TRUMP is seriously dangerous

[Burnt Hill]

the elites do not think of us as human beings

they think of us as useless eaters....

they take and they take and they take until we are used up

I am not suggesting that their ranks are not full of narcissistic psychopaths.

what I am supposed to say thank you sir for shooting me while I bleed to death?

Many of the family members of the deceased in Charleston forgave Dylan Roof.
There is more than enough blind hate in the world, it is not a path to victory.

Don't lose your humanity when fighting evil, it may be your best weapon.

[seemslikeadream]

they may have forgiven him but did they say thank you for shooting my love ones .... what a pretty outfit you are wearing ?

now shoot me too!

[Burnt Hill]

they may have forgiven him but did they say thank you for shooting my love ones .... what a pretty outfit you are wearing ?

now shoot me too!

Of course not.
And some family members justifiably wanted an eye for an eye.
Those are very human emotions.
And does not diminish their humanity.

That's a bit different from wishing DT dead from a great distance.
Which I surmise was spoken metaphorically anyway.
Or at least out of inner anger crying out for solutions.
We should just take care that we don't perpetuate the things that will eat us alive.

[Cordelia]

Thinking further on what 82, searcher, slad, and burnt hill have written on living w/power and in wealth beyond comprehension, humanity, compassion, assassination, mothers & sons, etc..... I'm reminded that a future King of England's own mother was, or was not (was imo), assassinated. And if so, with the possible plotting, complicity or at least acquiescence from his close family members. If that's 'true' , it's another ancient tragedy, and one worthy of a Shakespearean play. How does such treachery impact the secondary victims (like a prince) and how could his, and others' psychological sequelae affect future history?



Believe me, I'm not an apologist for any members of a privileged elite, nor do I believe forgiveness, if not genuinely felt, to be a necessary outcome of a tragedy. But suffering is suffering, no matter who the recipient and I hope I'd never trade empathy and compassion for an empty soul's endless circling.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRoAvVuEiio

[kelley]

assassination is a last resort of failed rhetoric or the extreme manifestation of realpolitik, and as an efficient tactic? it's as old as humankind

i'd not be surprised to see this current malignant perversion of camelot end more or less as the first version did

[SonicG]

Wierdz...maybe the plan really is to institute a One World government under the UN led by the great orange Satan??

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
The United Nations has such great potential but right now it is just a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time. So sad!
4:41 AM - 27 Dec 2016

Israel threatens to give Trump 'evidence' that Obama orchestrated UN resolution
Netanyahu allies claim ‘iron-clad information’ from Arab sources reveals Obama administration drafted document to end settlements, which US abstained from

Israel has escalated its already furious war with the outgoing US administration, claiming that it has “rather hard” evidence that Barack Obama was behind a critical UN security council resolution criticising Israeli settlement building, and threatening to hand over the material to Donald Trump.

The latest comments come a day after the US ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, was summoned by Netanyahu to explain why the US did not veto the vote and instead abstained.

The claims have emerged in interviews given by close Netanyahu allies to US media outlets on Monday after the Obama administration denied in categorical terms the claims originally made by Netanyahu himself.

However, speaking to Fox News on Sunday, David Keyes – a Netanyahu spokesman – said Arab sources, among others, had informed Jerusalem of Obama’s alleged involvement in advancing the resolution.

“We have rather iron-clad information from sources in both the Arab world and internationally that this was a deliberate push by the United States and in fact they helped create the resolution in the first place,” Keyes said.

Doubling down on the claim a few hours later the controversial Israeli ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer, went even further suggesting it had gathered evidence that it would present to the incoming Trump administration.

“We will present this evidence to the new administration through the appropriate channels. If they want to share it with the American people, they are welcome to do it,” Dermer told CNN.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/ ... bama-trump

[stillrobertpaulsen]

If there was actually real 'evidence' that he actually drafted the UN resolution against Israel, my respect for President Obama would skyrocket.

[seemslikeadream]

Winter is coming: prospects for the American press under Trump
How bad is it? Bad. I will explain why. Any bright signs? A few. This is part one. Part two is about what can be done. Out tomorrow.

28 DEC 2016 9:55 PM 63 COMMENTS →

This started as a thread on Twitter about “things to look for” in the next six to eight months. Readers asked what could be done in response. I will try to meet that request in part two. First we have to understand how deep and interconnected the problems are.

How bad is it? Pretty bad.
For a free press as a check on power this is the darkest time in American history since World War I, when there was massive censorship and suppression of dissent. I say this because so many things are happening at once to disarm and disable serious journalism, or to push it out of the frame. Most of these are well known, but it helps to put them all together. Here is my list:

1. An economic crisis in (most) news companies, leaving the occupation of journalism in a weakened state, especially at the state and local level, where newsrooms have been decimated by the decline of the newspaper business. The digital money is going to Google and Facebook, but they do not have newsrooms.

2. A low-trust environment for most institutions and their leaders, the same ones who are regularly featured in the news.

3. A broken and outdated model in political journalism, which tries to connect to the public through “inside” or access reporting about a class whose legitimacy is itself eroding. And since almost everyone got the result wrong in 2016, responsibility for this massive error is evenly distributed across the press, which means that no one is responsible for fixing what is broken.

4. An organized movement on the political right to discredit mainstream journalism, which stretches from Steve Bannon in the White House to Trump’s army of online trolls, with Breitbart, Drudge Report, talk radio and Fox opinion hosts mediating between the two, while the “alt reality” fringe feels newly emboldened. Its latest tactic is to shout down as “fake news” any work of reporting that conflicts with its worldview, leaving the term useless as a fraud alert. “Over the years, we’ve effectively brainwashed the core of our audience to distrust anything that they disagree with,” said John Ziegler, a conservative radio host, to a New York Times reporter. “Because the gatekeepers have lost all credibility in the minds of consumers, I don’t see how you reverse it.” In fact, no one knows how to fix this.

5. The rapid escalation of this drive-to-discredit as Trump gained traction with the electorate. Since 1970 it has grown from questioning the motives of people covering a Republican president in the speeches of Spiro Agnew, to countering liberal spin with the personalities at Fox News, to mistrusting all of the mainstream (or “drive-by”) media with Rush Limbaugh, and now to a place beyond that. Sean Hannity — who is probably closer to Trump than any other media figure — recently said on air: “Until members of the media come clean about colluding with the Clinton campaign and admit that they knowingly broke every ethical standard they are supposed to uphold, they should not have the privilege, they should not have the responsibility of covering the president on behalf of you, the American people.” In other words, the mainstream press should not be allowed to cover Trump. A few years ago that was a bridge too far. Now it’s a plausible test of poisoned waters.

6. After the debacle of 2016, trust in the news media as an institution feels lower than ever in living memory, while popular anger reaches an all-time high. The resentment is coming from the left, the right and what remains of the center. Pew Research Center: “Only about two-in-ten Americans (22%) trust the information they get from local news organizations a lot, whether online or offline, and 18% say the same of national organizations.” Gallup in September of this year: “Republicans who say they have trust in the media has plummeted to 14% from 32% a year ago. This is easily the lowest confidence among Republicans in 20 years.”

7. A homogeneity and coastal concentration in American newsrooms that can be described in many ways — lack of diversity is the most common, with disagreements on what kind of diversity is most desired — leaving the press ill-prepared to take creative action across a cultural divide. The situation was summed up in the most quotable line written by a journalist about Trump’s candidacy: “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” (Salena Zito in The Atlantic.)

8. A figure in power who got there in part by whipping up hatred against the press, and who shows no signs of ending that abusive practice… coupled with a disturbing pattern in which Trump broadcasts through his Twitter feed outrageously false statements, the press reacts by trying to “check” them, and the resulting furor works to his advantage by casting journalists in the role of petty but hateful antagonist, with Trump as the man who takes the heat and “tells it like it is.”

9. The emergence of an authoritarian political style in which trashing the norms of American democracy (as when he cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election, or suggested prosecution of his opponent) works to Trump’s advantage with a huge portion of his supporters, while failing to alarm the rest. This is especially troublesome because norms of democracy are what give the press its place in public life and representative government; if these can be broken without penalty that means the press can be shoved aside and not much will happen.

10. The increasingly dim prospect that there will be a fact-based debate to which journalists can usefully contribute when the leader of the free world feels free to broadcast transparently false or ignorant claims… coupled with the full flowering of the “we make our own reality” attitude (circa 2004) into a kind of performance art that simultaneously kicks up hatred of anyone trying to be evidence-based and liberates the speech of powerful actors from even the most minimal factual constraints.

11. An advanced stage of culture war, political polarization and asymmetrical mistrust of the press in which, instead of leading to greater public awareness and a gradual movement toward reform, sensational revelations, hard-hitting investigations and exposés of corruption are consumed as fuel in an accelerating political divide. In other words, Watergate-style journalism increasingly enflames and polarizes, rather than informing and alerting the public. The more damning and irrefutable the findings are, the more likely is this furious reaction, especially when Trump launches attacks on the journalists and news organizations doing the digging.

12. The success of “verification in reverse,” a method on the march, in which a knowing political actor takes facts that have been nailed down, and introduces doubt about them, which then releases energy (controversy, resistance, ready-to-hate news coverage) which in turn helps power a movement among those who wanted the established facts repealed, as it were. This is how Trump launched his political career. He became a birther. Wherever it succeeds, verification-in-reverse is a triumph over the craft of journalism, which has to be pro-verification or it may as well exit the stage.

13. Amusing ourselves to death, as Neil Postman’s 1985 book put it, in which the logic of entertainment overtakes adjacent but nominally distinct spheres that are supposed to be governed by their own logic, as when newsworthiness and the requirements of political debate are subordinated to entertainment values by media companies obeying commercial imperatives, while claiming a public service mantle. For journalists, this is the import of Jeff Zucker’s reign at CNN, and one of the lessons of Trump’s career as a “reality TV” star.

14. A shift in the power-to-inform toward a single platform and attention-economy colossus: Facebook, a creature of the tech industry that feels no native commitment to journalism… that wants to avoid responsibility for editing because editing does not scale… that easily surfaces demand for false stories about real events… and that is slowly taking charge of the day-to-day relationship with users of the news system, especially on mobile devices, which is where the growth is.

15. A proven model — proven, that is, by billionaire Peter Thiel — for bankrupting news companies and driving them out of business by using the court system and jury trials, which can leverage public disgust for The Media (see no. 6 above) into jury awards that defendants cannot possibly pay. As yet there is no known counter to this strategy. The fact that it worked once has an intimidating effect.

16. A crisis of representation around covering Trump in which it is not clear that anyone can reliably tell us what his positions are, or explain his reasons for holding them, because he feels free to contradict advisers, spokespeople, surrogates, and previous statements he made. As Esquire’s Charles Pierce put it to me: “Nobody speaks for the prez-elect, not even himself.” I list this because the press is not good at abandoning rituals and routines when they cease to make sense. Every interview with Kellyanne Conway or Reince Priebus is premised on a claim to represent the man in power. This claim may be false. But journalists need people to interview! So they will continue to do it, even though they may be misinforming the public. They may even realize this and be unable to shift course. What I’m trying to point out is that existing methods for “holding power to account” rest on assumptions about how it will behave. A man in power untroubled by contradictions and comfortable in the confusion he creates cannot be held accountable by normal means.

17. Weak leadership and a thin institutional structure in the American press, which is not accustomed to organizing itself to fight back or act assertively in any coordinated way, as with the White House Correspondents Association, currently failing even to get a meeting with the Trump transition team, but still planning to yuck it up with him at the WHCA dinner in the spring of 2017. In many ways the press resembles a “herd of independent minds,” with no one responsible for the beast as a whole, and no easy way to fix broken practices, or re-direct effort. Collaboration is on the rise in journalism, and that’s a good a thing. But while it’s easy to act against the press, it’s almost impossible for the press as a whole to deliberate and act in reply. And even if it could miraculously discover the will to do so, this would probably give new ammunition to political enemies of the press. Remaining a “herd of independent minds,” politically weak, is thus the safest course. Which is not to say it will work.

So that is what I mean by “winter is coming.” All those things 1-17 are happening at once, and strengthening one another. The combined effect is chilling.

The common elements: Low trust all around, an emboldened and nationalist right wing that treats the press as natural enemy, the bill coming due for decades of coasting on a model in political reporting that worked well for “junkies” but failed to engage the rest of us, the strange and disorientating fact that reality itself seems to have become a weaker force in politics, the appeal of the “strong man” and his propaganda within an atmosphere of radical doubt, the difficulty of applying standard methods of journalism to a figure in power who is not trying to represent reality but to substitute himself for it as a show of strength, the unsuitability of prior routine as professionals in journalism try to confront these confusing conditions, a damaged economic base, weak institutional structure and newsroom mono-culture that hinders any creative response, and a dawning recognition that freedom of the press is a fragile state, not a constitutional certainty.

Are there any bright signs? Yes, a few.
18. When you ask about specific news brands (as against The Media) the trust picture looks better.

19. I quote New York Times columnist Jim Rutenberg: “In the weeks since the election, magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Vanity Fair; newspapers including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post; and nonprofits like NPR and ProPublica have been reporting big boosts in subscription rates or donations.” The Guardian and Mother Jones are benefitting, too.

20. According to news industry analyst Ken Doctor, the Washington Post will add more than 60 journalists in the coming year. The Post is making money again. And its leadership believes that “investigative and deeper enterprise stories are good for the brand and the business”— not an expense that has to be subsidized by lighter fare, but a means to sustainability in themselves. That’s significant.

21. As the scope of the emergency dawns, it is possible that journalists in the U.S. will be inspired to do a better job and change what needs changing. Talent (and tips) could flood in as a slumbering public for serious news awakens.

22. Facing the same kind of hostility in multiple countries where similar conditions are found, journalists may discover a new level of international cooperation that helps them cope with the threat to their occupation. There’s already an global movement for fact-checking in journalism. Maybe another one will emerge around the realization that fact-checking is not enough.

23. In the U.S., the Constitution remains firmly in place, hard to alter. First Amendment protections are real and among the strongest in the world. There are no signs that prior restraint or overt government censorship are on the horizon— though self-censorship is another matter.

What not to do…
24. Don’t recruit Trump loyalists into the news and opinion space (Jeffrey Lord of CNN is the model) as a gaudy show of balance. This will not save you. Conservative, red state, working class and rural American voices may deserve special recruitment, but if they have integrity these people are just as likely to be critical of Trump.

25. Don’t settle for accusation-driven over evidence-based reporting, just to avoid drawing flak from Trump’s press-hating supporters or demonstrate how even-handed you are.

26. Don’t make it all about access to the President and his aides, or preserving the routines of White House reporting, as the press corps is currently doing— mostly out of habit. A Trump presidency is likely to be constructed on a propaganda model in which fomenting confusion is not a drag on the Administration’s agenda but a sign that it’s working. Access to such a machinery could wind up enlisting the press in a misinformation campaign. Here, I am getting ahead of the story because we don’t really know what a Trump White House will be like. And I am not saying that access to the president and his top advisors is unimportant or a dirty word. Rather, it should not be the organizing principle for journalists who are preparing to cover Trump.

In part two of this post, coming tomorrow, I will discuss “measures worth taking,” given what I have said in part one. I have several small ideas, and one larger one. It involves listening better than the political system does to what’s troubling Americans, and fashioning a proper news agenda out of that. This is not a new notion, but it is newly relevant now that winter is here for the public service press.
http://pressthink.org/2016/12/winter-co ... ess-trump/

[seemslikeadream]

Bibi Netanyahu Makes Trump His Chump

Thomas L. Friedman DEC. 28, 2016

For those of you confused over the latest fight between President Obama and Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel, let me make it simple: Barack Obama and John Kerry admire and want to preserve Israel as a Jewish and democratic state in the Land of Israel. I have covered this issue my entire adult life and have never met two U.S. leaders more committed to Israel as a Jewish democracy.

But they are convinced — rightly — that Netanyahu is a leader who is forever dog paddling in the middle of the Rubicon, never ready to cross it. He is unwilling to make any big, hard decision to advance or preserve a two-state solution if that decision in any way risks his leadership of Israel’s right-wing coalition or forces him to confront the Jewish settlers, who relentlessly push Israel deeper and deeper into the West Bank.

That is what precipitated this fight over Obama’s decision not to block a U.N. resolution last week criticizing Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The settlers’ goal is very clear, as Kerry put it on Wednesday: to strategically place settlements “in locations that make two states impossible,” so that Israel will eventually annex all of the West Bank. Netanyahu knows this will bring huge problems, but his heart is with the settlers, and his passion is with holding power — at any cost. So in any crunch, he sides with the settlers, and they keep pushing.

Obama ordered the U.S. to abstain on the U.N. resolution condemning the settlements (three months after Obama forged a 10-year, $38 billion military aid package for Israel — the largest for any U.S. ally ever) in hopes of sparking a debate inside Israel and to prevent it from closing off any chance of a two-state solution.

President Obama, left, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel in September. Credit Pool photo by Menahem Kahana
Friends don’t let friends drive drunk, and right now Obama and Kerry rightly believe that Israel is driving drunk toward annexing the West Bank and becoming either a bi-national Arab-Jewish state or some Middle Eastern version of 1960s South Africa, where Israel has to systematically deprive large elements of its population of democratic rights to preserve the state’s Jewish character.

Israel is clearly now on a path toward absorbing the West Bank’s 2.8 million Palestinians. There are already 1.7 million Arabs living in Israel, so putting these two Arab populations together would constitute a significant minority with a higher birthrate than that of Israeli Jews — who number 6.3 million — posing a demographic and democratic challenge.

I greatly sympathize with Israel’s security problems. If I were Israel, I would not relinquish control of the West Bank borders — for now. The Arab world is far too unstable, and Hamas, which controls another 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza, would likely take over the West Bank.

My criticism of Netanyahu is not that he won’t simply quit all the West Bank; it is that he refuses to show any imagination or desire to build workable alternatives that would create greater separation and win Israel global support, such as radical political and economic autonomy for Palestinians in the majority of the West Bank, free of settlements, while Israel still controls the borders and the settlements close to it.

Bibi never lays down a credible peace plan that truly puts the ball in the Palestinians’ court. And when someone like Obama exposes that — and Bibi comes under intense criticism from the liberal half of Israel, which sees the country getting more and more isolated and less and less democratic — Bibi just calls Obama an enemy of Israel and caves to the settlers. U.S. Jewish “leaders” then parrot whatever Bibi says. Sad.

More worrisome is the fact that President-elect Donald Trump — who could be a fresh change agent — is letting himself get totally manipulated by right-wing extremists, and I mean extreme. His ambassador-designate to Israel, David Friedman, has compared Jews who favor a two-state solution to Jews who collaborated with the Nazis. I’ve never heard such a vile slur from one Jew to another.

Trump also has no idea how much he is being manipulated into helping Iran and ISIS. What is Iran’s top goal when it comes to Israel? That Israel never leaves the West Bank and that it implants Jewish settlers everywhere there.

That would keep Israel in permanent conflict with Palestinians and the Muslim world, as well as many Western democracies and their college campuses. It would draw all attention away from Iran’s own human rights abuses and enable Iran and ISIS to present themselves as the leading Muslim protectors of Jerusalem — and to present America’s Sunni Arab allies as lackeys of an extremist Israel. This would create all kinds of problems for these Arab regimes. A West Bank on fire would become a recruitment tool for ISIS and Iran.

One day Trump will wake up and discover that he was manipulated into becoming the co-father, with Netanyahu, of an Israel that is either no longer Jewish or no longer democratic. He will discover that he was Bibi’s chump.

What a true friend of Israel and foe of Iran would do today is just what Obama and Kerry tried — assure Israel long-term military superiority to the tune of $38 billion, but, unlike Trump, who is just passing Israel another bottle of wine, tell our dear ally that it’s driving drunk, needs to stop the settlements and apply that amazing Israeli imagination to preserving Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/28/opini ... chump.html

[chump]

[seemslikeadream]

How Donald Trump Beat Palm Beach Society and Won the Fight for Mar-a-Lago

From the moment Donald Trump set eyes on Mar-a-Lago, the grand palace of old Palm Beach, he was on a collision course with one of the richest and most insular towns in America. Mark Seal chronicles how the president-elect created his “Winter White House” with brash ploys, lawsuits, and by turning Palm Beach’s exclusivity against it.
by MARK SEAL
DECEMBER 27, 2016 10:00 AM

FANFARE FOR THE ORANGE MAN Founding Trumpettes Terry Ebert-Mendozza, Toni Holt Kramer, Janet Levy, and Suzi Goldsmith, photographed in the living room of Mar-a-Lago with the painting The Visionary, by Ralph Wolfe Cowan.
Photograph By Harry Benson.
Standing at the bar at Mar-a-Lago, the outrageously ornate Palm Beach, Florida, mansion built by breakfast-cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post in the Roaring 20s and turned into a private club in 1995 by Donald Trump, I awaited the arrival of the 45th president-elect of the United States. He was coming that mid-November weekend, as he had done so often for the past 30 years. But in so many ways he was already there.

He was there in the minds of his club’s 500 members, who love the place enough to pay a $100,000 initiation fee, plus $14,000 in annual dues. He was there in the Trump wines we were drinking, from the Virginia vineyards run by his son Eric. And he was there in the adoring eyes of the bartender, who motioned to two portraits on the library bar’s walls, telling me, “That’s Marjorie Merriweather Post on the left and Mr. Trump—I mean, Mr. President—on the right.”

The portraits couldn’t be more different: Mrs. Post’s is small and plain, while Donald J. Trump’s, by Palm Beach artist Ralph Wolfe Cowan, is monumental. Clad in tennis whites, with a ray of heavenly Palm Beach sun beaming over his left shoulder, Trump is depicted as a bronzed, blond-haired god, or, as a plaque at the bottom of the frame proclaims, “The Visionary.”

Most of all, though, Donald Trump was there as the protagonist of the newest chapter in Palm Beach’s history: the loud, new-money outsider who came to town—one of the richest and most insular towns in America—and, through the titanic force of his personality, forced the scandalized Old Guard to bend to his will. And it begins, really, with the word “no.”

Not one “no,” but a barrage of them. Starting with the unanimous “No” vote of the town council when Trump appeared before it, in April 1992.

Trump arrived in Palm Beach with his family in the 1980s, a snowbird who had flown in from New York. He was so impressed with the town, its beach, and its golf courses that he placed a security deposit on an apartment at the Breakers, the storied resort hotel and condominium complex overlooking the Atlantic. “He was trying to put two penthouses together so there would be enough room for his kids,” the Breakers sales director later said. But “it couldn’t be done.”

One winter evening in 1985, according to an account Trump later wrote in Trump: The Art of the Comeback, he was being chauffeured to a dinner party when he asked the driver, “What’s for sale in town that’s really good?”

“Well, the best thing by far is Mar-a-Lago, but I guess you wouldn’t be talking about that,” the driver replied, probably thinking that no mortal could afford it.

“I asked him what Mar-a-Lago was,” Trump recalled.

Hearing the gilded story of the biggest house in the richest town, Trump ordered an immediate detour. He was driven through the quiet streets behind whose 12-foot hedges resided the historically understated gentry of America—Kennedys, Du Ponts, Fords, Pulitzers—until they arrived at an estate as grandiose as the aspirations of the Queens-born, 39-year-old real-estate developer in the limousine’s backseat.



Donald Trump in the Mar-a-Lago living room in 2009.
Photo: By PETER LANGONE/LICKERISH/CPI.

From the street Trump stared across the 17 acres of grounds at a phantasmagoria of a home that humbled even him. Mar-a-Lago was named for its location, the property stretching from the ocean to Lake Worth. With interiors designed by Ziegfeld Follies scenic designer Joseph Urban, it was the fantasy of “an American in love with the artistic splendor of Europe . . . [with] Hispano-Moorish tiles of Spain; the frescoes of Florence; Venetian arches to introduce and frame water passages . . . and a ninety-foot castle tower for unimpeded panoramas of sea and sky,” according to a description in Town & Country. There were 128 rooms over 110,000 square feet, with 58 bedrooms, 33 bathrooms, a ballroom (where Mrs. Post held her celebrated square dances), a theater, and a nine-hole golf course.

“I immediately knew it had to be mine,” Trump wrote.

But it had been practically abandoned as a white elephant. Shortly before her death, in 1972, Mrs. Post left Mar-a-Lago to the U.S. government, with the intent that the estate be used as a winter White House for U.S. presidents. But Nixon preferred his friend Bebe Rebozo’s place, farther south, in Key Biscayne, and Jimmy Carter in the extravagant confines of Mar-a-Lago would have been like Donald Trump in, well, the peanut fields of Plains, Georgia. So Carter’s administration, faced with the estate’s $1 million annual taxes and maintenance costs, kicked it back to the Post Foundation in 1981, which didn’t want to shoulder the estate’s financial burden, either. The foundation put it on the market for $20 million.

At the time, Post’s three daughters gathered amid Mar-a-Lago’s splendor, fast falling to neglect and disrepair. Actress Dina Merrill (from Mrs. Post’s second marriage, to stock-brokerage founder E. F. Hutton) and her half-sisters, Adelaide Breevort Close and Eleanor Post Close (from their mother’s first marriage, to stockbroker Edward Bennett Close), made a decision that would lead to the changing of the guard at the historic house, according to Anthony Senecal, who, starting in 1959, worked at Mar-a-Lago for Mrs. Post as one of 35 dining-room footmen and later became Donald Trump’s butler there.

“Adelaide said, ‘I’m not going to put another dime of my own money into this place, and we’ll just sell it as is,’ ” remembers Senecal.

“And Dina Merrill said, ‘O.K., well, I’m with you,’ and then the other daughter said, ‘Well, yeah, I’m with you, too.’ ”

But real offers were slow in coming, until Trump took his detour on the way to the dinner party. “The estate manager gave him a tour of the house, and Mr. Trump told me later that he made the offer to the girls, by letter, I’m sure, of paying $25 million for the 17 acres, the house, and the furnishings,” Senecal says. “And they said no. They wanted more money.”

But soon, the wolf was not only at the door—he was also on the beach.

Trump offered $2 million for a beachfront lot in front of Mar-a-Lago—which Post’s foundation had sold earlier for $346,000. While Trump didn’t buy the property until he closed on Mar-a-Lago, The Washington Post reported, “he decided to play hardball. He said he bought the beachfront property directly in front of it through a third party and threatened to put up a hideous home to block Mar-a-Lago’s ocean view.” “That was my first wall,” he told the Post. “That drove everybody nuts. They couldn’t sell the big house because I owned the beach, so the price kept going down and down.”

“So they decided to take Mr. Trump’s last offer, and sold him the house and the 17 acres and all the furnishings for less than $8 million,” says Senecal.


A MAN’S CASTLE IS HIS HOME Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.
By John Roca/New York Daily News Archive/Getty Images (Mar-A-Lago), By Scott Keeler/© Tampa Bay Times/The Image Works (Inset).
Mar-a-Lago’s bargain price tag rocks community, read the headline of the January 5, 1986, Palm Beach Daily News. Adding insult to injury, Trump would later write of Dina Merrill that she was “Mrs. Post’s arrogant and aloof daughter, who was born with her mother’s beauty but not her brains.” Confronted with Trump’s assessment, Merrill told a reporter, “How lovely. He’s a charming man, isn’t he?” (Merrill could not be reached for comment.)

“In the beginning, most of Palm Beach’s Old Guard did their best to avoid him,” says Vanderbilt scion Whitney Tower Jr., whose family members have lived in Palm Beach for almost a century. But now Donald Trump was not only a presence to be reckoned with in Palm Beach—he owned its biggest and grandest house. Trump had another problem, though: he was going broke.

“THERE’S NOTHING THE OLD ELITE HATES SO MUCH AND FEARS SO PROFOUNDLY AS DONALD TRUMP’S CLUB.”
“I was many billions in the red, $975 million of that debt I’d personally guaranteed,” Trump would write of his dire early-1990s financial straits. “The banks were crawling all over me. The Gulf War had a disastrous effect on tourism. Cash flows were dwindling at my casinos. Then I missed a mortgage payment on the Castle in Atlantic City. All hell broke loose. Wall Street went nuts. . . . Then, after being pummeled by my bankers, Ivana turned around and sued me [for divorce] for $2 billion.”

One Friday, while meeting with his bankers in New York, Trump inadvertently mentioned that he was flying to Mar-a-Lago on his 727 for the weekend. Upon seeing his bankers’ displeasure, he blurted out, spur-of-the-moment, “Fellows, I’m going to subdivide the 17 acres of Mar-a-Lago rather than sell the house . . . [and] build mansions on the ground. I’ll call the project the Mansions at Mar-a-Lago. I’ll turn it into a moneymaker.”

When he publicly announced his plan a new furor ensued: a Palm Beach landmark was in the hands of Donald Trump, who wanted to subdivide it into mini-mansions!

“Red Alert—Mar-a-Lago,” read the urgent call to arms from the Preservation Society of Palm Beach.

A year of meetings and hearings ensued, with fiery rhetoric on both sides. After six hours of deliberation, the council rejected Trump’s plan by a unanimous vote. Trump, “who slipped into the meeting Thursday, just as the board was voting, had his response ready: ‘I’m going to bring a $100 million lawsuit against the town of Palm Beach.’ ” (In fact he would sue the town for $50 million.)

“I’m no longer in the mood to compromise,” he told the Palm Beach Daily News the day after the ruling, with his then girlfriend, “a bikini-clad Marla Maples,” in the backyard of Mar-a-Lago. “I gave [the town] an opportunity, and they blew it. Now, I’m going to get everything I’m entitled to.”

Trump would later say that what he really wanted was to turn Mar-a-Lago into a private club—and some insisted he was miffed at not being invited to join the Bath and Tennis Club. “Utter bullshit!” he told Marie Brenner in this magazine in 1990. “They kiss my ass in Palm Beach. Those phonies! That club [the Bath and Tennis] called me and asked me if they could have my consent to use part of my beach to expand the space for their cabanas! I said, ‘Of course!’ Do you think if I wanted to be a member they would have turned me down? I wouldn’t join that club, because they don’t take blacks and Jews.”


Trump and butler Anthony Senecal, 1997.
By Art Streiber/August.
SOME RESTRICTIONS APPLY

In Palm Beach the private club to which you belong is not only your playground: it’s your platform, signaling who you are socially, economically, and culturally. Membership at the Bath and Tennis Club announces your arrival, and survival of an onerous vetting process, including backgrounds and bloodlines. “I know people who moved to Palm Beach, got blackballed at the B&T, and left town,” says one observer. The B&T, as its name implies, is the town’s premier lunch, pool, beach, and tennis club, its crescent-shaped, red-tile-roofed clubhouse overlooking a prime stretch of beach just across the street—but to its members’ mind-set, a world away—from Mar-a-Lago. It’s a lovely place where it’s always summer, where gentlemen in Vilebrequin swimsuits and linen shirts and ladies in pastels and pinks with sweaters over their shoulders socialize in much the same way they did when the club was established, in 1927.

“The B&T is frequented by heirs of old-line American industrial families with household names,” says book publisher Adrian Zackheim, whose former father-in-law was a member. “It’s considered bad form at the B&T to ask people what they do, because many of them don’t have regular jobs. A typical B&T obituary describes the deceased as ‘an avid sportsman.’ Instead, you’re better off asking them what they hunt.” Quail, duck, or pheasant?

Likewise, if you’re a member of the Everglades Club, you’re part of a heritage that has included such names as Vanderbilt, Whitney, Du Pont, Kennedy, Cabot, Pillsbury, Scripps, and Hilton. According to a longtime local, membership requires multiple nominations, letters of approval, and an excruciating vetting process in which three “No” votes from members means you’re out. So tight were the Everglades restrictions that “the old rule, to my understanding, was no member should bring a guest who would not be approved for membership themselves,” says the publicist and former Palm Beach resident Paul Wilmot. They weren’t kidding. Famed socialite C. Z. Guest and her husband, the polo champion Winston Frederick Churchill Guest, were suspended after they hosted a 25th-anniversary party that included cosmetics queen Estée Lauder and Nancy Reagan confidant Jerry Zipkin (not coincidentally, both were Jewish). The current seasonal aristocracy includes Cuban sugarcane brothers Pepe and Alfy Fanjul; Trump’s incoming secretary of commerce, Wilbur Ross; local social doyenne Pauline Pitt; security-services king Thomas C. Quick; and billionaire David Koch.

If you’re Jewish, there was a club for you, too, the century-old Palm Beach Country Club, “the top primarily Jewish club in the country—nothing else even comes close,” says a member. Other members have included Wall Street legend Henry Kaufman; New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft; private-equity-firm chieftain Henry Kravis; Seagram scion Charles Bronfman . . . and, infamously, Bernie Madoff, who found many of his victims there.

This was the genteel and closed world of private clubs in Palm Beach prior to the arrival of Donald Trump. Ironically, because of their tight restrictions and penchant for keeping people out, they became the Achilles’ heel that enabled Trump to alter the exclusionary culture of Palm Beach forever.

Getting nowhere with the Town Council on his Mar-a-Lago subdivision proposal, Trump needed a “fix-it person,” says Richard Rampell, the head of a prominent local accounting firm and the brother of the attorney who would help clear the way for Trump into Palm Beach, Paul Rampell. “So Trump meets with my brother, and my brother comes up with an idea to convert Mar-a-Lago into a private club that is open to everyone,” Richard Rampell tells me. At the time, Palm Beach’s Waspy private clubs had what he calls an open secret: as Trump claimed, they didn’t admit Jews or African-Americans.

With the specter of his lawsuit still hanging over the council, it voted 4--1 to approve Trump’s plan, and those who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, become members of the other clubs now had a club of their own. Naturally, the question when it comes to Donald Trump is always: Was it for him or them? “He basically opened Palm Beach up . . . to make a buck,” says Laurence Leamer, author of The President’s Butler, a novel about a “flamboyant” New Yorker who becomes president. “But he did it, and a lot of people in his shoes at that time wouldn’t have done it.”

Trump instructed his attorney to settle his $50 million lawsuit against the town, and the selling of the Mar-a-Lago Club began, with typical Donald Trump bravado. MAR-A-LAGO CLUB MEMBERSHIP LIST A REAL WHO’S WHO, read a December 12, 1994, Palm Beach Post headline, noting that Steven Spielberg, Henry Kissinger, Lee Iacocca, Denzel Washington, Michael Ovitz, Norman Mailer, and Elizabeth Taylor, among others, had joined. The club’s membership director added, in a later article, that Princess Diana and Prince Charles, then separated, “each filed their own application and paid their own $50,000 initiation fee.” But in March, Trump admitted that he had merely sent the royal couple and the other celebrities unsolicited offers for free honorary membership. According to The New York Times Magazine, he later declared, “I believe everyone’s going to accept.” (Many, if not all, declined membership, according to media reports at the time.)

HURRICANE DONALD

Donald trump challenges Agreement with town, read the full-page Palm Beach Preservation Foundation ad, alerting all citizens to appear at a special Town Council hearing on September 16, 1996, at which Trump would appeal to end certain restrictions—affecting noise and traffic, etc.—that had been part of his agreement with the council for approval of his club.

“At the insistence of Mr. Trump’s representatives, this Special Hearing comes at a time of year when many residents are away,” read the preservation foundation ad. Nevertheless, every seat in the council chambers was taken, with 72 citizens standing in the back, when the meeting began at 9:30 A.M. Trump and his attorney had already implied that he and his club had been discriminated against because many of its members were Jewish, and, worse, that the council members who had placed the conditions on him had not placed those restrictions on their own clubs. The council members were “more than pissed off,” says Richard Rampell, as this “put them on the defensive.”

Before the meeting, Paul Rampell had sent the council members copies of the movies Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—in which Katharine Houghton brings Sidney Poitier home to her parents, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy—and Gentleman’s Agreement, the 1947 film in which Gregory Peck plays a reporter who masquerades as a Jew to write a story about anti-Semitism.

“It was quite contentious,” recalls Lesly Smith, who, as president, presided over the meeting of the Town Council. “It was supposed to last for an hour, and I believe it went until two A.M.” When the council agreed to drop only three restrictions—the ban on photography at the club, a requirement for advance reservations to use certain facilities, and a requirement that Trump put 10 percent of room-rental revenues into a fund for restoring the estate—his lawyer circulated a copy of a new lawsuit against the town.

To Trump’s detractors, it was proof of ruthless bullying by him; to his supporters, a sign of strength. “Well, my God, the man is a born winner!” Toni Holt Kramer told me in her grand Palm Beach home. A former Hollywood reporter and the wife of retired car dealer Robert David “Bobby” Kramer, she is the bubbly blonde founder of the Trumpettes, Donald Trump’s most die-hard fans. During the campaign the Trumpettes shouted their allegiance to their hero from sound trucks, and later in the halls of Mar-a-Lago, where they celebrated his victory. “Donald Trump will do whatever it takes to win!” Kramer enthusiastically told me. “People who succeed can’t always be delicate debutantes!”


Trump and then wife Marla Maples, 1997.
By Art Streiber/August.
‘There is nothing the old elite hates so much and fears so profoundly as Donald Trump’s club,” wrote Leamer. Beauty-pageant contestants, rock stars, nearly naked lovelies poolside! On top of that, Trump recruited the likes of Céline Dion, Tony Bennett, Vic Damone, Billy Joel, and Diana Ross to sing in concerts in a 10,000-square-foot tent (since replaced by the 20,000-square-foot Donald J. Trump Grand Ballroom) Trump erected on his front lawn. “The tent wasn’t a good noise container,” says Leslie Shaw, a former member of the Town Council. “And you would have limos coming from Fort Lauderdale and Miami and friends flying in from all over.”

Palm Beach’s residential-noise ordinance stipulates that events must end at 11 P.M. How long did Mar-a-Lago’s events go? “Until two,” says Shaw, which resulted only in a nominal fine. As the parties ramped up, day and night, so did the ire of neighbors, including the Bath and Tennis Club. In 1998, Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs and Jennifer Lopez spent Easter Sunday weekend at Mar-a-Lago. One lunchtime the couple took a stroll on the beach, coming to rest on a beach chair beneath the Bath and Tennis Club’s picture windows, where they commenced what columnist Shannon Donnelly would later call the “Horizontal Rumba.”

“They crawled into one of the Bath and Tennis chairs and were doing the big nasty right beneath the Bath and Tennis’s picture windows with all of the grandmothers having lunch with their grandchildren,” remembers Donnelly, who broke the story in the Palm Beach Daily News.

But there was one commotion Trump himself couldn’t abide, and it came from above: airplanes flying over Mar-a-Lago. The flight path from Palm Beach International Airport passed directly over the estate, with planes flying over so noisily and so frequently that Trump felt the airport’s director “had a vendetta against him,” recalled Richard Rampell.

Trump wanted the county to move the airport, so he organized a “Noise Pollution Action Fund” with his neighbors, and, naturally, filed lawsuits. He sued Palm Beach County four times over the planes, but it was his 1995 lawsuit for $75 million against the county that would turn the noise into Trump gold.

SON OF A BEACH!

The county had advertised 215 acres of barren scrubland for lease south of the airport, near the county jail. Only one interested party had responded: Trump. He offered to drop his lawsuit in return for the county’s leasing him the land for 30 years, beginning at $438,000 a year, with an option for longer. Since the county had already paid a Washington, D.C., law firm a quarter of its $1.1 million commitment to fight Trump in court, the county officials accepted the offer. “This is the classic win-win situation,” one of the county’s attorneys told a local newspaper.

But the big winner was, once again, Donald Trump. In 1999, the seemingly useless scrubland became the site of the Trump International Golf Club. Again, he got the property at a steal, and after moving an estimated three million cubic yards of earth and transplanting 1,000 oaks and 700 royal-palm trees—with “an unlimited budget” Trump estimated at $40 million—he opened an 18-hole, Jim Fazio-designed course, also as a private club.

“In the beginning, [the initiation fee] was up to $250,000—or less—depending on who you knew and how he thought you fit in,” says an informed source. “It was all about him being the greatest P.R. man who ever lived. He’s always saying, ‘This is the greatest! He’s the greatest!’ ”

“It’s a beautiful course, and he had some very good members there, but after the crash of ‘08 a lot of people got Madoffed,” says another member. “He lost a lot of members. So he started selling limited memberships. People who joined for six figures were all of a sudden seeing people who bought memberships for less.”

Meanwhile, Trump has not stopped waging war with the town, “over sprinkler systems and fireproofing methods for the 16th century Portuguese tapestries that hung on his walls . . . over photo shoots, concerts and charity benefits . . . over ficus hedges,” according to the Tampa Bay Times. In 2006 he sued the town over his American flag. Not just any flag, but a Trump-huge, stadium-size flag atop an 80-foot pole in front of Mar-a-Lago—double the height allowed by local ordinance. When Trump was fined $250 a day, he sued the town for $25 million. But when the fines for the flag reached $120,000, Trump finally moved the pole and lowered the height, while reaping some good publicity by promising to donate $100,000 to veterans’ charities.

“He always wins,” says an exasperated resident. “And now his club is the winter fucking White House.”

On the morning of Trump’s arrival in Palm Beach, I drove down South Ocean Boulevard to Mar-a-Lago, to find that it has been turned into a fortress, protected by land, water, and air by the Secret Service and other agencies. Awarded the high-security status of the presidency, the club has indeed become the winter White House that Marjorie Merriweather Post envisioned, incidentally causing all of Donald Trump’s remaining conflicts with Palm Beach to suddenly vanish.

Commercial and private flights can no longer fly in its airspace when the president is in residence.

He can fly any size flag on any size flagpole he desires on his grounds.

His latest lawsuit against Palm Beach County was dropped.

And the Old Guard that once so angrily cursed and condemned him have gone mute, with what one local society member calls “amnesia.” Another says, “Everyone is lining up to kiss the ring. People are pissed off about what his comings and goings will do to the traffic here. But the fact is, against every pundit and the odds, he is the most important man in the world.”

Yes, Donald Trump was arriving not merely as the new president of the United States of America. More pertinently to these privileged few, he is now King of Palm Beach.



Donald Trump’s Mansions and Saddam Hussein’s Palaces Are Basically the Same

The Grand Staircase
In comparing the palatial estates of Donald Trump and Saddam Hussein, what better place to start than magnificent stairways. Every demagogue needs one; it’s part of the essential decor package, imperative for Making an Entrance, issuing grand pronouncements, or in the inevitable Hollywood biopic, raining indiscriminate hellfire down upon disloyal minions from a gold-plated AK-47, staving off a palace coup.
On the top: The “foyer” of the Donald’s former manse in Greenwich, Connecticut.

On the bottom: A “double-revolution staircase,” constructed of white marble with a mother-of-pearl overlay, in one of the three reception palaces at Saddam Hussein’s presidential compound in his hometown of Tikrit. (Note the third, uppermost staircase, which is the architectural equivalent of Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel explaining that his guitar amplifiers are superior, because “these go to 11.”)

Photo: Top, courtesy of Vista; bottom, by Patrick Robert/Corbis.

http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2016/12 ... mar-a-lago

[seemslikeadream]

Lobe and Wright on How Trump Could Spark a Disastrous Conflict
Published on January 2nd, 2017 | by Jasmin Ramsey


http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/44809?in=00:00&out=66:57

[seemslikeadream]

Prospects for the American press under Trump, part two
Winter is coming. But there are things that can be done. The second half of my post on the American press under threat. (Part one is here.)

30 DEC 2016 3:53 PM
pressdamnIn part one of this post, I described in 17 numbered paragraphs a bleak situation for the American press as a check on power, now that Donald Trump has been elected. My summary of it went like this:

Low trust all around, an emboldened and nationalist right wing that treats the press as natural enemy, the bill coming due for decades of coasting on a model in political reporting that worked well for “junkies” but failed to engage the rest of us, the strange and disorientating fact that reality itself seems to have become a weaker force in politics, the appeal of the “strong man” and his propaganda within an atmosphere of radical doubt, the difficulty of applying standard methods of journalism to a figure in power who is not trying to represent reality but to substitute himself for it as a show of strength, the unsuitability of prior routine as professionals in journalism try to confront these confusing conditions, a damaged economic base, weak institutional structure and newsroom mono-culture that hinders any creative response, and a dawning recognition that freedom of the press is a fragile state, not a constitutional certainty.
This is a crisis with many overlapping and deep-seated causes, not just a problem but what scholars call a wicked problem— a mess. You don’t “solve” messes, you approach them with humility and respect for their beastliness. Trying things you know won’t “fix” it can teach you more about the problem’s wickedness. That’s progress. Realizing that no one is an expert in the problem helps, because it means that good ideas can come from anywhere.

Being willing to start over is good, too. If I were running a big national desk in DC, I would try to zero-base the beat structure. Meaning: if you had no existing beats for covering national affairs in Donald Trump’s America, if you had to create them all from scratch, what would that system look like?

Is that going to fix what’s broken in political journalism? Nope. But trying it might reveal possibilities that were harder to see before. So let me be clear about this: I don’t have solutions to what I described in part one. And I’m not saying my suggestions are equal to the task. They are not. Rather, this is what I can think of. I have a series of small ideas that might be worth trying and a larger one to spell out.

I wish had better answers for you.

Measures worth taking (not “solutions.”)
27. Uncouple the news agenda from Trump’s Twitter feed. I don’t agree with those who say the press should ignore Trump’s tweets. Even calling them tweets is in a way an illusion. These are public statements from the president-elect. Bulletins from the top. Naming them for their means of delivery (Twitter) doesn’t help. They can’t be ignored any more than an announcement on whitehouse.gov can be disregarded.

But it is true that Trump uses his Twitter feed to deflect, distract, intimidate, monopolize and confuse. The press should find a way of handling — and fact-checking — these bulletins that shrinks them into a sidebar, or weaves them into a larger story originated by journalists rather than Trump’s Twitter finger. (One option: annotation.) Don’t let his feed set your agenda. And learn to be more careful with your headlines! That may be all he wants: your lazy headline.

28. Switch to an “outside in” (rather than inside out) pattern. Assume almost no access to Trump and the people around him who have power, or imagine that the access game becomes a net negative. Now what? You still have to find out what’s going on, but the “access” portal is closed. This seems to me a better starting point, even as you fight for real access, defend the daily briefing, and demand timely responses to Freedom of Information requests.

Outside-in means you start on the rim and work towards the center, rather than the reverse. Domestically, it involves mining sources in the agencies and civil service rather than the people perceived as “players.” (As is commonly done in investigative journalism.) With foreign policy it means more is likely to come from other governments than from the U.S.

During the Trump campaign who had better access: The reporters in the media pen, or those who got tickets and moved with the rest of the crowd? Were the news organizations on the blacklist really at a disadvantage? I can hear the reply. We need both: inside and outside. Fine, do both. My point is: outside-in can become the baseline method, and inside-out the occasionally useful variant. Switch it up. Send interns to the daily briefing when it becomes a newsless mess. Move the experienced people to the rim.

29. Less predictable, please. If Trump can break with established norms so can the journalists who cover him. When you’re not where he expects you to be, you’re winning. I’m not going to elaborate on this because that would defeat the point of listing it.

30. Drop the White House Correspondents Association Dinner. Just stop. You know why.

31. Track closely Trump’s promises and boasts during the campaign so you can compare them to what he is doing. It’s already underway. More like this.

32. From a follower on Twitter: (Good ideas can come from anywhere.) Seek and accept offers to speak on the radio in areas of Trump’s greatest support. Audience development people: this is your gig. Perfect thing to talk about about on red state talk radio: comparing Trump’s campaign promises to what what he has actually done.

33. Make common cause with scholars who have been there. Especially experts in authoritarianism and countries when democratic conditions have been undermined, so you know what to watch for— and report on. (Creeping authoritarianism is a beat: who do you have on it?)

34. Keep an eye on the internationalization of these trends, and find spots to collaborate with journalists across borders.

35. Try threat modeling the loss of press freedom or the vanished capacity to hold government to account.

36. Find coverage patterns that cross the great divide. For example: “Dave Weigel, who brought his distinct voice and broad knowledge of the far-right and far-left to our 2016 campaign coverage, will do the same on the Hill. He will track Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the Senate, and the Freedom Caucus in the House. He will look for new movements, new factions and new stars. And he will continue reporting on the so-called alt-right and the fake news industry, tracking its origins and spotlighting its authors in real time.”

37. Learn from Fahrenthold! Nothing I have said so far addresses the hardest problem in journalism right now: recovering trust while doing good work. But David Fahrenthold, the Washington Post reporter who uncovered the fiction of Donald Trump’s philanthropic giving, is single-handedly showing the way. It’s not just the great stories he’s digging up, or the way they hold power to account. It’s also the social turn his investigation took, and the lesson in transparency that he’s teaching the press.

Fahrenthold explains what he’s doing as he does it. He lets the ultimate readers of his work see how painstakingly it is put together. He lets those who might have knowledge help him. People who follow along can see how much goes into one of his stories, which means they are more likely to trust it. (And to mistrust Trump’s attacks on it… See how that works?) He’s also human, humble, approachable, and very, very determined. He never goes beyond the facts, but he calls bullshit when he has the facts. So impressive are the results that people tell me all the time that Fahrenthold by himself got them to subscribe.

He is not “solving,” but he’s certainly helping with the trust problem, the revenue problem, and the press-hater-in-chief problem (numbers 6, 1, 8 in part one of this post) all while pumping out Pulitzer-worthy stories that prove to Americans why we have a free press. That’s how a “mess” yields to patient effort. His methods are no mystery. They point the way to a trust restoration and learn-as-you-go project that needs to start tomorrow in journalism. Teams of people should be doing it the way he does it.

Learn from Fahrenthold! I can’t make it any clearer than that.

38. I’m not sure how to put this one, but here goes: Journalists need to think politically about journalism itself, which does not mean to politicize it. Like it or not, the press is a public actor, currently in the fight of its life against forces that want to bring it down. This is a political situation par excellence, but nothing in their training or temperament prepares journalists to fight the kind of battle they’re in. They think they would rather chase stories, publish what they find and let the politics take care of itself. But that won’t cut it anymore.

What I mean by “think politically” involves basic questions: What do we stand for that others also believe in? Who is aligned against us? Where are we most vulnerable? What are our opponents’ strengths? How can we broaden our base? Who are our natural allies? What can we unite around, despite our internal differences? What are the overlapping interests that might permit us to make common cause with people who are not journalists?

There is a reason these (political) questions sound “off” to most people in journalism. A free press has to be independent, or it is useless to us. That remains true, even in the emergency journalists find themselves in today. But staying independent does not mean standing alone. They cannot win this fight alone.

Reacting to their perception of a national emergency, Americans who still have trust in the press are putting money down and signing up for the news sources they want to support. What is that but a form of civic action? It involves not a party or interest group competing for power, but a public good they want to exist: accountability journalism. Nothing else can explain the surge in subscriber revenue following the election of Trump.

From journalists is only one way Americans get news now. They get it directly from newsmakers, as with Trump’s Twitter feed. They get it from ideological cadres styled as news sources, like Breitbart. They get it from entertainers like Rush Limbaugh (an opponent of the press) or John Oliver (an ally of accountability journalism). They get it from friends and family members passing along a personalized mix of stuff. They get it from people interested in the same things who collect online and pool information. They get it from bad actors filling false reports that look like news, like Alex Jones or those Macedonian teenagers.

How to persuade more people to get news from journalism — when they have many other choices at hand — is what I mean by thinking politically, but the wrong way to win that fight would be to politicize the product. This is where the problem of trust in the news media meets problems of practice in journalism; the two things are really one: how to begin to practicing in a way that might begin to expand trust. That’s why I said learn from Fahrenthold. He’s got that part working.

39. Where troubles meet issues: listening better.

After the election we heard this a lot: journalists need to listen better to people outside their current orbit and pick up the signals they somehow missed in 2016. As Jeff Jarvis put it in a morning-after symposium:

The news industry is stuck in its mass-media worldview, trying to create one product for all. Its worldview is limited by its creators’ lack of diversity — ethnic, economic, geographic, political (and let’s finally admit that most media and journalists are liberal).

We must do a much better job of listening to more communities — African-American, Latino, LGBT, women, of course, and also the angry white men (and women) who bred Trumpism — so we can understand and empathize with their needs, serve those needs, gain their trust, and then reflect and inform their worldviews.
We must do a better job of listening… It sounds good: who is not in favor of that? But what does better mean in this context? Better than whom?

Here’s an abstract answer (sorry: it will only take a minute!) Journalists, I think, need to listen for people’s troubles, and find the points where they connect to public issues. And they have to be better at that than a broken political system is. From there they can start to rebuild trust.

The distinction between “troubles” and “issues” was struck by sociologist C. Wright Mills in the 1950s. He said troubles were the problems that concern people in their immediate experience. “An issue is a public matter: some value cherished by publics is felt to be threatened.” When the issues that get attention fail to connect to people’s troubles, or when common troubles don’t get surfaced and formulated as public issues… that is where journalism-as-listener can intervene, and earn back trust.

A vivid example is the movie “Spotlight.” Thousands of people were personally troubled by the legacy of child abuse in the Catholic Church. But their private suffering was not a public issue until the Boston Globe made it one— by listening to their stories, piecing them together and confronting the people in power. For the Globe, the gain in reputation from that act was incalculable: years of goodwill in the community, impossible to purchase any other way.

But “Spotlight” is a once-in-a-lifetime story. More Spotlights is not much of a suggestion, is it?

This call-out was published two weeks after the election by the non-profit public affairs news site, Texas Tribune: Help us hear more voices from more Texans. It’s asking people to support with their donations a new position:

Voices not previously heard by the political establishment are being heard now. It’s a good time for the press to hone its listening skills too. This is and always has been — or should have been — a two-way conversation.

That’s why we’re crowdfunding the Trib’s first-ever community reporter position. This reporter will go the extra mile, literally, to forge relationships with our readers all across this state, translating their feedback into stories produced by our awesome reporters. The new position will ensure that the voices of more Texans from more places inform our coverage. This reporter’s beat will be Texans.
The bread-and-butter of the Texas Tribune is government and public policy news. Here it wants to make sure that the issues it reports upon speak to the troubles Texans experience in their lives. The beat is “Texans” because that is one way to make sure the listening gets done. It’s a modest start (one person, one beat) but there’s a big idea beneath the bubbly pitch.

Journalism that tries to find its public through “inside” coverage of the political class is vulnerable to rejection by portions of the public that are busy rejecting that class. This is a hard problem, to which “listening” sounds like a soft, warm and fuzzy solution. It isn’t.

Andrew Haeg, CEO of the journalism start-up Groundsource, recently tried to sketch what a “listening” model looks like. I found inspiring his imaginary description of a two-person listening team:

Emboldened by election postmortems urging better listening, inspired by Spotlight, trained in new tools and techniques, and stoked to pioneer new forms of listening-first investigative journalism, the duo works deep into the night, tipped over Chinese takeout, bleary-eyed, adrenaline-fueled, writing as they go a new playbook comprised of equal parts data journalism, community outreach, crowdsourcing, and investigative journalism.

They print and post handmade signs in grocery stores and truck stops: “What should we know?” with a phone number to text or call. They FOIA 311 data, download 211 data from the United Way, use Splunk and IFTTT and other tools to trigger alerts when key community datasets are updated. They hold town hall forums, set open office hours at local coffee shops and diners, and form key partnerships with community organizations to invite underserved communities into the conversation. They build a community of hundreds who ask questions and vote on which ones get answered, get texts with updates on the newsgathering progress and ongoing opportunities to share their concerns and stories. The community feed that develops is rich, authentic, and often shockingly prescient.
Five years ago I published this post: The Citizens Agenda in Campaign Coverage. It went nowhere with the U.S. press. It describes a listening model for election journalism in which the central question put to voters is not: who are you going to vote for? Or why are you so angry? But: what do you want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for votes? (It’s based on a 1992 project at the Charlotte Observer that did exactly that.) A team of journalists who had supple and plural answers to that — because they did the work and got it right — would hold in their hands a template for election coverage that builds trust.

For if you know what different groups of voters want the candidates to discuss (and you’re right!) you can push the candidates to address those things, whether they want to or not. You also have a blueprint for your own news agenda that is independent of the candidates, but expressive of the voters. I don’t know that this model would have prevented the debacle we saw in 2016, but I do know that horse race journalism has failed the people who practice it.

Whenever troubles don’t match up with issues, there is trust to be won for journalists able to listen better than systems that are failing people. Somehow this insight will have to be combined with more traditional virtues in journalism, if the press is going to withstand the attacks that are coming and thrive in a far more dangerous world.
http://pressthink.org/2016/12/prospects ... -part-two/

[seemslikeadream]

Report: Trump plans to shrink top intelligence agencies, including CIA

http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-ov ... dni-2017-1

Trump Reportedly Now Wants to Cut Back the CIA Because He Thinks Intelligence Is Too Politicized

Donald Trump, who famously does not use email or speak a foreign language or apparently travel much outside the Trump-themed hotel circuit, has some ideas. This should end well.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/ ... cized.html

Trump Sells America Out To Putin With Plan To Cut The CIA
By Jason Easley on Wed, Jan 4th, 2017 at 6:51 pm
President-elect Trump is planning on cutting the nation's intelligence agencies in another move that is a direct sellout designed to empower Russia and Putin.

don't forget the CIA did NOT create the Niger Forgeries

[82_28]

What if at trump's precendtial dysaguaration some or many in the crowd do the notsee salute? What if? What if?