January 27, 2024

Saturday, January 27, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

To read an article excerpted in this Roundup, click on its blue title. Each “blue” article is hyperlinked so you can read the whole article.

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Joe is always busy.

The President speaks about the Border and the misconduct of the Republicans in the House, kowtowing to Donald Trust.

Even some Republicans are disgusted.

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Kamala is always busy.

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Was it impossible to miss this? 👇

Donald Trump ordered to pay $83.3 million

to E. Jean Carroll for defaming her.

A New York jury on Friday ordered former President Donald Trump to pay a total of $83.3 million to E. Jean Carroll for ruining her credibility as an advice columnist when he called her a liar after she accused him of sexual assault.

The jury awarded Carroll $65 million in punitive damages, $11 million for the damage to her reputation and another $7.3 million. Trump is almost certain to appeal the verdict.

Despite the size of the penalty, the verdict was not unexpected. Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled even before the trial that Trump had in fact defamed Carroll. The jury only had to decide how much Trump owed her — not if he was liable. This is the second time Trump has been ordered pay Carroll; last year he was mandated by a jury to pay $5 million for a separate instance of defamation. (NPR).

2 things the Judge advised the jury.

Last night’s statement from E. Jean Carroll.

E. Jean Carroll will be interviewed live on The Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC at 9 PM ET on Monday.

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New York’s American Museum of Natural History makes an important change.

This news 👇 made me cry. I am so proud of our President. I feel, under Biden-Harris, despite so much that is wrong, America is becoming a better nation.

Leading Museums Remove Native Displays Amid New Federal Rules.

The American Museum of Natural History is closing two major halls as museums around the nation respond to updated policies from the Biden administration.

The American Museum of Natural History will close two major halls exhibiting Native American objects, its leaders said on Friday, in a dramatic response to new federal regulations that require museums to obtain consent from tribes before displaying or performing research on cultural items.

“The halls we are closing are artifacts of an era when museums such as ours did not respect the values, perspectives and indeed shared humanity of Indigenous peoples,” Sean Decatur, the museum’s president, wrote in a letter to the museum’s staff on Friday morning. “Actions that may feel sudden to some may seem long overdue to others.”

The museum is closing galleries dedicated to the Eastern Woodlands and the Great Plains this weekend, and covering a number of other display cases featuring Native American cultural items as it goes through its enormous collection to make sure it is in compliance with the new federal rules, which took effect this month.

Museums around the country have been covering up displays as curators scramble to determine whether they can be shown under the new regulations. The Field Museum in Chicago covered some display cases, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University said it would remove all funerary belongings from exhibition and the Cleveland Museum of Art has covered up some cases. And the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York said Friday evening that it had removed roughly 20 items from its musical instruments galleries.

But the action by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which draws 4.5 million visitors a year, making it one of the most visited museums in the world, sends a powerful message to the field. The museum’s anthropology department is one of the oldest and most prestigious in the United States, known for doing pioneering work under a long line of curators including Franz Boas and Margaret Mead. The closures will leave nearly 10,000 square feet of exhibition space off-limits to visitors; the museum said it could not provide an exact timeline for when the reconsidered exhibits would reopen.

“Some objects may never come back on display as a result of the consultation process,” Decatur said in an interview. “But we are looking to create smaller-scale programs throughout the museum that can explain what kind of process is underway.”

The changes are the result of a concerted effort by the Biden administration to speed up the repatriation of Native American remains, funerary objects and other sacred items. The process started in 1990 with the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, which established protocols for museums and other institutions to return human remains, funerary objects and other holdings to tribes. But as those efforts have dragged on for decades, the law was criticized by tribal representatives as being too slow and too susceptible to institutional resistance.

This month, new federal regulations went into effect that were designed to hasten returns, giving institutions five years to prepare all human remains and related funerary objects for repatriation and giving more authority to tribes throughout the process.

“We’re finally being heard — and it’s not a fight, it’s a conversation,” said Myra Masiel-Zamora, an archaeologist and curator with the Pechanga Band of Indians.

Even in the two weeks since the new regulations took effect, she said, she has felt the tenor of talks shift. In the past, institutions often viewed Native oral histories as less persuasive than academic studies when determining which modern-day tribes to repatriate objects to, she said. But the new regulations require institutions to “defer to the Native American traditional knowledge of lineal descendants, Indian Tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations.”

“We can say, ‘This needs to come home,’ and I’m hoping there will not be pushback,” Masiel-Zamora said.

Museum leaders have been preparing for the new regulations for months, consulting lawyers and curators and holding lengthy meetings to discuss what might need to be covered up or removed. Many institutions are planning to hire staff to comply with the new rules, which can involve extensive consultations with tribal representatives.

The result has been a major shift in practices when it comes to Native American exhibitions at some of the country’s leading museums — one that will be noticeable to visitors.

At the American Museum of Natural History, segments of the collection once used to teach students about the Iroquois, Mohegans, Cheyenne, Arapaho and other groups will be temporarily inaccessible. That includes large objects, like the birchbark canoe of Menominee origin in the Hall of Eastern Woodlands, and smaller ones, including darts that date as far back as 10,000 B.C. and a Hopi Katsina doll from what is now Arizona. Field trips for students to the Hall of Eastern Woodlands are being rethought now that they will not have access to those galleries.

“What might seem out of alignment for some people is because of a notion that museums affix in amber descriptions of the world,” Decatur said. “But museums are at their best when they reflect changing ideas.”

Exhibiting Native American human remains is generally prohibited at museums, so the collections being reassessed include sacred objects, burial belongings and other items of cultural patrimony. As the new regulations have been discussed and debated over the past year or so, some professional organizations, such as the Society for American Archaeology, have expressed concern that the rules were reaching too far into museums’ collection management practices. But since the regulations went into effect on Jan. 12, there has been little public pushback from museums.

Much of the holdings of human remains and Native cultural items were collected through practices that are now considered antiquated and even odious, including through donations by grave robbers and archaeological digs that cleared out Indigenous burial grounds.

“This is human rights work, and we need to think about it as that and not as science,” said Candace Sall, the director of the museum of anthropology at the University of Missouri, which is still working to repatriate the remains of more than 2,400 Native American individuals. Sall said she added five staff members to work on repatriation in anticipation of the regulations and hopes to add more.

Criticism of the pace of repatriation had put institutions such as the American Museum of Natural History under public pressure. In more than 30 years, the museum has repatriated the remains of approximately 1,000 individuals to tribal groups; it still holds the remains of about 2,200 Native Americans and thousands of funerary objects. (Last year, the museum said it would overhaul practices that extended to its larger collection of some 12,000 skeletons by removing human bones from public display and improving the storage facilities where they are kept.)

A top priority of the new regulations, which are administered by the Interior Department, is to finish the work of repatriating the Native human remains in institutional holdings, which amount to more than 96,000 individuals, according to federal data published in the fall.

The government has given institutions a deadline, giving them until 2029 to prepare human remains and their burial belongings for repatriation.

In many cases, human remains and cultural objects have little information attached to them, which has slowed repatriation in the past, especially for institutions that have sought exacting anthropological and ethnographic evidence of links to a modern Native group.

Now the government is urging institutions to push forward with the information they have, in some cases relying solely on geographical information — such as what county the remains were discovered in.

There have been concerns among some tribal officials that the new rules will result in a deluge of requests from museums that may be beyond their capacities and could create a financial burden.

Speaking in June to a committee that reviews the implementation of the law, Scott Willard, who works on repatriation issues for the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, expressed concern that the rhetoric regarding the new regulations sometimes made it sound as if Native ancestors were “throwaway items.”

“This garage sale mentality of ‘give it all away right now’ is very offensive to us,” Willard said.

The officials who drew up the new regulations have said that institutions can get extensions to their deadlines as long as the tribes that they are consulting with agree, emphasizing the need to hold institutions accountable without overburdening tribes. If museums are found to have violated the regulations, they could be subject to fines.

Bryan Newland, the assistant secretary for Indian Affairs and a former tribal president of the Bay Mills Indian Community, said the rules were drawn up in consultation with tribal representatives, who wanted their ancestors to recover dignity in death.

“Repatriation isn’t just a rule on paper,” Newland said, “but it brings real meaningful healing and closure to people.” (New York Times).

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CULT! CULT! CULT! CULT!

A must read if you want to understand what it means to be in a cult in general and in the Trump cult in specific.

It's a cult

LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV

Do you remember at the Republican National Convention in 2020, they didn’t bother with a platform?  It had never happened before in either major political party.  Platforms are one of those things political parties do.  It is a quadrennial statement of what the party stands for, what policies they want to implement, what sort of foreign policy they’ll pursue, what they think are the problems for which they have the best solutions.

Not in 2020.  What the Republican Party did at its convention was point at Donald Trump and say, we’re for whatever he’s for.  We believe in whatever he believes in.  We stand for whatever he stands for.  

One of the things that made the Republican Party’s capitulation to Trump so remarkable was the fact that it was done by party professionals, people who had spent their lives working their way up through Republican ranks until finally they got appointed to the “Platform Committee,” traditionally one of the real plums of party politics, the select few who got to set the agenda for the party for the next four years.

Now, after the vote in Iowa, I think we can see that it’s not just the party pros who have given up their lives and their membership in the Republican Party to become Trump’s true believers, it’s his voters.  Not all Republican voters, but Trump’s voters, the ones who turned out in the freezing cold for the caucuses and gave their votes to the man Republicans may as well start calling Dear Leader.

It's not about them, the voters.  It’s not about issues.  It’s not about policies.  It’s about him.

It’s always about the “him” in a cult.  Nothing else matters.  Whatever he says, they listen.  Whatever he tells them to believe, they believe.  Whatever he says is true, they accept. 

Trump stood up at a rally on January 8 in Sioux City, Iowa, and told a crowd that countries all over the world are sending military-age young men across the southern border of this country in some kind of imagined invasion to…what? Buy guns and kill people in the street?  Rape women?  Steal babies?  Like a good cult leader, all he had to do was deliver the setup and leave the rest to their imaginations.  Listen to how he introduced his remarks to his adoring followers in Sioux City:

(Pointing to a young man in the crowd) “They happen to be about the age of this gentleman right here, around 24, perfect age, in his early 20s. Just perfect for the military, isn’t it, huh? 27,000 people from China. All males, all between 20 and 25. Perfect for the military. I wonder what that’s all about. So, it’s a pretty scary thing. We have them coming in from Russia, the same thing. They all seem to be between 19 and 24 or 25. I wonder why that is. We’re going to be paying a price, but we’ll take care of it. If we get in, we’re going to be taking care of it. We’re going to have no choice but to take care of it. We’re not going to have a country.”

What the hell was that about?  We’ll never know, because we’ve reached a point in our politics where what goes on inside the Trump movement stays in the Trump movement.  I decided I would read one of his rally speeches just to see what he told his believers in Iowa that garnered him 51 percent of the Republican vote.  I discovered that he’s been out there at his rallies saying all manner of things, nearly every one of them lies, and he does it at great length.  His speech that night took an hour and 46 minutes to deliver.  He was on his feet the entire time.  You can say a lot about Donald Trump, but you can’t say he’s not indefatigable. 

Because we should all know what he’s doing out there at his rallies – and he’s holding them day after day after day -- here are a few of the morsels he threw out to his believers in Sioux City:

“Now they are persecuting Catholics in particular. I don’t know what’s going on with the Catholics. You guys are Catholic. What’s going on with Catholics? Why are they doing this with Catholics? Something’s happening. But they’re doing it with Christians, and they’re doing it with parents, and they’re doing it with a lot of people. And you explain that one, ‘Let’s go and get the parents at the school board meetings,’ right? It’s ridiculous.”

(Doesn’t get a bib rise, turns quickly to the subject of Biden)

“What he’s done to this country is unthinkable. Biden’s record is an unbroken streak of weakness, incompetence, corruption, and failure. Other than that, he’s doing quite well, isn’t he? Don’t you? That’s a hell of a list. That’s a hell of a list, right? That’s why crooked Joe is staging his pathetic, fear-mongering campaign event in Pennsylvania today. Did you see him? He was stuttering through the whole thing. He’s going, ‘He’s a threat to democracy. I’m a… They’ve weaponized government.’”

(Crowd interrupts with extended cheers)

“Wow. Couldn’t read the word, ‘He’s a threat to democracy.’ You know how bad the press is? You know what they do? They take me saying that like that, and they say, ‘Trump couldn’t say the word democracy. Look.’”

(More cheers)

“They had me, the other day I was imitating Biden because he can’t walk offstage, right? No, he can never find the exit. So, they had me turning around and looking for… He can never find… I mean, these stages have a lot of stairs on them. Some of them are four or five stairs, and he did. He had so many stairs, he couldn’t find it, and they showed me that I couldn’t find the way off the stage. In other words, they said, ‘He couldn’t find the way off the stage,’ and it’s just terrible. They’re so bad.”

(Points at media enclosure at back of venue)

“You guys are so dishonest. You’re so pathetic.”

(Cheers from delighted crowd)

“I mean, we won twice, and we’re going to win a third time. We’re going to win by more. Now they say we’re going to win by more in terms of November. We’re going to win by more than we did even the first two times that we won nicely. We won very nice. Look, I did get you $28 billion dollars, in all fairness, right? Who the hell else would get you $28 billion from China? The farmers of America.”

(Cheers)

(Turns to immigration and the border) “Last month, they set a record, hundreds of thousands of people, bigger than practically any city in your great state, I think bigger just about than any city came in just last month. They pretend like it’s under control. It’s not under control. It’s totally out of control.  Part of the reason they want them to come in is, in my opinion, because look, they’re not stupid. Anybody that can cheat on an election like that is not stupid because they’re professionals at cheating. But anybody that can cheat like that, they’re not stupid people. So, there’s two things and then a third. Number one, they’re stupid. Number two, they hate our country. And number three, they want those people to vote. And that’s a bad one. That’s the one that scares us most.  I’m telling you, they’re signing people. That’s what they’re doing. I believe now that that’s why they’re allowing these people to come in. People that don’t speak our language, they’re signing them up to vote. I believe that’s why you’re having millions of people pour into our country, and it could very well affect the next election. I believe that’s why they’re doing it because they know what they’re doing.”

Folks, he said that at the 36-minute mark.  He went on for another hour and 10 minutes, the crowd cheering every lie, every exaggeration, every appeal to racism and xenophobia and religious bigotry.  He was interrupted again and again by cheers and “We love Trump!  We love Trump!”

Close to the end, with maybe 20 minutes to go, here’s the way he begins wrapping it up: “I will end Biden’s inflation nightmare, save our nation from debt and economic despair, and we will, right from day one, we’re going to drill, drill, drill, drill, baby drill. An oilman told me, and he’s a great guy, a very successful guy, they say he looks at a piece of land, he takes a straw. Now it has to be a paper straw, so maybe it doesn’t work. The paper straws come wrapped in cellophane, do you ever see this? I mean, what’s going on? You got paper straws, they’re wrapped in cellophane. This country’s gone wild. But this man, he’s such a great oilman, a really amazing guy. He takes a straw and he puts it into the ground and oil comes out. The big companies go out, they spend billions looking for oil. This guy looks just like this, just a straw, and the oil comes out.”

Donald Trump, very successful guy, really amazing guy, he doesn’t make any sense, he doesn’t believe in anything beyond the end of his own nose, he tells lies the way other people breathe, he takes a cellophane wrapped paper straw, and he sticks it in his supporters’ ears, and cheers come out, “We love Trump!  We love Trump!”

He is the leader of a cult.  This election is about how many there are of them, and how many there are of us, and who will turn out and vote. 

(Substack - Truscott, the great, great, great, great, great, great grandson of Thomas Jefferson and a descendant of a distinguished military family, is a best selling novelist as well as a journalist).

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On Monday, if you need something wonderful to do…

https://www.youtube.com/RwigR1l7AM4?si=ZnG_GEY0L3jnknuV

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