#also is it too late to bring up that democrats bought ads for trump to ensure he was the republican nominee thinking hed be easy to beat

[frankendykes-monster]

People who make posts like this never actually reckon with the war crimes brought on by the Clintons (or any Democrat for that matter), they just pay lip service to the fact that they know it looks bad to throw support behind war criminals because they regard anyone outside the US as acceptable cannon fodder.

[trenttrendspotter]

Flex Your Social Media Muscle

By Nancy Trent

Some brands thrive on social media, while others consider it a necessary evil. Those brands that do social media as a chore are doing what we call “check-the-box” social media. They need to start engaging, authentically, to thrive in today’s competitive marketplace. 

Social media supports the human need for social interaction. It has the ability to take a message from dozens to millions.That’s power! 

It is the democratization of knowledge and information. At its best, it can transform consumers into actual journalists and producers for your brand.

Skin care expert and board-certified nurse practitioner, Melissa Haloossim brings new ways to think about skin to the social media platforms of her successful West Hollywood clinic, Skin Thesis on a daily basis. She leverages her excellent relationships with her celebrity clientele which includes Kim Kardashian West to boost her following and drive clients through the door in droves looking for her unique treatments. 

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest are all platforms to build your reputation and increase your odds of being discovered by the masses. Use them to network and learn like the pros. 

 Here is how:

The art of research

In a culture where instant gratification is in demand, we often make the mistake of running with our impulses. Response time on social media is fast. So you need to be more prepared and methodical before you start. 

Like traditional marketing, disseminating a message is only effective once you know your audience.   

See what they look like, hear what they sound like and explore what they like before you reach out to them. 

Linking to followers

If you know who your customers are and who influences your customer– you know who you should be following.  Now how do you get to them?

Put social and share buttons on everything you do so that people know how to find you on the platforms they check.  Add it to the website, packaging, business cards, email signatures, blog posts, ads and press releases. 

Actively find new followers by searching similar social media handles and inviting like-minded people to join your community.

Tell interesting stories, host contests, and offer giveaways and other incentives to get people to want to hear more of what you have to say.

Give people consistent, quality content that keeps them informed and entertained and motivated to come back for more. 

Mirror your marketing

Remember that social media is an extension of your traditional media messaging. Know what has worked for your brand in the past and stick to it to maintain a successful track record. 

Make sure that your social media department not only understands digital communications, but understands your brand.

Find your social media halo

Managing your online presence is most effectively done once you have established your offline message.  

Develop a voice and express it effectively on your social media platforms and stay true to it. Authenticity is key!

Finding ways to relate

Accruing the right followers is important, but engaging your following is paramount. 

Encourage interaction and drive conversations, for example:

Challenge yourself! Visit Skin City for our new selection of services. 

VS.

What’s the best facial you’ve ever had?  Share a tip or photo with us at @SkinCity #SkinCity

VS.

What do you love more, shopping for shoes or your favorite pedicure? Tell us what you love most about your pedicure and we will send the winner a pair Louboutins.

Effective posting

Play around with different types of content to determine what will work. 

People love sharing their opinion so polling your audience on a regular basis will keep them engaged.

People are voyeurs by nature. Give them a snapshot of your day to keep them intrigued.

People want free expertise. Share insider tips and tricks and they will find value in your posts.

People want to be recognized. Give fan or customer “shout outs” as much as possible to stroke the ego.

People are interested in what other people are talking about. Piggyback on what’s already trending to feed them more. 

Use your tentacles

Celebrities, experts, micro-celebs, journalists and mavens are all enthusiasts who can spread your message further with a third-party endorsement that is as easy as hitting “like.”

You can find ways to connect with influencers, online and off, but however you reach them, you will have to appeal to their hearts and minds even if you have a budget for endorsements. People don’t buy into endorsement deals that aren’t backed by passion.

Attracting endorsers

You can wait around for unsolicited endorsements but you are better off asking for them. Or even better conjure opportunities that they are interested in...think of cross promotions whether it’s someone’s new book or movie. You can also work with lime-minded businesses such as gyms, retailers or restaurants. 

Every satisfied customer should be incentivized to share an experience online. There are many ways to do this cost-effectively and develop new partnerships. Use your imagination, contacts and wish list to develop collaborations. 

Invite new people to experience your services, treatments and products in exchange for a public review. 

Controlling the conversation

People check into social for entertainment. They check their social media platforms in their spare time or when they want a break. Be there to amuse them and they will continue to come back for more.

They check in for engagement. They want to be heard. They want to see that someone is listening and responding to what they have to say.

They want information. They want to be a part of the buzz. What is everyone talking about? What are the most popular hashtags? How can you get in the conversation? How can you involve them in your conversation? 

They are not checking social media to be sold to, lectured or bored. 

If you have a promotion you need to wrap it up as a gift for them. 

Using avenues for self-promotion can be effective, so it pays to be strategic and play on each avenue’s strengths.  

You’re working in real time. In days, hours, even minutes, information can become outdated. If you meant to comment on a new trend or news story, but you’ve missed the boat, skip it. Interaction is valuable, but don’t confuse it with bothering people, or seeming too dependent on specific relationships. Every social media channel has an audience, so you’re often interacting with multiple people, even if you’ve only sent a message to one.

What else to be prepared for this year:

Likes may boost your ego but shares boost your popularity

Interactions, meaning liking, sharing and commenting, are the holy grail of social media. Likes may be easier to gain but shares are what you are really after and what is needed to go viral. 

Visuals trump words

Find the right image for your words because original written content gets more response with a visual component.  Expect for this to keep evolving.

RTE (real time engagement)

Dialing a phone number for customer service is a pain that no one wants to deal with, which is why turning to social media for questions and concerns has skyrocketed. Asking companies for help through social media continues to grow as more customers want real-time engagement. This term will increasingly be more of a staple in any business to customer (B2C) strategy. While the majority of consumers expect responses during regular business hours, after hours and on weekends, an increasing number expect to hear back within 30 to 60 minutes tops.

Go live

Live streaming and stories are increasingly preferred. It builds trust, creates connections and it’s fun!

Fan duds

The people that love you most, probably aren’t as loved as you’d like. According to the social monitoring website Mention, 91% of mentions come from people with fewer than 500 followers.

Timing

Early morning, late night, weekend, Fridays, Sundays. It’s not a gamble. It’s a stat! People check social in their free time so be there when they are. 

Social’s effect on your rank

Together social and SEO (search engine optimization) can influence sales. Social alone won’t and you have to make your social work for your SEO through post optimization, earned followers (not bought), diverse content and more. 

As seen in Skin Inc.

[aspiringbelle]

Election results from where I worked:

Biden: 127

Sanders: 99

Steyer: 42

Buttigieg: 34

Warren: 30

Klobuchar: 19

Gabbard: 4

Yang: 2

357 total votes, not counting 40 absentees, and 1 failsafe ballot.

By comparison:

2008 (Previous precinct turnout record of 233):

Clinton: 92

Obama: 81

Edwards: 58

Kucinich: 2

2016 (Democrat):

Sanders: 78

Clinton: 75

Wilson: 1

2016 (Republican):

Rubio: 212

Cruz: 187

Trump: 147

Kasich: 82

Carson: 79

Jeb!: 60

Also, by comparison, in the 2008 General Election, McCain got 842 votes, and Obama got 349. The primary vote here exceeded Obama's 2008 General election vote. Republicans may not lose sleep over losing this precinct, but they should worry that any Democrat may make inroads into their SC margin.

Other thoughts:

Sanders should and could have fought more here. That would have improved his margins.

I saw more Biden signs tonight on the way home than I saw of ANY candidate on the run-up to today. (One Biden, one Pete, both downtown near the election commission HQ.)

The Republican plan to boost Sanders failed. (Meanwhile, Trump appears to want to face Biden. We're I in Trump's shoes, I would too.)

Both Steyer and Tulsi bet a lot on SC, though most only noticed Steyer, who spent a LOT more. (Both bought several billboards.) I can see Tulsi staying in until either Super Tuesday or the Hawaii primary (to try and get some delegates from her home or birthplace). I think Steyer may want to get out.

Bloomberg wasted a lot of money on SC, buying ads despite not running there.

One person here claimed she saw Bloomberg in Charleston in a store.

Joe Biden paid a visit to a predominantly African-American precinct this morning.

My co-workers and I all disliked the election being called by 7, AS WE WERE TAKING DOWN THE POLLING PLACE.

One woman was told by a Sanders canvasser that she was eligible to vote after he registered her. Sadly, he was wrong, as she registered too late to vote in this primary. Memo to canvassers: make sure you research local election laws beforehand.

I don't know if any candidates mentioned the upcoming Sheriff's race here (10 days away!), Or any upcoming races (besides Elizabeth Warren at least mentioning voting out Lindsey Graham), or the effort to pass local hate crimes legislation or repeal an old anti-LGBT resolution.

If turnout here is any indication, the record of 2008 has been smashed. Republicans should begin being worried, if their base in SC has shrunk.

The election system worked mostly well, with few hitches.

Memo to voters: make sure you bring your voter registration information along with your photo ID just in case. (It does help!)

I'm tired, and not happy with the results, but glad my two favorite candidates both fought uphill battles well.

[bountyofbeads]

THE BATTLE FOR THE CONSTITUTION

The Disintegration of the American Presidency

The president’s job is to oversee the whole of the executive branch, but under Trump the inverse is happening.

By Susan Hennessey, Executive editor of Lawfare and Benjamin Wittes, Contributing writer and editor in chief of Lawfare | Published January 21, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted January 22, 2020

On January 13, 2020, a political scientist named Daniel Drezner tweeted a screenshot of a Washington Post  article, along with a cheeky comment: “I’ll believe that Trump is growing into the presidency when his staff stops talking about him like a toddler.” The screenshot showed a quotation about handling the president from a former senior administration official: “He’d get spun up, and if you bought some time, you could get him calmed down, and then explain to him what his decision might do.”

Drezner’s tweet was part of a lengthy thread. A very lengthy thread. The tweet, in fact, was the 1,163rd entry in a thread that began back in April 2017, with the same comment appended to a screenshot from The Washington Post: “Trump turns on the television almost as soon as he wakes, then checks in periodically throughout the day in the small dining room off the Oval Office, and continues late into the evening when he’s back in his private residence. ‘Once he goes upstairs, there’s no managing him,’ said one adviser.” Drezner had highlighted the quotation from the adviser.

The “toddler-in-chief thread” is surely the most quixotically lengthy Twitter thread in the history of the American presidency. Every time a White House adviser or a Republican member of Congress speaks about Trump in a news story as though he or she were talking about handling a small child, Drezner tweets the relevant passage with the same sentence, adding it to the thread.

Each entry separately documents a news story in which someone—usually a member of the executive branch—talks about managing the president, not the other way around, and talks about doing so in an explicitly infantilizing fashion. The collection is now the subject of a forthcoming book.

The thread is a source of humor, but Drezner is onto something profound. Whereas the president’s job is to supervise the White House staff and the executive-branch agencies that report to the White House, in the Trump presidency the inverse is what’s really happening most of the time, and people don’t even bother to pretend otherwise.

Yes, when Trump gives an actual order in a form directed to a subordinate person or agency, that order has to be carried out—or something has to happen that can be said to count as carrying it out—on pain of possible dismissal. But until the moment of an actual order—and even afterward, for those willing to take risks with their jobs—Trump can be avoided, evaded, cajoled, patronized, manipulated, or misrepresented in public by underlings who purport to serve him.

Infantilizing the president is a natural adaptive response to circumstances—if an entirely extra-constitutional one. Staffers and officials have reason to question the integrity of the president’s oath of office or his mental stability. Confronted with a president who rejects traditional executive-branch processes and management in favor of unfiltered personal expression and a merging of the office with his own personality, they have to do something.

But, of course, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. The Constitution creates a unitary executive branch in which, in the pure version at least, the president supervises the staff and they actually do what he tells them to do—or are removed if they do not. Constitutionally speaking, notwithstanding the internal processes that have built up over time, the executive branch is run by the president, and the president at some level supervises the entire branch.

The federal courts are divided regionally and stratified by the three layers of the judicial system—district courts, appeals courts, and the Supreme Court. Congress has two chambers, each with its own formal rules. But the American presidency is a single person. And the executive branch is little more than the people who work for him. There is a debate, of course, about how unitary the “unitary executive” really is, and that debate is wrapped up in a larger set of arguments about the scope and nature and limits of presidential power. But there is a core to the unitary-executive theory that is not in dispute: There is only one president, and he appoints the leadership of the executive agencies, who serve at his pleasure and thus must follow his direction or risk being fired.

Historically, this core unity has always tolerated some degree of fractiousness within the executive branch. One extreme example from early in the republic’s history is that of Thomas Jefferson, who funded and ran an opposition newspaper while serving in George Washington’s cabinet. Lower executive-branch officials often have statutory responsibilities of their own delegated to them by Congress, and civil servants are not appointed and removed at will by the president. The unity fiction became a bit more strained as the executive developed into an immense series of interlocking bureaucracies, including the supposedly independent federal regulatory agencies, over the course of the 20th century. Presidential lack of control over the State Department has long been a source of some consternation. And, of course, regardless of the president’s status as commander in chief, the military is a world of its own. The question of unity has always been one of degree; it is not absolute. That said, the idea of unity remains true in important respects.

When Trump took the oath of office, he assumed certain powers, all of which Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution vested personally in him: He became commander in chief of the military; he became responsible for appointing and supervising all heads of agencies and cabinet departments—including having the power to remove them from office; he was empowered to pardon criminals and those being prosecuted, to reprieve sentences, and to remit fines; he was empowered to make treaties with foreign governments, and thus to withdraw from them; he was given the power to appoint ambassadors and judges with the Senate’s advice and consent; he was given the power to veto legislation. All these powers came to Trump personally—not to his cabinet officials, not to his staff, not to Republican congressmen, but to him.

Alexander Hamilton’s “Federalist No. 70” is the essential starting point in a discussion of the executive branch. “Energy in the Executive,” wrote Hamilton, “is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks.” The reason? “A feeble Executive implies a feeble execution of the government. A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government.” Translation: If you want government to do things, you have to have an executive capable of it. Designing the executive branch in this fashion was controversial, with many of the opponents of the Constitution arguing that the president’s broad powers too closely resembled the monarchical power the colonies had only recently shaken off.

The modern presidency has powers Hamilton surely never imagined. In particular, the war powers have migrated—to what degree is a matter of debate, but certainly to some degree—from the legislature to the presidency, bringing unity of action and decision making to the powers of war and peace to a degree the Founders certainly did not envision. Similarly, the rise of informal international agreements that are not subject to the demands of the treaty power has concentrated a great deal of foreign-policy authority in the hands of the president. And the growth of the standing, institutional military transforms the commander in chief’s power in peacetime into something much bigger than it was in Hamilton’s time. What’s more, in many areas, Congress has delegated huge swaths of authority to the executive branch.

The basic structure, however, remains more or less as it was in Hamilton’s day, albeit much larger and with important exceptions that limit presidential control over independent agencies and lower-level officials across the government. The executive branch remains, broadly speaking, a vertically integrated organization with a single person at its apex.

The American presidency, in its unity, is profoundly dissimilar from nearly all other executives in democratic systems that have persisted over time. The founders of other democracies have, quite intentionally, decided differently from the founders of this one. For example, in Israel—another democratic country that faces ongoing security issues and fights wars semi-regularly—the power to take the country to war is generally vested not in the prime minister but in the government, a collective body. What’s more, although the government has legislative powers that in this country the president does not have, the government—and the prime minister himself, for that matter—serves at the discretion of the legislature. So not only is Israeli executive power not unified, but the executive can be dismissed for policy reasons alone. Most parliamentary democracies align far more closely with Israel on these points than with the American separation of powers.

In normal times, the American system has a lot to recommend it. It generates not just decisiveness of action but also political accountability for that action—what Hamilton called “a due dependence on the people” and “a due responsibility.” Divide up the executive authority, and nobody really knows who gets the credit for success and who gets the blame for failure.

But the American system gets sticky when you contemplate vesting the executive power in one person who cannot be easily removed when that person is as mercurial and peculiar as Trump. In such situations, the structure can start to seem downright reckless. In concentrating power so that this person directs the federal government to do things—and in making this person exceptionally difficult to depose for a protracted period of time—one has to have a certain amount of confidence in that person’s intentions and abilities.

The result has been that the executive branch’s unity has dissolved before the public’s eye. As the toddler-in-chief thread showed, in important respects the president ceased to be at the helm of the executive branch and instead became its mascot. Trump represented such a massive and radical change that the rest of the executive branch could not simply continue with business as usual; it had to adapt—and resist. Its response was in equal parts understandable and destructive of important constitutional norms.

Consider only a few of the countless examples of the breakdown in the president’s control over the executive branch. He said repeatedly that he wasn’t convinced that Russia had attempted to interfere in the U.S. election in 2016. He said he believed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denial of any involvement, regularly calling the allegations a “hoax” and the resulting investigation a “witch hunt.” All his top intelligence officials, however, contradicted him—at a single conference, the 2017 Aspen Security Forum. Indeed, over the first two years of Trump’s presidency, not a single one of his senior national security officials publicly backed his claims on the subject.

The FBI contradicted him on electronic surveillance. Asked about Trump’s claims that President Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower, then FBI Director James Comey testified, “With respect to the president’s tweets about alleged wiretapping directed at him by the prior administration, I have no information that supports those tweets and we have looked carefully inside the FBI.” The Justice Department later declared in a court filing that both its National Security Division and the FBI “have no records related to wiretaps as described by [Trump’s] tweets.”

When the White House lent its support to the Saudi-led blockade of Qatar, the State Department and the Pentagon openly contradicted it on the subject. Then Defense Secretary James Mattis quickly reassured the Qatari government that it had the United States’ backing, knowing that U.S. military aviation in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen relies on an airfield on the outskirts of Doha. Mattis signed a $12 billion arms deal with the Qataris days later.

When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan won a referendum granting him new powers, Trump called to congratulate him. This happened even as the State Department noted “irregularities on voting day and an uneven playing field during the difficult campaign period” and used the occasion to call on Turkey “to protect the fundamental rights and freedoms of all its citizens.” Trump also extended his congratulations to Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on the success of his controversial anti-drug campaign. The State Department nonetheless released its human-rights report finding the campaign to be rife with human-rights violations, including extrajudicial killings and basic disregard for human rights.

When Vladimir Putin won another presidential term, the intergovernmental Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe released a report criticizing the election as irregular and unfair. Perhaps sensing a theme, White House staffers warned Trump against appearing to endorse the election, writing “DO NOT CONGRATULATE” on the notes for his call with Putin. Trump ignored them and congratulated Putin anyway. While reporters noted the discrepancy between Trump’s apparent position and the OSCE report, the State Department spokeswoman at the time, Heather Nauert, said, “We have every reason to believe that the [report’s] conclusions are correct.”

Perhaps the most dramatic example came in the wake of the white-supremacist attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, that killed a peaceful protester. Trump infamously said that “both sides” were at fault for the violence and refused to treat the entire march as a white-supremacist endeavor. In a highly unusual move, the military chiefs took to Twitter to condemn the attacks and the underlying racism, though they didn’t refer to Trump directly. Meanwhile, then UN Ambassador Nikki Haley and Attorney General Jeff Sessions likewise condemned the attacks without rebuking the president. But Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state at the time, was more direct on the matter. When pressed on whether Trump’s “both sides” comments about Charlottesville reflected American values, Tillerson said, “The president speaks for himself.”

Pause for a moment over those words. A subordinate officer of the U.S. government declared—in public and without consequence—that the president of the United States did not speak for the country, the government, or the officer himself. Trump later fired Tillerson, but not for this.

As the scandal over the president’s interactions with Ukraine unfolded, executive-branch officials openly defied his direction to not testify before Congress. Not only did these officials ignore their boss’s instruction by appearing in the House, they went on to contradict the White House’s account of the facts. They then returned to their posts, carrying out the regular business of the executive branch.

In the American constitutional structure, this sort of executive defiance of the president is akin to a body’s rejection of a transplanted organ. The consequences may be a presidency that will be much harder to manage in the future. Trump complains of a “deep state” that operates independently of the president. The slander has a quality of self-fulfilling prophecy. One of the consequences, after all, of Trump’s mismanagement is a presidency with less control over the government; the bureaucracy today is far from a “deep state,” but its actions are less transparent than before. None of this is good.

It might be temporary. If the presidency returns to the mean, the executive branch may snap back toward unity too. There is some reason to expect this. After all, the formal authorities of the president have not changed. A future president could restore the executive to unity by being intolerant of executive freelancing. The executive has fractured only because Trump has let it fracture, because he tolerates a chaotic disunity that other presidents have not allowed and that future presidents can choose not to allow. It’s hard to imagine, in fact, future presidents tolerating the kind of insubordination Trump experiences daily, from which he seems to benefit so little and suffer so much.

But there is an alternative possibility, which is that Trump’s highly expressive presidency, a presidency that has the president in the role of entertaining and engaging the public, may have staying power, and that lessened presidential control over the executive branch is, to one degree or another, an organic feature of the expressive presidency.

There’s a quieter side to the breakdown of the unitary executive—one that is less visible than the public defiance. That’s the daily efforts to manipulate the president and maneuver around him by staff and cabinet alike. The comic side of this is the sort of infantilization that shows up in the toddler-in-chief thread. But there’s a less comic side, too.

In the summer of 2018, The New York Times reported on the machinations of John Bolton—the president’s then national security adviser—to get NATO countries to agree on their joint communiqué before the NATO summit in Brussels, which Trump was planning to attend. The reason? “To prevent President Trump from upending a formal policy agreement” by throwing the kind of tantrum at the summit that his own staff suspected he might. The feverish diplomacy to get an agreement before the summit event began, the paper reported, was “a sign of the lengths to which the president’s top advisers will go to protect a key and longstanding international alliance from Mr. Trump’s unpredictable antipathy.” Bolton, a highly controversial figure, at the time faced little public criticism for shielding U.S. alliance policy from the personality of the president he served.

Other examples of this tendency are legion. Perhaps the most famous came in the anonymous September 2018 op-ed in The New York Times, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” By a writer who claimed to be “a senior official in the Trump administration,” the article asserted “that many of the senior officials in [Trump’s] own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” The author described how “many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.” Most, he or she said, “are working to insulate their operations from his whims.” And while sometimes “cast as villains by the media … they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always successful.” The anonymous author went on to publish a book-length account, entitled A Warning.

The journalist Bob Woodward’s book  Fear is replete with other examples. It opens with Gary Cohn, then Trump’s chief economic adviser, stealing off the Resolute desk (the main desk in the Oval Office) a one-page letter that would have terminated the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement. Cohn was worried that if Trump saw the draft letter, which was dated September 1, 2017, he would sign it. So he removed it and placed it in a blue folder marked “KEEP.”

“I stole it off his desk,” Cohn later said. “I wouldn’t let him see it. He’s never going to see that document. Got to protect the country.” Trump didn’t notice. And when then Staff Secretary Rob Porter discovered that there were other copies, he and Cohn made sure all of them were removed. “Cohn and Porter worked together to derail what they believed were Trump’s most impulsive and dangerous orders,” Woodward wrote. “That document and others like it just disappeared.”

The defiance wasn’t limited to trade deals or White House staff. Early in his presidency, Trump—horrified by the gas attack by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that killed large numbers of civilians—got on the phone with then Defense Secretary Mattis and declared, “Let’s fucking kill him. Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them.” Mattis agreed and said he would get right on it. When he hung up, however, he said to staff, “We’re not going to do any of that.” The real policy? “We’re going to be much more measured.”

This sort of subterfuge of presidential will is perhaps inevitable when, as Tillerson put it in one argument with then National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, “the president can’t make a decision. He doesn’t know how to make a decision. He won’t make a decision. He makes a decision and then changes his mind a couple of days later.” Such subterfuge has undoubtedly saved the country from policy disasters. But it’s also poisonous stuff. Nobody elected these men to run the government, after all. One big piece of the argument for the unitary executive is that it creates clear accountability for policy and policy outcomes. But if the president’s staff and cabinet officers openly contradict him and gleefully undermine him internally or just ignore him entirely, who is accountable for what?

The stakes in this question are high. Years ago, while speaking on a panel, Brad Berenson—who served in the White House counsel’s office under President George W. Bush—made an arresting statement about the American presidency. The presidency, Berenson argued, is an office of terrifying power. There is no question, at least as a matter of domestic constitutional law, that the president has the legal authority under some circumstances to order a preemptive nuclear strike on Tehran or Beijing—or any foreign capital of his choosing, for that matter. That decision, and the ensuing consequences for our planet, rests with a single individual.

Berenson observed that there is only one thing more frightening than an American president who has such power in his sole command. And that is an American president who does not have that power. Imagine trying to reach a decision on a nuclear launch by committee in the moment of gravest emergency, the theory goes. The possibilities range from a reduction in flexibility and agility to outright paralysis.

The nuclear-launch power is the ultimate expression of the personal presidency that lies beneath the modern layers of process that have built up around the presidency. By virtue of sheer destructive force, nuclear weapons have a clarifying effect on conversations related to presidential power, unitary command, process, and the conduct of military and foreign affairs.

At noon on January 20, 2017, Trump very personally came into control of the nuclear arsenal. And suddenly a system designed to combine operational effectiveness with accountability—and designed to maximize security benefits—started to seem like not such a great idea after all. The former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper put it succinctly in a television interview: “In a fit of pique, [if] he decides to do something about Kim Jong Un, there’s actually very little to stop him. The whole system is built to ensure rapid response if necessary. So there’s very little in the way of controls over exercising a nuclear option, which is pretty damn scary.”

Reasonable minds will differ on whether Berenson’s argument is generally correct and personal presidential launch authority is the worst idea in the world except for all of the others. But Clapper’s suggestion raises the question of which is scarier: the personal presidency with launch authority in the wrong hands or a non-Hamiltonian executive with its hands tied in a crisis. Clapper’s sentiment was echoed by the commentators and members of Congress who, within weeks of Trump’s taking office, began discussing curtailing the president’s unilateral powers. Some commentators tried to mute the reality that Trump had personal launch authority, speculating that military officers would refuse an illegal or deeply imprudent order to launch a nuclear weapon. Hope springs eternal that process—any process—will save us, after all. But the reality is that the more fateful the decision, the more personal and less process driven the presidency is, or can be.

At least it’s not how the traditional presidency is supposed to work.

But Trump is proposing something new here, even if it’s wholly un-theorized and not thought through. He’s proposing a presidency that does not enforce unity, in which the president imposes no discipline on agencies, staff, or cabinet secretaries—even while demanding unswerving personal loyalty. The executive is characterized less by energy than by mania; meanwhile, the president tolerates the propagation of multiple policies and the undermining of his own authority, thus eroding the core value of accountability that executive control is supposed to bring.

______

This article was adapted from Hennessey and Wittes’s upcoming book, Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump’s War on the World’s Most Powerful Office.

*********

[thisdaynews]

How a Trump aide returns from exile: The David Bossie saga

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-a-trump-aide-returns-from-exile-the-david-bossie-saga/

How a Trump aide returns from exile: The David Bossie saga

He went from being a top campaign adviser and possible chief of staff candidate to the ostensible subject of a blistering Trump campaignstatementissued after allegations emerged that Bossie was using one of his political groups to profit off the president’s name. And then, just like that, he was back on Trump’s call list, given a campaign role and welcomed on presidential trips.

He accomplished the turn-around using a playbook that has become all-too-familiar in the Trump era: Defend the president, keep company with those who could influence the president and score a one-on-one meeting to make your case.

“There’s always a pathway to redemption,” said a former staffer who is also back in the fold after being pushed out at one point.

Over the past few weeks, Bossie has seemed omnipresent at Trump events. He sat alongside Trump’s top Capitol Hill allies at the House impeachment hearings. He flew with Vice President Mike Pence on Air Force Two. He was seen standing with Trump and Pence as they watched the House impeachment votes backstage at a Battle Creek, Mich., arena before a campaign rally, according to a person who was backstage.

The campaign has also brought him on board,naminghim the co-chairman of Trump’s Maryland campaign team and speaks regularly with the president and his re-election team, according to six people familiar with the situation.

His quick and quiet return followed an extended one-on-one meeting with Trump in the Oval Office in August in which Bossie refuted the allegations against him. He took a few minutes to outline his group’s ongoing political activities, including its ad campaign in support of the Trump agenda, and to explain to the president that he was working on his behalf, the people said.

The meeting had been set up by a senior White House official but came after several others who are influential with Trump persuaded the president he needed Bossie, especially during an impeachment fight. Those outside advisers include Reps. Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan, former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, according to those familiar with the situation. Fox News host Sean Hannity also put in a good word for Bossie, according to one of the people. Hannity didn’t return a request for comment.

“There’s a handful of people in Washington, D.C. who know what the impeachment process is like,” said lobbyist Bryan Lanza, who worked for Bossie at the conservative political group Citizens United before joining the Trump campaign in 2016. “Dave Bossie not only knows the impeachment process he knows how to fight the impeachment process and that’s what makes him a valuable asset to President Trump.”

Bossie isn’t alone. Trump confers regularly with fired aides, including Lewandowski and Priebus. He is expected to bring back his ousted personal aide John McEntee to the White House. And he even appears to have forgiven former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who he once said was “dumped like a dog by almost everyone,” but now has promoted Bannon’s new impeachment-focused radio show and podcast, “War Room,” at least seven times on Twitter.

Bossie declined to answer specific questions for this report, but did pass along a statement.

“I’ve been a proud supporter of President Trump from the beginning,” he wrote. “During the 2016 campaign, I had the privilege to serve as his deputy campaign manager, and since he’s been president it’s been my honor to help in any capacity I can. I look forward to continue working in support of President Trump’s agenda and his re-election in 2020 to keep America great.”

While Bossie’s career in politics spans back to the Reagan-era, he started to make a name for himself in conservative circles investigating Bill and Hillary Clinton as a Senate and House staffer in the 1990s.

Bossie’s Clinton focus continued once he left Capitol Hill. At Citizens United, which Bossie would eventually lead, Bossie worked aggressively to file public records requests and lawsuits meant to uncover damaging information on Hillary Clinton.

He also helped produce documentaries meant to derail Clinton’s presidential aspirations. The push to air “Hillary: The Movie” before the 2008 Democratic primaries was blocked by the federal government. A subsequent lawsuit over that documentary led to the landmark Supreme Court case that opened the door to more unregulated spending in elections from outside groups.

In 2010, Trump came into Bossie’s life. Bossie first met Trump through a mutual friend, prominent Republican donor Steve Wynn, while organizing an annual charity golf tournament at a club Trump had just bought in Sterling, Va., according to a book Bossie wrote with Lewandowski.

Soon after, Trump and Bossie became friends. Bossie was a connection into the political world as the real estate mogul toyed with running for office. It was Bossie who introduced Trump to both Bannon and Lewandowski, two people who later became key components of Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Bossie also assumed a critical role on Trump’s haphazard team, taking on the role of deputy campaign manager in September 2016. Two months later, after Trump had just shocked the world on election night, Bossie got a shout out from the president-elect during his victory speech.

When Trump’s team turned to preparing to govern, Bossie was tapped deputy executive director of the presidential transition.

“A friend of mine for many years,” Trump said when he first hired Bossie. “Solid. Smart. Loves politics, knows how to win.”

During the transition, Bossie was even considered for a White House job, likely deputy chief of staff for operations, which is responsible for the daily administration of the White House. But Priebus and others decided his hard-charging style would be a better fit on the outside, where he’s popular with the base, according to two people familiar with the situation. Bossie took to TV to defend the president and pumped out two glowing books on Trump with Lewandowski.

“David Bossie has worked hard in the trenches of the conservative nationalist movement and supported Trump before it was a fashionable Republican stance,” said another outside ally. “He’s very well regarded by the Trump base of loyal voters and activists.”

By late 2018, Bossie was well regarded enough that he was briefly mentioned as a possible candidate for White House chief of staff after Trump pushed out John Kelly in December. “This White House needs a Bossie chief of staff,” read an endorsement in the Washington Examiner at the time. The idea never took off.

But just a few months later, Bossie suddenly found himself on the outside looking in.

In May, Bossie wasaccusedof raising millions off Trump’s name for the Presidential Coalition, a Trump-supporting political group, but spending little on political activities. The allegations were made based on a review of Internal Revenue Service filings by the media organization Axios and the Campaign Legal Center, which advocates for a reduced influence of money in politics. The Presidential Coalition, which Bossie founded in 2005 to support President George W. Bush, had been using fundraising materials featuring images of Bossie and Trump together.

Without mentioning Bossie by name, Trump authorized his campaign to issue a severe rebuke, urging authorities to investigate groups that used Trump’s likeness to make money.

“President Trump’s campaign condemns any organization that deceptively uses the President’s name, likeness, trademarks, or branding and confuses voters,” the campaign said at the time.

Bossie was out.

Bossie disputes the ratio of money spent on political activities and faults the reporting for not including the amount of money the Presidential Coalition had in the bank, which was being stockpiled for an ad campaign, according to a person close to the Presidential Coalition. Others familiar with the situation said groups, such as the Presidential Coalition, need to spend a considerable amount of money to raise money.

“Dave Bossie didn’t do anything wrong,” said Michael Caputo, who served as a campaign adviser in 2016. “In reality, Bossie didn’t even do anything differently. … He was raising money the way conservatives have been fundraising for 40 years. President Trump may not like the way that works, but the president doesn’t like the way Washington works. It is what it is.”

At the time, Bossie said he was being targeted by “unabashed left-wing activists” at the Campaign Legal Center, which has reported it received donations from left-leaning organizations.

“We are unfairly targeted by left-wing smear tactics because we are outspoken defenders of the president,” he wrote in a statement at the time.

The Presidential Coalition, an affiliate of Citizens United, says it has spent $3 million in 2019 on promoting Trump’s agenda and contributing to state and local candidates and groups.

That includes$1.35million on TV and Facebook ads opposing impeachment in 17 House districts in New Mexico, New York, Michigan and South Carolina. The group expects to spend roughly another $1 million on anti-impeachment ads after the House sends the articles of impeachment to the Senate, according to the person close to the Presidential Coalition.

This past week, in response to questions about Bossie, the Trump campaign issued a glowing statement without mentioning the Presidential Coalition.

“David Bossie’s hard work and dedication were key to President Trump’s election in 2016,” said spokesman Tim Murtaugh. “We look forward to working closely with him in 2020 to re-elect the president. His insights and experience will be invaluable.”

In other words, Bossie’s back.

Daniel Lippman contributed to this report.

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New Foils for the Right: Google and Facebook

If the mainstream media is a perennial enemy of the right, Big Tech is a fresh and novel foe, arguably more relevant to 2018. Facebook, Google and their ilk are facing tough questions about their inability to police the content they distribute, including Russian propaganda during the 2016 presidential campaign. The companies have also been accused by lawmakers, critics and activists of monopolistic tendencies and manipulative product design.

The critique from conservatives, in contrast, casts the big tech companies as censorious and oppressive, all too eager to stifle right-wing content in an effort to mollify liberal critics.

“This could end up being the free speech issue of our time,” said Alex Marlow, editor in chief of Breitbart News, which has published articles accusing Google and Facebook of, among other sins, political bias. “The Silicon Valley elites are saying: ‘We don’t care what you want to see — we know what you should see. We know better.’”

Big Tech is easily associated with West Coast liberalism and Democratic politics, making it a fertile target for the right. And operational opacity at Facebook, Google and Twitter, which are reluctant to reveal details about their algorithms and internal policies, can leave them vulnerable, too.

“It’s the perfect foil,” said Eli Pariser, a former executive director of the liberal activist group MoveOn.org and the author of “The Filter Bubble,” a book about how consumers find information online. “There’s not even a real basis to establish objective research about what’s happening on Facebook, because it’s closed.”

Google, Facebook and Twitter loomed large at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Md., where dozens of guests squeezed into a standing-room-only ballroom for a discussion called “Suppression of Conservative Views on Social Media: A First Amendment Issue.”

Among the panelists were James O’Keefe, the guerrilla filmmaker who has tried to undermine news outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN, and James Damore, an engineer fired by Google after he circulated a memo arguing that biological differences accounted for the low number of women in engineering.

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Mr. Damore — a new celebrity in the right-wing world, who, in an interview, said of his first foray to CPAC, “There’s definitely a lot of people that want to take selfies” — described a culture of dogmatic liberalism at Google.

“There are political activists in all of these companies that want to actively push a liberal agenda,” he said. “Why does it matter? Because these companies are so ubiquitous and powerful that they are controlling all the means of mass communication.”

Before Mr. Damore spoke, organizers distributed baseball caps to guests emblazoned with an illustration of Twitter’s bird logo, upside-down and with its eyes crossed out.

The panelists accused social media platforms of delisting their videos or stripping them of advertising. Such charges have long been staples of far-right online discourse, especially among YouTubers, but Mr. Schweizer’s project is poised to bring such arguments to a new — and potentially larger — audience.

Photo

“There are political activists in all of these companies that want to actively push a liberal agenda,” James Damore, an engineer fired by Google, said at the Conservative Political Action Conference last month. Credit Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times

Mr. Schweizer, 53, was a speechwriting consultant to President George W. Bush. His reporting has been cited by The Times and “60 Minutes,” although he often uses a bombastic style akin to that of Breitbart News.

He is also the president of the Government Accountability Institute, a conservative nonprofit organization. He and Mr. Bannon founded it with funding from the family of Robert Mercer, the billionaire hedge fund manager and donor to Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign.

Mr. Schweizer declined to identify the film’s financial backers. A spokeswoman for the institute said it was not involved in the project.

In some ways, the complaints from the right about Big Tech mirror the grumblings of legacy news organizations, which have expressed concern that online algorithms wield too much power over how readers gain access to their content.

Jeffrey A. Zucker, the president of CNN, derided Google and Facebook as “monopolies” and called for regulators to step in during a speech in Spain last month, saying the tech hegemony is “the biggest issue facing the growth of journalism in the years ahead.” And former President Barack Obama said at an off-the-record conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last month that he worried Americans were living in “entirely different realities” and that large tech companies like Facebook were “not just an invisible platform, they’re shaping our culture in powerful ways.” The contents of the speech were published by Reason magazine.

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In the right’s more internet-savvy quarters, tech platforms have been a regular — and fruitful — subject of discussion since before the 2016 election. In May that year, Facebook was forced to respond to claims that the curators of its Trending Topics feature had suppressed conservative news sources, a controversy that called attention to Facebook’s editorial power.

That charge of editorial bias was echoed last weekend by Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist behind Infowars, who accused YouTube of planning to delete his organization’s account, a claim that was widely shared among conservatives.

YouTube did delete some videos that accused teenage survivors of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting of being “crisis actors,” and it issued “strikes,” or warnings, to the accounts of Infowars and Jerome Corsi, a conservative author and Infowars contributor. (YouTube denied that it had plans to delete the Infowars account.)

Facebook has also caught flak for adjusting the algorithm for its News Feed to emphasize posts from “friends, family and groups” over content from public pages. The change was part of an effort by the company to answer criticism, but also to reinvigorate its oldest and most profitable product, which recently recorded a decline in American daily users for the first time in its history.

The Facebook adjustment has affected virtually every media organization that is partly dependent on the platform for audiences, but it appears to have hit some harder than others. They include right-wing sites like Gateway Pundit and the millennial-focused Independent Journal Review, which was forced to lay off staff members last month.

The social news giant BuzzFeed recently bought ads on Facebook with the message, “Facebook is taking the news out of your News Feed, but we’ve got you covered,” directing users to download its app. Away from the political scrum, the viral lifestyle site LittleThings, once a top publisher on the platform, announced last week that it would cease operations, blaming “a full-on catastrophic update” to Facebook’s revised algorithms.

Right-wing media has pounced. In late February, citing statistics from the social analytics firm NewsWhip, Breitbart published an article on the effects on the president’s Facebook page with the headline “EXCLUSIVE: Trump’s Facebook Engagement Declined By 45 Percent Following Algorithm Change.” The drop, the article insinuated, occurred “following a year of pressure from left-wing employees and the mainstream media for ‘allowing’ the president to win the 2016 general election.”

Still, the brewing backlash did not stop Google and Facebook from courting the very crowd that now seems ready to declare them enemies. Both companies were sponsors at this year’s CPAC, leading to a few awkward moments.

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Facebook, which sponsored a “help desk” for attendees featuring smiling representatives and cookies frosted with emoji icons, provided a demonstration of its virtual reality program, Oculus. But the company was forced to apologize for including a first-person shooter simulation, given that the conference took place a week after the Parkland massacre.

Google, which has co-sponsored CPAC three of the past six years, held a lavish reception for attendees featuring an open bar and a roaring outdoor fireplace.

Mr. Marlow, the editor of Breitbart, was asked in an interview what he thought about Google’s giving a party in the midst of a crowd that is gunning for it.

“The least they can do,” Mr. Marlow said, “is buy us a drink.”

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MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM and JOHN HERRMAN

The post New Foils for the Right: Google and Facebook appeared first on dailygate.

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American Jews hear the footsteps of white nationalists and worry

Chanting “White lives matter! You will not replace us! and Jews will not replace us!,” several hundred white nationalists and white supremacists carrying torches marched in a parade through the University of Virginia campus. (Photo: Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post via Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — The day after the election in 2016, Nancy Goldstein, a 55-year-old Brooklyn writer and academic who has never been to Israel, opened up her computer and began the process of applying for Israeli citizenship.

In Washington, D.C., 49-year-old entrepreneur David Bennahum began the complex process of moving his family and startup business to Montreal, finally establishing all four of them and the company there in July.

The one thing they had in common: They are both Jewish. And both had looked at the campaign of Donald J. Trump and decided they would be safer as Jews and as liberals if they had an exit strategy from America.

The question of living as a Jew in America under Trump has provoked varying degrees of anxiety in the year since he tweeted out an anti-Semitic meme about Hillary Clinton — the infamous Star of David tweet — and then sought to defend it as a “Sheriff’s Star.” That’s when I first started to hear the half-panicked, half-joking conversations about exit strategies if Trump won and considerations about where to go if America were ever to become unsafe. A friend whose grandparents had fled Germany talked to her mother about going back there. A half-Jewish, half-Australian friend decided to pursue — and ultimately secured — dual citizenship and an Australian passport.

Contemplating worst-case scenarios is something practically encoded in the Jewish DNA, a legacy of 2,000 years of persecution culminating in the slaughter of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust less than a century ago. And given that most American Jews are Democrats and political progressives, the sense of foreboding that Trump has provoked has been compounded by his actions and rhetoric against other groups Jews have stood in solidarity with in America: refugees, immigrants, religious minorities, people fighting for civil rights.

Now the events in Charlottesville, Va., have triggered more difficult historical memories, and forced some Jews to freshly confront troubling questions about their personal and community safety. And it’s forcing many of them to weigh how much they trust America against how much they trust their own fears about where their country is going under Trump.

“What happened last Shabbat was terrifying. Seeing Nazis marching with torches on American soil touches our deepest vulnerability, our collective trauma. Hearing the leader of our country refuse to take a stand against them reminds us of so many closed borders, so many who turned away when our parents and grandparents were running for their lives,” Rabbi Rachel Timoner of Congregation Beth Elohim wrote in a letter to her Brooklyn, N.Y., congregation urging them to not feel alone in their fears, and to stand with in the wake of the Charlottesville car attack.

Three days after Charlottesville, Eran Greenberg, a 42-year-old doctor who works in Northern Virginia, had a different response: He retook possession of the gun he’d bought years ago but kept stored outside his home. “Seeing this up three blocks from my house set me off,” he said, sharing a photo of an Identity Evropa poster proclaiming “Our destiny is ours” on a lamppost in Old Town, Alexandria, Va. Identity Evropa is an American white supremacist group, and the offices of “alt-right” leader Richard Spencer are in Alexandria, making the city a hub of white nationalist activity.

“Every Jewish person I know feels pretty much exactly the same way. And it’s this sort of sense of dread because we don’t know when we’re being unnecessarily frightened and when to take it seriously. It’s the question that’s been asked by Jews around the world: When is it time to go? When is it time to leave? And when is it too late?” asked Kaili Joy Gray, 39, a D.C.-based senior editor at Share Blue media, who unspooled a Twitter thread asking similar questions after Charlottesville.

“Most of the time for American Jews, now, in 2017, we feel pretty safe. We don’t necessarily stand out. We don’t necessarily get a lot of attention, and we are used to thinking about the horrible things that have happened throughout our history as historical things. And in the last few days we’ve seen Nazis, saluting Trump and saying ‘Heil Trump’ and it stirs anger and frustration and fear and makes you realize it’s not history, it’s right now and this movement — this hatred — is being fueled by the president of the United States and that’s terrifying,” she said.

The Ku Klux Klan protested on July 8, 2017 in Charlottesville, Va. (Photo: Chet Strange/Getty Images)

D.C.-area residents, like New Yorkers, have since Sept. 11 been urged to develop evacuation plans in the event of a terrorist attack, and many work in offices that continue to hand out emergency kits with items such as whistles and face masks. The fact that so many Jews live in communities that have already been on high alert or targeted by al-Qaeda doubtless contributes to the conversations about exit strategies and escape routes, along with the political environment and recent worries about a conflict with a nuclear North Korea. But mainly it’s Trump.

“My husband and I have talked about [having to leave] only since Trump took office. In the last half-year, we’ve said, you know it’s a possibility,” said Maia, 40, a business development specialist in Washington, D.C., who asked that I not to use her last name or place of employment.

“Thank God there’s an Israel and we have property there,” she added, noting that that would be the couple’s destination if they ever felt truly threatened in America. Israel, of course, routinely comes under rocket fire from armed militias and has been subjected to waves of terrorist attacks that dwarf anything seen in America.

“Personally, it’s not as threatening to me as 9/11,” Maia said of the neo-Nazi marchers. “That felt more like an assault. This feels like a lot of empty rhetoric without a lot of planning. I hope that this can bring us together like 9/11.”

Bennahum’s reasons for moving to Canada were more complex than just the attentiveness to politics that comes with being a son of a Jew who survived World War II in Nazi-occupied Romania. There were serious business incentives, such as not having to pay healthcare costs for his employees, thanks to Canada’s single-payer system. And he speaks French.

“What opened the deal was the election and then what closed it was the incentives offered by the federal government and the Quebec government to companies like mine to relocate engineers and resources,” he said.

But he also has a dark theory about what’s happening in America, where he sees a democracy that has been under assault since the 1994 Gingrich revolution. The “deeply bad” Bush v. Gore decision, the “nihilistic Republican Congress from 2010 forward,” and Clinton’s loss of the White House despite winning the popular vote are, along with Gingrich’s move to polarize Congress, “four sequential fundamental battering rams to the social norms of the republic” that have helped weaken the American project, he said.

“I put the chances at one in three that the republic is over. Full stop. That the grand American experiment, the world’s oldest continuous democracy — 240 years young — I put it at a one in three shot that it’s out. If Republicans hold Congress in 2018, it goes to one in two. And I think if Trump is reelected with a Republican Congress in 2020, it’s one in one. It is over. … It’s all going to be decided in the next, what, 41 months,” he said. “If I’m wrong, great, then I’ll come back. It’s not complicated. If I’m right, I’m really sorry.”

“I think everyone needs an exit strategy. It doesn’t mean you have to exit right away. But if you have not executed on your path out, you’re naive. If your plan is just to wait and see, that’s not a good story. We know how that ends. That ends in tears, at best,” he said.

Not everyone is so apocalyptic about the future for Jews in America.

“Give me a country and I will tell you we are a lot better off than that country in the Jewish community,” said Ira Forman, the former special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism at the U.S. State Department. “I’d much prefer being a Jew in the United States in terms of anti-Semitic threats than even Canada, France or the U.K.”

“Anti-Semitism in the U.S. has been almost qualitatively different from what we see overseas,” he said. “We are not in the ’30s, and we are not the German Jewish community in the 1930s. It is sure as heck not that. But we can’t be complacent.”

Fighting anti-Semitism is hard, and some of the most obvious approaches, such as taking down Twitter and Facebook accounts of white supremacists, don’t do as much to solve the problem as people might hope. What works best, what is most powerful, Forman said, is the power of social opprobrium.

“One thing we know a fair amount about is civil society speaking out. Heads of churches, civic leaders, business leaders, even common people — when people speak out and the haters pay a social cost, that’s a very powerful tool. We need a lot of folks to speak out. Not just political leaders. We need civil society to rise up,” he said. “It’s got to be consistent, it’s got to be long term and it’s got to be a lot of people.”

The Jews I’ve spoken with are less afraid that the U.S. government will turn on them with the organized ferocity of the Third Reich than that independent armed bands of anti-Semites and white supremacists will gain enough strength and engage in enough acts of terrorism, harassment and negative propaganda to bring what has been the golden age of America for Jews to an end.

Fear of civilian anti-Semitism and mob violence, and not just official state actions, is deeply grounded in the Jewish experience of non-state actors being the vanguard of anti-Semitic violence when egged on by government officials.

Toppled and damaged headstones rest on the ground at Mount Carmel Cemetery in Philadelphia. Pa., on Feb. 27, 2017. The Anti-Defamation League found an increase in cases of anti-Semitic intimidation and vandalism in 2016, evidence that anti-Jewish bias intensified during the election. (Photo: Jacqueline Larma/AP)

“The ‘very fine people’ comment sent shivers down my spine, because the Latvian man who led the murder of my grandfather’s family and the rest of the inhabitants of his tiny village ended up immigrating to Canada after World War II. He settled in Toronto, where I grew up, and in fact lived in the same suburb as I did, not far from my house,” said Lavi Soloway, 50, an immigration lawyer in Los Angeles who in 2004 became a U.S. citizen. “Why am I afraid? I know that ordinary people, patriotic nationalists, people with hatred for the other, specifically hatred for Jews, can be driven to insane acts of violence.”

“Those Charlottesville marchers are a danger to us all. And I cannot simply write them off as a small band of loonies, not with the president giving them succor,” he said.

And then there is the deep pain caused by watching elders taking note of the new anti-Semitism in their waning days.

“When the Nazis invaded [my grandmother’s] hometown of Lodz, Poland, she was 18 years old. She watched as her parents and all the members of her family were killed. She survived three years in the Lodz Ghetto and internment in Auschwitz, Hainichen and Theresienstadt concentration camps,” said Soloway.

“She has lived a remarkable life, and thus it is so monstrously unjust that after having succeeded to rebuild and raise a family, and see her grandchildren grow to adulthood and start families of their own, she is now confronted with the rise of racist nationalism and anti-Semitism, not just in the U.S. but certainly in Europe as well.”

Children too have been frightened in a way that hurts. “Yesterday my 9 year-old saw some footage from Charlottesville. Then she asked me if there would be a second Holocaust,”  tweeted writer Peter Beinart on Friday.

Younger Jews in general are having trouble reconciling the idea of Nazi marches in America with how they think about this country, said Michael Uram, executive director and campus rabbi at the University of Pennsylvania, Trump’s alma mater.  A lot of students, particularly those at large universities in major cities who grew up on the coasts, “think of anti-Semitism as something that existed for their grandparents and parents.”

To confront it as something they too might have to fight is jarring. “There was an incredible sense of shock and disorientation that all this bubbled up,” he said. “They have not felt marginalized or prohibited from doing anything — and yet the story of anti-Semitism is coming up. It’s very hard for students on campus to integrate, to understand how it fits into their Jewish story.”

Some scoff at the idea that Americans would ever turn against Jews in a threatening way. Jewish Americans are, by and large, well assimilated, educated and successful. Trump’s own daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism when she married Jared Kushner, one of the president’s most trusted advisers. The public views Jews more warmly than any other religious faith, according  to a Pew Research Center study from 2014, although the numbers are higher among older Americans than those under 30. As well, “Jews receive their most positive ratings from whites,” according to Pew, demonstrating that there is a deep well of good faith toward Jews among the population from which white supremacists seek to recruit.

The widespread public condemnations of the marchers in Charlottesville and the rejection of the president by business, arts and charity leaders since his widely panned remarks Tuesday has been heartening to opponents of white nationalism. In Boston on Saturday, thousands of anti-white-supremacy marchers — the official police estimate was 40,000 — turned out to counter a “Free Speech” rally by Trump supporters and white supremacists that drew fewer than 100 attendees.

But fear is visceral, not rational. “Rationally, the reaction to Charlottesville by everyone in America who isn’t Trump is reassuring — it suggests there is no significant constituency for anti-Semitism in America. Irrationally, I’ve been thinking about the mechanics of leaving the country and even of last-ditch resistance, ever since last November,” said Adam Kirsch, a poet and literary critic in New York City.

Jews make up only 2.2 percent of the U.S. population, so even if only a tiny minority of white Christians choose to agitate against them, it could be felt profoundly given the broader demographics of the country. The Ku Klux Klan at its peak in the 1920s had a membership that constituted roughly 4 percent of Americans and was able to wield terror against African-Americans throughout the South.

The increasingly bitter polarization of U.S. politics is also a troublesome turn for Jews, in that they overwhelming vote for only one political party: The Democrats, now out of power at every level of national government. Of all the measured religions, Jews voted for Clinton at the highest percent, casting nearly three-quarters of their ballots for her and 24 percent for Trump, according to Pew . By comparison, only 16 percent of white, born-again Evangelical Christians voted for Clinton.

“The Jewish community has learned to live with the fact that one of the parties nominated — and White House came to be inhabited by — someone whose most fervent supporters are white nationalists racists and anti-Semites and those are the supporters he takes care not to alienate,” said Yehudah Mirsky, associate professor of the practice of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University in Boston.

“Does [Charlottesville] make Jews feel more threatened in America? It can’t not,” he said. That said, he added: “I don’t think American Jews have reason to be terrified. American society and American democracy are strong and healthy in all sorts of ways, but there are disturbing currents around, and president of the United States takes every opportunity to fan the flames.”

“Jews with historical memories always have their passports up to date, that’s just a matter of course,” Mirsky said. But “this isn’t France, where a Jew can’t walk around with his yarmulke on his head without fear of being beaten up.”

“Frankly one reason we don’t have that in America, is that as far as I can tell American Muslims are not anti-Semites,” he added.

Indeed Benjamin Sax, 42, a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Maryland, said his group has found that Jews, with their refugee experiences, and Muslims, currently fighting Trump’s ban on refugees and Muslims, have been coming together since the election to build bridges around opposition to the president. Rather than fueling anti-Semitism, he sees Muslims in America making common cause with Jews.

“One silver lining is that my organization has responded to numerous requests, mostly by Jewish and Muslim women, looking to connect, so that’s actually been a pretty amazing community. And allies who wouldn’t normally align are finding their ways to our organization.”

“I live in Baltimore so I don’t feel at all under siege,” says Sax, but he too has felt compelled to consider over the past year to consider where he would go if he couldn’t stay in America. “I wouldn’t move to Israel, I lived there for five years. I thought about Germany. And I know that there’s a strange irony in that, but my wife grew up in Europe.” Denmark, which they visited on a recent trip, also looked attractive. “It’s very easy to get swept away in a European culture and ignore the demons that are in their closets,” though, he noted.

There is also the option that many Jews are taking for now, to stay and fight. Build the self-styled resistance movement. Protest, organize and trust in America. “As the white Jewish mother of a black teen, I deal with my ‘Jewish anxiety and safety concerns’ by teaching marshaling for demonstrations and nonviolent civil disobedience and by helping to organize fierce, disruptive but peaceful protests of varying sizes. Building resistant, defiant, loud community is my jam,” Alexis Danzig, a member of the anti-Trump group Rise and Resist said, quoting from my query.

“And then I lie awake at night wondering how to get my kid out of the country.”

Seven months into Trump’s first term, Goldstein has completed all the paperwork and been approved for Israeli citizenship upon completing one week of residency there, but it’s a step so fraught, she is still hesitant to take it.

The president’s reaction to Charlottesville wasn’t a wake-up call for her but an example of what she feared and expected from his presidency. What she really wants, though, is to feel safe here again, not to leave America.

[mediacultures1318303-blog]

GIRL WRITES FIRST BLOG POST: YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT! CLICK TO FIND OUT…

No matter how much we try to deny it, all of us are guilty of spreading gossip without really knowing whether what we are saying is ‘the whole truth and nothing but the truth’, often oblivious to the impact it has. When I was little I remember a friend of my older sister telling me that if you ate the seeds of a watermelon, they would stay in your stomach and eventually grow into a tree inside you. The image of roots and leaves sprouting out of my mouth and ears resulted in me being terrified of eating watermelons for three years. Of course, it wasn’t until I voiced my concerns to my mother through tears after accidentally swallowing a seed that I learnt the real and rather underwhelming truth. 

In essence, the issue from this traumatic flashback of my youth is strikingly similar to the concept discussed in today's post: Fake News.

It’s fairly safe to say that all of us (especially those who have grown up with the internet) have come across some form of fake news within our lives. The aim of this annoying phenomenon that has exploded in recent years is to instill either a fear or specific belief within the person reading it. There can be multiple motivations behind fake news - to increase viewers, incite hatred of a group or community, support political beliefs, or simply to make money.

Some may be familiar with well known instances of fake news making the headlines in history, whether it be that time people thought a radio reading of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds was an actual broadcast of an alien attack (which in itself was a fake news story), or when Andrew Wakefield published the now debunked article in The Lancet claiming a link between the MMR vaccination and autism that sparked the anti-vaccination movement.

The headlines of fake news articles tend to lean towards being sensational and eye-catching, claiming to introduce never before seen/hidden scandalous or incredible information to the viewer (provided, of course, they click in to read more first). Fake news websites also often copy the layout and style of real news sites like the BBC or CNN. The people who produce fake news are deliberately trying to mislead the audience, and tend to be extremely subjective, with most focusing on issues many would deem sensitive or controversial. From viral celebrity death hoaxes to politically motivated articles steeped in fictitious events and statistics, fake news can range from spreading seemingly harmless trivia to potentially dangerous false information.

This information has already severely impacted hundreds of thousands of people across the globe, playing its part in what they eat (traumatic flashback), who they interact with, and even who they vote for. The elephant in the room in this instance would be the recent US election and, of course, the massive role that fake news played when it came to preying on potential voters. 

One of the most influential of these stories was titled “Hillary Clinton in 2013: ‘I would like to see people like Donald Trump run for office; they’re honest and can’t be bought”, posted on the now-deleted fake news site ConservativeState.com. It went viral, bringing in over 481,000 views within a week, despite the content essentially being made up. The comment Clinton allegedly made in the title was manufactured from a private speech she gave to Goldman Sachs that leaked on wikileaks about how she would like to see more successful business people in politics. Nowhere in the interview did she mention or endorse Donald Trump (her political opposition) in any way.

Hillary Clinton was slandered as ‘fake’ throughout her entire democratic campaign, dubbed ‘crooked Hillary’ by Trump supporters, and thousands of widespread news stories like this were spread to perpetuate an image of her as someone who was not to be trusted. Though it became apparent after it went viral that the story was fake, it was too late; hundreds of thousands of people had already viewed and shared the article without realising it as untrue. And somewhere, far away in Macedonia, a teenager in a small town like Veles watched the money trickle into his bank account from the ad revenue he collected as a result of his fake news story hitting the big time.

Throughout the US 2016 election the internet saw a spike in fake news, especially those that targeted conservatives (as these proved to perform the best in terms of views). Though that particular story is now taken down, there is no denying the damage it has done and the underlying message it spreads: that it is vital we ensure that the news we read is coming from a source we trust and believe in. It is all too easy to take news at face value and become carried away with a story when it may be just that - a story. 

Generations only become more and more cynical and wary of government conspiracies and hidden truths within society, and there may be some merit to articles that claim to tell you something no one else has - but it can be hard to investigate the rabbit hole without simultaneously falling down it. If fake news tells us anything, it is to ensure that we keep ourselves in check when it comes to who we trust with our time and who we let manipulate our opinions. Just because it looks legitimate doesn’t necessarily mean that it will tell you what you need to know.

After all, if it looks too interesting to be true, it probably isn’t. 

[newstfionline]

Trump said he’d do a lot—fast. Expectations, meet reality.

By Robert Costa and Philip Rucker, Washington Post, January 13, 2017

Running for president, Donald Trump promised an immediate revolution--to quickly rebuild America’s cities, overhaul the tax code and deport millions of illegal immigrants.

Just this week, Trump vowed to get started right away building a wall at the border with Mexico (“I don’t want to wait”) and repealing and replacing President Obama’s health-care law (“probably the same day, could be the same hour”).

But ahead of his swearing-in next Friday, the extraordinarily high expectations that Trump has set are running into the logjam known as American democracy. While every new president confronts Washington’s sluggish culture, Trump’s more grandiose and hard-line ideas could face unprecedented challenges--logistical and even constitutional.

Trump imagines a presidency of vision and velocity, but his big-ticket items cannot be done by presidential edict, no matter how loud Trump’s demands might be or assured he is of the popularity of his proposals. They will require consensus on Capitol Hill, emerging from a deliberative process that takes time and the navigation of a labyrinth of constituencies and special interests.

Trump’s team has devised a full legislative calendar with congressional leaders that begins with health care, but already Trump’s ambitions have been slowed somewhat. The Republican majorities in both chambers are moving swiftly to dismantle parts of current law but are still discussing how exactly to replace it. A House vote scheduled Friday on a budget measure, which includes steps to begin repeal of the health law, was preceded by hours of skittishness among both conservative and moderate members about whether Republicans were moving too soon.

Similarly, a spending package to construct roads, bridges and airports--a priority for leaders of both political parties--could get bogged down by squabbles over disbursement.

“I don’t think the government was built for speed,” said Sen. John Cornyn (Texas). The upper chamber’s No. 2 Republican added, “Things always happen more slowly than you want when you’re in the majority and trying to get something done.”

Several Trump advisers acknowledge that congressional procedures dictate that “the wheels of change move slowly,” as one put it. But Kellyanne Conway, the incoming White House counselor, said she was confident that Trump’s agenda will gain momentum.

“The Trump effect on Washington, D.C., is not going to be a fresh coat of paint on a rusty structure,” Conway said. “It’s going to be more of a gut renovation.”

Conway predicted that Trump will bring new energy to a city that has operated on a “glacial pace,” as well as “infuse levels of accountability, metrics and deliverables in a system that seems to lack if not abhor all three of those things.”

Yet for a man who has spent his career as his own boss--calling shots and inking transactions, running his world from the 26th floor of Trump Tower--the art of the deal may soon yield to the art of patience.

“He’s never had a boss in his whole life. It will be a sobering reality to have 535 bosses here--and more to the point, more than 200 million bosses scattered across the country,” Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) said. “Patience becomes a virtue as one moves from the business world into the body politic.”

The tempo is sure to frustrate Trump. It also risks making him appear ineffective to the masses of voters who bought into his campaign persona as a successful dealmaker and strongman who could blow up Washington and--seemingly overnight--better the lives of everyday Americans.

Trump’s inner circle is grappling with how to manage expectations and are looking for ways to demonstrate quick action and claim early victories. Vice President-elect Mike Pence--who spent 12 years in the House before being elected Indiana’s governor and is intimately familiar with the unpredictable volatility of Congress--has been central in those talks, according to senior transition officials.

There are areas where Trump’s administration sees opportunity to act unilaterally, such as negotiating trade deals or lifting Obama-era regulations. Trump plans a series of executive actions on a wide range of topics in his first days in office, and he told reporters he wants to have daily bill signing ceremonies his first two weeks.

Trump also plans in those weeks to announce his pick for the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the late justice Antonin Scalia. The nomination is expected to consume partisans on both sides and could take several months to reach confirmation.

Another roadblock: public resistance and protests, in particular on immigration, as well as potential resistance among more mainstream Republicans--including House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.)--to Trump’s most controversial proposals, such as a federal deportation force.

“That’s not happening,” Ryan said this week when asked about such a force during a CNN town hall forum.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) said, “Trump’s going to come up to the reality of the Republican Senate, which is full of people who have supported immigration reform.”

Trump associates privately say that any blame for delay or inaction on the meatier agenda items could be directed at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House: the Capitol.

Even as they commended him for tapping into the deep dissatisfaction Americans have about the political system--and Congress specifically--some Republican lawmakers said they were concerned Trump has created expectations too great to meet.

Republican congressional leaders are delicately balancing Trump’s vocal push, and their own desire for rapid change, with the dynamics confronting them in their chambers. In Trump, they see opportunity to pass a raft of legislation and a willing partner as long as the relationship is continually cultivated.

Conway said that in meetings with Pence last week, Republican lawmakers found Trump’s leadership style “fascinating” and said, “I’m going to see if I can jump on board and keep up.”

Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) shrug off Trump’s missives on Twitter and play up their phone calls and meetings with him. They echo his rhetoric about the pace, even as they quietly mention caveats that could delay passage--anything to keep Trump at ease with an institution he once disdained and is now getting to know.

In pushing to move as fast as possible, Republicans also run the risk of being accused of hypocrisy.

Republicans fiercely criticized Obama for moving too rapidly to pass the 2010 health care law, which was the subject of 14 months of debate as Democrats tried, and failed, to attract GOP support. The Senate held 100 days of hearings on the matter, and the House held 79, according to Schiliro.

“It’s a big, extraordinarily complicated issue,” Schiliro said. “A new law can’t be put in by fiat.”

Nevertheless, rank-and-file Republicans like what they are hearing from Trump.

“He’s trying to exhort a molasses-like institution to act more quickly,” said Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.). “When you’re the coach of the team, you always emphasize speed. But how fast the players go is how fast the players go. The coach can only do so much.”