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reading-writing-revolution · 3 years ago

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Heather Cox Richardson

October 4, 2021 (Monday)

“hello literally everyone,” the official account of Twitter tweeted this afternoon, after Facebook and its affiliated platforms Instagram and WhatsApp went dark at about 11:40 this morning. The Facebook outage lasted for more than six hours and appears to have been caused by an internal error. But the void caused by the absence of the internet giant illustrated its power at a time when the use of that power has come under scrutiny.

In mid-September, the Wall Street Journal began to publish a series of investigative stories based on documents provided by a whistle-blower.

The “Facebook Files” explore how the company has “whitelisted” high-profile users, exempting them from the rules that put limits on ordinary users. Another article reveals that researchers showed Facebook executives evidence that Instagram damages teenage girls by pushing an ideal body image and that they flagged the increasing use of the site by drug smugglers, human traffickers, and other criminals; their discoveries went unaddressed.

Concerned about declining engagement with their material, Facebook allegedly privileged polarizing material that engaged people by preying on their emotions. It appeared to have encouraged the extremism that led to the January 6 insurrection, lowering restrictions against disinformation quickly after the 2020 election.

Last night, on CBS’s 60 Minutes, former Facebook employee Frances Haugen revealed herself to be the source of the documents. She is concerned, she says, that Facebook consistently looks to maximize profits even if it means ignoring disinformation. Her lawyers have filed at least eight complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees companies and financial markets. Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, said it was “ludicrous” to blame Facebook for the events of January 6. Chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg have not commented.

Lawmakers have repeatedly asked Facebook to produce documents for their scrutiny and to testify about the social media platform’s public safeguards. Tomorrow, Haugen will testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security about the effects of social media on teenagers. Her lawyer, Andrew Bakaj, told Cat Zakrzewski and Cristiano Lima of the Washington Post that Haugen’s information is important because “Big Tech is at an inflection point…. It touches every aspect of our lives—whether it’s individuals personally or democratic institutions globally. With such far-reaching consequences, transparency is critical to oversight, and lawful whistleblowing is a critical component of oversight and holding companies accountable.”

Amidst the outrage over the Facebook revelations, technology reporter Kevin Roose at the New York Times suggested that the company’s aggressive attempts to court engagement reveal weakness, rather than strength, as younger users have fled to TikTok and other sites and Facebook has become the domain of older Americans. He notes that Facebook’s researchers foresee a drop of 45% in daily use in the next two years, suggesting that the company is desperate either to retain users or to create new ones.

While the technology Facebook represents is new, the concerns it raises echo public discussion of late nineteenth century industrialization, which was also the product of new technologies. At stake then was whether the concentration of economic power in a few hands would destroy our democracy by giving some rich men far more power than the other men in the country. How could the nation both preserve the right of individuals to build industries and preserve the concept of the common good in the face of technology that permitted unprecedented accumulations of wealth?

While money is certainly at stake in the issue of Facebook’s power today, the more pressing issue for our country is whether social media giants will destroy our democracy through their ability to spread disinformation that sows division and turns us against one another.

When we began to grapple with the excesses of industrialism, lots of people thought the whole system needed to be taken apart—by violence if necessary—while others hoped to save the benefits the technology brought without letting it destroy the country. Americans eventually solved the problems that industrialization raised for democracy by reining in the Wild West mentality of the early industrialists, protecting the basic rights of workers, and regulating business practices.

The leaked Facebook documents suggest there are places where the disinformation at Facebook could be reined in as the overreaches of industrialization were. When Zuckerberg tried to promote coronavirus vaccines on the site, anti-vaxxers undermined his efforts. But one document showed that “out of nearly 150,000 posters in Facebook Groups disabled for Covid misinformation, 5% were producing half of all posts, and around 1,400 users were responsible for inviting half the groups’ new members.” Researchers concluded: “We found, like many problems at FB, this is a head-heavy problem with a relatively few number of actors creating a large percentage of the content and growth.”

“I don’t hate Facebook,” Haugen wrote in a final message to her colleagues at the company. “I love Facebook. I want to save it.”

While most Americans were busy watching Facebook crash—the falling stock took between $5 billion and $7 billion of Zuckerberg’s net worth—drama in Washington, D.C., was an even bigger deal.

Los Angeles Times reporter Sarah D. Wire noted that the rioters who broke into the Capitol on January 6 ran more than 100 feet past 15 reinforced windows, “making a beeline” to four windows that had been left unreinforced in a renovation of the building between 2017 and 2019. They found the four windows, located in a recessed part of the building, Wire wrote, “by sheer luck, real-time trial and error, or advance knowledge by rioters.”

The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol will likely look into this oddity.

The committee has begun to take testimony from cooperative witnesses. Observers expect fireworks on Thursday when former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, longtime Trump aide Dan Scavino, Trump adviser Steve Bannon, and Trump appointee Kash Patel must hand over documents. Trump has vowed to fight the release of any information to the committee. Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) says the committee will make criminal referrals for anyone ignoring a subpoena.

Finally, today, the debt ceiling fight got even hotter. While Congress passed a continuing resolution to fund the government through December 3, the issue of the debt ceiling, which stops the government from borrowing money Congress has already spent, remains unresolved. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says the government will be unable to pay its obligations after October 18, and warns that a default, which has never before happened, would be catastrophic.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) insists the Democrats must raise the debt ceiling themselves, although the Republicans raised it three times under former president Trump and added $7.8 trillion to the debt, which now stands at $28 trillion. But when Democrats tried to pass a measure to raise the ceiling, Republicans filibustered it. As Greg Sargent points out in the Washington Post, McConnell is trying to force the Democrats to raise the debt ceiling through reconciliation, which cannot be filibustered. Since they get only one chance to pass such a bill this year, this would force them to dump their infrastructure bill.

McConnell is holding the nation hostage to keep the Democrats from passing a very popular bill, and today, Biden called him on it. McConnell complained that congressional Democrats were “sleepwalking toward significant and avoidable danger,” prompting Biden to demand that Republicans “stop playing Russian roulette with the U.S. economy.... Not only are Republicans refusing to do their job, but threatening to use their power to prevent us from doing our job—saving the economy from a catastrophic event—I think, quite frankly, is hypocritical, dangerous and disgraceful. Their obstruction and irresponsibility knows absolutely no bounds.”

When asked if he could guarantee we would not default on our debts, Biden said, “No, I can’t…. That’s up to Mitch McConnell.” If McConnell doesn’t blink and the Republicans continue to filibuster Democrats’ attempts to save the economy, there will be enormous pressure on the Democrats to break the filibuster.

Meanwhile, every day this drags on, Congress does not pass the Freedom to Vote Act.

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 3 years ago

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 4, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

In mid-September, the Wall Street Journal began to publish a series of investigative stories based on documents provided by a whistle-blower.

“I don’t hate Facebook,” Haugen wrote in a final message to her colleagues at the company. “I love Facebook. I want to save it.”

While most Americans were busy watching Facebook crash—the falling stock took between $5 billion and $7 billion of Zuckerberg’s net worth—drama in Washington, D.C., was an even bigger deal.

The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol will likely look into this oddity.

Meanwhile, every day this drags on, Congress does not pass the Freedom to Vote Act.

—

Notes:

https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2021/10/protecting%20kids%20online:%20testimony%20from%20a%20facebook%20whistleblower

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/03/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-revealed/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039

https://apnews.com/article/facebook-whatsapp-instagram-outage-8b9d3862ed957029e545182a595fdce1

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/03/technology/whistle-blower-facebook-frances-haugen.html

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-says-she-wants-to-fix-the-company-not-harm-it-11633304122

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/04/facebook-instagram-down-outage/

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/technology/facebook-files.html

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-vaccinated-11631880296

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-10-04/jan-6-rioters-exploited-little-known-capitol-weak-spots-a-handful-of-unreinforced-windows

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/01/bennie-thompson-jan-6-panel-subpoena-514940

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/04/jan-6-panel-trump-collision-514979

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/10/04/biden-schumer-debt-ceiling/

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#quotes #political #facebook #social media #debt ceiling #political hardball #Heather Cox Richardson #Letters From An American

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newstechreviews · 4 years ago

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Rising 34 stories above Bangkok’s Phetchaburi Road, the Thai Summit Tower is the headquarters of Thailand’s largest car parts manufacturer. Until recently, it was also home to an upstart political party headed by the company’s 41-year-old heir, Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit. On the fifth floor, he and the fresh-faced activists of the Future Forward Party (FFP) would hold boisterous press conferences and hushed policy meetings. They gained 17% of the vote in last year’s general election despite being barely a year old.

That remarkable showing should have thrust 81 FFP lawmakers into Thailand’s 750-seat National Assembly. But the political establishment struck back. First, Thanathorn was banned from politics over shares he allegedly held in a media company. (Thai law says electoral candidates cannot hold such shares; Thanathorn insists they had been transferred to his mother.) Then, on Feb. 21, the party was dissolved over alleged funding irregularities. The legal action was described as “politically motivated” by Human Rights Watch. With it, the political will of 6.3 million voters was snuffed out.

Sitting down with TIME in the week before that decision, Thanathorn was sanguine. Over the past two decades, populist governments in Thailand have been removed from power twice by the military and three times by the courts. The FFP may have been a long way from Government House but the power nexus centered around the palace, the courts and the military was evidently spooked.

“The Future Forward Party is a vehicle, but even if they dissolve us, we will continue the journey,” shrugged Thanathorn at the time. “This year, I’m sure, with me leading, or otherwise, we’ll return to public demonstrations.”

That’s to be expected. In the parlance of travel marketing, Thailand has long been sold as the Land of Smiles, but it could just as fairly be called the Land of Protests or Country of Coups. The Southeast Asian nation of 70 million has gone through seven attempted and 12 successful coups over the past century, while recent years have been punctuated by color-coded street protests aimed at paralyzing the sprawling capital. (Urban and southern royalists typically don yellow; rural voters from populous, rice-growing northern provinces wear red.)

Today, people are taking to the street once again. Clad in face masks, and flashing the three-fingered Hunger Games salute to the sound of Thai rap, thousands of protesters have thronged the capital over recent months, demanding political reform of a military-backed government seen as bungling and corrupt. While political grievances have festered for decades, “the FFP dissolution was the last straw,” says Thitinan Pongsudhirak, associate professor of political science at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University.

In terms of numbers, these are the biggest demonstrations since those preceding the 2014 coup d’état. In their ambition, however, they are unprecedented. Protesters have drawn up a 10-point manifesto that includes reform of the sacrosanct royal family and an overhaul of political institutions including a new constitution and elections. Coup leader General Prayuth Chan-ocha—now serving as prime minister, largely owing to a new constitution dictated by the military—warned last month that the protesters “really went too far.”

University and high school students are in the vanguard. Thitinan hasn’t seen anything like it in 27 years of academia. “The students feel empowered, they are wide awake, pay more attention, nobody’s falling asleep in class,” he says. “It’s astonishing for me, personally, as a teacher.”

Young Thais are also being galvanized by the pandemic, given the damage to Thailand’s tourism-reliant economy, which is forecast to shrink by 8-10% this year—the sharpest contraction in Southeast Asia. Coronavirus’ role in stoking the protests has “been huge, as people don’t see a future,” Thanathorn says. “The anger is there. It’s waiting to burst.”

Soe Zeya—Reuters Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit of Thailand’s progressive Future Forward Party gestures to his supporters at a rally in Bangkok, Thailand on Dec. 14, 2019.

‘It’s divide and conquer’

Instability in Thailand matters. It is America’s oldest ally in Asia and has served as a bulwark to more authoritarian, left-leaning neighbors ever since the Thai establishment, backed by Washington, constructed a national identity and cult of personality around Massachusetts-born King Bhumibol Adulyadej. During the 60s and 70s, huge posters of Bhumibol, paid for by American taxpayers, were distributed across the country to help win over hearts and minds in the face of a communist insurgency. But as the Cold War thawed, Bhumibol’s influence faded along with his health. By the time of his death in 2016, he remained an object of veneration for ordinary Thais but his role had morphed from a guarantor of political stability to underwriter of enormous wealth for courtiers and brass hats.

The latter still grip the levers of power. In the diplomatic vacuum left by the isolationist America First policy of President Trump, the junta has pushed Thailand towards China. Bangkok and Beijing have inked joint development projects and arms purchases, and the Thais have repatriated Chinese dissidents with scant regard to due process.

“As Washington condemned the [2014] coup and the junta cracked down on dissent, Beijing sidled up with infrastructure funding deals and promises of no-strings support,” says Sebastian Strangio, author of In the Dragon’s Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century.

Meanwhile the relationship between palace and army continues to be extremely close (Thai historian Thak Chaloemtiarana calls it “despotic paternalism”) and the stock justification for every military intervention remains “protection of the monarchy.” Thanathorn is not alone when he says the generals are responsible for Thailand’s cycle of protests and coups.

“We have enough evidence to show that a military-sponsored information operation installs hatred into society,” he says. “It’s divide and conquer.”

The military is getting richer in the process, controlling golf courses, horse-racing tracks and muay Thai stadiums. It owns hotel chains, conference centers, free trade zones and even TV and radio stations. In parliament, the 81 senators who are also generals have an average wealth of 78 million baht ($2.5 million) each, but 40 years of a general’s official earnings amounts to 48 million baht ($1.5 million)—and that’s assuming not a satang (or penny) is spent. According to legislative documents obtained by the FFP, Thailand’s military had off-budget spending of 18 billion baht ($580,000,000) last year.

“It’s a state within a state,” says Thanathorn. “Even MPs cannot see through their budgets, cannot audit income [and] expenses. Imagine if we used this money for schools and hospitals.”

On Feb. 8 and 9, the venality turned deadly. In Korat, a city 180 miles northeast of Bangkok, a soldier went on a killing spree that claimed 29 lives and wounded 58 others. The deadliest mass shooting in Thailand’s history began with the 31-year-old perpetrator slaying a superior officer, as well as the officer’s mother-in-law, whom he accused of cheating him in a lucrative land deal. He was eventually cornered in a shopping mall and killed. “Rich from cheating and taking advantage of people” he posted online during the rampage. “Do they think they can take money to spend in hell?”

In the wake of national mourning, reforms were promised. Still, in a tearful address, Thailand’s top general, Apirat Kongsompong, referred to the military as a “sacred” institution.

“What the hell? It’s a freaking army,” says Tony Davis, a Bangkok-based security analyst for IHS-Janes. “Every country needs one but do your job properly instead of floundering around in business activities.”

For Thanathorn, Korat offered “the best opportunity in 100 years” to push for reform. “We should not let those families suffer for nothing.”

Mladen Antonov—AFP/Getty Images A Bangkok inscription on a sky train bridge is seen through the hole of a banner during a commemoration of the anniversary of the 1932 revolution which ended absolute monarchy with heavily symbolic events in Bangkok on June 24, 2020, demanding reforms to a political system dominated by the arch-royalist army.

‘He’s pressing all the buttons’

Despite his considerable wealth, Thanathorn has long been an iconoclast. His uncle served as minister of transport between 2002 and 2005 and is now a senior figure in Thailand’s biggest pro-military party, but Thanathorn insists his family were always outsiders. His grandfather emigrated to Thailand from southern China’s Fujian province in the early 20th century. In 1977, Thanathorn’s father started Thai Summit, and he says he grew up in a middle-class household, walking or taking the bus to class like his peers. It wasn’t until high school that the family firm started booming on the strength of lucrative contracts with Japanese auto firms, beginning its transformation into an empire with $2.5 billion in annual revenue.

“That’s when I could see the gap between me and my friends,” Thanathorn says.

It’s also when Thailand’s glass ceiling became apparent. “When we began having wealth, my parents wanted to be recognized, to be one of the elite,” he says. “They tried to donate, to mingle with politicians and people in power. But we learned no matter how much we tried, we cannot be one of them, because we are new rich. So my parents stopped trying.”

But they refused to spoil the princeling. From the age of ten, Thanathorn was sent during school holidays to toil in restaurants, washing dishes and scrubbing floors. At a hotel, he lugged bags and cleaned rooms. He loaded pallets of goods onto sooty trucks at a warehouse.

“I wasn’t very happy about it at the time,” he laughs, “but I learned the gap between rich and poor. But back then, I didn’t think that it was structural. I didn’t know whether this gap was about opportunities or individual performance.”

It was while studying mechanical engineering at Bangkok’s Thammasat University that he had an awakening. “In my second year, I went to a slum in Bangkok for the first time,” he says, “My thinking changed drastically because I saw the social struggle.”

Thanathorn became a student activist for progressive causes, campaigning for issues like compensation for those evicted to make way for state development projects. Then he studied at Nottingham University in the U.K., where he became involved with the student branch of the far-left Socialist Workers Party. “I learned the way they mobilize, the way they organize,” he says. Afterward, a joint masters in global finance between Hong Kong University and NYU beckoned.

For Thanathorn, those studies laid bare the realities of Thailand’s kleptocratic economy. Minimal property taxes mean the rich can sit on huge assets, while many sectors are sealed off from competition. For example, craft breweries have sprung up across the world to cater for a new generation of beer fans. In Thailand, however, selling small-batch brew is banned under a decades-old law that shields two huge family-run corporations, which monopolize 90% of a $5.7-billion market. And while in most countries, several duty-free concessions are assigned for commercial airports—Seoul’s Incheon International Airport has a dozen—in Thailand, one firm with close government ties has been awarded the sole concession to Bangkok’s main airports for over two decades without formal bids, creating a multi-billion-dollar family empire from scratch. In Thailand, “you create billionaires within one generation without innovation or anything,” says Thanathorn.

After completing his studies, Thanathorn had plans to pursue a career in international development with the U.N. But following his father’s death from cancer in 2002, he returned to Thailand to assume leadership of Thai Summit at just 23, helming it for 17 years until he founded the FFP.

His political style wasn’t without detractors. Many disagreed with Thanathorn’s abrasive tactics, such as his public shaming of senior establishment figures—not done under Thailand’s strict social codes.

“He’s pressing all the buttons that are guaranteed to rile [the elite] instead of framing the problem in a manner which they cannot dispute,” says Davis.

Even those who have built a career out of needling the establishment harbor doubts. The political artist Headache Stencil—dubbed “Thailand’s Banksy,” says “Thanathorn is more like a revolutionary than a political leader … But he can shepherd the transition to someone else who is calmer and more suited to lead.”

But large numbers of voters were won over by the self-styled “billionaire commoner” with the sharp, handsome features and boy-band spiky hair. According to a late 2019 poll by the National Institute of Development Administration, 31% of respondents tabbed Thanathorn as best qualified to be prime minister, with Prayut named by just 23%.

Jonas Gratzer—LightRocket/Getty Images Protesters perform a ‘Hunger Games’ three finger salute during anti-government demonstration in Bangkok on Aug. 16, 2020.

‘Thailand’s inconvenient truth’

Father to four young children, Thanathorn professes a love of reading everything from Khaled Hosseini to Game of Thrones. “I preferred the books to the TV series,” he says.

There is certainly no end of palace intrigue in Thailand. After a string of scandals—and with his lavish, eccentric lifestyle—King Maha Vajiralongkorn, Bhumibol’s son, has failed to command the same respect as his father. The four-times married, former Air Force pilot once promoted his pet poodle, Fu-Fu, to the rank of Air Chief Marshall. Since ascending the throne, he’s consolidated power while spending much of his time overseas. In 2017, the King introduced a new salute and haircut for the armed forces to match those of his own bodyguards. That same year, a 1936 law was amended to give him full control of the Crown Property Bureau, which manages the palace’s estimated $30 billion fortune. Last October, he ordered the transfer of two prestigious army units to his direct command, making them an effective “praetorian guard,” says Davis.

On Sept. 2, reports emerged that the King’s former consort, Sineenat Wongvajirapakdi—who last year was arrested, stripped of all royal titles and had her family home demolished for disloyalty—was suddenly deemed “untainted” and had her privileges restored. The hashtags #FreeOfBlemish and #ReformTheMonarchy were top trends on Twitter in Thailand after the news broke.

“The King’s treatment of Sineenat as a possession, put away and taken out at his will, is one of many reasons why protesters in Thailand have broached the taboo topic of the monarchy,” says Tamara Loos, professor of history and Thai studies at Cornell University.

That such lurid plots play out against the backdrop of Thailand’s worst economic crisis since 1997 incenses young Thais. Unbound by the same existential fear of creeping communism as their parents and grandparents, today’s youth demand a more equitable society. But the Thai monarch is protected by what are considered the world’s harshest royal defamation laws—known as lèse majesté or Section 112—that carry a penalty of 15 years in prison, and which have increasingly been used to quash dissent.

On June 4, a Thai democracy activist, Wanchalearm Satsaksit, was kidnapped in Cambodia and is believed murdered. He was on a government list of 29 exiled activists accused of violating Section 112, of whom at least eight have disappeared or been discovered dead. The situation inside Thailand is also deteriorating. On 9 July, a man from Thailand’s northeast was thrown into a psychiatric hospital for wearing a shirt emblazoned with, “I’ve lost faith in the institution of the monarchy.” One protest leader, human rights lawyer Anon Nampa, who has been outspoken in calling for royal reform, has been arrested three times in recent weeks and charged with sedition. “Thailand’s inconvenient truth” is how Thanathorn describes co-option of the royal institution.

“Let me be clear about this: reforming the monarchy does not equal abolishing the monarchy,’ he says. “It’s the powers and goals of the monarchy that don’t suit the principle of democracy that have to be changed.”

Thanathorn says he and the current protesters “share the same ideas about the future of the country” but have chosen different paths—within the system and outside it. His ban from politics means he cannot stand for election, though a loophole has seen him appointed by sympathetic lawmakers to a budget scrutiny committee, which has already trimmed $1 billion from the books, including the cancellation of two Chinese-built submarines for the military. Thanathorn has also broken a taboo by openly questioning the royal budget.

It’s a risky strategy. The government still holds all the cards, including the backing of the parliament, military, palace and judiciary. Thanathorn has already been charged with seeking to abolish the monarchy and sedition, though was acquitted on both counts. Other than disappeared and caged activists, in recent years two anti-establishment Thai prime ministers have been forced into exile and convicted in absentia on charges they claim were politically motivated. Thanathorn insists he won’t flee his homeland even if it means jail—or worse.

“So be it, I’m not afraid,” he says. “If I don’t do this, I don’t see anyone else doing it.”

#Blogger

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shanedakotamuir · 5 years ago

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The 4 main conservative defenses for Trump against impeachment, explained

President Trump attends a “Keep America Great” rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on October 10, 2019. | Brendan Smialowski /AFP/Getty Images

Only one of them makes sense.

President Donald Trump allegedly withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid from the Ukrainian government to push lawmakers to announce an investigation into the son of a potential political opponent and his work with a Ukrainian energy company. That much, at least, seems clear. As does the fact that Trump has an 89 percent approval rating with Republican voters.

That’s why most Republican lawmakers aren’t going to change their minds on the impeachment of President Trump. While some in Congress might privately think that Trump’s alleged efforts to pressure Ukrainian officials to “do him a favor” and investigate former Vice President Joe Biden was a bad idea, they won’t say so in public.

Because, quite simply, Donald Trump is the president. Donald Trump is giving them what they want politically, the economy appears strong and, most critically, Donald Trump is far more popular and powerful than they are.

But House Republicans and many Trump-supportive conservative and right-leaning writers and pundits have largely attempted to avoid saying as much.

Rather, together with constantly shifting responses to specific testimony, they appear to have developed three basic alternative defenses for Trump as House impeachment hearings continued: Donald Trump was “too inept” to have intended to do what he is being accused of doing; what Donald Trump did was actually good; and Trump’s actions were bad, but not impeachable.

But some Congressional Republicans and conservatives have begun saying the purest and perhaps most accurate defense of Trump out loud: Whatever he did, it doesn’t matter — not to “normal people” and not to the Republican Party.

1. “Impeachment for incompetence would disqualify most of the government”

The first basic defense of Trump regarding Ukraine is the simplest: Trump lacked the intent and the basic competence to get a quid pro quo deal with Ukraine done. And without intent (legally defined as a conscious decision to commit an illegal act), some argue that what Trump did may have been bad and dumb, but not criminal — and thus, not a “high crime or misdemeanor.”

As elucidated by the Wall Street Journal editorial board in October:

... it may turn out that while Mr. Trump wanted a quid-pro-quo policy ultimatum toward Ukraine, he was too inept to execute it. Impeachment for incompetence would disqualify most of the government, and most Presidents at some point or another in office.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham seemingly agreed, telling CBS News earlier this month that the administration appeared “incapable” of forming a quid pro quo, thus rendering the entire impeachment discussion null and void.

"It was incoherent," Sen @LindseyGrahamSC says of Trump's Ukraine policy. "They seem to be *incapable* of forming a quid pro quo." pic.twitter.com/rdZxyIazNj

— Steven Portnoy (@stevenportnoy) November 6, 2019

Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro made similar arguments on his podcast, saying on October 7 that Trump would make a fantastic client for a defense attorney because “Trump doesn’t have requisite intent for anything. The man has the attention span of a gnat ... if you are his defense lawyer, his best defense to ‘he had a plan in Ukraine to go after Joe Biden’ is ‘dude doesn’t have plans.’” And on November 11, Shapiro argued, “I don’t think he’s had the level of intent necessary to eat a hamburger.” I reached out to Shapiro, but he was unable to comment on Wednesday.

And after all, military aid to Ukraine was eventually restored. So according to this argument, the actions for which Trump is facing impeachment (withholding aid for selfish reasons) never actually happened. Per National Review’s Rich Lowry, “The best defense Republicans can muster is that nothing came of it. An ally was discomfited and yanked around for a couple of months before, ultimately, getting its defense funding.”

And his magazine’s editorial board argued earlier this month, “It has to matter that, at the end of the day, the harm of this episode was minimal or nonexistent. The Ukrainians got their defense aid without making any statement committing themselves to the investigations.”

It’s true that intent matters — in criminal proceedings. I spoke with Ken White, a criminal defense attorney and former US attorney, who told me, “Intent is very important in court, and for many of these crimes, from witness intimidation to bribery, prosecutors must prove corrupt intent. If we were in federal court, litigating criminal charges against the president, I think the “Trump is just Trump” defense would be colorable and tricky to overcome.

“With normal humans, when they act like Trump you can infer corrupt intent; the defense is that you can’t make that inference with Trump because he acts that way all the time, reflexively.”

But White added two caveats. “First, that’s a matter of proof. A jury could still reject it and see corrupt intent. Second, this ain’t federal court.” Impeachment, after all, is a political process, not a legal one.

And as to the argument that funding to Ukraine was indeed restored, the Cato Institute’s Gene Healy pointed out in October that an unsuccessful or “incompetent” attempt to commit an impeachable act doesn’t make it less impeachable:

The Nixon crew botched most of the schemes it undertook, from the Watergate caper to the attempt to audit the president’s political enemies. That didn’t save Richard Nixon from being driven from office via the impeachment process.

2. “Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani deserve praise”

Some of Trump’s defenders are taking an entirely different approach and stating that Donald Trump’s actions were not only defensible, but good. In the words of Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) (who criticized Lt. Col. Vindman for having “opinions counter” to the president), “it’s perfectly within the purview of the president’s authority” to base military aid on the assurance of an investigation into corruption (or more accurately, the announcement of an investigation).

They argue that the government of Ukraine was corrupt and Trump was elected to fight corruption — ergo, of course he would resist sending aid to Ukraine. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) put it this way: “Corruption is not just prevalent in Ukraine. It’s the system. Our president said time out, time out, let’s check out this new guy.”

.@RealDonaldTrump and @RudyGiuliani deserve praise for pushing for accountability because these officials seem to have zero concern about Ukraine's collusion w/Obama admin targeting America's election in 2016 -- and the Biden cover-up...

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) November 20, 2019

As Washington Examiner writer Byron York wrote in a piece entitled “What if Trump was right about Ukraine?”, supporters of this line of logic argue that while perhaps Trump’s actions weren’t the best, he had real and genuine concerns about Ukraine’s government and its alleged efforts to collude with the Clinton campaign and influence the 2016 election.

Those efforts are based on allegations that Ukrainian officials, concerned about former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s work for a pro-Russian political party, attempted to assist the Clinton campaign and harm the Trump campaign. Right-leaning media outlets have focused serious attention on those allegations since 2017.

For example, the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway argued on Fox News in October of this year, “You have people who have already admitted that people affiliated with the Ukrainian government worked with the Democratic National Committee’s contractors to help Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign,” arguing that Ukraine and the DNC took part in actual collusion, unlike Russia and Trump’s campaign.

York writes that if the allegations were true, Trump’s actions make sense. “If [those concerns] were even mostly legitimate, then Trump defenders could say: “Look, he had a point. Even if one thinks he handled the issue inappropriately, the fact is, what was going on in Ukraine was worrisome enough for a United States president to take notice.” Quoting former US Special Representative to Ukraine Kurt Volker, York concluded, “The president said Ukraine ‘tried to take me down.’ He wasn’t wrong.” (It’s worth noting that other conservatives disagree.)

This was the argument that Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a writer at National Review who published “The Case for Trump” earlier this year, made to me, saying that it made sense for Trump to be suspicious of Ukraine. He asked that I quote him in full.

“Trump is a businessman and he does not want to give much military aid in general, and naturally not to corrupt governments who have in the past, according to Politico, tried to interfere in the 2016 election.”

“Trump naturally takes the past Ukrainian efforts, again according to the 2017 Politico report, to harm his election effort, as a personal affront given they reportedly sought to stop Trump from becoming president and yet wanted him to reverse the Obama policy of no military aid once he was elected (which he did).”

“Once more, we are left with a supposed thought crime of considering delaying aid in exchange for Ukrainian promises of investigating 2016 interference in an American election—which never happened, but was actually reified by earlier suspension of actual Ukrainian investigations in 2016 (and possibly of Hunter Biden) and refusal to arm the Ukrainians.”

But this argument has problems of its own. Fiona Hill and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, both of whom served on Trump’s National Security Council, testified earlier this month that they had seen no evidence that the government of Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election. Hill added in testimony Thursday, “I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a US adversary, and that Ukraine — not Russia — attacked us in 2016.”

The Politico piece to which Dr. Hanson referred during our conversation notes that while some Ukrainian officials supported Clinton, their efforts were “far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia’s alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails,” which was a “top-down” effort. And according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, one of the main sources for allegations that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election — including allegations that they, not Russia, hacked the DNC — was Manafort himself.

3. “Impeaching a president is the most extreme and anti-democratic remedy”

But other conservatives have argued that Trump’s actions, even if tied to an “understandable and justifiable” desire to investigate allegations of Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election, were improper, inappropriate, or just plain bad.

As Townhall.com and Fox News commentator Guy Benson told me, those involved in the alleged quid pro quo “were up to something that stunk.” “They misused and abused their power,” he said. “It’s serious and it should be taken seriously.

But in his view, impeachment is a step too far. “My case against impeachment and removal is that it rises to a thermonuclear option that has never been detonated before. Doing so based on this, so close to an election, in a president’s first term, would do enormous damage.”

Rather, he favors censure, a “very rare tool” last used against President Andrew Jackson in 1834 that would, as he wrote in October, “represent a severe and formal condemnation from the people’s branch, and would constitute a stain on the president’s term in office.”

Daily Caller founders Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel have also argued that impeachment is too harsh a punishment for Trump. In an op-ed in October where they stipulated that “Donald Trump should not have been on the phone with a foreign head of state encouraging another country to investigate his political opponent,” they then wrote, “Impeaching a president is the most extreme and anti-democratic remedy we have in our system of government.”

And they added:

The facts are out there for the American people to weigh as they make their decision. How about we let them sort all this out? There’s no need to come up with thin excuses for a purely partisan impeachment process when we have an election right around the corner.

I spoke to Patel, who told me, “Nancy Pelosi was right for all those months when she repeatedly said that to undo that election without bipartisan support based on clear criminal behavior would tear the country apart. We are on the eve of a new election where the American people can once again vote on Trump and this time they can weigh for themselves Trump’s behavior in this Ukraine affair. That’s a much better solution.”

Thoughts after day one: Trump’s mention of Biden on his 7/25 call was inappropriate. I’ve said that all along. However, nothing I heard today leads me to change my mind : impeachment goes too far. Let the voters settle this. One party, partisan impeachment is not the answer.

— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) November 13, 2019

4. “No one cares”

But an even simpler defense of the president is one being made by Carlson on his Fox News show and by others within the conservative movement, and it actually doesn’t require defending the president at all.

Instead, Republicans are arguing that the entire process is a “distraction.” Moreover, they’re arguing that it doesn’t matter what Trump did or didn’t do because the Senate won’t vote to impeach the president and the average American doesn’t care.

As Townhall.com writer Kurt Schlichter wrote earlier this week, “We’re too busy working, too focused on our 401(k)s going through the roof and on [Trump] flipping circuit courts like a boss, to care about the latest outrage to end all outrages.” I reached out to Schlichter and will update if and when I hear back.

On the November 15 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson argued, “normal people” — “someone with kids and a job and a marriage you care about” — aren’t thinking about impeachment and would rather “the buffoons on TV would stop yapping about Trump 24/7 and talk about something relevant.”

It’s an argument being made by Republicans both inside and outside of the administration. For example, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham tweeted that instead of impeachment (which was “boring” and a “waste of time”), “Congress should be working on passing USMCA, funding our govt & military, working on reduced drug pricing & so much more.”

With record low unemployment and record high wage growth, Democrats know they can't beat President Trump in 2020. Democrats need to #StopTheMadness and get back to work for the American people.

— PA GOP (@PAGOP) November 20, 2019

This argument seems somewhat self-refuting — after all, tweeting or writing or saying on national television that no one cares about impeachment would imply that someone, somewhere, decidedly does.

But for the GOP, it is perhaps the most revealing. Not of the sentiment of the average American — 70 percent of whom believe Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine were “wrong” — but of the Republicans. Because they are well aware that within a slimmed-down Republican Party that has largely excised his enemies and detractors through retirements and election losses, Trump is the only available lodestar.

And so for them, it doesn’t actually matter what Trump did with regard to Ukrainian military aid: whether he intended to hurt Joe Biden’s presidential hopes, whether he was genuinely concerned about corruption, or whether he did something that constitutes an impeachable offense. Trump is all they’ve got.

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gracieyvonnehunter · 5 years ago

Text

The 4 main conservative defenses for Trump against impeachment, explained

President Trump attends a “Keep America Great” rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on October 10, 2019. | Brendan Smialowski /AFP/Getty Images

Only one of them makes sense.

But House Republicans and many Trump-supportive conservative and right-leaning writers and pundits have largely attempted to avoid saying as much.

1. “Impeachment for incompetence would disqualify most of the government”

As elucidated by the Wall Street Journal editorial board in October:

"It was incoherent," Sen @LindseyGrahamSC says of Trump's Ukraine policy. "They seem to be *incapable* of forming a quid pro quo." pic.twitter.com/rdZxyIazNj

— Steven Portnoy (@stevenportnoy) November 6, 2019

“With normal humans, when they act like Trump you can infer corrupt intent; the defense is that you can’t make that inference with Trump because he acts that way all the time, reflexively.”

2. “Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani deserve praise”

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) November 20, 2019

3. “Impeaching a president is the most extreme and anti-democratic remedy”

And they added:

— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) November 13, 2019

4. “No one cares”

With record low unemployment and record high wage growth, Democrats know they can't beat President Trump in 2020. Democrats need to #StopTheMadness and get back to work for the American people.

— PA GOP (@PAGOP) November 20, 2019

This argument seems somewhat self-refuting — after all, tweeting or writing or saying on national television that no one cares about impeachment would imply that someone, somewhere, decidedly does.

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#Vox - All

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timalexanderdollery · 5 years ago

Text

The 4 main conservative defenses for Trump against impeachment, explained

President Trump attends a “Keep America Great” rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on October 10, 2019. | Brendan Smialowski /AFP/Getty Images

Only one of them makes sense.

But House Republicans and many Trump-supportive conservative and right-leaning writers and pundits have largely attempted to avoid saying as much.

1. “Impeachment for incompetence would disqualify most of the government”

As elucidated by the Wall Street Journal editorial board in October:

"It was incoherent," Sen @LindseyGrahamSC says of Trump's Ukraine policy. "They seem to be *incapable* of forming a quid pro quo." pic.twitter.com/rdZxyIazNj

— Steven Portnoy (@stevenportnoy) November 6, 2019

“With normal humans, when they act like Trump you can infer corrupt intent; the defense is that you can’t make that inference with Trump because he acts that way all the time, reflexively.”

2. “Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani deserve praise”

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) November 20, 2019

3. “Impeaching a president is the most extreme and anti-democratic remedy”

And they added:

— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) November 13, 2019

4. “No one cares”

With record low unemployment and record high wage growth, Democrats know they can't beat President Trump in 2020. Democrats need to #StopTheMadness and get back to work for the American people.

— PA GOP (@PAGOP) November 20, 2019

This argument seems somewhat self-refuting — after all, tweeting or writing or saying on national television that no one cares about impeachment would imply that someone, somewhere, decidedly does.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2KJzrxb

#Vox - All

0 notes

corneliusreignallen · 5 years ago

Text

The 4 main conservative defenses for Trump against impeachment, explained

President Trump attends a “Keep America Great” rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on October 10, 2019. | Brendan Smialowski /AFP/Getty Images

Only one of them makes sense.

But House Republicans and many Trump-supportive conservative and right-leaning writers and pundits have largely attempted to avoid saying as much.

1. “Impeachment for incompetence would disqualify most of the government”

As elucidated by the Wall Street Journal editorial board in October:

"It was incoherent," Sen @LindseyGrahamSC says of Trump's Ukraine policy. "They seem to be *incapable* of forming a quid pro quo." pic.twitter.com/rdZxyIazNj

— Steven Portnoy (@stevenportnoy) November 6, 2019

“With normal humans, when they act like Trump you can infer corrupt intent; the defense is that you can’t make that inference with Trump because he acts that way all the time, reflexively.”

2. “Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani deserve praise”

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) November 20, 2019

3. “Impeaching a president is the most extreme and anti-democratic remedy”

And they added:

— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) November 13, 2019

4. “No one cares”

With record low unemployment and record high wage growth, Democrats know they can't beat President Trump in 2020. Democrats need to #StopTheMadness and get back to work for the American people.

— PA GOP (@PAGOP) November 20, 2019

This argument seems somewhat self-refuting — after all, tweeting or writing or saying on national television that no one cares about impeachment would imply that someone, somewhere, decidedly does.

from Vox - All https://ift.tt/2KJzrxb

#Vox - All

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scottadamsblog · 7 years ago

Text

Russia Hacked our Election! (So what?)

I see a consensus forming that Russia attempted to influence our election with fake news and other social media shenanigans.

But why?

If you start with the assumption that Russia is an enemy of the United States, you probably assume they do bad things to us simply to weaken our power and effectiveness. For example, this article hypothesizes that Russia’s intention was to breed distrust between whoever became president and our intelligence services. I guess that hypothesis sort-of-almost makes sense. But I wouldn’t say it passes my personal sniff test.

Then there’s the more popular theory that the Russians were colluding with the Trump campaign because Putin thought he could somehow control President Trump via blackmail, or business ties, or something else we’re imagining. I guess that could be true. Sort of. But that doesn’t pass my sniff test either.

Then there’s the hypothesis that Russia was messing with our democratic system to weaken the country by sowing distrust about the election process, or possibly by electing a president they believed would be less effective. But I have a hard time believing the Russians thought Trump would be ineffective. Maybe they just thought he would be divisive, and perhaps they thought that’s good for Russia in some way.

I suppose any one of the versions of reality I described could be true. But my brain has to work hard to make sense of any of those explanations. The pieces fit, but only when I hammer them. That raises a red flag for confirmation bias.

Just for fun, let’s compare the standard explanations for Russia’s alleged influence on the election with two other hypotheses.

Hackers and Misdirection

As Putin accurately pointed out in a recent interview, hackers can make their attacks seem to come from other sources, including Russia. I assume there are hundreds, if not thousands, of Trump-supporting Americans with the skills to hack poorly-secured servers. Even if you assume Putin wanted to hack American servers, he would have needed to get in line to do it. Given all the American hackers who opposed Hillary Clinton, there is perhaps a one-in-a-hundred chance Putin’s hackers (if they exist) got to the DNC and Clinton’s servers before the hordes of non-Russian hackers did it. So even if Putin tried, the odds are low that his team got to the good stuff first.

But that’s just the hacking allegation. The “influence” goes further than that, including fake news and other social media shenanigans.

Fake News and Social Media Shenanigans

Let’s say Russia did attempt to influence American voters to support Trump. The first question I have to ask is this: Aren’t all the big countries trying to influence elections in all the other countries, all the time? If Russia did try to influence an American election, wouldn’t that be business as usual? Do we imagine the United States is NOT trying to influence foreign elections through our own fake news and social media manipulations? I always assumed we do that sort of thing. I base that assumption on the following observation about human beings:

If the payoff for bad behavior is high, and the odds of getting caught and punished are low, bad behavior happens every time.

That describes the situation with influencing foreign elections. The payoff is high (potentially) and one assumes the major intelligence agencies know how to avoid getting fingered. Whenever you have this sort of situation, you always have mischief.

But let’s get back to Russia’s presumed payoff for somehow destabilizing the United States. I think we need to check that assumption because Putin seems like a smart guy. It’s hard for me to believe he thinks he would come out ahead by destabilizing the world’s most important military and economic power. And that is doubly true when you are teaming with that country to fight ISIS, put a cap on North Korea, and keep the economy chugging along. It’s hard for me to imagine a scenario in 2017 in which Russia gains by poking America with a sharp stick. The probable outcome seems more bad than good. Who wants a pissed-off nuclear superpower looking in your direction? It doesn’t pass the sniff test. If Putin were an idiot, I could see him wanting to cause this sort of trouble just because he was dumb.

Putin isn’t dumb.

Global Democracy Hypothesis

I’d like to introduce a new hypothesis to explain why Russia might have wanted to influence American elections: They believed a Hillary Clinton presidency would be a disaster to the world, including Russia.

We’ve been brainwashed by the media and our own government to believe Russia always acts against our interests. I think it would be more accurate to assume Russia always acts in its own best interest, and that can sometimes be in conflict with our interests.

But not always.

There is no rule that says Russia’s best interests have to diverge from America’s. For example, both countries want to defeat ISIS. Both countries prefer a non-nuclear North Korea. Both countries prefer robust trade. And so on.

As a thought experiment, imagine the United States watching some other country’s election process while believing one of the main candidates would be a disaster for the world, including the United States. Would our intelligence services try to influence that election, even if it was a NATO country?

Of course they would. At least I hope so.

But something much larger than government-on-government influence is happening, and I’d like to call that out in this post. We keep talking about physical border security, but what about influence security? Any country with widespread Internet access is susceptible to the same kind of fake news and other social media influence that we suspect Russia of doing. And every citizen can play this game. For example, if I were highly motivated to influence an election in Great Britain, I’m sure I could move a few thousand votes in any direction I chose. Could it be said in that case that America is trying to manipulate a foreign election? Yes, unambiguously so. And I believe it is totally legal, even if I use fake news as my persuasion.

From 2017 onward, the democratic process in any country is open to “voting” by the entire world. The foreign “votes” will come in the form of social media influence on the local voters. There is no practical way to stop any of that from happening. And that means political power will migrate from the traditional triumvirate of politicians, rich people, and the media, to individual persuaders who are good at it. In 2017 and beyond, the best persuaders in the world will be influencing democratic elections in every country. And those persuaders will be from anywhere on the globe. Borders can’t stop persuasion.

While you were watching the news coverage about physical borders between countries, and physical immigration, the democratic process in each country became global. We can (and do) influence politics across borders now, bigly. And fake news is part of the soup, unfortunately.

Did Putin or other Russian nationals try to influence American elections? I assume so. I also assume America has done the same -- in terms of influence on their local politics -- to Russia, and to every one of our allies.

And if we aren’t doing that sort of thing, why the hell not? Voting is open across borders now. We would be wise to vote in those other countries. That’s what Russia did. Allegedly.

---

You might enjoy reading my book because Russia. (See video review here)

I’m also on...

Twitter (includes Periscope): @scottadamssays

YouTube: At this link.

Instagram: ScottAdams925

Facebook Official Page: fb.me/ScottAdamsOfficial

#Putin #Trump #POTUS

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anthonybialy · 4 years ago

Text

Rounded Off

Please note the quite even amount we have to give the White House to make our lives pleasant. Life's managers are nice enough to repair your challenges by law and remove tricky numbers containing a high variety of numerals. You're funding it, so you may as well know exactly how much.

The fondness for precise spending is peculiar for a rather imprecise entity. I'm sure this government is careful about frittering 13 figures at a time, especially since it's not their cash. Seizing it doesn't make it so any more than a burglar deserves your deed.

Every new spending measure is uncannily in an amount that even the president can remember. Joe Biden has spent a career being known for careful precision, which is as true as thinking he's going to make you rich through highway repair. The big boy remembers big numbers as long as there are lots of zeros.

America will be saved dollar amounts that are unnervingly round. Rather pushy requests for exactly $100 billion or $2 trillion or $4 freaking trillion are totally not because Biden can't remember anything more specific, so get that cruel notion about a hoary dunce out of your head.

The rumor about the president avoiding using cellphones until he learned the magic pocket screens would remember phone numbers is entirely unfounded. By contrast, life contains no coincidences, like how exactly100 more days of mask-wearing is sure to make the virus surrender. Imagine how hard it would be to remember if it were 98 or 117? Doctors have totally backed Biden's expert medical mandate, at least if they prefer cushy White House jobs ordering lesser citizens how to conduct their affairs instead of helping the sick.

It's almost like every single issue results in a rather unproductive president calling for more spending of your money on your behalf. The conspiracy about present White House dwellers enjoying crises because they gives them chances to expand government can't be accepted as fact just because it lines up perfectly. Tides provoke calls for $500 billion in education spending so we can learn about this mysterious sky rock that makes water appear and recede.

Your attentive overlords haven't taken enough from you for the privilege of driving on occasionally paved surfaces. Workers already pay taxes in case anyone wondered why their paycheck felt light. They're compelled to do so by law, although you may be surprised to learn the percentage can be changed.

Needing to extend the budget so bridges don't collapse or to make fast choo-choos is either extraneous spending or a tacit admission nothing government does works. If you're an enthusiast, you'll be glad to spend more. If you're not, tough.

Incinerating another fortune indicates those elected because Trump sucks have zero original ideas. Classic notions would be okay if they were into old good ones. But they're not calling for gin to be mixed with dry vermouth.

The ancient faction endorses concepts more ancient than Bernie Sanders that are just as preposterous. The difference between the government and mafia is the latter maintains at least the appearance of honor.

Keep trying to make the economy better by draining it. Take food off a plate, bite twice, and hand it back to the appreciative starving party. This administration's dupes either honestly believe government helps or just think the successful need to be punished for it by having a huge portion of their incomes funneled through a capital that would never, ever spill. You can decide which is more daft if it helps cope.

An expert is someone who agrees with Biden. As with everything else liberals believe, they try to overcome obvious deficiencies in their beliefs by demonizing dissent.

Pretending they have evidence on their side is another way they ignore it. Preeners claiming to obey science just happen to cite those on their payroll. Meanwhile, they adhere to a viewpoint discredited by countless examples. Researchers see one instance where government has improved a service by taking money from others to buy something for those mugged.

Government fixes everything, according to those aware of nothing. The absurdly tiresome outlook that hasn't worked yet, which means it's due. Revolutionaries wonder if people could buy their own things and be enabled to do it more frequently with higher quality goods if only they could get ahead. Biden's age or time spent allegedly serving hasn't made him proficient at manning an abacus or anything else.

Hearing why a fantastic sum will turn America into utopia is even goofier when it' never a prime number. Leave it to greedy businesses to figure out exact costs as a selfless government take another trillion without tracking it. As for a more certain number, present White House staffers think 1984 has a happy ending. You should be glad Big Brother was so kind, ingrate.

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pensarelvirus · 5 years ago

Text

‘The impossible has already happened': what coronavirus can teach us about hope / Rebecca Solnit

Disasters begin suddenly and never really end. The future will not, in crucial ways, be anything like the past, even the very recent past of a month or two ago. Our economy, our priorities, our perceptions will not be what they were at the outset of this year. The particulars are startling: companies such as GE and Ford retooling to make ventilators, the scramble for protective gear, once-bustling city streets becoming quiet and empty, the economy in freefall. Things that were supposed to be unstoppable stopped, and things that were supposed to be impossible – extending workers’ rights and benefits, freeing prisoners, moving a few trillion dollars around in the US – have already happened.

The word “crisis” means, in medical terms, the crossroads a patient reaches, the point at which she will either take the road to recovery or to death. The word “emergency” comes from “emergence” or “emerge”, as if you were ejected from the familiar and urgently need to reorient. The word “catastrophe” comes from a root meaning a sudden overturning.

We have reached a crossroads, we have emerged from what we assumed was normality, things have suddenly overturned. One of our main tasks now – especially those of us who are not sick, are not frontline workers, and are not dealing with other economic or housing difficulties – is to understand this moment, what it might require of us, and what it might make possible.

A disaster (which originally meant “ill-starred”, or “under a bad star”) changes the world and our view of it. Our focus shifts, and what matters shifts. What is weak breaks under new pressure, what is strong holds, and what was hidden emerges. Change is not only possible, we are swept away by it. We ourselves change as our priorities shift, as intensified awareness of mortality makes us wake up to our own lives and the preciousness of life. Even our definition of “we” might change as we are separated from schoolmates or co-workers, sharing this new reality with strangers. Our sense of self generally comes from the world around us, and right now, we are finding another version of who we are.

As the pandemic upended our lives, people around me worried that they were having trouble focusing and being productive. It was, I suspected, because we were all doing other, more important work. When you’re recovering from an illness, pregnant or young and undergoing a growth spurt, you’re working all the time, especially when it appears you’re doing nothing. Your body is growing, healing, making, transforming and labouring below the threshold of consciousness. As we struggled to learn the science and statistics of this terrible scourge, our psyches were doing something equivalent. We were adjusting to the profound social and economic changes, studying the lessons disasters teach, equipping ourselves for an unanticipated world.

The first lesson a disaster teaches is that everything is connected. In fact, disasters, I found while living through a medium-sized one (the 1989 earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area) and later writing about major ones (including 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and Fukushima nuclear catastrophe in Japan), are crash courses in those connections. At moments of immense change, we see with new clarity the systems – political, economic, social, ecological – in which we are immersed as they change around us. We see what’s strong, what’s weak, what’s corrupt, what matters and what doesn’t.

I often think of these times as akin to a spring thaw: it’s as if the pack ice has broken up, the water starts flowing again and boats can move through places they could not during winter. The ice was the arrangement of power relations that we call the status quo – it seems to be stable, and those who benefit from it often insist that it’s unchangeable. Then it changes fast and dramatically, and that can be exhilarating, terrifying, or both.

Those who benefit most from the shattered status quo are often more focused on preserving or reestablishing it than protecting human life – as we saw when a chorus of US conservatives and corporate top dogs insisted that, for the sake of the stock market, everyone had to go back to work, and that the resultant deaths would be an acceptable price to pay. In a crisis, the powerful often try to seize more power – as they have in this round, with the Trump Department of Justice looking at suspending constitutional rights – and the rich seek more riches: two Republican senators are under fire for allegedly using inside information about the coming pandemic to make a profit in the stock market (although both have denied wrongdoing).

Disaster scholars use the term “elite panic” to describe the ways that elites react when they assume that ordinary people will behave badly. When elites describe “panic” and “looting” in the streets, these are usually misnomers for ordinary people doing what they need to do to survive or care for others. Sometimes it’s wise to move rapidly from danger; sometimes it’s altruistic to gather supplies to share.

Such elites often prioritise profit and property over human life and community. In the days after a huge earthquake struck San Francisco on 18 April 1906, the US military swarmed over the city, convinced that ordinary people were a threat and a source of disorder. The mayor issued a “shoot to kill” proclamation against looters, and the soldiers believed they were restoring order. What they were actually doing was setting inexpert firebreaks that helped fire spread through the city, and shooting or beating citizens who disobeyed orders (sometimes those orders were to let the fires burn down their own homes and neighbourhoods). Ninety-nine years later, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’s police and white vigilantes did the same thing: shooting black people in the name of defending property and their own authority. The local, state and federal government insisted on treating a stranded, mostly poor, mostly black population as dangerous enemies to be contained and controlled, rather than victims of a catastrophe to be aided.

The mainstream media colluded in obsessing about looting in the aftermath of Katrina. The stock of mass-manufactured goods in large corporate chain stores seemed to matter more than people needing food and clean water, or grandmothers left clinging to roofs. Nearly 1,500 people died of a disaster that had more to do with bad government than with bad weather. The US Army Corps of Engineers’ levees had failed; the city had no evacuation plans for the poor, and President George W Bush’s administration failed to deliver prompt and effective relief. The same calculus is happening now. A member of the Brazilian opposition said of Brazil’s rightwing president Jair Bolsonaro: “He represents the most perverse economic interests that couldn’t care less about people’s lives. They’re worried about maintaining their profitability.” (Bolsonaro claims he is trying to protect workers and the economy.)

The billionaire evangelist who owns the arts and crafts chain Hobby Lobby claimed divine guidance in keeping his workers at their jobs when businesses were ordered to close. (The company has now closed all its stores.) At Uline Corporation, owned by billionaire Trump backers Richard and Liz Uihlein, a memo sent to Wisconsin workers said: “please do NOT tell your peers about the symptoms & your assumptions. By doing so, you are causing unnecessary panic in the office.” The billionaire founder and chairman of payroll processing corporation Paychex, Tom Golisano, said: “The damages of keeping the economy closed as it is could be worse than losing a few more people.” (Golisano has since said his comments were misrepresented, and has apologised.)

Historically, there have always been titans of industry who prized the lifeless thing that is profit over living beings, who paid bribes in order to operate unhindered, worked children to death or put labourers in mortal danger in sweatshops and coal mines. There were also those who pressed on with fossil fuel extraction and burning despite what they knew, or refused to know, about climate change. One of the primary uses of wealth has always been to buy your way out of the common fate, or, at least, it has come with a belief that you can disassociate from society at large. And while the rich are often conservative, conservatives more often align with the rich, whatever their economic status.

The idea that everything is connected is an affront to conservatives who cherish a macho every-man-for-himself frontier fantasy. Climate change has been a huge insult to them – this science that says what comes out of our cars and chimneys shapes the fate of the world in the long run and affects crops, sea level, forest fires and so much more. If everything is connected, then the consequences of every choice and act and word have to be examined, which we see as love in action and they see as impingement upon absolute freedom, freedom being another word for absolutely no limits on the pursuit of self-interest. Ultimately, a significant portion of conservatives and corporate leaders regard science as an annoyance that they can refuse to recognise. Some insist they can choose whatever rules and facts they want, as though these too are just free-market commodities to pick and choose from or remake according to one’s whims. “This denial of science and critical thinking among religious ultraconservatives now haunts the American response to the coronavirus crisis,” wrote the journalist Katherine Stewart in the New York Times.

Our rulers showed little willingness to recognise the ominous possibilities of the pandemic in the US, the UK, Brazil and many other countries. They failed in their most important job, and denying that failure will be a major focus for them. And while it may be inevitable that the pandemic will result in an economic crash, it is also turning into an opportunity for authoritarian power grabs in the Philippines, Hungary, Israel and the US – a reminder that the largest problems are still political, and so are their solutions.

When a storm subsides, the air is washed clean of whatever particulate matter has been obscuring the view, and you can often see farther and more sharply than at any other time. When this storm clears, we may, as do people who have survived a serious illness or accident, see where we were and where we should go in a new light. We may feel free to pursue change in ways that seemed impossible while the ice of the status quo was locked up. We may have a profoundly different sense of ourselves, our communities, our systems of production and our future.

For many of us in the developed world, what has changed most immediately is spatial. We have stayed home, those of us who have homes, and away from contact with others. We have withdrawn from schools, workplaces, conferences, vacations, gyms, errands, parties, bars, clubs, churches, mosques, synagogues, from the busyness and bustle of everyday life. The philosopher-mystic Simone Weil once wrote to a faraway friend: “Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated.” We have withdrawn from each other to protect each other. And people have found ways to help the vulnerable, despite the need to remain physically distant.

My friend Renato Redentor Constantino, a climate campaigner, wrote to me from the Philippines, and said: “We are witness today to daily displays of love that remind us of the many reasons why humans have survived this long. We encounter epic acts of courage and citizenship each day in our neighbourhoods and in other cities and countries, instances that whisper to us that the depredations of a few will eventually be overcome by legions of stubborn people who refuse the counsel of despair, violence, indifference and arrogance that so-called leaders appear so eager nowadays to trigger.”

When we are no longer trying to unlink ourselves from the chain of a spreading disease, I wonder if we will rethink how we were linked, how we moved about and how the goods we rely on moved about. Perhaps we will appreciate the value of direct face-to-face contact more. Perhaps the Europeans who have sung together from their balconies or applauded together for their medical workers, and the Americans who came out to sing or dance on their suburban blocks, will have a different sense of belonging. Perhaps we will find a new respect for the workers who produce our food and those who bring it to our tables.

Although staying put is hard, maybe we will be reluctant to resume our rushing about, and something of the stillness now upon us will stay with us. We may rethink the wisdom of having much of our most vital stuff – medicine, medical equipment – made on other continents. We may also rethink the precarious just-in-time supply chains. I have often thought that the wave of privatisation that has characterised our neoliberal age began with the privatisation of the human heart, the withdrawal from a sense of a shared fate and social bonds. It is to be hoped that this shared experience of catastrophe will reverse the process. A new awareness of how each of us belongs to the whole and depends on it may strengthen the case for meaningful climate action, as we learn that sudden and profound change is possible after all.

“Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” Wordsworth wrote, a little more than 200 years ago. Perhaps this will be the moment that we recognise that there is enough food, clothing, shelter, healthcare and education for all – and that access to these things should not depend on what job you do and whether you earn enough money. Perhaps the pandemic is also making the case, for those who were not already convinced, for universal healthcare and basic income. In the aftermath of disaster, a change of consciousness and priorities are powerful forces.

A dozen years ago I interviewed the Nicaraguan poet and Sandinista revolutionary Gioconda Belli for my book on disaster, A Paradise Built in Hell. What she told me about the aftermath of the 1972 earthquake in Managua – that, despite the dictatorship’s crackdown, it helped bring on the revolution – was unforgettable. She said: “You had a sense of what was important. And people realised that what was important was freedom and being able to decide your life and agency. Two days later you had this tyrant imposing a curfew, imposing martial law. The sense of oppression on top of the catastrophe was really unbearable. And once you had realised that your life can be decided by one night of the Earth deciding to shake, [you thought]: ‘So what? I want to live a good life and I want to risk my life, because I can also lose my life in one night.’ You realise that life has to be lived well or is not worth living. It’s a very profound transformation that takes place during catastrophes.”

I have found over and over that the proximity of death in shared calamity makes many people more urgently alive, less attached to the small things in life and more committed to the big ones, often including civil society or the common good.

I have mostly written about 20th-century disasters, but one analogy a bit further back comes to mind: the Black Death, which wiped out a third of Europe’s population, and, in England, later led to peasant revolts against war taxes and wage caps that were officially quashed, but nevertheless led to more rights and freedoms for peasants and labourers. In the emergency legislation passed in the US in March, many workers gained new sick-leave rights. Lots of things we were assured were impossible – housing the homeless, for example – have come to pass in some places.

Ireland nationalised its hospitals, something “we were told would never happen and could never happen,” an Irish journalist commented. Canada came up with four months of basic income for those who lost their jobs. Germany did more than that. Portugal decided to treat immigrants and asylum seekers as full citizens during the pandemic. In the US, we have seen powerful labour agitation, and results. Workers at Whole Foods, Instacart and Amazon have protested at being forced to work in unsafe conditions during the pandemic. (Whole Foods has since offered workers who test positive two weeks off on full pay; Instacart says it has made changes to safeguard workers and shoppers, while Amazon said it is “following guidelines” on safety.) Some workers have gained new rights and raises, including almost half a million Kroger grocery store workers, while 15 state attorneys-general told Amazon to expand its paid sick leave. These specifics make clear how possible it is to change the financial arrangements of all our societies.

But often the most significant consequences of disasters are not immediate or direct. The 2008 financial collapse led to 2011’s Occupy Wall Street uprising, which prompted a new reckoning with economic inequality and a new scrutiny of the human impact of exploitative mortgages, student loans, for profit-colleges, health-insurance systems and more, and that in turn amplified the profiles of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, whose ideas have helped pull the Democratic party to the left, towards policies that will make the US fairer and more equal. The conversations stirred by Occupy and its sister movements across the globe incited more critical scrutiny of ruling powers, and more demands for economic justice. Changes in the public sphere originate within the individual, but also, changes in the world at large affect our sense of self, our priorities and our sense of the possible.

We are only in the early stages of this disaster, and we are also in a strange stillness. It is like the Christmas truce of 1914, when German and English soldiers stopped fighting for a day, the guns fell silent and soldiers mingled freely. War itself paused. There’s a way that our getting and spending has been a kind of war against the Earth. Since the outbreak of Covid-19, carbon emissions have plummeted. Reports say the air above Los Angeles, Beijing and New Delhi is miraculously clean. Parks all over the US are shut to visitors, which may have a beneficial effect on wildlife. In the last government shutdown of 2018-2019, elephant seals at Point Reyes National Seashore just north of San Francisco took over a new beach, and now own it for the duration of their season of mating and birthing on land.

There’s another analogy that comes to mind. When a caterpillar enters its chrysalis, it dissolves itself, quite literally, into liquid. In this state, what was a caterpillar and will be a butterfly is neither one nor the other, it’s a sort of living soup. Within this living soup are the imaginal cells that will catalyse its transformation into winged maturity. May the best among us, the most visionary, the most inclusive, be the imaginal cells – for now we are in the soup. The outcome of disasters is not foreordained. It’s a conflict, one that takes place while things that were frozen, solid and locked up have become open and fluid – full of both the best and worst possibilities. We are both becalmed and in a state of profound change.

But this is also a time of depth for those spending more time at home and more time alone, looking outward at this unanticipated world. We often divide emotions into good and bad, happy and sad, but I think they can equally be divided into shallow and deep, and the pursuit of what is supposed to be happiness is often a flight from depth, from one’s own interior life and the suffering around us – and not being happy is often framed as a failure. But there is meaning as well as pain in sadness, mourning and grief, the emotions born of empathy and solidarity. If you are sad and frightened, it is a sign that you care, that you are connected in spirit. If you are overwhelmed – well, it is overwhelming, and it will take decades of study, analysis, discussion and contemplation to understand how and why 2020 suddenly took us all into marshy new territory.

Seven years ago, Patrisse Cullors wrote a sort of mission statement for Black Lives Matter: “Provide hope and inspiration for collective action to build collective power to achieve collective transformation. Rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards vision and dreams.” It is beautiful not only because it is hopeful, not only because then Black Lives Matter set out and did transformative work, but because it acknowledges that hope can coexist with difficulty and suffering. The sadness in the depths and the fury that burns above are not incompatible with hope, because we are complex creatures, because hope is not optimism that everything will be fine regardless.

Hope offers us clarity that, amid the uncertainty ahead, there will be conflicts worth joining and the possibility of winning some of them. And one of the things most dangerous to this hope is the lapse into believing that everything was fine before disaster struck, and that all we need to do is return to things as they were. Ordinary life before the pandemic was already a catastrophe of desperation and exclusion for too many human beings, an environmental and climate catastrophe, an obscenity of inequality. It is too soon to know what will emerge from this emergency, but not too soon to start looking for chances to help decide it. It is, I believe, what many of us are preparing to do.

Fuente: https://www.theguardian.com/about-hope-rebecca-solnit

[Publicado 7/abril/2020]

#Rebecca Solnit #The impossible has already happened #what coronavirus can teach us about hope #reflexión #literature #society #salud #sociedad #UK #USA #covid-19 #coronavirus #crisis #pandemia #virus #hope #capitalism #necropolitics #worldpolitics

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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

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“Why,” President of the United States Donald Trump asked rhetorically during a sit down with Fox News propaganda broadcaster Sean Hannity Thursday night, “didn’t somebody call the FBI 36 years ago?”

Any number of old geezers could easily fail to grasp the dynamics of sexual assault that would lead a 15-year-old girl to be reluctant to report a crime perpetrated by an older boy in her community. But the truly Trumpian coup-de-grace is that the current president doesn’t seem to understand what the FBI is or what it does.

A normal interviewer might have pressed Trump on some of this, but Hannity is not a normal interviewer. Indeed, through significant stretches of the interview he can’t actually be bothered to formulate questions of any kind, instead simply issuing supportive statements like “better news with Kim Jong Un. He is not firing rockets over Japan.” To this, Trump sagely replies, “Honestly, Korea, North Korea, South Korea, things are working out very nicely.”

In truth, of course, nothing is working out. The North Koreans have already tested their rockets, so they aren’t firing more. Sanctions enforcement is unraveling because of a combination of Trump’s trade war with China and premature declaration of victory on the Korean nuclear issue.

But even in the absence of concrete policy achievements, Trump does have a good economy to point to. Thus the rather pathetic trajectory of the interview moves away from any discussion of real things. It instead leads to Trump and Hannity joining forces to block an economic cataclysm that will allegedly be unleashed by a totally fake version of the congressional Democrats.

Trump is not conversant in the main issues of American public policy and doesn’t bother studying for interviews, so every time he does one he ends up spouting risible nonsense.

Here, for example, is the president explaining his trade policy: “It is time to take a stand on China. It has been a long time, they have been hurting us. Our farmers are great and starting to do very well again. It is very interesting, but we are putting very, very heavy sanctions and other things on various countries. And we are getting along with some countries. We have been ripped off, Sean, by the world. All of these countries, for years and years, we can’t do it anymore.”

Farmers are, of course, hurting quite badly from the disruption of trade with China. And the tariffs Trump is putting on imports from China (and on steel and aluminum from much of the world) aren’t sanctions. And more broadly, the whole reason a disruption of trade with China hurts farmers is that the trading relationship isn’t a case of anybody ripping anybody off — it’s a whole series of mutually beneficial exchanges.

Trump also reminds us that his southern border wall is “going to have lots of doors. People are going to come in, but they are going to come in through merit.” He doesn’t seem to know that the “merit” immigration plan he’s endorsed would cut legal immigration in half and leave native-born Americans poorer. Rather, Trump thinks “they’re going to come in because we have companies moving in from all over the world, they are coming back to the United States United States. The biggest companies, Foxconn, the biggest companies are coming back.”

Foxconn is a Taiwanese company that certainly isn’t coming back to America. It is raking in subsidies to the tune of $200,000 per job created, which seems like a stiff price to pay.

Trump explains that he fixed NAFTA, though he doesn’t seem to have any information about what provisions of the deal are changing: “Good for Mexico, good for us, everybody is happy. NAFTA was a disaster. We lost thousands of plans, millions of jobs, NAFTA was a disaster. We have renegotiated it.”

Trump is, in general, not really a specifics guy. His main message is that everyone has to vote Republican but he doesn’t know why.

If Republicans do well in the midterms, holding a House majority and gaining a Senate seat or two, they are going to try to govern the country. They will make another stab at repealing the Affordable Care Act, enact a new round of tax cuts, and move to cut safety net programs like SNAP.

There’s a problem with this program of cutting taxes for the rich in order to cut useful programs for the rest is: It’s unpopular. So when Hannity asks Trump to explain why people should vote Republican, Trump can’t bother to cite any of their actual policy agenda:

HANNITY: What do you say to those people that love you, but maybe aren’t so hot on the Republican House or Senate member?

TRUMP: You have to go out and vote. We need more Republicans. We will get everything we want, but we need more Republicans. Want to protect your second amendment, everything, protect all of the great success that you have had over the last little more than a year and a half, think of it, we are coming up — can you believe it — on two years.

Another tactic is to make up fake positions and attribute them to his opponents, as when Trump says, “The Democrats, they want open borders, people coming in, that means crime.”

Last, but by no means least, Trump observes that “the stock market today hit the highest level in its history” and then says a Democratic Congress will crash the market for no reason: “401(k)s are up, 57 percent in a short period of time. If the Democrats get in, those numbers will be cut in half. You will see bad things.”

Why does Trump have so little actual information about anything that’s actually happening? Well, as he explains at the end as Hannity as wrapping up the segment and throwing to Laura Ingraham, “Laura, I love your show, I watch it all the time. And you know what, you are special. You really are.”

And it’s true. He’s not just a beneficiary of Fox’s friendly coverage, he’s a genuinely enthusiastic consumer who believes highly biased cable news broadcasts are a good way to get information about American politics and public policy. And it shows.

Original Source -> Trump’s latest interview shows Republicans have nothing to run on in November

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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newagesispage · 7 years ago

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JANUARY 2018

PAGE RIB

*****Although companies can’t technically give financial support to a candidate, execs and employees can pool their money and donate. Let’s not forget those who gave big support Roy Moore: NBC Universal, AT&T, Aflac, Comcast, Lockheed Martin, Honeywell, Price Waterhouse Cooper, Pfizer, Boeing and Microsoft among others.

*****Check out the great new music video from This Ordinary Life featuring Chris Learned. Go Go Go!!

*****So happy to see Richard Gilliland on Criminal Minds. More!!

***** What went thru Hillary’s mind when she saw the crowd in the street yelling “lock him up” at Flynn. The former national security advisor admits lying to the FBI and was directed before inauguration while at Mar- A -Lago to work with Russia. Wil this bring up charges of the Logan act in which people who aren’t in the government conduct business on behalf of the government in foreign policy?** ABC’s Brian Ross was suspended after erroneously reporting that Flynn was directed to do this before the election. ** Where is Hunter S. Thompson when we need him?

*****Days alert: I really do love Andre and Abby’s dynamic. **Good to see Kate get found and I can’t believe she later tells on herself.**I know that Nicole supposedly can’t get pregnant but will she come back one day with Eric’s baby?? Will there be a baby for Eli?** It seems that Sammy can’t ever be in town without bedding someone.**Great to see the fabulous Louise Sorel back as Vivian!!** Next up is GH’s Tyler Christopher as another DiMera heir, Stefan O. and Leann Hunley is back as Anna who will spend some time with Roman. Hooray.. There are new DOOLMOJIS, emoji’s of Days characters.

*****Scary clown has fired the entire HIV/AIDS advisory council by a Fed ex letter. 150 mil cut from HIV prevention, 26 mil cut from housing for people with aids, 800 mil cut from global programs.** The one good thing right now is the economy. The clown has the luck of inheriting Obama’s hard work. Many companies are doing better because regulations are being cut and money will be saved at tax time but how safe are the rest of us?? They may be uncomfortable with Trump talk but they will sure take the money. I guess they can live with no good thought about human rights and climate change. And in foreign policy the President is Putin’s bitch.** Word is that they are working on more White House staff restructuring in January.

*****Reuters reports that Russian tankers are supplying fuel to North Korea by transferring it at sea.

*****Duncan Jones has launched an online book club dedicated to his Dad, David Bowie’s favorite 100 books. Woo Hoo!

*****Stories are coming out that the Dr. Phil staff aid in getting drugs and drink for addicts. There are also claims that people are not properly monitored by medical personnel.

*****The house passed the notion that conceal and carry can go from one state to another.

*****Cash cab is back with new shows after 5 years. Ok.. I did not even know it was gone but I guess the popularity of the reruns continues on the Game show network.

*****A mandate has been repealed so they will be able to drill in the National wildlife reserves. It never ends with these money guys. The Native American community are screaming out to keep Bears ears and the grand staircase safe and peaceful.** Mike Murphy calls our current predicament , “the first screwball presidency.”**

*****Scott Pelly is out as anchor of the CBS evening news and Jeff Glore is in. The network wanted to go with youth.

*****What is it with the History channel? They take intriguing subjects like HH Holmes, Jack the Ripper and The Zodiak and turn a few nuggets into yawn fests. The recent special , Manson speaks didn’t really let him speak much. The premise was that they had hours of Manson on tape but they only played a few select sentences at the beginning and the end of commercial breaks and the rest was mostly pontificating and talking to others. Harold Trues cousin was great though. There were some interesting people who had interaction with Manson or the family at various times and I did learn a few things but it wasn’t exactly as advertised. It did not need to stretch to 2 nights. Many of their specials are more of the same. One does have to wonder that with Manson’s death, will people come forward with new info? Hangers on or witnesses may have bought into his scary mystique and been afraid to talk and may feel more free to open up now. Will more mysteries get solved? ** Manson apparently left all rights to his image to a pen pa he has had for 20 years. News reports claimed he had no next of kin which we know is wrong.

*****Rick Steves is speaking out for the international legalization of marijuana.

*****Better late than never with Henry Winkler is back at the beginning of the year.

*****IBM has named Fletcher Previn its youngest chief information officer in their history.

*****Ads for the Olympics have already started.

*****Psych: The movie was delicious. Glad to see they did not lose their mojo. There was a Richard Thomas mention. Go!

*****Word is that Stranger Things season 3 will hit us in 2019.

*****Have a wonderful 2018 everyone and fight on for the rights for all of us!!

*****John Oliver called out Dustin Hoffman for his treatment of women. Hoffman responded, “Do you believe everything you read?” The tone was as condescending as I have ever heard. There have since been more allegations. Since the incident John Oliver tells us that the conversation did not really go anywhere and it makes him sad.** Newest allegations in the me too, expose your pig era are against Tavis Smiley, Mario Batali and Morgan Spurlock. Andrea Ramsey is the first woman to be called out who had to drop out of a congressional race in Kansas after allegations that she harassed a male subordinate. And Gene Simmons is being sued which we should have seem coming. He was even put out by Fox news! ** Thanks Time for The silence breakers as the person of the year. In a world where these brave women are standing up after years of abuse, why are we still stuck with garbage like The Bachelor?

*****John Conyers retires.** We lost Al Franken and in his case it was barely mentioned that so many women signed letters of support and truly believed in him. He will leave at the end of the year. I guess he had to go but he is such a fighter for the truth. He was one of the few who called out those taking our rights away. Tom Arnold claims this was all set up and the first woman was coached to bring him down and that he has proof but it is hard to believe him. He still hasn’t shown us the ‘proof’ of Trump and his filth that he claims to have. Will Franken be able to do more once he is on the outside again? What is all but the first allegation turn out to be nothing? What does that mean for his future? Tom Brokaw was right , that the people of Minnesota should have decided his fate and not a bunch of senators. Even Newt defended Al on Fox. Pelosi’s big mouth on Meet the Press helped to fuck this up. We must always believe the accuser first. But there are going to be times when accusations come for other reasons other than the truth. I always say.. follow the evidence. Ruining a good man or woman is just as bad as rape. But we must remember that only about 3% of sexual allegations are false. Trump and his cohorts know the left will usually back down. They love that the left are do gooders while they just deny and smile. They do not care about the “what about you guys?” stuff. The Trumpsters think Minnesota is a great place for “their kind” of candidate so they can gain more control.

*****Director Bryan Singer was fired from the Bohemian Rhapsody film for allegedly not showing up to work .Dexter Fletcher will now direct.

*****Ryan Reynolds will play Det. Pikachu?

*****ABC is bringing us Child support with Fred Savage and Ricky Gervais. I am not much of a game show fan but I am intrigued.

*****So it seems that those in charge at House of cards were listening and put Robin Wright at the top of the heap and will continue.

*****Homeless numbers are up mostly due to soaring rent prices.

*****The Trump announcement about Jerusalem was good for some more distraction and chaos. Nothing may ever happen with the newly named capital and it would take years before things were ever moved anyway. Why is this twitter coward allowed to put us thru this over and over? Why is he still holding rallies? The White house says he is testing lines for his next election. He is seeing what the base is most excited about because that is all he really seems to care about. So far, their research shows the talking points that get the biggest reaction are standing for the anthem, winning by a landslide, distrust of the media and appointing conservatives

*****The John Travolta /Gotti film pulled its Dec. 15 release date. Producers exercised a buy back clause and are looking for a new distributer.

*****We are finding out that teaching creationism is a big part of the reason Trump and Betsy Devos are so gung ho about this voucher school program.

*****I was so shocked to hear Donald Sutherland say he thought of himself as an ugly man. I vehemently disagree as I always thought he was so fucking hot.

*****The new tax plan gives tax breaks for private planes and inherited estates that are over a million. The plan will add a trillion to the deficit and seems to keep adding more incentive to the rich with every passing day.** Since 1980, the economy has transferred 8 points of national income from the poor to the rich according to the Washington Post.

*****The critic choice noms are out giving the top spots to The Shape of water and Feud: Bette and Joan. Others include Daniel Kaluuya and Jordan Peele for Get Out, Patrick Stewart, It , Stranger Things, The Crown, Bob Odenkirk, Michael McKean (yes!), Allison Brie and Glow, Ed O’Neill, Jessica Lange (no Susan?), Judy Davis, Laura Dern, all the late night Jimmy’s, and the only nom for AHS for Evan Peters.

*****This month’s Fox headline: Andrew Jackson: hero under fire!

*****The Librarians are back on TNT doing their goofy best with that great cast and its better than ever.

*****Christiane Amanpour is now on in place of Charlie Rose on PBS. Great show but I don’t ever remember her wearing that much makeup.

*****Brooklyn 99 has had a great season. Think Bovine Brothel!!

*****Baskets is coming on FX.WHEW!!!

*****What happened to the voice on the quilted northern commercial? They have now opted for a softer, more optimistic voice. Did the other voice scare people or make them cry?

*****Love HBO’s Rolling Stone: Stories from the edge. So many memories come flooding back from articles I have read thru the years. They include some of the most important stories from our recent past, lest we forget. Please tell me there is somebody deep undercover in the scary clown administration. Speaking of which, Omarosa is out and seems to want to sell her story but trouble is neither side seems to like her or trust her so how will that play out?

***** Will history lay a lot of blame, good and bad on the Clintons for the direction of this country? They already point out the sexual allegations against President Clinton everyday somewhere. Did he usher in this movement? The Paula Jones case made it possible for a sitting President to be sued which seems to have backfired on the republicans. Can you imagine Trump sitting for a deposition? Oy! Will Hillary be slighted for not winning and sticking us with Trump? There were many things in play in the election so is that fair? **Pete Davidson got a Hillary tattoo as a gift for her for Christmas. His statement: Thanks for being such a badass and one of the strongest people in the universe. I mean no shit..If the roles were reversed on the candidates: The President seems like a sore winner, can you imagine if he had lost? And can you imagine how well the government would be running with a woman in charge (except , of course all the trouble the haters would have caused).

*****A federal appeals court overturned a ruling that Brendan Dassey had been coerced into confessing to the murder of Teresa Halibach. Next stop: The Supreme Court. Let the guy out, what a ridiculous waste of time and resources.

*****The scary clown administration has told the CDC they are not to use the words Diversity, transgender, fetus, entitlement, vulnerable, evidence based or science based.

***** I am not always much on tradition but with all the ridiculousness going on we don’t hear enough about the niceties like the first lady decorating and the White House Christmas ornament which this year honors Franklin D. Roosevelt. SAD

*****Why were the republicans allowed to build this tax reform bill behind closed doors? This is not how our democracy is supposed to work. The mostly rich white male republicans just keep seeing how far they can go and they keep getting their way. They just do it. They had Trump so why not Moore? We can’t forget how close that election really was with an accused teen loving monster.** I mean we all saw that focus group where the citizen said that his Grandmother was married and had kids by 13. Ok that is true enough I am sure. But then he added that years ago a Mother would be thrilled to hear that their 14 year old daughter was being hit on by a DA. What the Fuck? This is the mentality we are dealing with. No care for character or the hate they spew for those that are different as long as they get their way. Outlaw abortion, guns for all, more money allocated for the old useless trickle down and crow about Jerusalem makes everybody happy. Some evangelicals said their votes were their sacrifice for the greater good. My son commented that he did not see them as making the sacrifice, it was the teenage girls who sacrificed, not once but again and again as they are dragged thru the mud. Isn’t the main objective of Christianity to convert others to the word of God? Is this the way to do it? It seems you are only pushing others away? Who wants to knowingly become a part of the hate? Why does some of the media never learn? They concentrate mostly on the allegations and not enough on the other horrible things that came out of his mouth. Why not tell us the wonderful things Doug Jones did in his life and the things he stood for? Of course, Mitch McConnell won’t let him vote on the tax plan. C’mon REAL media concentrate.. quit looking at the shiny object. It will be good for all of us.** And why do so many people not vote? It makes me crazy that someone would not want to exercise a right that was so hard fought for? Are they too stupid? Too cool? ** By the way Roy Moore is now suing Alabama because he is such a sore loser claiming he has proof of voter fraud( yes, we are still on that kick) and he also states that he passed lie detector tests about the teen victims.

*****What is with people on the computer in the government? Do they never learn to keep things to themselves? It will always come back at ya. This time it is people discussing what an idiot Trump is. Well, we all know that but don’t make inquiries easy for them.

*****Saw an interview with Judd Apatow. He said something about all films aren’t winners or something as he referred to Walk Hard. Oh.. what a shame, just because it isn’t a money maker. I always thought it was his best film.

*****Gotta see David Bowie: The last 5 years.

*****Disney has bought much of Fox which includes interest in Hulu and National Geographic. Fox will keep the sports and news for now.

*****The Illinois Governor race is heating up with Chris Kennedy, Jeanne Ives, Daniel Biss and JB Pritzker with his empire behind him.

*****Anita Hill will lead a Hollywood commission looking into sexual harassment and advancing equality in the workplace.

*****The Golden Globe noms are out and will be presented on January 7. This year there are nods to The Disaster artist, Get out, The Crown, Stranger Things, Elizabeth Moss, Claire Foy, Bob Odenkirk, Issa Rae, Feud and love for both Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange, Jessica Biel, Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman. Supporting noms for Alfred Molina and David Harbour are exciting. The shape of water did big at the globes as they seem to be doing everywhere. I was so glad to see Ozark and Jason Bateman get recognized. Yeow! Oprah is getting the Cecil B. DeMille award which I was hoping would go to Kurt Russel. They have done away with Mr. and Miss Golden Globes and rechristened the children of the famous the Golden Globe ambassador. This year we have the Rock’s daughter.

*****SAG also released their noms. They will air on TNT January 21 with host Kristen Belle. Jessica and Susan from Feud and all the women of Big little lies are included. Glad to see Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin from Grace and Frankie along with Alison Brie, Layra Linney, Elizabeth Moss, Millie Bobbie Brown and Claire Foy.. The casts of Glow, Veep, The Crown, Stranger Things and Curb your enthusiasm got some notice. Larry David and Marc Maron, Jason Bateman, David Harbour and Bob Odenkirk show us the fine work on TV. The movie noms pay respect to Laurie Metclf, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson, James Franco, Daniel Kalluya and Gary Oldman. The casts honored are Get Out, Mudbound, Ladybird and Three billboards.** There are so many great shows out there but I would love to see some recognition for Major Crimes and The Middle.

*****Don’t get me started on the new class for the 2018 Rock and Roll hall of fame. Again.. and I get so tired of saying this NO J. Geils?** So here it s: Bon Jovi (really), Dire Straits, The Moody Blues (about time), The Cars, Nina Simone and the early influence award goes to Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

*****The moment between Joe Biden and Meagan McCain was a heartfelt, spontaneous, bipartisan thing of beauty. It shows us how we can find our humanity. And on the other side it was a smart political move.

*****OMG.. Michael Shannon was on the best At home with Amy Sedaris ever!!!!!

*****The Trump administration officially downgraded climate change to a national security threat.

*****Thanks Karina Longworth for the most recent podcast of You must remember this: Where monsters come from. Bela and Boris are two of my earliest childhood heroes. It is a nice break from the recent political landscape. Hmm, pigeon and rum omelet dinners??** I also just read that James Franco is a big fan of the podcast. Give it a listen, you will be hooked.

***** A judge ruled that the FBI’s listing of juggalos as a gang wasn’t a ‘final agency’ so it isn’t legally binding and could not be challenged in court.

*****The bidding has begun for The Weinstein Company.

*****Ringo Starr and Barry Gibb will finally get their knighthood.

*****R.I.P. The victims of the train derailment, Simeon Booker, Pat Dinizio, Richard Dobson, Bruce McCandless. Dick Enberg, Bob Givens. Jordan Feldstein, Marshall Loeb, Sue Grafton, Jack Blessing, John Anderson, Jim Burns, Erica Garner and Rose Marie.

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blueraith · 7 years ago

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Because I Was So Fucking Bored

I decided to take up reading Actual Published Books (TM) again. A lot of fanfiction was updating as fast as my eternally bored, temporarily out of work, crazed, self needed. It was one of the very few leisurely activities I could take on without getting constantly questioned. I couldn’t decide what fictional book I wanted to buy, and didn’t want to take the time to research any, so I decided to go non-fiction. Besides, haven’t read a non-fiction book in literally years.

In the end, I settled on The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J Evans. Always wondered how the fuck Germany allowed themselves to be taken in my Nazism, and also because of recent events. My high school always hand waved the World Wars. Like, ‘oh, yeah, then there was this war with the Germans, ‘Murica came in and kicked their asses, saved some Jews, and that was the end of it. Read this diary about this kid and that’s about as far as we’re gonna take you.’

So, I’m reading this book, and I can’t help but draw some alarming similarities to what happened with Germany, and what is happening now. Similarities, mind you, not one-to-one causation, before any mentions of Godwin’s Law comes up. Because, as it turns out, the German political landscape was much more complicated than ‘Eviillll Natzis!’ At least, before said evil Nazis came to power. What I was most alarmed by, was America’s rising fanatical Nationalism and how that relates to both World Wars. (I have also been listening to Dan Carlin’s podcast on World War I.) Turns out that both world wars had countries with raging cases of nationalism out the wazoo. But Dan doesn’t really get into the meat of nationalism like this book does.

There were several reasons Germany ultimately dove into that fanatical, and outright murderous case of nationalism. First, the book points out that one can’t assume that Germans were fatigued or lazy in their voting. The opposite is actually the case, Germans were apparently great voters. Turn outs of around 80%. That’s insane by American standards. These Germans lived in a very different time. Politics were often the center of their social lives. These guys made clubs for pretty much everything. If you were interested in joining a book club, for instance, you’d probably have to join one that fit your political ideals. If you were a Social Democrat, then you’d join a Social Democrat book club. But wait, there are two different types of Social Democrats, because the party split along nationalist issues. So, if you were more into nationalism, you’d probably want to join a Independent Social Democrat book club.

And that’s really a symptom of why Germany fell into control of the Nazis. Their political parties were insane. There were six major political parties at any given moment during the Republic years. (The years following the end of WWI and the start of WW2. Wiemar Republic years, basically.) The Social Democrats were the most popular, but their parliament was ultimately unstable because of how many parties there were, and there could be more, smaller parties, than those six if the major parties had any schisms like the Social Democrats ultimately did.

Another was the resentment of the Treaty of Versailles, which is probably the most well known symptom of the rise of Nazi Germany. Germany, and the world, fell into a great depression, but nowhere was this economic collapse more pronounced in Germany. They suffered a case of hyper inflation, one of the worst cases history has seen before or since, and the treaty was not helping any matters with the reparations. Many Germans resented that their government’s money had to go to these other countries, more specifically the French in particular, while their economy collapsed around them. And this hyper inflation was extreme. Before its start, around four German marks were needed to match an American dollar. Towards its height, well over a billion marks were needed to match the dollar. That’s right. Over a fucking billion. I’m not exaggerating whatsoever. Prices in stores were often written in chalk because they would change on the hour.

But these two issues are specifically German. America did go through a depression recently, but nowhere to the extreme as the pre-WW2 hyper inflation that Germany suffered. We have two political powers, and therefore aren’t as unstable and hard to predict as Germany’s six.

Where we are similar to pre-Nazi Germany is our growing sense of nationalism and paranoia that something is out to get us. In Germany’s case, it was the Jews, the ‘societal unfit,’ and the gays. Ours are illegal immigrants, Muslims, quite frankly black people, and—similarly—the gays. In Germany’s case, many far-right pundits blames the Jews first and foremost for their country’s complicated and far reaching issues. They blamed the Jews for the economy, accused them of getting rich while of the rest of the people’s misfortune. They blamed them for society’s move to secularism, ironically, and for ‘stabbing the army in the back’ during WWI.

In our case, American alt-right figures blame illegals for taking jobs that not a single white, middle class, American male would ever want to take on. They blame the Muslims for not ‘policing their own’ and committing what are honestly statistically rare terrorist attacks, and are ignoring the fact that growing nationalism and xenophobia are causing a radicalization of young, conservative, white males who are actually committing more acts of terrorism than radical Islamics are. Black people are protesting against issues of institutional racism, and white people are attributing this only as an unjust attack against their ‘people’ and ‘culture’ along the right. And the right are blaming LGBT issues for ‘distracting from the real issues’ and are attributing the community to a growing sense of immorality. Also similar to the Germans and their views of ‘the gays’ pre-Nazism.

And, now that I think about it, perhaps our political spectrum is similar to the Germans’ all those years ago. With the split of the conservative voting block into the Republicans and the Tea Party movement, and the Democrats with an as of unnamed voting block that is more socialist in nature. These were more than likely Bernie Sanders voters. Both splits are, in my opinion that I have admittedly not researched very heavily so take this with a grain of salt, probably what caused such an odd choice of presidency that Trump is. He is not what the good ol’ boys would have wanted in the Republican party. The GOP utterly failed to see where the wind was blowing with their more rural and working class voters and didn’t adjust. Just kept throwing up rich white guys with political pedigrees for generations behind them. My own family often spoke of how they wanted someone in power who wasn’t ‘part of the system’ and ‘politically corrupt.’

As for the left, the Democrats had a similar issue. Bernie Sanders isn’t someone they ever would have chose for their front runner. And depending on who you ask, allegedly sabotaged him appropriately. Anecdotally, I have seen many left and liberal voters complain that the system was broken, declared they wouldn’t vote, or even voted for Trump themselves because, while some of Sanders voters were economically left, they were extremely to the right on social issues. This likely doomed Hilary’s chances in the long run.

And this isn’t even getting to Germany’s issues with staunch, traditionalist values. Many Germans feared a loss of cultural identity following their loss of WWI. This was the time of the Roaring ‘20s, remember, and world wide rise of secularism. Feminism was sweeping through several countries, Germany included. Sex was increasingly on the rise thanks to contraceptives. All of this saw a swift backlash of the religious, sexist, or traditional. The Catholic Church, both in the Vatican, and the leadership in Germany, wrote harshly against contraceptives. Men, young and old, of the far-right started ever more clubs against both feminism and voting rights. There was this rather extreme doubt towards the Wiemar Republic during this time. The Army and courts staunchly refused to uphold laws in any neutral capacity. The courts in particular were egregious. Often giving slaps on the wrists for actual political assassins of the far-right because their ‘selfless nationalism’ was ‘inspiring.’ This due almost entirely to the fact that the judges in these courts were from the time of Imperial Germany and still wanted the Kaiser to return to power. The resented the democracy, and so did the army. Many traditional Germans wished for a return of an authoritarian figure as staunch, powerful, and unyielding as the Bismark had been. In fact, here’s were the Treaty of Versailles comes back because Republic supporters had signed it, many traditional, far-right Germans blamed the Republicans for forcing them in this humiliating position.

Again, this is not a one-to-one comparison. Thank God, because America would be in a lot of trouble if we were in such a mess as Germany was back then. In all of that, where we are most similar to Germany is this growing backlash among young men towards issues like feminism and the left. I am on Reddit quite frequently. I see, anecdotally admittedly, many young men grow a resentment towards what they call ‘feminazis’ and, more rarely thank the lord because this term is particularly cringeworthy, ‘libtards’. Reddit is primarily made up of young men from 18-30 years of age. Most of them are American or Canadian, and white. There are some alarming Reddit communities where some of their more radical members’ resentment towards women and feminism is extremely apparent. The Red Pill, and its many spin off communities, MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), and at its most radical, Incels. Which, disgustingly, stands for involuntary celibate. Now, those are extremists. There is a more general sense of sexism within the most popular communities too. Any /r/news story that features a woman getting arrested is likely to have an upvoted phrase of ‘pussy pass denied’ in there somewhere. There is even a subreddit of the same name, actually. I regularly see young men post about fearing marriage because apparently women are all out to get what are likely, given how young Reddit actually skews, non-existent, imaginary assets. TumblrInAction is a community entirely dedicated to these guys going out, finding the most radical feminist posts they can, reposting them of Reddit where they mock them, perpetuate lies that this is what modern feminism looks like wholesale, and pretends that many of the more extreme posts aren’t satire in and of themselves. In many parts of Reddit, feminism has grown synonymous to crying wolf by ‘special snowflakes,’ ‘SJWs,’ and ‘feminazis.’ Or, women who have become manhating, boogeymen out to get them in particular. Granted, this is just Reddit. I use them as an example here because this is a community largely made up of young men and it is easy to watch them propagate ideas and thoughts among their many communities in real time. I am certain there are other sites where this can be done, but I honestly have no desire to visit some of the more extreme.

Where this concerns Germany, there was this growing sense among the far-right that German women were not doing their duty in raising and tending to the next generation of noble, strong, young German children, though they were most concerned with boys. German women had gained the right to vote, they were getting jobs increasingly, and the birth rate was falling due to the use and education of contraceptives. As I mentioned, clubs were literally made to protest feminism. There were also clubs created that focused on hiking, camping, singing nationalist songs, all excluding women. For the most part, far-right Germans blamed their women straying from the ‘German ideal’ on Americanization. This was also a time when censorship was lifted, and movies, books, art, and radio shows were increasingly embracing modernism.

I’m not about to claim that America is about to become a dictatorship as murderous as Nazi Germany. But with the rise of nationalism, the fact that many white supremacists and racists have come out of the woodwork and homophobia too, it has become apparent that we are forgetting what can happen when these types of ideals are allowed to perpetuate without consequence or thought. Nazism ultimately dehumanized many of the groups they victimized to an alarming degree. Portions of America are doing this to a lesser, but still alarming, degree. The right has grown to fear these groups as a threat against them and the stranglehold their constituents have held for decades, when in reality, they aren’t ‘losing’ anything by the country becoming more egalitarian across the board. And as this is happening, both political sides are becoming more radicalized in response to the other. I cannot claim who ‘started’ the whole thing, nor do I care to. I believe this problem is more along a feedback loop, a circle of cause and effect. It does not matter who started it, ultimately our politics are becoming more partisan. Our government is becoming increasingly unwilling to cooperate across the aisle. And this is creating a political fatigue for voters across the nation. Moderates are growing less in number because the noise, irrationality, and extremism is becoming exhausting.

And this issue is getting perpetuated wholesale, across the board. I cannot even begin to assess how to fix it without sounding like a keyboard warrior. There are extreme and hostile minorities in feminism. And, despite it being a minority, for some reason, groups of young men, like those on Reddit, seem to believe that they are the majority. They react by dismissing feminism entirely, which fuels the extremists on the left, Reddit reads it again.... And the problem moves up and up. The left focuses on immigration amnesty, the right reacts with xenophobia, the left tries to streamroll over the issue because of the racism, the right reacts with more racism....

Ultimately, the Nazis came into power because of a variety of reasons, but you can boil it down to nationalism, political instability, and a growing sense of paranoia from without and within. You can see similar themes in America right now. How to fix it, who knows. All I know is that America’s radicalization is ultimately growing more violent and reactionary on the right. Hopefully they won’t grow as bad as Nazis. You know, despite the fact that there are literally neo-nazis coming out of the woodwork lately.

#politics #i was super duper bored during the hurricane #this is my report on what i have read so far

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averyella · 7 years ago

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Who Framed Roger Stone?

FRUSTRATED THAT THE HOUSE AND SENATE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEES CAN’T FIND ANY PROOF OF TRUMP-RUSSIAN COLLUSION, OBAMA AND THE DEMOCRATS ARE SUING THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN AND MYSELF IN AN EFFORT TO HARASS AND DISTRACT

By Roger Stone

Yesterday I accepted service from an Obama controlled left wing front group called “Protect our Democracy”, who is suing the Trump campaign and myself, claiming that I violated the civil rights of three DNC donors who were identified by WikiLeaks. This is based on the false premise that I colluded with the Russians to hack the DNC email servers and deliver the material to Julian Assange.

Ironically, the lawsuit for invasion of privacy contained my home address in the caption that was posted online and emailed to virtually every reporter in America. Frankly I am tired of the death threats and daily vituperation my family is subjected to on social media and the net but I’ll never stop speaking out.

This ridiculous lawsuit offers no evidence nor proof of these wild allegations but merely strings together a series of publicly reported falsehoods regarding my contacts and alleged advance knowledge of the Wiki Leaks disclosures. It’s actually hard to believe that any reputable lawyer would put their name on this preposterous lawsuit and not realize that they are courting sanctions.

The left knows that any time and energy I have to spend to defend this bogus lawsuit is focus I cannot put on defeating the Deep State Coup D’état now taking place with the Generals seizing control of the White House and Robert Muller as the designated Lord High Executioner. This lawsuit is designed to be a pain in the ass, a distraction and an absurd abuse of the Judicial process.

The lawyers putting their name on this piece of crap include a former Federal Judge and several partners of prestigious white-shoe law firms. I can predict that each of them will be subject to complaints to their respective State Bars over this frivolous abuse of due process. These complaints cannot just be dismissed and hearings and bar investigation will be real.

It is notable that this nuisance lawsuit treats the claim that the DNC servers were hacked as an indisputable fact when in fact, only last week a number of experienced intelligence agency veterans came forward to say that the technological evidence indicates that the purloined material was not hacked at all but was most likely loaded to thumb drives and removed from the premises.

The British Diplomat Craig Murray publicly claimed that he received this data in a parking lot near Washington’s American University and passed it on to Wiki Leaks. Julian Assange has publicly confirmed this. There has been widespread speculation than the person who handed the thumb drive to Murray is none other than Seth Rich.

Why do all of those who think the polite thing to do is to stop asking who murdered Seth Rich ignore the fact that Julian Assange publicly offered a $25,000 reward for information that led to the capture of Rich’s murderer? Although Assange has declined to confirm that Seth Rich was indeed a source, it is notable that he has posted the links to numerous third-party stories that make this claim.

The Obama funded lawsuit relies upon the hacking of the DNC, and is therefore based on something that actually never happened. Isn’t it curious that DNC never let the FBI examine the so called hacked email servers? Instead the DNC used a private contractor, CrowdStrike to perpetuate an entirely false narrative about Russians hacking the DNC.

It doesn’t matter how many mindless Intelligence Agency bureaucrats or idiotic members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees repeat the mantra “the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee.” None of them can produce any actual proof that this happened. Neither can the lawyers behind this ludicrous harassment lawsuit.

Their lawsuit is a steaming bowl of shit. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, “after this, therefore because of this” is a fallacy as a legal premise. That I had some knowledge of the events that unfolded does not in any way prove that I made those things happen or that I colluded with agents of the Russian State or anyone else to tip the election to Donald Trump.

This poorly drafted harassment lawsuit recycles again the false claim that my tweets somehow prove that I had advance knowledge of the hacking of John Podesta’s email simply because I predicted that his business dealings with his brother Tony and the Clintons with the oligarchs around Putin were going to get scrutiny. In fact, the Uranium deal, the Joule banking deal and the lucrative Gazprom contract were all reported by the mainstream media in the fall.

Note I tweeted it the day my friend Paul Manafort stepped down over trumped up charges that he had done something improper in the campaigns of Victor Yanukovych. I knew from an opposition report by Dr. Jerome Corsi that I had read on August 1st, that Podesta was in tight with Putin and had money laundered funds from the Russian Mafia. I even wrote about it.

WikiLeaks themselves posted on their Twitter feed on July 21st the bold declaration that they had the goods on Hillary Clinton and that they would publish them in October. I most certainly had an independent source, a journalist who knows Assange confirmed that the tweet was accurate. I have at various times described this journalist as a “go between” “emissary” and “mutual friend.” Throughout August and September this journalist continued to assure me that WikiLeaks had and would publish devastating information that would severely harm Hillary Clinton’s prospects in the election. He was right.

None of this, however, proves that I had advanced knowledge of the content, format or source of any of the material, nor did I have any knowledge of where it came from. I speculated that much of the material would be related to the Clinton Foundation which actually turned out to be partially true.

Those who criticized WikiLeaks and Julian Assange for publishing material from whistle blowers or classified material are strongly urged to read the court’s decision in USA v. New York Times in The Pentagon Papers case. The Washington Post routinely publishes purloined material that’s classified. Bob Woodward has made a career of it. Julian Assange is a journalist who belongs to no party or ideology. He clearly sees the evil of the Deep State and the bi-partisan duopoly that has managed America for the last 30 years and presided over the erosion of our civil liberties and the destruction of our economy.

CIA Mike Pompeo continues to smear Julian Assange as a “Russian asset” which is false. Sources tell me that the Justice Department has convened a secret Grand Jury in order to secure an indictment against Julian Assange, although what law he has allegedly broken is not clear. It’s a slippery slope when you start jailing journalists.

This liberal hit job lawsuit against me and the Trump Campaign also recycles the misinformation about a now public exchange with Guccifer 2.0 a hacker the Intelligence Agency insists, again without proof that he is a Russian cut out. In fact, there is direct evidence showing that the computer program allegedly used by Guccifer 2.0 is actually registered to a Democratic National Employee. The simple fact is that my only exchange with Guccifer 2.0 was over the direct message function of Twitter and came almost six weeks after Wikileaks published the DNC material which Guccifer claims he hacked. Therefore, collusion by me would be impossible without a time machine. Any inference that this constituted collusion is disproved by the timing, content and context of the actual exchange

I have released the entire exchange publicly and it is banal and innocuous. In fact, when Guccifer 2.0 sends me a link to some kind of vote targeting program, which I later learned was stolen by some Florida Political Consultant, I entirely disregarded it as “pretty standard” and forwarded it to no one. He asks how he can help me and I ignore the offer.

Factcheck.org which is funded by the Walter Annenberg Foundation confirmed that there was no evidence that I knew about the hacking of Podesta’s emails or that I had advance knowledge of the content of the WikiLeaks Clinton October disclosures. They correctly point out the “coincidence” that was footnoted by the timing of some of my tweets.

This lawsuit which the Obama’s “Project for Democracy” is actively using for fund raising merely recycles the demonstrably false claims of the buffoons on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. The lawsuit itself proves less than nothing. It’s clear that the Democrats, frustrated by the failure of either Congressional Committee to find evidence of collusion between the Russians and the Trump Campaign, would now like use this baseless lawsuit to conduct a “fishing expedition” and distract me from the fight to Make America Great Again.

Unfortunately, I have no choice but to defend against the suit by retaining an attorney admitted to the DC Bar. The costs of a long-drawn-out harassment lawsuit are more than my family can bare when coupled with the ongoing legal costs of negotiations with the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, neither of whom want to allow me to testify in public for fear that I will humiliate them and expose the entire canard of Russian collusion. That’s why my friends have set up the Roger Stone Legal Defense Fund which you can find at: http://www.whoframedrogerstone.com/.

Sources:

http://www.whoframedrogerstone.com/

https://unitedtoprotectdemocracy.org/privacylawsuit/

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/FactCheck-Misrepresenting-Stones-Prescience.html?mobi=true

https://stonecoldtruth.com/russian-mafia-money-laundering-the-clinton-foundation-and-john-podesta/

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-russia-hack-evidence/

from https://stonecoldtruth.com/who-framed-roger-stone/ from Roger Stone http://rogerstone1.blogspot.com/2017/08/who-framed-roger-stone.html

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milaleah · 7 years ago

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Who Framed Roger Stone?

By Roger Stone

Sources:

http://www.whoframedrogerstone.com/

https://unitedtoprotectdemocracy.org/privacylawsuit/

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/FactCheck-Misrepresenting-Stones-Prescience.html?mobi=true

https://stonecoldtruth.com/russian-mafia-money-laundering-the-clinton-foundation-and-john-podesta/

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-russia-hack-evidence/

from Roger Stone – Stone Cold Truth https://stonecoldtruth.com/who-framed-roger-stone/ from Roger Stone https://rogerstone12.tumblr.com/post/163981408913

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