“In too many places, including in Europe and the United States, democratic progress is under assault,” he will say, according to excerpts of his speech.
“We must demonstrate that democracies can still deliver for our people. That is our galvanizing mission,” he will say. “Democracy doesn’t happen by accident. We have to defend it. Strengthen it. Renew it.”
Biden to affirm transatlantic ties in first major foreign policy outing (msn.com)
I suggest Black Women Voters reach out to Russian Women as part of a New Worldwide Emancipation. We have seen that the Republican emancipation of white people, only, is another insurrection and secession. The Russian Czar backed Lincoln in the Civil War and kept hostile foreigners from siding with the Confederate Traitors. It is time for Black Voters to honor Fremont’s Foreign Fighters, many who were socialists who championed the serfs of Europe. My ‘Royal Janitor’ novel – has come true! My visions of Rena Easton – have changed the world. I suggest Vice President Kamala Harris help establish a Black Diplomatic Core and bring the Civil War Apartheid to an end. Black Women Voters are not promoting socialism, and for the most part are devout Christians. Why not Black Missionaries? China is moving in on Africa while our Navy cruises the South China Sea to hold back China’s advances that are emboldened by Traitor Trump’s betrayal of all Democracies!
I see a Russian tour of Black American Women Poets. Black students should learn Russian.
Female poetry in contemporary Russia – Russia Beyond (rbth.com)
I suggest the formation of The American Defence Staff with Harry and Meghan as its founders. The Queen of England stripped Diana’s son of his military honors. Meghan descends from black slaves. The Marin Shipmates can escort overseas diplomats. The last stigma of the Black Holocaust needs to be removed, being, freed slaves did not fight for their emancipation but for one famous unit. Since Israel became a nation, we tax payers gave the Jewish victims of Fascism billion of dollars in defence spending so they could lose the Victim status in the world. I see a all black Navy and Marine detachment located in the Washington Naval Yards that could send units to our Nation’s Capitol when the next insurrection takes place. There have been two – so far. Never again will the battle flag of traitors be carried in the Capitol rotunda.
John Presco
American Artifacts Preview: Washington Navy Yard History – YouTube
Job Offer by British Defence Staff | Rosamond Press
Tsar Alexander II and President Abraham Lincoln: Unlikely Bedfellows? (hawaii.edu)
What China Wants From Africa? Everything (forbes.com)
Whenever I observe the never-ending barrage of social media posts by Republicans decrying the evils of “socialism,” I can’t help being struck by the irony that the Republican Party was in part founded by genuine socialists and foreign socialists to boot. In fact, Abraham Lincoln, one of the party’s most important founding members, though not a socialist himself, undoubtedly read a great deal of Karl Marx’s work via American socialist Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, where Marx served as foreign correspondent for a decade. In addition, several of Lincoln’s socialist Republican Party colleagues (comrades?), went on to become key supporters of his 1860 presidential campaign, members of his administration or high-ranking officers in the Union Army.
The Republican Party’s Red Roots. Whenever I observe the never-ending… | by Al Ronzoni | Medium
Texas secession talk fades amid winter storm, power outages – Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)
By MICHAEL HILTZIK BUSINESS COLUMNIST FEB. 17, 2021 5:51 AM PT
It wasn’t that long ago — just a few days and weeks, in fact — that some Texas political leaders were talking about the virtues of seceding from the United States.
At the end of January, a state legislator filed a bill aimed at creating a legislative committee by referendum “to develop a plan for achieving Texas independence.”
The measure quickly won the endorsement of state GOP Chairman Allen West, who said the measure aimed to give Texans “a right to voice their opinions on a critical issue.”
Biden to affirm transatlantic ties in first major foreign policy outing (msn.com)
When Joe Biden last addressed the Munich Security Conference two years ago, he made a promise to a packed-in crowd at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof.
“This too shall pass,” Biden said in 2019, lamenting the isolationist turn the US took under then-President Donald Trump. “We will be back.”
On Friday, Biden will declare that “America is back” as he returns — virtually — to the annual security conference to reaffirm the US’ position of global leadership, the power of its alliances and the resilience of democracy — in the United States and abroad.
But he will acknowledge the strains of the past four years.
“In too many places, including in Europe and the United States, democratic progress is under assault,” he will say, according to excerpts of his speech.
“We must demonstrate that democracies can still deliver for our people. That is our galvanizing mission,” he will say. “Democracy doesn’t happen by accident. We have to defend it. Strengthen it. Renew it.”
Paired with his first virtual session of the Group of 7 a few hours earlier, Biden’s back-to-back diplomatic engagements center on his attempt to restore the transatlantic alliance after it became strained under Trump, who viewed Europe as a trade rival and often said he believed traditional US friends were harder to deal with than adversaries.
Meeting virtually with the G7 from the White House Situation Room, Biden joined a club in which he’s long sought membership. In a brief photo-op, he was smiling and nodding along as the summit’s host, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, made introductory remarks.
The meeting was not without some hitches; at one point, mumbling in German interrupted Johnson’s speech and he instructed German Chancellor Angela Merkel to mute her line.
“Can you hear us Angela? That’s OK,” he said. “I think you need to mute.”
While officials, in previewing his appearances, said that Biden would not be focused mainly on Trump during his outings, his predecessor’s looming influence will nonetheless inform the message the President is seeking to convey.
“He will certainly acknowledge that democracy is under stress, democratic institutions are under stress, under challenge in the United States that they are in parts of Europe and in other parts of the world as well,” a senior administration official said. “But that acknowledgment will be the jumping off point to a confident and assertive claim that he will make in this speech that we have the wherewithal to renew and strengthen our democratic institutions.”
A regular participant in the Munich conference during his years as a senator, vice president and private citizen, Biden has used the event as a testing ground and sounding board for his foreign policy. The event itself, founded at the height of the Cold War as a self-described “trans-Atlantic family meeting,” in some ways epitomizes the type of group-based diplomacy that he has long espoused.
The pandemic has forced the yearly gathering out of its traditional home in the grand Bavarian hotel. Instead, Biden will speak to the conference from the East Room of the White House, where he has spent the first month of his presidency attempting to undo damage he says cost the United States its credibility abroad.
This year, Biden hopes to make the case for a united front against Russia and China, and will lay out specific grievances against those countries’ anti-democratic threats.
After four years of the US unilaterally tackling the challenges posed by China, Biden will outline a multilateral strategy for confronting and competing with Beijing.
As he looks to bolster the US’s more traditional alliances with European countries and other democracies around the world, the President will look to leverage those ties to confront the growing challenges that China presents, urging the US and its allies to “stand together,” the official said.
“With respect to China, he will make clear in the speech that he’s not looking for confrontation and he’s not looking to do cold war, but he’s expecting stiff competition and he welcomes it,” a senior administration official said. “And he believes that the United States and Europe and democracies across the Indo-Pacific should all work together to push back against the Chinese.”
The official said Biden is not expected to make specific asks of US allies during the G7 or Munich Security Conference with respect to China, but will urge US allies to “stand together” and “develop a common outlook.” The official stressed that taking action against China would not be the thrust of Biden’s remarks at either conference, nor would he be engaging in “chest-beating.”
Addressing the security conference one day after the State Department announced that the US will engage in multilateral negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, Biden is expected to reiterate that commitment, but will not divulge his timetable for the talks or an agreement.
“We look forward to engaging in diplomacy. We are keen to sit down and hear what the Iranians have to say. We want to come up with a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear program, and let’s get to work,” the official said. “He’s not going to go further than that in his remarks.”
Before delivering a speech at the Munich conference, Biden will attend a closed session of the G7, during which he will unveil a $4 billion US commitment to COVAX, the World Health Organization’s effort to provide vaccines to poor countries. The President plans to announce $2 billion contribution to the fund and commit to spending another $2 billion, contingent on contributions from other nations.
And just as Biden has pitched his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package by underscoring the risk of “going too small,” not too big, a senior administration official said Biden would underscore a similar message as it relates to the global economic recovery.
“This is an era for action and investment and not for austerity,” the official said, previewing Biden’s remarks.
The session will also mark the United States’ official return to the Paris climate accord, 30 days after Biden announced he would re-enter the US in the pact during his first day in office.
Biden joins a G7 that had been fractured by the presence of Trump, who came to dislike the group and questioned why he needed to participate in its summits at all. At his first meeting, held on a cliffside in Sicily, he felt ganged up upon when the leaders tried to convince him to remain in the Paris deal.
The next year, during a riverside retreat in the northern woods of Quebec, he stubbornly resisted the other leaders’ entreaties on tariffs and left early, rescinding his signature from the concluding statement as he flew to Singapore to meet with Kim Jong Un.
The leaders clashed again a year later during a heated dinner meeting underneath the Biarritz lighthouse in France, when Trump said he wanted Russia to rejoin the group.
By his fourth year in office, when it was his turn to host the summit, Trump went back and forth on where it would be convened, upset that optics and ethics prevented him from holding it at his resort in Doral. Ultimately, at the urging of French President Emmanuel Macron, he held a video conference call. But he never hosted an actual summit.
There is undoubtedly a sense of tensions relaxing with Biden replacing Trump in the United States’ chair around the G7 table. Even among those leaders who attempted to cultivate the former President, like British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Biden provides at least a more predictable and stable presence than Trump, whose sour moods — often prompted by jet lag, aides said — derailed many a G7 session.
In some ways, the restoration of a reliable American voice is Biden’s signal message during his debut multilateral outing, which a senior administration official likened Thursday evening to a “virtual trip to Europe.”
“The President will indicate his very strong view that the US has a deep set of enduring strengths that transcend what we have seen over the course of the last four years,” the official said, previewing the President’s activity on the condition of anonymity.
Soon after Joe Biden announced last year that he would pick a woman as his running mate, Democratic congresswoman Jackie Speier began warning Facebook executives: Female politicians receive the most vile online attacks, and the company’s filters were failing to stop them.
“We showed them 20 examples that were disgusting — and they were still up!” said Speier, of Hillsborough, whose meetings included one with Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. Facebook’s response gave her little comfort. “Keep sending us these horrific examples,” she said executives told her, “and we’ll take them down.”
In times of crisis, people typically look for strong, pragmatic leaders who will allay their fears while being straight with them and work around the clock to solve the problem at hand. Usually—not in all cases but in most of them—people aren’t interested in seeing elected officials go on TV or the internet and blame others for the situation they‘re in, but rather use what precious time they have to figure out how to fix things. Like, say your state was in the midst of a massive power outage, and millions of people didn‘t have heat while frigid weather refused to let up. You’d probably want your local leaders to work on restoring power before you froze to death, rather than going on Fox News to blame socialist policies that don’t exist for the situation, right? Unfortunately for the people of Texas, they’re stuck with politicians like Greg Abbott, Ted Cruz, and Dan Crenshaw, who think a visit to Sean Hannity, or some tweets about the perils of socialism, are just what the doctor ordered.
On Tuesday, for example, as millions of his constituents continued to go without power amidst freezing temperatures, Governor Abbot stopped by Hannity’s show to warn viewers that what his state was going through shows why America can’t trust people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her pinko-liberal energy policies. “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Abbott said. “It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary for the state of Texas as well as other states to make sure we’ll be able to heat our homes in the winter time and cool our homes in the summer time.”
Rick Perry Insulted My Southern Kin
Posted on July 26, 2018 by Royal Rosamond Press
My kindred, Anthony Hodges, fought the takeover of the Sons of Confederate Veterans by Sweeney who Rick Perry blessed. My great grandmother was kidnapped by Cherokee chief and born him a son. Some of my genetic material is kin to the first landowners. I got a whole bunch of cousins who might be on the Rolls, and due Southern Land.
John Presco
https://rosamondpress.com/2011/07/05/john-hodges-rosamond/
According to the Washington Times (via Nexis), in March 2000 Perry fired off a letter to Denne Sweeney, Texas commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans: “Although this is an emotional issue,” he wrote, “I want you to know that I oppose efforts to remove Confederate monuments, plaques, and memorials from public property. I also believe that communities should decide whether statues or other memorials are appropriate for their community.”
(Sweeney, for his part, later ascended to the position of commander in chief of the national Sons of Confederate Veterans, where, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported, he presided over “a purge of some 300 members, accused of disloyalty for criticizing racism in the SCV.”)
The Rev. Eric Dean, an American Southerner living in Europe, had been hearing the rumors for months. Finally, he decided to pay a visit to a former high-ranking leader of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), the Southern heritage group of which Dean had long been a proud member. Was it true, Dean asked last November, that the SCV was being taken over by racial extremists? Were the decent colleagues Dean remembered really being swamped by white supremacists?
Within days of his visit to Tennessee to see Anthony Hodges, the former No. 2 leader in the SCV who had earlier been purged by his enemies, Dean had reached a conclusion. Hodges, E-mailed comrades in the SCV, had told him the group was moving “towards a more politically active, secessionist and racist agenda.” “Racial groups,” Hodges added, controlled “key leadership positions.” As a result, there was an ongoing “exodus” of lifelong SCV members, including U.S. senators.
And so Eric Dean quit the SCV. Members of the unit he served as chaplain did, too. And with that, the SCV’s entire European division ceased to exist.
For Rev. Dean, the clincher was a sermon from the SCV’s chaplain in chief that attacked “racial interbreeding” as ungodly and described slavery as biblically sanctioned. But that was only the latest development in a long and ugly story. For almost four years now, the SCV has been embroiled in an increasingly nasty civil war, as racial extremists battle moderates for control of what is certainly the largest Southern heritage organization in America. In the last year and a half, under the leadership of a new national chief whose politics have become clearer as his term of office unfolded, the ascendancy of the radicals has become undeniable.
Since Denne Sweeney took over as SCV commander in chief in August 2004, the group’s executive council has been stripped of moderate former commanders. A purge of some 300 members, accused of disloyalty for criticizing racism in the SCV, was completed. An ancient alliance with the Military Order of Stars & Bars, a sister organization for descendants of Confederate officers, was scuttled, and a bitter war with another old ally, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, erupted. Sweeney suspended an entire state division of the SCV and replaced its leaders. He diverted money originally intended for the upkeep of a cemetery and building a museum to a brand-new political arm. He promoted followers with documented racist histories to key national leadership positions. Through it all, Sweeney presided over an exodus of fully 25% of the SCV’s membership, which fell from 36,000 to 27,000
“The slackers and the grannies have been purged from our ranks,” Kirk Lyons, a radical who first floated the idea of taking over the SCV in a 2000 meeting of neo-Nazis and former Klansmen, exulted in December. Now, Lyons added, the SCV needs to become “a modern, 21st century Christian war machine capable of uniting the Confederate community and leading it to ultimate victory.”
The Die is Cast
The first evidence of an attempt to take over the SCV came in early 2002, when it emerged that Lyons — a white supremacist attorney married on the grounds of the Aryan Nations by its neo-Nazi leader, Richard Butler– was running for a regional leadership position within the SCV. Though Lyons was narrowly defeated after the Southern Poverty Law Center drew attention to his candidacy, an unknown man named Ron Wilson managed to win election as the SCV’s commander in chief. It wasn’t long before it became obvious that Wilson was a close Lyons ally.
In the next two years, Wilson, who once endorsed and sold a virulently anti-Semitic book from his home business, joined the battle in earnest. He initiated a purge of those who had criticized racism within the SCV or were in any way tied to a rump group called Save the SCV that sought to eject racists. He strengthened ties to Lyons — whose stated goal is to turn the South into “a majority European-derived country” — and to Lyons’ Southern Legal Resource Center (SLRC), a nonprofit that battles so-called “heritage violations” against white Southerners. And he allowed racists and anti-Semites to land key positions of power within the SCV.
But it wasn’t immediately clear where Denne Sweeney would come down in 2004, after two years of bitter internal strife inside the SCV. Many hoped that his election would bring calm and an end to the angry politics of Lyons and his friends.
By last April, it was obvious those hopes were without foundation. At a special convention held in Concord, N.C., Sweeney led a move that stripped former commanders in chief of the organization — many of whom had spoken out against racism — of their ex officiovoting power on the General Executive Council. At the same time, Sweeney expanded his own powers to help him control the SCV.
Sweeney’s second in command, Lt. Comdr. Hodges, had joined a lawsuit to prevent the changes to the executive council. Though the suit remained unresolved, Sweeney also used the convention, which was packed with his own supporters, to eject Hodges and replace him with a Sweeney ally. He then initiated a formal break with the Military Order of Stars & Bars (MOSB), whose former leader, Oklahoma City attorney Jeff Massey, had participated in the lawsuit that Hodges was also a part of. And he presided over the SCV’s donation of $10,000 to Lyons’ SLRC.
Denne Sweeney had come down foursquare for the radicals.
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