Trump 21: Tweeting Us Into the Apocalypse

[GreyhoundFan]

Thanks @Palimpsest! One of the few good things to come out of this horrid sham administration is the good work of many journalists.

This is from one of the WaPo's mega-articles. I thought it so very true:

[fraurosena]

25 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

@fraurosena -- one of my local PBS stations is rerunning Ken Burns' documentary, "The Roosevelts: An Intimate History." I started to tear up a couple of times because, although deeply flawed people, TR, FDR, and Eleanor, pushed to make life better for Americans. Were they always successful? No, but at least they took action. The episode that aired the other night included one of FDR's fireside chats, this one was right after the bank holiday, when people were panicking. He was calm and reassuring. One person's letter that was quoted included verbiage that the writer's parents were deeply conservative Republicans, but they were happy with FDR. Can you imagine that happening today? The TT wouldn't know calm and reassuring if it bit him in his ample ass.

Yesterday I found this, seemingly unrelated (but bear with me) article.

Are you ready to consider that capitalism is the real problem?

Spoiler

In February, college sophomore Trevor Hill stood up during a televised town hall meeting in New York and posed a simple question to Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives. He cited a study by Harvard University showing that 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 no longer support the system of capitalism, and asked whether the Democrats could embrace this fast-changing reality and stake out a clearer contrast to right-wing economics.

Pelosi was visibly taken aback. “I thank you for your question,” she said, “but I’m sorry to say we’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is.”

The footage went viral. It was powerful because of the clear contrast it set up. Trevor Hill is no hardened left-winger. He’s just your average millennial—bright, informed, curious about the world, and eager to imagine a better one. But Pelosi, a figurehead of establishment politics, refused to–or was just unable to–entertain his challenge to the status quo.

It’s not only young voters who feel this way. A YouGov poll in 2015 found that 64% of Britons believe that capitalism is unfair, that it makes inequality worse. Even in the U.S., it’s as high as 55%. In Germany, a solid 77% are skeptical of capitalism. Meanwhile, a full three-quarters of people in major capitalist economies believe that big businesses are basically corrupt.

Why do people feel this way? Probably not because they deny the abundant material benefits of modern life that many are able to enjoy. Or because they want to travel back in time and live in the U.S.S.R. It’s because they realize—either consciously or at some gut level—that there’s something fundamentally flawed about a system that has a prime directive to churn nature and humans into capital, and do it more and more each year, regardless of the costs to human well-being and to the environment we depend on.

Because let’s be clear: That’s what capitalism is, at its root. That is the sum total of the plan. We can see this embodied in the imperative to grow GDP, everywhere, year on year, at a compound rate, even though we know that GDP growth, on its own, does nothing to reduce poverty or to make people happier or healthier. Global GDP has grown 630% since 1980, and in that same time, by some measures, inequality, poverty, and hunger have all risen.

We also see this plan in the idea that corporations have a fiduciary duty to grow their stock value for the sake of shareholder returns, which prevents even well-meaning CEO’s from voluntarily doing anything good—like increasing wages or reducing pollution—that might compromise their bottom line.

Just look at the recent case involving American Airlines. Earlier this year, CEO Doug Parker tried to raise his employees salaries to correct for “years of incredibly difficult times” suffered by his employees, only to be slapped down by Wall Street. The day he announced the raise, the company’s shares fell 5.8%. This is not a case of an industry on the brink, fighting for survival, and needing to make hard decisions. On the contrary, airlines have been raking in profits. But the gains are seen as the natural property of the investor class. This is why JP Morgan criticized the wage increase as a “wealth transfer of nearly $1 billion” to workers. How dare they?

What becomes clear here is that ours is a system that is programmed to subordinate life to the imperative of profit.

For a startling example of this, consider the horrifying idea to breed brainless chickens and grow them in huge vertical farms, Matrix-style, attached to tubes and electrodes and stacked one on top of the other, all for the sake of extracting profit out of their bodies as efficiently as possible. Or take the Grenfell Tower disaster in London, where dozens of people were incinerated because the building company chose to use flammable panels in order to save a paltry £5,000 (around $6,500). Over and over again, profit trumps life.

It all proceeds from the same deep logic. It’s the same logic that sold lives for profit in the Atlantic slave trade, it’s the logic that gives us sweatshops and oil spills, and it’s the logic that is right now pushing us headlong toward ecological collapse and climate change.

Once we realize this, we can start connecting the dots between our different struggles. There are people in the U.S. fighting against the Keystone pipeline. There are people in Britain fighting against the privatization of the National Health Service. There are people in India fighting against corporate land grabs. There are people in Brazil fighting against the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. There are people in China fighting against poverty wages. These are all noble and important movements in their own right. But by focusing on all these symptoms we risk missing the underlying cause. And the cause is capitalism. It’s time to name the thing.

What’s so exciting about our present moment is that people are starting to do exactly that. And they are hungry for something different. For some, this means socialism. That YouGov poll showed that Americans under the age of 30 tend to have a more favorable view of socialism than they do of capitalism, which is surprising given the sheer scale of the propaganda out there designed to convince people that socialism is evil. But millennials aren’t bogged down by these dusty old binaries. For them the matter is simple: They can see that capitalism isn’t working for the majority of humanity, and they’re ready to invent something better.

What might a better world look like? There are a million ideas out there. We can start by changing how we understand and measure progress. As Robert Kennedy famously said, GDP “does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play . . . it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

We can change that. People want health care and education to be social goods, not market commodities, so we can choose to put public goods back in public hands. People want the fruits of production and the yields of our generous planet to benefit everyone, rather than being siphoned up by the super-rich, so we can change tax laws and introduce potentially transformative measures like a universal basic income. People want to live in balance with the environment on which we all depend for our survival; so we can adopt regenerative agricultural solutions and even choose, as Ecuador did in 2008, to recognize in law, at the level of the nation’s constitution, that nature has “the right to exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate its vital cycles.”

Measures like these could dethrone capitalism’s prime directive and replace it with a more balanced logic, that recognizes the many factors required for a healthy and thriving civilization. If done systematically enough, they could consign one-dimensional capitalism to the dustbin of history.

None of this is actually radical. Our leaders will tell us that these ideas are not feasible, but what is not feasible is the assumption that we can carry on with the status quo. If we keep pounding on the wedge of inequality and chewing through our living planet, the whole thing is going to implode. The choice is stark, and it seems people are waking up to it in large numbers: Either we evolve into a future beyond capitalism, or we won’t have a future at all.

What the article states about capitalism - in essence that everything revolves around money, even at the cost of human life and wellbeing - is writ large in what is wrong with the current political system, that, let's face it, revolves around money, to the exclusion of everything else. Ideals and ethics have been left by the wayside. 

I wish I had a solution... 

[GrumpyGran]

11 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Thanks @Palimpsest! One of the few good things to come out of this horrid sham administration is the good work of many journalists.

This is from one of the WaPo's mega-articles. I thought it so very true:

Is that some kind of threat? Didn't think his anger over lil' Don would go in that direction.

As for the trip my thoughts because news here travels fast and I'm not keeping up:

I thought Melania really showed him up. She seemed more comfortable than I have ever seen her and when she was at the hospital with the kids, she seemed genuinely happy. Maybe she should just appoint herself goodwill ambassador to the world, grab Barron and hit the road.

The looks on Macron's face while Cheeto was waxing on about how great Jr is were sublime. He was trying so hard! Perfect.

And what was up with the handshake/wrestling in the street? It looked like Melania and Brigitte thought they were about to start a fist-fight.

[fraurosena]

Ha, you mean this handshake?

 

As off-putting as that display was, what I found rather disturbing came at the very last. Just before he gets into the limo, it looks suspiciously like the presidunce is giving the nazi salute there... 

[GrumpyGran]

4 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Ha, you mean this handshake?

 

As off-putting as that display was, what I found rather disturbing came at the very last. Just before he gets into the limo, it looks suspiciously like the presidunce is giving the nazi salute there... 

Probably comes naturally to him. Yes, that was it and in viewing it again I think Macron was giving him the Eternal Handshake again. Ugh, he finally got his tiny dirty mitts on Brigitte. 

[JMarie]

35 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Ha, you mean this handshake?

 

As off-putting as that display was, what I found rather disturbing came at the very last. Just before he gets into the limo, it looks suspiciously like the presidunce is giving the nazi salute there... 

Trump kissed the French First Lady.  Did Macron also kiss Melania, or was that edited out?

[GreyhoundFan]

"The real lesson of the Trump family’s troubles? Nepotism doesn’t pay."

Spoiler

In my early 20s, I worked for a hedge fund manager as an analyst, performing due diligence on companies he was considering for investment. I visited a wide range of businesses — storage area network companies, broadband providers, medical-device manufacturers and less tech-oriented ventures, including one whose only products were couches and chairs that converted into beds. Sometimes the companies were interesting and innovative, and sometimes they were complete disasters. The disasters had many of the same markers: poor performance, murky financials and, at least once, a supercar of Italian extraction leased by management in the parking lot. 

One other trend stood out: If my boss told me that I’d be looking at a “family run” company, there would probably be additional red flags. These didn’t always emerge, but when they did, they were consistent. Senior managers would be woefully unqualified or incompetent or both, and inevitably related to the chief executive. Certain employees, also related to the CEO, would be regarded as un-fireable. Their excessive compensation (it was always excessive) would in no way be tied to performance. Succession plans would consist of elevating and installing relatives in unearned positions designed primarily to satisfy the founder’s fantasies of creating a dynasty. 

I encountered those same dynamics years later when, as editor in chief of the New York Observer, I assigned and edited stories about commercial real estate in the city. New York real estate is very dynastic and insular; a few families have run the largest companies over the course of several generations. One of them is the family of Jared Kushner, then the Observer’s owner and now a senior White House adviser and son-in-law to President Trump. Another, of course, is Trump’s. Both Kushner and Trump are second-generation executives in their family businesses (I would use the word “were” here, but neither of them have completely divested themselves), and Trump’s children are third-generation. 

So when the Trump family business became running the United States of America, naturally, the head of the household could not resist installing his nearest and dearest in positions of senior management. Kushner and Ivanka Trump were given adviser positions and West Wing offices; Donald Trump Jr. and his brother Eric were left to nominally run the Trump Organization. And if I were conducting due diligence on either operation today — the United States or Trump’s business — I wouldn’t recommend getting involved. The controversy this past week prompted by Trump Jr.’s disclosure that he met with a Russian lawyer to obtain dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of the Russian government’s support for Trump may have overshadowed the controversy the previous week prompted by Trump’s decision to let Ivanka represent the United States at a Group of 20 meeting. But they’re symptoms of the same underlying dysfunction: The unearned power Trump’s children wield simply because they’re his children.   

When Kushner and Ivanka Trump first arrived in the White House, their presence was greeted with a tiny bit of hope on the part of liberals and anti-Trump Republicans that the two might be able to moderate the president’s worst impulses . They were going to persuade him to prioritize climate change, advance progressive workplace rules for women and families, and defend gay rights. But so far there’s no concrete evidence that they’ve gotten anything done except to accompany Trump in meetings when convenient, exploit the office for access to people they wouldn’t meet otherwise  and pose for photo ops.

Trump has made it no secret that he views Ivanka as a potential successor of sorts — he once suggested he could name her as his running mate. So although it was wildly inappropriate, it’s not the least bit surprising that both of them thought it was fine for her to sit in for Dad at the G-20 summit. The conclave was not, of course, a Take Your Daughter to Work event. But for someone who recently claimed to “stay out of politics ,” Ivanka didn’t seem to have any objection to being slotted into a position with very big political stakes. In her mind, apparently, it was hers to take. Similarly, her husband seems to feel qualified, despite a lack of anything resembling relevant experience or expertise, to assume the mantle of director in charge of everything the president doesn’t understand or wants to delegate or that Kushner would simply like to run.

Kushner’s appointment(s) are already backfiring, though, in part because last year, he took part in meetings with a number of Russian operatives and neglected to mention them on crucial security forms — including Trump Jr.’s meeting. 

That meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was a product of Trump Jr.’s own license to take charge of anything his family’s name touches. Like all his siblings and his brother-in-law, Trump Jr. had no experience working in politics before last year, but that didn’t stop him from meeting with sketchy operatives and dragging the ostensible professionals, such as campaign manager Paul Manafort, into them.  

This past week, after news of the meeting burst into the open, the president first offered a head-scratching defense of his son, applauding Jr.’s transparency (something Trump has never valued in any incarnation) and tepidly referring to him as “a high-quality person,” a designation ambiguously located on the president’s usual scale of “loser” to “tremendous,” and not exactly the term of endearment you’d expect from a protective parent. Trump also pleaded ignorance of the meeting in question, which strains credulity even more than it probably strains the family bonds. Asked about it at a news conference in Paris on Thursday, he stuck with the general line that his namesake hadn’t done anything wrong: “I have a son who’s a great young man. He’s a fine person. He took a meeting with a lawyer from Russia. It lasted for a very short period, and nothing came of the meeting. And I think it’s a meeting that most people in politics probably would have taken.”

The one upside that may have appealed to the CEOs of all those family-owned corporations — and, apparently, the head of our newly family-owned federal government — is that putting otherwise unqualified relatives into positions of power does buy a certain amount of blind loyalty. Maybe Trump’s motivation for having Kushner and Ivanka in the White House with him was not that he ever intended to rely on them as advisers (there’s no evidence that they’ve ever been able to sway him on policy), but rather that they provide some psychological comfort, in the sense that he can trust them not to stab him in the back.

The dysfunction of Trump’s nepotistic impulses goes hand in hand with his family’s odd notion of loyalty. It’s a sentiment that runs only one way: Everyone in the family demands loyalty, but none of them necessarily expects to reciprocate it, especially to anyone outside the family. (I include Kushner here, who once told me that a predecessor of mine was someone he admired because he was a “loyal guy,” neglecting to mention that the “loyal guy” was someone he had fired.) This view is evidently shared by Trump Jr., who in 2012 tweeted the following: “At dinner w our greenskeeper who missed his sister’s wedding 2 work (luv loyalty 2 us) ‘No big deal hopefully she’ll have another someday’ ;)” 

Ultimately, the mess Trump and his administration have landed in was an obvious consequence of this most disastrous of family-run enterprises. People related to the president were put in senior positions, once again, despite having no being woefully unqualified or incompetent or both. They were, and are, regarded as un-fireable and not held to normal performance standards. And much of this is driven by the family patriarch’s fantasies of political dynasty. 

All of the red flags are there; not even family wins out. And certainly not the country. The only real loyalty Trump has ever had is to himself.

I certainly would not want to hire any of those yahoos.

[GreyhoundFan]

Jennifer Rubin is back: "Neither Trump nor the GOP will recover anytime soon"

Spoiler

When, over the past fortnight, President Trump’s ludicrous suggestion — since walked back — that the United States should form a cybersecurity operation with Russia is not the top story and the continued discombobulation of the GOP hardly makes the top five stories, one grasps the degree to which this presidency is crumbling before our eyes.

Forget achieving its pipe dream of repealing and replacing Obamacare. Never mind the silly insistence from Trump advisers Gary Cohn and H.R. McMaster that the United States really isn’t suffering from the worst decline in international prestige and power since the end of the Vietnam War. The pressing issue is now under what circumstances the presidency will collapse and whether — in layman’s, if not legal, terms — his family and campaign behaved treacherously in seeking help from a hostile foreign power.

We are now down to arguing about whether the president’s son was independently attempting to collude in secret with Russians or whether his father was in on the scam as well. We know not from leaks but from Donald Trump Jr.’s statements and emails that Rob Goldstone, a manager for pop star Emin Agalarov, arranged for a meeting with Kremlin-linked lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, specifically telling the candidate’s son that help from Russia for his father’s candidacy was available. In the best-case scenario, the campaign — contrary to repeated representations — had multiple meetings with Russians, including one to provide campaign opposition material to assist a foreign power’s foreign policy objectives, the purpose of which the Trump clan initially lied about. That’s the most innocuous explanation. Beyond that, as our friends at Lawfare blog put it:

Trump Jr. claims there was no followup to the meeting on his end, but the question of whether the Russian side took further action following the conversation is also critical. Was this really a one-off meeting that didn’t go anywhere, or was it an effort to sound out the people around the candidate to determine their willingness to accept Russian help before taking further steps?

There’s also the question of the candidate’s personal knowledge. The White House has denied that the President knew of the meeting; deputy press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said that Trump had learned of the meeting recently. That said, he was clearly in the building on the relevant day, and the meeting involved two close family members and his campaign chairman and a woman purporting to be bringing news of a foreign government effort to help his campaign. So again, the story as it stands today is consistent with an abortive effort to gather dirt that never went anywhere and of which the President neither knew nor approved—and on which nobody followed up. But it’s also consistent with a covert contact that precipitated the first major release of Russian-hacked material stolen from Trump’s opponents. It’s certainly consistent with individuals willing to publicly lie to cover up their contacts, and only acknowledge such contacts when caught by the media.

And let’s not forget that one attendee of that meeting, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, who also attended a meeting to try to set up a secret channel using Russian facilities in order to cut out U.S. intelligence agencies still works in the West Wing — and oh, by the way, favored the termination of FBI Director James B. Comey, who was vigorously investigating the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia.

There is little doubt that if Democrats controlled the House, we would be down the road to impeachment. Nor is there much dispute that the existence of an underlying “crime” — collusion with a foreign power (an effort to obtain something of value from a foreign power) — would make the possible charge of obstruction of justice (oh, that!) even more potent. And it is this unmistakable and irremovable scandal — a web of collusion, lies and coverup — that suggests there is no way to move beyond this, no remedy or resolution that provides the Trump White House with a clean bill of legal and political health.

Republicans’ willingness to accept even national betrayal — that’s what Trump Jr. was willing to undertake, after all — will disgrace the party and its leaders for years, if not permanently. It is a party no longer capable of defending our national interests and Constitution from foreign enemies.

As an aside, the view of America from across the Atlantic is a brew of dumbfoundedness and disgust, a creeping sense that the world’s greatest democracy is in a tailspin led by a malicious crackpot. At least Americans and our European friends can agree on that.

I hope the Repug party is damaged beyond repair. They deserve no better. We're certainly getting their worst.

[AnywhereButHere]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/07/14/politics/trump-transparent-border-wall/index.html

Quote

"One of the things with the wall is you need transparency," Trump said. 

"You have to be able to see through it. In other words, if you can't see through that wall -- so it could be a steel wall with openings, but you have to have openings because you have to see what's on the other side of the wall." 

Experts have noted that with potentially violent cartels looking to smuggle people, drugs and other illicit goods into the US, it's essential that agents have visibility on their movements. 

Trump offered another example. 

"As horrible as it sounds, when they throw the large sacks of drugs over, and if you have people on the other side of the wall, you don't see them -- they hit you on the head with 60 pounds of stuff? It's over," Trump said. "As crazy as that sounds, you need transparency through that wall."

Did anyone post this yet? The man is certifiable. I think he's been hit on the head one too may times.

I don't think he has to worry. With no funding to speak of, this wall will be so transparent, it's like it won't even be there!

[AuntK]

3 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"The real lesson of the Trump family’s troubles? Nepotism doesn’t pay."

  Reveal hidden contents

In my early 20s, I worked for a hedge fund manager as an analyst, performing due diligence on companies he was considering for investment. I visited a wide range of businesses — storage area network companies, broadband providers, medical-device manufacturers and less tech-oriented ventures, including one whose only products were couches and chairs that converted into beds. Sometimes the companies were interesting and innovative, and sometimes they were complete disasters. The disasters had many of the same markers: poor performance, murky financials and, at least once, a supercar of Italian extraction leased by management in the parking lot. 

One other trend stood out: If my boss told me that I’d be looking at a “family run” company, there would probably be additional red flags. These didn’t always emerge, but when they did, they were consistent. Senior managers would be woefully unqualified or incompetent or both, and inevitably related to the chief executive. Certain employees, also related to the CEO, would be regarded as un-fireable. Their excessive compensation (it was always excessive) would in no way be tied to performance. Succession plans would consist of elevating and installing relatives in unearned positions designed primarily to satisfy the founder’s fantasies of creating a dynasty. 

I encountered those same dynamics years later when, as editor in chief of the New York Observer, I assigned and edited stories about commercial real estate in the city. New York real estate is very dynastic and insular; a few families have run the largest companies over the course of several generations. One of them is the family of Jared Kushner, then the Observer’s owner and now a senior White House adviser and son-in-law to President Trump. Another, of course, is Trump’s. Both Kushner and Trump are second-generation executives in their family businesses (I would use the word “were” here, but neither of them have completely divested themselves), and Trump’s children are third-generation. 

So when the Trump family business became running the United States of America, naturally, the head of the household could not resist installing his nearest and dearest in positions of senior management. Kushner and Ivanka Trump were given adviser positions and West Wing offices; Donald Trump Jr. and his brother Eric were left to nominally run the Trump Organization. And if I were conducting due diligence on either operation today — the United States or Trump’s business — I wouldn’t recommend getting involved. The controversy this past week prompted by Trump Jr.’s disclosure that he met with a Russian lawyer to obtain dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of the Russian government’s support for Trump may have overshadowed the controversy the previous week prompted by Trump’s decision to let Ivanka represent the United States at a Group of 20 meeting. But they’re symptoms of the same underlying dysfunction: The unearned power Trump’s children wield simply because they’re his children.   

When Kushner and Ivanka Trump first arrived in the White House, their presence was greeted with a tiny bit of hope on the part of liberals and anti-Trump Republicans that the two might be able to moderate the president’s worst impulses . They were going to persuade him to prioritize climate change, advance progressive workplace rules for women and families, and defend gay rights. But so far there’s no concrete evidence that they’ve gotten anything done except to accompany Trump in meetings when convenient, exploit the office for access to people they wouldn’t meet otherwise  and pose for photo ops.

Trump has made it no secret that he views Ivanka as a potential successor of sorts — he once suggested he could name her as his running mate. So although it was wildly inappropriate, it’s not the least bit surprising that both of them thought it was fine for her to sit in for Dad at the G-20 summit. The conclave was not, of course, a Take Your Daughter to Work event. But for someone who recently claimed to “stay out of politics ,” Ivanka didn’t seem to have any objection to being slotted into a position with very big political stakes. In her mind, apparently, it was hers to take. Similarly, her husband seems to feel qualified, despite a lack of anything resembling relevant experience or expertise, to assume the mantle of director in charge of everything the president doesn’t understand or wants to delegate or that Kushner would simply like to run.

Kushner’s appointment(s) are already backfiring, though, in part because last year, he took part in meetings with a number of Russian operatives and neglected to mention them on crucial security forms — including Trump Jr.’s meeting. 

That meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was a product of Trump Jr.’s own license to take charge of anything his family’s name touches. Like all his siblings and his brother-in-law, Trump Jr. had no experience working in politics before last year, but that didn’t stop him from meeting with sketchy operatives and dragging the ostensible professionals, such as campaign manager Paul Manafort, into them.  

This past week, after news of the meeting burst into the open, the president first offered a head-scratching defense of his son, applauding Jr.’s transparency (something Trump has never valued in any incarnation) and tepidly referring to him as “a high-quality person,” a designation ambiguously located on the president’s usual scale of “loser” to “tremendous,” and not exactly the term of endearment you’d expect from a protective parent. Trump also pleaded ignorance of the meeting in question, which strains credulity even more than it probably strains the family bonds. Asked about it at a news conference in Paris on Thursday, he stuck with the general line that his namesake hadn’t done anything wrong: “I have a son who’s a great young man. He’s a fine person. He took a meeting with a lawyer from Russia. It lasted for a very short period, and nothing came of the meeting. And I think it’s a meeting that most people in politics probably would have taken.”

The one upside that may have appealed to the CEOs of all those family-owned corporations — and, apparently, the head of our newly family-owned federal government — is that putting otherwise unqualified relatives into positions of power does buy a certain amount of blind loyalty. Maybe Trump’s motivation for having Kushner and Ivanka in the White House with him was not that he ever intended to rely on them as advisers (there’s no evidence that they’ve ever been able to sway him on policy), but rather that they provide some psychological comfort, in the sense that he can trust them not to stab him in the back.

The dysfunction of Trump’s nepotistic impulses goes hand in hand with his family’s odd notion of loyalty. It’s a sentiment that runs only one way: Everyone in the family demands loyalty, but none of them necessarily expects to reciprocate it, especially to anyone outside the family. (I include Kushner here, who once told me that a predecessor of mine was someone he admired because he was a “loyal guy,” neglecting to mention that the “loyal guy” was someone he had fired.) This view is evidently shared by Trump Jr., who in 2012 tweeted the following: “At dinner w our greenskeeper who missed his sister’s wedding 2 work (luv loyalty 2 us) ‘No big deal hopefully she’ll have another someday’ ;)” 

Ultimately, the mess Trump and his administration have landed in was an obvious consequence of this most disastrous of family-run enterprises. People related to the president were put in senior positions, once again, despite having no being woefully unqualified or incompetent or both. They were, and are, regarded as un-fireable and not held to normal performance standards. And much of this is driven by the family patriarch’s fantasies of political dynasty. 

All of the red flags are there; not even family wins out. And certainly not the country. The only real loyalty Trump has ever had is to himself.

I certainly would not want to hire any of those yahoos.

The thing we have to remember is that none of these yahoos, Jared, the princess, Junior, Butthead, are federal employees!  While they aren't being paid salaries, (good), they also aren't under federal civil service rules, yet look at the POWER they seem to enjoy, along with the tax $$ that are being spent on them for travel, office space, staff. And there are innumerable financial benefits that they are enjoying as a result of their positions, most of which are not public knowledge. 

The thing that scares me most though, is that with their greed and incompetence, these yahoos, along with the Dunce and his minions, are the most dangerous group of misfits who have occupied the WH in the history of this nation.  And I can't even think of anybody who would be a close second. (Maybe Nixon.) They are a danger to the republic and to our democracy. If the idiots in Congress fail to recognize this and do their jobs, we could possibly see the end of the world's leading democracy. And THAT is what keeps me awake at night!

[AuntK]

I do remember the Carter presidency.  Like Obama, he faced a lot of adversity in Congress, often from his own party. Carter's problem was that he was a genuinely good human being, open, honest, and trying to make life better for most Americans, especially the poor. Carter was not from a wealthy background, but always considered himself privileged because his family owned land, had a successful farm, food on the table, and a commitment to bettering oneself through hard work and education. I get really pissed at those who declare he was one of our worst presidents; he wasn't, he brought back to the White House a culture of decency and respect which had been lost under Nixon/Ford. And America badly needed that at the time. (Just as we will after this clown show.)  I've always said Jimmy Carter was probably the finest man to ever serve as POTUS and that, sadly, proved to be his downfall. He was a true servant of the people. He wasn't a politician, never was. He wasn't shady or untruthful.  But, I don't think that matters to James Earl Carter because when he finally meets his Maker, he is not going to have a whole lot of explaining to do.

Unlike some people.

[Howl]

@AuntK, that is such a beautiful tribute to Mr. Jimmy.  I'm so glad he is still with us. I'd recommend his childhood autobiography, An Hour Before Daylight. 

[fraurosena]

2 hours ago, AnywhereButHere said:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/07/14/politics/trump-transparent-border-wall/index.html

Did anyone post this yet? The man is certifiable. I think he's been hit on the head one too may times.

I don't think he has to worry. With no funding to speak of, this wall will be so transparent, it's like it won't even be there!

Uhm, a wall that has alternating solid and transparent parts?

Sounds like the description of a cage to me...  

[PreciousPantsofDoom]

On 13/07/2017 at 1:25 PM, GreyhoundFan said:

Not about the orange menace, but this is a real president: "Jimmy Carter recovering after collapsing from dehydration in Winnipeg, report says"

  Reveal hidden contents

Former president Jimmy Carter was taken to a hospital Thursday for dehydration while in Winnipeg, according to a news report.

The 92-year-old was in Canada helping build a Habitat for Humanity home when he “collapsed,” a volunteer told CBC News, triggering a rush of paramedics and firefighters to assist him. An ambulance took Carter to a hospital.

“President Carter has been working hard all week. He was dehydrated working in the hot sun and has been taken offsite for observation. He encourages everyone to stay hydrated and keep building,” a statement from the Carter Center said.

As a precaution, Carter was transported to St. Boniface General Hospital for re-hydration, and former first lady Rosalynn Carter is with him, the center said.

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter are the organization’s most prominent supporters, and since 1984 have  built, renovated or repaired almost 4,000 homes globally, according to the nonprofit’s website.

The Carters arrived in Canada this week to build or repair as many as 100 homes across Canada in four days, ending Friday, the organization said.

Carter described a rising concern over housing costs in Canada as a reason to get involved.

“Housing affordability in Canada is at an all-time low. We are proud supporters of Habitat for Humanity and grateful to everyone who is joining us in our efforts to bring affordable housing to families across the country,” Carter said.

Carter announced in 2015 that he was free of a type of melanoma that spread across his brain.

The man is 92 and actually building houses. for the poor. The orange menace is 21 years younger and couldn't actually build something out of legos, much less actual buildings.

Carter was  fine and back to building houses the next day, so this was ultimately not bad news, yet it has added a new worry.  I really really really (really) do not want Carter to die until Trump is out of there . AFAIK, it is tradition for the sitting President to eulogise former Presidents. Jimmy Carter deserves better.  Regardless of opinions about Carter's tenure as President, he is known as an honorable man who has used his life to try to do some good for the world.  What does Trump know or care about such principles?    How could Trump possibly show Carter the respect he is due?  Hang in there, Jimmy, don't die on Trumpy's watch! 

[Audrey2]

@PreciousPantsofDoom, you know if Trump had to eulogize Carter, the whole eulogy would be how Trump has Made 

America Great Again and is the Best President Ever. Seriously. No one even comes close. Sadly, I think any mention of Carter would be in a way to brand Carter as a loser. The eulogy would be all about Trump, unless he talks about Carter being part of the party of Crooked Hillary or evil Obama.

[FundamentallyShocked]

13 hours ago, AnywhereButHere said:

 With no funding to speak of, this wall will be so transparent, it's like it won't even be there!

 

Will the wall be like the Emperor's Clothes? Will we all have to ooo and ahh over the invisible wall and pay homage to the Cheeto?

[AnywhereButHere]

52 minutes ago, FundamentallyShocked said:

Will the wall be like the Emperor's Clothes? Will we all have to ooo and ahh over the invisible wall and pay homage to the Cheeto?

That is terrifying for many reasons. Mainly though, because I can see it actually happening! 

[WiseGirl]

12 hours ago, PreciousPantsofDoom said:

  How could Trump possibly show Carter the respect he is due?

Could Trump show anyone respect? Seriously though, Carter deserves better than to have the possibility of this sitting president to eulogize this wonderful humanitarian.  Hang on Jimmy, hang on .....

[milkteeth]

20 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Yesterday I found this, seemingly unrelated (but bear with me) article.

Are you ready to consider that capitalism is the real problem?

  Hide contents

In February, college sophomore Trevor Hill stood up during a televised town hall meeting in New York and posed a simple question to Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives. He cited a study by Harvard University showing that 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 no longer support the system of capitalism, and asked whether the Democrats could embrace this fast-changing reality and stake out a clearer contrast to right-wing economics.

Pelosi was visibly taken aback. “I thank you for your question,” she said, “but I’m sorry to say we’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is.”

The footage went viral. It was powerful because of the clear contrast it set up. Trevor Hill is no hardened left-winger. He’s just your average millennial—bright, informed, curious about the world, and eager to imagine a better one. But Pelosi, a figurehead of establishment politics, refused to–or was just unable to–entertain his challenge to the status quo.

It’s not only young voters who feel this way. A YouGov poll in 2015 found that 64% of Britons believe that capitalism is unfair, that it makes inequality worse. Even in the U.S., it’s as high as 55%. In Germany, a solid 77% are skeptical of capitalism. Meanwhile, a full three-quarters of people in major capitalist economies believe that big businesses are basically corrupt.

Why do people feel this way? Probably not because they deny the abundant material benefits of modern life that many are able to enjoy. Or because they want to travel back in time and live in the U.S.S.R. It’s because they realize—either consciously or at some gut level—that there’s something fundamentally flawed about a system that has a prime directive to churn nature and humans into capital, and do it more and more each year, regardless of the costs to human well-being and to the environment we depend on.

Because let’s be clear: That’s what capitalism is, at its root. That is the sum total of the plan. We can see this embodied in the imperative to grow GDP, everywhere, year on year, at a compound rate, even though we know that GDP growth, on its own, does nothing to reduce poverty or to make people happier or healthier. Global GDP has grown 630% since 1980, and in that same time, by some measures, inequality, poverty, and hunger have all risen.

We also see this plan in the idea that corporations have a fiduciary duty to grow their stock value for the sake of shareholder returns, which prevents even well-meaning CEO’s from voluntarily doing anything good—like increasing wages or reducing pollution—that might compromise their bottom line.

Just look at the recent case involving American Airlines. Earlier this year, CEO Doug Parker tried to raise his employees salaries to correct for “years of incredibly difficult times” suffered by his employees, only to be slapped down by Wall Street. The day he announced the raise, the company’s shares fell 5.8%. This is not a case of an industry on the brink, fighting for survival, and needing to make hard decisions. On the contrary, airlines have been raking in profits. But the gains are seen as the natural property of the investor class. This is why JP Morgan criticized the wage increase as a “wealth transfer of nearly $1 billion” to workers. How dare they?

What becomes clear here is that ours is a system that is programmed to subordinate life to the imperative of profit.

For a startling example of this, consider the horrifying idea to breed brainless chickens and grow them in huge vertical farms, Matrix-style, attached to tubes and electrodes and stacked one on top of the other, all for the sake of extracting profit out of their bodies as efficiently as possible. Or take the Grenfell Tower disaster in London, where dozens of people were incinerated because the building company chose to use flammable panels in order to save a paltry £5,000 (around $6,500). Over and over again, profit trumps life.

It all proceeds from the same deep logic. It’s the same logic that sold lives for profit in the Atlantic slave trade, it’s the logic that gives us sweatshops and oil spills, and it’s the logic that is right now pushing us headlong toward ecological collapse and climate change.

Once we realize this, we can start connecting the dots between our different struggles. There are people in the U.S. fighting against the Keystone pipeline. There are people in Britain fighting against the privatization of the National Health Service. There are people in India fighting against corporate land grabs. There are people in Brazil fighting against the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. There are people in China fighting against poverty wages. These are all noble and important movements in their own right. But by focusing on all these symptoms we risk missing the underlying cause. And the cause is capitalism. It’s time to name the thing.

What’s so exciting about our present moment is that people are starting to do exactly that. And they are hungry for something different. For some, this means socialism. That YouGov poll showed that Americans under the age of 30 tend to have a more favorable view of socialism than they do of capitalism, which is surprising given the sheer scale of the propaganda out there designed to convince people that socialism is evil. But millennials aren’t bogged down by these dusty old binaries. For them the matter is simple: They can see that capitalism isn’t working for the majority of humanity, and they’re ready to invent something better.

What might a better world look like? There are a million ideas out there. We can start by changing how we understand and measure progress. As Robert Kennedy famously said, GDP “does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play . . . it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

We can change that. People want health care and education to be social goods, not market commodities, so we can choose to put public goods back in public hands. People want the fruits of production and the yields of our generous planet to benefit everyone, rather than being siphoned up by the super-rich, so we can change tax laws and introduce potentially transformative measures like a universal basic income. People want to live in balance with the environment on which we all depend for our survival; so we can adopt regenerative agricultural solutions and even choose, as Ecuador did in 2008, to recognize in law, at the level of the nation’s constitution, that nature has “the right to exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate its vital cycles.”

Measures like these could dethrone capitalism’s prime directive and replace it with a more balanced logic, that recognizes the many factors required for a healthy and thriving civilization. If done systematically enough, they could consign one-dimensional capitalism to the dustbin of history.

None of this is actually radical. Our leaders will tell us that these ideas are not feasible, but what is not feasible is the assumption that we can carry on with the status quo. If we keep pounding on the wedge of inequality and chewing through our living planet, the whole thing is going to implode. The choice is stark, and it seems people are waking up to it in large numbers: Either we evolve into a future beyond capitalism, or we won’t have a future at all.

What the article states about capitalism - in essence that everything revolves around money, even at the cost of human life and wellbeing - is writ large in what is wrong with the current political system, that, let's face it, revolves around money, to the exclusion of everything else. Ideals and ethics have been left by the wayside. 

I wish I had a solution... 

Thank you for posting this. It's critical going forward that we realize that Trump is a symptom, but capitalism is the disease. After the election I joined the Democratic Socialists of America and I've been active with them fighting for health care and a living wage. Their membership has tripled in the last few months as people are realizing that we have no future if we don't begin to organize and demand change.

[GreyhoundFan]

"The latest evidence of Trump’s unfitness may be the most revolting"

Spoiler

Every week — nearly every day — brings fresh, stomach-churning evidence of President Trump’s unfitness for office. The latest may be the most revolting.

Confronted with incontrovertible proof that his son leapt at the prospect of meeting with a “Russian government attorney” offering to dish dirt on Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support” for his candidacy, the president took the position that this was political business as usual.

His first public reaction, in an interview with Reuters, was that “many people would have held that meeting.” The next day, Trump ratcheted up that astonishing assertion, from “many” to “most,” asserting, “I think from a practical standpoint, most people would have taken that meeting. . . . Politics isn’t the nicest business in the world, but it’s very standard.”

No. It. Isn’t.

Donald Trump Jr. at least had the decency to admit, in his interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, that, “in retrospect, I probably would’ve done things a little differently.” Not his father. I know being Trump means never having to say you’re sorry. I understand the fierce parental instinct to defend your erring child, even if that child is a 39-year-old father of five.

But this meeting was unacceptable. It was not even in the exurbs of appropriate. Hard to believe this really requires spelling out, but apparently it does, so here goes: A candidate for president of the United States and his campaign have no business, none, trucking with an emissary of a foreign government peddling incriminating information about their opponent.

That this meeting was explicitly described as an element of a Russian plot to influence the U.S. election is icing on an already repulsive cake. That the target of this feeler — the candidate’s son — embraced such meddling rather than recoiling from it only adds to the sordidness of the episode.

And that the intended beneficiary, now the sitting president of the United States, is unable and unwilling to accept that fact should be chilling to every patriotic American. Perhaps he is incapable of ever acknowledging wrongdoing. That only adds to the chill.

As does Trump’s staggering refusal to recognize the reality of Russian attempts to interfere in the election. What was Trump doing, at this late stage, asking Russian President Vladimir Putin if he meddled?

“I said, ‘Did you do it?’ And he said, ‘No, I did not. Absolutely not,’ Trump told Reuters. “I then asked him a second time in a totally different way. He said absolutely not.”

That isn’t the point. The intelligence community has told Trump that Russia interfered. The president shouldn’t be inquiring — he should be informing Putin about the consequences of this unacceptable behavior. But Trump continues to dispute reality. “Somebody did say if [Putin] did do it, you wouldn’t have found out about it,” Trump added.

We are at risk of suffering outrage overload here. So many troubling things have happened, and Trump continues to make so many beyond-the-pale statements, that we are losing our capacity to respond to all of it with appropriate concern.

Meanwhile, the alarm bells clang. Trump, we are told, didn’t know about the meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya until a few days before it became public. Except, maybe, he did. “In fact, maybe it was mentioned at some point,” Trump acknowledged in a conversation with pool reporters — part of an off-the-record, then on-the-record encounter not included in the official White House transcript.

Was he talking about Russian adoption or the meeting itself? Unclear — but at this point, the White House deserves little presumption of honesty or full disclosure. The latest evidence: NBC News’s report that the Trump Tower meeting was also attended by a former Soviet counterintelligence officer. So much for Trumpian back-patting about transparency.

I hear the what-aboutists stirring. But what about Democrats and Ukraine? According to a January report in Politico, a Ukrainian American consultant to the Democratic National Committee “met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia.” Problematic? Perhaps. But Ukraine is not a U.S. adversary. The scope of its reported involvement is far different from a Putin-directed effort to illegally hack emails to help elect Trump.

If there is one silver lining to this staggering news, it is that it serves to strengthen special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Trump continues to cry “witch hunt.” Yet there can no longer be any doubt that there is something for Mueller to investigate. And even this supine Republican Congress would not tolerate his summary firing. Would it?

I like the characterization of the Repug congress as supine. Yup, that just about describes it.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Americans put Trump in the Oval Office. What does that say about the country?"

Spoiler

The vaudeville show that’s running at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue didn’t book itself into the White House. Nearly 63 million Americans sent that burlesque comedy with headliner Donald Trump to Washington. That 66 million other voters thought otherwise is beside the point. Trump didn’t anoint himself president. Millions put him in office.

What does that tell us about the country?

Was hatred of President Barack Obama, fear of Hillary Clinton, outrage over America’s perceived direction enough to transfer the reins to Trump?

It’s not as if the Trump on display in the Oval Office is not the same Trump we saw on the campaign trail or on reality TV or out and about touting his businesses. He was, by any yardstick, the most unqualified presidential nominee in modern history.

Trump didn’t seize the presidency by deception. For months on end, he was out there for all voters to see, measure and judge. Some of us did offer our preelection assessments, based upon his campaign, well before time came to cast ballots.

In my view, Trump showed himself to be one who could be neither out-demagogued nor out-nastied.

Well in advance of the vote, the country heard Trump’s vile insults and claims: Mexican immigrants are criminals and rapists; Obama wasn’t born in the United States and was an illegitimate president.

And his attacks on people. Megyn Kelly: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” Jews: “The only kind of people I want counting my money are little short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.): “He’s not a war hero . . . I like people that weren’t captured.” My journalist colleague Serge Kovaleski, who has limited mobility in his arms: “Now the poor guy, you ought to see this guy,” Trump said, before contorting his arms in an apparent impersonation.

Trump the candidate showed himself to be an ignorant, undisciplined, ranting bully who exaggerated and lied without shame. A man who wore a tough-guy masculinity but was actually a coward, who picked on women, demeaned minorities and was thoroughly lacking in human decency.

Trump’s character defects were on full display well before the polls opened.

President Trump’s behavior in the White House has been equally as disgusting and beneath the dignity of that high office.

And now our nation’s capital is being wrenched apart by the Trump-Russia scandal and congressional and federal investigations into the Kremlin’s intrusion in the election.

The country can’t claim not to have seen this coming.

On Oct. 7, one month before the election, U.S. officials put it out there: “The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. . . . These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. . . . We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”

Questions, serious questions, surfaced about whether Trump associates or campaign staff had any role in assisting Moscow’s meddling in the election to hurt Clinton and elect Trump. And answers are coming in.

Trump’s ties and affinities to Russia were no secret, either.

Two months before Election Day, reports appeared in The Post, including in this column, that there was strong evidence that Trump’s businesses had received significant funding from Russian investors — thus adding to a growing sense that the Russians may have had their hooks in him and his associates.

“Turn over the keys to Trump,” I wrote, “who mingles with Putin’s Russian oligarchs, hustles business opportunities in Moscow, blithely looks past Putin’s annexation of Crimea, and glosses over the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its support for Iran and Bashar al-Assad in Syria? Who says the NATO-member Baltic states can count on our help only if threatened by Russia if they have ‘fulfilled their obligations to us’? Who says of Russian election meddling: ‘I’m not going to tell Putin what to do’?

“No wonder Putin, covert manipulator of the West, smirks. In Donald Trump, Russia will never have had it so good,” I wrote, adding: “Something voters may wish to think about.”

Well, millions did, taking in all that Trump — by word, thought and deed — had to offer. And they decided to swallow the Kool-Aid and enter the Trump Show with the unquestioned obedience of an adoring audience.

Now what does that say about us?

It says there are many morally bankrupt idiots out there.

[GreyhoundFan]

An excellent, and sadly true, op-ed from the NYT: "No One Cares About Russia in the World Breitbart Made"

Spoiler

The revelation that Donald Trump’s son, son-in-law and campaign manager met with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer promising information that would “incriminate” Hillary Clinton was a true bombshell in an era when we have become almost inured to them. Here was proof that members of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign had, at the very least, been eager to collude with Russia to influence the 2016 election.

No one could gainsay the facts: Mr. Trump’s own son published them on Twitter.

As recently as five or 10 years ago, every major news outlet would have treated this set of facts as front-page news and a dire threat to Mr. Trump’s presidency. The conservative press and Republican voters might disagree on certain particulars or points of emphasis. But their view of reality — of what happened and its significance — would have largely comported with that of the mainstream. You’d have had to travel to the political fringe of right-wing talk radio, the Drudge Report and dissident publications like Breitbart News to find an alternative viewpoint that rejected this basic story line.

Not anymore. Look to the right now and you’re apt to find an alternative reality in which the same set of facts is rearranged to compose an entirely different narrative. On Fox News, host Lou Dobbs offered a representative example on Thursday night, when he described the Donald Trump Jr. email story, with wild-eyed fervor, like this: “This is about a full-on assault by the left, the Democratic Party, to absolutely carry out a coup d’état against President Trump aided by the left-wing media.”

Mr. Dobbs isn’t some wacky outlier, but rather an example of how over the last several years the conservative underworld has swallowed up and subsumed more established right-leaning outlets such as Fox News. The Breitbart mind-set — pugnacious, besieged, paranoid and determined to impose its own framework on current events regardless of facts — has moved from the right-wing fringe to the center of Republican politics.

It’s a process that’s happened organically. “They have an incredible eye for an important story, particular ones that are important to conservatives and Republicans,” Jeff Sessions, now the attorney general, told me in 2015, explaining how Breitbart News was shaping grass-roots conservative opinion by spreading its message across mediums that party leaders in Washington paid little attention to. “They’ve become extraordinarily influential. Radio talk-show hosts are reading Breitbart every day. You can feel it when they interview you.”

There have been mileposts along the way: the populist revolt on the right that killed bipartisan immigration reform in 2013, the toppling of House Speaker John Boehner in 2015. And, of course, the rise of Mr. Trump, whose attacks on the mainstream media have conditioned his supporters to dismiss as “fake news” any reporting that is critical of him or his administration — Mr. Trump has even criticized the coverage of his son’s Russia liaison, where the basic facts aren’t in dispute, as coming from the “fake media.”

The full scale of this transformation still hasn’t registered, but it’s evident in President Trump’s approval ratings. Despite six months of White House strife, precious few legislative achievements and a metastasizing Russia scandal, Republicans have largely stood by their president. While his national support has dipped below 40 percent, his approval rating within his own party remains strong: Republican support for the president has hovered around 85 percent since his inauguration. These numbers reflect a shift in Republicans’ disposition, of which Mr. Trump is both a major cause and the main beneficiary.

So far, there’s little sign that the president’s approval rating with Republicans is in danger of eroding. Earlier this month, a congressional source told me, Democratic strategists looking at a Republican-held swing district that is expected to be in play in next year’s midterm elections were shocked when a private poll they conducted showed that Republican support for Mr. Trump in the district is even stronger now than it was on Election Day.

A number of factors have been put forward to explain President Trump’s unexpected resilience. One line of argument is that he’s being buoyed by Republican lawmakers who could abandon him if they lose faith in his ability to deliver results. “The relationship has always been largely transactional,” the G.O.P. strategist Alex Conant told RealClearPolitics this month. “Republicans in Congress can pass laws, and Trump can sign them. Therefore, it’s mutually beneficial.”

Another argument holds that Mr. Trump’s efforts to discredit mainstream outlets, echoed by the right-wing media, have stripped his followers of their ability to distinguish what’s real from what isn’t.

Both arguments have merit. But the transformation of the Republican mind-set encompasses more than just news or politics. Andrew Breitbart, the founder of Breitbart News, liked to say that “politics is downstream from culture.”

Culture has always been a driving obsession of the conservative underworld of Breitbart and its ilk. “Andrew was always more interested in changing the culture than he was in changing what was going on in Washington,” Steve Bannon, who ran Breitbart News and is now Mr. Trump’s chief White House strategist, once told me. (Mr. Bannon left his position at Breitbart News in August of 2016 to take over the Trump campaign.)

One reason that an alternative view of reality has taken such deep root among Republicans is that they seem to be focusing more on the broader culture. Last week a new Pew Research Center poll showed that a majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents now believes that colleges and universities — the flash point of our current culture wars — have a negative effect on the country. This number is up sharply from the 45 percent who agreed with this same statement last year.

If you look at the other side of the aisle, about three-quarters of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents consistently say that colleges and universities have a positive effect on the country.

As American politics has become more polarized and tribal, it’s gotten harder to shake voters from their partisan loyalties. At least so far, the news that Donald Trump Jr. was prepared to accept Russian help to subvert a United States election doesn’t appear to have changed this state of affairs. If you’re not a Republican, watching Republicans react to the news can feel a bit like witnessing a mass hallucination. Even more so when some emissary from the alternate Republican universe like Kellyanne Conway teleports onto CNN or another mainstream outlet to state her case.

There’s no guarantee that this will endure. Even on Fox News, there are scattered signs that the latest Russia developments may finally be breaking through — at least to a few folks. “This was a bungled collusion,” the Fox pundit Charles Krauthammer said the other night, noting that he had previously been sympathetic to the White House line. “It undoes the White House story completely.”

But of course the conservative ranks have always included principled NeverTrumpers, whose resistance to the Republican drift has been mostly ignored by the rank and file. Don Jr.’s travails will be a good test of the resiliency of the new Republican worldview. If special counsel Robert Mueller finds evidence of Russian collusion, it will be followed by a bigger test measuring just what it takes to snap out of a mass hallucination.

 

[Cleopatra7]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Americans put Trump in the Oval Office. What does that say about the country?"

  Reveal hidden contents

The vaudeville show that’s running at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue didn’t book itself into the White House. Nearly 63 million Americans sent that burlesque comedy with headliner Donald Trump to Washington. That 66 million other voters thought otherwise is beside the point. Trump didn’t anoint himself president. Millions put him in office.

What does that tell us about the country?

Was hatred of President Barack Obama, fear of Hillary Clinton, outrage over America’s perceived direction enough to transfer the reins to Trump?

It’s not as if the Trump on display in the Oval Office is not the same Trump we saw on the campaign trail or on reality TV or out and about touting his businesses. He was, by any yardstick, the most unqualified presidential nominee in modern history.

Trump didn’t seize the presidency by deception. For months on end, he was out there for all voters to see, measure and judge. Some of us did offer our preelection assessments, based upon his campaign, well before time came to cast ballots.

In my view, Trump showed himself to be one who could be neither out-demagogued nor out-nastied.

Well in advance of the vote, the country heard Trump’s vile insults and claims: Mexican immigrants are criminals and rapists; Obama wasn’t born in the United States and was an illegitimate president.

And his attacks on people. Megyn Kelly: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” Jews: “The only kind of people I want counting my money are little short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.): “He’s not a war hero . . . I like people that weren’t captured.” My journalist colleague Serge Kovaleski, who has limited mobility in his arms: “Now the poor guy, you ought to see this guy,” Trump said, before contorting his arms in an apparent impersonation.

Trump the candidate showed himself to be an ignorant, undisciplined, ranting bully who exaggerated and lied without shame. A man who wore a tough-guy masculinity but was actually a coward, who picked on women, demeaned minorities and was thoroughly lacking in human decency.

Trump’s character defects were on full display well before the polls opened.

President Trump’s behavior in the White House has been equally as disgusting and beneath the dignity of that high office.

And now our nation’s capital is being wrenched apart by the Trump-Russia scandal and congressional and federal investigations into the Kremlin’s intrusion in the election.

The country can’t claim not to have seen this coming.

On Oct. 7, one month before the election, U.S. officials put it out there: “The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. . . . These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. . . . We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”

Questions, serious questions, surfaced about whether Trump associates or campaign staff had any role in assisting Moscow’s meddling in the election to hurt Clinton and elect Trump. And answers are coming in.

Trump’s ties and affinities to Russia were no secret, either.

Two months before Election Day, reports appeared in The Post, including in this column, that there was strong evidence that Trump’s businesses had received significant funding from Russian investors — thus adding to a growing sense that the Russians may have had their hooks in him and his associates.

“Turn over the keys to Trump,” I wrote, “who mingles with Putin’s Russian oligarchs, hustles business opportunities in Moscow, blithely looks past Putin’s annexation of Crimea, and glosses over the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its support for Iran and Bashar al-Assad in Syria? Who says the NATO-member Baltic states can count on our help only if threatened by Russia if they have ‘fulfilled their obligations to us’? Who says of Russian election meddling: ‘I’m not going to tell Putin what to do’?

“No wonder Putin, covert manipulator of the West, smirks. In Donald Trump, Russia will never have had it so good,” I wrote, adding: “Something voters may wish to think about.”

Well, millions did, taking in all that Trump — by word, thought and deed — had to offer. And they decided to swallow the Kool-Aid and enter the Trump Show with the unquestioned obedience of an adoring audience.

Now what does that say about us?

It says there are many morally bankrupt idiots out there.

Part of the problem with the Democrats was that they underestimated the sheer amount of nastiness and vitriol that resides in much of the American electorate. They assumed that "of course" most voters wouldn't vote for such an unorthodox and blatantly offensive candidate like Trump and thought 2016 would be an easy victory. Even on here, a lot of people were hoping that Trump would win the GOP primary because it would be a shoo-in for Hillary, and I pointed out that tge "solid South" would go for whoever has an R next to their name. Then on election night, not only did the South go for Trump but formerly reliable blue states like Pennsylvania and Ohio. The Democrats bought into the hype about Obama's election showing that we were somehow "post-racial" and ran with it. The most important thing that I took away November 8, 2016 was to never forget that this is a country founded on genocide and slavery, and that many Americans think this is a good thing. Trump is not an abandonment of some Platonic ideal of "American values" so much as he's the alpha and omega of the notion that this country was founded by and for white, landowning males, who can "grab pussy" and it's all good somehow. As far as I'm concerned, Thomas Jefferson was no different than Trump in these regards, other than being superficially more cultured.

[fraurosena]

With the new season starting tonight, this is for all you GOT fans out there.

Game of Trump

Spoiler

Wicked siblings willing to do anything for power. Secret deals with sworn enemies. The shock of a dead body. A Wall. Foreign bawds, guns for hire, and snakes. Back-stabbing, betrayal and charges of treason. Little birds spying and tattling. A maniacal mad king and his court of scheming, self-absorbed princesses and princelings, swathed in the finest silk and the most brazen immorality, ruling with total disregard for the good of their people.

The night in Washington is dark and full of terrors. The Game of Trump has brought a pagan lawlessness never before seen in the capital.

So far in life, Donald Trump has survived and thrived on the same philosophy espoused by Littlefinger in “Game of Thrones”: “Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder.”

But is the rampant deception and corruption in his gaudy, jangly realm about to engulf the Emperor of Chaos? Is this the grisly endgame for Cersei in King’s Landing and Donald in Washington? A talent to distract on Twitter, our Joffrey-like president will learn, is not the same as the ability to walk through fire.

The crowds are swelling, yelling: “Shame. Shame. Shame.”

Hugging their tattered brand, the family tried for a respite this weekend. Ivanka and Jared fled to Sun Valley to hang out with the global elite at Herb Allen’s conference. After escaping to the City of Light for Bastille Day — poor battered Sean Spicer had to settle for a party at the French Embassy here — Trump and Melania were going to his Bedminster club to attend the U.S. Women’s Open being held there. (Some women protested, saying the Open should be closed to Donald Trump.)

Trump always inflates his numbers, using his own special brand of ego arithmetic. But Don Jr. and Jared have been busy deflating their numbers.

Don Jr. pooh-poohed the meeting revealed in The New York Times’s scoop that he met with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with Kremlin contacts, and Rob Goldstone, a publicist who represents a Russian pop star who featured Trump in his music video. But it later turned out there was more to the picture.

First we learned there were six, not four, people in the meeting, including a lobbyist who just happened to be a former member of the Soviet unit dealing in counterintelligence. Then we found out there were eight. Next, we’ll find out Putin was FaceTiming from Moscow.

Don Jr. was not ashamed that he had gleefully met with Russians to collect dirt on Hillary Clinton. He was only annoyed, as he told Sean Hannity in the womb of Fox News, that the meeting turned out to be “a nothing” and “just a wasted 20 minutes.” The thought that it was improper has not entered his mind.

Jared Kushner has had to amend his list of foreign contacts three times, adding more than 100 names that had somehow eluded him. “His lawyers have said this was inadvertent and that a member of his staff had prematurely hit the ‘send’ button for the form before it was completed,” Michael Isikoff wrote in Yahoo News.

No one in Washington, a land intimately familiar with obnoxiously oppressive forms, believed that. As Vox noted: “But the thing is, there isn’t one ‘send button’ for this kind of security clearance form. There are 28.”

As theater, the Trump saga is spectacular, with a dazzling collection of fools and jesters. Who could make up Rob Goldstone, the rotund, vodka-swilling, chocolate-inhaling, British publicist who liked to party at the Russian Tea Room?

The Daily Beast recalled that back in the ’80s, when Goldstone represented John Denver and Michael Jackson, he went to Ethiopia for Band Aid, a rock concert to help famine victims, and managed to gain seven pounds. As he explained to The Sydney Morning Herald, “I mean, what else is there to do in a country like Ethiopia but eat?” In 2010, Goldstone wrote an essay in The Times on “The Tricks and Trials of Traveling While Fat.”

And who possibly could concoct Trump lawyer Marc Kasowitz? According to ProPublica, after a man watching Rachel Maddow emailed Kasowitz Wednesday telling him to “Resign Now,” the lawyer shot back with a bunch of nasty messages, such as “Watch your back, bitch” and “I already know where you live, I’m on you. … You will see me. I promise. Bro.”

Kasowitz, ProPublica reports, has a drinking problem that could hamper him getting a security clearance. He has grown increasingly frustrated by Trump’s lack of discipline as the president sulks and rages in his tent over the Russia labyrinth, according to The Washington Post.

So this lawyer is the one trying to instill discipline in that president?

In an interview with reporters on Air Force One on the way to Paris, President Trump once more tried to deflect blame from Russia for the election hacks. “And I’m not saying it wasn’t Russia,” he said. “What I’m saying is that we have to protect ourselves no matter who it is. You know, China is very good at this. I hate to say it, North Korea is very good at this. Look what they did to Sony Studios.”

He bragged about his cunning when he brought up the hacks with Putin. After citing it once, Trump said, “I then said to him again, in a totally different way.”

Wow. That must have really outfoxed the lethal former K.G.B. agent. You know nothing, Donald Trump.

Trump defended his beleaguered oldest son — who is the same age as Emmanuel Macron — as “a good boy.” Don Jr. certainly learned Trump family values.

In the immortal words of the villainous Ramsay Bolton on “Game of Thrones”: “If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention.”

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[JMarie]

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

The Daily Beast recalled that back in the ’80s, when Goldstone represented John Denver and Michael Jackson, he went to Ethiopia for Band Aid, a rock concert to help famine victims, and managed to gain seven pounds. As he explained to The Sydney Morning Herald, “I mean, what else is there to do in a country like Ethiopia but eat?” In 2010, Goldstone wrote an essay in The Times on “The Tricks and Trials of Traveling While Fat.”

 

There are no words to describe his insensitivity.