Monday Reads
Posted: January 9, 2017 Filed under: 2016 elections, Afternoon Reads 26 Comments
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Steve Sack / Minneapolis Star Tribune
Good Morning!
I’m going to try to put up some interesting links prior to the “you’ll never guess what the Corrupt Russian Puppet is doing now” stories. Believe me, ethics in Washington DC are headed for an all time nadir and that’s saying a lot.
One of the giant sequoias that has graced postcards and family photos for well over a century has fallen. Pioneer Cabin Tree–known for being a “drive through”–likely fell when record levels of rain flooded the area.
It’s not clear why the tree fell, but probably had to do with the giant sequoia’s shallow root system — the roots only go about two or four feet deep — and the fact that the trail around the tree was flooded due to rain.
“When I went out there (Sunday afternoon), the trail was literally a river, the trail is washed out,” Allday said. “I could see the tree on the ground, it looked like it was laying in a pond or lake with a river running through it.”
The tree had been among the most popular features of the state park since the late 1800s. The tunnel had graffiti dating to the 1800s, when visitors were encouraged to etch their names into the bark.
Joan Allday, wife of Jim Allday and also a volunteer at the park, said the tree had been weakening and leaning severely to one side for several years.
“It was barely alive, there was one branch alive at the top,” she said. “But it was very brittle and starting to lift.”
Yosemite has flooded and three have been killed.
Meryl Streep stormed the Golden Globes with a political speech that has now become a T-Rump twitter obsession.
Meryl Streep received the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes on Sunday night, and she slammed Donald Trump’s “performance” in her acceptance speech.
“Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners, and if you kick us all out, you’ll have nothing to watch except for football and mixed martial arts, which are not arts,” she said tearfully and with a faint voice upon accepting the career-spanning honor.
She echoed Hugh Laurie’s comment about how the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is part of “the most vilified segments in American society right now” — Hollywood, foreigners and the press. “But who are we, and what is Hollywood anyway? It’s just a bunch of people from other places,” she explained, outlining her New Jersey upbringing, plus the non-Los Angeles backgrounds of Sarah Paulson, Sarah Jessica Parker, Amy Adams, Natalie Portman, Ruth Negga, Viola Davis, Dev Patel and Ryan Reynolds. She asked sarcastically, “Where are their birth certificates?”
Streep then noted that one “performance” stood out this year: that of Donald Trump when he publicly mockedThe New York Times‘ Serge Kovaleski, a disabled reporter. “There was nothing good about it, but it did its job,” she said. “It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out my head because it wasn’t in a movie; it was in real life. That instinct to humiliate when it’s modeled by someone in a public platform, it filters down into everyone’s life because it gives permission for others to do the same.”
Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence,” she continued. “When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.”
After stressing the importance for the press to stand up to Trump — “We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call them on the carpet for every outrage … We’re going to need them going forward and they’re going to need us to safeguard the truth,” she said of journalists — Streep concluded her speech by quoting Carrie Fisher: “As my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia, said to me once, ‘Take your broken heart, make it into art.’ “
Adam Zyglis / Buffalo News
White House Mommy has taken to the air waves to once again whine “Leave him alone! Leave Twitler alone!!!” As for Twitler, Streep hit all the right little buttons.
Here’s an interesting bit of information on Margaret Wise Brown who wrote “Goodnight Moon”.
When she graduated from college, Brown worked at the Greenwich Village progressive Bank Street Cooperative School, which sought a more child-centric approach to teaching. Here, Brown discovered her gift for engaging children under the age of 5 with her prose. She contributed to the school’s textbooks and published stories under the school’s literary arm. Soon after she sold her first manuscript to a major publisher.
The ideas came quickly. “The Runaway Bunny,” for example, popped in Brown’s head while she was skiing — she wrote the whole story, start to finish, on her ski receipt. Perhaps because it all came so easily, she spent her money with an almost pathological frivolity. She bought the entire contents of a flower cart with her first advance check and sold full rights to a story to buy a gray fox coat.
Despite her growing success, she harbored a deep insecurity about her career and wished to write “real” literature.
“I hope to write something serious one day as soon as I have something to say. But I am stuck in my childhood, and that raises the devil when one wants to move on,” she said.
And like many of the great children’s authors (Roald Dahl and Maurice Sendak come to mind), she had a conflicted relationship with her young fans. She told a Life reporter in 1946, “I don’t especially like children . . . At least not as a group. I won’t let anybody get away with anything just because he’s little.”
Brown never married or had children and didn’t seem to bemoan that fact. In a letter to her college alumni newspaper in 1945, she wrote derisively: “How many children have you? I have 50 books.”
Politico has an indepth story on a man with much experience with Nuclear Arms threats. Former Defense Secretary Bill Perry believes were more at risk today than ever before.
“I finally thought by the end of the ‘80s we lived through this horrible experience and it’s behind us,” Perry said. “When I was secretary, I fully believed it was behind us.”
After leaving the Pentagon, he accepted an assignment from Clinton to negotiate an end to North Korea’s nuclear development program—and seemed agonizingly close to a breakthrough as the last days of the president’s term expired.
Now, he sees his grandchildren inheriting a planet possibly more dangerous than it was during his public career. No one could doubt that the Sept. 11 terrorists would have gladly used nuclear bombs instead of airplanes if they had had them, and it seems only a matter of time until they try. Instead of a retreating threat in North Korea, that fanatical regime now possesses as many as eight nuclear bombs, and is just one member of a growing nuclear club. Far from a new partnership with Russia, Vladimir Putin has given old antagonisms a malevolent new face. American policymakers talk of spending up to $1 trillion to modernize the nuclear arsenal. And now comes Donald Trump with a long trail of statements effectively shrugging his shoulders about a world newly bristling with bombs and people with reasons to use them.
Jeffrey Frank asks “WHAT IF A PRESIDENT LOSES CONTROL?” while writing for the New Yorker.
There’s no need to dwell on the particular character of Trump, who will be sworn in on January 20th. But it is worth examining what remedies exist if any President is too careless, inattentive, or impulsive to deal sensibly with questions affecting the nation’s survival. What could be done if a President behaves in a way that directly threatens to turn the planet into radioactive dust? And who could do it? Or, to rephrase that for a super-partisan era, who would be brave enough even to cross party lines, if taking that step were required to stop someone who, acting on a whim or in a tantrum, seemed ready to start a nuclear war? It might not take much to arrive in such a scenario; after all, it didn’t take much, recently, for Pakistan’s defense minister, reacting to a loony fake-news dispatch, to threaten nuclear retaliation against Israel.
The Constitution does provide certain remedies, foremost among them being impeachment, though that requires a high crime or misdemeanor, a House bill, a Senate trial. But there is another path, also complicated, and possibly impractical. President Obama, the other day, addressed some of the charming creakiness that the Founders left for their descendants, such as the compromise that gives equal senatorial representation to California, with thirty-eight million people, and to Wyoming, with little more than a half-million. That disproportionate inheritance is not likely to be changed, just as the Electoral College is unlikely to be changed—at least not any time soon; the Founders made it difficult to tamper with their extraordinarily durable, imperfect document.
But what if it were a matter of imminent peril, having to do with Presidential instability, or even insanity?
and on to the latest ethics “fracas” where the Republicans and T-Rump have decided that no one needs to be vetted.
We don’t need no stinking ethics!!
Donald Trump’s Cabinet parade marches to the Capitol this week, as Republican leaders are vowing to plow ahead with a slew of confirmation hearings despite a sharp warning from the government’s top ethics watchdog.
Nine of Trump’s Cabinet picks are slated to come before Senate committees for vetting at 10 hearings (Attorney general pick Jeff Sessions is expected to face questions over two days): two on Tuesday, five on Wednesday and three more on Thursday. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is encountering resistance not only from Democrats but the chief of the nonpartisan Office of Government Ethics, who said over the weekend that some of Trump’s nominees have yet to complete required financial disclosures and ethics documentation.
I’ve never been so disoriented before in my life. It feels like were living through a junta that just overthrew our democracy. How can our institutions withstand this? How can our planet withstand this?
China has just issued a threat to us.
“If Trump reneges on the one-China policy after taking office, the Chinese people will demand the government to take revenge. There is no room for bargaining,” said the Global Times.
Here’s a tidy summary of this week in Destroy US Democracy.
1. Trump fires all Ambassadors and Special Envoys, ordering them out by inauguration day.
2. House brings back the Holman rule allowing them to reduce an individual civil service, SES positions, or political appointee’s salary to $1, effectively firing them by amendment to any piece of legislation. We now know why they wanted names and positions of people in Energy and State.
3. Senate schedules 6 simultaneous hearings on cabinet nominees and triple-books those hearings with Trump’s first press conference in months and an ACA budget vote, effectively preventing any concentrated coverage or protest.
4. House GOP expressly forbids the Congressional Budget Office from reporting or tracking ANY costs related to the repeal of the ACA.
5. Trump continues to throw the intelligence community under the bus to protect Putin, despite the growing mountain of evidence that the Russians deliberately interfered in our election.
6. Trump breaks a central campaign promise to make Mexico pay for the wall by asking Congress (in other words, us, the taxpayers) to pay for it.
7. Trump threatens Toyota over a new plant that was never coming to the US nor will take jobs out of the US.
8. House passes the REINS act, giving them veto power over any rules enacted by any federal agency or department–for example, FDA or EPA bans a drug or pesticide, Congress can overrule based on lobbyists not science. Don’t like that endangered species designation, Congress kills it.
We’re so fucked.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Monday Reads: The United States of Thugs (Russian installed and otherwise)
Posted: January 2, 2017 Filed under: Afternoon Reads 16 Commentsbonne année!!
Well, it’s 2017 and I can tell you that you’re best getting your research and journalism from Twitter these days by following the right people. People responsible for actual research are taking to Twitter like it’s their only hope. It’s one of the few places where you can really see the in-depth dig into Trump’s Russian mob connections which should make the Thug Elect impeachable from the moment he takes the oath of office.
So Adam Khan’s feed is a must read and follow.
https://twitter.com/Khanoisseur/status/816005216298377216
The other is Selim Sazak.
https://twitter.com/scsazak/status/815034945714397184
Sazik did op research for three “clients” last year on Trump and his Russian Thug connections. He’s a PhD candidate and you have to work around the Tweets in Turkish although I had a friend translate a bunch of them last night for me while we we’re catching up over drinks at J&J’s. My friend’s also a professor in Middle Eastern Studies from here but teaching in Maryland. They’re kind of interesting and I’m assuming Google can translate them for me too.
A lot of what he’s found has been out there but not in what we’d call mainstream media. BB has covered some of this before, but it’s worth looking at these two researchers Twitter Story Boards as well as some of the original research from places like Foreign Policy. This is a 2014 article introducing us to the Corleones of the Caspian who are business associates of Trump as outlined by Sazak, Khan, and Financial Times (be sure to follow this link https://ig.ft.com/sites/trumps-russian-connections/ or google Trumps Russian connections.) among other reputable sources. If you really want some fascinating reads, start with those two folks and read their links and go straight down the Rabbit hole to the Russian Mafia that will soon hold the lease on the White House.
Here’s a good long thread to help you get a start:
https://twitter.com/Khanoisseur/status/813850552467476480
It includes links to magazines–this one is MOJO–and some side notes. The MOJO article that always intrigued me most is still where they write about a “veteran spy” who insists that the Russians have been grooming Trumpf for a long time.
Meanwhile, as the Russian version of the Sopranos awaits us on January 20th, Paul Krugman says we’re on our way to becoming Trumpistan and I think he’s right.
Meanwhile, with only a couple of weeks until Inauguration Day, Donald Trump has done nothing substantive to reduce the unprecedented — or, as he famously wrote on Twitter, “unpresidented” — conflicts of interest created by his business empire. Pretty clearly, he never will — in fact, he’s already in effect using political office to enrich himself, with some of the most blatant examples involving foreign governments steering business to Trump hotels.
This means that Mr. Trump will be in violation of the spirit, and arguably the letter, of the Constitution’s emoluments clause, which bars gifts or profits from foreign leaders, the instant he recites the oath of office. But who’s going to hold him accountable? Some prominent Republicans are already suggesting that, rather than enforcing the ethics laws, Congress should simply change them to accommodate the great man.
And the corruption won’t be limited to the very top: The new administration seems set to bring blatant self-dealing into the center of our political system. Abraham Lincoln may have led a team of rivals; Donald Trump seems to be assembling a team of cronies, choosing billionaires with obvious, deep conflicts of interest for many key positions in his administration.
In short, America is rapidly turning into a stan.
Is it possible Teen Vogue could be the most useful source of news in the country right now? Check out this headline: ” Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Made over $420,000 Selling Access to the President-elect on New Year’s Eve; “The transition is not concerned about the appearance of a conflict,” a spokesperson said,.”
To be clear, simply saying “the president cannot and does not have a conflict” in no way eliminates the obvious potential conflict of interest. Previous issues include but are not limited to Trump’s hotel in Washington D.C. and its pay-for-play potential, Trump’s attempt to prevent development on British wind farm because it would block the view from his golf course, and hisdiplomacy-disrupting call to Taiwan after scoping out the possibility of building Trump property in the region. There are a lot of other examples.
While Trump has said his sons will take over his business, many have suggested that the only way for Trump to truly avoid conflicts of interest is by divesting his assets entirely. As ethics expert Norman Eisen put it in an interview with Chuck Todd, “There is no way that Donald Trump can serve as the president of the United States and hang onto this enormous web of domestic and international businesses and keep an interest in them. He’s going to be conflicted, there’s going to be a cloud, a question every time he makes a decision. … He’s going to stumble over the Constitution.”
Or Vanity Fare be thanked for commiting random acts of journalism?
Only in America could a serial bankrupt pass himself off as a successful businessman. (And almost none of those he bankrupted were even regular businesses. They were casinos—where people essentially come to lose their money.)
Only in America could a man who offended Hispanics, Muslims, Jews, and African-Americans, as well as women, babies, and the handicapped, become the Republican nominee for president.
Only in America could a man for whom truth is an inconvenient concept feel comfortable referring to his opponent as “lying” and “crooked.”
There are more …
Der Spiegal compares Trump To Mussolini to check out exactly the extent of his loyalty to fascism and white nationalism or his own very grandiose need for ego assurance. Can he pass the Fascism test?
If it is fascism, then it would be a disaster on a global scale. See above. But if it isn’t fascism, it would be a defamation of Trump’s voters to call it that, akin to accusing them of helping to bring a fascist to power and potentially driving them away from democracy forever. That’s why we must exercise great care when using the term. What is fascism and how does it relate to Trump? Or to the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany party, the Freedom Party of Austria, France’s Front National or Viktor Orbán in Hungary?
In February, fascism expert Robert Paxton told the online magazine Slate that Trump “even looks like Mussolini in the way he sticks his lower jaw out.” There are also parallels when it comes to his treatment of women: Mussolini was accused of being addicted to sex (a charge, it must be said, that was never levelled at Hitler). At the political level, though, comparison is difficult because there are so many different ideas about what truly constitutes fascism.
Action française, which formed at the end of the 19th century, is considered Europe’s first fascist organization. Mussolini’s Italy became the first fascist country, followed by Hitler’s National Socialist Germany. Hungary, Croatia, Spain and Portugal also developed regimes during the 1930s and 1940s that had fascist elements. But the differences between Nazi Germany and Francisco Franco’s Spain were so great that it’s difficult to mention them in the same breath. Franco was a dictator, but didn’t seek control of his subjects’ thoughts and private lives. He wasn’t an imperialist and he didn’t seek to eradicate Judaism.
One early definition comes from German historian Ernst Nolte, who wrote a fair amount of nonsense in his career but who was an undisputed expert on fascism. He described it as such: “Fascism is anti-Marxism which seeks to destroy the enemy by the evolvement of a radically opposed and yet related ideology and by the use of almost identical and yet typically modified methods, always, however within the unyielding framework of national self-assertion and autonomy.” It’s a long-winded sentence and it provides little by way of orientation today, given that the Soviet Union no longer exists and Marxism is no longer considered be a real political adversary.
It’s a long an interesting read.
Robert Kutner prepares us for Impeachment. He’s definitely got a call to action out there on HuffPo.
Donald Trump is wildly unfit to be president, and he will demonstrate that in ways that break the law and violate the Constitution. Since the election, there have been three wishful efforts to keep Trump from the presidency: a recount doomed by a lack of evidence; a futile campaign to flip Trump electors; and an even more improbable drive to get the Supreme Court to annul the 2016 election.
These moves, indicative of magical thinking, make Trump’s opposition look a lot weaker than it is―at a time when the stakes for the Republic could not be higher. There will also be marches and demonstrations, but they will also look weak unless they have a strategic focus.
There is only one constitutional way to remove a president, and that is via impeachment.
What’s needed is a citizens’ impeachment inquiry, to begin on Trump’s first day in office.
The inquiry should keep a running dossier, and forward updates at least weekly to the House Judiciary Committee. There will be no lack of evidence.
The materials should be made public via a website. The inquiry should be conducted by a distinguished panel whose high-mindedness and credentials are, well, unimpeachable.
There needs to be a parallel public campaign, pressing for an official investigation. For those appalled by Trump, who wonder where to focus their efforts, here is something concrete―and more realistic than it may seem.
Trump has already committed grave misdeeds of the kind that the Constitutional founders described as high crimes and misdemeanors. With his commingling of his official duties and his personal enrichment, Trump will be in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which unambiguously prohibits any person holding public office from profiting from gifts or financial benefits from “any king, prince or Foreign state.”
Trump, who has entangled his business interests with his political connections at home and abroad, has already declared his contempt for these Constitutional protections. He declared, “The law is totally on my side, meaning the president can’t have a conflict of interest.” Oh, yes he can, and this president will.
In his dalliance with Vladimir Putin, Trump’s actions are skirting treason. John Shattuck, former Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and former Washington legal director of the ACLU has pointed to the constitutional definition of treason: a crime committed by a person “owing allegiance to the United States who… adheres to their enemies, giving them aid or comfort.” By undermining further investigation or sanctions against the Russian manipulation of the 2016 election, Trump as president would be giving aid and comfort to Russian interference with American democracy.
The New Yorker sings the praises of The Return of Civil Disobedience. We shall resist.
Movements are born in the moments when abstract principles become concrete concerns. MoveOn arose in response to what was perceived as the Republican congressional overreach that resulted in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. The Occupy movement was a backlash to the financial crisis. The message of Black Lives Matter was inspired by the death of Trayvon Martin and the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. Occupy’s version of anti-corporate populism helped to create the climate in which Senator Bernie Sanders’s insurgent campaign could not only exist but essentially shape the Democratic Party platform. Black Lives Matter brought national attention to local instances of police brutality, prompting the Obama Administration to launch the Task Force on 21st Century Policing and helping defeat prosecutors in Chicago and Cleveland, who had sought reëlection after initially failing to bring charges against police officers accused of using excessive force.
President Obama will take to the stage in Chicago to tell us that our Democracy will survive. I wish I had that kind of faith and hope.
On the evening of Jan. 10, at Chicago’s McCormick Place, president Barack Obama will give his final address to the American people, a tradition that dates all the way back to George Washington. In 1796, after 45 years of public service, Washington penned a lengthy address about his decision not to run for a third term as president.
Just over 220 years later, that same speech is inspiring Obama, whowrote in an email to supporters that he was taking a cue from the original founding father for his own farewell. “In 1796, as George Washington set the precedent for a peaceful, democratic transfer of power, he also set a precedent by penning a farewell address to the American people,” Obama wrote. “And over the 220 years since, many American presidents have followed his lead.
“Since 2009, we’ve faced our fair share of challenges, and come through them stronger. That’s because we have never let go of a belief that has guided us ever since our founding—our conviction that, together, we can change this country for the better.”
Washington’s final address was handwritten over 32 pages, and touched on everything from geographical ideology to international alliances. Here are some choice excerpts (emphases mine); you can read the full text here or the original handwritten document here (pdf).
We’ll certainly be hanging together here and not alone.
Love you all! And my best to every one and their loved one’s during this very challenging time.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Last Friday of 2016 Reads: RESIST
Posted: December 30, 2016 Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: RESIST 25 Comments
The struggle continues in earnest. RESIST.
I’m not going to be celebrating the New Year as much as I will be crying over 2016 which turned hope into dread. The only hopeful thing I’m seeing at this point are the acts of deliberate protest against the Fascist regime we face starting January 20th. Some are more subtle than others. The most important thing is that must continue.
We must RESIST.
Mama Ayesha’s restaurant Washington, D.C.’s Adams Morgan neighborhood does not plan on painting President-elect Donald Trump into its presidential mural, the Washingtonian reported on Thursday.
“Our official position is that it is not in the budget,” Amir Abu-El-Hawa, a member of the family that owns the restaurant, told the publication.
The mural features the founder of the restaurant, “Mama” Ayesha Abraham, standing alongside 11 presidents, from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Barack Obama.
“She was the American dream. For a Muslim and Arab woman immigrant from Palestine to come here on her own and build this business, is a remarkable legacy,” said Abu-El-Hawa, who is the founder’s great-nephew.
According to the Washingtonian, the mural was painted by Karla “Karlisima” Rodas between 2007 and 2009 and was partially sponsored by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
The artist is Colombian born had has been in the USA since 1984. You can see more about the artist and the restaurant at the link. There’s a great video of the artist explaining her work and vision.
A member of the Mormon Tabernacle choir has resigned rather than be part of an organization that would participate in the Inauguration of the Hair Furor. The best part is that she said she “could not throw roses at Hitler” and would “certainly never sing for him”.
President-elect Donald Trump’s plans for his inauguration have hit another bump in the road. A member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which is slated to perform at the event, has quit in protest and penned an open letter explaining her reasoning.
Jan Chamberlin announced her resignation from the Church of Jesus Chris of Latter-day Saints-affiliated choir in a note on Facebook on Thursday. In the letter, which is addressed to the choir’s leader and her family and friends, Chamberlin said that after reflection and prayer and with “a sad and heavy heart,” she is resigning her position in the choir.
T-rump continues to have a difficult time getting any one to perform at his installment. Performance is definitely a political statement for many and even those who may like him are afraid of the blowback from those of us that RESIST.
Unlike any other year, however, the overarching theme of performing at Trump’s swearing-in is that of risk. “An artist would be risking too much,” notes Horowitz. “Their career, their fan base, their relationships in the music industry. As one of the most divisive president-elects in history, Trump shouldn’t be surprised that he’s facing a lack of support.”
Meanwhile, a restaurant in Hawaii has banned Trump voters saying “No Nazis”.
Café 8 ½ in Honolulu, Hawaii, is facing harsh criticism for hanging a sign on its front door that tells voters who cast their ballot for President-elect Donald Trump to eat elsewhere.
“If you voted for Trump you cannot eat here! No Nazis,” reads the yellow sign, as reported by Fox News on Tuesday.
Here’s a great interview to read at VersoBooks: “Trump, fascism, and the construction of “the people”: An interview with Judith Butler”. Isn’t it nice to see people calling it what it is? FASCISM!!!!
What does Donald Trump represent? The American philosopher Judith Butler, professor at Berkeley University, has recently published a short book in French, Rassemblement [Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly]. She explains that Donald Trump incarnates a new form of fascism. As she puts it, “A lot of people are very happy to see this disturbing, unintelligent guy parading around as if he was the centre of the Earth and winning power thanks to this posture.”
Many writers and intellectuals in the United States and Europe have expressed their views on the Trump phenomenon; mostly to express their consternation or their reprobation, condemning the excesses of his language or expressing their alarm at his proposals to build a wall on the Mexican border or to expel millions of undocumented migrants. But if we are to try to understand what is going on with “Trump” — the Trump phenomenon — then we need to bear in mind the analyses that Judith Butler has elaborated since the late 1990s, from her Excitable Speech, A Politics of the Performative to her latest book, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly.
Mediapart: Might we say that Donald Trump is a sort of “figure in the carpet” of the analyses you have been producing over the last two decades? Is Trump not a “Butlerian object” par excellence
Judith Butler: I am not sure that Trump is a very good object for the analyses that I usually conduct. For example, I do not think that there is a fascination for Trump as a person. And when we look at his speeches, we also have to consider more particularly the effects this discourse has on a certain fringe of the American people. Let us not forget that he was elected by less than a quarter of the population, and that he is on the brink of becoming president only thanks to the existence of an archaic Electoral College.
So we should not imagine that Trump enjoys wide popular support. There is a general disillusionment with the political field and a certain scorn for the two main US parties. But Hillary Clinton got more votes than Trump. So when we ask about the support for Trump, we should also ask ourselves how it was that a minority of Americans was able to bring him to power. What we need to interrogate is not an upsurge of popular support [for Trump], but a democratic deficit. The Electoral College should be abolished so that our elections more clearly reflect the popular will. I also believe that our political parties should be rethought in order to increase popular participation in the democratic process.
The minority that supported Trump, the minority allowing him this electoral success, was able to achieve its goal not only thanks to its own rejection of the political field but also the fact that almost 50% of the electorate expressed their disaffection by not going out to vote. Perhaps we ought to speak of the collapse of democratic participation in the United States.
I think that Trump unleashed a rage that has many causes and many targets, and we should probably be sceptical of those who claim to know the true cause, the one single object of this anger. The state of economic devastation and disappointment and the loss of hope for the future — born of economic and financial movements that have decimated whole communities — certainly did play an important role. But so, too, did the United States’ increasing demographic complexity, as well as forms of racism both old and new… There is a desire for “firmness,” expressed through the strengthening of state power against foreigners and undocumented workers, but this is also accompanied by a desire for greater freedom from the burden of government: a slogan simultaneously serving both individualism and the market.
Here’s a ten-point list of what we can do in the upcoming year(s) of the work to tear down our country within the White House itself. Peter Drier suggests we prepare ourselves. I love this first one.
1. Don’t forget: Trump does not have a mandate. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote byclose to 3 million votes. Only 27 percent of the nation’s 231 million eligible voters voted for Trump. In the first election in 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act, Republicans intensified their voter-suppression efforts, targeting black and Latino communities in key battleground states. More than 40 percent of eligible voters did not vote; most non-voters were low-income, minority and/or young Americans who, had they gone to the polls, would have voted Democratic. Polls also show that even most Trump voters do not agree with much of his policy agenda. A CBS survey showed about one-quarter of Trump voters said he is not qualified to be president. Seventy percent of all voters said immigrants without documents should be able to apply for legal status rather than be deported.
But, can we ever forget exactly how much we saw racism, misogyny, and xenophobia on display this last year? Can we face down our disappointment at being wrong when we thought that America was basically good and couldn’t go down this rabbit hole of hate? Can the struggle for justice succeed?
After Trump’s election, it is more or less impossible to believe that we are making meaningful progress. White liberals who woke up horrified on Nov. 9 weren’t horrified because the world had suddenly changed—we were horrified because the scales had finally fallen from our eyes, and we could at least see our unjust, racist, sexist country for what it is. The next president will not be a woman, the makeup of the Supreme Court will not shift toward progressivism, and we are not jolly passengers on a cruise ship sailing toward an era of tolerance, justice, and respect for the dignity and rights of all.
The first challenge is being met now. Trump’s spin on Russian interference in our election is falling apart. The Alt-Right enablers have going from denying Russian involvement to saying it was a good thing. How can this not be seen as treason?
This morning, Russian President Vladimir Putin responded to the Obama administration’s announcement yesterday that the United States will undertake sweeping retaliation against Russia for its alleged interference in our election. In a surprise, Putin said he would not be expelling U.S. diplomats as part of the escalating tensions.
This led to some speculation that Putin is simply biding his time until Donald Trump takes over as president, putting someone more friendly to Putin and Russia in the White House — hopefully meaning all those bad feelings about possible Russian efforts to tip the election to Trump can be forgotten. Trump, too, has been saying we need to “move on.”
Reporters and scholars continue to be under attack for providing evidence. False claims from Alt Right enablers are sending Trump Goons into attack and threat mode.
If we ever had any doubt that DudeBroProgs are just Republicans in hipster clothing who smoke pot, take a look at this Chait headline: “Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson Unite to Dismiss Russian Hacking Allegations”. At least were seeing the birds of that feather finally flock together.
One of the great meetings of journalistic minds took place last week, when left-wing journalist Glenn Greenwald appeared on Fox News with Tucker Carlson. The segment was devoted to their purportedly strange agreement over the Russian hacking story (which is not actually strange at all, given their mutual antipathy for the center-left). Greenwald has long dismissed the charge that Russia manipulated WikiLeaks’ publication of Democratic party emails as a “smear,” mocking suspicions of misbehavior by what he referred to in sarcastic capitalized words as “The Russians”; he called it typical of the Democrats’ alleged tendency to use false attacks against Russia to discredit its adversaries (“So WikiLeaks has become an enemy of the Democratic Party, and they seem to have one tactic with their adversaries and enemies, which is to accuse them of being Russian agents”). On Carlson’s program, Greenwald attacked the Washington Post for reporting that the CIA and the FBI believed Russia’s hacking was intended to help Trump win. It is a remarkable segment that merits close reading.
“Should we believe that assessment?” asked Carlson. “We should be extremely skeptical of it for multiple reasons,” replied Greenwald. “These are assertions that are being made unaccompanied by any evidence whatsoever.”
https://twitter.com/AlGiordano/status/814660479683534848?lang=en
We actually need to thank Lady Lindsey and her sidekick McGrumpy McGrumpkins for doing the right thing today.
Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain has scheduled a hearing on cyber threats for Thursday, where the issue of Russia’s election-year hacking will take center stage, a source familiar with the committee’s planning told POLITICO.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, National Security Agency and Cyber Command Chief Adm. Mike Rogers and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Marcel Lettre are scheduled to testify, according to the source.
The timing of the hearing — three days into the new Congress — is in the same week that President-elect Donald Trump says he plans to be briefed by the intelligence community on the Russian hacking.
This is going to be a long, draining struggle but I don’t think we have much of a choice at this point but to fight all we can.
RESIST.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Tuesday Reads: I Hate 2016.
Posted: December 27, 2016 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, Barack Obama, Foreign Affairs 48 Comments
Good Afternoon!!
Before I begin, news just broke that Carrie Fisher has died. I hate 2016.
I’ve defended President Obama for years now, but I’m disgusted with him right now. Obviously, the man has a huge ego and he’s not really much of a feminist except at at a surface level. Now he has joined Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders in claiming he would have beaten Donald Trump–and not a single one of those men did the work or went through the attacks that Hillary Clinton had to deal with. U.S. News:
President Barack Obama says he is “confident” he could have beaten Donald Trump if he was on the ballot this year, prompting the president-elect to respond with an defensive denial amid a flurry of tweets sent out late Monday night.
“President Obama said that he thinks he would have won against me,” Trump wrote. “He should say that but I say NO WAY! – jobs leaving, ISIS, OCare, etc.”
Trump was responding to Obama’s interview with former aide David Axelrod, in an episode of Axelrod’s podcast The Axe Files released Monday.
In a sit-down at the White House before departing last week for his annual Christmas getaway to Hawaii, Obama told Axelrod that he did not believe Trump’s election was a repudiation of the vision of a more inclusive America Obama had tried to convey in his campaigns and as president
“In the wake of the election and Trump winning, a lot of people have suggested that somehow, it really was a fantasy,” Obama said. “What I would argue is, is that the culture actually did shift, that the majority does buy into the notion of a one America that is tolerant and diverse and open and full of energy and dynamism.”
Yes, and Hillary did win a majority of votes–about as many as Obama got in 2012; but, never mind. A man would have done better, right? WTF?! And BTW, David Axelrod tore down Hillary throughout the campaign. Surely Obama must be aware of that fact?
Everyone, including he media, is now blaming Hillary for the coming apocalypse. No one wants to deal with the media’s year-long obsession with emails or their failure to adequately investigation and report on the Russian interference in the election. Many reporters are rushing to excuse James Comey’s successful efforts to hurt Clinton shortly before election day.
Here’s an unscientific investigation by Sam Stein (who has actually been pretty friendly to Clinton): Did James Comey Cost Hillary Clinton The Election? We Asked The Late-Deciding Voters.
For months, as the election wound down to its bitter conclusion, Leonard Rainey of Louisiana struggled over which presidential candidate he’d support.
In the past, the choice would have been simple. Rainey, 33, leans Republican. He voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. But like others this cycle, he found the idea of backing GOP nominee Donald Trump repugnant, matched only by the nausea that accompanied the thought of pulling the lever for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
He entertained sitting out the election. But, as he said, “you don’t have a right to bitch if you don’t vote.” So he pored over the news in search of guidance. It became overwhelming. Each WikiLeaks revelation was a new micro-drama; every Trump debate performance an eye-opener.
“His mouth doesn’t fucking stop,” he said after the second one.
By the final week, the continuous revelations and conspiracy theories surrounding Clinton were taking a toll. Rainey had heard something about Clinton’s ties to a pedophilia ring ― a hoax that led an armed man to fire shots in a D.C.-based pizzeria. He found Clinton Foundation ties to the Saudis and Qatari government disturbing.
The night before Election Day, Rainey kept worrying about how a President Trump might navigate a complex international standoff. He woke up wondering if Clinton was the right choice. But in the end, he voted for Trump anyway ― an uninspired, rote contribution to American democracy.
“You could have put up anybody else against him,” Rainey said. “But they just picked a bad candidate.”
Well that proves it then. A life-long Republican from Louisiana thinks Clinton was a “bad candidate,” and a few other folks that Stein talked to said similar things. Stein quotes five men and one woman in his piece. Most were Republicans, and one was a Bernie bro. Case closed.
Meanwhile, instead of rehashing the election and making unprovable claims, maybe Obama should be reflecting on his failure to act when he might have been able to reduce the damage done by Putin and Comey or at least take action to punish Russia for stealing our election. He might also want to think about why he failed to take any action to prevent what looks to be genocide in Syria.
The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen: Thanks to no-drama Obama, American leadership is gone.
If Dec. 7, 1941, is the day that Franklin D. Roosevelt said “will live in infamy,” then Dec. 20, 2016, has got to be a close second. No Americans died that day as they did at Pearl Harbor, but the American Century, as Time magazine founder Henry Luce called it, came to a crashing end. Turkey, Iran and Russia met in Moscow to settle matters in the Middle East. The United States wasn’t even asked to the meeting.
Winston Churchill said in 1942 that he had not become Great Britain’s“First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” Nonetheless, by the end of the 1940s, much of the empire was gone. Churchill was an unapologetic colonialist, but he was up against liberation movements of all kinds, not to mention the antipathy of the United States to imperialist ambitions — in short, history itself. Churchill had a marvelous way with words, and greatness accompanied him like a shadow, but in certain ways he was a 19th-century man wandering, confounded, in the 20th.
Barack Obama is quite the reverse. He is a 21st-century man who never quite appreciated the lessons of the 20th. He has been all too happy to preside over the loss of American influence. Aleppo, Syria, now a pile of rubble, is where countless died — as did American influence. The Russians polished it off from the air, doing for the Syrian regime what the United States could not figure out how to do for the rebels. The city hemorrhaged civilian dead, and America, once the preeminent power in the region, did virtually nothing.
It could be that Obama was right. It could be that all along he knew that the rebels were beyond saving — although he predicted that Bashar al-Assad would be toppled — and, anyway, the United States was not going to again get into some Middle Eastern quagmire. America had twice made war in Iraq; it had lost Marines in Lebanon. Though perhaps these were just excuses to do nothing. After all, no one ever recommended putting boots on the ground in Syria. That was Obama’s straw man.
And now we are headed toward autocracy. That will be Obama’s legacy.
Here’s an interesting article by Yochi Dreazen at Vox: I’ve spent 15 years covering national security. I’ve never seen anything like the Russia hack.
National security has been the focus of virtually all of my professional life….But I’ve never covered anything quite like Russia’s hack of the Democratic National Committee’s servers and the email account of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, moves designed to steal and then release information damaging to the Democratic presidential nominee.
Think about it this way: In a best-case scenario, Russian President Vladimir Putin has managed to persuade tens of millions of Americans to question the integrity of the US political system and the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s narrow win. In a worst-case scenario, the Kremlin just handed the White House to the most jarringly pro-Russian presidential candidate in American history.
Imagine I had told you, in 2013, that this would happen — that Russia would successfully hack into a political party’s servers and use the revelations to try to change the course of an American presidential election. Imagine you didn’t know which party benefited, so there was no reason to downplay the event’s horror, or shrink from its implications. How much of a freakout would you have predicted across America? What sort of response would you have expected? How angry, specifically, would you have expected Republicans — a traditionally Russo-skeptic party — to be?
And yet there may be no response. Nor is it even obvious what the response should, or would, be. Part of me thinks we should consider this to be a case of espionage (stealing the documents in the first place) paired with an unusually sophisticated propaganda effort (leaking the sexiest material slowly to dominate the news cycle in the final weeks before the election). Part of me thinks we should consider this to be an act of war, no different than if Putin had launched a cyberattack that took down the electrical grid or the banking system. And part of me thinks it’s something new entirely — a hybrid that is more than mere spying but less than an outright assault.
I’m at even more of a loss when it comes to thinking about what the US should do in response. Russia doesn’t have real elections, so there’s no Putin rival for Washington to quietly try to help win the presidency. The US could try to embarrass the Russian leader by releasing details of the tens of billions of dollars that he and his closest allies are believed to have squirreled away in a labyrinth of offshore bank accounts. Putin controls Russia’s media, though, so it’s not clear if that information would reach many Russians. Given Putin’s sky-high approval ratings, it’s not also clear if many Russians would care. And not even Russia hawks think Obama would — or should — retaliate with military force.
I’m left with a pair of depressing conclusions: Putin got the president he wanted, and he’ll likely escape without any serious retribution for his direct attack on American democracy — in fact, he’s likely to get the most pro-Russian president, and pro-Russian administration, in recent American history. His operation will have been an extraordinary success, and so the US won’t be the only Western power that Putin targets: German politicians are already warning that Russian hacking threatens their upcoming elections.
Please read the rest at Vox.
And check this out at Newsweek too: Neil Buchanan: American Democracy is on Life Support. Here’s the intro:
Is it too late to save constitutional democracy in the United States?
It is possible that there is nothing that can be done to prevent Donald Trump’s presidency from turning the U.S. into an autocratic state, completing the Republicans’ generation-long effort to make sure that only certain people are allowed to participate in our weakening republic.
Even if that is true—and no one can say with certainty, at this point in history, whether we will indeed go down that path—it is important to decide how to proceed even in the face of inevitable disaster.
Should people who believe in the rule of law act as if there is something still to be done to save the nation from political death, or should they face reality and merely try to minimize the pain as the patient dies slowly in hospice care?
Here, I will explain why it is so difficult to see a hopeful path forward after the 2016 elections. The deep problem is not merely that the Democrats will not control any branch of the federal government or most state governments, although that is obviously a huge disability.
The ultimate problem is that Trump and the Republicans have thrown off any hint of good faith, which means that Democrats who try to bargain with them might be fated to be played for suckers.
In such circumstances, Democrats could choose to simply ease people’s pain as the republic fades away. Like palliative care for the dying, strategies that would be unthinkable for other patients—such as administering high doses of painkillers—might now make sense.
One more from CNN: It’s your duty to laugh at Donald Trump, by Rob Crilly.
Time and time again he has shown himself vulnerable to mockery. Humor is Kryptonite to his thin-skinned existence.He is utterly impervious to the usual weapons of politics. Try to wound him with shame or embarrass him with public scrutiny and you may as well try to sink a duck by pouring a jug of H2O over its rear end.But we all know the size of his hands. Graydon Carter’s long-running feud with the “short-fingered vulgarian”, as he so pithily put it, recently resurfaced in the pages of Vanity Fair, where a waiter at the Trump Grill was quoted discussing the size of his bosses’ digits.Inevitably, the orange-haired bloviator responded with a humorless tirade on Twitter.Trump’s sensitivity is easily understood when you realize he is on a desperate quest to be taken seriously. Just remember the face he pulled when he sat beside Barack Obama in the Oval Office on that Thursday after an election.it was the sort of face a three-year-old exhibits when they really, really want you know they are concentrating. Or when they are trying to squeeze out a number two.What stories are you following today?
Monday Reads: 2016 has been like a year long Red Wedding
Posted: December 26, 2016 Filed under: Afternoon Reads 23 Comments
Well, it’s the last week of 2016 and the only thing I can think is that it’s a prelude to 2017 which is lining up to be an even worse year although we don’t know which of the icons that wrote the soundtrack to our lives will die at this time. I’m actually more concerned about the death of more important things like civil liberties and civil rights.
But, before I move on to my tribute to people who resisted Fascism in the past as inspiration for what faces us in 2017, let me just say goodbye to George Michael whose life, loves and music was unapologetically, in your face sexuality after being outted by Tabloids. George Michael was fierce.
I can barely get through a week without listening to his outstanding tribute with Queen to Freddie Mercury. He considered it his proudest but saddest moment. I’ve linked to a video of Queen and George in rehearsal for that performance where you can see David Bowie watching with Seal. It feels like George RR Martin wrote the script for 2016 where all the good guys get killed and the bad guys take over the kingdom. Seriously, it feels that way to me.
Here’s some inspiration from the past to help us buckle up as we careen towards 2017 and the take over of our government by Fascists. A flamboyant sportscaster led a secret mission to get his family out of Germany during those famous 1936 Berlin Olympic games. His story is now coming to light.
But here’s where we can start. Stanley Wertheim was a little more than 2 years old when Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. He doesn’t remember much from his childhood in Warburg, about 400 kilometers southwest of Berlin.
“I have some memories, but they’re vague. And only memories of certain incidents,” he says.
In one of those incidents, Stanley wandered out of his family’s backyard.
“And saw everyone saying ‘Heil Hitler’ and raising their arms, and so I did the same thing,” Stanley recalls. “Until, finally, some man caught me by the back of the neck and dragged me back to my house. ‘Cause that could have resulted in serious consequences.”
Stanley Wertheim is Jewish. Everything he did — or didn’t do — could have resulted in serious consequences.
The Olympics came to Berlin when Stanley was 6. The world was becoming concerned about German militarization and discrimination against Jews. And the regime hoped to send the message that there was nothing to fear.
So, the Games were important for Hitler and the Third Reich, but they weren’t of much consequence to 6-year-old Stanley Wertheim and his family.
“Well, that meant nothing to us except that Ted would be here,” Stanley says.
Also worth reading is the obituary of 96 year old Marion Pritchard who saved the lives of around 150 Jewish people and children in acts of bravery that should be told and retold. She was a true hero.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
We take time now to remember Marion van Binsbergen Pritchard who died this month at the age of 96. During the second world war in her native Holland, she helped more than 150 Jews evade the Nazis. Her son Ivor Pritchard told us how she became a rescuer.
IVOR PRITCHARD: She was riding her bicycle down the street and came upon a scene where the Germans were collecting Jewish children, just picking them up by the arm and the leg and the hair and throwing them into a truck. And there were two women who saw this. And they went up to the Germans and protested, whereupon they took the two women and put them in the truck, too, and drove off. And my mother witnessed this.
CHANG: From that moment forward, she committed herself to protecting Jews. She shuttled young children from one hiding place to another. Little ones couldn’t be moved in the dark after curfew because they might cry out, so she transported them in broad daylight.
PRITCHARD: She would put a child on her bicycle and pedal down the street. And the German soldiers would see the young woman with her child and wave at her, and she would wave at them. And she would go right by to wherever she needed to go.
CHANG: For almost three years, Marion helped hide a Jewish man and his three children in a home outside Amsterdam. One day, several Germans and a local Dutch collaborator came to the door looking for Jews. They left without finding the hidden family. But then…
PRITCHARD: The Dutch collaborator came back by himself. And she had a revolver that had been given to her by the friend in the resistance. And she didn’t know what else to do, so she shot him. So now she’s got a Dutch collaborator dead on the floor. What’s she going to do?
CHANG: Marion had a friend who found a delivery man to pick up the body and a mortician to dispose of it. This is the lesson that Marion Pritchard took from that story.
PRITCHARD: The world, at that time, did not neatly divide up into perpetrators, victims, bystanders and rescuers. The delivery man wasn’t actively involved in the resistance. The mortician wasn’t actively involved in the resistance. And yet, when asked, they cooperated.
In two truly bizarre acts of weirdness, the Trump administration seems to have declared itself the beacon for radical christianity in an act of unconstitutional unrepentant reptilian ickiness. Then T-Rump himself sends out a weirdish christmas greeting that looks like a raised white power fist. It was such a tiny fist with such tiny fingers.
Sean Spicer is going to be T-Rump’s press secretary and he’s already caused quite the controversy with a badly worded tweet which appears to be the way of things right now. One badly worded tweet after another on things that are blatantly not constitutional, legal or American. Who tweets out about freaking Kings these days anyway? George RR Martin are you writing this script? Please, let us know.
President-elect Donald Trump’s team yesterday accused media critics of politicizing Christmas after a holiday message from the Republican Party sparked a Twitter war over whether the GOP was comparing Trump to Jesus Christ.
The message released yesterday by the Republican National Committee read in part, “Over two millennia ago, a new hope was born into the world, a Savior who would offer the promise of salvation to all mankind.
“Just as the three wise men did on that night, this Christmas heralds a time to celebrate the good news of a new King,” the statement continued.
That last clause caused social media users of both parties to question whether the “new King” referred to on “this Christmas” was Trump.
For a lift, check out our Seventh Ward Santa who made the NPR news.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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