Showing posts with label friction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label friction. Show all posts

Thursday, May 26, 2016

Trouble in Trump paradise as bickering among top aides leads to another "You're fired" moment.

Karen Giorno with Donald Trump.
Courtesy of Politico: 

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign on Wednesday night announced it had parted ways with its national political director, Rick Wiley — a move that appears to stem in part from an ongoing turf war atop the campaign. 

Wiley was the first high-profile hire by Paul Manafort, the veteran GOP operative who Trump brought on board in late March to help professionalize a campaign that had cruised through the GOP primary season with a skeleton staff.

But Manafort and Wiley quickly found themselves at odds with Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and key members of the team he had built. 

Sources in and around the campaign told POLITICO that Wiley was not responsive to Lewandowski or other officials from the old regime, and that he had clashed in recent weeks with Karen Giorno, a Lewandowski ally who ran Trump’s campaign during the Florida GOP primary. 

Gee another organization put together by Donald Trump is starting to crumble? Who could have predicted such a thing?

You know, besides everybody.

By the way if you think that the name Karen Giorno sounds vaguely familiar well you are probably right.

Also courtesy of Politico:

The consultant Donald Trump hired in November to lead his Florida campaign abruptly resigned from a previous post with Gov. Rick Scott’s administration after a blow up at a Disney G.O.P. fundraiser, according to former party and administration staff.

Karen Giorno, who served as Scott’s external affairs director in 2011, now has the title of southeast political director for Trump’s campaign. Scott has also endorsed Trump's campaign. 

That year, the keynote speaker at the Republican Party of Florida’s Victory Dinner was Sarah Palin. 

Giorno wanted better seating for the Palin family at the Victory Dinner, according to the sources, which led her to try and rearrange seating in the ballroom at the Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort & Spa where the event was being held.

She received complaints from RPOF staff who had made the seating charts, and was reminded the event was a political function and that she worked for Scott’s administration, an official state job. 

“She was upset about how things were working with the Palin Victory Dinner event,” said a former party employee. “She yelled at RPOF staff and got into an altercation with some fundraising folks, then was summarily told to leave the room and not come back.”

Interesting.

Kind of makes one wonder if this most recent conflict was in some way Palin related as well.

Or perhaps it is yet another weird Palin coincidence.

(H/T to Martha.)

P.S. Since this post mentions Palin I should let you guys know that the trial call for Track's case has once again been continued.

I wonder how many times they can actually do that?

Wednesday, February 06, 2013

This country is not separated Right to Left, it is separated from North to South.

Courtesy of Salon:  

Mainstream American history, from the point of view of the white majority in the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast, is a story of military successes. The British are defeated, ensuring national independence. The Confederates are defeated, ensuring national unity. And in the 20th century the Axis and Soviet empires are defeated, ensuring (it is hoped) a free world. 

The white Southern narrative — at least in the dominant Southern conservative version — is one of defeat after defeat. First the attempt of white Southerners to create a new nation in which they can be the majority was defeated by the U.S. Army during the Civil War. Doomed to be a perpetual minority in a continental American nation-state, white Southerners managed for a century to create their own state-within-a-state, in which they could collectively lord it over the other major group in the region, African-Americans. But Southern apartheid was shattered by the second defeat, the Civil Rights revolution, which like the Civil War and Reconstruction was symbolized by the dispatching of federal troops to the South. The American patriotism of the white Southerner is therefore deeply problematic. Some opt for jingoistic hyper-Americanism (the lady protesteth too much, methinks) while a shrinking but significant minority prefer the Stars and Bars to the Stars and Stripes. 

The other great national narrative holds that the U.S. is a nation of immigration, a “new nation,” a melting pot made up of immigrants from many lands. While the melting pot story involves a good deal of idealization, it is based on demographic fact in the large areas of the North where old-stock Anglo-Americans are commingled with German-Americans, Polish-Americans and Irish-Americans, along with more recent immigrant diasporas from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. 

But even before the recent wave of immigration from sources other than Europe, the melting pot never included most of the white South. From the early 19th century until the late 20th, the South attracted relatively few immigrants. Who wanted to move to a backward, rural, apartheid society dominated by an oligarchy of a few rich families? Apart from several encapsulated minorities — Cajuns in Louisiana, Germans in central Texas — most white Southerners remained descendants of colonial-era immigrants from the British Isles, chiefly English and Scots-Irish. And while Irish and German Catholics and Jews diversified the religious landscape of the North, the South was dominated by British-derived Protestant sects like the Episcopalians, Baptists and Methodists from Virginia to Oklahoma and Texas.

You know I think that this chasm between the North and South was NEVER more apparent than after the election of Barack Obama. In the North it was celebrated as this incredible step forward as a country, and the very embodiment of the progress we were making as a nation. But in the South is was seen as an aberration, and sign that something had gone terribly wrong, and the country was no longer the America that they loved so much.

I encourage you to read the entire article, it is very illuminating and portends of dangerous times ahead. Times that it would behoove us to prepare for, or find ourselves once again in the grip of a war we did not see coming.