We Resist: Day 588

One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures (plus the occasional non-Republican who obliges us to resist their nonsense, too, like we don't have enough to worry about) is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.

So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.

Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.

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Earlier today by me: Good Morning Trump Is a Nightmare I'm Sorry and Trump Regime Questions Citizenship of Latinx Citizens and Trump's Relentless and Dangerous War on the Press.

Here are some more things in the news today...

[CN: Stochastic terrorism] Jill Colvin at the AP: Trump Stands by Warning of 'Violence' If Dems Win Midterms. "Asked Wednesday what he meant [when he said that, if Democrats win, they "will overturn everything that we've done and they'll do it quickly and violently. And violently. There's violence. When you look at antifa, and you look at some of these groups, these are violent people."], Trump told reporters, 'I just hope there won't be violence. If you look at what happens— There's a lot of unnecessary violence all over the world, but also in this country. And I don't want to see it.'" The hell he doesn't. The whole reason he keep saying shit like this is because he wants "to see it."

This is (one reason) why the GOP is working overtime to rig the election. And, as a reminder, refusing to their jobs and hold foreign governments accountable for election interference (to their benefit), thus allowing more of the same, is itself collusion. https://t.co/ZCkpn3KZpW

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) August 30, 2018

Eliana Johnson and Elana Schor at Politico: Trump Personally Lobbying GOP Senators to Flip on Sessions.

The willingness of Republican senators to turn on Attorney General Jeff Sessions is the result of a furious lobbying campaign from [Donald] Trump, who for the past 10 days has been venting his anger at Sessions to "any senator who will listen," as one GOP Senate aide put it.

The president, who has spent a year and a half fulminating against his attorney general in public, finally got traction on Capitol Hill thanks to the growing frustration of a handful of GOP senators with their former colleague — most importantly, Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and South Carolina's Lindsey Graham, who have been irritated by Sessions' opposition to a criminal justice reform bill they support, according to interviews with more than a half-dozen congressional GOP aides, Trump advisers, and Republicans close to the White House.

Trump raised the prospect of firing Sessions last week in a phone conversation with Graham, according to two Capitol Hill aides, who said that Graham pressed the president to hold off until after the midterm elections. The president has also complained loudly about Sessions to several Republican senators, according to a GOP chief staff.

..."There's the belief that if the president taking action with respect to Sessions is going to be an important part of the Mueller obstruction case, most of that case has already been made. Things that the president has already done privately that have been reported, but also things that the president has done publicly that could be characterized as bullying or intimidating, all of that case is already there ready to be made, such that firing him is almost like an afterthought," said one person familiar with the conversations among members of the president's legal team.

This is incredible. The president of the United States reportedly wants to remove his Attorney General because he's forever pissed that the Attorney General followed the law by recusing himself from an investigation of the president that the president wants him to obstruct, and the governing party is going along with it because they're pissed that they're not getting their way on a piece of legislation, so they're supporting the president, who has so thoroughly demonstrated his contempt for the law that, in less than two years, the idea that he would fire his Attorney General is met with a shrug because he's brazenly tried to obstruct justice since Day One. We are lost.

Nicole Lafond at TPM: Trump Denies Reports That Ivanka and Kushner Had Role in 'Pushing Out' McGahn. "While [Donald] Trump spent most of Thursday morning criticizing the media on Twitter, he was exceptionally exasperated by one chunk of New York Times reporting that suggested his daughter Ivanka Trump played a role in Don McGahn's departure. The President is likely referencing the chunk in the Times piece on McGahn's exit that said Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, were among McGahn's biggest critics. Ivanka Trump reportedly lambasted McGahn to her father over the degree of his cooperation with special counsel Robert Mueller." So, contrary to being a "moderating" presence, Ivanka is agitating her father to behave like an authoritarian. Huh!

"We’ve never had to worry whether a president would intervene in the relocation of a federal office in order to safeguard the profits he was getting from a hotel. But now we do." https://t.co/wOb5waLlhm

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) August 30, 2018

Jim Rutenberg and Maggie Haberman at the New York Times: National Enquirer Had Decades of Trump Dirt; He Wanted to Buy It All. "He and his lawyer at the time, Michael D. Cohen, devised a plan to buy up all the dirt on Mr. Trump that the National Enquirer and its parent company had collected on him, dating back to the 1980s, according to several of Mr. Trump's associates. ...It is not known how much of the material on Mr. Trump is still in American Media's possession or whether American Media destroyed any of it after the campaign."

Bank of America freezing accounts of customers suspected of not being US citizens https://t.co/fR9D1qnURG

— The Sacramento Bee (@sacbee_news) August 30, 2018

Holy shit that is bad. Bad. For all the reasons discussed here, and but also because if you're actually a citizen and need to mount a legal fight, you don't have access to your own money. My god.

[CN: Video may autoplay at link] Lee Moran at the Huffington Post: Mike Pence's Wistful Tweet About 'a More Respectful Time' Does Not Go Over Well. "On Tuesday, Pence bemoaned the Democrats' attempt to block the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, [Donald] Trump's Supreme Court nominee... The Veep's comments did not go over well. Many Twitter users reminded him of how Republicans denied a Supreme Court seat to Merrick Garland, former President Barack Obama's nominee. They also highlighted the lack of respect [Donald] Trump shows to his rivals on an almost daily basis."

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Remember those exit polls that said a majority of white women voted for Trump? A new Pew analysis says that wasn’t true: “Trump did much worse with white women and white college-educated voters than what the exit polls found.” https://t.co/3in4HG0ykL

— Matt Pearce 🦅 (@mattdpearce) August 30, 2018

If exit polls among white women were off by 5 points, it's because white women were afraid to say they voted for Hillary Clinton. Why is that, I wonder? Cough. (There is an established history of some white women married to white men lying about for whom they are going to vote or did vote when asked in proximity to their husbands.)

[CN: Climate change] Staff at the Daily Beast: Climate Change's 'Point of No Return' Is Now 2035: Study. "A new study says that climate change could reach the 'point of no return' in 2035. If governments around the world don't take decisive action to combat pollution and global emissions by then, it's 'unlikely' that global warming will remain below 2 degrees Celsius in 2100, the goal set by the Paris Climate Agreement, according to the study."

[CN: Climate change] Oliver Milman at the Guardian: Climate Change: Local Efforts Won't Be Enough to Undo Trump's Inaction, Study Says. "Individual cities, regions, and businesses across the globe are banding together determinedly to confront climate change — but their emissions reductions are relatively small and don't fully compensate for a recalcitrant U.S. under the Trump administration, a new study has found. A cavalcade of city mayors, regional government representatives, and business executives from around the world will convene in San Francisco next month for a major summit touting the role of action beyond national governments to stave off the worst impacts of climate change. But the greenhouse gas cuts offered up by these entities are relatively modest, according to new research, placing the onus on nations to raise their ambitions even as the U.S., the world's second largest emitter, looks to exit the landmark Paris climate agreement."

Inmates have been on a nationwide strike for a week now, protesting inhumane conditions and promoting ceasefires between prison gangs. Activists call it a success, but @MotherJones found that only two state systems acknowledge that it is even happening. https://t.co/zFvRru4bS9

— Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith) August 29, 2018

They don't have to acknowledge it to feel the pressure, though... Vauhini Vara at the Atlantic: The Viral Success of a Strike No One Can See.

Months ago, inmates across the U.S. began planning a strike over prison conditions, including low or nonexistent wages. To start getting the word out, they didn't target big news organizations. Instead, organizers posted about the imminent strikes to their own social-media followers. And they contacted publications with an activist bent, like Shadowproof, a press organization focused on marginalized communities, and the San Francisco Bay View, a black-liberation newspaper.

They worried, based on past experience, that mainstream outlets would emphasize that prisoners' often anonymous accounts of the strike couldn't be verified and the fact that the impact of the strike was hard to predict. But more radical publications, they believed, would focus on the strikers' message, about unjust prison conditions and what should be done about them. That message could be amplified online, and picked up by bigger publications. "We intentionally went from the bottom up," Brooke Terpstra, an organizer in Oakland with the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, a group that has been supporting the strike, told me.

...[T]he strikers' strategy, designed for the current media moment, has proved extraordinarily successful by the measures set by the strikers themselves. Following initial pieces in publications like Shadowproof and the Bay View, mainstream outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and NPR started covering the protest. Social-media posts from the strike organizers and their supporters have gone viral. People are talking about the strike and, by extension, about poor prison conditions across the U.S. and prisoners' demands to see them changed. In an era in which most people experience public events by reading, hearing, and watching videos about them online, the inability to get an inside look at the current prison protest doesn't seem to have hampered its reach.

Dr. Jody Steinauer at the New York Times: Want to Protect the Right to Abortion? Train More People to Perform Them. "More than a third of ob-gyn residency programs don't offer routine abortion training. Some programs offer training only on treating someone who is managing a miscarriage, so those residents do not gain skills in counseling and caring for women who want to end their pregnancies. Most family medicine residency programs still have no abortion training at all, even though family physicians are critical for providing high-quality family planning within primary care services. And yet the need for qualified abortion providers has never been more urgent. Roe is hanging in the balance. It's time for a national commitment to training and supporting the next generation of providers to meet the needs of patients whose rights are under threat."

And, finally, some good news! Rowan Walrath at Mother Jones: California Is One Step Closer to Requiring Colleges to Offer Medication Abortions. "A bill that would require California's public universities to provide students with medication-based abortions is one step away from becoming law after passing the state Assembly today. It will head back to the Senate for a final concurrence vote this week before landing on Gov. Jerry Brown's desk. The bill, SB 320, applies to all University of California and California State University campuses, with an option for community colleges and private universities to take part. The first of its kind, the legislation started out as a resolution dreamed up by the UC-Berkeley group Students United for Reproductive Justice. ...'The movement to get medication abortion on campus began when students recognized our need for it,' [Adiba Khan, one of the group's cofounders] said in an press release. 'Now, we need Governor Brown to sign this bill into law to make abortion care on campus a reality for all students.'"

What have you been reading that we need to resist today?