That’s Milwaukee punk Irish stalwarts Whiskey Of The Damned, a personal favorite and currently touring the fuck out of the planet, doing something like 200 gigs a year. Their shows are sweaty, fervent, whiskey drenched and nothing but fun. Eoin, the singer, is sone of an Irish musician who decided to move to Milwaukee because it was nicknamed Brew City. Eoin plays in his Da’s band and feels like it is too slow; his Da thinks Eoin plays too loud and too fast and is damaging his listener’s brains. It is also Irish Fest this weekend….
It is always Another Day Dead at the Empire, but here in Milwaukee the Apocalypse was the course of the day as the Vulgar Talking Yam stopped in to dance on the still-smoking embers of a long-festering chancre on the social pact.
I recently saw an analysis that indicates during Turdwaffle’s tenure in public office (nearly all his life!) he has reduced public transportation into and out of Milwaukee, and within Milwaukee, to the extent that Milwaukee residents lost access to 30,000 jobs. Combine that with the Targo debacle, and is there any wonder that the black community is ready to explode? Especially combined with the abuse by the police?
Yeah, yeah, you will hear that the murdered person had a gun and ran from the police. But he hadn’t done anything wrong, and Walker’s ALEC-goons had made carrying a gun a right in almost any venue. Yeah, he had a record. But when black men will be gunned down WHILE SURRENDERING, or killed in custody, how is that even a reasonable indictment?
What you will not hear, is the massive turnout of all Milwaukeeans into the area to help clean up. Heck, a bunch of barbers set up in a park to give free haircuts. Gwen Moore has been walking white politicians and reporters through the area for days, explaining how it is a vibrant part of Milwaukee. Hell, Springsteen’s 1975 Bomb Scare Show was in the neighborhood.
So, Fucking Trump. First of all, let me say that I do not think of Trump as an anomaly. He is the pure, undiluted id of the Republican Party since the Southern Strategy made racism a permanent part of their genetic makeup. He is only surprising to Beltway Pundits who have been pretending for decades that BOTH SIDES.
So of course Hair Furor stopped by to gloat and trot out the Lawn Order speech.
While flanked by Turdwaffle and insane fake-cowboy Milwaukee County Shirriff & Just For Men Beard customer Clarke, he apparently stayed at downtown Pfizer Hotel, but traveled about an hour northwest (at least 40 miles from the areas of actual unrest) to West Bend – a community in which I’ve done work, mind you — (and which you might remember seeing on appliances, back when we actually made things here in America, before people like Trump and Romney sold them off for scrap and/or moved the jobs to third world countries with no labor laws and no environmental safeguards)…
Ahem. Anyway, so he stood up there with two Wisconsin political grandstanding assnuggets, and addressed a completely white crowd (most of which are terrified of actually going to Milwaukee) and took to whitesplaining to black people on why they should vote for him.
It was kind of astonishing in its cluelessness.
The most obvious thing is how he considers African Americans to be completely stupid. They have a very good idea who has their concerns more in mind, and are fully goddam aware that is is not the Republican Party, and even less Donald Trump.
This was a speech directed entirely at suburban white folks.
People who feel uncomfortable with the racist demagoguery on display, and are perfectly comfortable with black folks in service jobs, but feel like saying “I have a black friend” inoculates them. But are still racist as fuck, and when a black family moves int the neighborhood, are alarmed. My own damn parents are this cohort.
But it was intended to make borderline white folks feel more comfortable with TrumpVoting, because “he’s obviously not that racist, remember when he blamed the liberals for black rioting?”
Yes, he is a fucking racist, he learned it from his father. Both of them lost lawsuits for racist rental policies. He is a failure at business; his biggest success has been being able to create a pyramid scheme to keep his lifestyle afloat while his ventures fail one after the other. he hates you and me, he hates good taste, and he hates the people who build his tasteless crap because they can do something he can’t. He is insecure and self-loathing, and he directs that outward. I am coming around to the idea that his head is not so good, as his non-teleprompter shouts are increasingly deranged and disassociated from reality. Of course, as a rich fuck-snorkel, he has been disconnected from reality for his entire life.
Yeah, so no news here. But fuck I hate the fact that he came to Milwaukee (or Milwaukee-adjacent) to try to make hay over the problems we have that have been simmering for decades (and which I have documented, mostly from an architectural / urban planning aspect).
Elect Hillary. Fuck this clown. Fuck the Republican Party, who nominated this clown.
Empire Of The Senseless 
The only thing I’d take exception to is this:
“He is the pure, undiluted id of the Republican Party”
No. The Republican party doesn’t genuinely give a fuck about any of Donald’s ‘social issues’. They exist for one single reason – the upward transfer of wealth and power from the people to the 1% and the corporations they own and operate. Their problem has always been that this is not a particularly popular position among most people, so they aligned themselves with movement conservatives – originally evangelist christianists over abortion – and that led them to pretend to adopt a whole bunch of authoritarian white nationalist positions during elections. In fact, the Republican party as an entity would LOVE to do a deal on immigration, trick as many African Americans and Hispanics as possible into joining in their own destruction and win some elections. But their voters are onto them, and have been trying to find some electoral option that would forget about the fucking rich and do some fucking violence to all the people they hated. Trump, being a consumate salesman, read the room and told them what they wanted to hear. So the Republican party, blindly and stupidly believing that their voting constituency agreed with their core mission, opened up their nominating process to the point where the voters could ignore the party’s desires altogether, and when you crowdsource your important decisions, you get Boaty McBoatface.
Well, you’re ignoring the part of the Republican Party that embraced the bigots and misogynists, and the other part that enveloped the right wing evangelicals. The reality is that the GOP depends on all three of these parts to work more-or-less in harmony to create electoral success. Now, they are losing voters to Death, so they are including reliance on electoral jiggery-pokery through gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement to maintain a viable base, but that only goes so far.
I guess I was referring to the Republican party as a whole, not just the establishment part of it.
Yeah – I think they’ve really become two different components. Hence the ‘civil war’ framing. The voters were never the party – at least not since ’75. The party used the voters to gain power and then pissed on them when the election was over. The voters knew that, but where else were they gonna go? The Republican party was the only game in town. They TRIED to change the direction by primarying party stalwarts like Cantor, but the tea party legislators never were able to get control of the party. So the voters – conservatives by ideology, Republicans only because the American Fascist party wasn’t an option – finally did an end run. The party, which had forced their voters to accept the hated John McCain and the Crypto-Liberal Romney tried to do it again, giving Jeb Bush unlimited funds and access to all the resources. But Trump came along – he didn’t need any money or help at first – and the voters flipped a big middle finger at the Paul Ryan Republican Party and nominated their guy.
I see what you’re saying, but the institutional GOP consciously planned to use the bigots, racists, Christianists, Dominionists, thugs, pugs, mugs, Rapists, Papists, Nazis, Fascists, and Methodists to leverage their political power. I think they need to have those guys stapled to their scrotums. And seriously, from what I am seeing on social media, the conservatives are falling in line behind Trump like they always do. Yeah, there are a few older republicans endorsing Hillary, but they tend to be the guys who are hoping she is going to be as militaristic as the Thunderistas claim she will – a claim that has no actual basis in reality other than the vote for the AUMF.
And since the Id is the part that represents the instinctual, base drives, I think Trump is as near a perfect distillation of those constituencies as I ever want to see….and conveniently also represents the billionaire squeezebags….
“from what I am seeing on social media, the conservatives are falling in line behind Trump”
That’s exactly what I’m saying. Conservative does not equal Republican party. The few that are loudly leaving the party or promising to vote for Clinton are old Republicans, not hardcore movement conservatives. The Conservative Movement created Trump – the Republicans, as I discussed, wanted to inflict Jeb Bush on their voters…
Yeah, but it does, nowadays. The people who identify as conservative are forming in line to vote Republican.
Yeah. And while I think it’s interesting to explore the Rise of Trumpism and its ultimate hostile takeover of the Republican Party, you’re right that in the end one is preferable to the other like terminal pancreatic cancer is preferable to a sucking chest wound. But just like the Sanders campaign, I can’t help but be fascinated by the narrative, and the way the voters lined up behind their own vision/dream/fantasy rather than that of the party. The Democratic party as a political organization was smart enough to retain some measure of control to make sure they didn’t end up with Boaty McBoatface, but the fractures between the people and the political organizations that claim to represent them are becoming too large to be sustainable.
Both Sanders and Trump made ridiculous promises their voting constitutencies desperately wanted to believe, but that anybody with any sense at all knew were utterly impossible. Sanders wasn’t going to break up the banks or create a single payer health care system. And Trump isn’t going to build a wall or deport 11 million immigrants or quit NATO. The fact that this kind of fantasy/you get a pony kind of campaign has the kind of success in 2016 that we have seen should worry us deeply about the kind of Presidential campaign we’re going to see starting in about two and a half years…
No. I think Sanders made unrealistic promises within the realm of actual political achievement. Trump is promising to blow everything up in favor of being the singular person who can fire anyone who troubles him
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Meh – make the distinction if you want, but it’s a distinction without a difference. Both took advantage of naive constituencies by promising them things they wanted that neither had even a 1% chance of delivering…