldiers and ammunition, and moulded shells and shot, to carry war into Kentucky and Tennessee, to desolate the homes of hundreds and thousands of good people who only asked to live in peace at their old homes, and under the Government of their inheritance. But these comparisons are idle. I want peace, and believe it can only be reached through union and war, and I will ever conduct war with a view to perfect an early success.
…
War is the remedy our enemies have chosen. Other simple remedies were within their choice. You know it and they know it, but they wanted war, and I say let us give them all they want; not a word of argument, not a sign of let up, no cave in till we are whipped or they are.
…
If they want eternal war, well and good; we accept the issue, and will dispossess them and put our friends in their place. I know thousands and millions of good people who at simple notice would come to North Alabama and accept the elegant houses and plantations there. If the people of Huntsville think different, let them persist in war three years longer, and then they will not be consulted. Three years ago by a little reflection and patience they could have had a hundred years of peace and prosperity, but they preferred war; very well. Last year they could have saved their slaves, but now it is too late.

All the powers of earth cannot restore to them their slaves, any more than their dead grandfathers. Next year their lands will be taken, for in war we can take them, and rightfully, too, and in another year they may beg in vain for their lives. A people who will persevere in war beyond a certain limit ought to know the consequences. Many, many peoples with less pertinacity have been wiped out of national existence.

War is hell.

Do we really need to ‘understand’ Trump supporters?
By Leonard Pitts Jr., Hiami Herald
May 6, 2018

(Rose) is a nice lady who wrote me a nice email in which she spoke about the need to try to understand Donald Trump’s supporters. As Rose put it, “We need to not close ourselves off to how the other side thinks.”

It’s a sentiment I hear a lot from progressives, and it bespeaks a great generosity of spirit.

But I couldn’t disagree more.

Don’t get me wrong. Thinking people will always try to see past their own ideological blind spots, to put themselves into the shoes of those they disagree with. That’s an admirable trait. In normal times it’s a trait I would applaud with enthusiasm.

But these are not normal times. Indeed, sometimes, I wonder if we appreciate just how abnormal — how fraught with danger — they really are. Under Trump, American laws, news media and mores are under assault, to say nothing of American democracy itself.

And I’m sorry, but I don’t think “understanding” Trump followers will ameliorate — or even address — any of that. Besides which, is there really so much left to “understand”?

Not from where I sit. Long before Trump even existed as a political force, many of us noted with alarm the rise of a backlash among right-wingers deeply angry and profoundly terrified by the writing on the demographic wall. Said writing foretold — and for that matter, still foretells — the declining preeminence of white, Christian America. As several studies now show, a sense of alarmed displacement among white, Christian America is the soil from which the weed of Trumpism grew.

The idea that we must “understand” those folks carries with it an implicit suggestion that in so doing, we might find some ground for compromise. It would be a great idea in normal times. But again, these times are not normal.

No compromise is possible here for a simple reason Trump followers seem to understand better than the rest of us: You can’t compromise with demography, can’t order numbers to stop being what they are and saying what they say about the coming tide of change. But what you can do is seize the levers of power and change the rules of the game in hopes of blunting the force of that tide. That — again, look at the studies — is what Trump supporters elected him to do.

So while, it is admirable to think “understanding” can fix this country, it is also naive. Progressives should ask themselves: When’s the last time you heard any Trump supporters talking about the need to understand you? You haven’t — and that ought to tell you something.

Here’s the thing: The rest of us have the moral high ground here. We see the same demographic writing on the wall that Trump followers see, but where it makes them angry and fearful, it leaves us energized. Many of us are excited to see the nation that will arise from this cauldron of change.

That’s because the idea of change doesn’t threaten us. It will challenge us, yes, but we’re ready for that. We know that this is a big country, big enough for many different kinds of people, many different ways of life. We know what it means to live and let live. And we know that welcoming the stranger, caring for the stranger, is simply what you do as a human being.

I submit that those are core American virtues. And that now would be an excellent time for progressives to exhibit a little courage in their defense. Trump followers see a nation in demographic peril, so they seek a nation where those who frighten them can be regulated into irrelevance. There’s no big mystery about that. There never has been.

So no, they don’t really need to be understood. What they need to be is defeated.

Trump supporters speak
By Leonard Pitts Jr., Miami Herald
May 26, 2018

Rather than pontificate yet again upon the motives of Donald Trump’s supporters, I’ll let a few of them explain themselves in their own words.

Here, then, is “Robert” with a comparative analysis of the 44th and 45th presidents:

“President Trump has accomplished more positive things for this nation in less than two years than the last three have accomplished in twenty plus years. After the past eight years of a Muslim Marxist in the White House this nation could not survive another demwit in the White House. … Could you please list one thing the demwit party has done for the black people in America other than hand out government freeies for their continued votes?”

And here’s “Gary’s” take on demographic change:

“(America) has a constitution which guarantees equal rights for all and yet people like you hungar for change that puts people like me in the back of the bus. You seem egar to know what it would be like to be in the driver’s seat. You need look no further than Zimbabwe and South Africa. When people like you started driving the bus, the wheels came off. That’s what terrifies people like me.”

This column is presented as a service for those progressive readers who are struggling with something I said in this space. Namely, that I see no point in trying to reason with Trump voters. I first wrote that over a month ago, and I am still hearing how “disappointed” they are at my refusal to reach out. So I thought it might be valuable to hear from the people I’ve failed to reach out to.

I’m sure some of you think those emails were cherry-picked to highlight the intolerance of Trump voters. They weren’t. They are, in fact, a representative sampling from a single day in May, culled by my assistant, Judi.

It’s still an article of faith for many that the Trump phenomenon was borne out of fiscal insecurity, the primal scream of working people left behind by a changing economy. But I don’t think I’ve ever, not once, seen an email from a Trump supporter who explained himself in terms of the factory or the coal mine shutting down.

I have, however, heard from hundreds like “Matthew,” who worries about “immigrants” and “Gerald,” who thinks people of color have an “alliance” against him. Such people validate the verdict of a growing body of scholarship that says, in the words of a new study by University of Kansas professors David N. Smith and Eric Hanley, “The decisive reason that white, male, older and less educated voters were disproportionately pro-Trump is that they shared his prejudices and wanted domineering, aggressive leaders …”

Look, I get it. That’s a hard pill for those progressives who have kin or friends among Trump supporters. We love who we love, even when they — or we — are small, unkind or disappointing. That’s what family is about. We love who we love, and let no one make you feel compelled to apologize for that.

But at the same time, let us be clear-eyed and tough-minded in assessing what’s happened to our country — and why. How else can we salvage it from the likes of “A Trumper” who says Trump was needed to “get things back in order” after the “terrible job” done by President Obama?

He wrote: “We’re sick of paying welfare to so many of your brothers who don’t know what work and integrity mean. I hope you keep writing these articles and reminding my White Christian brothers that we did the right thing and we need to re-elect Trump.”

I have two words for those progressives who think it’s possible to “reason” with that:

You first.