Monday Open Thread | Amy Sherald Week

Posted on October 23, 2017 by rikyrah

Happy Monday, Everyone! This week’s featured artist is Amy Sherald. I was fascinated researching Ms Sherald and her body of work.

Amy Sherald (born 1973) is an American painter based in Baltimore, Maryland. Her work started out autobiographical in nature, but has taken on a social context ever since she moved to Baltimore.She is best known for her portrait paintings that address social justice, as well as her choice of subjects, which are drawn from outside of the art historical narrative. Through her work, she takes a closer look at the way people construct and perform their identities in response to political, social, and cultural expectations. Sherald is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery.

Early life and education

Amy Sherald was born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1973. As a child, she was never surrounded by art because it was never an interest for her family. Her mother only supported art as a summer program and never as a career, until she won the National Gallery Portrait Competition. She studied at the Clark Atlanta University, where she earned her Bachelor of the Arts degree in painting in 1997. After that, she became an apprentice to Dr. Arturo Lindsay, who was an art history professor at Spelman College.In 1997, she was also a part of the Spelman College International Artist-in-Residence program in Portobelo, Panama. She attended the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2004, where she earned her M.F.A. in painting. After gaining her M.F.A, she lived and studied with painter Odd Nerdrum in Larvik, Norway. In 2008 she attained an artist residency assistantship at the Tong Xion Art Center in Beijing, China.[
Career

Sherald’s work focuses on issues of race and identity in the American South. Her experience of being one of very few black students to attend a private school often influences her work. At the beginning of her career, she started out by installing and curating shows in the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo and the 1999 South American Biennale in Lima, Peru. Recently, her work was acquired by the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Smithsonian Museum of African American Art.She also has helped to organize and install international exhibitions in Central and South America.
In October 2017 it was announced that Sherald and Kehinde Wiley had been chosen to paint official portraits of Michelle Obama and Barack Obama to be held in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

http://www.amysherald.com/

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48 Responses to Monday Open Thread | Amy Sherald Week

  1. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 9:30 pm

    Pete’s gonna be at the Blacksonian!!

    Oh, to have tickets that day…lucky people.

    https://www.instagram.com/p/BanKz5oFPVb/

    Reply
  3. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 9:22 pm

    Rauner looks to Washington for the power to change pension benefits
    by Kim Geiger Chicago Tribune

    Stymied by a Democrat-controlled General Assembly and still in a contract dispute with the largest state employee union, Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner is looking to Washington for help advancing his agenda to weaken the influence of organized labor in Illinois.

    He’s lobbying Congress to give states like Illinois the power to change public employee pension benefits, which he argues are overly generous because of a “corrupt bargain” between politicians and union negotiators. And the governor is hoping to get legal victories over unions at the U.S. Supreme Court, where the recent appointment of a new conservative justice could tilt decisions in his favor.
    ADVERTISING

    The focus on D.C. allows the first-term governor to show supporters he has a plan for delivering on the promises he made as a candidate despite losing a two-year budget battle with Democrats over the summer. And it comes as Rauner prepares for a re-election campaign in which he needs to win back his conservative base after his approval of controversial abortion and immigration legislation left many of them angry.

    http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-met-bruce-rauner-washington-20171020-story.html

    Reply
  4. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 9:18 pm

    Thread

    https://twitter.com/renato_mariotti/status/921914377690845186

    Renato Mariotti‏Verified account @renato_mariotti

    2/ Illinois @GovRauner is trying to get Congress to pass a law that would take away the Illinois Constitutional right to keep your pension.

    3/ Due to the supremacy clause of the constitution, Congress and Trump
    could try to undo a state constitutional right without an amendment.

    4/ Can you imagine working your whole life for a pension you thought was guaranteed and then have it reduced after retirement?

    5/ That shouldn’t be lawful. If we don’t stop this, what rights could they take away next? /end

    Reply
  9. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 8:50 pm

    Iowa’s new voting restrictions deepen our democratic crisisEllen Kurz and Brad Anderson, Iowa View contributors

    Published 12:40 p.m. CT Oct. 20, 2017 |

    Every news cycle seems to bring more of the same — chaos, anger and deep division. Our television screens and our social media elevate the most extreme voices and nowhere do we hear a
    civil debate on important issues like education, jobs, climate change, taxes and the choices facing our state and our country today.

    Elections are the great equalizer, where no one vote or voice is more important than the other and everyone’s vote is counted, whether you have 100,000 Twitter followers, or you don’t own a computer. It is a true Iowan value and tradition to engage in our democracy by the simple yet critical actof voting. At a time when the country is experiencing such turmoil we need the participation of more citizens, not less.

    It is not an overstatement to say the future of our democracy depends on the state of the democratic process, or, simply put, ensuring everybody can vote and that their votes are counted.

    http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/iowa-view/2017/10/20/voter-id-law-iowa-deepens-democratic-crisis/784615001/

    Reply
  12. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 8:20 pm

    Eric Holder will be on MSNBC this hour. on Rachel Maddow

    Reply
  14. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 2:33 pm

    Trump Supporters Are Being Set Up to Dismiss His Ties to Russia
    by Nancy LeTourneau
    October 23, 2017

    If you avoid right wing media, you might not be aware of the story that has them all galvanized right now, a remake of the old one about how the Russians bribed the Clintons to sell off 20 percent of America’s uranium. It’s the lie Peter Schweitzer tried to sell in his book, Clinton Cash, which has been repeatedly fact-checked since he and Bannon conned the New York Times into buying it in 2015.

    The reason this whole nonsense has been resurrected is because a reporter named John Solomon has been writing about it at The Hill almost daily for the last week. To understand what’s up, it is helpful to know a little bit about his background. From 1987 until 2006 Solomon worked as a reporter for the Associated Press. Here is how Josh Marshall summarized his reputation among fellow journalists.

    He had a well-earned reputation as the easiest mark in the business for GOP oppo research hits. It was actually a kind of running gag among Republican campaign operatives. No one will run with a story you’re trying to float? Bring it to John Solomon.

    His position at The Hill started this past summer.

    There are a couple of stories prior to this one that Solomon is known for. Back in 2006, while working for AP, he attempted to smear Harry Reid by suggesting he had ties to Jack Abramhoff. In doing so, he wrote about contacts between the two but failed to mention that the former majority leader voted against the bills Abramhoff was pushing.

    After his arrival at The Hill, Solomon was able to weaponize a story about how James Comey’s memos documenting his conversations with Trump contained classified information. That one made the rounds among right wing news sites. To demonstrate how that story was completely debunked, even Fox News issued a retraction. Even so, Solomon maintains a consistent presence on that network.

    Solomon is one of Sean Hannity’s main sources for pushback against accusations of the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russian officials. Solomon has appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News television program “four times in June and four in May,” according to Nieman Lab. Hannity frequently cites Solomon’s reports to tamp down accusations of the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia during the 2016 presidential election or the administration’s general improper behavior. On May 9, Hannity boosted one of Solomon’s reports to distract from fired national security adviser Michael Flynn’s contacts with Russian officials and instead hyped Trump’s claims that someone in former President Barack Obama’s administration unlawfully unmasked Flynn.

    Reply
  15. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 2:23 pm

    Look at this whining.

    “White Working Class Populism & Conservatism Are Incompatible”:

    … We rarely used to put it in racial terms, unless we were talking about Eminem or the Cash-Me-Ousside Girl or some other white person who has embraced (or affected) some part of black popular culture. With the Trump-era emergence of a more self-conscious form of white-identity politics — especially white working-class identity politics — the racial language comes to the surface more often than it used to. But we still rarely hear complaints about “acting un-white.” Instead, we hear complaints about “elitism.”

    The parallels to the “acting white” phenomenon in black culture are fairly obvious: When aspiration takes the form of explicit or implicit cultural identification, however partial, with some hated or resented outside group that occupies a notionally superior social position, then “authenticity” is to be found in socially regressive manners, mores, and habits. It is purely reactionary.

    The results are quite strange. Republicans, once the party of the upwardly mobile with a remarkable reflex for comforting the comfortable, have written off entire sections of the country — including the bits where most of the people live — as “un-American.” Silicon Valley and California at large, New York City and the hated Acela corridor, and, to some extent, large American cities categorically are sneered at and detested. There is some ordinary partisanship in that, inasmuch as the Democrats tend to dominate the big cities and the coastal metropolitan aggregations, but it isn’t just that. Conservatives are cheering for the failure of California and slightly nonplussed that New York City still refuses to regress into being an unlivable hellhole in spite of the best efforts of its batty Sandinista mayor. Not long ago, to be a conservative on Manhattan’s Upper East Side was the most ordinary thing in the world. Now that address would be a source of suspicion. God help you if you should ever attend a cocktail party in Georgetown, the favorite dumb trope of conservative talk-radio hosts.

    We’ve gone from William F. Buckley Jr. to the gentlemen from Duck Dynasty. Why?

    American authenticity, from the acting-even-whiter point of view, is not to be found in any of the great contemporary American business success stories, or in intellectual life, or in the great cultural institutions, but in the suburban-to-rural environs in which the white underclass largely makes its home — the world John Mellencamp sang about but understandably declined to live in. Shake your head at rap music all you like: When’s the last time you heard a popular country song about finishing up your master’s in engineering at MIT?

    White people acting white have embraced the ethic of the white underclass, which is distinct from the white working class, which has the distinguishing feature of regular gainful employment. The manners of the white underclass are Trump’s — vulgar, aggressive, boastful, selfish, promiscuous, consumerist. The white working class has a very different ethic. Its members are, in the main, churchgoing, financially prudent, and married, and their manners are formal to the point of icy politeness. You’ll recognize the style if you’ve ever been around it: It’s “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am,” but it is the formality of soldiers and police officers — correct and polite, but not in the least bit deferential. It is a formality adopted not to acknowledge the superiority of social betters but to assert the equality of the speaker — equal to any person or situation, perfectly republican manners. It is the general social respect rooted in genuine self-respect.

    Its opposite is the sneering, leveling, drag-’em-all-down-into-the-mud anti-“elitism” of contemporary right-wing populism. Self-respect says: “I’m an American citizen, and I can walk into any room, talk to any president, prince, or potentate, because I can rise to any occasion.” Populist anti-elitism says the opposite: “I can be rude enough and denigrating enough to drag anybody down to my level.” Trump’s rhetoric — ridiculous and demeaning schoolyard nicknames, boasting about money, etc. — has always been about reducing. Trump doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to duke it out with even the modest wits at the New York Times, hence it’s “the failing New York Times.” Never mind that the New York Times isn’t actually failing and that any number of Trump-related businesses have failed so thoroughly that they’ve gone into bankruptcy; the truth doesn’t matter to the argument any more than it matters whether the fifth-grade bully actually has an actionable claim on some poor kid’s lunch money. It would never even occur to the low-minded to identify with anybody other than the bully. That’s what all that ridiculous stuff about “winning” was all about in the campaign. It is might-makes-right, i.e., the politics of chimpanzee troupes, prison yards, kindergartens, and other primitive environments. That is where the underclass ethic thrives — and how “smart people” came to be a term of abuse. This involves, inevitably, a good deal of fakery…

    The populist Right’s abandonment of principle has been accompanied by a repudiation of good taste, achievement, education, refinement, and manners — all of which are abominated as signs of effete “elitism.” During the Clinton years, Virtue Inc. was the top-performing share in the Republican political stock exchange. Fortunes were made, books were sold by the ton, and homilies were delivered. The same people today are celebrating Donald Trump — not in spite of his being a dishonest, crude serial adulterer but because of it. His dishonesty, the quondam cardinals of Virtue Inc. assure us, is simply the mark of a savvy businessman, his vulgarity the badge of his genuineness and lack of “political correctness,” and his pitiless abuse of his several wives and children the mark of a genuine “alpha male.” No less a virtue entrepreneur than Bill Bennett dismissed those who pointed out Trump’s endless lies and habitual betrayals as suffering from “moral superiority,” from people on “high horses,” and said that Trump simply is “a guy who says some things awkwardly, indecorously, infelicitously.”…

    The problem, in Bennett’s telling (and that of many other conservatives), isn’t that Trump is a morally defective reprobate but that he is aesthetically displeasing to overly refined “elitists.” That is a pretty common line of argument — and an intellectual cop-out — but set that aside for the moment. Let’s pretend that Bennett et al. are correct and this is simply a matter of manners. Are we now to celebrate vulgarity as a virtue? Are we to embrace crassness? Are we supposed to pretend that a casino-cum-strip-joint is a civilizational contribution up there with Notre-Dame, that the Trump Taj Mahal trumps the Taj Mahal? Are we supposed to snigger at people who ask that question? Are we supposed to abandon our traditional defense of standards to mimic Trump’s bucket-of-KFC-and-gold-plated-toilet routine?…

    The “alpha male” posturing, the valorizing of underclass dysfunction, the rejection of “elite” tastes and manners — right-wing populism in the age of Trump is a lot like Bruce Springsteen’s act, once acidly (and perfectly) described as a “white minstrel show.” I wonder if Bill Bennett can tap-dance.

    Race is part of this, as it is part of many things in America, but it is easy to make too much of it, too. The white underclass may suffer from “acting white,” but what poor people in general suffer from is acting poor, i.e., repeating the mistakes and habits that left them (or their parents and grandparents, in many cases) in poverty or near-poverty to begin with…

    Reply
  18. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 10:11 am

    Are we entering the end times for the NFL?
    Professional basketball offers the NFL a blueprint for success: embrace the black culture of the majority of your players
    BY DAVID DENNIS, JR.

    The National Football League, the American sport that comes closest to resembling a religion, has its end times in sight: the year 2021. “The likelihood,” NFL Players Association executive director DeMaurice Smith said in August, “of either a strike, or a lockout is in ’21 a virtual certainty.”

    Doomsdays. Humanity has always been obsessed with them.

    Every religious text has mention of the end times. In just the past 30 years, we’ve survived Halley’s comet, Y2K, the end of the Mayan calendar and the rapture that was supposed to happen in September. But nothing lasts forever. The NFL has survived lockouts and strikes before and has seemed like Teflon for the past decade with sky-high broadcast ratings, massive revenues and an annual American holiday called Super Bowl Sunday. But the league has serious competition for American pastime status from the National Basketball Association.

    This may seem far-fetched now, while the NFL’s television ratings lead the NBA’s by a wide margin (although numbers were down last season, and some wonder whether television ratings, in a streaming world, matter as much as they used to). And the NBA doesn’t have anything close to dominating a whole day in America like the Super Bowl. But the NBA, which is as popular as ever in this social media era, continues to embrace an important fact about American culture: Black culture and black people determine cool. Cool resists linear structures. If the NFL wants to maintain its dominance, it needs to embrace black culture or get left behind. Just like baseball.

    Let’s be clear: The 2017 NBA Finals between the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers was the league’s most watched Finals since Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls played the Utah Jazz in 1998. But the average 20.4 million viewers who tuned into each game is equal to the average viewership for a single Sunday Night Football game in 2016. And the NFL is still an unmitigated cash cow, with a net worth of more than $13 billion, dwarfing the NBA’s $6 billion figure. The average NFL franchise is worth $2.5 billion. Worth of the average NBA franchise: $1.36 billion, a 3.5-fold increase over the past five years. Over at Major League Baseball, the average team is worth $1.54 billion, but 50 percent of viewers are 55 or older, up from 41 percent in 2010. And in its defense, the MLB can still captivate the country when it has historic World Series matchups like last year’s battle between Cinderellas in the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians. And they almost doubled back with a monster championship series between the Yankees and Dodgers if the former hadn’t lost to the Houston Astros. ESPN data shows the average age of baseball viewers at 53. The average age is 47 for the NFL, and it’s rising. The average age is 37 for the NBA, and it seems to be staying there. Baseball’s television ratings continue to trend downward.

    Howard Bryant, ESPN senior writer and author of Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston, summarizes the NFL’s stance in relation to the NBA and MLB: “Post-ABA merger,” he says, “basketball has done by far the best job of adapting to the people who play the sport, baseball the worst. The NFL has been in between, leaning towards a bad job.”

    Reply
  19. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 9:49 am

    Meet the Trumpkins
    A crop of Republicans are betting that a Trump-style mix of crassness and white grievance will bring them victory in 2018.

    by Saahil Desai

    As of late September, Donald Trump had the lowest approval rating of any president that far into his first term. Yet there has been remarkably little atrophy among Trump’s base. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll from the same month found that 98 percent of Trump primary voters approve of the president’s job performance. Among Americans who support Trump, 61 percent don’t envision anything that would change their favorable opinion of him. A majority of Republican voters consider themselves primarily loyal to the president rather than to the Republican Party.

    It’s no wonder, then, that 2018 GOP primaries are devolving into fights about which candidate in the race is most closely aligned with the Trump agenda. Take the Arizona Senate race: Jeff Flake, the incumbent, who refused to endorse Trump and wrote a book earlier this year excoriating the president, is facing a tough primary challenger in Kelli Ward, who has positioned herself as an unwavering partner to the president. Steve Bannon, back at Breitbart after being ousted from the White House, is scheming to cultivate Trump allies to challenge establishment Republican incumbents with help from the billionaire Robert Mercer, who has already pumped $300,000 into a Super PAC affiliated with Ward’s campaign.

    In the murky sea of 2018 GOP candidates, the most fascinating creatures are the ones trying to capture the secret sauce that propelled Trump from laughingstock to president. Trump’s crudeness didn’t deter as many voters as pundits anticipated and Democrats hoped; nor did his embrace of the politics of white racial resentment. Down-ballot candidates have taken notice. Elements of Trump’s brand of populism are surfacing in various configurations among two types of opportunists: longtime vulgarians emboldened to run for higher office by the president’s success, and establishment politicians eager to rebrand themselves to ride Trump’s appeal among the GOP base.

    Reply
  20. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 9:35 am

    Family values.

    Trump forgets Tiffany in list of his children https://t.co/BMf2DbHLqU

    — David Frum (@davidfrum) October 23, 2017

    Reply
  21. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 9:34 am

    Why it matters if Trump pays his aides’ legal bills
    10/23/17 10:12 AM
    By Steve Benen

    ………………………………………………………

    President Trump plans to spend at least $430,000 of his personal funds to help cover the mounting legal costs incurred by White House staff and campaign aides related to the ongoing investigations of Russian meddling in last year’s election, a White House official said. […]

    The arrangement drew immediate criticism from Walter Shaub, the former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, who suggested on Twitter that it is rife with potential conflicts.

    “A potential witness or target of an investigation (and boss of investigators) paying for legal fees of other potential witnesses or targets?” Shaub wrote.

    Axios’ original report on this used the words “pledge” and “promise” to describe the president’s intention to defray the costs of his aides’ legal representation.

    I’m highlighting the specific verbs because Trump’s credibility in this area is something of a joke. This is, after all, a president who’s been caught lying about contributions to veterans’ charities. Sure, he may say he’s prepared to use his own money to help cover the legal costs of his team, but what Trump says and what Trump does often have little to do with one another.

    But just for the sake of conversation, let’s say the “plan” is legitimate. Let’s assume that Trump will follow through on this vow, grab his checkbook, and start writing checks to his staffers’ law firms. That brings us back to Walter Shaub’s concerns.

    Given the circumstances, this need not be seen as a story about magnanimity. In the Russia scandal, the sitting president is in legal jeopardy – there’s every reason to believe he’s under investigation for obstruction of justice, for example – and those around him are, at a minimum, potential witnesses who may be able to shed light on Trump’s alleged wrongdoing.

    And that’s where the trouble kicks in. What happens if officials in the West Wing have information to share that may be damaging to the president, who also happens to be paying for these officials’ legal counsel?

    In other words, we don’t know if Trump is prepared to start writing personal checks to help his team because he wants to help them or if he wants to help himself. It’s not hard to imagine the president thinking that he can perhaps buy his aides’ silence by opening his wallet and discouraging them from “flipping.”

    Reply
  22. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 9:33 am

    THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 10/21/17
    Trump interviews with U.S. attorney candidates raise eyebrows
    Rachel Maddow reports on Donald Trump meeting with candidates for U.S. attorney positions in the districts that would have jurisdiction over Trump’s affairs, which isn’t illegal but is unusually enough to draw concerned attention.

    THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 10/21/17
    Trump screening of U.S. attorney candidates unheard-of
    Barbara McQuade, former U.S. attorney, talks with Rachel Maddow about the rarity of presidents meeting with candidates for U.S. attorney positions and why Donald Trump doing so is of particular concern.

    Reply
  23. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 9:31 am

    THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 10/20/17
    Expert sees risk of corruption in Trump foreign government deals
    Sarah Chayes, author of “Thieves of State,” talks with Rachel Maddow about the structure of corruption in some developing nations and why she sees a risk of that kind of corruption spreading to the United States under Donald Trump

    THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 10/21/17
    Trump flouting norms risks venal turn in US
    Sarah Chayes, author of “Thieves of State,” talks with Rachel Maddow about why Donald Trump’s business with corrupt foreign governments risks spreading corruption to the United States

    Reply
  24. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 9:29 am

    THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 10/21/17
    Search for answers on U.S. soldier deaths in Niger intensifies
    Rachel Maddow looks at circumstances and U.S. interests in and around Niger and the increasing demand for answers about the how four American soldiers were killed there.

    Reply
  25. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 9:28 am

    THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 10/21/17
    Trump Chief of staff John Kelly lied in attack on Rep. Wilson
    Rachel Maddow reports the latest developments in the mess Donald Trump has made politicizing military next-of-kin notifications with the fact that Trump chief of staff John Kelly’s attack on Rep. Frederica Wilson in his defense of Trump was completely false.

    Reply
  26. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 9:27 am

    THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 10/21/17
    Weak response leaves Puerto Rico backsliding one month post-storm
    Rachel Maddow reports on the updated death toll, the rate of infection, and the reverse in progress restoring electricity to Puerto Rico as the inadequate response to Hurricane Maria is turning a natural disaster into a public health catastrophe.

    Reply
  27. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 9:26 am

    THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 10/20/17
    US refugee office denying girl access to abortion
    Rachel Maddow reports on an anti-abortion extremist appointed by Donald Trump to lead the Office of Refugee Resettlement trying to force a teenage girl refugee to give birth by denying her access to medical care, including abortion services.

    Reply
  28. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 9:24 am

    THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 10/21/17
    Greater need but less help for Puerto Rico
    Rachel Maddow compares the amount of help the Houston area received after Hurricane Harvey and the progress made in recovering from that storm to the comparatively meager response Puerto Rico and the corresponding slow progress there.

    Reply
  29. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 9:13 am

    Trump keeps rejecting plans to pay for his proposed tax cuts
    10/23/17 09:21 AM
    By Steve Benen
    Republicans remain eager to pass a massive tax plan, which still doesn’t actually exist. That said, GOP lawmakers continue to consider some provocative ideas to help offset the costs of the package they have in mind.

    The New York Times reported the other day, for example, that Republicans are “considering a plan to sharply reduce the amount of income American workers can save in tax-deferred retirement accounts.” According to the lobbyists who are working with GOP lawmakers – Democrats have been excluded from the process – Republicans have weighed capping “the annual amount workers can set aside to as low as $2,400 for 401(k) accounts,” far less than the $18,000 a year most Americans can put in their 401k without paying taxes upfront.

    This would only cover about a tenth of the cost of the GOP tax plan, but it’s a start. Or, it might have been a start if Donald Trump hadn’t just rejected the idea in his latest morning tweet. The Washington Post reported:

    President Trump vowed on Monday that his tax cuts plan would not include any changes to tax-deferred retirement accounts such as 401(k)s, following reports last week that House Republicans were weighing a sharp reduction in the amount of income American workers could save through such programs.

    Trump tweeted Monday morning: “There will be NO change to your 401(k). This has always been a great and popular middle class tax break that works, and it stays!”

    Reply
  30. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 8:55 am

    Bernie’s Bots: How Fake Twitter Accounts Manipulate Public Perception

    31%.

    The percentage above represents a wide range of interpretations, depending on the context. If one were to receive a 31% on his or her exam, the reaction to this number would be an obvious disappointment. If one were to receive a 31% tip as a server, then he or she would most likely be elated. That same percentage also elicits a wide range of emotions in the sporting world as well. A professional basketball player who shoots 31% is most likely not happy with his performance while a professional baseball player who gets a hit 31% of the time is most like quite proud of the work he is doing. The point of these comparisons is that a certain numerical percentage can tell us a lot about a person based on how he or she performs, but, more importantly, how he or she chooses to respond to that percentage moving forward.

    Senator Bernie Sanders is currently at 31%.

    He is at 31% in terms of the number of actual human beings that follow his Twiter account of the more than 8 million who claim to do so, this according to a routine Twitter audit of the senator’s verified account. That means that 69%, or roughly 4.9 million of Sanders’ followers are not living, breathing human beings. In fact, you can tell that they are bots simply by going to Sanders’ Twitter profile where the overwhelming majority of his recent followers have not Tweeted a single time since joining this month. In addition, several are following anywhere from 40 to 180 people but do not have any followers themselves, a key characteristic of being a Twitter bot. Of the people these bots follow, there tends to be a pattern in that they will follow a handful of politicians, a handful of news organizations, and a handful of celebrities. Hardly ever do they follow an Average Joe because they want to be able to maximize their retweets to the largest audiences possible.

    Reply
  31. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 8:53 am

    Donald Trump’s ‘blind spot on Russia’ isn’t going away
    10/23/17 08:41 AM
    By Steve Benen
    After Congress approved new economic sanctions against Russia, Donald Trump grudgingly signed the bill into law, but not before blaming lawmakers – including members of his own party – for undermining the U.S. relationship with the Putin government.

    But the story took a strange turn recently when the public learned that the sanctions still haven’t been implemented, despite the deadline included in the law. On “Meet the Press” yesterday, NBC’s Chuck Todd sought an explanation from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a proponent of the sanctions.

    TODD: [Y[ou’ve come on this show numerous times and said, “Russia needs to be punished.” You passed a tough sanctions bill. You passed it in July. The president signed it in early August. There was a deadline of October 1st. It is not October 1st. It is October 20th and the sanctions have not been implemented. Why?

    GRAHAM: I think that the Trump administration is slow when it comes to Russia. They have a blind spot on Russia I still can’t figure out.

    Really? You still can’t figure it out? It’s just a total mystery as to why this president might have a “blind spot” when it comes to the foreign adversary that launched an espionage operation that help put Donald Trump in power?

    Is it really that difficult to wager a guess?

    Reply
  32. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 8:38 am

    MEDIA ALERT:

    Former Attorney General Eric Holder will be on the Rachel Maddow show TONIGHT.
    9 pm EST, MSNBC

    Reply
  33. SouthernGirl2 says:
    October 23, 2017 at 8:37 am

    Look at this hellish monster, y’all. He’s calling a grieving widow a lie. I hate him so much.

    https://twitter.com/GMA/status/922427384808091648

    https://twitter.com/GMA/status/922440944200376321

    Reply
  34. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 8:36 am

    Myeshia Johnson, widow of Sgt. La David Johnson: “I don’t know how he got killed, where he got killed or anything.” pic.twitter.com/mdF2feLcUd

    — Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 23, 2017

    Myeshia Johnson, widow of Sgt. La David Johnson: “Whatever Ms. Wilson said was not fabricated. What she said was 100% correct.” pic.twitter.com/sS5zmkDwAF

    — Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 23, 2017

    Q: You were upset when you got off the phone?

    Myeshia Johnson: “Oh very. Very upset and hurt. Very It made me cry even worse.” pic.twitter.com/4LkNyulGgk

    — Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 23, 2017

    Sgt. La David Johnson’s widow: “[Trump] couldn’t remember my husband’s name… That’s what hurt me the most.” pic.twitter.com/ta7QRDNRr7

    — Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 23, 2017

    Reply
  35. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 8:31 am

    $74 million to build homes for hurricane victims awarded to a company that claims it has 5 employees, uses a residential home address as HQ https://t.co/rUU5A7J1Kd

    — Adam Khan (@Khanoisseur) October 23, 2017

    Reply
  36. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 8:30 am

    NEWS – @OFA enters partnership with Holder redistricting group @DemRedistrict, Obama to announce it himself shortly https://t.co/34H4ctzVpk

    — Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) October 23, 2017

    Reply
  37. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 8:29 am

    AM JOY 10/22/17
    Trump judge nominee Thomas Farr defended voter ID law
    Donald Trump’s federal judge nominee Thomas Farr defended the defeated, controversial North Carolina voter ID law, but Ari Berman of The Nation tells Joy Reid he may soon hear similar cases if confirmed.

    Reply
  38. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 8:26 am

    AM JOY 10/22/17
    Obama and Bush appear to address Trump rhetoric
    Former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush seemed to critique Donald Trump and the impact of his presidency in recent speeches. Joy Reid and her panel discuss.

    Reply
  41. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 6:44 am

    More on the devastation to Medicare by this budget

    https://mobile.twitter.com/kathieallenmd/status/922255090941079552

    Reply
  42. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 6:31 am

    Please call your Congressman and Senators about the GOP budget, which takes an axe to Medicare and Medicaid.

    Reply
  43. rikyrah says:
    October 23, 2017 at 6:19 am

    Good Morning, Everyone 😐😐😐

    Reply

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