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tomorrowusa · 8 months ago

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Russian state media loves "Moscow Marjorie" Taylor Traitor Greene. They undoubtedly hope that her attempt to oust Speaker Johnson creates chaos and prevents the already overdo aid package to Ukraine from passing.

The Russian government is engaged in an effort to destabilize and weaken liberal democracies. Greene fits in nicely with their plans.

Secret Russian foreign policy document urges action to weaken the U.S.

In a classified addendum to Russia’s official — and public — “Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation,” the ministry calls for an “offensive information campaign” and other measures spanning “the military-political, economic and trade and informational psychological spheres” against a “coalition of unfriendly countries” led by the United States. “We need to continue adjusting our approach to relations with unfriendly states,” states the 2023 document, which was provided to The Washington Post by a European intelligence service. “It’s important to create a mechanism for finding the vulnerable points of their external and internal policies with the aim of developing practical steps to weaken Russia’s opponents.” The document for the first time provides official confirmation and codification of what many in the Moscow elite say has become a hybrid war against the West. Russia is seeking to subvert Western support for Ukraine and disrupt the domestic politics of the United States and European countries, through propaganda campaigns supporting isolationist and extremist policies, according to Kremlin documents previously reported on by The Post. It is also seeking to refashion geopolitics, drawing closer to China, Iran and North Korea in an attempt to shift the current balance of power.

Just a quick word to point out that Putin is under the delusion that his Axis of Authoritarians would have Russia as its head. China is stronger than Russia and will not kowtow to a country which has a GDP not much bigger than Italy's and is suffering enormous losses in a war with a country which has only a quarter of Russia's population.

Using much tougher and blunter language than the public foreign policy document, the secret addendum, dated April 11, 2023, claims that the United States is leading a coalition of “unfriendly countries” aimed at weakening Russia because Moscow is “a threat to Western global hegemony.” The document says the outcome of Russia’s war in Ukraine will “to a great degree determine the outlines of the future world order,” a clear indication that Moscow sees the result of its invasion as inextricably bound with its ability — and that of other authoritarian nations — to impose its will globally.

In addition to old school revanchism, Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine is a test to see how far the liberal democracies will let Putin go.

For Mikhail Khodorkovsky — the longtime Putin critic who was once Russia’s richest man until a clash with the Kremlin landed him 10 years in prison — it is not surprising that Russia is seeking to do everything it can to undermine the United States. “For Putin, it is absolutely natural that he should try to create the maximum number of problems for the U.S.,” he said. “The task is to take the U.S. out of the game, and then destroy NATO. This doesn’t mean dissolving it, but to create the feeling among people that NATO isn’t defending them.” The long congressional standoff on providing more weapons to Ukraine was only making it easier for Russia to challenge Washington’s global power, he said. “The Americans consider that insofar as they are not directly participating in the war [in Ukraine], then any loss is not their loss,” Khodorkovsky said. “This is an absolute misunderstanding.”

Putin was taken aback by both Ukraine's fierce defense and by Western resolve to protect the independence of a European democratic state. He refuses to admit that he made an enormous blunder so he continues to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of Russians while hoping that his US servants like Greene, Gaetz, and Trump will rescue him.

#marjorie taylor greene #moscow marjorie #dupe of putin #russia #vladimir putin #russian hegemony #invasion of ukraine #subverting western support for uktaine #nato #russian attempts to undermine liberal democracies #democracy vs. dictatorship #stand with ukraine #ukraine aid now #агрессивная война россии #русский реваншизм #русский мiръ #москва марджори #владимир путин #путин хуйло #мясные волны #союз постсоветских клептократических ватников #путин – это лжедмитрий iv а не пётр великий #руки прочь от украины!#геть з україни #вторгнення оркостану в україну #слава україні!#героям слава!

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camisoledadparis · 5 days ago

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THIS DAY IN GAY HISTORY

based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more … December 21

1804 – Benjamin Disraeli (d.1881) was a British Conservative politician, writer and aristocrat who twice served as Prime Minister. He played a central role in the creation of the modern Conservative Party, defining its policies and its broad outreach. Disraeli is remembered for his influential voice in world affairs, his political battles with the Liberal leader William Gladstone, and his one nation conservatism or "Tory democracy". He made the Conservatives the party most identified with the glory and power of the British Empire. He is, as of 2015, the only British Prime Minister of Jewish birth. Disraeli was born in London. His father left Judaism after a dispute at his synagogue; young Benjamin became an Anglican at age 12.

Together with his sister's fiancé, William Meredith, Disraeli travelled widely in southern Europe and beyond in 1830–31. The trip was financed partly by a novel, The Young Duke, written by Disraeli in 1829–30. The tour was cut short suddenly by Meredith's death from smallpox in Cairo in July 1831. Despite this tragedy, and the need for treatment for a sexually transmitted disease on his return, Disraeli felt enriched by his experiences. He became aware of values that seemed denied to his insular countrymen. The journey encouraged his self-consciousness, his moral relativism, and his interest in Eastern racial and religious attitudes.

After several unsuccessful attempts in which his opposition accused Disraeli of practicing "Eastern love", i.e. homosexuality, Disraeli entered the House of Commons in 1837. When the Conservatives gained power in 1841, Disraeli was given no office by the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel. In 1846, Peel split the party over his proposal to repeal the Corn Laws, which imposed a tariff on imported grain. Disraeli clashed with Peel in the Commons. The Conservatives who split from Peel had few who were adept in Parliament, and Disraeli became a major figure in the party, though many in it did not favor him. When Lord Derby, the party leader, thrice formed governments in the 1850s and 1860s, Disraeli served as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons. He also forged a bitter rivalry with the Liberal Party’s William Gladstone.

Upon Derby's retirement in 1868, Disraeli became Prime Minister briefly before losing that year's election. He returned to opposition, before leading the party to a majority in the 1874 election. He maintained a close friendship with Queen Victoria, who in 1876 created him Earl of Beaconsfield. Disraeli's second term was dominated by the Eastern Question—the slow decay of the Ottoman Empire and the desire of other European powers, such as Russia, to gain at its expense. Disraeli arranged for the British to purchase a major interest in the Suez Canal Company (in Ottoman-controlled Egypt). In 1878, faced with Russian victories against the Ottomans, he worked at the Congress of Berlin to obtain peace in the Balkans at terms favourable to Britain and unfavourable to Russia, its longstanding enemy. This diplomatic victory over Russia established Disraeli as one of Europe's leading statesmen.

World events thereafter moved against the Conservatives. Controversial wars in Afghanistan and South Africa undermined his public support. He angered British farmers by refusing to reinstitute the Corn Laws in response to poor harvests and cheap imported grain. With Gladstone conducting a massive speaking campaign, his Liberals bested Disraeli's Conservatives in the 1880 election. In his final months, Disraeli led the Conservatives in opposition. He had throughout his career written novels, beginning in 1826, and he published his last completed novel, Endymion, shortly before he died at the age of 76.

1944 – Michael Tilson Thomas, the American conductor, was born today. A conductor, pianist, composer and director of the San Francisco Symphony, Thomas has become in a relatively short time one of the most prominent American conductors of his generation. Perhaps most significantly, he is the first Gay conductor to achieve such prominence without masking or hiding his sexuality.

Tilson Thomas does not discuss his sexuality or his personal life with the public, but his dedication to creating and presenting music that explores the Gay experience confirms his importance as a Gay conductor.

Not only has he impressed audiences with his musical vision, talented conducting, and prolific number of recordings, but he has also used his position to commission works by Gay composers that use the medium of classical music to represent Gay life and Gay history.

To this end, he organized the American Mavericks music festival in San Francisco in June 2000. The festival highlighted the works of such composers as Lou Harrison, Lukas Foss, Earle Brown, Steve Reich, David Del Tredici, and Meredith Monk. Tilson Thomas has similarly pushed audiences to rethink the relationship between classical music and homosexuality by celebrating openly Gay composers such as Harrison and by commissioning works from Del Tredici and others that explicitly explore the experiences of Gay men and Lesbians. Although Gay men and Lesbians have long been present in the world of classical music, both as performers and as audience members, they have often remained invisible. Tilson Thomas has taken bold steps to change this.

In May 2001, Tilson Thomas conducted the premiere of Del Tredici's Gay Life, a series of pieces he commissioned that are based on poems by Allen Ginsberg, Thom Gunn, and Paul Monette. The work both explores the experiences of Gay men in America and also delves into the challenges that Gay men have faced in their struggle to survive the AIDS epidemic.

In addition, two of Tilson Thomas' own compositions have added to the small but growing classical music repertoire focused on Gay subjects. Three Poems by Walt Whitman, written for baritone and orchestra, and We Two Boys Together Clinging, for baritone and piano, use Whitman's poetry to explore intimacy between men.

1947 – Dr. Steven Watson, born on this date, is a cultural historian who is particularly interested in the dynamics of the twentieth century American avant-garde.

His 1991 book Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde was called "a chapter in our national biography" by Stefan Kanfer for the Los Angeles Times and "a marvelous group portrait of a band of cultural renegades" by Publishers Weekly. Watson has written five books about 20th century American avant-garde and counterculture movements, curated two exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery ("Group Portrait, The First American Avant-Garde" and "Rebels: Painters and Poets of the 1950's"), and served as consultant curator for the Whitney Museum exhibition "Beat Culture and the New America".

Watson grew up in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota and graduated from Mound High School. He majored in English at Stanford University and participated in anti-Vietnam War protests, including a guerrilla theater piece called Alice in ROTC-Land, co-starring with Sigourney Weaver.

After graduation, he founded an alternative elementary school called KNOW School in Auburn, California. He studied psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he received his Ph.D. in 1976, and he worked for nineteen years as the staff psychologist of the Putnam County Community Mental Health Clinic.

In 1976, Watson also began writing articles for the Village Voice, New York Newsday, Soho Weekly News, and Gaysweek. His work on gay culture included the first major article about Marsha P. Johnson, an early extended interview with Sylvia Rivera, and a book about the transgender figure, Minette. At the same time, he began writing books about key circles of the twentieth century.

He currently lives in New York City.

1958 – Andrew Lear is a Classicist and scholar of gender history and the history of sexuality. His research focuses on concepts of gender and sexuality in ancient Greek poetry and art. His book on male-male erotic scenes in ancient Athenian vase-painting Images of Ancient Greek Pederasty: Boys Were Their Gods, was positively reviewed: it greatly expanded the number of known scenes and proposed a sophisticated framework for their interpretation.

He has written articles on topics including gender ideals in the work of Greek poets Anacreon and Theognis, as well as book reviews for Classical World. Lear is seen as an expert on the comparison between ancient and modern views and practices of gender and sexuality. His poems and translations have appeared in such journals as Persephone, the Southern Humanities Review, and Literary Imagination. He has taught at Harvard, Columbia, Pomona College, and NYU.

In addition to his academic career, Lear designs and leads educational tours on topics related to his research. In 2013, he founded Oscar Wilde Tours, the first tour company focused on LGBT history. Oscar Wilde Tours gives "gay secrets" museum tours that illuminate the history of homosexuality hidden in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, and London's National Portrait Gallery. It also offers multi-day tours in Europe focused on gay history and art. Oscar Wilde Tours won the Travvy silver prize in 2016 for best LGBT tour operator.

In 2016, Lear expanded this line by founding Shady Ladies Tours, a tour company focused on women’s history. Their Shady Ladies tour of the Metropolitan Museum presents depictions of royal mistresses and courtesans in the collection, and the Nasty Women tour is about pathbreaking women from Pharaoh Hatshepsut to Gertrude Stein.

1965 – Andy Dick is an American comedian, actor, musician and television/film producer. He is best known as a comic but is also known for his eccentric and controversial behavior. His first regular television role was on the short-lived but influential Ben Stiller Show. In the mid-1990s, he had a long-running stint on NBC's NewsRadio and was a supporting character on Less than Perfect. He briefly had his own program, The Andy Dick Show on MTV, and he is also noted for his outlandish behavior from a number of Comedy Central Roasts. He also landed in 7th place on the 16th season of Dancing with the Stars.

Dick was born in Charleston, South Carolina and he was adopted at birth. Dick appeared in numerous theater productions during his high school years and was elected homecoming king his senior year in 1983. While in high school, Dick tended to use his name as a joke; and one day, he dressed in a homemade superhero costume and presented himself at school as "Super Dick". Dick graduated from Joliet West High School in 1984, and is a close friend of actor Anthony Rapp, whom he had known since childhood.After graduating from high school, Dick joined Chicago's Second City.

Dick was married to Ivone Kowalczyk from 1986 to 1990, with whom he has a son, Lucas (b. 1988). He also has a son and a daughter with Lena Sved.

!n 2005, Dick stirred controversy in Edmonton, Alberta, at Yuk Yuk's comedy club when he dropped his pants and exposed his genitals to the audience. Amid the uproar, he was ushered off the stage and the second night was cancelled.

In a 2006 interview with the Washington Post, he stated that he was bisexual.

On January 23, 2010, Dick was arrested about 4 a.m. at a bar in Huntington, West Virginia, on charges of sexual abuse after reportedly groping a bartender, and a male patron. He was released from jail after pleading not guilty and posting $60,000 bail. On June 29, 2011, Dick was formally indicted by a Cabell County Grand Jury for two counts of first degree sexual abuse. Dick pleaded not guilty during a formal arraignment in Cabell County Circuit Court in Huntington on July 29, 2011. After receiving the not guilty plea, the judge set a trial date of January 17, 2012. After several delays, on May 21, 2012, Dick was given a six-month pre-trial diversion. An assistant prosecutor has said that the agreement states if Dick stays out of legal trouble for six months, the criminal charges would be dismissed.In January 2012, the two alleged victims filed a civil suit against Dick for unspecified damages.

1969 – Jack Noseworthy Jr. is an American actor, whose most visible movie roles were in Event Horizon, U-571, Barb Wire and Killing Kennedy.

He was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, and graduated from Lynn English High School in 1982 and attended Boston Conservatory, where he earned a BFA.

He appeared in Bon Jovi's music video "Always", with Carla Gugino and Keri Russell. He co-starred with Meryl Streep in the Public Theater's 2006 production of Mother Courage and Her Children.

He starred in a short-lived MTV drama series, Dead at 21. In December 2005, he originated the role of Armand in the musical Lestat during its pre-Broadway run at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco, but left the production during its first week of previews. He is also the only male actor to play Peter Pan on Broadway, in the revue Jerome Robbins' Broadway.

Noseworthy made his debut as a nightclub performer in September 2006 at the Metropolitan Room in New York City in "You Don't Know Jack!".

In 2013, Noseworthy played Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in Killing Kennedy, a made-for-television movie aired on National Geographic Channel.

In 2018, Noseworthy joined the Canadian production of Come from Away, in the role of Kevin T. and others.

Noseworthy has been in a relationship with Tony-winning choreographer Sergio Trujillo since 1990. They married in 2011. Noseworthy and Trujillo have a son born in 2018.

2007 – Nepal Supreme Court orders the end of anti-LGBTQ laws and creates new laws that safeguard LGBTQ people.

2009 – Mexico City legalises same-sex marriage and adoption by same-sex couples (effective March 2010)

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 2 years ago

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[Kevin Kallaugher] :: The Baltimore Sun

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

May 21, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAY 22, 2023

The list of 500 banned Americans that Russian president Vladimir Putin released on Friday makes it clear that Putin is openly aligning himself with Trump and today’s MAGA Republicans. The people on the list are not necessarily involved with U.S. policy toward Russia; they are Americans who are standing in the way of the Trump movement’s takeover of our country.

Notably, one of the names on the list is Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who refused to “find” the 11,780 votes Trump needed to win Georgia in 2020 and thus take the state’s electoral votes from Democratic winner Joe Biden. Also on the list was Michael Byrd, the Capitol Police officer who killed Ashli Babbitt as she attempted to break into the chamber of the House of Representatives, where more than 60 representatives and staffers were holed up, on January 6, 2021. Others made the “500 list,” according to the statement, for being part of “power or law-enforcement structures directly involved in the persecution of dissidents in the wake of the so-called ‘storm of the Capitol.’”

Since Trump’s attempt to overthrow the will of the voters on January 6, 2021, his supporters have imitated the language and the laws that enabled Putin to destroy representative democracy in Russia and Viktor Orbán to undermine liberal democracy in Hungary.

Attempting to set a new kind of imperial Russia up as a challenger to the liberal democracies that have held the majority of global power since World War II, Putin in 2019 declared liberal democracy “obsolete.” At a time when his own economic and social troubles at home threatened his continuing hold on power, he lashed out at democracy’s emphasis on equality before the law, saying that immigrant rights, gay rights, and women’s rights undermine “the culture, traditions and traditional family values of millions of people making up the core population.”

Like Putin, Orbán cemented power with attacks on immigrants, LGBTQ people, and abortion rights while claiming to be shoring up traditional religion. Not surprisingly, both Putin and Orbán have praised Trump, with the overlap between the former U.S. president and the autocratic leaders becoming more pronounced as Trump’s followers work to undermine U.S. support for Ukraine in its fight to push back Russia’s invasion and in the Conservative Political Action Conference’s decision to hold a second meeting in Budapest, Hungary, this month.

That overlap is also visible in the anti-immigrant, anti-LBGTQ, and antiabortion legislation spreading through U.S. states dominated by Trump loyalists.

When Trump was in the White House, his team worked hard to put loyal supporters into power in state Republican parties before the 2020 election, possibly aware that he was likely to lose the vote and would have to turn to loyalists to steal it for him. (Recall that on October 31, 2020, Trump ally Stephen Bannon told an audience that the plan was simply to say he had won, and now, in a lawsuit filed last week against Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Noelle Dunphy alleges Giuliani told her of the scheme on February 7, 2019.) Packing the state parties with loyalists did indeed pay off: according to a study by Nick Corasaniti, Karen Yourish, and Keith Collins of the New York Times, at least 357 sitting Republican legislators in battleground states used their official positions either to discredit or to try to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Radicalizing the state parties has continued since Trump left office, strengthening his base in state legislatures. Those legislators are now advancing the illiberal Christian democracy embraced by Putin and Orbán, using the same language and politics of fear to pass laws that explicitly reject the principle of a nation based in the idea that is central to democracy: that everyone is equal before the law.

The attempt to demonize immigrants has been central to the Trump base since he announced his presidential campaign with the statement that “the U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems” and went on to say that Mexican immigrants are “bringing drugs…bringing crime. They’re rapists.” (In fact, undocumented immigrants are less than half as likely as native-born Americans to be arrested for violent crimes or drug offenses.)

Republicans have refused to consider bipartisan legislation that would fund immigration courts and border security, and instead have hammered on the idea that immigrants are “flooding” our borders. They fought to keep the pandemic-related Title 42 in place, insisting that its end would create, as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) put it, an “Imminent Invasion.” When, in fact, the end of Title 42 led to a 60% decrease in unauthorized crossings, Greene still pushed forward, calling for Biden’s impeachment for his handling of immigration issues.

This same antidemocratic extremism explains the anti-trans, anti-drag, and anti-LGBTQ legislation, all of which are an attack on equality before the law. A March 8 article in Mother Jones by Madison Pauly exposed how the wave of anti-trans legislation passing through Republican-dominated state legislatures is written and pushed by well-funded Christian activists and organizations who argue, like Orbán, that they are protecting children (although 86% of trans or nonbinary young people have reported the attacks on them are affecting their mental health, and nearly half have seriously considered suicide).

Advocates for those laws inaccurately claim that they are protecting children from genital mutilation, but as Nancy Goldstein of the Texas Observer pointed out, the American Academy of Pediatrics stands behind gender-affirming care. Dr. Joshua Safer, the executive director of the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery in New York City, explains: No other countries “are reconsidering the use of hormones and surgeries as first-line treatment for transgender children because hormones and surgeries are not first-line treatment for transgender children…. First-line interventions include mental health intakes and social adjustments…. Puberty blockers sometimes follow.” Those treatments are reversible if a patient changes their mind.

Nonetheless, the rhetoric of demonization is working: Brian Tyler Cohen reports (with video) that “Christian” pastor Jason Graber recently called for the execution of all LGBTQ people as well as the parents of transgender people: “They just need to be shot in the back of the head and then we can string them up above a bridge.”

Goldstein points out that the language of demonization Republicans are using mimics that of the “southern strategy,” by which Republican leaders from President Richard Nixon onward solidified their base by creating the idea that Black Americans threatened the well-being of white people. That strategy, too, is ongoing in the Republican Party. On Monday, May 15, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill that defunds any state college or university with a diversity, equity, and inclusion program and that bans courses that “distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics,” a reference to courses that acknowledge racism or sexism. Texas, Tennessee, North Dakota, Iowa, and Ohio are considering similar legislation.

The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a Latino civil rights organization; Equality Florida, a gay rights advocacy group; and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) have all issued advisories warning against travel to Florida. “Florida is openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals,” the NAACP said. “Before traveling to Florida, please understand that the state of Florida devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by African Americans and other communities of color.”

With its antiabortion legislation, the MAGA movement is also signaling its abandonment of the idea that everyone should be equal before the law. Since the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision last June, fifteen states have banned or severely restricted abortion rights. On Tuesday a supermajority of the North Carolina legislature, established when Tricia Cotham, a Democrat who ran on abortion rights, switched parties, overrode the veto of the Democratic governor Roy Cooper to ban virtually all abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy.

In Sumner County, Tennessee, these antidemocratic Republicans have taken over the county government and, as Christina A. Cassidy wrote today in the Associated Press, promptly changed the county’s official documents to say that operations would be “most importantly reflective of the Judeo-Christian values inherent in the nation’s founding.” They are trying to shape the county, including election rules, according to their ideology.

It is these same MAGA Republicans who are threatening to force the United States to default on its debt for the first time in our history, with catastrophic consequences, unless the Democrats agree to protect all tax cuts and slash the domestic spending that protects ordinary Americans. It’s important to remember that the global autocratic movement is not solely about creating a traditional religious society; it is about destroying democracy to concentrate wealth and power in a small group of men, usually white men, who will dominate the rest of us.

For all the talk of House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) negotiating over a budget that Republicans will then approve before they are willing to raise the debt ceiling, he has never had the votes of the extremists that he needs to make that happen. They are demanding that the Democrats dismantle the government programs that protect ordinary Americans in exchange for agreeing not to blow up the world economy.

And so, the battle over democracy has come down to the debt ceiling.

Today, Biden told reporters that he would not agree to the extremists’ demands. “We put forward a proposal that cuts spending by more than a trillion dollars, and on top of the nearly $3 trillion in deficit reduction that I previously proposed through the combination of spending cuts and new revenues,” he said.

“Let me be clear,” he said. “I’m not going to agree to a deal that protects, for example, a $30 billion tax break for the oil industry, which made $200 billion last year—they don’t need an incentive of another $30 billion—while putting healthcare of 21 million Americans at risk by going after Medicaid.

“I’m not going to agree to a deal that protects $200 billion in excess payments for pharmaceutical industries and refusing to count that while cutting over 100,000 schoolteachers and…assistants’ jobs, 30,000 law enforcement officers’ jobs cut across…the entire United States of America.

“And I’m not going to agree to a deal that protects wealthy tax cheats and crypto traders while putting food assistance at risk for nearly… 1 million Americans.

“And it’s time for Republicans to accept that there is no bipartisan deal to be made solely—solely—on their partisan terms. They have to move as well.

“All four congressional leaders agree with me that…default is not—let me say it again—default is not an option. And I expect each of…these leaders…to live up to that commitment.

“America has never defaulted—never defaulted on our debt, and it never will.”

—

[FROM COMMENTS]

Michael Bales

We have difficulty seeing reality when it's beyond our experience and coming into view ever so slowly. But what's happening to our country is clearer tonight thanks to Heather. It's a slow-moving government takeover — governments of all size and type.

Republicans have been nibbling away for so long but now are taking bigger and bigger bites, gobbling up democracy. Is anyone at this point doubting they indeed seek to kill the federal government and create conditions ripe for authoritarian rule?

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Kevin Kallaugher #The Baltimore Sun #MAGA agenda #Debt Ceiling #Trump tax cuts for billionaires #Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #Radical Right Wing Agenda #Gilded age #Authoritarianism #Russia #Hungary #Democracy in Danger #gerrymandering #Slow moving government takeover

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democraticpeoplesrepublich · 5 months ago

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decades of systemic dissemination of anticommunist propaganda, repeated ad nauseam to undermine the perceived success of any attempt to actually create and maintain socialism in the real world -> not a psyop, to be taken at face value immediately.

communists (sometimes FROM OTHER COUNTRIES) trying to explain why casting a vote in a bourgeois liberal democracy is not itself a meaningful action against fascism, ESPECIALLY without any attempts to organize the working class into a socialist body with actual political power -> psyop being carried out by insidious foreign interlopers (probably RUSSIAN or CHINESE) and their armies of bots. disregard without delay.

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glitterypeanutmugnickel · 2 years ago

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July 23, 2022

Heather Cox Richardson

Jul 24

Comment

Thursday’s public hearing by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol brought to its logical conclusion the story of Trump’s attempt to overturn our democracy. After four years of destroying democratic norms and gathering power into his own hands, the former president tried to overturn the will of the voters. Trump was attacking the fundamental concept on which this nation rests: that we have a right to consent to the government under which we live.

Far from rejecting the idea of minority rule after seeing where it led, Republican Party lawmakers have doubled down.

They have embraced the idea that state legislatures should dominate our political system, and so in 2021, at least 19 states passed 34 laws to restrict access to voting. On June 24, in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision, the Supreme Court said that the federal government did not have the power, under the Fourteenth Amendment, to protect the constitutional right to abortion, bringing the other rights that amendment protects into question. When Democrats set out to protect some of those rights through federal legislation, Republicans in Congress overwhelmingly voted to oppose such laws.

In the House, Republicans voted against federal protection of an individual’s right to choose whether to continue or end a pregnancy and to protect a health care provider’s ability to provide abortion services: 209 Republicans voted no; 2 didn’t vote. That’s 99% of House Republicans.

They voted against the right to use contraception: 195 out of 209 Republicans voted no; 2 didn’t vote. That’s 96% of House Republicans.

They voted against marriage equality: 157 out of 204 Republicans voted no; 7 didn’t vote. That’s 77% of House Republicans.

They voted against a bill guaranteeing a woman’s right to travel across state lines to obtain abortion services: 205 out of 208 Republicans voted no; 3 didn’t vote. That’s 97% of House Republicans.

Sixty-two percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal. Seventy percent support gay marriage. More than 90% of Americans believe birth control should be legal. I can’t find polling on whether Americans support the idea of women being able to cross state lines without restrictions, but one would hope that concept is also popular. And yet, Republican lawmakers are comfortable standing firmly against the firm will of the people. The laws protecting these rights passed through the House thanks to overwhelming Democratic support but will have trouble getting past a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

When he took office, Democratic president Joe Biden recognized that his role in this moment was to prove that democracy is still a viable form of government.

Rising autocrats have declared democracy obsolete. They argue that popular government is too slow to respond to the rapid pace of the modern world, or that liberal democracy’s focus on individual rights undermines the traditional values that hold societies together, values like religion and ethnic or racial similarities. Hungarian president Viktor Orbán, whom the radical right supports so enthusiastically that he is speaking on August 4 in Texas at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), has called for replacing liberal democracy with “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy,” which will explicitly not treat everyone equally and will rest power in a single political party.

Biden has defended democracy across the globe, accomplishing more in foreign diplomacy than any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Less than a year after the former president threatened to withdraw the U.S. from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken pulled together the NATO countries, as well as allies around the world, to stand against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The new strength of NATO prompted Sweden and Finland to join the organization, and earlier this month, NATO ambassadors signed protocols for their admission. This is the most significant expansion of NATO in 30 years.

That strength helped to hammer out a deal between Russia and Ukraine with Turkey and the United Nations yesterday to enable Ukraine to export 22 million tons of grain and Russia to export grain and fertilizer to developing countries that were facing famine because of Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian ports. An advisor to the Ukrainian government called the agreement “a major win for Ukraine.” When a Russian attack on the Ukrainian port of Odesa today put that agreement under threat, U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Bridget A. Brink called the attack “outrageous.”

Biden has also defended democracy at home, using the power of the federal government to strengthen the ability of working Americans to support their families. As soon as Biden took office, Democrats passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to rebuild the economy. It worked. The U.S. has added 10 million new jobs since Biden took office, and unemployment has fallen to 3.6%. That strong economy has meant higher tax revenues that, combined with the end of pandemic spending, have resulted in the budget deficit (the amount by which the government is operating in the red each year and thus adding to the national debt) dropping considerably during his term.

The strong economy has also led to roaring inflation, fed in part by supply chain issues and high gas prices. During the pandemic, as Americans turned to ordering online at the same time that factories closed down, shipping prices went through the roof. In the past year or so, outdated infrastructure at U.S. ports has slowed down turnaround while a shortage of truckers has slowed domestic supply chains. Biden’s administration worked to untangle the mess at ports by getting commitments from businesses and labor to extend hours, and launched new programs to increase the number of truckers in the country.

While oil companies are privately held and thus have no obligation to lower their prices rather than pocket the record profits they have enjoyed over the past year, Biden has nonetheless tried to ease gas prices by releasing oil from the strategic reserve and by urging allies to produce more oil for release onto the world market. Gas prices have declined for the past month and now average $4.41 a gallon, down from a high of more than $5 last month.

Last month, on June 25, Biden signed into law the first major gun safety bill in almost 30 years, having pulled together the necessary votes despite the opposition of the National Rifle Association. On July 21, he signed the bipartisan FORMULA (which stands for “Fixing Our Regulatory Mayhem Upsetting Little Americans”—I’m not kidding) Act to drop tariffs on baby formula for the rest of the year to make it easier to get that vital product in the wake of the closure of the Sturgis, Michigan, Abbott Nutrition plant for contamination, which created a national shortage. The Biden administration has also organized 53 flights of formula into the country, amounting to more than 61 million 8-ounce bottles.

While we have heard a lot about Biden’s inability to pass the Build Back Better part of his infrastructure plan because of the refusal of Republicans and Democratic senator Joe Manchin (WV) to get on board, Biden nonetheless shepherded a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill through this partisan Congress, investing in roads, bridges, public transportation, clean energy, and broadband. Last Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris announced that 1 million households have signed up for credits to enable them to get broadband internet, a program financed by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Love or hate what Biden has done, he has managed to pull a wide range of countries together to stand against Russian president Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian attack in Ukraine, and he has managed get through a terribly divided Congress laws to make the lives of the majority better, even while Republicans are rejecting the idea that the government should reflect the will of the majority. That is no small feat.

Whether it will be enough to prove that democracy is still a viable form of government is up to us.

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yourreddancer · 2 years ago

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HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

July 23, 2022 (Saturday)

Far from rejecting the idea of minority rule after seeing where it led, Republican Party lawmakers have doubled down.

They voted against the right to use contraception: 195 out of 209 Republicans voted no; 2 didn’t vote. That’s 96% of House Republicans.

They voted against marriage equality: 157 out of 204 Republicans voted no; 7 didn’t vote. That’s 77% of House Republicans.

When he took office, Democratic president Joe Biden recognized that his role in this moment was to prove that democracy is still a viable form of government.

.Last month, on June 25, Biden signed into law the first major gun safety bill in almost 30 years, having pulled together the necessary votes despite the opposition of the National Rifle Association. On July 21, he signed the bipartisan FORMULA (which stands for “Fixing Our Regulatory Mayhem Upsetting Little Americans”—I’m not kidding) Act to drop tariffs on baby formula for the rest of the year to make it easier to get that vital product in the wake of the closure of the Sturgis, Michigan, Abbott Nutrition plant for contamination, which created a national shortage. The Biden administration has also organized 53 flights of formula into the country, amounting to more than 61 million 8-ounce bottles.

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mariacallous · 2 years ago

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President Vladimir Putin spoke today in the Kremlin’s St. George’s Hall, in front of members of Russia’s parliament. His speech addressed the “results” of Russian-staged “referendums” in the self-proclaimed “DNR” and “LNR,” as well as the occupied Ukrainian regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, explaining their annexation by Russia as historic “fate.” Putin said that he is “certain” that the Federation Council (the upper chamber of the Russian parliament) will “support the constitutional laws on the acceptance and constitution within Russia of four new regions,” “because it is the will of millions of people.”

Those people, Putin added, “are becoming our citizens forever.” “Russia will never betray the residents of DNR, LNR, Zaporizhzhia and the Kherson oblast,” he said. “We will defend our land by all the means and powers in our disposal; we will do everything to ensure a safe life for our people. This is the great liberating mission of our people.”

Criticizing the generalized “West,” and especially “the Anglo-Saxons,” Putin made a series of historical and geopolitical points. The main ones are as follows. The West is guilty of colonialism and slave trade. In the twentieth century, “our country” (the USSR) spearhead the anti-colonial movement. The West resents Russia for resisting its colonization attempts. Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism are the religions that represent traditional values Russia will uphold. The fall of the USSR resulted in Western extraction of Russia’s wealth. Western claims of bringing freedom and democracy to the world are lies and hypocrisy.

Putin reminded the parliament of the Allied Forces’ destruction of German cities during World War II. American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he remarked in passing, “set a precedent.” The speaker then moved on without explaining what exactly he meant.

“The Anglo-Saxons,” Putin continued, are not satisfied with sanctions alone, and have now resorted to destroying the all-European energy infrastructure. The US policy is founded on “the rule of the fist,” hence new military bases everywhere, NATO expansion, etc. Anyone who challenges western hegemony is automatically proclaimed an “enemy.” The West’s ambitions of “total domination” are the reason it is undermining other “sovereign centers of global development.” “Ye shall know them by their fruits,” he concluded on this subject, quoting the Gospel of Matthew.

“The battlefield we have been called to is the battlefield for our people and for the great historic Russia,” Putin said. Russia is going to defend its people from from “monstrous experiments.” This, however, requires the “consolidation of the whole society” – but on the basis of sovereignty, freedom and self-determination.

“Our values,” Putin said, are charity, humanism and compassion. He then quoted the Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin, who wrote:

If I think that my motherland is Russia, that means that I love in Russian, contemplate and think in Russian, sing and speak in Russian; that I believe in the spiritual powers of the Russian people and embrace its historic fate with my instinct and will. Its spirit is my spirit; its fate is my fate; its suffering is my sorrow; its flourishing is my joy.

“The truth is with us. Russia is with us,” Putin concluded his speech, followed by a standing ovation.

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tearsinthemist · 3 years ago

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Why would Putin attack a neighboring country that has not provoked him or threatened Russia in any way and risk sweeping economic sanctions? Former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul explains why Putin’s assault on Ukraine is really about his decades-long obsession with claiming victory over the United States and the West. Putin views the invasion not only as a way of expanding Russia’s reach and power but also as a means of defying the American-led, liberal democratic order. Putin wants democracy to fail everywhere – not just in Ukraine. By starting this war, Putin is attempting to undermine the world’s democracies and engage in a broader struggle that will not only vanquish Ukraine but destabilize long-held principles, relationships, and coalitions in the West as well. Tune in to the full episode to learn more about Putin’s miscalculations regarding the strength of the NATO alliance, the extent of Russian opposition to the invasion, as well as what’s at stake for an already shaky international order.

This is all I have. I didn't watch the video.

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unforcedperspective · 4 years ago

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Notes on China from the 66th Annual Session of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly

(23 Nov 2020, NATO)

The following notes are from the speech made by Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, with a focus on issues pertaining China.

The Secretary General called for the strengthening of NATO as a political alliance in view of a wide range of security issues that include China's rise to prominence. He pointed to increasingly global challenges and the need for cooperation, "Terrorism, cyber threats, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, pandemics and disinformation campaigns. None of our countries, even the biggest ones, can deal with such challenges alone.

"This is also true of our approach to China. China is not our enemy, but its rise is fundamentally shifting the global balance of power. [It] challenges ... our security and our technological edge, multiplying the threats to open societies and individual freedoms. So the rise of China requires our continued collective attention to fully understand what it means for our security and to act accordingly."

Gerry Connolly, incumbent President of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and American Democrat, asked: "You emphasize clearly China represents a direct challenge to the liberal democratic values that bind the Alliance together. It is not shy about challenging those values and attempting on occasion to undermine those societies that embrace those values. I wonder if you could elaborate a little bit on how best you think the Alliance going forward needs to organise itself to meet that challenge."

The Secretary General made mention of how China significantly helped member nations' economies. "Having said that, we are of course concerned about the fact that we now have a power ... that doesn’t share our values. We are seeing what they've done in Hong Kong undermining the democratic rights of the people living there. How China is dealing with minorities in their own country. And also, how they behave for instance in the South China Sea, or in approaching countries all over the world."

He drew on the experiences of Australia, Canada, Sweden and Norway in how China reacted when those countries did not behave as it would like. "China is trying to intimidate, coerce other countries to act in accordance with their wishes. The idea that the main response to this is that that we have to stand together. Both when it comes to responding politically, but also investing in technology, military capabilities. It's even more important for the United States to keep friends and allies close. And that's exactly why NATO is also important for the United States. Very briefly, resilience, or society social support to how we need to deal with some of the threats and challenges received from rising China."

Alec Shelbrooke, Leader of the UK Delegation, queried: "I'd like to focus my question on the high north. China has ambitions to build an Arctic Silk Road and is exercising in the Baltic Sea [and] Russia's submarine presence in the North Atlantic is now higher. This area will be of increasing importance to her over the next few decades. I'd like to know what short and medium term plans NATO itself is developing to ensure the protection of its own strategic interest in that area."

The Secretary General acknowledged that the high north was becoming more important with the melting of the ice, more Russian military capabilities and increased interest from China. He said, "The high north should be characterised by low tensions. That's still my aim, but the increased military presence of course makes that a bit more difficult. But I think that we should continue to have a dual track approach dialogue, but also then presence and strength. NATO has increased its presence in the high north. We need to protect the North Atlantic we need to protect all the cables, which actually IP for transmission of more than 90 - almost all data which is transmitted by cables. And then, and then we need more exercises we had the Trident Juncture exercise." He called for increased air and naval presence overall.

Michael Turner, member from the United States stated, "modernization efforts [of China and Russia] certainly do look at threats which should be translated for us into capabilities." He asked how NATO 2030 would proceed with their modernisation.

The Secretary General said that a main goal of NATO 2030 was to make NATO more global instead of remaining a regional alliance because the threats they face are more globalised. While it would not mean moving NATO into the South China Sea, it would still tackle cyber issues. He suggested, "We should strengthen further our cooperation with like minded countries in the Asia Pacific region. I visited Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand four strong dedicated committed partners of NATO. They all want to work more closely with NATO.

"Our response to the political challenges we see from China not sharing our core values, democracy, individual liberties, just makes that cooperation with other like minded partners even more important. We see a significant military modernization going on in China, all with the second largest budget investing heavily in military capabilities and combined with new advanced disruptive technologies.

“We see more and more Chinese investments in critical infrastructure in ports and airfields ... also in telecommunications and 5G. We have agreed some baseline requirements in NATO to make sure that our infrastructure is safe. We need to do more on resilience, we need to do more on technology and defence spending, we need to stand up for our values, working with like minded partners to protecting our political advantage. That's at least some of the things we need to do as part of the 2030 and beyond.”

#nato #china #politics #news #world politics #south china sea

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collapsedsquid · 5 years ago

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The Assembly was never to reopen. Its violent suppression was a shattering blow to the democratic hopes once placed in the revolution. As Maxim Gorky wrote, ‘For almost a hundred years the finest Russians have lived by the idea of a Constituent Assembly . . . in the struggle for this idea, thousands of the intelligentsia and tens of thousands of workers and peasants have perished . . .’. Now, Lenin and his regime of People’s Commissars had ‘given orders to shoot the democracy that demonstrated in honor of this idea’.11 But the Bolsheviks were unabashed. Pravda’s headlines denounced Chernov and Tsereteli as ‘The hirelings of bankers, capitalists, and landlords . . . slaves of the American dollar.’Lenin offered a chilling obituary for parliamentary politics. Under the title ‘People from Another World’, he described the anguish he felt at having to attend even one meeting of the Constituent Assembly.13 It was for him the experience of a nightmare. ‘It is as though history had accidentally . . . turned its clock back, and January 1918 became May or June 1917!’ To be plunged from the ‘real’, ‘lively’ activity of the Soviet of workers and soldiers into the world of the Constituent Assembly, was to be plunged into a ‘world of saccharine phrases, of slick, empty declamations, of promises and more promises based . . . on conciliation with the capitalists’. ‘It was terrible! To be transported from the world of living people into the company of corpses, to breathe the odour of the dead, to hear those mummies with their empty “social” . . . phrases, to hear Chernov and Tsereteli, was simply intolerable.’ The elected delegates of the Social Revolutionaries, who had braved Bolshevik intimidation to applaud the appeal to unite against the threat of civil war, Lenin mocked as the un-dead, who after sleeping in their coffins for the last six months, had arisen to mechanically applaud the counter-revolution. The Bolsheviks and the men of the February revolution were now on different sides of the barricades. Against those who called for peace, Lenin hailed ‘the class struggle that has become civil war, not by chance . . . but inevitably . . .’ Lenin, of course, was making his own inevitabilities. Nothing was more likely to provoke a civil war than the attempt to found a one-party dictatorship on a humiliating, separate peace with Germany.

I feel like the last sentence here when fully unwrapped undermines what he’s trying to do with the rest of the paragraph. Look at the illiberal democracy-mocking Lenin, compared with his liberal democratic opponents who demand that we force a mutinous recalcitrant army to continue a bloody unending war.

#the deluge

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alessandriana · 5 years ago

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Internet trolls don’t troll. Not the professionals at least. Professional trolls don’t go on social media to antagonize liberals or belittle conservatives. They are not narrow minded, drunk or angry. They don’t lack basic English language skills. They certainly aren’t “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” as the president once put it. Your stereotypical trolls do exist on social media, but the amateurs aren’t a threat to Western democracy.

Professional trolls, on the other hand, are the tip of the spear in the new digital, ideological battleground. To combat the threat they pose, we must first understand them — and take them seriously.

On August 22, 2019, @IamTyraJackson received almost 290,000 likes on Twitter for a single tweet. Put in perspective, the typical tweet President Trump sends to his 67 million followers gets about 100,000 likes. That viral tweet by @IamTyraJackson was innocent: an uplifting pair of images of former pro football player Warrick Dunn and a description of his inspiring charity work building houses for single mothers. For an anonymous account that had only existed for only a few months, “Tyra” knew her audience well. Warrick’s former coach, Tony Dungy, retweeted it, as did the rapper and producer Chuck D. Hundreds of thousands of real users viewed Tyra’s tweet and connected with its message. For “Tyra,” however, inspiring messages like this were a tool for a very different purpose.

The purpose of the Tyra account, we believe, was not to spread heartwarming messages to Americans. Rather, the tweet about Warrick Dunn was really a Trojan horse to gain followers in a larger plan by a foreign adversary. We think this because we believe @IamTyraJackson was an account operated by the successors to Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA). Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted the IRA for waging a massive information war during the 2016 U.S. election. Since then, the IRA seems to have been subsumed into Russia’s Federal News Agency, but its work continues. In the case of @IamTyraJackson, the IRA’s goal was two-fold: Grow an audience in part through heartwarming, inspiring messages, and use that following to spread messages promoting division, distrust, and doubt.

We’ve spent the past two years studying online disinformation and building a deep understanding of Russia’s strategy, tactics, and impact. Working from data Twitter has publicly released, we’ve read Russian tweets until our eyes bled. Looking at a range of behavioral signals, we have begun to develop procedures to identify disinformation campaigns and have worked with Twitter to suspend accounts. In the process we’ve shared what we’ve learned with people making a difference, both in and out of government. We have experienced a range of emotions studying what the IRA has produced, from disgust at their overt racism to amusement at their sometimes self-reflective humor. Mostly, however, we’ve been impressed.

Professional trolls are good at their job. They have studied us. They understand how to harness our biases (and hashtags) for their own purposes. They know what pressure points to push and how best to drive us to distrust our neighbors. The professionals know you catch more flies with honey. They don’t go to social media looking for a fight; they go looking for new best friends. And they have found them.

Disinformation operations aren’t typically fake news or outright lies. Disinformation is most often simply spin. Spin is hard to spot and easy to believe, especially if you are already inclined to do so. While the rest of the world learned how to conduct a modern disinformation campaign from the Russians, it is from the world of public relations and advertising that the IRA learned their craft. To appreciate the influence and potential of Russian disinformation, we need to view them less as Boris and Natasha and more like Don Draper.

As good marketers, professional trolls manipulate our emotions subtly. In fall 2018, for example, a Russian account we identified called @PoliteMelanie re-crafted an old urban legend, tweeting: “My cousin is studying sociology in university. Last week she and her classmates polled over 1,000 conservative Christians. ‘What would you do if you discovered that your child was a homo sapiens?’ 55% said they would disown them and force them to leave their home.” This tweet, which suggested conservative Christians are not only homophobic but also ignorant, was subtle enough to not feel overtly hateful, but was also aimed directly at multiple cultural stress points, driving a wedge at the point where religiosity and ideology meet. The tweet was also wildly successful, receiving more than 90,000 retweets and nearly 300,000 likes.

This tweet didn’t seek to anger conservative Christians or to provoke Trump supporters. She wasn’t even talking to them. Melanie’s 20,000 followers, painstakingly built, weren’t from #MAGA America (Russia has other accounts targeting them). Rather, Melanie’s audience was made up of educated, urban, left-wing Americans harboring a touch of self-righteousness. She wasn’t selling her audience a candidate or a position — she was selling an emotion. Melanie was selling disgust. The Russians know that, in political warfare, disgust is a more powerful tool than anger. Anger drives people to the polls; disgust drives countries apart.

Accounts like @IamTyraJackson have continued @PoliteMelanie’s work. Professional disinformation isn’t spread by the account you disagree with — quite the opposite. Effective disinformation is embedded in an account you agree with. The professionals don’t push you away, they pull you toward them. While tweeting uplifting messages about Warrick Dunn’s real-life charity work, Tyra, and several accounts we associated with her, also distributed messages consistent with past Russian disinformation. Importantly, they highlighted issues of race and gender inequality. A tweet about Brock Turner’s Stanford rape case received 15,000 likes. Another about police targeting black citizens in Las Vegas was liked more than 100,000 times. Here is what makes disinformation so difficult to discuss: while these tweets point to valid issues of concern — issues that have been central to important social movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo — they are framed to serve Russia’s interests in undermining Americans’ trust in our institutions.

These accounts also harness the goodwill they’ve built by engaging in these communities for specific political ends. Consistent with past Russian activity, they attacked moderate politicians as a method of bolstering more polarizing candidates. Recently, Vice President Biden has been the most frequent target of this strategy, as seen in dozens of tweets such as, “Joe Biden is damaging Obama’s legacy with his racism and stupidity!” and “Joe Biden doesn’t deserve our votes!”

The quality of Russia’s work has been honed over several years and millions of social media posts. They have appeared on Instagram, Stitcher, Reddit, Google+, Tumblr, Medium, Vine, Meetup, and even Pokémon Go, demonstrating not only a nihilistic creativity, but also a ruthless efficiency in volume of production. The IRA has been called a “troll farm,” but they are undoubtedly a factory.

While persona like Melanie and Tyra were important to Russian efforts, they were ultimately just tools, interchangeable parts constructed for a specific audience. When shut down, they were quickly replaced by other free-to-create, anonymous accounts. The factory doesn’t stop. They attack issues from both sides, attempting to drive mainstream viewpoints in polar and extreme directions.

In a free society, we must accept that bad actors will try to take advantage of our openness. But we need to learn to question our own and others’ biases on social media. We need to teach — to individuals of all ages — that we shouldn’t simply believe or repost anonymous users because they used the same hashtag we did, and neither should we accuse them of being a Russian bot simply because we disagree with their perspective. We need to teach digital civility. It will not only weaken foreign efforts, but it will also help us better engage online with our neighbors, especially the ones we disagree with.

Russian disinformation is not just about President Trump or the 2016 presidential election. Did they work to get Trump elected? Yes, diligently. Our research has shown how Russia strategically employed social media to build support on the right for Trump and lower voter turnout on the left for Clinton. But the IRA was not created to collude with the Trump campaign. They existed well before Trump rode down that escalator and announced his candidacy, and we assume they will exist in some form well after he is gone. Russia’s goals are to further widen existing divisions in the American public and decrease our faith and trust in institutions that help maintain a strong democracy. If we focus only on the past or future, we will not be prepared for the present. It’s not about election 2016 or 2020.

The IRA generated more social media content in the year following the 2016 election than the year before it. They also moved their office into a bigger building with room to expand. Their work was never just about elections. Rather, the IRA encourages us to vilify our neighbor and amplify our differences because, if we grow incapable of compromising, there can be no meaningful democracy. Russia has dug in for a long campaign. So far, we’re helping them win.

#this is SO important #read it #study it #and pay attention to what you're sharing!!!#us politics

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yobaba30 · 6 years ago

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Adam Schiff: An open letter to my Republican colleagues

February 21 at 6:06 PM

This is a moment of great peril for our democracy. Our country is deeply divided. Our national discourse has become coarse, indeed, poisonous. Disunity and dysfunction have paralyzed Congress.

And while our attention is focused inward, the world spins on, new authoritarian regimes are born, old rivals spread their pernicious ideologies, and the space for freedom-loving peoples begins to contract violently. At last week’s Munich Security Conference, the prevailing sentiment among our closest allies is that the United States can no longer be counted on to champion liberal democracy or defend the world order we built.

For the past two years, we have examined Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and its attempts to influence the 2018 midterms. Moscow’s effort to undermine our democracy was spectacularly successful in inflaming racial, ethnic and other divides in our society and turning American against American.

But the attack on our democracy had its limits. Russian President Vladimir Putin could not lead us to distrust our own intelligence agencies or the FBI. He could not cause us to view our own free press as an enemy of the people. He could not undermine the independence of the Justice Department or denigrate judges. Only we could do that to ourselves. Although many forces have contributed to the decline in public confidence in our institutions, one force stands out as an accelerant, like gas on a fire. And try as some of us might to avoid invoking the arsonist’s name, we must say it.

I speak, of course, of our president, Donald Trump.

The president has just declared a national emergency to subvert the will of Congress and appropriate billions of dollars for a border wall that Congress has explicitly refused to fund. Whether you support the border wall or oppose it, you should be deeply troubled by the president’s intent to obtain it through a plainly unconstitutional abuse of power.

[President Tariff Man may be learning all the wrong lessons from his trade wars]

To my Republican colleagues: When the president attacked the independence of the Justice Department by intervening in a case in which he is implicated, you did not speak out. When he attacked the press as the enemy of the people, you again were silent. When he targeted the judiciary, labeling judges and decisions he didn’t like as illegitimate, we heard not a word. And now he comes for Congress, the first branch of government, seeking to strip it of its greatest power, that of the purse.

Many of you have acknowledged your deep misgivings about the president in quiet conversations over the past two years. You have bemoaned his lack of decency, character and integrity. You have deplored his fundamental inability to tell the truth. But for reasons that are all too easy to comprehend, you have chosen to keep your misgivings and your rising alarm private.

That must end. The time for silent disagreement is over. You must speak out.

This will require courage. The president is popular among your base, which revels in his vindictive and personal attacks on members of his own party, even giants such as the late senator John McCain. Speaking up risks a primary challenge or accusations of disloyalty. But such acts of independence are the most profound demonstrations of loyalty to country.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III may soon conclude his investigation and report. Depending on what is in that report and what we find in our own investigations, our nation may face an even greater challenge. While I am alarmed at what we have already seen and found of the president’s conduct and that of his campaign, I continue to reserve judgment about what consequences should flow from our eventual findings. I ask you to do the same.

[Congress did its job on the border deal. It needs to do it again by amending the emergency act.]

If we cannot rise to the defense of our democracy now, in the face of a plainly unconstitutional aggrandizement of presidential power, what hope can we have that we will do so with the far greater decisions that could be yet to come?

Although these times pose unprecedented challenges, we have been through worse. The divisions during the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement were just as grave and far more deadly. The Depression and World War II were far more consequential. And nothing can compare to the searing experience of the Civil War.

If Abraham Lincoln, the father of the Republican Party, could be hopeful that our bonds of affection would be strained but not broken by a war that pitted brother against brother, surely America can come together once more. But as long as we must endure the present trial, history compels us to speak, and act, our conscience, Republicans and Democrats alike.

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You can assume - and rightly so - that any republican who does NOT “speak out” is either COMPLICIT, or has been compromised by either Trump or his Russian counterparts for EMBARRASSING or ILLEGAL DEEDS or taking laundered money, e.g., RUBLES in donations, or BOTH.

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reading-writing-revolution · 5 years ago

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"If you step back for a moment and look at the world map like you're playing Risk, things might come into focus a bit better about what is actually going on.

Yesterday it was revealed that the conservative Tory party is receiving a lot of Russian money into its campaign coffers. We know that the biggest threat to Russian aggression is NATO. So if you're a gangster with more personal wealth than Jeff Bezos, what would you do with that money if you wanted to cause some havoc against your enemies?

Would you hand some cash to some people in an attempt to break up the European market with an idea like Brexit? Because that's what Putin has done. He didn't face any consequences for that because the people who got their money are simply outraged that you are outraged that they took money to do something against their own interest. But to understand why these Brexiters want to shoot themselves in the foot so badly you have to first remember that historically, conservatives have always had the slime of sedition coursing through their veins.

With the aid of Rupert Murdoch's propaganda machine, people in Britain went a little nuts after imbibing the lies that Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage began spewing about the NHS spending $300 billion on immigrants. Beating up on immigrants has always been an effective tool for the rich to turn the poor against the poorer because most of the poor are convinced that they are just premature millionaires themselves so it must be all those foreigners coming to take their jobs.

The irony and hypocrisy that Murdoch is himself an immigrant should not be lost on anyone but it is his megalomania that should have more of us alarmed. He was quoted as saying that when he calls a politician in England and America, they always answer the phone. When he calls anyone in Brussels, nobody cares. Malignant narcissists do not like being slighted in such a way as we saw with the prime minister of Denmark when she refused to sell Greenland to Trump.

Both Murdoch and Putin are at their roots, insurgents who mean to undermine liberal democracy. But Putin is not merely satisfied with sowing chaos in England and the United States. He wants to destroy NATO and there was a real danger of the Ukraine becoming a member of NATO and Putin would do anything to prevent that. So he needed what people in the spy trade-craft call a 'useful idiot.'

Putin has said that the breakup of the Soviet Union was the most humiliating thing ever visited on the Russian people and that he means to restore mother Russia to its former glory. So Putin has been sowing chaos as best he can all across Europe by filling the campaign coffers of the most right wing conservative candidates that he can find. But why only conservatives you might ask? Because as there power has declined through contrition, their wacky ideas have become revolting to the kids coming of voting age and they know that in politics, money is everything. If they mean to hold seats of power, they must have an endless supply of cash. Putin has done this all across Europe with great success and he has one ally with control of huge media sources in Rupert Murdoch.

Putin started this campaign to make Russia great again by first establishing some pro-Russia groups in Crimea. These agents then took to the newspapers and television claiming the Ukrainians were oppressing them and gee willikers, Vlad was not about to let the pro-Russian separatist languish under the tyranny of a president who fled to Moscow once the people revolted. So he invaded Crimea and killed anyone in his way. Then he built a bridge tying Crimea to Russia. Of course this wasn’t entirely kosher with the rest of the world so NATO imposed the harshest sanctions they could on Russia. The effect has been reducing a country which spans eleven time zones to an economy smaller than Italy and New York state.

Now that he was paying for the crime he didn’t get religion, he just did more crime. Putin then invaded eastern Ukraine killing 13,000 people. Then the Russian navy began ramming Ukrainian boats and seizing their sailors while claiming they were the aggressors. This has gone on on Trump’s watch.

Putin knew one thing for certain and that was Hillary Clinton helped craft the heavy sanctions against Russia so if she were elected president, she wouldn’t be so inclined to lift those sanctions so what could Putin do to keep Hillary from becoming president? Anything he possibly could.

It’s important to remember now that when Trump was claiming anyone could have hacked into the DNC server that he knew Russia did it. Yesterday at Roger Stone’s trial it was revealed that Roger Stone was telling Paul Manafort that he was in contact with Julian Assange and that he had access to Russian intelligence about Hillary. This is documented. Roger Stone told Manafort he knew a way to win the election but, ‘it ain’t pretty’ meaning collaborating with the Russians via Julian Assange. This is not speculation, these are facts laid out in federal court by a US Attorney. Trump’s purpose of saying it could be China or a 300 pound guy in his basement was to deflect from the verifiable fact that it was Russia. He didn’t want the truth known that they helped him win the election.

Since Trump’s election, Putin has been on a killing spree in European countries where his critics have fled his retribution. He has brazenly murdered former spies in England and Germany. He has not faced any further sanctions for these crimes because he has one very devoted fan, Trump.

If you look at the Risk map again, you can see in the Middle East, the threat of a regime change in Syria is now gone. The only base that Russia has on foreign soil is in Syria. Putin has again effectively gotten a right-wing nationalist to win a functional dictatorship in a NATO member state, Turkey.

Putin has been selling arms to Erdogan to shore up his dictatorship and Erdogan has embraced Putin’s tactics in dealing with any political opposition. He has done this by paying two members of Trump’s inner circle, Mike Flynn and Rudy Giuliani. Erdogan has offered big money to both to get Trump to deport a cleric that Erdogan wants to kill, badly. The last time Erdogan was in the United States to visit Trump, his security detail brutally assaulted protesters here and Trump did absolutely nothing about it. Not even a, ‘hey don’t do that here.’

We now know that Trump withdrew our troops in northern Syria after a call with Erdogan. Erdogan told Trump that he was going to invade northern Syria and kill him some Kurds. Trump did not put up any resistance at all to this planned genocide. Why? Well Trump has hotels there and other business interests in Turkey and Erdogan can snap his fingers and take away any money from Trump. After the blowback of abandoning our allies, Erdogan did Trump a solid and gave him Al-Baghdadi.

So if you look at the Risk map before Trump became president and now, you can see England in chaos. Poland in chaos. Ukraine is invaded and losing control of their eastern territory and their coastal waters. Putin has a very good relationship now with Turkey, he has strengthened the Assad regime and completely restored its territorial control of Syria. He has gotten Iran to come in to sow even more chaos and this was all done in the name of ‘bringing home the troops.’ Not one soldier is coming home. In fact Trump sent 1800 extra soldiers to guard oil wells in Saudi Arabia because they are paying us like mercenaries.

When both houses of congress voted to stop weapons sales to Saudi Arabia so they couldn’t kill Yemeni civilians, Trump overruled them and sold them anyway. The fact that Trump has sent our troops to Saudi Arabia as mercenaries has not perturbed any Republican in congress.

That’s because Republicans no longer have any interest in National Security. Putin funneled $30 million through the NRA to help elect Trump and his henchman have filled Republican coffers with cash they need to keep themselves in office. It’s so very curious how easily Republicans so quickly went from being harsh critics of Russia and then changing their presidential platform specifically on Russian aggression in Ukraine to be a little more accommodating to what can only be called a pro-Putin stance.

We know Trump lied about his Trump-Moscow deal. We know that Trump cares only for money. After losing more money than any single person the IRS ever kept track of, Trump is more than eager to get that billion dollars he lost of his father’s money. He has proven over and again that he will lie, cheat and steal from anyone in his quest to pad his bank account and Putin *knows* this.

Trump has never once missed an opportunity to lie for Putin nor has he missed an opportunity to praise him. After Russia rammed a Ukrainian vessel and took its crew hostage, the State Department thought it might look a bit bad if Trump had a meeting with Putin in South America. So they put out a statement saying that the meeting was cancelled because what Russia did was an outrageous violation of international law. Not even an hour later, Russia announced that the meeting was still on. Hmmm. So how do those Russian bastards have the unmitigated gall to tell the world what the president of the United States is going to do after he just said the meeting was off? Was Trump finally going to stand up to Russia? Nope. The meeting happened just as it was previously scheduled with no record whatever of what was said.

Russia effectively said that Trump was their bitch and after announcing there would be no meeting with Putin, they told their bitch that he wasn’t calling off any meeting and that he was going to meet when they said they would meet and Trump did. How do you think that went over in the State Department?

Any one of the things I have mentioned merits being impeached. If Barack Obama had paid off two women to keep them quiet, he would have already been removed from office and justly so. This is how far they have fallen. They have abandoned any semblance of ethics because their leader has no ethics. They are entirely amoral in ways not seen since Caligula was walking around. They have completely abandoned any belief in the rule of law or the constitution. There is not one Republican in congress who can open their mouths and not lie. What’s most troubling is the way that they have become so servile to Vladimir Putin at the costs of American lives.

This trade-war has caused China to go looking for other suppliers for their agricultural needs and who have they turned to? Putin. We were making a profit from China to the tune of $26 billion for the American farmers. Now we are borrowing money from China to give money to American farmers to *not* sell their crops to China. Republicans think this is a good deal because they cannot admit that this is lunacy at its putrid worst.

As more and more damning testimony is revealed about Trump’s incompetence, Republicans are contorting themselves into debased loons trying to defend a president we now know beyond any reasonable doubt, lies as easily as he breathes and who has committed multitudes of felonies that they care nothing about. After last night’s revelation from the senior Trump official writing A Warning by Anonymous, I am left wondering why Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence have not begun 25th amendment proceedings but doing so would mean that they would have to have some allegiance to the constitution that we know without question they do not have.

Donald Trump and the Republican party have become an existential threat greater than any enemy before to the United States. No amount of hand-wringing is going to cure us of this scourge. It’s going to take some drastic measures because the common Republicans are not up in arms about the complete servility of Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin because they are too busy getting poisoned a little every day from the propaganda that tells them comforting lies instead of inconvenient truths. The truth is that Trump has not missed an opportunity to hurt America and help Russia.

If we do not take action now, the epitaph of the United States will read, ‘when fascism came to the United States, it was welcomed with open arms because the unbridled power of propaganda poisoned the minds of Republicans everywhere who sold out every principle this country was founded upon to own the libs.’"

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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Mueller Hearings Present Make-or-Break Moment for Democrats https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/20/us/politics/mueller-hearings-democrats.html

Here is the question I hope Bob Mueller is asked on Wednesday: "More than 1,000 former prosecutors have signed a public letter asserting that, in their opinion, Donald Trump would be charged with obstruction of justice if he were not president. Do you agree or disagree with that letter? Please explain your answer."

The proposition of "make-or-break" is nonsense. This article itself is an example of normalizing Trump's documented behavior. Trump, his people, and his party lie until they can lie no more, delay as long as they can, then when cornered admit "yes we did it, but what's wrong with that". It is nonsense. The bar for the acceptability of Trump's behavior is placed exceedingly low, while the bar for effective intervention is placed exceedingly high. Stop.

Donald J Trump MUST be held ACCOUNTABLE for his NUMEROUS crimes and corruption. We CANNOT allow him to "SHOOT SOMEONE ON 5th AVENUE" and get away with it. PLEASE CONGRESS DO YOUR JOB!!!

Mueller Hearings on Wednesday Present Make-or-Break Moment for Democrats

By Nicholas Fandos | Published July 20, 2019 | New York Times | Posted July 20, 2019 |

WASHINGTON — For more than two years, Democrats have hoped that Robert S. Mueller III would show the nation that President Trump is unfit for office — or at the very least, severely damage his re-election prospects. On Wednesday, in back-to-back hearings with the former special counsel, that wish could face its final make-or-break moment.

Lawmakers choreographing the hearings before the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees warn that bombshell disclosures are unlikely. But over about five hours of nationally televised testimony, they hope to use Mr. Mueller, the enigmatic and widely respected former F.B.I. director, to refashion his legalistic 448-page report into a vivid, compelling narrative of Russia’s attempts to undermine American democracy, the Trump campaign’s willingness to accept Kremlin assistance and the president’s repeated and legally dubious efforts to thwart investigators.

For a party divided over how to confront Mr. Trump — liberals versus moderates, supporters of impeachment versus staunch opponents — the stakes could scarcely be higher.

“One way or the other, the Mueller hearing will be a turning point with respect to the effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for his reckless, degenerate, aberrant and possibly criminal behavior,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Democratic Caucus chairman and a member of the Judiciary Committee. “After the hearing, we will be able to have a better understanding of the pathway forward concerning our oversight responsibilities and the constitutional tools that are available to us.”

Partisans in both parties may already have made up their minds, but Democrats are counting on Mr. Mueller’s testimony to focus the broader public’s attention on the findings of his 22-month investigation — either to jumpstart a stalled impeachment push or electrify the campaign to make Mr. Trump a one-term president.

Even Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has been a voice of caution on impeachment for much of the year, has tied the testimony to Democrats’ broader political prospects.

“This coming election, it is really an election that the fate of this country is riding on,” she told House Democrats at a private meeting recently, according to an aide who was there. “This presidency is an existential threat to our democracy and our country as we know it.”

Democratic hopes are rising on an unlikely horse. Mr. Mueller has made his reluctance to testify widely known, and his appearance could easily backfire. If the hearings fail to sizzle, the viewing public could be left agreeing with the president that it is time to move on.

“A lot of public attitudes have hardened on the subject of Trump and Russia,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee. “So I’m realistic about the impact of any one hearing on public attitudes.”

No matter what happens, House investigators say their inquiries into possible obstruction of justice by Mr. Trump and other accusations of administration malfeasance will go on, and those inquiries could yet inflict political damage on the president’s re-election prospects or even re-energize impeachment talk.

But perhaps no other witness can command the authority of Mr. Mueller, who conducted his work in silence, above the political maw of Washington, and delivered it this spring with a modicum of words and drama.

Mr. Mueller is unlikely to level new charges on Wednesday against the president. Unlike Leon Jaworski, the Watergate prosecutor who persuaded a grand jury to name President Richard M. Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator, or Ken Starr, the independent counsel who made a convincing case for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, Mr. Mueller has left a more ambiguous trail.

His report detailed dozens of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia, painting a portrait of a campaign willing to accept foreign assistance. But it did not find enough evidence to charge anyone with conspiring with the Russians. And though Mr. Mueller pointedly declined to exonerate Mr. Trump from obstructing his investigation, he took the view that Justice Department policies prevented him from even considering whether to charge.

Mr. Mueller, 74, is unlikely to change course now — particularly after he used his lone public appearance in May to clarify that any testimony he delivered would not stray from his report.

“We go in eyes wide open,” said Representative Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat on the Intelligence Committee. “His style under the most effusive of circumstances is almost monosyllabic.”

Knowing that Mr. Mueller is unlikely to take the bait on more explosive questions, Democrats see their role as coaxing him through some of the most damaging passages of his report.

Democrats on the Judiciary Committee will have the first opportunity, and they intend to dwell heavily on five of the most glaring episodes of possible obstruction of justice that Mr. Mueller documented in the second volume of his report. They include Mr. Trump’s direction to the former White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II to fire Mr. Mueller and then publicly lie about it; his request that Corey Lewandowski, a former campaign chief, ask Attorney General Jeff Sessions to reassert control of the investigation and limit its scope; and possible witness tampering to discourage two aides, Paul Manafort and Michael D. Cohen, from cooperating with investigators.

Many lawmakers, including Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, view the behavior in at least some of those episodes as reaching the threshold of high crimes and misdemeanors, established in the Constitution as grounds for impeachment. They will try to solicit Mr. Mueller’s views — tacitly or explicitly.

“The overwhelming majority of the American people are unfamiliar with the principal conclusions of the Mueller report, so that will be a starting point,” Mr. Jeffries said. “To the extent that Bob Mueller can explain his conclusions, particularly as it relates to possible criminal culpability of the president, that will be compelling information.”

Democrats on the Intelligence Committee will use the second hearing to highlight evidence from the report’s first volume about Russia’s social media disinformation and hacking operations during the 2016 campaign and high-profile contacts between Trump associates and Russians offering assistance to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign.

Republicans are expressing little concern about the Democrats’ strategy. Mr. Mueller’s style and his prosecutorial conclusions will “blow up in their face,” said Representative Steve Chabot, Republican of Ohio, who helped prosecute the impeachment case against Mr. Clinton.

“Back then, Starr came out pretty clearly and said that he felt there were impeachable offenses that had been committed,” Mr. Chabot said. “Now we have a special counsel who, at this point, is saying no. We invested so much time and money and taxpayer dollars in this that we should give considerable weight in that.”

Time is not on the side of impeachment advocates. Congress’s six-week August recess is at hand. A fiscal deadline is likely to dominate Congress when it returns, and with the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 3, the nation’s attention is likely to shift toward the 2020 presidential campaign. A recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that support for opening impeachment hearings based on current evidence had dropped among registered voters from June to July, to just 21 percent. Fifty percent said it was time for the country to move on.

Support in the House is somewhat higher and continues to grow with every fresh outrage Mr. Trump provides the Democrats, including an across-the-board refusal to comply with the House’s investigations and comments that four liberal congresswomen of color should “go back” to their own countries. A handful of House Democrats this week announced their support for impeachment, pushing the total toward 90, according to a New York Times tally.

And Mr. Nadler formally acknowledged for the first time this month that impeachment articles were “under consideration as part of the committee’s investigation, although no final determination has been made.”

But the announced support is still far short of the 218 needed to impeach the president and send charges to the Senate for a trial, and moderate Democrats from Republican-leaning districts have quietly fumed at the position they are being put in.

As the most powerful Democrat against impeachment, Ms. Pelosi fears an attempt to oust Mr. Trump would backfire on Democrats and further divide the country unless her party can build broader support. She has counseled lawmakers “to have a level of calmness, no drama” about the questioning at the Mueller hearing, according to a senior aide, and she and her deputies will be watching how or if public sentiment shifts after Wednesday.

No need to “hype it,” she has advised — Mr. Mueller’s words will carry power.

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uboat53 · 2 years ago

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A few days ago Ukrainian President Zelensky gave an address before the United States Congress and I think it's worth taking the opportunity to talk about Ukraine again because we so often don't except for the far-right politicians who advocate kowtowing to Russia.

The war going on in Ukraine right now is far larger than just a spat between Ukraine and Russia, it's a war that could determine the future of freedom and democracy in the world. This is not an exaggeration, Russia and other totalitarian/authoritarian countries are not just dictatorships within their own borders, they are fundamentally incapable of tolerating freedom and democracy anywhere in the world.

When people are free, it is obvious that their lives are better. People are simply happier and more prosperous under liberal democratic governments that respect individual liberties. With the rise of the internet and the growing interconnectedness of the world it is no longer possible for dictators to prevent their people from coming into contact with people from other places and the simple act of that contact, especially when sustained over time, will show their people the fundamental nature of the lies their own propaganda seeks to sow.

For this reason, authoritarian countries, Russia and China being the largest and most powerful among them, will always seek to undermine and destroy freedom and democracy around the globe.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a test, a test of whether the free world will allow a brutal dictatorship to crush a nascent liberal democracy by force. If Russia is allowed to succeed in crushing Ukraine it will increase the threat on other small democracies that border large autocracies such as Taiwan, South Korea, and Poland among others.

This is not a war the United States can fight directly, unfortunately the risk of escalation to nuclear war is too great, but it is not a war we should walk away from either. Ukrainians are fighting not just for their own land and freedom but for the freedom of all of us and we should provide them whatever tools and weapons they need for as long as they need them.

Already the Ukrainians have scored a dramatic victory, holding their own and revealing the Russian military to be a paper tiger, but there is still far more to do. Until Russia is forced to abandon its brutal attempt to weaken freedom and democracy in the world both by crushing it in a neighboring state and by attempting to divide and undermine those countries that practice it then our own liberties will remain insecure.

In all of this we can be thankful both that President Zelensky has turned out to be such an inspiring leader and that Ukrainians of all situations have shown such admirable courage and resilience in the face of a relentless assault. It is mostly through their efforts that we are in a position where victory is possible at all.

Given all of this, I would argue that the United States and other liberal democracies should commit to providing as much aid and equipment as is possible to Ukraine. This war is being waged as much against us as against them, as Putin's repeated declarations have made crystal clear, and we should count ourselves lucky that we are asked only to sacrifice a few of our tax dollars and not the lives of our friends, children, and fellow citizens.

This war will likely continue for some time, though the Ukrainians have proven extremely effective at fighting the Russian war machine it is clear that the Russian leadership believes that we in the US and the West in general do not have the resolve to continue a conflict if we are even the slightest bit inconvenienced by it. Even worse, there are those within our society and even in our government that are committed to proving him right.

Do not let them win. It is time for us to show that the same country that endured years of hardship and loss in order to win the second world war still has at least enough resolve to continue to spend some of its abundant resources in another war to defend our values. If we don't, it is certain that Ukraine will not be the last war we fight for those values and the next one will cost us far more dearly.

#ukraine #russia ukraine war #russia ukraine putin #vladimir putin #vlodimir zelensky #president zelensky #politics #international politics #freedom and democracy #liberal democracy #anti authoritarian #us politics #nato #europe #the west

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enubus · 3 years ago

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Democrats Are Priming Themselves To Refuse To Accept Any Election Defeats

How will Democrats react to the thumping that most observers believe they will get in the 2022 midterm elections? Or to the possibility that in three years a Republican could be sworn in as the 47th president?

They relish the Jan. 6 opportunity to endlessly relive the supposed danger that a disgraceful but still pathetically ineffectual riot posed to the republic, which they have spent the last 12 months misrepresenting as an “insurrection” or failed coup d’etat by Republicans.

The media treated the date as a sort of new national holiday to reinforce the awfulness of former President Trump and his deplorable supporters. But all that hyperbole about that riot being the moral equivalent of the Confederates firing on Fort Sumter, Pearl Harbor, or even the 9/11 terrorist attacks hasn’t convinced many people living outside the leftist bubble of CNN, MSNBC, and The New York Times to believe Republicans are a party of insurrectionists.

From the outside, the inflamed rhetoric of Jan. 6 fever appears to be an utterly cynical exercise in gaslighting. That was most apparent when used to justify Democrats’ push for so-called “election reform” laws that President Joe Biden claimed last week to be the only thing standing athwart a return to “Jim Crow” racism. The legislation is, in fact, an effort to federalize elections, discard every rule aimed at ensuring voter integrity, and in effect rig the process to Democrats’ advantage.

Democrats May Believe Their Own Spin

But the more one digs deeper into the avalanche of Jan. 6 articles in left publications like The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and many others or listens to leading Democrats and party activists talk about the subject, the less cynical it seems. Democrats have been drinking their own mix of toxic partisan Kool-Aid to the point they actually believe that Trump and Republicans are authoritarians and plotting to destroy American democracy.

Indeed, after years of faithfully spreading conspiracy theories about the Capitol riot and Trump colluding with the Russians to steal the 2016 election, it was inevitable that liberals and leftists would be in a genuine state of panic about the possibility that they are living through the last years of a Weimar Republic-like prelude to Trumpian fascism. They believe that all resistance to Democratic legislation and leftist policies such as critical race theory indoctrination, or even public rudeness to Biden (“Let’s go, Brandon”), are evidence of an insurrectionist spirit.

Leftist Media In Frenzy of Fear

When one listens to political hacks like Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., say that ending the filibuster in the Senate and passing new voting laws is vital to the continued existence of the American republic, it’s hard to take him seriously. Yet audiences for left-wing outlets that are publishing innumerable think pieces along the lines of, “What Will It Take to Stop the 2024 Election Coup,” “The Republican Plot to Steal the 2024 Election,” “Seven ways Republicans are already undermining the 2024 election,” “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun,” or “No One Is Coming to Save Us From the ‘Dagger at the Throat of America’,” to cite just a few examples, are almost certainly buying what those who are breathlessly warning of the danger ahead are selling. Indeed, the authors of these pieces probably believe it too.

Seen in this light, serious arguments that try to explain to Democrats that Republican voter integrity measures like voter ID laws or banning vote harvesting won’t “suppress” the vote of minorities are likely to fall on deaf ears. So will pointing out that the Russia hoax used by federal officials to hobble Trump was a lot closer to a coup attempt than the foolish efforts to find a legal strategy to stop Biden from taking office.

The left is equally uninterested in the lack of evidence that Jan. 6 was anything but a disorganized riot or that, even if the 2020 count was accurate despite the chaos induced by pandemic practices, the election was unfairly influenced by the bias of Big Tech companies and corporate media outlets that suppressed reports of Biden family corruption.

Once you discard the idea that Republicans are relatives, friends, or neighbors who may disagree with you about politics but who also mean well and instead view them as the moral equivalent of Germans who voted Adolf Hitler into power, talk about defending democracy becomes a life and death struggle. That means defeat can never be accepted and must be averted at all costs, no matter what it takes.

Left Ready to Reject GOP Wins

To be fair, some on the right have come to see politics as an existential struggle as well. But while Biden’s capture by his party left-wing lends credence to those arguments, Democrats aren’t so much worried about the consequences of policy shifts to American society. What they appear to be claiming is that any system that could put the GOP or Trump back in power is not merely horrifying but must be the result of a corrupt or racist system that is being manipulated by Trumpist authoritarians.

This amounts to a political faith that is building toward a belief that Republican victories in November 2022 will be inherently illegitimate and must be rejected by hook or crook. The same applies to their hysteria about 2024 which, as the literature produced on the subject indicates, they have half-convinced themselves has already been stolen.

That these conspiracy theories masquerading as a defense of democracy bear more than a slight resemblance to the conviction on the part of some Trump supporters that there was no way their man could have fairly lost in 2020 is an irony lost on the left. As much as they are certain that any doubts about 2020 are the product of Trump’s “big lie,” the embrace of their own collection of conspiracies about vote suppression and Republicans stealing elections is nothing less than another “big lie.”

The impact of the myths about Jan. 6 being an insurrection and democracy endangered by a GOP assault on voting rights has, in effect, painted the Democrats into a corner where any defeat must be considered proof of a rigged system.

Prepare for Extreme Measures

Seen in that light, it’s not enough to denounce Democratic rhetoric as false or cynical. The net effect of their claims is that those who have been convinced of it are calling for extreme measures to prevent an election loss and are already preparing to regard their party’s likely coming rejection by the voters as another coup, no matter how honest the count may be.

The full consequences of this are unknowable but, at the very least, Americans should prepare for efforts by the Democrats’ cheering section in the corporate media and by the Big Tech overlords of the Internet to go further than they did in 2020 to prevent such an eventuality. If fails, more “mostly peaceful” riots in the aftermath of Republican election victories are likely. As with the violence and looting unleashed by the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, that will not be termed an “insurrection” by those still raging about what happened on Jan. 6.

All that, and not Republican opposition to the Biden presidency and Democratic legislation, is the most serious blow to the fabric of American democracy imaginable.

Jonathan S. Tobin is a senior contributor to The Federalist, editor in chief of JNS.org, and a columnist for the New York Post. Follow him on Twitter at @jonathans_tobin.

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