#what a day. one of the most dramatic elections in history and news of putin stepping down that was confirmed false the next day

[project-sekai-facts]

Today is November 5th, which means it’s MEIKO’s anniversary and Absolutely Nothing Else.

Happy DestielPutinElection.

[antoine-roquentin]

markus soder, who recently lead a poll of germany’s favourite potential chancellors, likes to cosplay, including, well, some good old fashioned blackface. look out trudeau, you’ve got competition.

The German Söderweg:

To begin with, it’s worth recalling how drastically both he and the current Interior Minister (and preceding Minister President and CSU chair) Horst Seehofer misread the consequences of Merkel’s 2015 decision to keep the German border open to asylum-seekers. In their interpretation of events, the political crisis over refugees was the uncorking of a bottle that would release all of the conservative spirits that Merkel had suppressed. As Merkel seemed to reveal her true colors – that of a delusional humanitarian – Söder and Seehofer finally thought they had her cornered. 2015–18 was the period in which they tried to finish her off by riding the wind of the right-wing backlash toward her and her policies (Needless to say, there was no principle in any of this: in his days as the Health Minister under Kohl, it was Seehofer who was regularly criticized within his own party for being ‘communist’ when it came to the destitute). Seeing no threat from the AfD, Seehofer and Söder decided to relax the CSU’s Strauß doctrine (‘Never allow a democratically legitimized party right of the CSU’) and appeared to think that the fledgling party’s promotion of more forthright Euroscepticism could be helpful. Then comes the CSU’s Austrian romance. Let us revisit those happy days:

Mid-December 2017: The Austrian Chancellor, Sebastian Kurz of the ÖVP, and his coalition partner, Heinz-Christian Strache of the hard-right FPÖ, presented their coalition agenda withdrawing protections for refugees at the Kahlenberg, site of a decisive 1683 battle against the Turks.

Early January 2018: Alexander Dobrindt, head of the CSU’s parliamentary group, published his call for a ‘Middle Class Conservative Turn’ in Die Welt (Springer’s ‘prestige’ paper). Portions of it read like a less erudite version of Anders Breivik’s manifesto.

Early January 2018: Viktor Orbán was the guest of honor at the CSU-Klausur, and gave an interview to Bild-Zeitung (that had been leading a pro-Kurz campaign for weeks by then): ‘We are not talking of immigrants or refugees, we are talking about an invasion’.

And so the CSU with Söder in the driver’s seat appeared prepared to go down the Austrian road: EU-critical, Putin-curious, agrarian-traditional, culture-war-trigger-happy, maximally Islamophobic neoliberal.

Then came the stunning upset. The CSU was humiliated in the 2018 October regional election. Söder lost 10 percent of the vote, much of which seemed to have been recouped by the Greens, who offer an ever more urban and online electorate the sought-after credentials of anti-racism and cosmopolitanism. With 16 seats lost in the parliament, Söder’s majority vanished. He had to build a humiliating, if not unprecedented coalition with the Free Voters of Bavaria, a hodge-podge ‘non-ideological’ party of the centre. It was now clear that the turn to the right had been a mistake. How did Söder respond? By conducting one of the most dramatic U-Turns in recent German history. Overnight he became a lover of bees and trees – calling for new regulations for their protection. He declared combustion engines would be banned by 2030. His progressivism even overshot what his party was prepared to stomach. At the CSU conference last year, Söder’s proposal for a quota of 40 percent women at all levels of the CSU was rejected by the party delegates. The CSU still has the best discipline of any party in the land, but there are audible grumblings from lower quarters. The CSU Landtag chair Thomas Kreuzer has been lately appending pointed reminders about ‘the farmers’ to Söder loyalty oaths.

What all of this reveals is not simply that Söder is now, belatedly, reforming the CSU in the same way that Merkel did the CDU. It shows that, with his eye on the Chancellorship, Söder knows that he has no choice but to forge a working alliance between main sections of export-oriented industry and the progressive middle classes. He grasps the objective pressure Merkel is under to balance the hegemonic alliance of big multinational corporations (as opposed to smaller, more conservative family businesses), moderate conservatives and urban liberals. Urbanization and export-orientation are two of the dominant forces shaping German social life: and they are moving the country in a progressive and liberalizing direction. (The AfD, caught in factional infighting, and experiencing diminishing returns on its novelty, has meanwhile become a party of last resort for disenchanted members of the state security apparatus and the Bundeswehr). Söder knows that he must divert some of the Green vote or at least make the prospect of ruling with them more plausible. The Austrian example was always an unworkable fantasy in Germany, even in Bavaria, where there are fewer traditional Catholics, the population is urbanizing, and there is a strong ‘progressive’ neoliberal ideology that emanates from BMW (Munich), Siemens (Munich), Adidas (Herzogenaurach), Audi (Ingolstadt), etc. Companies like this do not exist on the same scale in Austria; the country is 20 percent less urban than Germany; and Austrians never underwent any comparable ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’, as they still prefer to think they were not responsible for crimes committed by Nazi-Germany. Despite Kurz’s relative popularity among the professional classes of Vienna, and his wing of ÖVP’s closer position to the Federation of Austrian Industries (Industriellenvereinigung), which represents big capital groups, Austrian conservatives can still cobble together a majority without the sort of urban progressives on whom Merkel has increasingly come to rely.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 19, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

On January 20, 2017, Trump took the oath of office and gave his “American Carnage” speech describing America as a hellscape, and we were off to the races.

Trump vowed he would smash norms and boundaries to “drain the swamp.” He filled positions in his administration with political operatives and appointed his son-in-law Jared Kushner to manage so many projects it would have been funny if it weren’t so deadly serious. The policies the administration advanced were usually hastily and poorly conceived; when the courts overturned them, Trump complained of “the Deep State.”

Days after he took office, he issued the travel ban aimed at Muslims, the first in a series of actions throughout his presidency designed to subordinate people of color to white Americans. The racism in his rhetoric and regulations pulled white supremacists behind him. On August 11-12, 2017, they rioted in Charlottesville, Virginia. Their protest of the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee became an attempt to create a political vanguard.

The “Unite the Right” rally turned violent, injuring more than 30 people and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer, whose last Facebook post before she joined the counter protest in Charlottesville read: “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Three days after the riots, asked about the violent protests in Charlottesville, Trump said that “you… had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” People took that, rightly, as Trump’s support for white supremacy and the gangs that advanced it, a support illustrated dramatically in summer 2020, when he and his attorney general, William Barr, used federal troops against peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters.

By spring 2017, there was another crisis on the horizon. The FBI was investigating the cooperation of Trump’s presidential campaign with Russian spies. Trump’s former National Security Adviser, retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn, had lied to the FBI about conversations with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, and Trump pressured then-FBI Director James Comey to stop the agency’s investigation of Flynn. When Comey refused, Trump fired him, prompting the deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to appoint Special Counsel Robert Mueller (then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions had recused himself because he, too, had lied about conversations with Russians) to investigate the ties between Trump campaign officials and Russian operatives.

Both Mueller’s report and the report of the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee established that Russian operatives had interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump. They indicated that Trump campaign officials knew what the Russians were doing and were willing to accept their help. The Senate Intelligence Committee also noted that Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort gave sensitive internal information about the campaign to a Russian operative in Ukraine. Trump continued to call these allegations the “Russia hoax,” but observers noted that, for all his feuds with other leaders, he seemed oddly solicitous of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump came to office with an expanding economy. In the first three years of his presidency, the economy continued to grow, in part because of tax cuts that slashed the corporate tax rate by 40%. Trump promised that these cuts would be “rocket fuel for our economy,” but economic growth stayed at about 2.9%, the same as it had been in 2015, and more than 60% of the benefits from the cuts went to those at the top 20% of the economic ladder. Even before the pandemic, Trump’s economic policies were projected to add about $10 trillion to the national debt by 2025, an increase of more than 50%.

And then the pandemic hit. Trump first downplayed the crisis, then insisted that Democrats demanding he address the crisis were overplaying it: he called it a Democratic “hoax.” The pandemic tanked the economy, undercutting his best argument for reelection, and by summer 2020 the administration had decided its best option was to reopen schools and the economy and to try to achieve herd immunity through infections. The result was a disaster. Today, on the last day of Trump’s administration, the number of Americans we have officially lost to Covid-19 has topped 400,000. That’s about the same number of people we lost in World War Two.

The pandemic threw about 22 million people out of work and forcing businesses into bankruptcy. As the faltering economy undercut Trump’s plans for reelection, he tried to destroy faith in mail-in ballots, trying to drive people to in-person voting sites. Then, when that didn’t work, he pushed the idea that Democrats would steal the election. Although his Democratic challengers Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 election by more than 7 million popular votes and secured the Electoral College by a vote of 306 to 232, Trump and his supporters continued to insist the election was stolen.

On January 6, 2021, Trump and key members of his administration rallied his supporters to attack the counting of the certified electoral ballots for Biden and Harris. Encouraged by the president, the crowd marched to the Capitol with the plan of disrupting the vote. They overpowered the police, killing one officer; broke into the building; and came within a minute of taking our elected leaders hostage, or perhaps executing them on the gallows they built.

In the wake of the attack on the Capitol, the House of Representatives impeached Trump for the second time—the first was in 2019 after he withheld congressionally-approved money to Ukraine in an attempt to bully the newly-elected Ukraine president into announcing an investigation into Joe Biden’s son Hunter in the hopes of weakening Biden as a potential rival in the 2020 election.

So, Trump leaves the White House tomorrow facing a second Senate impeachment trial.

Trump has split the Republican Party. His true loyalists intend to turn America into a right-wing, white, Christian nation as embodied in the 1776 Report the administration released yesterday. In the last days of the administration, Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is pretty clearly trying to position himself for a 2024 presidential run, tweeting from the official government account of the State Department a long list of what he considers his accomplishments. Others are likely planning to give him a run for his money. Today Senator Josh Hawley, under suspicion of inciting the January 6 rioters with his support for throwing out Biden’s Electoral College votes, slow-walked Biden’s nominee for Secretary of Homeland Security because Hawley objects to Biden’s plans to create a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

Establishment Republicans are trying to regain control of the party. After the January coup attempt, some corporations announced they would no longer donate to Republicans who had voted to challenge the certified electoral votes, while others declared a moratorium on all political spending. The corporate turn against the Trump wing of the Republican Party strengthened the backbone of the establishment Republicans. Today Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) stood on the floor of the Senate and put Trump at the center of the January 6 attack on the Capitol. "The mob was fed lies," McConnell said. “They were provoked by the President and other powerful people."

But McConnell went on. He claimed that neither party has a broad mandate after the 2020 elections, which, he said, meant that the Democrats have no call to advance “sweeping ideological change.” He is referring, of course, to the plans of incoming President-Elect Biden and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris, which he has every intention of stopping.

Today, President-Elect Joe Biden arrived at Joint Base Andrews. He traveled in a private plane since Trump refused to extend him the traditional courtesy of a military plane offered from an outgoing president to an incoming one. Trump will not attend Biden’s swearing-in; he will leave for Florida in the morning. In his place, three of the other living ex-presidents will be attending the inauguration: Republican George W. Bush, Democrat Bill Clinton, and Democrat Barack Obama. It’s a party of ex-presidents, together to emphasize the peaceful transition of power. Trump won’t be there.

The tide is already turning against him. Vice President Mike Pence has announced he will not be able to attend Trump’s farewell ceremony as he is attending Biden’s inauguration instead. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and McConnell—who will become minority leader tomorrow after the two new Democratic senators from Georgia are sworn in—are not going to see Trump off, either: they will be attending church with Biden before his inauguration.

Tomorrow at noon, President-Elect Joe Biden takes the oath of office. He intends to return the government to the principles the Democratic Party has held since the late nineteenth century: that the federal government has a role to play in responding to the needs of ordinary Americans. He has also embraced the traditional Democratic idea that the government should actually look like the people it represents. In an implicit rebuke of Trump’s white nationalism, he has tapped the most diverse set of officials in American history. They are also extraordinarily well-qualified and have many years of experience in government.

Biden and Harris have already outlined a very different administration than Trump’s. Their first task is to combat the coronavirus. Biden wants 100 million vaccinations in his first 100 days in office, and is mobilizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Guard to make that happen. To rebuild the economy, they have advanced a coronavirus relief package designed to protect children, first, and then women and families. It calls for expanded food relief and rent and mortgage protection, as well as expanded unemployment benefits and a one-time relief payment.

Trump’s administration is, perhaps, ending where it began. This weekend, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny returned to Russia after his near-fatal poisoning by Putin’s agents in August. Upon his return to Russia, authorities immediately detained him. Trump refused to join other nations in condemning the poisoning, but yesterday, Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) demanded that the U.S. hold Putin accountable for “the corruption and lawlessness of the Putin regime.” Joining Romney in calling for new sanctions against Russia were a range of senators from both parties.

The act is called the “Holding Russia Accountable for Malign Activities Act.”

—-

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[presssorg]

Lies: Border Wall, Unemployment, Trade War, Unemployment, Mueller Russian Investigation, more

AP FACT CHECK: Trump’s untruths on Russia probe, wall, jobs WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is glossing over the facts when it comes to the Russia investigation and his economic performance. The president suggests the 34 charges issued or guilty pleas achieved by special counsel Robert Mueller have had little to do with him. But Trump’s ignoring reality. Most significantly, his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, has implicated Trump in a crime by linking him to a hush-money scheme. Cohen also pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his efforts during the 2016 campaign to line up a Trump Tower Moscow project, saying he did so to align with Trump’s “political messaging.”

On the economy, Trump claimed record low unemployment for blacks, Hispanics and Asian-Americans even as the numbers have risen after the partial government shutdown. And he described the steel industry as “totally revived” despite 20,000 job losses over the past decade. A look at his past week’s claims, also covering global warming and purported progress in building a border wall: RUSSIA INVESTIGATION TRUMP: “Of the 34 people, many of them were bloggers from Moscow or they were people that had nothing to do with me, had nothing to do with what they’re talking about or there were people that got caught telling a fib or telling a lie. I think it’s a terrible thing that’s happened to this country, because this investigation is a witch hunt.” — interview with CBS, broadcast Sunday. THE FACTS: Trump’s correct that Mueller’s team has indicted or gotten guilty pleas from 34 people. He’s wrong to suggest that none had anything to do with him or were simply “bloggers from Moscow.” Among these people are six Trump associates and 25 Russians accused of interfering in the 2016 election. In particular, Cohen definitely was in trouble for what he did for Trump. Cohen pleaded guilty in August to several criminal charges and stated that Trump directed him to arrange payments of hush money to porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal to fend off damage to Trump’s White House bid. Prosecutors’ court filings in December backed up Cohen’s claims. The Justice Department says the hush money payments were unreported campaign contributions meant to influence the outcome of the election. That assertion makes the payments subject to campaign finance laws, which restrict how much people can donate to a campaign and bar corporations from making direct contributions. It is true that many of Trump’s former associates, including Cohen, were charged with either lying to the FBI or Congress. The 25 Russians charged were not simply “bloggers.” According to Mueller’s indictment last February, 13 Russians and three Russian entities are accused of attempting to help Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton by running a hidden social media trolling campaign and seeking to mobilize Trump supporters at rallies while posing as American political activists. The indictment says the surreptitious campaign was organized by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm financed by companies controlled by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a wealthy businessman with ties to President Vladimir Putin. Mueller’s team also charged 12 Russian military intelligence officers in July with hacking into the Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic Party and releasing tens of thousands of private communications. The charges say the Russian defendants, using a persona known as Guccifer 2.0, in August 2016 contacted a person in touch with the Trump campaign to offer help. And they say that on the same day that Trump, in a speech, urged Russia to find Clinton’s missing emails, Russian hackers tried for the first time to break into email accounts used by her personal office. —— TRUMP: “You look at General Flynn where the FBI said he wasn’t lying, but Robert Mueller said he was, and they took a man and destroyed his life.” — interview with CBS. THE FACTS: That’s not what the FBI said. And Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, has agreed that he lied to the FBI, having pleaded guilty to it.

The idea that Flynn didn’t lie to the FBI picked up steam after Republicans on the House intelligence committee issued a report last year. It said ex-FBI director James Comey, in a private briefing, told lawmakers that agents who interviewed Flynn “discerned no physical indications of deception” and saw “nothing that indicated to them that he knew he was lying to them.” But Comey called that description “garble” in a private interview with House lawmakers in December. Comey, in essence, said Flynn was a good liar, having a “natural conversation” with agents, “answered fully their questions, didn’t avoid. That notwithstanding, they concluded he was lying.” At his sentencing hearing in December, Flynn acknowledged to Judge Emmet Sullivan that he knew it was a crime when he lied to the FBI in January 2017. Flynn declined to accept the judge’s offer to withdraw his guilty plea. Neither he nor his lawyers disputed that he had lied to agents. —— UNEMPLOYMENT TRUMP: “You saw the jobs report just came out. …The African-Americans have the best employment numbers in the history of our country. Hispanic Americans have the best employment numbers in the history of our country. Asian-Americans the best in the history of our country.” — CBS interview. THE FACTS: Black unemployment is not currently the lowest ever, possibly in part to the partial government shutdown, which lifted joblessness last month. Black unemployment did reach a low, 5.9 per cent, in May. But that figure is volatile on a monthly basis. That rate has since increased to 6.8 per cent in January. Hispanic and Asian-American joblessness has also risen off record lows last year. Hispanic unemployment last month was 4.9 per cent, up from a low of 4.4 per cent reached in October and December. Asian-American unemployment was at 3.1 per cent, up from 2.2 per cent in May. Moreover, there are multiple signs that the racial wealth gap is now worsening. The most dramatic drop in black unemployment came under President Barack Obama, when it fell from a recession high of 16.8 per cent in March 2010 to 7.8 per cent in January 2017. —— THE WALL TRUMP: “The chant now should be ‘finish the wall’ as opposed to ‘Build the Wall’ because we’re building a lot of wall. I started this six months ago — we really started going to town — because I could see we were going nowhere with the Democrats.” — comments Friday. TRUMP: “Large sections of WALL have already been built with much more either under construction or ready to go. Renovation of existing WALLS is also a very big part of the plan to finally, after many decades, properly Secure Our Border. The Wall is getting done one way or the other!” — tweet Thursday. THE FACTS: Despite all his talk of progress, he’s added no extra miles of barrier to the border to date. Construction is to start this month on a levee wall system in the Rio Grande Valley that will add 14 miles of barrier, the first lengthening in his presidency. That will be paid for as part of $1.4 billion approved by Congress last year. Most work under contracts awarded by the Trump administration has been for replacement of existing barrier. When Trump says large parts of the wall “have already been built,” he’s not acknowledging that previous administrations built those sections. Barriers currently extend for 654 miles (1,052 kilometres), or about one-third of the border. That construction was mostly done from 2006 to 2009. —— STEEL INDUSTRY TRUMP: “Tariffs on the ‘dumping’ of Steel in the United States have totally revived our Steel Industry. New and expanded plants are happening all over the U.S. We have not only saved this important industry, but created many jobs. Also, billions paid to our treasury. A BIG WIN FOR U.S.” — tweet Jan. 28. THE FACTS: He’s exaggerating the recovery of the steel industry, particularly when it comes to jobs. In December, the steel industry employed 141,600 people, the Labor Department says in its latest data. Last March, when Trump said he would impose the tariffs, it was 139,400. That’s a gain of just 2,200 jobs during a period when the overall economy added nearly 2 million jobs. On a percentage basis, steel industry jobs grew 1.6 per cent, barely higher than the 1.3 per cent increase in all jobs. Yet those figures still lag behind where they were before the 2008-2009 recession. When that downturn began, there were nearly 162,000 steelworkers. Some companies have said they will add or expand plants. It’s difficult to know just how many jobs will be added by newly planned mills. But construction spending on factories has yet to take off significantly after having been in decline between 2016 and much of 2018. Construction spending on factories has been flat in the past year, according to the Census Bureau. Trump’s reference to “billions paid to our treasury” concerns money raised from tariffs on foreign steel and other products. Such tariffs are generally paid by U.S. importers, not foreign countries or companies, and the costs are often passed on to consumers. So that money going to the government is mostly coming from Americans. —— VOTER FRAUD TRUMP: “58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote. These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. All over the country, especially in California, voter fraud is rampant. Must be stopped. Strong voter ID!” — tweet Jan. 27. THE FACTS: That “iceberg” quickly began to melt as officials found serious problems with a report from the Texas secretary of state’s office on voter fraud. More broadly, Trump is overstating the magnitude of such fraud across the U.S. The Texas report suggested as many as 95,000 non-U.S. citizens may be on the state’s voter rolls and as many as 58,000 may have cast a ballot at least once since 1996. Since it came out, however, state elections officials have been notifying county election chiefs of problems with the findings. Local officials told The Associated Press that they received calls from Texas Secretary of State David Whitley’s office indicating that some citizens had been wrongly included in the original data. So far no one on the lists has been confirmed as a noncitizen voter. Election officials in Texas’ largest county say about 18,000 voters in the Houston area were wrongfully flagged as potentially ineligible to vote and those officials expect more such mistakes to be found on their list. Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Trump ally, acknowledged problems in the report, saying “many of these individuals may have been naturalized before registering and voting, which makes their conduct perfectly legal.” Early claims by other states of possible illegal voting on a rampant scale haven’t held up. When Florida began searching for noncitizens in 2012, for instance, state officials initially found 180,000 people suspected of being ineligible to vote when comparing databases of registered voters and driver’s licenses. Florida officials later assembled a purge list of more than 2,600 names but that, too, was beset by inaccuracies. Eventually, a revised list of 198 names of possible noncitizens was produced through the use of a federal database. In the U.S. overall, the actual number of fraud cases has been very small, and the type that voter IDs are designed to prevent — voter impersonation at the ballot box — is almost nonexistent. In court cases that have invalidated some ID laws as having discriminatory effects, election officials could barely cite a case in which a person was charged with in-person voting fraud. —— JUDGES TRUMP: “After all that I have done for the Military, our great Veterans, Judges (99), Justices (2) … does anybody really think I won’t build the WALL?” — tweet Jan. 27. THE FACTS: He’s boasting here about his record of getting federal judges and justices on the bench. But that record is not extraordinary. He also misstates the total number of judges who have been confirmed by the Senate — it’s 85, not 99. While Trump did successfully nominate two justices to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, during his first two years in office, four other modern presidents did the same — Democrats Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy, and Republican Richard Nixon. Trump, meanwhile, is surpassed in the number of confirmed justices by Warren Harding (four), William Taft (five), Abraham Lincoln (three) and George Washington (six), according to Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and expert on judicial appointments. Trump’s 85 total judicial appointees lag behind five former presidents at comparable points in office. The five are George W. Bush, 99; Clinton, 128; Ronald Reagan, 88; Nixon, 91; and Kennedy, 111, according to Wheeler’s analysis. —— CLIMATE CHANGE TRUMP: “In the beautiful Midwest, wind chill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded. In coming days, expected to get even colder. People can’t last outside even for minutes. What the hell is going on with Global Waming? Please come back fast, we need you!” — tweet Jan. 28. THE FACTS: Global warming does not need to make a comeback because it hasn’t gone away. Extreme cold spells in parts of the globe do not signal a retreat. Earth is considerably warmer than it was 30 years ago and especially 100 years ago. The lower 48 states make up only 1.6 per cent of the globe, so what’s happening there at any particular time is not a yardstick of the planet’s climate. Even so, despite the brutal cold in the Midwest and East, five Western states are warmer than normal. “This is simply an extreme weather event and not representative of global scale temperature trends,” said Northern Illinois University climate scientist Victor Gensini. “The exact opposite is happening in Australia,” which has been broiling with triple-digit heat that is setting records. Trump’s own administration released a scientific report last year saying that while human-caused climate change will reduce cold weather deaths “in 49 large cities in the United States, changes in extreme hot and extreme cold temperatures are projected to result in more than 9,000 additional premature deaths per year” by the end of this century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at recent rates. Trump routinely conflates weather and climate. Weather is like mood, which is fleeting. Climate is like personality, which is long term. —— Associated Press writers Christopher Rugaber, Jill Colvin, Colleen Long and Seth Borenstein in Washington, Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Paul J. Weber in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report. —— Find AP Fact Checks at http://apne.ws/2kbx8bd Follow https://twitter.com/APFactCheck EDITOR’S NOTE — A look at the veracity of claims by political figures

Published at Mon, 04 Feb 2019 05:28:50 +0000 Read the full article

[southeastasianists]

When Indonesia’s New Order regime met its end in May 1998, I was a PhD student researching Indonesian opposition movements while teaching Indonesian language and politics at a university in Sydney. Along with other lecturers and students, I watched the live broadcast of Suharto’s resignation speech, listening to the words of one of our colleagues as she translated the president’s fateful words for Australian TV. Clustered around a television screen in a poky AV lab, everyone present felt awed by the immensity of what we were witnessing, relieved that a dangerous political impasse had been broken, and nervously hopeful about the future after so many long years of political stagnation.

The extraordinary achievements of political reform in the years that followed formed one of the great success stories of the so-called “third wave” of democratisation—the worldwide surge of regime change that began in Southern Europe in the mid-1970s and then spread through Latin America, Africa and Asia. The post-Suharto democracy has now lasted longer than did Indonesia’s earlier period of parliamentary democracy (1950–1957), and the subsequent Guided Democracy regime (1957–65). While it still has another dozen years to pass the record set by Suharto’s New Order, Indonesian democracy has proved that it has staying power.

What few would question, though, is that the quality of Indonesia’s democracy was a problem from the beginning—and that under President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) democratic quality has begun to slide dramatically.

Earlier this year, the Economist Intelligence Unit gave Indonesia its largest downgrading in its Democracy Index since scoring began in 2006. With a score of 6.39 out of a possible maximum of 10, the country is now bumping down toward the bottom of the index’s category of “flawed democracies”, on the verge—if it sinks just a little lower—of crossing into the category of “hybrid regime”. This downgrading of Indonesia’s position follows similar drops for the country in other democracy indices like the Freedom in the World surveycompiled by Freedom House.

Indonesia’s trajectory is not bucking the global trend. Around the world, democracy is in retreat. Freedom House says democracy is facing “its most serious crisis in decades”, with 71 countries experiencing declines in political rights and civil liberties in 2017 and only 35 registering gains, making 2017 the twelfth year in a row showing global democratic recession.

Unlike during an earlier era of military coups, today the primary source of democratic backsliding is elected politicians. Leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán undermine the rule of law, manipulate institutions for their own political advantage, and restrict the space for democratic opposition. Elected despotism is, increasingly, the order of the day. Indeed, as I argue here, the primary threat to Indonesia’s democratic system today comes not from actors outside the arena of formal politics, like the military or Islamic extremists, but the politicians that Indonesians themselves have chosen.

Eroding democracy, in democracy’s name

Over recent years, successive central governments have introduced restrictions on democratic rights and freedoms in Indonesia. This process began during the second term of the Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono presidency, which began in 2009, but has accelerated significantly since the election of Jokowi in 2014.

The immediate backdrop to some of the most regressive moves has been the contest between Jokowi and his Islamist and other detractors, especially in the wake of the mobilisations against the Chinese Christian governor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (Ahok).

In July 2017, Jokowi issued a new regulation, subsequently approved by the national legislature, that granted the authorities sweeping powers to outlaw social organisations that they deemed a threat to the national ideology of Pancasila. The new law actually built on an earlier, somewhat less harmful version issued during the Yudhoyono presidency. The government quickly took advantage of the law to outlaw Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia, a large Islamist organisation that, while openly rejecting pluralism and democracy, has also pursued its goals non-violently.

At the same time, several critics of President Jokowi have been arrested on charges of makar, or rebellion (though it appears the authorities may not be proceeding with these cases). The government has coercively intervened in the internal affairs of Indonesia’s political parties so as to attain a majority in parliament. A prominent media mogul supportive of anti-Jokowi political causes was slapped with what appeared to many to be politically-motivated criminal investigations. Foreign NGOs and funding agencies face an increasingly restrictive operating climate.

Meanwhile, the military has been brought back into governance, at least at the lowest levels of the state, with the government reinstituting the Suharto-era of babinsa—junior officers assigned to villages—and promoting military involvement in non-security related functions as fertiliser distribution.

A related source of decline in the quality of Indonesia’s democracy, meanwhile, is intolerant attitudes toward religious and other social minorities, alongside narrowing public space for critical discussion of religious topics, and the growing ascendancy of religious conservatism in social and political life.

A few years ago, religious minorities such as Shia Muslims and members of the Ahmadiyah sect were the most frequent target of violent attack and restrictions; recently, the country has been gripped by an anti-LGBT panic. It is possible that Indonesia will soon criminalise homosexuality. At a time when many third-wave democracies, notably those in Latin America, are becoming more respectful of the rights of homosexuals and other sexual minorities, Indonesia is moving in the opposite direction.

While none of these government measures has in itself been a knockout blow against freedom of expression and association, taken together they constitute a significant erosion of democratic space. As the global democracy indices recognise, it already makes no sense to speak of Indonesia as being a full, or liberal, democracy. These developments point toward, at best, Indonesia’s becoming an increasingly illiberal democracy, where electoral contestation continues as a foundation of the polity, but coexists with significant restrictions on political and religious freedoms, and where the rights of at least some minority groups are not protected.

Defying the odds

But the picture is not unremittingly gloomy. Indonesia has a long way to go before it sinks to the level of Russia or even Turkey, and it is worth pausing to contextualise the recent trends in the context of the achievements of Indonesian democracy over the last 20 years.

Many of these gains remain firmly established. Democratic electoral competition has become an essential part of Indonesia’s political architecture. Apart from sporadic calls to do away with direct elections of regional heads (pilkada), no mainstream political force calls openly for electoral mechanisms to be replaced with a rival organising principle. Even when the authoritarian populist Prabowo Subianto ran for the presidency in 2014, he had to disguise his anti-democratic impulses with talk of returning to Indonesia’s original 1945 Constitution—i.e. the version of the constitution that the Suharto regime had relied upon, but which seems attractive to many Indonesians because it resonates with Indonesia’s nationalist history.

Public opinion surveys demonstrate continuing strong support both for democracy as an ideal, and for the democratic system actually practised in Indonesia. Moreover, Indonesia still has a relatively robust civil society and independent media, at least in the major cities. Political debate on most topics remains lively. For example, it is generally easy for critics of President Jokowi to express their views loudly and directly—not something that can be done in most of Indonesia’s ASEAN neighbours. Indeed, some of the recent attempts to curtail free speech has been prompted by concerns about the ease with which so-called “fake news”, conspiracy theories and wild rumours circulate through social media.

Moreover, it is worth emphasising that many of the very people who pose the greatest threat to Indonesian democracy—its elites—have in fact bought into the new system. Elites throughout the country have benefited from the new opportunities for social mobility and material accumulation they have been able to secure through elections and decentralisation.

A recent survey of members of provincial parliaments, conducted by Lembaga Survei Indonesia (LSI) in cooperation with the Australian National University, shows that while Indonesia’s regional political elites are certainly illiberal on many issues, they are strongly supportive of electoral democracy as a system of government. Indeed, on many questions their views are markedly moredemocratic than the general population.

For example, when asked to judge on a 10-point scale whether democracy was a suitable system of government for Indonesia, the average score provided by these parliamentarians was 8.14—not far from the maximum score of 10 for “absolutely suitable”, and a full point higher than the 7.14 given by respondents in LSI’s most recent general population survey in which the same question was asked. Likewise, these legislators were considerably less likely to support military rule or rule by a strong leader than were the population at large.

These responses are significant, because democracy is not simply a system favouring protection of civil liberties and ensuring accountability of officials to the public (areas where Indonesia has, to spin it positively, a mixed record). It is also a means of ensuring regular and open competition between rival political elites.

Viewed in this light—as a means of regulating elite circulation—Indonesian democracy looks more robust. Though elite buy-in does not preclude continuing erosion of civil liberties at the centre, or guarantee protection of unpopular minorities, it does pose a considerable obstacle to the return of a command-system of centralised authority such as that which ruled Indonesia under the New Order.

A consolidated low-quality democracy?

It is in no small part due to this elite support for the status quo—in part begrudging and contingent, but nevertheless real—that Indonesian democracy has proven resilient to potential spoilers. This resilience is in itself an important achievement: there is a body of scholarly literature that suggests that once a country has experienced democratic rule for a lengthy period—one scholar, Milan Svolik, puts the figure at 17–20 years—it is very unlikely to regress toward outright authoritarianism.

Moreover, Indonesia’s present backsliding—as with the wider global trend—can arguably be viewed in part as a retreat that comes after a democratic high water mark is reached. If the last century is any guide, democratic progress and regression come in worldwide waves: the third wave of democratisation which began in the 1970s was preceded by two earlier waves that came in the wake of World War I and World War II. In both periods, many of the newly democratic regimes that were established in the wake of the breakup of multinational and colonial empires did not last long. But in each case, these retreats were superseded by new waves of democratisation.

Obviously, we need to be cautious when thinking about future trends. We are in the midst of a new world-historic transition and we do not know whether we are merely at the start of the worldwide retreat of democracy, or already near the turning of the authoritarian tide.

Most worryingly, some of the ingredients giving rise to democratic weakening in the current period are new, and do not yet show signs of abating. Strikingly, for the first time in decades, there are signs of weakness in advanced democracies—both in terms of declining popular support for democracy as measured in some opinion polls, and in the election of would-be autocrats such as Donald Trump. Wealth inequality in many countries is reaching levels not seen since the dawn of the age of mass democracy a century ago, with the result that the growing political dominance of oligarchs—a major focus of academic analysis in Indonesia—is a worldwide trend. Meanwhile, new communication technologies of the internet and social media are opening up participation in political debate, but also driving a polarisation that undermines a shared public sphere and delegitimises opponents.

The forces conspiring to undermine democracy globally, the resulting unsupportive international climate for Indonesia’s democratic revival, plus the growing signs of democratic decline in the country itself, should make us cautious about celebrating the twentieth anniversary of reformasi with a tone of triumph.

Nevertheless, it is worth viewing contemporary predicaments from the perspective of those of us who watched Suharto resign 20 years ago. Back then, as we watched Suharto read out his speech, my friends and I mixed astonishment, excitement and relief with genuine anxiety about what was in store for Indonesia. Many expert commentators were very sceptical of the notion that Indonesia could become a successful democracy. Some urged caution, pointing to the acrimony that had dogged Indonesia’s earlier democratic experiment in the 1950s, and highlighting the under-development of civilian politics and the continuing influence of the armed forces.

Indonesian democracy exceeded most expectations back then. It might just do so again.

[opedguy]

GOP Opposes Biden’s Infrastructure Plan

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), April 5, 2021.--President Joe Biden, 78, has the GOP exactly where he wants them, it total submission to Democrat policies now pushing for a $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan only weeks after Democrat passed the $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill.  Spending money like a drunken sailor is precisely what the public wants, handing Biden 73% approval ratings for his handling to the Covid-19 crisis.  Whether Republicans admit it or not, they’re a minority party, with the majority of voters going Democratic.  Biden’s overall approval rating is a whopping 53,8%, almost 20% above Trump’s average in the days leading up to the election.  Biden has a strong wind at his back to pass his $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan, even if it doesn’t come with one Republican vote.  Former Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) vowed to fight Biden’s plan but the plain truth is he can’t stop Democrats from going to a simple majority.     

        Biden’s big election win over former President Donald Trump [306-232] in the Electoral College and over 5 million more popular votes giving him the mandate to pass whatever he wants.  As long as the economy continues what now looks like a V-shaped post Covid-19 recovery, Biden will continue to maintain high approval ratings but, more importantly, keep the GOP from winning back a House of Senate majority.  As it stands right now, there’s zero evidence that Republicans will have momentum to resume control of the House and Senate in 2022.  If the economy continues to recover, Democrats, if anything, will continue to pad their majorities in both Houses.  “They know we need it,” Biden said with respect to his $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan, that he claims could create 19 million middle class jobs.  With Trump out of the picture, the GOP finds itself politically deflated.       

       Biden said while he’ll considers GOP objections, he said that infrastructure spending is being done all over the world.  “Everybody around the world is investing in billions and billions of dollars in infrastructure, and we’re going to do it here,” Biden said.  Republicans have no real way to resist Biden’s $2.3 trillion plan, unless the stock market sells off and the economy starts heading south.  All indications point to expanding equity markets and a V-shaped economic recovery.  Only geopolitical events could derail the current economic juggernaut that looks to continue improving.  If Russian President Vladimir Putin invades eastern Ukraine, then markets could sell off.  Other than that, the economy looks to regain the momentum it had before the pandemic, something that looks like it heading in the rear view mirror.  It’s ironic that Trump predicted a V-shaped recovery in 2021, the biggest year for growth ever.      

       As more American’s get vaccinated, it seems directly correlated with economic recovery.  Funny that during the 2020 campaign Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris told voters not to trust Trump’s rosy predictions on vaccines.  Biden and Harris not only told voters not to trust Trump’s vaccines, they told them they wouldn’t be ready until well into 2021.  Once Biden and Harris won the Nov. 3 election, Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna announced that the FDA has approved their vaccines, exactly on the same schedule Trump promised.  But more importantly, Trump correctly predicted that the vaccines would serve like “rocket fuel” to the struggling economy, making 2021 one of the biggest economic growth years in U.S. history.  So far, Trump’s forecasts have proved true, with Biden and Harris reaping the benefits. As long as the economy continues to hum along, GOP won’t derail Biden’s $2.3 infrastructure bill.     

        When it comes to domestic policy, there’s only good news on the horizon for Biden’s domestic programs.  When it comes to foreign policy, it’s the only thing now that can derail U.S. economic progress.  Since taking office, Biden has sent U.S.-Russian relations spiraling into Cold War lows.  No one believed during the post WW II Cold War period, that the U.S. and former Soviet Union would get into a shooting war.  With Biden calling Putin a “soulless killer” March 16, the prospects for a shooting war, most likely in eastern Ukraine, have dramatically increased.  Biden and his 58-year-old Secretary of State Tony Blinken have pushed relations with Russia and China to the brink. Blinken accused China of “genocide” against the Muslim Uyghurs in Western China’s Xinjaing province, something not supported by facts.  While China mistreats the Uyghurs, there’s no genocide taking place.       

      Republicans led by McConnell  and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) don’t have a prayer to stop Biden from pushing for the lion’s share of $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan.  McConnell and Blunt simply don’t have the political capital or votes needed to stop Biden from advancing his plan.  Biden vowed to “push as hard as I can” to pass his plan that has popular support.  Unlike Trump, when you have the media behind you and approval ratings at 53.8%, there’s little real resistance ahead.  Republicans simply don’t have the votes or popular opposition to Biden’s infrastructure plan.  Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has already set in motion the steps needed to pass Biden’s plan with a simple majority.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) estimates a House vote by July 4.  Republicans are kidding themselves that the can stop Biden from passing his plan.

 About the Author 

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging the Bullet and Operation Charisma.  Reply  Reply All  Forward

[keywestlou]

THE WORM TURNS / THE BOSTON TEA PARTY

I always considered the worm turning a less than tasteful phrase.  Till I learned its actual meaning.

The short phrase is derived from a 1546 proverb. The actual line: “Even a worm will turn.” Its meaning surprising. A person pushed too far will retaliate.

That is why the Boston Tea Party is part of the title. The colonists were pushed too far by the Crown’s abusive taxing and dumped the tea into the sea.

I take the phrase and tea dumping to introduce Federal District Court Judge Lynn Adelman of the Eastern District of Wisconsin.

Judge Adelman has had it with the conservative Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. He is striking out. He has written an article for the prestigious Harvard Law Review which will be published soon. The article condemns the Robert Court’s assault on democracy.

Judge Adelman’s observations include the Supreme Court privileges the wealthy and corporate interests at the expense of the public. He states the Court has greatly contributed to income inequality, health care inequality, and the hollowing out of the American middle class.

Judge Adelman wrote, “We are in a new and arguably dangerous phase in American history. Democracy is inherently fragile…..We desperately need public officials who will work to revitalize our democratic republic. Unfortunately, the conservative justices on the Roberts Court are not among them.”

Lower court federal judges do not criticize the Chief Justice or the members of the Supreme Court themselves in such a public fashion. Judge Adelman’s words reflect the boiling cauldron that is tipping.

He is not the only one to recently so criticize. Associate Justice Sotomayor in a recent dissent was critical of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. She asserted they had their thumb on the scale in certain type decisions.

Trump continues to believe Putin is his good friend. There is a saying the blind cannot see. Trump is blind in this regard.

World oil problems reveal once again that Trump’s friendship with Putin is “bogus.”

Putin has initiated an oil war with Saudi Arabia. His intent was not to get at Saudi Arabia. Rather, to go through such a scenario in order to get at the United States. Putin’s goal is to drown U.S. shale oil companies that rely on higher prices in a sea of cheap crude.

The U.S. oil industry is fragile. Built on a mountain of debt. Putin wants to cripple the U.S. shale industry.

There is a reason. Up to 2018, Russia was the world’s largest oil provider. In 2018, the U.S. replaced Russia because of “debt ridden fracking growth” in the U.S.

Thank you again Donald for neither understanding nor knowing what is going on. Continue to think you are friends with the tyrants of the world. You a wanna-be one.

The wonders of Sweden’s socialism is bringing the nation down.

A Woman’s Day March was held yesterday in Malmo, Sweden. One of the marchers carried a sign: Sweden Must Die.

Sweden was the gem socialist state till about 15 years ago. Then Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East began arriving. Free everything!

The result scary.

It is predicted that “ethnic Swedes” will be a minority in their own country in 40 years. Maybe, sooner. Ten percent of babies born in Sweden today have Islamic names.

The Swedes and Muslims are in constant conflict. Violence and crime are on the upswing. Especially since a new migration in 2015. The level of conflict is described as “a small war.”

It is assumed it will only get worse with the passage of time.

Biden is on a roll! Yesterday’s Democratic primary proof. Biden won 4 of 6 states.

Sanders will have to pull out at some point. It does not appear he can be successful.

There is a debate sunday between the 2. Then more primaries tuesday. Let the debate and tuesday primaries go forward. If Sanders still looks bad, he should withdraw and support Biden.

Understandably tough for him to do. He fought the good battle 4 year ago and is fighting it again. Problem is he is not going to make it. Such is life. The goal of all Democrats should be to defeat Trump and save America!

Some coronavirus observations re Italy.

The entire nation is under lockdown. The government’s message: Everyone stays home. The message was received. They are staying  home.

Rome and Milan are “ghost towns.” No one on the streets.

Pope Francis has interjected himself.  He has directed his priests to “get out” and comfort the sick. Makes sense. Francis said, “My priests have the courage to get out…..go to the sick to bring them the comfort of God.”

Francis is correct. From the time of Jesus, priests have made it one of their primary responsibilities to help the sick. Even where the sickness was leprosy.

Italians can be dramatic. I know. I am of of Italian ancestry. My mother was born in Italy. I make the observation because some in Italy are asking the question as to whether the coronavirus is the beginning of the apocalypse.

During the Civil War, Lincoln’s General-in-Chief of all Union armies was General George B. McClellan. Donald Trump in uniform. A more inept general did not exist.

Lincoln picked up on McClellan’s ineptness quickly. Fired him this day in 1862. Actually demoted him to Commander of the Army of the Potomac. McClellan did no better.

He saw the handwriting on the wall. Resigned.

Thought he was smarter than Lincoln. Knew everything. He ran against Lincoln for President in the Election of 1864. Lincoln buried him.

I wrote a term paper on The Presidential Election of 1864 while in college. McClellan and Trump had many similar traits. I would describe them as birds of a feather.

Trump and Nero had similar traits, also.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned. The U.S. and the world are in the midst of a deadly virus. How to defeat it the most important issue facing everyone. Including Trump.

Not all the time, however. Yesterday morning instead of tweeting re coronavirus, Trump tweeted charging Obama with all sorts of wrongdoing and called out for support in getting the wall built.

An idea. Trump moved monies from the military budget and other budgets to build the wall. Now big time dollars are required to deal with the cornavirus epidemic. Trump should borrow the unused “borrowed monies” for the wall and use them to deal with the coronavirus crisis.

Washington State hit the hardest from the virus. It is projected that if things continue as they are, Washington will have 64,000 coronavirus cases by May.

May Johnson’s love life?

There is now an “Everest.” Second time in 2 weeks she has mentioned him. In today’s diary she wrote that “she fixed a letter to Everest.”

Enjoy your day!

    THE WORM TURNS / THE BOSTON TEA PARTY was originally published on Key West Lou

[bigyack-com]

The Decade's Most Memorable Events In 10 Minutes

2010-2019: A Decade In Review - Highlights of events from around the world between 2010 and 2019New Delhi: While most of us have been busy on our phones, a decade has gone by. How significant has it been? Well, the manner in which the way of life has changed this decade has been the most significant in over a century. The way we live, work, eat, travel, and entertain has changed almost entirely - and our smartphones are what is leading the way. From getting a cab to ordering groceries, banking to making reservations, everything became just-a-click-away in the last ten years. But while we might have been busy in the virtual world, tapping away on our screens, a lot has happened in the real world too, and even out in space.Here is a comprehensive list of the decade's most memorable events for you to journey through, in nostalgia, thinking about the better moments fondly, learning from the mistakes made, celebrating the achievements, and remembering all those who won't journey on with us to the next decade.2010: The Year In Review Apple founder Steve Jobs unveils the world's first iPad; Instagram is launched; WhatsApp comes to India; Uber and Ola make debut; Netflix starts expanding its streaming service to the international market; WikiLeaks is founded by Julian Assange; Burj Khalifa becomes the tallest building in the world; Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcanic eruptions cause enormous disruption to air travel; Scientists in a South African cave discover 2-million-year-old fossils of a new species called Australopithecus Sediba, which are potentially the ancestors to Humans. India's BrahMos missile, jointly developed with Russia, sets the world record for becoming the world's first and fastest supersonic cruise missile; Arab Spring protests spread across the middle-east and north Africa; Pakistan is devastated by massive floods resulting in one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the country's history as 20 million are affected, 14 million left homeless; Ireland and Greece face a grave economic crisis; BP oil spill, also known as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico becomes the largest maritime oil spill in history; 16-year-old Justin Bieber becomes the youngest solo male to hit #1 on the album chart since 13-year-old Stevie Wonder in 1963; Australia elects its first female prime minister; Indian-American Ajay Banga takes over as CEO of Mastercard; Dozens of asylum seekers drown as the boat they were in crashed into rocks near Christmas IslandThose who left us in 2010: Jyoti Basu 5-time chief minister, and arguably West Bengal's tallest leader after India's independence.2011: The Year In Review Operation Geronimo: Osama Bin Laden is killed; India wins the cricket world cup; Scientists discover Kepler-22b - An extrasolar planet orbiting within the Goldilocks zone or habitable zone of the Sun-like star Kepler-22. The planet is nearly 2.5 times the size of Earth and has a 290-day year; Formula One comes to India - Indian Grand Prix held at the Buddh International Circuit in Noida; Anna Hazare's Lokpal movement leads anti-corruption drive, protests; Royal Wedding: Prince William, Duke of Cambridge and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge marry; Dominique Strauss-Kahn is arrested for assault in the US; Japan is hit be a massive earthquake and tsunami, which leads to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in the country; News of the World shuts down; Occupy Wall Street protests surge; SpaceX announces plan for the world's first fully reusable rocket; Swiss tennis ace Roger Federer becomes the second most respected, admired and trusted individual in the world after Nelson Mandela.Those who left us in 2011: Apple founder Steve Jobs; Elizabeth Taylor, one of Hollywood's most iconic actresses dies at 79; Grammy Award winner Amy Winehouse2012: The Year In Review Nirbhaya gang rape in Delhi; The rise of Arvind Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi Party; Pakistani terrorist Ajmal Kasab, who was one of the terrorists in the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks hanged; Scientists discover the existence of the Higgs boson or God particle; NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft becomes the first human-made object to leave the solar system and venture into interstellar space; Facebook goes public, launches IPO; Barack Obama re-elected as US President; Vladimir Putin is re-elected as Russia's President; Elon Musk first mentions the concept for a "fifth mode of transport", calling it Hyperloop; Hurricane Sandy causes widespread disaster in the US; Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting leaves 27 dead in US; Red Bull Stratos: Millions watched LIVE as Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner jumps from the edge of space (128,100 feet) wearing a spacesuit - Records set: Balloon altitude record and sound barrier broken.Those who left us in 2012: Nirbhaya dies two weeks after the attack; American singer Whitney Houston dies at 48; Neil Armstrong, US Astronaut and first person to walk on the Moon, dies at 822013: The Year In Review Sachin Tendulkar retires from all forms of cricket; Commander Abhilash Tomy of the Indian Navy becomes the first Indian to complete a solo, non-stop circumnavigation of the world under sail; Massive floods across north India leaves nearly 6,000 dead, becoming India's worst natural disaster since the 2004 tsunami; Kedarnath flood: Large-scale destruction in surrounding areas, but Kedarnath temple unaffected; Video shows massive Chelyabinsk meteor entering Earth's atmosphere over Russia; Scientists study the air trapped in the Antarctic ice and find that 2013 is the first time in 800,000 years that we have over 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere; Boston Marathon Bombing: 2 homemade pressure cooker bombs detonated 14 seconds and 210 yards apart leave more than 264 injured; Black Lives Matter movement gains momentum; Coup overthrows Egyptian government; Malala Yousafzai survives assassination attempt; Xi Jinping is elected as the President of China; Edward Snowden exposes US's NSA surveillance program; Bitcoin demand surges; Jeff Bezos buys Washington Post; Twitter goes public, launches IPO; Alibaba goes public, launches IPO.Those who left us in 2013: Former South African President and global icon Nelson Mandela dies; The Fast and the Furious star Paul Walker tragically dies in a high-speed car accident; 'Lawrence of Arabia' star Peter O'Toole dies at 812014: The Year In Review "Modi Wave" across the country; Narendra Modi is elected Prime Minister of India, forms a majority government after the World's largest ever elections held till now; MH370 disappears: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 mysteriously disappearance mid-flight; India becomes the first nation to successfully reach Mars in the first attempt; ISIS takes Mosul, expansion of ISIS gains momentum; The Ice Bucket Challenge goes viral on social media, to promote awareness about ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis); Sydney hostage crisis: A gunman with an ISIS flag takes dozens of people hostage at a Lindt Cafe in Sydney; ISIS offshoot Boko Haram spreads across north Africa, especially Nigeria; Boko Haram kidnaps 276 girls from a college in Nigeria's Chibok; Over a hundred missing even today, many feared dead; India safely brings back 46 nurses from ISIS captivity in Iraq; Mount Everest Avalanche: Ice avalanche kills 16 climbing sherpas, injures 9 others; Satya Nadella takes over as Microsoft CEO; Shashi Tharoor's wife Sunanda Pushkar found dead in her hotel room in Delhi; Annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation; Rosetta's Philae lander becomes the first space probe to soft land on a comet (Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko); Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) shot down by a surface-to-air missile over Ukraine; North Korea hacks Sony Pictures.Those who left us in 2014: Robin Williams commits suicide; American poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou dies; Lauren Bacall, one of Hollywood's iconic actresses dies at 89; American comedian and actress Joan Rivers dies2015: The Year In Review Nepal is devastated by a massive 7.8 earthquake - nearly 9,000 dead, 22,000 injured, 3.5 million people homeless; Himalayan earthquake leads to avalanche on Mount Everest, killing at least 22 people, making it the deadliest avalanche to hit the world's highest peak; Operation Raahat: Indian Armed Forces and the Ministry of External Affairs evacuate more than 5,600 people, including 960 foreign nationals from Yemen during the 2015 military intervention by Saudi Arabia and its allies; Wing Commander Pooja Thakur of the Indian Air Force becomes the first female officer to lead the Guard of Honour at Rashtrapati Bhavan during the visit of then US President Barack Obama; Sheena Bora murder case: Indrani and Peter Mukerjea arrested; Volkswagen emission scandal - findings cover 482,000 cars in the US alone; US legalises same-sex marriage; Greece plunges into severe debt, pressuring EU; Dramatic visuals of the TransAsia Airways Flight 235 crash in Taiwan shocks the world; 'Je suis Charlie': Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack in France condemned globally; India initiates the International Solar Alliance in major step towards green energy, 121 other countries join; Sundar Pichai takes over as Google CEO.Those who left us in 2015: Renowned scientist, teacher and former President of India APJ Abdul Kalam dies at 83; Grammy-winning blues legend BB King dies at 89; Leonard Nimoy, Spock from Star Trek, dies at 832016: The Year In Review Demonetisation in India; India carries out surgical strikes on terror launch pads across the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir; Indian national Kulbhushan Jadhav abducted from Iran, held captive by Pakistan; Mother Teresa canonised posthumously as 'Saint Teresa of Calcutta' by Pope Francis at a ceremony in St Peter's Square in Vatican City; Brexit Vote: Britain votes to leave the EU - The British Exit is termed Brexit; 'Obama Out': President Obama drops mic on stage as a symbol of the end of his presidency; Donald Trump is elected as US President; Amazon Prime Video launches worldwide; The historic Paris Climate Agreement in signed to take effective measures against Climate Change; Scientists invent the Crispr-Cas9, a unique technology that enables medical researchers to edit and delete DNA, thereby allowing effective genetic engineering; Florida nightclub shooting: Omar Mateen kills 49 people and wounds 53 at a gay nightclub in Orlando; Dhaka Cafe Attack: 5 terrorists take dozens hostage at the Holey Artisan cafe in Dhaka, kill 22 civilians, 2 cops; Scientists and researchers successfully detect the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory or LIGO - The existence of gravitational waves was first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916; Pokemon Go, an augmented reality mobile game, got millions of people out on the street; Leonardo DiCaprio wins Oscar for The Revenant; Brangelina divorce: Angeline Jolie files for divorce from Brad Pitt.Those who left us in 2016: Tamil icon and former chief minister Jayalalithaa dies at 68; American singer-songwriter Prince dies at 57; English singer-songwriter George Michael found dead in his bed in his home in England; Singer-songwriter David Bowie dies at 69; Alan Rickman, who played Hogwarts professor Severus Snape in Harry Potter dies at 69; Legendary boxer Muhammad Ali dies at 74; Cuban communist revolutionary Fidel Castro dies at 902017: The Year In Review One nation, one tax - India adopts GST, biggest reform since opening of the economy; Kulbhushan Jadhav sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court - India, denied consular access on multiple occasions, takes Pakistan to UN court ICJ; India's ISRO set the world record  for the largest number of satellites ever launched successfully on a single rocket - 104 satellites; The India-China border standoff at Doklam lasts 73 days; SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket becomes the world's first reusable rocket to successfully complete a mission; Phase 1 of the Iran-India Chabahar Port opens; Indian priest Father Tom Uzhunnalil rescued from ISIS captivity in Yemen, returns safely to India; London's Grenfell Tower fire: 72 people die, 70 others critical in one of Britain's worst fires; Texas church shooting - 26 people killed in mass shooting by Devin Patrick Kelley in Sutherland Springs in US; Las Vegas Strip shooting: Stephen Paddock opens fire on a crowd of concert-goers, killing 58 people and wounding 413; Charlottesville white supremacy march gathers momentum; Australia legalises same-sex marriage; #MeToo movement spreads across the world; Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse cases - Dozens of women reveal they were raped, assaulted and sexually abused by Weinstein over a 30 year period; Oscars faux pas: La La Land was given the Best Picture award, only to be take away and given to Moonlight, causing a massive embarrassment at the Oscars;Those who left us in 2017: Legendary comedian Don Rickles dies at 90; Playboy founder Hugh Hefner dies at 91; Rock 'n' roll music pioneer Chuck Berry dies at 90; Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington commits suicide; American musician Tom Petty dies at 492018: The Year In Review Tesla Motors' sports car orbits Earth with astronaut at the wheel; India decriminalises section 377 - consensual homosexual sex between adults; India and Oman sign agreement under which India gets access to the facilities at Duqm for the Indian Air Force and the Indian Navy; India completes nuclear triad (Air, land and sea, undersea ballistic missile capability): Completion of the nuclear triad with the first successful deterrence patrol by INS Arihant; Kerala devastated by floods: Nearly 500 dead, 140 missing, over 2 lakh people homeless; India brings back the mortal remains of 39 Indians killed by ISIS in Iraq's Mosul; Air India makes history, becomes first and only airline in the world to fly to Israel over Saudi airspace; India's 'Statue of Unity' becomes the tallest statue in the world; Roger Federer becomes the first male tennis player to win 20 grand slams; The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal; Royal Wedding: Britain's Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex marry; Indra Nooyi steps down as CEO of PepsiCo Inc after 12 years in office; California wildfires in the US; Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court Brett Kavanaugh faces sexual assault allegations; US-China trade war begins; Saudi author and columnist Jamal Khashoggi who fled in 2017, killed in Turkey; Tham Luang cave rescue: The miraculous cave rescue in Thailand - 12 boys of a football team, aged 11 to 16, and their 25-year-old assistant coach enter a cave which gets flooded. The rescue ops take 18 days; US House of Representatives passes bill and allocates funds to build the US-Mexico border wall.Those who left us in 2018: Former Prime Minister of India Atal Bihari Vajpayee dies at 93; Tamil icon and former chief minister Karunanidhi dies at 94; Bollywood actress Sridevi dies at 54; Legendary American comic book writer Stan Lee, creator of Spider-Man, Iron Man, Hulk, and many more, dies at 95; Celebrity chef and author Anthony Bourdain commits suicide at 61; Swedish DJ and electronic artist Avicii (real name: Tim Bergling) commits suicide at 28; Former US President George HW Bush dies at 94; Former US Senator John McCain dies at 82.2019: The Year In Review World celebrates the 150th year of Mahatma Gandhi's birth; Narendra Modi is re-elected Prime Minister of India, forms a 2nd majority government after the World's largest ever elections till now; Supreme Court of India delivers its verdict on the Ayodhya land dispute case, settling one of the longest disputes globally; India sends its second lunar exploration mission, Chandrayaan-2; India-American Abhijit Banerjee wins the Nobel Prize in the field of Economic Sciences; Balakot airstrikes: India carries out pre-emptive airstrikes on a JeM terror training facility in Pakistan's Balakot; Parliament of India declares the practice of Triple Talaq illegal and unconstitutional; Kulbhushan Jadhav case: International Court of Justice rules in favour of India - 16-judge UN court bench ruled 15-1 in favour of India, stops Kulbhushan Jadhav's execution, tells Islamabad to give consular access; India revokes the "temporary" Article 370 from its Constitution; Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh become union territories; India successfully tests anti-satellite or ASAT weapon under the mission code-named Mission Shakti, becomes a space power; Sundar Pichai takes over as CEO of Alphabet - Google's parent company; Notre-Dame de Paris fire: Massive fire at the Notre-Dame Cathedral in France; Flight Lieutenant Bhawana Kanth become India's first woman air force pilot to qualify to undertake combat missions on a fighter jet; Sub-Lieutenant Shivangi of the Indian Navy becomes its first woman pilot; Pakistan-based terrorist Masood Azhar designated a global terrorist by the UN Security Council; Donald Trump becomes the first sitting US President to set foot in North Korea; Operation Kayla Mueller: ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi killed by the US military; India's fastest train - Train 18, also known as Vande Bharat Express, flagged off by PM Modi; India announces plan to launch its own space station; missions to Mars, Venus, and Sun; Sri Lanka Easter bombings: 259 people killed, over 500 injured after 3 churches and 3 luxury hotels are targeted in a series of coordinated terrorist suicide bombings; New Zealand's Christchurch mosque shootings: Gunman kills 51 people, injures 49, live-streams the attack on Facebook; American financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein commits suicide; Walmart shooting: El Paso, Texas - A gunman shot and killed 22 people and injured 24 others; Families of illegal migrants separated at the US-Mexico border - Children separated from parents; Hong Kong Protests: Anti-China protests rock Hong Kong; First black hole image captured on camera, viewed by 2 billion people worldwide; Climate activist Greta Thunberg makes powerful speech at the UN Climate Change summit; Students across the world protest demanding climate action; Anti-CAA, Anti-NRC Protests: Protests across India over the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens; Donald Trump Impeached, becomes the 3rd US President to be impeached in the House of Representatives after .Those who left us in 2019: Former Defence Minister and Chief Minister of Goa Manohar Parrikar dies at 63; Former chief minister of Delhi Sheila Dikshit dies at 81; Former Foreign Minister and senior BJP leader Sushma Swaraj dies at 67; Former Finance Minister and senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley dies at 66; Renowned lawyer Ram Jethmalani dies at 95.   Read the full article

[libertariantaoist]

The headline in the Washington Post said it all: “Trump  ends covert CIA program to arm anti-Assad rebels in Syria, a move sought by  Moscow.” The madness that has infected what passes for journalism today  could not be more starkly dramatized: everything is seen through the distorting  lens of Russophobia. It doesn’t matter that that the program had failed to achieve  its ostensible goal, and that the US-vetted rebels had for the most part defected  to al-Qaeda,  al-Nusra,  and ISIS.  Atrocities committed  by the “moderate” rebels go unmentioned. That real experts on the region  like Joshua  Landis hailed the move as a step toward a peaceful settlement is ignored.  The only thing that matters is that, as one unnamed “current official” cited  in the article puts it, “Putin won in Syria.”

From this perspective, the Syrian people are merely pawns in a geopolitical  game between Washington and Moscow. Elsewhere in the piece, the authors – Washington  Post reporters Greg Jaffe and Adam Entous – bemoan the fact that the US has  somehow “lost” Syria. Under the cover of citing anonymous former White House  officials, they write:

“Even those who were skeptical about the program’s long-term value, viewed  it as a key bargaining chip that could be used to wring concessions from Moscow  in negotiations over Syria’s future.

“’People began thinking about ending the program, but it was not something  you’d do for free,’ said a former White House official. ‘To give [the program]  away without getting anything in return would be foolish.’”

The Syrian people are mere “bargaining chips” as far as the movers and shakers  of the American empire are concerned: they have no reality outside the cold  calculations of power politics, the maneuvers of our know-it-all political class,  who think they are qualified to run the world.

This is the same mentality that led us into the disastrous invasion of Iraq,  and the equally tragic and bloody intervention in Libya, both of which resulted  in chaos and the triumph of terrorism. In both cases we destroyed a secular  authoritarian regime and paved the way for the growth of radical Islamist factions,  enabling the spread of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and similar terrorist formations. And  for what?

When the history of this era is written, the motivations of US policymakers  under both President Obama and President George W. Bush will be called into  question: why did they destroy the Middle East? Was it simply an error of judgment,  or was something more sinister involved? Did they deliberately upend these societies,  actively aiding Islamist barbarians, much as the late Roman emperors invited  the Teutonic barbarians into the empire as mercenaries – who eventually turned  on them and sacked Rome?

The rebel forces, both those “vetted” by the CIA and freelancers like al-Nusra,  al-Qaeda, and ISIS, all have a program in common: the establishment of an Islamic  state in the whole of Syria, which will be ruled according to the medieval strictures  of Sharia law. Christians, Alawites, Kurds, and other minorities will be either  subjugated, or driven out: genocide is a likely outcome of a rebel victory.  Under these circumstances, any support to these elements is criminal – so why  did we undertake this project to begin with?

The reason is simple: our Sunni Arab “allies,” Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states,  have enormous influence in US ruling circles, and they utilized it to forge  a bipartisan pro-Islamist coalition consisting of Hillary Clinton, John Kerry,  and the liberal imperialists over at the Center for a New American Century,  and the John McCain-Lindsey Graham wing of the GOP. Obama reluctantly went along  with what was an aid-to-terrorists program, while putting some limits on it  and ultimately balking at full-scale US intervention in Syria when the public  rose up against it.

The framing of this issue in terms of whether it helps Russia signals a strategic  shift for the War Party: during the Bush years, the alleged enemy was al-Qaeda  and associated terrorist groups, but under the Obama administration we saw the  beginning of a new turn, away from fighting radical Islamism and toward a policy  of accommodating and even allying with it, starting with the so-called Arab  Spring. With the Obama foreign policy in the region largely farmed out to then  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, this culminated in the Libyan intervention  and the arming of Islamist groups in Syria. Simultaneously, Mrs. Clinton started  denouncing Putin as the modern-day equivalent of Hitler, and the foreign policy  mandarins in Washington began to characterize “Putinism,” rather than radical  Islamism, as the principal enemy of the United States.

Sen. McCain, one of the loudest advocates of arming the Islamist rebels and  overthrowing Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad, was quite explicit recently about  this radical reorientation of the War Party’s strategic vision: Russia, he  declared in a visit to Australia, is the "premier and most important  threat, more so than ISIS.” Clinton supporter and leading neoconservative Max  Boot, a former CIA analyst, said the same thing during his recent lambasting  by Tucker Carlson: asked why Russia is supposed to be a threat, he answered  because “they have nuclear weapons.” Well, so do many countries, including China,  Pakistan, Israel, and France. Why single out Russia for special opprobrium?

I answered that question here,  at least in part, and won’t reiterate what I wrote back then. Suffice to say  that what the War Party requires is a credible enemy, one with some size, a  history of conflict with the US, and preferably a nuclear capability. Russia  qualifies on all three counts, and Putin in particular has aroused the ire of  the political class by criticizing Washington’s pretensions of global hegemony.  And of course there’s the sheer political opportunism of the Democrats: rather  than admit that Mrs. Clinton lost fair and square, because she was a terrible  candidate, they’re claiming Putin “stole” the election on Trump’s behalf. Add  to this the influence – and wealth – of exiled Russian oligarchs, and the stage  is set for an anti-Russian crusade, the likes of which we haven’t seen since  the 1950s.

Despite the relentless propaganda campaign waged in the media, the Trump administration  has – finally! – been able to keep at least one of the promises made during  the campaign: that “regime change” was no longer going to be an American goal  in Syria. And with the ceasefire in southern Syria, and probably more to come  along those lines, it looks like we are cooperating with Russia in an effort  to bring peace to the region – this despite the hate campaign being waged against  both Trump and the Russians here at home.

Progress is slow, inconsistent, and subject to sudden setbacks – but it’s happening  all the same. And that is good news indeed.

[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/politics/ap-fact-check-trumps-untruths-on-russia-probe-wall-jobs/

AP FACT CHECK: Trump's untruths on Russia probe, wall, jobs

President Donald Trump is glossing over the facts when it comes to the Russia investigation and his economic performance.

The president suggests the 34 charges issued or guilty pleas achieved by special counsel Robert Mueller have had little to do with him. But Trump’s ignoring reality. Most significantly, his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, has implicated Trump in a crime by linking him to a hush-money scheme. Cohen also pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his efforts during the 2016 campaign to line up a Trump Tower Moscow project, saying he did so to align with Trump’s “political messaging.”

On the economy, Trump claimed record low unemployment for blacks, Hispanics and Asian-Americans even as the numbers have risen after the partial government shutdown. And he described the steel industry as “totally revived” despite 20,000 job losses over the past decade.

A look at his past week’s claims, also covering global warming and purported progress in building a border wall:

RUSSIA INVESTIGATION

TRUMP: “Of the 34 people, many of them were bloggers from Moscow or they were people that had nothing to do with me, had nothing to do with what they’re talking about or there were people that got caught telling a fib or telling a lie. I think it’s a terrible thing that’s happened to this country, because this investigation is a witch hunt.” — interview with CBS, broadcast Sunday.

THE FACTS: Trump’s correct that Mueller’s team has indicted or gotten guilty pleas from 34 people. He’s wrong to suggest that none had anything to do with him or were simply “bloggers from Moscow.” Among these people are six Trump associates and 25 Russians accused of interfering in the 2016 election.

In particular, Cohen definitely was in trouble for what he did for Trump. Cohen pleaded guilty in August to several criminal charges and stated that Trump directed him to arrange payments of hush money to porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal to fend off damage to Trump’s White House bid. Prosecutors’ court filings in December backed up Cohen’s claims.

The Justice Department says the hush money payments were unreported campaign contributions meant to influence the outcome of the election. That assertion makes the payments subject to campaign finance laws, which restrict how much people can donate to a campaign and bar corporations from making direct contributions.

It is true that many of Trump’s former associates, including Cohen, were charged with either lying to the FBI or Congress.

The 25 Russians charged were not simply “bloggers.”

According to Mueller’s indictment last February, 13 Russians and three Russian entities are accused of attempting to help Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton by running a hidden social media trolling campaign and seeking to mobilize Trump supporters at rallies while posing as American political activists. The indictment says the surreptitious campaign was organized by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm financed by companies controlled by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a wealthy businessman with ties to President Vladimir Putin.

Mueller’s team also charged 12 Russian military intelligence officers in July with hacking into the Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic Party and releasing tens of thousands of private communications. The charges say the Russian defendants, using a persona known as Guccifer 2.0, in August 2016 contacted a person in touch with the Trump campaign to offer help. And they say that on the same day that Trump, in a speech, urged Russia to find Clinton’s missing emails, Russian hackers tried for the first time to break into email accounts used by her personal office.

———

TRUMP: “You look at General Flynn where the FBI said he wasn’t lying, but Robert Mueller said he was, and they took a man and destroyed his life.” — interview with CBS.

THE FACTS: That’s not what the FBI said. And Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, has agreed that he lied to the FBI, having pleaded guilty to it.

The idea that Flynn didn’t lie to the FBI picked up steam after Republicans on the House intelligence committee issued a report last year. It said ex-FBI director James Comey, in a private briefing, told lawmakers that agents who interviewed Flynn “discerned no physical indications of deception” and saw “nothing that indicated to them that he knew he was lying to them.” But Comey called that description “garble” in a private interview with House lawmakers in December.

Comey, in essence, said Flynn was a good liar, having a “natural conversation” with agents, “answered fully their questions, didn’t avoid. That notwithstanding, they concluded he was lying.”

At his sentencing hearing in December, Flynn acknowledged to Judge Emmet Sullivan that he knew it was a crime when he lied to the FBI in January 2017. Flynn declined to accept the judge’s offer to withdraw his guilty plea. Neither he nor his lawyers disputed that he had lied to agents.

———

UNEMPLOYMENT

TRUMP: “You saw the jobs report just came out. …The African-Americans have the best employment numbers in the history of our country. Hispanic Americans have the best employment numbers in the history of our country. Asian-Americans the best in the history of our country.” — CBS interview.

THE FACTS: Black unemployment is not currently the lowest ever, possibly in part to the partial government shutdown, which lifted joblessness last month.

Black unemployment did reach a low, 5.9 percent, in May. But that figure is volatile on a monthly basis. That rate has since increased to 6.8 percent in January.

Hispanic and Asian-American joblessness has also risen off record lows last year. Hispanic unemployment last month was 4.9 percent, up from a low of 4.4 percent reached in October and December. Asian-American unemployment was at 3.1 percent, up from 2.2 percent in May.

Moreover, there are multiple signs that the racial wealth gap is now worsening. The most dramatic drop in black unemployment came under President Barack Obama, when it fell from a recession high of 16.8 percent in March 2010 to 7.8 percent in January 2017.

———

THE WALL

TRUMP: “The chant now should be ‘finish the wall’ as opposed to ‘Build the Wall’ because we’re building a lot of wall. I started this six months ago — we really started going to town — because I could see we were going nowhere with the Democrats.” — comments Friday.

TRUMP: “Large sections of WALL have already been built with much more either under construction or ready to go. Renovation of existing WALLS is also a very big part of the plan to finally, after many decades, properly Secure Our Border. The Wall is getting done one way or the other!” — tweet Thursday.

THE FACTS: Despite all his talk of progress, he’s added no extra miles of barrier to the border to date. Construction is to start this month on a levee wall system in the Rio Grande Valley that will add 14 miles of barrier, the first lengthening in his presidency. That will be paid for as part of $1.4 billion approved by Congress last year.

Most work under contracts awarded by the Trump administration has been for replacement of existing barrier.

When Trump says large parts of the wall “have already been built,” he’s not acknowledging that previous administrations built those sections. Barriers currently extend for 654 miles (1,052 kilometers), or about one-third of the border. That construction was mostly done from 2006 to 2009.

———

STEEL INDUSTRY

TRUMP: “Tariffs on the ‘dumping’ of Steel in the United States have totally revived our Steel Industry. New and expanded plants are happening all over the U.S. We have not only saved this important industry, but created many jobs. Also, billions paid to our treasury. A BIG WIN FOR U.S.” — tweet Jan. 28.

THE FACTS: He’s exaggerating the recovery of the steel industry, particularly when it comes to jobs.

In December, the steel industry employed 141,600 people, the Labor Department says in its latest data. Last March, when Trump said he would impose the tariffs, it was 139,400. That’s a gain of just 2,200 jobs during a period when the overall economy added nearly 2 million jobs. On a percentage basis, steel industry jobs grew 1.6 percent, barely higher than the 1.3 percent increase in all jobs.

Yet those figures still lag behind where they were before the 2008-2009 recession. When that downturn began, there were nearly 162,000 steelworkers.

Some companies have said they will add or expand plants. It’s difficult to know just how many jobs will be added by newly planned mills. But construction spending on factories has yet to take off significantly after having been in decline between 2016 and much of 2018. Construction spending on factories has been flat in the past year, according to the Census Bureau.

Trump’s reference to “billions paid to our treasury” concerns money raised from tariffs on foreign steel and other products. Such tariffs are generally paid by U.S. importers, not foreign countries or companies, and the costs are often passed on to consumers. So that money going to the government is mostly coming from Americans.

———

VOTER FRAUD

TRUMP: “58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote. These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. All over the country, especially in California, voter fraud is rampant. Must be stopped. Strong voter ID!” — tweet Jan. 27.

THE FACTS: That “iceberg” quickly began to melt as officials found serious problems with a report from the Texas secretary of state’s office on voter fraud. More broadly, Trump is overstating the magnitude of such fraud across the U.S.

The Texas report suggested as many as 95,000 non-U.S. citizens may be on the state’s voter rolls and as many as 58,000 may have cast a ballot at least once since 1996. Since it came out, however, state elections officials have been notifying county election chiefs of problems with the findings. Local officials told The Associated Press that they received calls from Texas Secretary of State David Whitley’s office indicating that some citizens had been wrongly included in the original data.

So far no one on the lists has been confirmed as a noncitizen voter. Election officials in Texas’ largest county say about 18,000 voters in the Houston area were wrongfully flagged as potentially ineligible to vote and those officials expect more such mistakes to be found on their list.

Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Trump ally, acknowledged problems in the report, saying “many of these individuals may have been naturalized before registering and voting, which makes their conduct perfectly legal.”

Early claims by other states of possible illegal voting on a rampant scale haven’t held up.

When Florida began searching for noncitizens in 2012, for instance, state officials initially found 180,000 people suspected of being ineligible to vote when comparing databases of registered voters and driver’s licenses. Florida officials later assembled a purge list of more than 2,600 names but that, too, was beset by inaccuracies. Eventually, a revised list of 198 names of possible noncitizens was produced through the use of a federal database.

In the U.S. overall, the actual number of fraud cases has been very small, and the type that voter IDs are designed to prevent — voter impersonation at the ballot box — is almost nonexistent. In court cases that have invalidated some ID laws as having discriminatory effects, election officials could barely cite a case in which a person was charged with in-person voting fraud.

———

JUDGES

TRUMP: “After all that I have done for the Military, our great Veterans, Judges (99), Justices (2) … does anybody really think I won’t build the WALL?” — tweet Jan. 27.

THE FACTS: He’s boasting here about his record of getting federal judges and justices on the bench. But that record is not extraordinary. He also misstates the total number of judges who have been confirmed by the Senate — it’s 85, not 99.

While Trump did successfully nominate two justices to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, during his first two years in office, four other modern presidents did the same — Democrats Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy, and Republican Richard Nixon. Trump, meanwhile, is surpassed in the number of confirmed justices by Warren Harding (four), William Taft (five), Abraham Lincoln (three) and George Washington (six), according to Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and expert on judicial appointments.

Trump’s 85 total judicial appointees lag behind five former presidents at comparable points in office.

The five are George W. Bush, 99; Clinton, 128; Ronald Reagan, 88; Nixon, 91; and Kennedy, 111, according to Wheeler’s analysis.

———

CLIMATE CHANGE

TRUMP: “In the beautiful Midwest, wind chill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded. In coming days, expected to get even colder. People can’t last outside even for minutes. What the hell is going on with Global Waming? Please come back fast, we need you!” — tweet Jan. 28.

THE FACTS: Global warming does not need to make a comeback because it hasn’t gone away. Extreme cold spells in parts of the globe do not signal a retreat.

Earth is considerably warmer than it was 30 years ago and especially 100 years ago. The lower 48 states make up only 1.6 percent of the globe, so what’s happening there at any particular time is not a yardstick of the planet’s climate. Even so, despite the brutal cold in the Midwest and East, five Western states are warmer than normal.

“This is simply an extreme weather event and not representative of global scale temperature trends,” said Northern Illinois University climate scientist Victor Gensini. “The exact opposite is happening in Australia,” which has been broiling with triple-digit heat that is setting records.

Trump’s own administration released a scientific report last year saying that while human-caused climate change will reduce cold weather deaths “in 49 large cities in the United States, changes in extreme hot and extreme cold temperatures are projected to result in more than 9,000 additional premature deaths per year” by the end of this century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at recent rates.

Trump routinely conflates weather and climate. Weather is like mood, which is fleeting. Climate is like personality, which is long term.

———

Associated Press writers Christopher Rugaber, Jill Colvin, Colleen Long and Seth Borenstein in Washington, Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Paul J. Weber in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report.

———

Find AP Fact Checks at http://apne.ws/2kbx8bd

Follow @APFactCheck on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APFactCheck

EDITOR’S NOTE _ A look at the veracity of claims by political figures

[garancefranke-ruta]

Trump won this Kansas district by 27 percent. Tonight a Republican won it by single digits.

Republican Ron Estes, Democrat James Thompson and Libertarian Chris Rockhold (Photos: Bo Rader/Wichita Eagle via AP, Travis Heying/The Wichita Eagle via AP)

A ruby-red Republican district in Kansas where Donald Trump trounced Hillary Clinton just five months ago stayed in GOP hands Tuesday night even as Democrats dramatically closed the margin in the state — an outcome sure to send shivers through Republicans facing reelection in 2018 in less favorable districts.

With more than 99 percent of the votes counted, state Treasurer Ron Estes was declared the winner of the first congressional election since Donald Trump won the White House, taking more than 53 percent of the vote. The special election in Kansas’ Fourth Congressional District had pitted Estes against civil rights attorney and army veteran James Thompson for the seat vacated by Mike Pompeo, now Trump’s CIA director. Libertarian Chris Rockhold also ran.

Thompson won more than 45 percent of the vote — a percentage more than 15 points higher than that garnered by the Democrat who ran in the district last November.

Kansas is not a swing state in presidential elections, and the last time a Democrat won its Fourth Congressional District was 1992. This past fall, Pompeo bested his Democratic rival by 31 percentage points, and Trump won the district by a 27 percent margin of victory.

Thompson’s under-the-radar campaign in the district proved to have surprising momentum, thanks to disillusionment in the state with the policies of GOP Gov. Sam Brownback and Thompson’s own authentic-seeming message of helping the working class.

His ability to close the margin forced national Republicans to pitch in to bolster Estes over the final weeks of the race in what should have been an easy Republican seat to hold.

“Mr. Estes did not beat us. It took a president of the United States, a vice president, the speaker of the House, a senator coming into our state, and a bunch of lies to try to drum up the vote,” Thompson said after his loss.

Kansas has been going through a wrenching political period after a Republican experiment with massive tax cuts led to budgetary shortfalls, which are projected to reach more than $1 billion by the middle of 2019. That has transformed the normal political conversation in the state and led even Republican legislators to back tax increases in an effort to fix the state revenue gap, though their efforts have yet to succeed. The trouble with taxes led Kansas Democrats and GOP moderates to make significant gains in the state Legislature last fall, at the same time Trump was elected, though both remain in GOP hands.

This more moderate Kansas state Legislature voted to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act shortly after the failure of Trump’s Obamacare repeal efforts last month. GOP Gov. Sam Brownback vetoed the expansion, and the GOP-controlled Kansas House narrowly upheld his veto.

The Estes campaign itself did not generate particular enthusiasm and came in for some light mockery over an ad featuring him in chest-high waders in a literal swamp, promising to drain the metaphorical one in Washington. His ads have focused more on reining in Washington excesses, while Thompson’s have focused on biography and the struggle to get out of poverty and to live as a member of the working class in Kansas.

National Republicans piled in to the race to save the seat after internal polling showed the margin of the contest as too close for comfort. “I am personally reaching out to you today to help strengthen our House majority by electing Ron Estes in Kansas’ Fourth Congressional District,” House Speaker Paul Ryan wrote in an email appeal. “As a friend of Ron’s and as House Speaker, I can tell you that this is one of the most important House races in the country.”

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, stumped for Estes on Monday in Wichita, urging voters to take nine others to the polls with them and warning, “Our enemy right now is complacency.” Cruz, a former 2016 presidential candidate, beat Trump in the Kansas Republican presidential primary caucus last year.

Vice President Mike Pence recorded a robocall over the weekend. So did President Trump, speaking out on a one-minute, five-second robocall that went out to tens of thousands of likely GOP voters Monday.

“I have something big to tell you. … On Tuesday, Republican Ron Estes needs your vote and needs it badly,” Trump said in the recording.

“Ron is a conservative leader who’s going to work with me to make America great again. We’re going to do things really great for our country. Our country needs help. Ron is going to be helping us, big league. … This is an important election.”

On Tuesday, he followed up with a tweet:

Ron Estes is running TODAY for Congress in the Great State of Kansas. A wonderful guy, I need his help on Healthcare & Tax Cuts (Reform).

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2017

Though Trump is polling at roughly 40 percent nationally, his support remains strong in solidly Republican areas as well as among party members.

“People here still like Trump,” Thompson told the Washington Post. “It’s not been a referendum on him. It’s a referendum on the failed Republican leadership in the state. People don’t want these policies taken to the national level.”

That hasn’t stopped Thompson from allying himself with the anti-Trump resistance in no uncertain terms, tweeting out the hashtag #resistance in thanks to the local anti-Trump Indivisible group that has been organizing on his behalf.

Thompson’s message has focused on working-class families, veterans, the Constitution and the need for a political change.

An earlier, much less high-powered Trump team effort to buoy a candidate in the state fell flat in February, when White House-backed Alan Cobb failed to make it out of the GOP special election primary. Sam Clovis, the one-time Trump campaign co-chair, had sent a letter supporting Cobb to the 126 state party delegates that would pick a candidate, and Trump social media guru Dan Scavino tweeted on his behalf. Cobb also had strong ties to the Kochs, as the former Kansas director of Americans for Prosperity and a one-time lobbyist for Koch Industries.

In the end, Estes’ long tenure in the district and history of winning office statewide made the difference.

Early voter turnout was low but had a disproportionately high share of Democrats, given the district’s historic GOP tilt, and help lift Thompson on election day.

Thompson raised a quarter of a million dollars in the final days of the race, much of it in small-dollar donations via liberal fundraising sites.

On Monday, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which had been staying away from the contest, entered the race to do last-minute live calls to 25,000 households.

Read more from Yahoo News:

Trump declares that North Korea is ‘looking for trouble’ as tensions rise

Haley warns Putin on Assad: ‘We’re not going to have you cover for this regime any more’

Why did Trump decide to attack Syria? Just turn on your TV

Trump said Obama needed war authority from Congress. Will he ask for it now?

Photos: Ten most endangered rivers in the United States for 2017

[sunrec]

On February 27, 1933 the German Parliament building burned, Adolf Hitler rejoiced, and the Nazi era began. Hitler, who had just been named head of a government that was legally formed after the democratic elections of the previous November, seized the opportunity to change the system. “There will be no mercy now,” he exulted. “Anyone standing in our way will be cut down.”

The next day, at Hitler’s advice and urging, the German president issued a decree “for the protection of the people and the state.” It deprived all German citizens of basic rights such as freedom of expression and assembly and made them subject to “preventative detention” by the police. A week later, the Nazi party, having claimed that the fire was the beginning of a major terror campaign by the Left, won a decisive victory in parliamentary elections. Nazi paramilitaries and the police then began to arrest political enemies and place them in concentration camps. Shortly thereafter, the new parliament passed an “enabling act” that allowed Hitler to rule by decree.    

After 1933, the Nazi regime made use of a supposed threat of terrorism against Germans from an imaginary international Jewish conspiracy. After five years of repressing Jews, in 1938 the German state began to deport them. On October 27 of that year, the German police arrested about 17,000 Jews from Poland and deported them across the Polish border. A young man named Herschel Grynszpan, sent to Paris by his parents, received a desperate postcard from his sister after his family was forced across the Polish border.  He bought a gun, went to the German embassy, and shot a German diplomat. He called this an act of revenge for the suffering of his family and his people. Nazi propagandists presented it as evidence of an international Jewish conspiracy preparing a terror campaign against the entire German people. Josef Goebbels used it as the pretext to organize the events we remember as Kristallnacht, a massive national pogrom of Jews that left hundreds dead.

The Reichstag fire shows how quickly a modern republic can be transformed into an authoritarian regime. There is nothing new, to be sure, in the politics of exception. The American Founding Fathers knew that the democracy they were creating was vulnerable to an aspiring tyrant who might seize upon some dramatic event as grounds for the suspension of our rights. As James Madison nicely put it, tyranny arises “on some favorable emergency.” What changed with the Reichstag fire was the use of terrorism as a catalyst for regime change. To this day, we do not know who set the Reichstag fire: the lone anarchist executed by the Nazis or, as new scholarship by Benjamin Hett suggests, the Nazis themselves. What we do know is that it created the occasion for a leader to eliminate all opposition.

In 1989, two centuries after our Constitution was promulgated, the man who is now our president wrote that “civil liberties end when an attack on our safety begins.” For much of the Western world, that was a moment when both security and liberty seemed to be expanding. 1989 was a year of liberation, as communist regimes came to an end in eastern Europe and new democracies were established. Yet that wave of democratization has since fallen under the glimmering shadow of the burning Reichstag. The aspiring tyrants of today have not forgotten the lesson of 1933: that acts of terror—real or fake, provoked or accidental—can provide the occasion to deal a death blow to democracy.

The most consequential example is Russia, so admired by Donald Trump. When Vlaimir V. Putin was appointed prime minister in August 1999, the former KGB officer had an approval rating of 2 percent. Then, a month later, the bombs began to explode in apartment buildings in Moscow and several other Russian cities, killing hundreds of citizens and causing widespread fear. There were numerous indications that this was a campaign organized by the KGB’s heir, now known as the FSB. Some of its officers were caught red-handed (and then released) by their peers. A Russian parliamentarian announced one of the “terror” attacks several days before the bomb actually exploded.

Putin blamed Muslim terrorists and began the war in Chechnya that made him popular. He thereafter exploited more terrorist attacks to consolidate his rule: three years later, Russian security forces ended up gassing to death Russian civilians in a botched response to an attack at a Moscow theater. Putin used the negative press coverage as a justification for seizing control of television. In 2004, after the Beslan massacre, in which terrorists occupied a school and killed a large number of parents and children during a violent confrontation with Russian forces, Putin abolished the position of elected regional governors. And so the current Russian regime was built.

Once an authoritarian regime is established, the threat of terrorism can be used to deepen repression, or indeed to promote it abroad. In 2013 and 2014 the Russian media spread hysterical reports about a non-existent Ukrainian terrorist threat as the Russian army prepared and then fought a war in Ukraine. In 2015, Russia hacked into a French television channel, pretended to be ISIS, and broadcast messages apparently intended to frighten the French population into voting for the National Front, the far-right party financially supported by Russia (and whose leader, Marine Le Pen, is expected to reach the second round of the French presidential elections to be held this April and May). In 2016, the Russian media and Russian diplomats engaged in a large-scale disinformation campaign in Germany, spreading a false tale about refugees raping a girl of Russian origin—again with the likely aim of helping the German far right.

The use of real or imagined terrorist threats to create or consolidate authoritarian regimes has become increasingly frequent worldwide. In Syria, Russia’s client Bashar al-Assad used the presence of ISIS to portray any opposition to his regime as “terrorists.” Our president has admired the methods of rule of both Assad and Putin.  In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has used the July 2016 coup attempt—which he has called “terrorism supported by the West”—to justify the arrest of tens of thousands of judges, teachers, university professors, and to call for a referendum this spring that could give him sweeping new powers over the parliament and the judiciary.

It is aspiring tyrants who say that “civil liberties end when an attack on our safety begins.” Conversely, leaders who wish to preserve the rule of law find other ways to speak about real terrorist threats, and certainly do not invent them or deliberately make them worse.

In this respect, the Bush administration’s reaction to the September 11, 2001 attacks was not as awful as it might have been. To be sure, 9/11 was used to justify the vast expansion of NSA spying and the torture of foreign detainees. It also became the specious pretext for an ill-considered invasion of Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of people, spread terrorism throughout the Middle East, and ended the American century. But at least the Bush administration did not claim that Muslims as a whole were responsible, nor try to change the basic rules of the political game in the United States. Had it done so, and succeeded, we might already today be living in a post-democratic country.

If we know the history of terror manipulation, we can recognize the danger signs, and be prepared to react. It is already worrying that the president speaks unfavorably of democracy, while admiring foreign manipulators of terror. It is also of concern that the administration speaks of terrorist attacks that never took place, whether in Bowling Green or Sweden, while banning citizens from seven countries that have never been tied to any attack in the United States.

It is alarming that in a series of catastrophic executive policy decisions—the president’s Muslim travel ban, his selection of Steve Bannon as his main political adviser, his short-lived appointment of Michael Flynn as national security adviser, his proposal to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem—there seems to be a single common element: the stigmatization and provocation of Muslims. In rhetoric and action, the Trump administration has aggrandized “radical Islamic terror” thus making what Madison called a “favorable emergency” more likely.

It is the government’s job to promote both freedom and safety. If we face again a terrorist attack—or what seems to be a terrorist attack, or what the government calls a terrorist attack—we must hold the Trump administration responsible for our security. In that moment of fear and grief, when the pulse of politics might suddenly change, we must also be ready to mobilize for our constitutional rights. The Reichstag fire has long been an example for tyrants; it should today be a warning for citizens. It was the burning of the Reichstag that disabused Hannah Arendt of the “opinion that one can simply be a bystander.” Best to learn that now, rather than waiting for the flames.

[marcjampole]

Every other democracy in world history would already have dumped Trump

Looking at the video streams and photos of the marches around the country against the Trump Administration was like sex. There are only three kinds, good, better and best. 

Seriously, I had many favorite photos of the marchers, but my absolute top favorite was of the D.C. police wearing pink caps loaned to them for the purpose taking the photo. It’s not the 19th century anymore. For the most part, police in major cities are educated professionals with working wives. They want Trump as little as the marchers do. 

The truth of the matter is, no one wants Trump except that gerrymandered minority who for this brief instant in history control Republican primaries and the Electoral College. And a good chunk of that minority are orange-dog Republicans. The Republican Party doesn’t want him. The military doesn’t want him. The CIA doesn’t want him. The news media don’t want him. A majority of the people in the country voted against him and think him incompetent for the job. No country in the world save Russia wants him. Correction, China doesn’t really want him but knows that it will be the big winner if he manages to put his program through.

But no one is willing to even consider changing governments at this point. Except, that is, for a contingency supporting Trump, for whom violent regime change is a fondest dream.

In no other democracy in the history of humankind would the Trump government still be standing. Every other democracy has either been weak or a parliamentary system which produces multiple parties. In either case, the kind of protest we saw the day after the inaugural ceremonies would have toppled the government. In any parliamentary system, the marches would force the government to resign, something that Paul Krugman pointed out in the New York Times. In Turkey, the military might have taken over and immediately handed power to Hillary Clinton or Paul Ryan. Moreover, no other democracy has had an Electoral College to serve as an intermediary between voters and election results.  In every other democracy, the candidate receiving 2.8 million more votes would have been declared the winner.

We may talk about Putin, Comey, voter suppression, the news media’s double standard and the GOP ending super delegates as proximate causes for the ascendancy of Donald Trump, but the structural causes are two: the Electoral College and the two-party system, two attributes of American government which are pretty much unique.

The problem with the Electoral College is the winner-take-all nature of the system, increasing the power of some states and the voters in those states. Winner-take-all is not in the constitution.  States made it a winner-take-all system only in the 1880’s. In other words, we don’t have to attempt the near impossible task of amending the constitution to address the basic problem with the Electoral College. All we have to do is amend state laws to mandate that their electors divide their vote according to the popular vote. Democrats have won the popular vote in four out of five of the last elections but have assumed the presidency twice only. My conclusion: Democrats and progressives should begin a major campaign to either pass a federal law using the 14th amendment as a pretext for mandating states divide electoral votes to reflect popular vote totals. We could also attempt to change state laws, but that’s a little tricky. We would have to focus first on red states, because if only blue states changed the law, Democrats could see their margin of loss in the Electoral College grow at the same rate as their margin of victory in the popular vote increases.

Imagine if we had more than two parties as national and legislative force. Imagine if we had three, four or more parties. In election cycles of the 21st century, the Democrats and Greens would have formed alliances to rule the government, which would have moved the Democrats to the left. The demands of the Libertarians would have forced the Republicans to ditch Trump for someone real. 

But let’s be realistic. We’re talking about the United States of America, the country founded on slavery and propelled by racism through its entire history. If we had multiple parties, they would without a doubt tend to break down along racial lines. And that could get ugly. 

So we accept all the cheating that went on to elect Trump and let him serve. Everyone conveniently forgets that Republicans fixed the voting rules in many swing states. We conveniently forget that James Comey and Vladimir Putin broke the rules. We forget that the news media created different rules for the two candidates. And we overlook the hundreds of rules that the winning candidate broke in his professional career. But once this seeming ruleless election ends, we all follow the rules that dictate that the winner of the Electoral College, no matter how unqualified and unpopular, has the right to dramatically make disastrous and illogical changes in the direction of the country.  The peaceful transfer of power matters more than the will of either the people or the ruling elite.

It’s what we in America like to call “stability.”

[scoutshonor56]

Kakistocracy

In “Trump: Think Like a Billionaire” (2004), Trump wrote that others “are surprised by how quickly I make big decisions, but I’ve learned to trust my instincts and not to over-think things.” He added, “The day I realized it can be smart to be shallow was, for me, a deep experience.”

 Well, there you have it folks, Donald Trump in a nutshell.  I distinctly remember that surreal morning of this past November 9, when I awoke to the knowledge that yes, it wasn’t all a horrible dream, this ass-clown is actually going to be elevated to the highest office in the land. This orange-haired bag of bluster and braggadocio was going to become my president.  A scene from “It’s a Wonderful Life” flashed through my head, when a shocked James Stewart first starts to come to grips with his new reality that includes he now lives in a sleazy, flashy town called Pottersville, and no longer Bedford Falls.  Feeling more than a little disorientated, he says to his angel, Clarence, “No, NO… I just got hold of some bad liquor or something…”

 Me? I thought I was experiencing a horrible, nightmarish acid flashback.  See Bob? Mom always said that all those hedonistic days of recreational drug use will catch up to you…

I apologize, as in a recent past blog I said that I was done writing about politics, and Donald Trump in particular; but as we approach his inauguration this Friday, and after observing his behavior over the last week or so, I simply can’t leave this unsaid.  As Popeye used to say, “I’ve had all I can stanz, and I can’t stanz no more!”  The Dude “will not abide.”  If you’ve never seen “The Big Lebowski”, well shame on you, and I’m not even going to explain that last one…

 Yes, after viewing the highlights of his recent press conference – on “The Daily Show” of course, the only context within which I can watch Donald Trump, as he’s best taken with a stiff shot of humor and truth – it’s become obvious that our worst fears are about to unfold.  For those who grasped at that last thin straw of hope that just maybe, once if office we would see a tempering of the man’s style… ah, nope; he’s going to conduct his time as president with the same ego-centric, blunt style that he campaigned with.  For him, the office of the presidency is just a bigger and better reality TV show.

 I thought I could shrug this one off, a four year joke; I’ll just keep my head down, disengage from any discourse or political news, and hopefully, at the least, he won’t set the house on fire and it will provide a hard lesson for America and the GOP party – just ignore him… But I now find that the closer we get to January 20th, the more physically ill I feel.  There is a dark and impending malaise hovering over not just my head, but over our nation.  Like Captain Kirk and the Enterprise, we are about to boldly go where our country has never gone before, led by a man who literally lives in his own reality.  A blustering, pathological liar lacking the least amount of dignity or decorum for the office and position he is about to represent.  A man who lives high above the streets of New York in a pimped-out golden palace that makes the term baroque blush.  Who loves himself so much, he once funneled $20,000 from his own Trump Foundation to pay for a 6ft. painting of himself.  That is, when he wasn’t siphoning off cash from this bogus charity organization – to which he hasn’t contributed a dime since 2008 - to help pay for his legal defense tabs.

 A thin-skinned asshole with the temperament, empathy, and depth of thought of a grade school bully, who over the last year has insulted and mocked (just to name a few) a decorated veteran and former POW (John McCain), a disabled reporter from the NY Times (Serge Kovaleski), the grief-stricken Muslim parents of an American veteran killed over in Iraq by a suicide bomber (Khizr and Ghazala Khan), and now, this past weekend, on the eve of Martin Luther King day no less, he disparages the character and civic patriotism of universally revered Georgia congressman John Lewis, responding to Lewis’s statement that he will be boycotting the inauguration and refuses to accept Trump’s legitimacy as a fairly elected president with the tweet  “All talk, talk, talk — no action or results…Sad!”

 The gall of this man.  The imperial-like hubris!  Let’s clear this one up with a single sentence: Back in the mid 60’s, while Trump was attending his well-heeled schools and busy getting five deferments from serving in Vietnam, John Lewis was putting himself on the front line here in America for civil rights, including the march in Selma, Alabama (known as “Bloody Sunday”) during which he was struck so violently by a state trooper wielding a billy club that his skull was fractured.

 Yeah – “all talk.”  Well, OK, in Trump’s defense, I doubt he even knows the story of John Lewis, and the fact that his latest tweet attack came days before MLK Day probably never even entered his tiny brain, which has severely limited time for facts, or reading, or anything else that doesn’t orbit around his own small universe of self-assured greatness.

 And like the worst of cowards, he picks his fights from afar, using his favorite mode of communication – due to his child-like attention span and stunted verbal prowess – Twitter, 140 characters at a time.  Here’s one for you Don: “YOU SUCK – SO SAD!”  He is offensive and abhorrent to all things civil and good, and his behavior as an example only stokes the fires of divisiveness, xenophobia, and hate. Since his election hate crimes have spiked dramatically, and white supremacist groups have made no secret of their glee over Trump’s victory.

 Returning to his press conference – his first in six months and now almost a misnomer in terms – that night Trevor Noah (on “The Daily Show”) did a zoom-in on a video still from this combative circus sideshow, focusing on the table next to the podium stacked with piles and piles of bloated, paper-stuffed manila folders, supposedly representing the hundreds of business dealings that Trump will now be divesting from and turning over to his sons.  Noah took the liberty to point out the obvious: wait a minute… every sheaf of paper looked brand new, crisp and sharp edged; and even more revealing, out of all those folders NOT ONE of them had any kind of label on them, anywhere.  No dates, no titles, nothing; as clean and untouched looking as the ones on the shelves of your local Office Depot.  Come on… Oh well, what’s a meeting with the press without props, you know?  Any good con man worth his salt knows that!

 To add to the ruse, during a pathetic and ego-stroking attempt to further make his point, Donny also bragged that he recently turned down a multi-billion dollar deal with Dubai(!) – even though of course, he assured us, he is more than capable of running both his business and the country.  As if he could treat global and national politics and diplomacy as a “second job”… Oh yeah, and those tax returns?  According to Don, nobody is interesting in seeing those but the false media and character-smearing reporters, fogettaboutit!

 I’ve got nothing – I’m positively gob-smacked.

 Then the most foreboding moment of all, his coup de grace: angrily and arrogantly refusing to take a question from Jim Acosta, a CNN reporter because "Your organization is terrible... you are fake news!”, before calling on a  reporter  from Breitbart, an unabashed, openly anti-women, anti-semetic, anti-progress, anti-immigrant, and anti-nonwhites news (propaganda) organization formerly run by his newly appointed chief strategist, Steve Bannon.

 Are you ready folks?  First step to a Fascist government?  Delegitimize the press; same result as suppression, just a little slicker – gives Donny sort of that famous, “Hey I’m not saying, I’m just repeating what I heard” buffer that he used so effectively during the primary run to discredit his opponents. Hey, this ain’t China now - I ain’t clamping down on the media - just characterizing it as false and unreliable. Yep, in DT’s world, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth comes only in 140 characters or less.  

 I remember when Stephen Colbert was on Comedy Central with his own show, during the reign of George W, and he came up with the humorous phrase “truthiness”. In other words, if it “felt” true in your gut, well, then it was true, or as good as true.  Trump has swallowed this concept and shit out a twisted, even more effective and simplistic version of this: if you don’t like a fact, simply deny it’s truth.  Earth is round?  No it’s not. 2+2=4?  No it doesn’t.  According to factcheck.org, Trump’s winning percentage of electoral votes - 56.9 percent - was well below the historical average, 70.9 percent.  Further, Trump’s share of electoral votes ranked 44th out of 54 elections going back to 1804.  His take on the election results? “A landslide.”  “One of the biggest Electoral College victories in history!”  

 Donald Trump has literally created a whole new category for the term “liar”.  He lies like most people pick their nose or fart; it’s simply become part of his vernacular.  He can’t even make the distinction anymore between truth and lies, nor does he care.  

 I could go on and on, in particular about his obtuse and bizarre cabinet picks so far - “Hey, Dr. Ben, wake up, you’re on!” - or his shady and questionable bro-mance with Putin, but I’m going to close with this salient point: During yet another contentious and embarrassing appearance on CNN the other day, Donny’s idiot former campaign manager and now senior advisor/spokesperson (go-to spin doctor), Kellyanne Conway, tried to assure us with the ridiculous plea to not judge her boss by “what comes out of his mouth”, but “what’s in his heart.”  Wow – first, what’s in his heart is memories of Russian hookers treating him to a golden shower, and second, NEWS FLASH YOU STUPID BIMBO: in life, what you say matters, it has meaning; and if you’re the president of the United States, what you say affects the lives of millions.

 * Oh yeah, as to my cryptic title: I borrowed it from Paul Krugman’s excellent piece in the NY Times yesterday (which I encourage reading), and yes, kakistocracy is actually a word, I looked it up!  According to the old Merriam-Webster, it means rule by the worst.

[xtruss]

A Reductionist Approach to the Forthcoming Biden-Putin Summit in Geneva

— Gilbert Doctorow | May 30, 2021

In the past several days, ever since a firm date and location were announced for a summit between the US and Russian presidents, 16 June in Geneva, American political scientists and journalists have been working overtime to fill newspaper columns and broadcast time with speculation on what should, what could be the agenda for such a meeting. As we all know, meetings of heads of state must be programmed in detail in advance to succeed.

We have heard, read that possible agenda items will include global hot spots such as Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Palestine as well as the management of the Covid pandemic and implementation of the Paris agreement on cutting greenhouse emissions, among others.

Indeed, the foregoing discussion points are “highly likely” to receive attention of the principals and of the task forces in their suites. We may even see some agreements reached on common positions when the leaders present their conclusions at the press conference following their talks. However, this type of discussion leapfrogs over the question which analysts should be asking first: why exactly has the Biden administration moved so quickly to schedule a face to face meeting with Vladimir Putin, whom the American president, as a leader of the Democratic Party, had vilified for the whole of the Trump years in office. Biden was one of those who insisted that the Russians had intervened in the 2016 presidential elections to do dirt on Hilary Clinton and help elect Donald. He believed the Russians were guilty of the Novichok poisoning of the Skripals in English Salisbury in 2018. In his programmatic policy article published by Foreign Affairs magazine at the start of the presidential race early in 2020, he detailed how the Russians had pursued malign policies in Syria and elsewhere.

Most recently, Biden was in line with fellow Democrats in condemning the Russian imprisonment of opposition activist Alexei Navalny. In short, the Democrats, and Biden at their helm, had made Russia into the great villain behind most every development domestically or internationally harmful to American interests. The culmination was Biden’s confirmation a little more than a month ago to a television reporter that Putin “is a killer.”

So why is Joe Biden pressing ahead with a meeting so early in his tenure in office? We are told that the objective is to achieve “greater stability” in bilateral relations. But I have not heard from our commentators what stability is to be addressed. In the brief essay which follows, I will attempt to fill that void. In doing so, I will ignore all the aforementioned agenda items, which I consider to be little more than a distraction to draw public attention away from the essence of the forthcoming meeting, from what is driving the American side since it is simply too embarrassing for hubristic American elites to swallow this truth.

In my reductionist approach, the summit has one driver behind it, namely to put a cap on an arms race that the United States is losing, if it has not already irrevocably lost, and to prevent the adverse shift in the strategic balance against America from getting still worse. The side benefit would be to strike down planned military expenditures budgeted for well over a trillion dollars to modernize the nuclear triad alone. This would thereby free funds for the massive infrastructure investments that Biden is presently trying to push through Congress.

In saying this, I am not guessing or engaging in wishful thinking. I am basing myself on facts that go back to March 2018. These facts are not being marshalled today by my peers, firstly because foreign policy commentators in the public domain tend not to have memories that go back more than a month or two, and secondly because the facts themselves were officially suppressed at the time and never appeared in the mainstream media. What publication there was occurred in the so-called alternative media, by the efforts of myself and a few other contrarians, as I will detail below.

The events I am alluding to relate to the dramatic disclosure of Russia’s latest cutting edge strategic weapons systems by Vladimir Putin in the last third of his lengthy address to Russia’s joint session of its bicameral legislature, what we commonly call his State of the Nation address. Putin described in detail the operational capabilities of new systems that were ready for release to the active military forces or were far advanced in the testing and production pipeline. These included hypersonic missiles flying at Mach 10 and more. He claimed that the new weapons systems marked the first time in history that Russia had moved ahead of the West in innovative, unparalleled performance of its arms, whereas in the Soviet past, from the end of the Second World War and advent of the nuclear age, they had always been playing catch-up. Moreover, he insisted that the new weapons systems signified the restoration of strategic parity with the United States.

Since the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM treaty in 2002 under George Bush, US policy had aimed at enabling a first strike knocking out Russian ICBMs and then rendering useless Russia’s residual nuclear forces which could be shot out of the air by U.S. anti-ballistic missile systems. Russia’s new, maneuverable and ultra-high speed missiles could evade all known ABMs. According to Putin’s text in March 2018, the new Russian strategic arms relegated the hundreds of billions that the Americans had invested in achieving superiority to the status of a modern day Maginot Line. Whatever Washington could throw at Russia, the residual Russian forces would penetrate American defenses and wreak havoc on the American homeland.

In the days following this “shock and awe” speech, the mainstream U.S. media reacted to Putin’s claims with incredulity. The notion that his relatively poor country could move ahead of the United States in strategic weapons, working from a budget 10 times less, seemed improbable to many. Moreover, skeptics pointed to the context of Putin’s speech, which was in effect his electoral platform for the presidential elections later in the same month. They argued that his grand show before parliament was for domestic consumption, to defend himself against Russia’s Liberals, who had made corruption and theft of state assets their battering ram and who argued, like Yabloko candidate Grigory Yavlinsky, that the country could never be a military match for the West given its low GDP and manufacturing industry.

However, in official Washington, and surely inside the Pentagon, there were those who did not let ubiquitous arrogance and supposed exceptionalism blind them to the facts Putin had produced. If his presentation were a bluff, it would put in jeopardy tens of millions of his compatriots and it was out of character for a leader who had always been restrained and consequential. Among those who were alarmed by Putin’s roll-out of the technical capabilities now possessed by the Russians were four U.S. Senators, three of them full-fledged Democrats and one Independent who otherwise ran as a Democrat when he sought the presidency. The two Senators I call particular attention to here were Dianne Feinstein of California and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the nominal Independent.

I mention Sanders, because he was one of the more visible Putin-bashers among the Democratic Party leadership when he ran for the presidency in party primaries. Feinstein is notable because at the time she was one of the longest serving members of the Senate Intelligence Committee where, from 2009 to 2015, she was the chair. Therefore, we may well assume that what Putin revealed at the start of March 2018 had not figured in the assessments of Russian military might by the whole U.S. intelligence establishment. This was an enormous intelligence failure, but it was not unique as regards U.S. understanding of Russia in those years. Time after time, the Americans had found themselves clueless about Russian demarches, including, for example, the Kremlin’s military intervention in the Syrian civil war in 2015, the establishment of its joint intelligence command with Baghdad, its receiving overflight rights of Iran and Iraq to carry on its mission in Syria. These “surprises” had come despite the presence of thousands of U.S. intelligence officers in Iraq.

In an open letter to then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson published on the Senate website of one of the four signatories, Senator Jeff Merkey (D- Oregon) these four Democratic Senators called upon him to immediately enter into arms control negotiations with the Russians, notwithstanding all of the differences with the Russians in so many other domains.

I quote from the opening paragraphs:

“We write to urge the State Department to convene the next U.S.-Russia Strategic Dialogue as soon as possible. A U.S.-Russia Strategic Dialogue is more urgent following President Putin’s public address on March 1st when he referred to several new nuclear weapons Russia is reportedly developing including a cruise missile and a nuclear underwater drone, which are not currently limited by the New START treaty, and would be destabilizing if deployed.”

Specifically, they proposed that the new Russian weapons systems be brought into the SALT treaty, which they urged him to extend. This would ensure strategic stability.

I quote from their closing paragraph:

“There is no guarantee that we can make progress with Russia on these issues. However, even at the height of Cold War tensions, the United States and the Soviet Union were able to engage on matters of strategic stability. Leaders from both countries believed, as we should today, that the incredible destructive force of nuclear weapons is reason enough to make any and all efforts to lessen the chance that they can never be used again.”

This letter by four U.S. Senators published on the Senate website of one was picked up by the agency RIA Novosti, RBK and Tass within hours of initial posting, from where it went into mainstream Russian news. However, mainstream U.S. and other Western media did not give a single line of coverage to it and it disappeared in days as if down a black hole.

However, all traces of nervousness in official Washington did not end there. Later in the month, following the victory of Vladimir Putin in the elections which took place on the 18th , The New York Times carried on page one a report of Donald Trump’s remarks about his phone call to congratulate his Russian counterpart:

“We had a very good call,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “We will probably be meeting in the not-to-distant future to discuss the arms race, which is getting out of control.”

Yet, even the words of a president led to nothing, and the issue of Russia’s possibly having achieved strategic parity with the United States and reinstated Mutually Assured Destruction was left without public discussion in Washington. The President called for and Congress reacted positively to raising the defense budget and in particular to funding a massively expensive modernization of the country’s nuclear weapons potential.

A year later, in his February 2019 State of the Nation address Vladimir Putin returned to the question of Russia’s new strategic arms and what they meant for bilateral relations with the United States. As he said explicitly now, the country’s new hypersonic weapon systems would enable Russia to reach targeted American cities within the same 10-12 minutes that the Americans would enjoy by lobbing their slower missiles at Moscow from perches in Poland and Romania. Still the United States did not react. America was very busy with its domestic political wars.

In 2020, Russia, the United States and the world at large were wholly absorbed in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. However, in 2021 the Kremlin has repeatedly called attention to those of its most advanced weapons that are now integrated into its armed forces and are fully operational. As Vladimir Putin remarked in an address to one professional organization a week ago that was covered extensively on state television’s evening news, the firings of its newest missiles have been followed closely by American intelligence. With more than a dollop of contempt for American pigheaded self-indulgence and denial of reality, Putin said that the Russians stood ready to share their telemetric recordings with the United States so that they could see better what they were now up against.

The caustic disdain for Russia’s ill-wishers implicit in that statement is fully symptomatic of the latest hard line that we see in Russian foreign policy ever since Biden assumed the presidency. Putin is not coddling Joe the way he did Donald. The Kremlin has no illusions about the Cold War mentality of its American and of its European adversaries, and it is responding in kind. This pertains to diplomatic expulsions, to economic and personal sanctions, to whatever slings and arrows come its way.

In recent weeks, we have seen how every affront to Russian national pride and to international diplomatic norms has been met by a Russian response that went one step further against “unfriendly states,” of which the United States is now listed officially.

In this highly charged atmosphere, we may assume that sober reports on Russian military capabilities have been fed to the President by senior Pentagon officials. While politicians have engaged in their blather, for many weeks these military men in the Joint Chiefs of Staff have been engaging their counterpart in the Russian military establishment, General Gerasimov, to keep the peace, avoid misunderstandings where U.S. and Russian forces act in close proximity and to maintain “stability.” It is a safe bet that their concerns are what is driving the agenda for the summit, and it is a safe bet that the Biden-Putin meeting will end in some agreement on procedures for negotiating a broader and deeper arms control treaty. Whatever else happens at the summit in Geneva will be cherries on the cake.

— Source: Gilbert Doctorow

[rockislandadultreads]

Biographies: noteworthy titles you need to read ASAP

One Life by Megan Rapinoe

Megan Rapinoe is one of the world's most talented athletes. But beyond her massive professional success on the soccer field, Rapinoe has become an icon and ally to millions, boldly speaking out on the issues that matter most. In recent years, she's become one of the faces of the equal pay movement and her tireless activism for LGBTQ rights has earned her global support. In One Life, Rapinoe embarks on a thoughtful and unapologetic discussion of social justice and politics. Raised in a conservative small town in northern California, the youngest of six, Rapinoe was four years old when she kicked her first soccer ball. Her parents encouraged her love for the game, but also urged her to volunteer at homeless shelters and food banks. Her passion for community engagement never wavered through high school or college, all the way up to 2016, when she took a knee during the national anthem in solidarity with former NFL player Colin Kaepernick, to protest racial injustice and police brutality - the first high-profile white athlete to do so. The backlash was immediate, but it couldn't compare to the overwhelming support. Rapinoe became a force of social change, both on and off the field. Using anecdotes from her own life and career, from suing the United States Soccer Federation alongside her teammates over gender discrimination to her widely publicized refusal to visit the White House, Rapinoe discusses the obligation we all have to speak up, and reveals the impact each of us can have on our communities. As she declared during the soccer team's victory parade in New York in 2019, "[T]his is everybody's responsibility, every single person here, every single person who is not here, every single person who doesn't want to be here, every single person who agrees and doesn't agree.... It takes everybody. This is my charge to everybody. Do what you can. Do what you have to do. Step outside yourself. Be more. Be better. Be bigger than you've ever been before."

Frontier Follies: Adventures in Marriage & Motherhood in the Middle of Nowhere by Ree Drummond

From her beginnings as an early blogger, Ree Drummond has become a household name with a passionate following of devoted fans. On her blog, in her magazine, and on her cooking show, Ree shares recipes, tales of her adventures in the country, and stories of everyday life with her four children and cowboy/rancher husband. In this down-to-earth and charming book, Ree shares real-life anecdotes about parenting from her own unique vantage point. While her busy life is constantly full of new surprises, what's most important to her is family. Over the years she's learned a few things about balancing motherhood with a million other things, and now she offers the wisdom of her experiences; the ups, the downs, the bumps in the road, the laughter and the tears; in stories brimming with the relatable wit and humor found in her cookbooks and her bestselling love story, The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels.

Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation by Candace Owens

Political activist and social media star Candace Owens explains all the reasons how the Democratic Party policies hurt, rather than help, the African American community, and why she and many others are turning right. What do you have to lose? This question, posed by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump to potential black voters, was mocked and dismissed by the mainstream media. But for Candace Owens and many others, it was a wake-up call. A staunch Democrat for all of her life, she began to question the left’s policies toward black Americans, and investigate the harm they inflict on the community. In Blackout, social media star and conservative commentator Owens addresses the many ways that liberal policies and ideals are actually harmful to African Americans and hinder their ability to rise above poverty, live independent and successful lives, and be an active part of the American Dream. Weaving in her personal story that brought her from the projects to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, she demonstrates how she overcame her setbacks and challenges despite the cultural expectation that she should embrace a victim mentality. Owens argues that government assistance is a double-edged sword, that the left dismisses the faith so important to the black community, that Democratic permissiveness toward abortion disproportionately affects the black babies, that the #MeToo movement hurts black men, and much more. Well-researched and intelligently argued, Blackout lays bare the myth that all black people should vote Democrat—and shows why turning to the right will leave them happier, more successful, and more self-sufficient.

Didn't See That Coming: Putting Life Back Together When Your World Falls Apart by Rachel Hollis

Fear. Grief. Loss. Betrayal. Rachel Hollis has felt all those things. Now, she takes you to the other side. I want you to know that what’s been good will always be good: the smell of coconut sunblock, a five year old showing you the spot where his front tooth used to be, a home-cooked meal, when your love kisses that exact spot on your neck, a grandmother’s handwriting, a job well done, the kindness of strangers, the human spirit, an Appaloosa horse, the ritual of your faith, laughing until you pee your pants a little, holiday dessert tables, first birthday parties, a perfect cup of coffee. What’s good will always be good, and one of the most awful, beautiful things about the hard seasons is that unless we experience hardship, we’ll never truly appreciate the goodness. Rachel Hollis sees you. As the millions who read her #1 New York Times bestsellers Girl, Wash Your Face and Girl, Stop Apologizing, attend her RISE conferences and follow her on social media know, she also wants to see you transform. When it comes to the “hard seasons” of life—the death of a loved one, divorce, loss of a job—transformation seems impossible when grief and uncertainty dominate your days. Especially when, as Didn’t See that Coming reveals, no one asks to have their future completely rearranged for them. But, as Rachel writes, it is up to you how you come through your pain—you can come through changed for the better, having learned and grown, or stuck in place where your identity becomes rooted in what hurt you. With her signature humor, heartfelt honesty and true-life stories, in Didn’t See that Coming Rachel Hollis shares how to embrace the difficult moments in life for the learning experiences they are, and that a life well-lived is one of purpose and focused on the essentials. This is a small book about big feelings, inspirational, aspirational, and an anchor that shows that darkness can co-exist with the beautiful.

A Promised Land by Barack Obama

A riveting, deeply personal account of history in the making—from the president who inspired us to believe in the power of democracy. In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency—a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil. Obama takes readers on a compelling journey from his earliest political aspirations to the pivotal Iowa caucus victory that demonstrated the power of grassroots activism to the watershed night of November 4, 2008, when he was elected 44th president of the United States, becoming the first African American to hold the nation’s highest office. Reflecting on the presidency, he offers a unique and thoughtful exploration of both the awesome reach and the limits of presidential power, as well as singular insights into the dynamics of U.S. partisan politics and international diplomacy. Obama brings readers inside the Oval Office and the White House Situation Room, and to Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, and points beyond. We are privy to his thoughts as he assembles his cabinet, wrestles with a global financial crisis, takes the measure of Vladimir Putin, overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds to secure passage of the Affordable Care Act, clashes with generals about U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, tackles Wall Street reform, responds to the devastating Deepwater Horizon blowout, and authorizes Operation Neptune’s Spear, which leads to the death of Osama bin Laden. A Promised Land is extraordinarily intimate and introspective—the story of one man’s bet with history, the faith of a community organizer tested on the world stage. Obama is candid about the balancing act of running for office as a Black American, bearing the expectations of a generation buoyed by messages of “hope and change,” and meeting the moral challenges of high-stakes decision-making. He is frank about the forces that opposed him at home and abroad, open about how living in the White House affected his wife and daughters, and unafraid to reveal self-doubt and disappointment. Yet he never wavers from his belief that inside the great, ongoing American experiment, progress is always possible. This beautifully written and powerful book captures Barack Obama’s conviction that democracy is not a gift from on high but something founded on empathy and common understanding and built together, day by day.

Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey

From the Academy Award®–winning actor, an unconventional memoir filled with raucous stories, outlaw wisdom, and lessons learned the hard way about living with greater satisfaction I’ve been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me. Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life’s challenges—how to get relative with the inevitable—you can enjoy a state of success I call “catching greenlights.” So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. This is fifty years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops. Hopefully, it’s medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot’s license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears. It’s a love letter. To life. It’s also a guide to catching more greenlights—and to realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too. Good luck.