BLUE TSUNAMI
‘Republican bloodbath’: Journalists are haunted by Trump’s surprise 2016 victory — but many conservatives are convinced he’s doomed


Published on October 23, 2020 By Mario Almonte

Donald Trump (AFP)

For many political reporters in the mainstream media these days, the old adage, “Once bitten, twice shy,” accurately reflects the tone of their coverage of Donald Trump and the presidential race. While rival Joe Biden has consistently polled significantly better than Trump since entering the race in April 2019, much of the mainstream media can’t quit the feeling that Biden could still lose. They are haunted by the ghost of the 2016 presidential race, which was won by Trump despite nearly every poll indicating he would not.

A recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, for example, shows Biden ahead of Trump by 11 points, 54 percent to 43 percent among likely voters. In covering the poll, reporter Domenico Montanaro details an impressive number of categories in which Biden leads Trump. Yet, Montanaro feels compelled to preface it all by reminding readers that Trump won with just 46 percent of voters in 2016 nationally – just 3 percent above his current standing. “It was enough for him to squeeze out a victory in the states key to the Electoral College,” he says, adding ominously, “Trump is within striking distance.”

The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof tells Yahoo Finance writers Max Zahn and Andy Serwer, “I think that it’s more likely that Joe Biden will win in a landslide, than that Trump will win at all.” Even so, he hedges, “There is a possibility that things will come together for (Trump).” Zahn and Serwer themselves share Kristof’s hesitations. They note that a FiveThirtyEight poll only gives Trump a 12 percent chance of winning, but FiveThirtyEight also gave Trump just a 13.5 percent chance of winning on the same date in 2016. There is still the “possibility of an ‘October surprise,’” they say.

You Can Go With This Or You Can Go With That

In dissecting its own survey showing Biden in front with double digits, FiveThirtyEight also seems to caution against breaking out the champagne just yet. Biden is leading in almost every category, they observe, “But that doesn’t mean that the demographic trends bubbling beneath the surface can’t have an outsized effect.” They add: “Take 2016. President Trump won in large part because he carried white voters without a college degree by a bigger margin than any recent GOP presidential nominee….”

Foreign news reporters aren’t immune to the sense of insecurity in the face of Biden’s overwhelming lead over Trump. UK’s The Independent’s John T. Bennett cites a new poll by JL Partners which gives Biden a 10-point edge over Trump. However, there’s “ample reasons for Mr. Biden and his campaign team to worry,” he cautions. “Note that the September poll showed Trump performing (only) slightly better than in 2016.”

But Wait, There’s More

A recent NBC News/WSJ poll found registered voters favoring Biden over Trump by an 11 point margin. Even so, writer Mark Murray remarks, “There’s…the memory of what happened in 2016: The October NBC News/WSJ poll from four years ago…showed Hillary Clinton with an identical 11-point lead over Trump.”

CNN’s Keven Breuninger takes stock of numerous national polls that show Biden with a “sizeable lead over President Donald Trump.” He nevertheless cautions, “But there are reasons for the Democratic nominee to worry…(Trump’s) lead in several crucial swing states is slightly lower than Hillary Clinton’s was at this point in the 2016 race.”

On the Other Hand

Ironically, Republicans and ardent Trump supporters don’t seem to share the same insecurities about Trump’s chances of winning the election. They are positively convinced he will lose.

The Daily Beast reports, “Rupert Murdoch Predicts a Landslide Win for Biden.” It says that Murdock is now “firmly of the mindset that the next president will be Biden.” Murdoch told his associates, “After all that has gone on, people are ready for Sleepy Joe.”

NBC News reports, “GOP senators voice fears of a painful Trump loss” that will spill into their senate races. They are hearing, “Pointed warnings of electoral defeat have come in recent days from Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. All are former critics turned allies who reliably vote with the president.” They note Sasse’s recent comment during a telephone conference call, in which he criticized Trump for kissing “dictators’ butt.” Sasse warns, “I’m now looking at the possibility of a Republican bloodbath in the Senate.”

And Trump himself, normally a fierce optimist about his ability to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, is showing signs of resignation about his potential loss. During a recent rally in Georgia, he muses that if he loses, “Maybe I’ll have to leave the country.”

Expert: Trump is treading dangerously close to tacking ‘to an almost explicitly QAnon narrative’




Published on October 23, 2020


By Meaghan Ellis, AlterNet

President Donald Trump is scrambling to maintain the hold on his support base with just two weeks left until Election Day and it looks like he’s going a step further to ensure QAnon believers have a voice.

On Tuesday, the White House issued a press release praising the president’s actions taken to combat human trafficking.

“President Donald J. Trump has prioritized fighting for the voiceless and ending the scourge of human trafficking across the Nation,” the White House said in its statement, later adding, “Since taking office, the President has signed nine pieces of bipartisan legislation to combat human trafficking, both domestically and internationally.”

While the Trump administration has vowed to take a “whole-of-government approach” to combatting the issue of human trafficking, it is not as cut-and-dry as it seems.

With so many QAnon followers believing there is a secret pedophilia ring run by high-ranking Democrats, Trump’s latest actions may serve as yet another signal for QAnon followers to continue their plight to combat a non-existent pedophilia ring instead of focusing on the real issues of human trafficking.

According to This Week, QAnon’s disturbing beliefs and the president’s subliminal acknowledgement of their beliefs could be problematic. The publication explains:

QAnon’s founding myth holds that our society has long been in thrall of a “deep state” cabal of Satan-worshipping, cannibalistic, Democratic pedophiles with whom Trump is locked in secret battle — and Trump is closing out his re-election campaign with near-confirmation of exactly that. He’s treating QAnon as a significant part of his base and sending a hearty dog whistle in their direction.

Just in—

White House out with a press release praising @realDonaldTrump's work "combating human trafficking and protecting the innocent."

Issues that absolutely need to be addressed, of course. But also issues that will rally Qanon followers. pic.twitter.com/f0e610ZKi5
— Zach Everson (@Z_Everson) October 20, 2020


Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, weighed in with his concerns about the Trump campaign treading dangerously close to the QAnon conspiracy theories.

“We’re seeing the Trump campaign tack closely to an almost explicitly QAnon narrative,” Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, told The Washington Post in an August report. “I don’t expect to hear the president talking about pedophilia or Satanism, but I expect to hear almost everything else.”

The White House’s statement came just days after Trump claimed to have no knowledge of QAnon and what they believe.

“I know nothing about QAnon,” Trump told NBC moderator Savannah Guthrie during his town all special on October 15. “What I do hear about it is they are very strongly against pedophilia… I do agree with that, and I agree with it very strongly.”

Whoops, Trump did it again

Published on October 22, 2020 By Amanda Marcotte, Salon
- Commentary

President Donald Trump (left, via Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons) and FBI Director Christopher Wray (right, via Wikimedia Commons).

Back thousands of years ago, in February of 2020, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a “moderate” Republican, justified her vote to acquit Donald Trump at his impeachment trial — despite the mountains of evidence of guilt — by claiming that Trump had learned his lesson.

“I believe that the president has learned from this case,” Collins told CBS news anchor Norah O’Donnell at the time. “The president has been impeached — that’s a pretty big lesson.”

That excuse was preposterous at the time, making it sound like Trump was a child who had his hand in the cookie jar, not a 73-year-old man caught abusing his powers of office to blackmail the Ukrainian president into propping up conspiracy theories about Joe Biden. But it was also hilariously predictable that Trump, who is incapable of learning or growing as a person, would absorb any moral lessons from being impeached.

Trump didn’t learn anything. In fact, he’s only escalated the very same botched conspiracy that got him impeached, only this time around he’s abusing his power on the home front, instead of in a distant nation most Americans couldn’t find on a map.

Truth told, Trump demonstrated his failure to learn within days of his acquittal, first by bragging about it and then pivoting to lying about the Democrats. Since then, he’s gone right back to abusing his power to fabricate lies about his opponent. He and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani — along with Giuliani’s buddy Andrii Derkach, a Ukrainian legislator with ties to Russian intelligence — eventually returned to the very scheme that got Trump impeached in the first place: an attempt to counterfeit evidence that Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, had somehow dragged his father into a corrupt scheme. It’s a claim with literally no evidence to support it, no matter how much Trump and Giuliani repeat the accusation.

On Wednesday evening, Devlin Barrett and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump has threatened to fire FBI Director Christopher Wray — who, lest we forget, was appointed by Trump after the firing of James Comey — unless Wray announces a phony investigation into Biden that Trump can use as last-minute ammunition in the presidential campaign.

“Trump wants official action similar to the announcement made 11 days before the last presidential election by then-FBI Director James B. Comey,” Barrett and Dawsey write, referring to Comey’s infamous announcement that “he had reopened an investigation into [Hillary] Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state after potential new evidence had been discovered.”

That investigation resulted in no damning information about Clinton, which was entirely predictable. Clinton had been thoroughly investigated for years without a speck of meaningful dirt turned up on her. But that announcement did help turn an election Clinton should have won to Trump’s favor: It caused a surge of undecided voters to break for Trump at the last minute, allowing him to win several important swing states by razor-thin margins.

So there’s one thing Trump was capable of learning: The value of fake scandals to distract from serious issues, such as his own corruption and incompetence. And he’s hoping for a repeat, which is why he’s pressuring Wray to pull a Comey against Biden.

But in doing so — and in “considering” whether to fire Wray if he doesn’t — Trump is doing the exact same thing that got him impeached: Pressuring a government official to announce a phony investigation into his opponent, and threatening to use the powers of his office to punish that person if they don’t comply. This time Trump is targeting a Senate-confirmed official who leads a federal law enforcement agency rather than a foreign leader.

For those who have grown hazy on the details of Trump’s impeachment — which is understandable, since there have been dozens, if not hundreds, of Trump-caused crises since then — a quick recap: In the summer of 2019, Trump called the newly elected president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, and told him that the U.S. would withhold military aid (which had been authorized by Congress) unless Zelensky did Trump “a favor.” That favor was to announce an “investigation” into Biden aimed at propping up the convoluted conspiracy theory about Hunter Biden, a Ukrainian gas company and a fired Ukrainian prosecutor that Giuliani and Trump were trying to push into the mainstream media.

Zelensky clearly felt uneasy participating in a scheme to smear an innocent man’s reputation, but Ukraine desperately needed the military aid to fight Russian aggression. Luckily for Zelensky, he was spared from this blackmail scheme by a whistleblower and Trump’s eventual impeachment for abusing his office.

Now Trump is doing to Wray what he did to Zelensky. The only difference is that Trump’s leverage in this case is limited: He can dismiss the FBI director at any time, having already done so once, but that’s about it. With Zelensky, Trump’s threats carried a lot more weight.

Either way, the basic story is the same: Trump is demanding that a government official abuse his powers and launch a completely phony investigation based on made-up charges, for Trump’s political benefit. In fact, Trump has reportedly made similar threats about Attorney General Bill Barr, because the Justice Department’s bogus special-counsel investigation of the Russia investigation evidently hasn’t turned up anything Trump can use to bolster his conspiracy theories about the Democrats. (If Barr, the most dogged and ruthless of Trump’s sycophants, is in trouble, things in the White House are getting really bad.)

There’s a word for all this: Blackmail.

Unfortunately, the media coverage about the attacks on Wray (and on Barr) or about the latest ridiculous wrinkles in Rudy Giuliani’s harebrained schemes all too often fails to provide the necessary context. It doesn’t remind readers that none of this is new, and that in fact all these developments are part of the same conspiracy that got Trump impeached. The Washington Post article on the threats against Wray fails to use the word “impeachment” or to mention that Trump is treating Wray exactly as he treated Zelensky. And although mainstream media has emphasized the most important aspects of Giuliani’s efforts to smear Biden — that Giuliani is not credible and is believed by U.S. intelligence to be spreading Russian disinformation — most articles don’t explain that Giuliani is still working the same plot that got his celebrity client (quite likely his only client) impeached.

It’s as if G. Gordon Liddy kept burglarizing various Democratic offices after the Watergate break-in, but the reporting on his later crimes failed to mention the first one. Our national situation is an ongoing catastrophe, no doubt. But is it really too much to expect journalists to explain that Trump keeps on doing the very thing he was impeached for doing?

Either way, the situation shows that Trump, despite all his chaotic crazy-uncle ranting, doesn’t actually have a lot of tricks in his bag. The only thing he knows how to do is cheat — and the only way he knows how to cheat is by threatening and blackmailing other people to do the work for him. Without that, he’s got nothing.

Trump’s ‘herd immunity’ advisor has been spreading his quackery behind the scenes for quite a while

 October 20, 2020
By Ray Hartmann
- Commentary



This is not Dr. Scott Atlas’ first rodeo.

It might seem like Atlas came out of nowhere after getting recruited by Stephen Miller at a QAnon meeting. Or you might have him confused with the Atlas who tried to kill Superman in #677 of the superhero series.

Atlas wasn’t famous until he got plucked by Trump from the farthest right reaches of the universe as a pandemic adviser carrying the flag for herd immunity. That, of course, is the theory that says, in effect, that saving the economy in an election year is certainly worth losing a few million lives.

But it turns out Atlas has been on the political scene as a foe of government health care for quite a while. As a creature of the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank uneasily affiliated with Stanford University, Atlas has left a bit of a paper trail

In 2008, for example, Atlas was the presidential campaign health adviser for one Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor–since turned vampire–who was running a crowded Republican-primary field that included Governors Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee and Senator John McCain. Romney’s signature issue was bringing Romneycare, the popular public health-care program he advanced in Massachusetts, to the national scene.

Here’s what Atlas had to say about that:

“Mitt Romney’s legacy is the creation of a multibillion-dollar government health bureaucracy that punishes employers and insists middle income individuals either purchase health insurance or pay for their own health care,” Atlas said to the Associated Press. “The former is a mandate, the latter is a tax, and neither one is free market.”

With Atlas’ assistance, Giuliani finished 8th in a field of 8 that year, the only candidate to stay in the race and receive zero delegates. Romney finished closely behind Huckabee. McCain, of course, won a landslide primary victory, only to lose to President Barack Obama, whose landmark Obamacare was modeled in part after Romneycare.

If that isn’t ironic enough, there’s this: On March 24, 2012, a reinvented Romney proudly announced his team of five healthcare advisers who would help him attack the horrors of the Affordable Care Act. First on the list: Dr. Scott Atlas.

Perhaps that honeymoon didn’t last after Romney went down to defeat in the general election. Atlas, was still snarky about Romneycare in 2014.

Researchers then reported, according to the Boston Globe, “that four years after Romneycare was implemented in 2006, death rates in the state dropped nearly 3 percent among young and middle age adults compared with similar populations in states that didn’t expand coverage.”

Replied Atlas, citing no facts: “I am skeptical that such an immediate and significant drop in mortality would occur after getting health insurance.”

Why, of course you’re skeptical, sir. That’s what has produced descriptions today from the likes of Dr. Robert Redfield, Trump’s director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who said succinctly “everything (Atlas) says is false.”

On the other hand, that doesn’t keep Atlas’ weirdness from rubbing off on others. At a Senate Health Committee hearing in May, Romney posed the following question, according to the St. George News, of Utah:

“Should we let this run its course through the population and not try to test every person?” Romney asked Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. “I’m saying that a bit as a strawman, but I’m interested in your perspective.”

His response was unenthusiastic.

“Collins said the result would not be a disaster when it came to much of the population that is not at high risk of dying from the virus,” the paper reported, “but it could be deadly for the elderly and others with health conditions like asthma, diabetes and heart conditions.”

Deadliness is the sort of thing that troubles the likes of Atlas’ 78 medical faculty colleagues at Stanford University, who issued a statement condemning his idiocy.

“Many of his opinions and statements run counter to established science and, by doing so, undermine public health authorities.” For his part, Atlas brandished his Trumpish credentials by threatening those colleagues with a defamation lawsuit for speaking truth.

In response to that lawsuit, attorneys for the Stanford faculty members said, ““If [Atlas] cannot tolerate science-based criticism of his opinions and statements concerning this public health crisis, then he has no business advising anybody, let alone the President of the United States.”

But he is.

Melinda Henneberger: 

How could bloodthirsty execution of Kansas woman ever amount to justice?

2020/10/23

©The Kansas City Star

YURI GRIPAS/AFP/Getty Images North America/TNS

The selectively pro-life Trump administration has brought back the federal death penalty with what I think we can safely call a vengeance during this tough-on-crime campaign season. Did Attorney General William Barr, only recently honored at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast for his “Christlike behavior,” even flinch when ordering that a Kansas woman will be murdered in our name on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception?

Most of those who suffer great cruelty as children do not go on to brutalize others as adults. But Lisa Montgomery, the woman we’re killing by lethal injection on Dec. 8, isn’t one of those victims who never made the news.

In 2004, she strangled a pregnant 23-year-old, Bobbie Jo Stinnett, in Stinnett’s home in Skidmore, Missouri. The scene was so grisly that when Stinnett’s mother found her body, she told police that it looked like her stomach had exploded; Montgomery had cut Stinnett open with a kitchen knife and had stolen the baby girl she then tried to pass off as her own.

At her 2007 trial, a psychiatrist testified that Montgomery had for years “suffered from significant physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather.” Even when her mother finally caught him raping her, the doctor said, it was her daughter she blamed, and saw as “a seducer or home-wrecker.” Yet Montgomery “still strived for approval from her mother,” who was herself so violent that she killed the family dog in front of her children to punish them. At 18, Montgomery married her stepbrother at her mother’s urging. Her life did not get better.

The prosecution wrote all of this off as “the abuse excuse” of a “wicked” criminal who was only faking mental illness. “As a society, we can’t let people use the fact that they had bad parents or didn’t have a good childhood as an excuse to murder people,” said Matt Whitworth, the lead prosecutor in the case.

If even one juror had held out against her execution, she would have spent the rest of her life in prison. But no, it was unanimous, and jurors told reporters that they, too, saw her as the prosecution did, as a Star news story put it, as a “scheming, dishonest manipulator who used false pregnancies to gain advantage in her interpersonal relations.”

Now, all these years later, we’re going to do to Lisa Montgomery what she did to Bobbie Jo Stinnett. Which I’m sure is going to deter other victims of severe child abuse from being damaged in ways that we’ll then pretend are just an excuse for their crimes. And who is it who’s faking, again?

Skidmore, Missouri, population 284, where Montgomery knocked on Stinnett’s door pretending to want to buy a puppy, is really only known for two things: murder and mob justice.

Four years before Stinnett’s killing, in 2000, her 25-year-old cousin, Wendy Gillenwater, had been stomped to death by the “boyfriend” who’d left her with 14 fractured ribs, a punctured lung and lacerated liver. The next year, in 2001, another cousin, 20-year-old Branson Perry, disappeared and was never found.

There have been precocious murderers and elderly ones in surrounding Nodaway County: Benny Kemper was just 15 when he sneaked into his classmate’s basement, waited until the Merrigan family was asleep and killed them one by one in their beds in 1972. Lloyd Jeffress was 71 when he shot up Conception Abbey in 2002, killing two monks and wounding two others before ending his own life. A local farmer, William Taylor, made national news after he ran over his wife Debra with a combine in 1994.

But it’s the can-do vigilantism that sets this far northwest corner of Missouri apart.

In 1931, a crowd of thousands watched the Maryville lynching of Raymond Gunn, a Black man the mob tied to a pole on the roof of a one-room schoolhouse and burned alive. That’s where Gunn was suspected of having murdered a 20-year-old teacher, but there was no trial, and the local sheriff never called in the National Guard troops who were in town to protect Gunn. He didn’t want any of them to get hurt, he said later. The Gunn family’s home was burned, too, and many Black residents fled that day. Burned fragments of what had been the schoolhouse were pocketed as souvenirs.

Half a century later, in 1981, Skidmore pulled together again, for the broad-daylight murder of “town bully” Ken Rex McElroy. Dozens of people saw him shot in his truck on Main Street, with at least two guns, and yet no one was ever arrested.

Isn’t it in that same bloodthirsty spirit that we’ll call the death of Lisa Montgomery justice? Unlike Gunn or McElroy, she was at least convicted in court. And unlike Gunn, her guilt is not in doubt. But in taking the life of a woman who never had much of a chance of one, neither is ours.

———

ABOUT THE WRITER

Melinda Henneberger is a columnist and member of The Kansas City Star’s editorial board.

———

©2020 The Kansas City Star (Kansas City, Mo.)

About Amy Coney Barrett’s secret church stint


Amy Coney Barrett (MSNBC)

By Jillian S. Ambroz and David Cay Johnston, DC Report @ RawStory
Published on October 21, 2020

There’s an important omission from Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s Senate questionnaire about her fitness to serve on the United States Supreme Court.

She failed to disclose that she served as Council Chair for St. Joseph Catholic Church in South Bend, Ind., for two one-year appointments, between 2013 and June 2015. Her responsibilities included providing counsel and advice to the pastor and assisting in all church duties, according to the church’s documents on its Council Bylaws.

The parish runs a grammar school that, according to its website, teaches that “homosexual behavior” is an offense against the Sixth and Ninth commandments. Neither commandment makes any reference to homosexuality. Both commandments address heterosexual behavior, however.

Various religions  CHRISTIAN SECTS cite the commandments slightly differently, but widely published versions of the Sixth Commandment say “thou shalt not commit adultery.” The Ninth says “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy
neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.”



Barrett did disclose that she served on the board of the Trinity School in South Bend from 2015 to 2017, which is affiliated with community faith group, People of Praise, an extremely tight-knit and conservative Catholic religious organization. During that time, the school enforced a policy to not accept children of unmarried couples. The admissions policy clearly states that it excluded students with gay parents.

In addition, the pastor of her congregation in South Bend runs an organization that aims to keep people ”who struggle with same-sex attraction” to live celibate lives instead.

While Barrett did list her role on the board of Trinity School in the exhaustive 69-page document submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee, St. Joseph’s Catholic Church cannot be found once in the filing. It raises questions of what kind of bigotry might be practiced there that she would not mention her ties to the church.

On the very first page of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Supreme Court nominee questionnaire, nominees are asked to include an employment record dating back to their college graduation. This would include any affiliation as an officer, director, partner or employee or non-profit organization, with or without pay.

This new information should cause the Senate Judiciary to pump the brakes on her confirmation. The Senate is expected to vote on her nomination on Oct. 26.

It may have been a calculated omission because Barrett provided details on her work history otherwise, going back to a job she held as a summer administrative assistant to Phelps Dunbar LLP, in New Orleans, in 1994.

Her position as parish council chair was unpaid. Barrett and her husband, Jesse M. Barrett, were also generous donors to St. Joseph’s Church. An annual report for 2012-2013 shows a donation for that year between $10,000 and $25,000.

While it’s no secret the Trump Administration wants to fill every possible bench with a conservative judge, Barrett was hand-picked by former White House counsel Don McGahn. He put Barrett forth for consideration noting her “unbending conviction on social issues.”

Calls to Barrett’s office and various senators on the Judiciary Committee were not returned. A call to St. Joseph’s Catholic Church was redirected to the Bishop’s office of the Diocese in Fort Wayne, Ind.

An Ewenki reindeer guardian in China's northmost forest

By Xu Xiaoxuan

The reindeers raised by Gu Musen walk in the snow in the Greater Hinggan Mountains. [Photo courtesy of Gu Musen]

Reindeers may not always be seen in Western countries bringing Santa Clause and gifts on Christmas Eve. However, in the Greater Hinggan Mountains of China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, one can at least see reindeers scampering over the snow with tinkling bells in the dense birch forests.

The reindeer raisers are the Ewenki ethnic minority group, known as the last hunting tribe and the only reindeer herding one in China.

33-year-old Gu Musen is the youngest reindeer herder in the forest.

Gu, who now has 30 reindeers, began to raise the lovely creatures in 2014 when he came back from Beijing. "I went to the capital to make a living in 2010, but I found it hard to get used to the hustle and bustle of city life," he recalled.

Initially lacking experience, Gu once could do nothing but helplessly watch a reindeer die in front of him. Then, he consulted tribal members of the older generation and other herders about how to take care of these animals with the magnificent and beautiful antlers. Gradually, he has become a reindeer "expert" and learned a lot including prescribing medicine for sick animals.

The natural beauty and tranquil life in the mountains have gratified Gu, who thought the peace should be shared with others. Thus, he began to show his daily life on the Chinese video-sharing platform Douyin two years ago. Reindeer feeding and calving, vigorous forests, snow-capped mountains and traditional Ewenki customs etc., are all presented in the videos.

Now, Gu has attracted more than 200,000 followers on Douyin and garnered a total of over four million likes with his 140+ posts. The rising popularity of the videos has also earned Gu more customers for the velvet antlers and other reindeer products, thus increasing income for him.

In addition, the videos have drawn more people to Gu's breeding center to see the reindeers and experience Ewenki culture. "I teach the visitors to make Ewenki handicrafts and cook traditional food," he said, "I draw the reindeers and sell drawings as well. All these have boosted my average income to 10,000 to 15,000 yuan a month."

When free, Gu comes down from the mountains to his two-story house in Aoluguya township, where the local authorities constructed 88-square-meter homes each for Ewenki ecological migrants. The Ewenki people left mountains and stepped into modern life under the government's environmental protection project and permanent hunting ban starting in 2002.

A brand-new life, however, doesn't equate with traditional abandonment. About 12 families are still raising reindeers in the mountains like Gu, and the reindeer population has grown from 100 to around 1,200.

Besides, local tourism has also thrived under the government's stimulus package of 100 million yuan. By selling reindeer products, running family hotels and making fur and leather crafts, the average net income of the former hunters has soared to about 20,000 yuan a year.

"With the older generation passing away, what may also wither is Ewenki's time-honored culture. I feel great responsibility to pass on the ethnic cultural heritage."One of Gu Musen's drawings features his son nestling against a reindeer. [Photo courtesy of Gu Musen]

"My ten-month-old son has been surrounded by the reindeers since he was born. I hope he can inherit and carry forward our Ewenki's reindeer herding culture," Gu beamed.

As rivalry with Washington heats up, Beijing commemorates 'victory' in 'war to resist US aggression'


Analysis by James Griffiths, CNN
Updated  Thu October 22, 2020

Hong Kong (CNN)Seventy years ago this week, hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops began crossing into North Korea, in an intervention that would turn the tide of the conflict on the Korean Peninsula and eventually hold United Nations forces to an uneasy detente.
In China, that conflict is known as the "War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea," and is seen as a great victory, a view shared by Pyongyang, though North Korea failed to make any gains after its initial invasion of the South was rebuffed, and would likely have been defeated but for Beijing's assistance.

Anniversaries of the war have often been used as an opportunity for anti-US rhetoric in China, depending on relations with Washington: 2000 saw a large-scale commemoration, coming after the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, as anti-US feeling was widespread; while in 2010, then President Hu Jintao oversaw a far more muted 60th anniversary, amid better feeling toward Washington.

This year, Beijing has pulled out all the stops, as relations with the US plumb new depths amid the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic and increasingly aggressive rhetoric from US President Donald Trump.

On Friday, Chinese leader Xi Jinping will attend an event commemorating China's entry into the war, where he will "deliver an important speech," according to state news agency Xinhua. The ceremony caps a week of events, and jingoistic saber-rattling in Chinese state media and official propaganda.

Speaking earlier this week, Xi said the war was "a victory of justice, a victory of peace and a victory of the people" and should "inspire the Chinese people and the Chinese nation to overcome all difficulties and obstacles, and prevail over all enemies."

In a lengthy front-page commentary in the People's Liberation Army Daily, the official newspaper of China's military, the author hailed the "glorious victory" which "left the Americans with the deepest impression that what Chinese people say counts," and to respect "China's red lines."

One of those alleged red lines potentially came close to being crossed this week, as the US State Department on Wednesday approved the proposed sale of $1.8 billion in advanced weapons systems sales to Taiwan, over the vociferous objections of Beijing, which has warned Washington that such a sale could "gravely" damage US-China relations and cross-straits stability.

Taiwan has emerged as a major potential flashpoint between the US and China in recent years, as Washington has become more forceful in its approach toward Beijing and China adopted a threatening posture towards the self-ruled island, which it has vowed to seize militarily if necessary.

In an op-ed Wednesday, US National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien said that Xi's "ambitions for control are not limited to the people of China," words that he echoed in an address to the Atlantic Future Forum, an event organized by the British military, in which he accused Beijing of "seeking dominance in all domains and sectors," according to a Reuters report of the event.

Washington has been trying to rally its allies, both in Asia and elsewhere, to take a more forceful approach to China, even as the pandemic and the forthcoming US presidential election has largely distracted attention at home. This week it was announced that Australia will join the US, Japan and India in naval exercises in the Indian Ocean next month, another step in the militarization of the so-called Quad alliance between the four nations.

That comes, however, amid renewed questions about the US' perceived dominance in the Pacific. A new report by the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank with links to the government, found that Washington's military and diplomatic influence in the region has suffered as a result of the pandemic, while China's was on the rise.

"Despite its continuing pre-eminence, US standing has waned," Lowy noted in its recent Pacific Power Index. "Washington, far from being the undisputed unipolar power, can more correctly be described as the first among equals in a bipolar Indo-Pacific."

Meanwhile, the report said, "Beijing has enhanced its military capability by investing in weaponry that could threaten US and allied bases in the region."

Xi calls for promoting spirit demonstrated in War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea

Xinhua, October 23, 2020

Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday urged efforts to carry forward the great spirit demonstrated in the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea.

Xi made the remarks while addressing a meeting marking the 70th anniversary of the Chinese People's Volunteers' entering the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to fight in the war.

It is necessary to speak to invaders in the language they know: that is, a war must be fought to deter invasion, and force must be met by force, Xi said. "A victory is needed to win peace and respect."

He said the Chinese nation will never cower before threats, or be subdued by suppression.

Xi noted the need to pool the formidable national strength that unites all, regardless of how times may evolve.

He also called for fostering the valor of the nation that fears no death, and stressed the need to promote the national wisdom of keeping to the right path, making innovations, and striving to march forward.

 

China urges US to stop oppression, restrictions against Chinese media outlets

Xinhua, October 23, 2020

China on Thursday urges the United States to stop the political oppression and senseless restrictions against Chinese media outlets.

Foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian made the remarks at a press briefing in response to a U.S. decision to designate another six Chinese media outlets in the United States as "foreign missions."

In recent years, the U.S. government has imposed unwarranted restrictions on Chinese media agencies and personnel in the United States, purposely made things difficult for their normal reporting assignments, and subjected them to growing discrimination and politically-motivated oppression, Zhao said.

In December 2018, the United States demanded relevant Chinese media outlets in the United States to register as "foreign agents." On Feb. 18, 2020, the United States designated five Chinese media agencies as "foreign missions." On June 22, the United States again added four Chinese media organizations as "foreign missions," Zhao said.

On Oct. 21, the United States announced that it would designate six more Chinese media outlets as "foreign missions."

"This is its latest step of political suppression and stigmatization against Chinese media and journalists stationed in the United States. China firmly rejects and strongly condemns the U.S. senseless moves," Zhao said.

"China will make legitimate, necessary reactions. China urges the United States to immediately change course, correct mistakes, and stop the political oppression and senseless restrictions against Chinese media outlets," he said.

The U.S. moves, specifically targeting Chinese media, are based on Cold-War mindset and ideological bias, he said. "They severely undermine Chinese media's reputation and image, severely impact Chinese media's normal functioning in the United States, and severely disrupt cultural and people-to-people exchange between the two countries."

Such moves reveal the hypocrisy of the United States' self-proclaimed "freedom of the press," Zhao said.

Considering the U.S. government's wanton interference in domestic and foreign journalists' reporting, as well as their unwarranted smears and oppression against journalists, the United States itself is the perpetrator that blatantly suppresses media and restricts press freedom, he said.

"Its self-proclaimed image of a 'beacon' exists in name only," Zhao said.

A missing painting by renowned Black artist Jacob Lawrence has resurfaced after 60 years

Published 22nd October 2020

Credit: Anna-Marie Kellen/Metropolitan Museum of Art
A missing painting by renowned Black artist Jacob Lawrence has resurfaced after 60 years

Written by David Williams, CNN

Along-lost painting by famed Black American modernist Jacob Lawrence is back on public display for the first time in decades.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced on Wednesday that a visitor to the museum realized that it had been in a neighbor's collection for years and encouraged them to contact the museum.

The current owners bought the painting at a charity auction in 1960, the museum said.

The work, titled "There are combustibles in every State, which a spark might set fire to. -- Washington, 26 December 1786" depicts the Shays' Rebellion, an uprising of farmers in Massachusetts following the Revolutionary War, according to a news release.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has hired its first full-time Native American curator
It was number 16 in a series of 30 panels in Lawrence's "Struggle: From the History of the American People (1954--56)" that represent historical moments from 1775 through 1817.
Its existence was known because it was described in the 1956 brochure for the first showing of "The Struggle" series in New York at the Alan Gallery. The panels were exhibited at the gallery again in 1958 and had not been seen together as a group until earlier this year when this exhibition debuted at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, the statement said.

The Met says the locations of four other paintings from the series are still not known.
The painting was represented by an empty frame prior to the discovery, according to the statement.

Visitors wearing protective masks observe COVID-19 prevention protocols as they browse the "Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Credit: John Minchillo/AP

"It is rare to make a discovery of this significance in modern art, and it is thrilling that a local visitor is responsible," Met Director Max Hollein said in a statement.

"We are also very excited for our colleagues at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), the organizers of the exhibition that inspired this historic find. And most importantly, we are looking forward to having visitors enjoy this new addition -- in these final two weeks at The Met and at the upcoming venues of the show."

Painting returned 87 years after Nazis stole it from a Jewish family in Berlin

Lawrence, who lived from 1917 to 2000, was one of the first nationally recognized Black artists in the United States and his colorful, abstract work portrayed the experiences of African Americans, according to the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Sotheby's sold his 1947 painting "The Businessmen" for more than $6.1 million in a 2018 auction.

The series is on display until November 1, the Met said.

The painting will be included in the touring exhibition that will be presented in museums in Birmingham, Alabama; Seattle, Washington; and Washington, DC, through next fall.