Texas Democrats desperately want Rep. Joaquín Castro to run for governor next year — and they’re frustrated by what they see as his twin brother’s presidential ambitions getting in the way.

The congressman’s decision as to whether to run against Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is caught up in the Castro brothers’ unique mix of their deep personal connection and parallel political ambitions. Joaquín Castro is being hounded by Democrats to get in but is torn, according to people who’ve spoken with him, over whether to take on a popular incumbent with $40 million in the bank.

That’s where his identical twin brother, Julián Castro, comes in. The former Housing and Urban Development secretary and 2012 Democratic convention speaker recently launched a PAC and is spending the fall writing an autobiographical, campaign-style book, and has made his interest in 2020 clear.

The brothers serve as each other’s top strategists, and they’ve agreed that Julián’s next political move takes primacy for now. One worry is that a Joaquín loss for governor — it would be an uphill battle, at best, against Abbott — would make the Castros look like losers. The other is that if Joaquin happened to pull off an upset, it would distract attention from Julián, potentially complicating his path to the White House.

‘Using my white privilege for the right reasons’: Florida woman justifies brutal beatdown of racist woman

“This is a young country built on racism,” Dagg wrote. “Black people have been disenfranchised for over 250 years. The faster white people accept and validate the truth, the closer we’ll come to a place of peace and understanding.

“Fighting racism is dependent on me using my white privilege for the right reasons,” she added

The location of the storm and these facilities offers almost unlimited opportunities for spills from small to monstrous as pipelines and storage tanks could be ruptured or even torn from their foundations. Meaning that what’s starting as a disaster for Texas, could end up being an ecological disaster for the entire Gulf region.

The concentration of oil and gas facilities in the region also means that Harvey could have a major effect on what happens at your local gas pump, and possibly what happens for the US economy as a whole.

On the ecological front, the risks from Harvey could go well beyond oil spills. From Emily Atkin at New Republic …

Environmental advocates are also worried that Harvey will create long-term public health problems due to accidental toxic substance releases, and not just from refineries and power plants. In the 30 counties where a disaster has been declared, there are dozens of Superfund sites, many of which are essentially waste pits containing harmful chemicals. The San Jacinto River Waste Pits, for example, contain carcinogenic dioxins, which are linked to birth defects. Advocates also rightly point out that communities living closest to all these sites—both the Superfunds and the refineries—are disproportionately low-income and minority. “This is an environmental justice issue,” Enck said.

Breitbart published a story on Monday accusing National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster of not briefing President Trump on a Naval collision near Singapore, raising new speculation that the conservative site is going opponents of Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist who has now returned to the website.

The report said McMaster, along with his Chief of Staff Ret. Gen. John Kelly had originally "kept the president in the dark on the incident" involving the USS McCain, which it says caused the president to respond "that's too bad," when asked about the matter.

Trump's initial, curt response raised eyebrows and received criticism, however the president later issued more detailed remarks on Twitter.

The report marks the second time in less than a day that the publication has taken aim at McMaster.

On the morning he was being ousted as Donald Trump’s chief strategist last Friday, Steve Bannon had already turned the page. “Why do you sound unfazed?” a friend asked Bannon as news of his demise ricocheted across the web. “Because,” Bannon replied, “we’re going to war.” Hours later, Bannon was calling into the editorial meeting at Breitbart News, rallying his troops to continue the battles he waged inside the White House. “We have a duty to the country to be the vanguard of ‘The Movement,’” he told his staff, according to one person on the call. Bannon’s main targets are the West Wing’s coterie of New York Democrat “globalists”—Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner and former Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn—as well as the “hawks,” comprised of National Security Adviser H.R McMaster and his deputy, Dina Powell. “He wants to beat their ideas into submission,” Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow told me. “Steve has a lot of things up his sleeve.”

The chaotic, war-torn West Wing of the past six months will be prologue, but the coming struggles will be as personal as they are ideological, waged not with leaks but with slashing Breitbart banners. On Sunday, Breitbart took renewed aim at McMaster, with a headline claiming he advocated “Quran Kissing.” But most of all, there’s a deep animosity between Bannon and Kushner, amplified by a lack of respect. Bannon finds Kushner’s political instincts highly questionable. “He said Jared is a dope,” one Bannon ally recalled. The two clashed fiercely on personnel decisions and policy debates, both domestic and international, many of which Bannon lost. But Bannon, who was the only West Wing advisor to publicly support the president’s response to the violence in Charlottesville, is especially galled at being scapegoated as an anti-Semite in its wake. “It’s one of the attacks he takes most personally because it’s not true,” a Breitbart staffer told me. Bannon’s allies lay out a more complicated backstory. Bannon, they say, lobbied Trump aggressively to move America’s embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but was blocked by Kushner. And, according to three Bannon allies, Bannon pushed a tougher line against the Palestinians than Kushner did. In May, when Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas visited the White House, Bannon stayed home. “I’m not going to breathe the same air as that terrorist,” Bannon texted a friend.

In the final weeks, Bannon was relentlessly tarred as a prime West Wing leaker, but Bannon’s allies make a similar case about Kushner. Specifically, they believe that Kushner cultivated a relationship with Matt Drudge, who frequently pushed anti-Bannon headlines—“The Total Eclipse of Steve Bannon”; “Bannon ‘Is the Real President”—in the weeks leading up to Trump’s decision to defenestrate him. Bannon also told friends that he believed Kushner encouraged Fox News chairman Rupert Murdoch to lobby Trump to fire him. Last week, The New York Times reported that Murdoch told Trump over a private dinner with Kushner that Trump needed to jettison his chief strategist. The Bannon camp believes that Murdoch was especially receptive to Kushner’s lobbying because Murdoch is worried about the rise of Sinclair Broadcasting as a competitor to Fox, and blames Bannon for Trump’s decision so far not to block the Sinclair’s $3.9 billion takeover of Tribune Media in May.

Meanwhile, the next phase has already begun. On Sunday, the website’s lead story was based on a Daily Mail report that said Ivanka was behind Bannon’s removal. “Trump’s daughter Ivanka pushed out Bannon because of his ‘far-right views’ clashing with her Jewish faith,” the article noted. Another piece was headlined: “6 TIMES JAVANKA’S DISPLEASURE WITH POTUS LEAKED TO PRESS.” In his feud with Kushner, Bannon may have a powerful ally: Reince Priebus, also recently departed from the White House with a quiver of grudges. Recently, according to several sources, Bannon has told friends he wants Priebus to give his account of the James Comey firing to special prosecutor Robert Mueller. According to a source close to Priebus, the former chief of staff believes that the decision was made during an early May weekend in Bedminster, where Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and Stephen Miller were with the president. Trump returned to the Oval Office on Monday, May 8 and told other aides he intended to fire Comey.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/08/steve-bannon-readies-his-revenge

The “national flag of Kekistan” mimics a German Nazi war flag, with the Kek logo replacing the swastika and the green replacing the infamous German red. A 4chan logo is emblazoned in the upper left hand corner. Alt-righters are particularly fond of the way the banner trolls liberals who recognize its origins

Who are the antifa?

Years before the alt-right even had a name, antifascists were spending thankless hours scouring seedy message boards and researching clandestine neo-Nazi gatherings. They were tracking those who planted the seeds of the death that we all witnessed in Charlottesville. Agree or disagree with their methods, the antifa, who devote themselves to combating racism, are in no way equivalent to alt-right trolls who joke about gas chambers. Behind the masks, antifa are nurses, teachers, neighbors, and relatives of all races and genders who do not hesitate to put themselves on the line to shut down fascism by any means necessary.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/08/16/who-are-the-antifa/?tid=ss_fb&utm_term=.de72538e936