*president trump is seriously dangerous*

[seemslikeadream]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVGg7ssl0XY

[SonicG]

I really cannot bear to watch that...

That's too bad, because it was intriguing.

- This was a plea for help, or more directly, a request to not be killed.
- The request to not be killed was accompanied by a promise of money.
- The president intimated that the CIA would be give free reign to do as they pleased.
- He also intimated that he hopes they will get the chance to invade Iraq and take control of the oil fields.
- There was some real applause, but the vast majority of it was highly prompted by his claquers. Watch the people in front of the camera carefully. when they don't move during an applause session, the clapping is coming from Trump's retinue of lackeys.

Thanks for the recap. I read some of the transcript. How effective was his plea mixed in with some of the weakest attempts at self-aggrandizement I have ever seen?

But I met him, and I said “he is so good”. Number one in his class at West Point. Now, I know a lot about West Point. I’m a person that very strongly believes in academics. In fact, every time I say, I had an uncle who was a great professor at MIT for 35 years, who did a fantastic job in so many different ways academically. He was an academic genius.

And then they say: “is Donald Trump an intellectual?” Trust me. I’m like a smart person. [laughter] [pointing at Mike Pompeo] And I recognized immediately
...
And they said “Donald Trump did not draw well”. And I said “well it was almost raining”. The rain should have scared them away. But God looked down and he said “we’re not going to let it rain on your speech”.

In fact, when I first started I said “oh no”. First line, I got hit by a couple of drops. And i said “oh, this is too bad, but we’ll go right through it”. But the truth is: that it stopped immediately. It was amazing. And then it became really sudden, and then I walked off and it poured right after I left - it poured.

The CIA is most certainly full of cold-hearted bastards, but even they can smell the BS Trump is piling up, and think, WTF...Or maybe they realize that Trump is there to just pump out hot air while they (intelligence agencies) get to go back to doing what they want with even less oversight and restraint?

[Iamwhomiam]

Trump's speech at the CIA is terrifying. Aside his backpedaling, obviously to save his life as barracuda notes, was his reference to taking the oil; we have assets but have been restrained from using them; eliminating ISIS and winning a war. Know the last war we won? Remember how?

Quite a historic speech, really. Wandering, egocentric, militaristic, absurd deliver yet one with a profoundly ominous message.

[SonicG]

Know the last war we won?

The War on Drugs? Shit, he might just decide to bring that back to "save the ravaged inner cities..."



Oh, Armando Ianucci could not have done it better...

[Iamwhomiam]

WWII

[SonicG]

WWII

oh...right...I lived in Hiroshima for 11 years, so I vaguely remember how that war was "won"...
Iran is basically on the other side of the world, so a few nukes there won't have any effects on the good ole' USA...

[seemslikeadream]

News Media, Target of Trump’s Declaration of War, Expresses Alarm
By SYDNEY EMBER and MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUMJAN. 22, 2017

Among other easily debunked assertions, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, claimed on Saturday that Donald J. Trump’s inauguration was the most attended in history. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
For wary Washington journalists, it seemed only a matter of time before Donald J. Trump’s presidency would lead to a high-tension standoff between his administration and the news media.

But on Day 1?

The news media world found itself in a state of shock on Sunday, a day after Mr. Trump declared himself in “a running war with the media” and the president’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, used his first appearance on the White House podium to deliver a fiery jeremiad against the press.

Worse, many journalists said, were the falsehoods that sprang from the lips of both Mr. Trump and Mr. Spicer on Saturday. Mr. Trump accused the news media of confecting a battle between himself and the intelligence services (in fact, he had previously compared the services to Nazi Germany in a Twitter post). And among other easily debunked assertions, Mr. Spicer falsely claimed that Mr. Trump’s inauguration was the most attended in history (photographs indicated it was not).

“It was absolutely surprising and stunning,” the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, Jeff Mason, said on CNN on Sunday.

In a phone interview later, Mr. Mason said: “People were surprised. I was surprised. It’s not what I was expecting for the first statement by the press secretary in the press room.”

The tensions flared anew on Sunday when Kellyanne Conway, one of Mr. Trump’s top advisers, said in a television interview that Mr. Spicer had merely presented “alternative facts” about the inauguration, prompting an astonished response from her questioner, Chuck Todd of NBC.

“Wait a minute — ‘alternative facts’?” Mr. Todd asked Ms. Conway on “Meet the Press.” “Look, alternative facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods.”

When Mr. Todd pressed her about why the administration had put Mr. Spicer behind the lectern for the first time to “utter a provable falsehood,” Ms. Conway responded with a sharp threat. “If we’re going to keep referring to our press secretary in those types of terms, I think that we’re going to have to rethink our relationship here,” she said.

Video of Ms. Conway’s evasion quickly spread on social media. The phrases “alternative facts” and “#alternativefacts” had been used on Twitter more than 380,000 times by midafternoon on Sunday, a Twitter spokesman said.

Also by Sunday afternoon, there were scattered calls for the White House press corps to boycott Mr. Spicer’s briefings, although such a drastic response appeared unlikely.

Ben Smith, the editor in chief of BuzzFeed, said on Sunday that the briefings were “a useful, if not essential, tradition” and that his outlet would keep a reporter there. Mr. Smith added that the Trump administration would “find practical reasons to be honest.”

“In particular,” Mr. Smith wrote in an email, “I think they’ll find in moments of real crisis, rather than political theater, that they need to win back the credibility that they are spending now.”

Mr. Mason, the correspondents’ association president, who is the chief liaison between the White House press corps and Mr. Spicer, said his goal was to maintain a constructive relationship.

“It’s up to him and up to the president to decide how they want to get started,” Mr. Mason said of Mr. Spicer. “And that’s what they decided.”

Some reporters and commentators noted that hostility between White House press operations and the news media was nothing new.

Jack Shafer, the acerbic media critic, wrote on Twitter that “the press is supposed to be abused, disparaged, defamed, dissed.” He added, “It’s part of the job.”

“If Sean wants to have an angry tone, frankly, I don’t care,” Ms. Sweet said on CNN. “I don’t care if you vent.”

She added: “I care if he says something that’s true. I care if he gives us facts.”

In an interview on Sunday, Ari Fleischer, who served as press secretary under George W. Bush, said that Mr. Spicer’s statements on Saturday were somewhat typical of the spin at press briefings.

But Mr. Spicer’s “eagerness and willingness” to confront the press corps so directly represented a break from tradition, Mr. Fleischer said. “Everybody complains about the press, but most people bite their tongue” in news conferences, Mr. Fleischer said.

Mr. Fleischer added that Mr. Spicer’s remarks could hurt his credibility unless he backed them up — or at least addressed them — during the first official White House briefing on Monday.

“Sean’s first client is the president of the United States and those around the president; his second client is the press corps,” Mr. Fleischer said. “And he has to serve both, always guided by the truth.”

In reporting on the day’s events, many news organizations also called out the falsehoods that Mr. Trump and Mr. Spicer offered on Saturday, using variations of “false,” “falsehoods” and“lies” in headlines and stories. Breitbart News, the right-wing website that has embraced Mr. Trump, was more credulous in its headline: “WH Press Secretary Sean Spicer Blasts Media’s ‘Deliberately False Reporting.’”

Voice of America, the government-funded news operation that broadcasts American journalism beyond the country’s borders, pointed out Mr. Spicer’s inaccuracies and ran an article from The Associated Press fact-checking his remarks.

Still, that came only after the organization initially posted a string of Twitter messages that quoted Mr. Spicer without context, prompting questions about whether it was endorsing his comments. Voice of America’s director, Amanda Bennett, said that there had been no instructions or interference from the Trump administration and that Voice of America had quickly decided it needed to provide more explanation.

“Internally, there was like an explosion of direct messages saying you’ve got to do something about this,” Ms. Bennett said in an interview on Sunday.

That led to a course correction on Twitter, including the deletion of one tweet that appeared to support Mr. Spicer.

For First Amendment advocates, the events of Mr. Trump’s first 48 hours in office were, to say the least, unsettling.

In a statement, the American Civil Liberties Union denounced Mr. Spicer’s remarks as “possible government censorship” and vowed that any threats by Mr. Trump’s administration to the principles of freedom of the press would be met with a “vigorous defense” of the First Amendment.

“If Trump wants to take on the First Amendment,” the group said in the statement, “we will see him in court.”


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/22/busi ... facts.html

Don’t Broadcast Sean Spicer’s Press Conferences Live

And other rules for covering an administration of liars.

By Dan Gillmor


How should journalists cover people who lie routinely and brazenly, and whose plain goal is to delegitimize the traditional press as an institution?

You’d have imagined by now that American journalists from major news organizations would have a strategy, given the Trump team’s habitual contempt for truth during the presidential campaign. But by the end of Day 2 of the Trump presidency, it was clear that the press corps—or at least the portion of it that covers the White House—is still groping for a way forward.

Saturday’s triple spectacle was a lesson and a harbinger. On a day when millions of people took to the streets in America and across the globe in a wave of Women’s Marches to protest Trump’s misogyny, racism, corruption, and more, Trump and his press secretary, Sean Spicer, took to their podiums and shredded truth as they attacked journalism.

It’s so routine for Trump to lie at this point that journalists seem to almost shrug it off, even as they often (though not always) point out the falsehoods, at least the major ones. So amid his rambling remarks in Virginia to a crowd of CIA employees and members of his own staff, a whopper greatly inflating the size of the inauguration audience on the National Mall was fairly routine for him. So was his bizarre claim that he hadn’t fiercely attacked the intelligence community—even though that’s what he’s used his own Twitter account to do in recent weeks. And he expressed his opinion, not for the first time, that journalists are terrible people.

But Spicer’s tirade, several hours later in the White House press room, was anything but routine. Press secretaries almost always alienate White House reporters, but typically that takes a while. Spicer took care of it on his first full day in the job by spouting demonstrable untruths about the inauguration audience even as he lambasted the press. His most memorable false statement: “This was the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.” (No, it wasn’t.)

Journalists’ reaction was instructive, and in some cases deeply disappointing. A few organizations parroted that line directly, in tweets and headlines and stories—most that I saw have now been updated to be more accurate—perhaps on the journalistic theory that the job of news organizations is to write down or record what people say and publish it. This, of course, is stenography, not journalism—and an utter abdication of journalism’s watchdog role.

The problem is compounded when people live-tweet an event, which in its worst form is little more than broadcasting a text version of live video. (Even if a Twitter user follows a tweet quoting an official with another tweet offering some context or analysis, there’s always the risk that only one of those tweets will reach a critical mass of eyeballs.) When you’re covering people who don’t tell the truth, you have a problem: You may end up giving them a direct, unedited line to your audience.

When you’re covering people who don’t tell the truth, you have a problem: You may end up giving them a direct, unedited line to your audience.
CNN, manifestly culpable for giving Trump a massive amount of free, unedited airtime through the primary and general elections, did the best job on Saturday. As CNN’s excellent media reporter Brian Stelter said in a tweet, his news channel “made a conscious choice not to show the @PressSec statement live. The decision was to monitor the statement & then report on it.”

When the CNN story appeared, it had a perfect headline: “White House press secretary attacks media for accurately reporting inauguration crowds.” The channel’s handling of this affair struck me as nearly ideal.

Several news organizations initially erred, but recovered fast. The New York Times’ original web headline, “Trump Attacks Media on Crowd Size,” morphed over time into what appeared in the newspaper on Sunday, a much better handling of what happened: “With False Claims, Trump Attacks Media on Turnout and Intelligence Rift.” Headlines—and tweets are essentially headlines—matter a great deal, since many people don’t read further. Getting to the truth in the body of a story is helpful but not nearly enough.

One emerging school of thought among Washington journalists holds that maybe they shouldn’t bother to attend Spicer’s briefings at all.


The advantage of this is obvious: Freed from the constraints of traditional White House reporting, journalists might have more time to investigate an administration that plans to upend all kinds of norms and laws. But it would also be an abandonment of one of the press’ central roles in Washington: asking, or at least trying to ask, tough questions. Given the Republican Congress’ plain disinterest in holding Trump to account, and Democrats’ own initial struggles to serve as a counterweight, a serious press is more essential than ever. Access to power is overrated, but we need at least some honest reporters to monitor Spicer’s statements and, when he permits it (he didn’t on Saturday), ask questions that the American people need an answer to.

But to do so, we also need journalists to adopt some new rules of engagement. The lies about crowd size from Trump and Spicer were, in the larger scheme of things, minor. Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway’s insistence on Sunday that Spicer was offering “alternate facts” was brazen but laughable. All of their statements are harbingers of much worse. Maybe it’s too much to expect journalists to act collectively, but in order to do their and job and serve the public interest, it’s essential that they change some of the ground rules, and do it together.

First, major news organizations need to follow CNN’s lead and decline to air press briefings from known prevaricators live. Do what CNN did: Listen, separate truth from falsehood, and then report accurately. If Spicer tells the truth, feel free to run the statement in full. Using the same logic, I’d also urge media to stop running Trump’s statements live, but recognize that’s never going to happen. (During the campaign I urged that debate broadcasts not run live, but be quickly vetted for falsehoods before airing. No one took me up on that.)

Second, don’t live-tweet or live-blog, for the same reasons, unless you are certain you’re not just re-transmitting bogus information. Far too many people only read headlines and tweets and rarely hear or see the substance. Analyzing statements in real time is fraught with problems, but letting quotes stand alone in tweets is inviting trouble.

Third, with this administration, it may be safest to assume deceit. This goes beyond the normal skepticism all journalists should have when listening to politicians.

Fourth, when lying happens, make that clear in the headline and top of the story. Don’t just repeat the false statement and then say it’s not true in the body of the piece.

Fifth, ask if there’s a purpose beyond the immediate story. It may well be the case that Trump and Spicer achieved more urgent tactical and even strategic goals on Saturday. They diverted at least some attention away from the massive protest marches, which should have been by far the biggest story of the day. And in the process, they made press credibility part of the day’s memory, moving ahead in their campaign to discredit journalists in general.

The flaws in my suggestions should be equally obvious. What if, among the major broadcasters, Fox News runs the briefings while everyone else declines to do so? And even if Fox suddenly developed a journalistic conscience and held back, Facebook Live, YouTube, and other live-streaming options aren’t going away. (And what about C-Span, which is assiduously comprehensive and neutral?)

All presidents lie. All press secretaries obfuscate. But this administration is in a league of its own.
Moreover, what if there’s a genuine national emergency in which the public needs to hear from the White House in a prompt way? Trump and Spicer’s willingness to mislead will have awful consequences if a substantial portion of the American public decides the administration can’t be trusted under any circumstances; this may be the best reason of all to hope the Trump team will come to understand it needs to shoot straight in press briefings and other communications.

All presidents lie, of course. All press secretaries obfuscate or worse. But this administration, like the campaign, is in a league of its own. And journalists now realize that the new president and his senior staff view the press in the way all authoritarians see real journalism: not a vital part of a functioning system of government. Not a sometimes annoying collection of insecure people who would rather watch the action than join it. Not even an occasional adversary.

No, for Trump, the press is truly part of the enemy—the people and institutions who might challenge his unfettered right to say and do exactly what he pleases, publicly or in secret, in the most powerful job on the planet.

Please, journalists: Act accordingly.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... ences.html

Top Legal, Ethics Scholars To File First Major Lawsuit Against Trump On Monday
Lawsuit alleges that President Trump’s foreign business interests are leading to constitutional violations. “These violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause pose a grave threat to the United States and its citizens,” the lawsuit claims.

Originally posted on Jan. 22, 2017, at 5:51 p.m.
Updated on Jan. 22, 2017, at 7:09 p.m.

WASHINGTON — The first major lawsuit against President Trump’s alleged business conflicts is being filed by some of the nation’s top legal and ethics scholars on Monday, a liberal watchdog group announced Sunday evening.
“Never before have the people of the United States elected a President with business interests as vast, complicated, and secret as those of Donald J. Trump,” the lawsuit to be filed on behalf of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) alleges, “creating countless conflicts of interest, as well as unprecedented influence by foreign governments.”
The lawsuit — a copy of which was reviewed by BuzzFeed News on Sunday evening — alleges violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause violations that it claims “pose a grave threat to the United States and its citizens.”
Under the constitutional provision, “no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
The lawsuit asks the federal court to issue a declaratory judgment defining elements of the Foreign Emoluments Clause — specifically issuing a judgment that Trump’s business interests do or will violate the clause — and an injunction barring Trump from violating the clause.
“As a direct result of [Trump]’s purposeful refusal to acknowledge that he is submerged in conflicts of interest and his purposeful refusal to take precautions necessary to avoid those conflicts,” the lawsuit alleges, “[he] is now committing and is poised to continue to commit many violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause—some documented, and others not yet apparent due to the complex and secretive nature of [Trump]’s business holdings—during the opening moments of his presidency and continually thereafter.”
Specifically, the lawsuit points to the leases at Trump Tower in New York to the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and the Abu Dhabi Tourism & Culture Authority, foreign diplomats’ stays and foreign embassies’ events at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, as well as investments or planned business dealings in 10 foreign countries, as leading to the alleged constitutional violations.
The complaint is to be filed Monday morning in US District Court for the Southern District of New York on behalf of CREW — which on Friday also filed a letter with the General Services Administration asking it to immediately begin investigating whether Trump’s business had breached its lease of the Old Post Office building with the federal government.
“We did not want to get to this point. It was our hope that President Trump would take the necessary steps to avoid violating the Constitution before he took office,” CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder said. “He did not. His constitutional violations are immediate and serious, so we were forced to take legal action.”
In addition to Bookbinder, the lawyers behind the lawsuit include prominent constitutional law professors Laurence Tribe and Erwin Chemerinsky, prior White House ethics lawyers Norm Eisen and Richard Painter (who are both now on the board of CREW), and Zephyr Teachout and Deepak Gupta.
“Consistent with the Framers’ intent, the definition of a ‘present’ or ‘Emolument’ under the Foreign Emoluments Clause also is properly interpreted in a broad manner, to cover anything of value, monetary or nonmonetary,” the lawsuit argues. “The Foreign Emoluments Clause also explicitly prohibits the receipt of “any present [or] Emolument … of any kind whatever,” emphasizing the breadth of the things of value covered under the provision.”
Over the past year, in connection with Trump’s candidacy and election, there has been increased focused on the clause — with most legal scholars echoing many of the views advanced in Monday’s lawsuit. Those views have not been universal, however, with some scholars suggesting the clause should not be read so broadly.
The lawsuit also raises the possibility that Trump’s dealings “also likely cause [him] to run afoul of” another constitutional provision, “the ‘Domestic Emoluments Clause’” — which states that the president “shall not receive … any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them,” as in any of the individual states, while president.
A primary pushback to the lawsuit, as was often the case in lawsuits challenging President Obama’s actions as president, likely will be as to whether CREW has standing to bring the lawsuit. Standing is a requirement that a plaintiff in a lawsuit have sufficient, individualized injury that results from the alleged action or inaction.
The complaint points to a 1982 US Supreme Court case — Havens Realty Corp. v. Coleman — and a subsequent 1993 case out of the appeals court overseeing federal courts in New York — Ragin v. Harry Macklowe Real Estate Co. — as providing backing for CREW’s standing in the new case. The cases found that organizations had standing to bring lawsuits in cases relating to alleged violations of the Fair Housing Act because, as the appeals court put it in the 1993 case, the organization “had to devote significant resources to identify and counteract the defendant’s [sic] racially discriminatory steering practices.”
In the new lawsuit, CREW alleges that “violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause have required CREW to divert and expend its valuable resources specifically to counteract those violations, impairing CREW’s ability to accomplish its mission.” The lawsuit goes on to spend the next nine pages detailing the specifics of this alleged basis for a court to find that CREW has standing to bring the lawsuit.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/chrisgeidner/t ... .rmwK9K3av

Painter talks government ethics, conflicts of interest
Published January 20, 2017 at 11:28 am

Congressional ethics have had a tough few months, and according to a George W. Bush lawyer, it is only getting worse.

In a program hosted by the League of Women Voters Edina Jan. 12, former White House ethics counsel Richard Painter discussed governmental conflicts of interest and ethics violations that affect the gamut of political persuasion.

As a leading ethics lawyer, who has worked at the University of Minnesota since 2007, Painter has been seen on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and PBS, as well as being interviewed and referenced in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Politico and other news outlets.

This has lead people who disagree with him to call him the “ethics nanny” and an “obscure government ethics lawyer from Minnesota.”
“It would be great to be obscure because it means people are behaving, and the New York Times isn’t calling up lawyers asking them questions,” Painter said.

Painter said that the number one concern for ethics and the greatest conflict of interest for government is the role of money in politics, something that outside of congressional members is a shared bipartisan value.

“The polling data was quite clear – conservative voters are as fed up with campaign money … as liberal voters,” Painter said. “If you go to the grassroots, whether it be liberal, conservative or moderate … [there is] deep, deep hostility with campaign finance and the corruption that comes along with it.”

Painter believed that increased regulations against campaign finance hasn’t been working because either laws are struck down by “activist judges,” or corporations enlist K Street lobbyists to draft exceptions to the regulations that are delivered to congress members to pass.
“What we get is more regulation … that chokes off small business but lets the big guys, who pay to play, get what they want,” Painter said, adding that Congress members that get fundraising out of this arrangement are in no hurry to deregulate. “Free-market Republicans, or whether you believe in a free market … the last thing you are going to want is this system.”

Another branch of campaign finance abuse comes from influence from foreign donations.

“We know that foreign donations from foreign nationals and from foreign corporations and foreign governments are strictly prohibited,” Painter said. “And drinking under the age of 21 is illegal. It does not happen at the University of Minnesota.”

While the Supreme Court has held up the ban for foreign individuals and corporations from influencing U.S. elections, there are loopholes.

“All you need to do is buy an American corporation … and suddenly someone in China is making the decisions,” Painter noted as just one example. “There is nothing pernicious here about foreign companies … but do we as Americans get to choose what happens in the Communist Party of China? We are not going to be deciding, if anybody, is going to be succeeding Vladimir Putin in Russia. Do we want other countries making those decisions about the United States?”

Painter’s second major concern for corruption was from the revolving door of private sector executives taking jobs in the executive branch.

“The revolving door has some good aspects,” Painter said. “We like to have people in government understand a little bit of the people they regulate. It would be helpful to have someone in the energy department who knew something about how an oil company or solar company worked. There is some great value in bringing in private sector people.”

But it comes at a cost.

Individuals can bring their private sector biases, or worse, their private sector investments into the government that can either favor their former employer, their own financial interests, or both.

The solution is forcing government workers to remove their financial conflicts of interest, through several methods including divestiture, investing solely in broad mutual funds or a blind trust.

“If you hold onto stocks, if you are in the government, it will be a criminal offense to participate in any given matter that can influence those stocks,” Painter said. “If you are the treasury secretary and you own financial service industry stocks, you can’t do anything that can affect the financial services industry.”

This criminal statute applies to every one in the executive branch, with the exception of two – the president and vice president.
While every former president has followed what is required of every other executive branch employee, President-elect Trump is not, and Painter’s critique of Trump’s plan to remain the head of his corporation – foreign debts and stocks included – is what has splashed him all over cable news.

“Our president-elect has assets all over the world, and we have trouble all over the world – nothing new about that,” Painter said. “Imagine President Roosevelt – the Japanese just bombed us. Imagine if he has a map with Roosevelt Properties, and he has a pin in Berlin and a pin in Munich, a pin in the Philippines and something in Tokyo, and the president is saying, ‘What are we going to do about this situation?’ and he has a $300 million line of credit to Deutsche Bank. Imagine the temptation to say, ‘Oh, the Japanese? Whatever. Well we don’t need to get the Germans involved.’ I don’t know what Roosevelt would have done, but fortunately he had a diversified portfolio all invested in the good ol’ USA.”

While he said he trusts Trump to work for the best of America’s interests regardless of how it may benefit his stock portfolio, Painter asks, do we want the appearance of corruption?

According to Painter, one of the many issues that has emerged from the transition period was handled well by Trump, which was to make his son-in-law Jared Kushner an official White House employee.

“There is a debatable question about nepotism I think honest people can disagree on … but if they are going to appoint [Kushner], that is no where near as bad as the alternative being considered,” Painter said. “That he can hang out in the East Wing [with wife Ivanka] and just meander over to the West Wing and tell people what to do? He [would] be criminally prosecuted. If you are going to appoint him, do it on board.”

That’s not to say there isn’t the potential for conflicts of interest and ethics violations on the horizon.

With sons Eric and Donald Jr. still actively running the family business, even a stray conversation could spell corruption.

“That is going to be a big problem,” Painter said. “If we have this mingling of government business with Trump organization business, it can get too close to bribery. What is [Ivanka] going to do? What is she going to talk about with her husband, who is a White House employee? She should not be talking business with her brothers. Siblings should be on good enough terms to talk about anything other than money.”

While the next presidential term might be ethically dicey, it does not have to be all doom and gloom.

Painter encouraged those who were concerned to call legislators – Democrats and Republicans alike – to stand up to ethics violations and push for a more fair system of campaign finance.
http://current.mnsun.com/2017/01/20/pai ... -interest/

[seemslikeadream]

Trump’s WhiteHouse.Gov Disappears Civil Rights, Climate Change, LGBT Rights
The minute Donald Trump was sworn into office, the White House’s web site changed—dramatically.
Justin Miller
JUSTIN MILLER

01.20.17 12:23 PM ET
WhiteHouse.gov immediately wiped pages on LGBT rights, civil rights, climate change, and health care from its “issues” section after Donald Trump took the oath of office.
Health Care
Civil Rights
LGBT
The page on climate change was replaced with a page entitled “An America First Energy Plan” that ignores climate change entirely and says, “President Trump is committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the U.S. rule.”
The new “America First Foreign Policy” page made no mention of Russia or China, instead discussing the defeat of ISIS and the renegotiation of NAFTA and other trade deals. “If our partners refuse a renegotiation that gives American workers a fair deal, then the President will give notice of the United States’ intent to withdraw from NAFTA,” the page read. The same language was repeated on the new “Trade Deals Working for All Americans” page on Whitehouse.gov.

The page on civil rights was replaced with a page entitled “Standing Up For Our Law Enforcement Community” that replaces concerns with how police act with a demand for more cops. It also paints predominantly black inner cities as shooting galleries.
“In our nation’s capital, killings have risen by 50 percent,” the page claims, which is false: homicides in Washington, D.C. were down in 2016 over 2015.
Trump’s campaign website was more robust, featuring pages on a variety of issues and including press releases related to the black community, like "DONALD J. TRUMP’S NEW DEAL FOR BLACK AMERICA." Now the words “black” or “African-American” do not appear once in any policy sheets on WhiteHouse.gov.
In contrast, President Obama's WhiteHouse.gov page on his first day in office featured a slate of issues he campaigned on; Trump's White House page doesn't even have a policy page on his signature campaign issue: immigration.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... ights.html

[seemslikeadream]

Rocky First Weekend for Trump Troubles Even His Top Aides
By PETER BAKER, GLENN THRUSH and MAGGIE HABERMANJAN. 22, 2017

From left, Kellyanne Conway, Jared Kushner, Stephen K. Bannon and Reince Priebus, all Trump advisers, were sworn in at a White House ceremony on Sunday. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s first weekend in office unfolded much the way things often did during his campaign: with angry Twitter messages, a familiar obsession with slights and a series of meandering and at times untrue statements, all eventually giving way to attempts at damage control.

The problem is that what works on the way to the White House does not always work once a candidate gets there.

To the extent that there was a plan to take advantage of the first days of his administration, when a president is usually at his maximum leverage, Mr. Trump threw it aside with a decision to lash out about crowd sizes at his swearing in and to rewrite the history of his dealings with intelligence agencies.

The lack of discipline troubled even senior members of Mr. Trump’s circle, some of whom had urged him not to indulge his simmering resentment at what he saw as unfair news coverage. Instead, Mr. Trump chose to listen to other aides who shared his outrage and desire to punch back. By the end of the weekend, he and his team were scrambling to get back on script.

New presidents typically find the adjustment from candidate to leader to be a jarring one, and Mr. Trump was not the first to get drawn into the latest flap in a way that fritters away whatever political good will comes with an inauguration. Former President Bill Clinton got off to a tough start by engaging on issues that were not central to his agenda, most notably gays in the military, and took a while to learn how to focus on his highest priorities.

But Mr. Clinton showed none of the combativeness and anger of Mr. Trump.

“The adjustment from private citizen to running the country is unbelievably hard,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a longtime adviser to former President Barack Obama. He said that what people, even new presidents, often fail to fully understand “is that after you stand out there in the weather and take the oath of office in front of an adoring crowd, you walk into that building and you are in charge of the free world.”

At first, at least, Mr. Trump seemed to be resisting the notion that he should adjust his approach now that he is in office. After all, his pugilistic style was a winning formula, one that got him to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in the first place. Many of his supporters cheer him taking on the establishment. And some allies said any blowback would not matter long anyway.

“Ultimately this is about governing,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who has advised Mr. Trump. “There are two things he’s got to do between now and 2020: He has to keep America safe and create a lot of jobs. That’s what he promised in his speech. If he does those two things, everything else is noise.”

“The average American isn’t paying attention to this stuff,” he added. “They are going to look around in late 2019 and early 2020 and ask themselves if they are doing better. If the answer’s yes, they are going to say, ‘Cool, give me some more.’”

That is the long view and ultimately perhaps the most important one. The short view from many political professionals is that Mr. Trump’s debut was not a success. The president himself seemed to be trying to find a way forward as the weekend proceeded. He danced to “My Way” on Friday night and did it his way on Saturday, but by Sunday he seemed to be trying something different.

A day after waves of opponents gathered in Washington and cities around the nation and world to protest his presidency, Mr. Trump began Sunday still in a mood to push back.

“Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression that we just had an election!” he posted on Twitter in the morning. “Why didn’t these people vote? Celebs hurt cause badly.”

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Kellyanne Conway, his counselor, contributed to the combative mood in an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd when she described the falsehoods that the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, had told reporters Saturday night as “alternative facts” — an assertion that lit up Twitter.

However, Mr. Trump later adopted the more above-it-all demeanor that presidents typically take. “Peaceful protests are a hallmark of our democracy,” he wrote on Twitter. “Even if I don’t always agree, I recognize the rights of people to express their views.”

Mr. Trump faces a challenge few of his predecessors have confronted. Having won an Electoral College victory but not the popular vote, he entered office with less public support in the polls than any other president in recent times. After a transition in which he did relatively little to reach out to his opponents on the left and they hardly warmed to him, he found hundreds of thousands of protesters chanting just a few blocks from his new home on the first morning he woke up there.

That has left the new White House feeling besieged from Day 1, fueling the president’s grievances and, in the view of some of his aides, necessitating an aggressive strategy to defend his legitimacy. “The point is not the crowd size,” Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, said on “Fox News Sunday” before the mood began to soften. “The point is that the attacks and the attempts to delegitimize this president in one day — and we’re not going to sit around and take it.”

Mr. Trump grew increasingly angry on Inauguration Day after reading a series of Twitter messages pointing out that the size of his inaugural crowd did not rival that of Mr. Obama’s in 2009. But he spent his Friday night in a whirlwind of celebration and affirmation. When he awoke on Saturday morning, after his first night in the Executive Mansion, the glow was gone, several people close to him said, and the new president was filled anew with a sense of injury.

He became even more agitated after learning of a pool report by a Time magazine reporter incorrectly reporting that a bust of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office. (The reporter, Zeke Miller, did not see the bust and, after realizing the error, quickly issued a correction and apology.)

While Mr. Trump was eager to counterattack, several senior advisers urged him to move on and focus on the responsibilities of office during his first full day as president. That included a high-stakes trip to the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, where he had been coached to demonstrate support of the agency and criticize Senate Democrats for delaying confirmation of his nominee to lead it, Mike Pompeo. The advisers left thinking he agreed.

But Mr. Spicer, who often berated reporters for what he called biased coverage during the campaign, shares Mr. Trump’s dark view of the news media and advocated an opening-day declaration of war.

After racing through his words of reconciliation at the C.I.A. in Langley, Va., Mr. Trump launched into a rambling, unscripted discussion that drifted to the topic of crowd size, making a series of verifiably false claims. Mr. Spicer then went to the White House briefing room for his first turn at the lectern and issued a blistering attack on reporters, made his own false claims and then stormed out without taking questions.

Some of the president’s supporters found the first weekend troubling. L. Lin Wood, a prominent libel lawyer who was a vocal defender of Mr. Trump’s on Twitter during the campaign, said that he considered it a dangerous debut.

“To someone who believed we might have a good opportunity to change, it’s just a terrible start. Because he’s got a long way to go,” Mr. Wood said. “This is going to go downhill quickly if it’s not changed, and that’s not good for any of us.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/22/us/p ... .html?_r=0

[seemslikeadream]

NEWS & POLITICS
Donald Trump Poses a Never-Before-Seen Threat in American History
We've had demagogues before but never in the Oval Office. The resistance begins now.
By Peter Dreier / AlterNet January 21, 2017

I have watched, listened to, and read many commentaries on the inaugural address but so far none of the mainstream pundits have used the one word that best identifies Donald Trump: fascist.

The United States is not Weimar Germany. Our economic problems are nowhere as bad as those in Depression-era Germany. Nobody in the Trump administration (not even Steven Bannon) is calling for mass genocide (although saber-rattling with nuclear weapons could lead to global war if we’re not careful).

That said, it is useful for Americans to recognize that we are facing something entirely new and different in American history. Certainly none of us in our lifetimes have confronted an American government led by someone like Trump in terms of his sociopathic, demagogic, impulsive, and vindictive personality (not even Nixon came close).

We are witnessing something new in terms of the uniformly right-wing inner circle with whom he’s surrounded himself and appointed to his cabinet. We must adjust our thinking and view with alarm his reactionary and dangerous policy agenda on foreign policy, the economy, the environment, health care, immigration, civil liberties; and poverty. We have to be willing to sweep aside past presidential precedents in order to understand Trump’s willingness to invoke all the worst ethnic, religious and racial hatreds in order to appeal to the most despicable elements of our society and unleash an upsurge of racism, anti-semitism, sexual assault, and nativism by the KKK and other hate groups. We need to suspend our textbook explanations about the American presidency in order to recognize Trump’s ignorance about our Constitutional principles and the rule of law; and his lack of experience with collaboration and compromise. We’ve never seen a president with so little familiarity with the truth; he is a pathological liar, on matters large and small.

We cannot take solace in the fact that Trump lost the popular vote or that only 25 percent of all eligible voters actually voted for him. Instead, we must face clearly the reality that Trump now presides over a federal government in which all three branches are controlled by right-wing corporate-funded Republicans. We may be lucky to discover that Trump might be an incompetent leader and unable to unite the Republicans, but we shouldn’t count on it.

“From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first, America first,” Trump said. By branding his message “America First,” Trump was echoing and invoking a motto of the isolationist, anti-Semitic crusade in the 1930s that wanted the United States to appease Hitler.

Indeed, Trump’s entire speech was a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland crazy quilt of words that meant the exactly opposite of what was expressed. It was an angry rant, reflecting the personality traits of an insecure bully: narcissistic, thin-skinned, revengeful, and impulsive, lacking empathy or humility.

Fascists claim to speak for “the people,” while pursuing policies that overwhelmingly benefit a handful of the favored – families, cronies, corporations, and loyalists.

“Today we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another or from one party to another, “ Trump said today, “but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the people.” Later, he proclaimed: “January 20th, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again.”

Like other fascists, Trump claimed to speak for the “forgotten men and women,” whose voice has been ignored, whose job has been exported, whose neighborhood is unsafe, whose living standard has declined.

Fascists always attack current politicians while claiming the mantle of “the people.”

“We will no longer accept politicians who are all talk and no action,” Trump said today, using the same words he used several days earlier to defame Cong. John Lewis, a civil rights icon who, unlike Trump, put his body on the line countless times to make America a more humane and inclusive society.

Fascists seek to unite the country behind a smokescreen of patriotism while scapegoating the weak and powerless.


“We are one nation, and their pain is our pain,” Trump said. “We share one heart, one home and one glorious destiny.”

But his speech was a series of deflections away from the core problem facing the United States: the growing power of a tiny wealthy elite – sometimes called the “1%” but in reality the .001% — over our economy and politics.

Trump has populated his Cabinet and top advisors with some of America’s wealthiest and greediest people, corporate robber barons, militarist zealots, Wall Street titans, right-wing conspiracy theorists, anti-Semites, and racists, some of them (like Trump) born wealth but who have demonstrated no inclination for public service or even noblesse oblige.

To deflect attention away from the super-rich, Trump – like fascists throughout history – points his fingers at and scapegoats others. In today’s speech, he avoided explicit reference to Mexican immigrants, Muslims, China, Hollywood, the media and unions – groups he castigated throughout the campaign. But his address included many dog whistles that his core supporters understand.

“We’ve defended other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own,” was Trump’s dog whistle to America’s white supremacist “alt right” movement, who want to deport undocumented immigrants while eliminating the social safety net from those who live here and contribute to our society.

Trump personifies the worst aspects of corrupt crony capitalism. He inherited his father’s real estate empire, made possible by federal government housing subsidies. He has curried favor with Democratic and Republican politicians at the local, state and national level by contributing millions of dollars in campaign donations. He has abused the nation’s bankruptcy and tax laws to avoid his responsibility to his lenders, employees, business partners, and the country as a whole.

In his address, Trump pledged that “We will follow two simple rules: Buy American and hire American.” But Trump has used undocumented immigrants to construct his glitzy apartment buildings and hotels. Most of the ties, suits, shirts, and other clothing items sold as part of the Donald J. Trump Collection are made in overseas sweatshops.

Like fascists everywhere, Trump’s speech included a list of troubles he intends to fix, without pointing out that they were caused by the policies, people, and principles he embraces.

He described: “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities, rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation. An education system flush with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge. And the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

Meanwhile, he’s appointed a corporate mogul as Labor Secretary with a track record of abusing his employees and opposing the minimum wage. He’s named a billionaire Education Secretary who has spent hundreds of millions of her inherited fortune to destroy public education in favor of corporate-backed private charter schools. He’s named as his Commerce Secretary a law-abusing hedge fund manager who has proposed a tax law that will provide huge tax breaks to the very rich and an infrastructure plan designed to enrich the rich while saddling the middle class with higher taxes.


“The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes,” Trump said, having named as Treasury Secretary a Wall Street tycoon who made his fortune ripping off consumers, illegally foreclosing on working families, and discriminating against low-income and minority communities and borrowers.

In his speech Trump pledged to “harness the energies, industries and technologies of tomorrow.” But’s nominated to be Secretary of State the head of the nation’s largest oil company, someone who has made billions by polluting the environment, denying the reality of global warming, lobbying against clean energy technologies, and forging an alliance with Vladimir Putin.

Trump’s speech included no mention of human rights. He avoided any reference to police abuses or the epidemic of gun violence made possible our lax gun laws. He said nothing about rising inequality. He ignored the dramatic spike in hate crimes – against Muslims, Latinos, Jews, gays and lesbians, and others – that has plagued the country since his election in November. He evaded any mention of homelessness, climate change, or the plight of refugees around the world.

We should not have expected, and did not get, any remarks about civil rights or civil liberties – tenets which Trump has consistently violated and defamed throughout this career and his campaign.

We must view Trump as a real threat to our institutions, to our democracy, and to our future. The Trump presidency and Trumpism is a new phenomenon in our country’s history. Never before has such an authoritarian personality been president. We’ve had demagogues in the House and Senate, but never in the Oval Office. The best primer to understand what we’re facing is Philip Roth’s 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, a counter-factual history in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt is defeated in the 1940 presidential election by the pro-Hitler, anti-Semitic aviator Charles Lindbergh.

We can overcome.

Trump is already the least popular American president in modern memory.

Americans will soon see that Trump’s promises were empty.

Already, opposition movements are in motion, preparing to challenge his appointments, his lies, and his policies, and preparing for the 2018 and 2020 elections, when Trump can be neutralized.

In the not-too-distant future, we can try to translate our progressive policy agenda into actual policies — adopting campaign finance reform, immigration reform, stronger environmental regulations, stricter rules on Wall Street, and greater investment in jobs and anti-poverty programs; turning Election Day into a national holiday, reforming our labor laws, protecting women’s right to choose, expanding LGBT rights, making our tax system more progressive, reforming our racist criminal justice system, investing more public dollars in job-creating infrastructure and clean energy projects; adopting paid family leave, and expanding health insurance to all and limiting the influence of the drug and insurance industry.


But, at the moment, our stance must be one of resistance and opposition.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politi ... an-history

[seemslikeadream]

Trump is not fighting the press but the very concept of reality

Analysis: Forget the White House circus – it is time reporters were redeployed to the real world

about 12 hours ago Updated: about 3 hours ago
Ed O'Loughlin

Donald Trump attacked the 'dishonest media' in speech at the CIA headquarters before his Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, held a conference disputing the photographic proof of the crowd size at President Trump's inauguration. Video: The White House

Only days into his presidency, Donald Trump and his advisors are already at war not only with the opposition and the mainstream media, but with the very concept of reality itself.
Mr Trump’s claim on Saturday that the media lied about the size of his inauguration crowd were amplified later that day at a surreal White House press briefing.
Almost shouting at times, Trump press spokesman Sean Spicer accused the assembled reporters - and millions more watching on television - of deliberately framing photographs and video to conceal “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period”.
He then left the room without taking questions or providing any evidence to support his allegations, which are flatly contradicted by all the available evidence.
This ripping-up of the reality-based rule-book will do nothing for the morale of the White House press corps, already spooked by rumours that Trump wants to evict them from their traditional home in the West Wing.
Future briefings
Trump’s people have not confirmed this, but say that future briefings could moved to a bigger venue than their current room in the West Wing; Trump wants more space for his supporters in the far-right online commentariat.
Wary of any erosion of existing privileges and access, the White House Correspondents’ Association has proactively denounced “any move that would shield the president and his advisers from the scrutiny of an on-site White House press corps”.
But here’s the thing: why should anyone assume that the White House press corps will be capable of holding Trump to scrutiny, whether it is based on-site or not?
It is now clear that Mr Trump has very little knowledge of the truth, and even less interest in it. Many of his statements are starkly contradictory, or – like his claim that his inauguration crowd was bigger than President Obama’s in 2009, or the women’s protest march on Washington last Saturday – demonstrable lies.
Una Mullally: The battle against Trump has only started
Trump war with media to be fought with ‘alternative facts’
Trump White House steps up attack on media
His pre-inauguration “press conference” in Trump Tower consisted mainly of trash talk and boasting, backed by a hollering mob of supporters. It was like the shouty bits between bouts in pro wrestling, except less scripted, and a good deal less witty.
If the presidency turns into a circus, why should the fact-based media stay in the tent? And what is the point of these press briefings anyway, in a world of instant information and pervasive social media?
I have never been to a White House press briefing, but I’ve attended many other press conferences involving heads of state and the like. The pattern is always broadly the same.
The Questions
At the front of the room, senior reporters from the TV networks and major print media compete for the privilege of asking The Questions. The winners get their voices, and possibly faces, onto the rolling bulletins. This is a very big deal to them.
Yet to the people at home it makes no difference who asks the questions. The reporters standing at the back of the conference get just as much information as those at the front. They would, if they could, ask exactly the same questions, and receive the same replies.
Trump could be doing the media an unwitting favour if he shuts down this dog and pony show. Highly-paid veteran reporters could then be redeployed to the real world, to dig out unpleasant facts and talk to actual people - the kind of old fashioned first-principles footwork which is never, ever done by the new breed of Net Nazis and online opinion-slingers, who know the world only through the filter of their screens.
Meanwhile the distasteful business of sifting for nuggets in the torrent of White House bullshit could be re-assigned to a relatively small pool of junior reporters. It would harden them up for the real work ahead.
At a time of collapsing budgets and a crisis of relevancy, the established media can no longer afford to dedicate so much of its dwindling resources to empty pieties and processes.
In Ireland, too, we see how much priority, in terms of personnel and column inches, is wasted on the posturings of our professional politicians, even though the real decisions are made in private jets zipping our business “leaders” between tax havens, and in the boardrooms of vulture funds and Goldman Sachs.
Such hollowed-out news breeds disillusionment, not only with the message but with the messenger as well. The mainstream media bleeds credibility, which is gleefully soaked up by the online mob of trolls, bots and haters. They at least are seldom dull.
Whatever you may think, most professional journalists care deeply about the truth, and try to interpret known facts as scrupulously as possible. They often make mistakes. Wealthy proprietors, where they exist, will find ways to induce self-serving distortions. Yet very few old-school reporters will, like many of their new online rivals, simply make things up.
But is it still good enough merely not to be fake? When the mainstream media runs pious stories about Enda Kenny’s longterm policies, as if he had any, or about ESRI statements trumpeting an economic recovery, or pieces advising precarious young people how to save up for a house and a pension, are they not guilty of misleading reporting?
These kinds of stories are all strictly true. People in big offices really did say those things; the financial advice would be good if the youngsters had real jobs and money. But they don’t feel true, not to the struggling majority. They are “fakey” - not made up, but in practice irrelevant.
It is just over 10 years since the Irish-American satirist Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” to describe the opposite of “fakeyness” – the emotionally satisfying but factually bankrupt far-right propaganda pumped out by the likes of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News.
A few months later, Colbert was invited to speak at the annual cosy dinner of the White House Correspondents’ Association, at which the presidency traditionally exchanges in-jokes with the press corps. Colbert’s brutal filleting of Bush that night has gone into legend. But his deepest cut was reserved for the journalists.
“The President makes decisions . . . The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down . . . Just put ‘em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration? You know, fiction!”
Ed O’Loughlin is an author and journalist.
http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/trump ... -1.2946563

[seemslikeadream]

MERCER




The Bizarre Far-Right Billionaire Behind Trump's Presidency


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQUkaEVe7II

Donald Trump Finds an Easy Mark in Urine Mogul Robert Mercer

Jon Schwarz
October 13 2016, 12:30 p.m.
EVEN AS DONALD TRUMP’S campaign has exploded like the Krakatoa volcano in 1883, his primary financial backer, billionaire hedge fund manager Robert Mercer, has never wavered.

In a recent statement Mercer declared, in language reminiscent of an early John Birch pamphlet, that “America is finally fed up and disgusted with its political elite. Trump is channeling this disgust and those among the political elite who quake before the boombox of media blather do not appreciate the apocalyptic choice that America faces on November 8th. We have a country to save and there is only one person who can save it.”

Mercer, the co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies on Long Island, is the most generous conservative donor of this election, contributing more than $20 million so far. Mercer began the cycle as a key supporter of Ted Cruz, creating Keep the Promise I, a Super PAC devoted to electing Cruz, and giving it $13.5 million. But when Cruz dropped out, Mercer changed its name to Make America Number 1, gave it millions more, and set it to work electing Trump. Mercer is also one of the main investors in Breitbart, and his daughter organized the August campaign shakeup that put Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon — both longtime Mercer intimates — in charge.

So why does Mercer feel such allegiance to Trump? Is it Trump’s policies, élan, and extraordinary judgement and poise?

Maybe. But based on Mercer’s past, it’s more likely that it’s that Mercer is an incredibly easy mark. He has a long history of falling for cranks and grifters, and Trump is just the largest.

Mercer is a relative newcomer to big-time Republican politics, but not to writing big checks to people with exciting proposals to change the world.

For instance, in 2005 Mercer’s family foundation sent $60,000 to Art Robinson, an Oregon chemist, so Robinson could expand his huge collection of human urine. Robinson, who believes that a close analysis of urine can “improve our health, our happiness and prosperity, and even the academic performance of our children in school,” has now received a total of $1.4 million from the Mercer foundation. He’s used this to buy urine freezers and mail postcards to puzzled Oregonians asking them to send him their urine, among other things.

Robinson, who also feels public education is America’s “most widespread and devastating form of child abuse and racism,” ran for Congress in 2010 against Democrat Peter DeFazio. Mercer, smitten with Robinson’s vision of low taxes and large-scale urine collection, co-funded a Super PAC that spent $600,000 on ads supporting him.

Mercer also funds the peculiar organization Doctors for Disaster Preparedness, to which Robinson belongs. The group’s other members hold varied beliefs, such as that low doses of radiation are good for you, that HIV does not cause AIDS, and that the U.S. government did not stop the San Bernardino terrorist attacks because it’s “on the other side.”

More recently, Mercer contributed $425,000 to the Super PAC “Black Americans for a Better Future.” The other donors — all of whom appear to be, like Mercer, white — have given only $38,350 combined, making Mercer responsible for 92 percent of the haul. BABF seems to exist only to employ Raynard Jackson, an African-American political consultant in Washington, D.C., who has accused Barack Obama of “relentless pandering to homosexuals.” Given that BABF’s stated goal is to deliver “at least 15% of the black vote” to the GOP presidential nominee this year, it’s fair to say it hasn’t been a rousing success. In the small world of black Republicans, Jackson is viewed as an embarrassment and a conman.

Then we come to Trump, whose portfolios of scams seems as infinite as the stars. Remarkably, Trump has also been involved in urine solicitation — his multilevel marketing scheme The Trump Network asked members to send in a urine sample so they could receive vitamins perfectly tailored to their metabolism. Perhaps it was hearing about the urine angle that ultimately sold Mercer on Trump’s trustworthiness and acumen.

In the end, Mercer’s story seems a little sad. It’s easy to imagine Trump, Bannon, and Conway explaining to him that with just a little more of his money they can win the election by proving that two wrongs in fact do make a right. “We’ve got trouble, right here in New York City,” they must tell him on conference calls. “And that starts with T, and that rhymes with C, and that stands for Clenis.”

Then everybody hangs up and Mercer goes back to playing with his $2 million model train, overjoyed that he’s finally got some nice, smart friends who really like him.

https://theintercept.com/2016/10/13/don ... rt-mercer/

[seemslikeadream]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNK430YOiT4

[Nordic]

[semper occultus]

We are not living in a 'post-truth' world, we are living the lies of others

Nigel Farage is not a Nazi and nor is Donald Trump. But what is terrifying – and deeply akin to fascism – is our ability to ‘think’ our way from truth into lies

Robert Fisk @indyvoices Thursday 29 December 2016

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/donald-trump-post-truth-world-living-the-lies-of-others-a7500136.html

We do not live in a “post-truth” world, neither in the Middle East nor in the West – nor in Russia, for that matter. We live in a world of lies. And we always have lived in a world of lies.

Just take a look at the wreckage of the Middle East with its history of people’s popular republics and its hateful dictators. They feast on dishonesty, although they all – bar the late Muammar al-Gaddafi – demand regular elections to make-believe their way back to power.

Now, I suppose, it is we who have regular elections based on lies. So maybe Trump and the Arab autocrats will get on rather well. Trump already likes Field Marshal/President al-Sissi of Egypt, and he’s already got a golf course in Dubai. That he deals in lies, that he manufactures facts, should make him quite at home in the Middle East. Misogyny, bullying, threats to political opponents, authoritarianism, tyranny, torture, sneers at minorities: it’s part and parcel of the Arab world.

And look at Israel. The new US ambassador-to-be – who might as well be the Israeli ambassador to the US – can’t wait to move the American embassy to Jerusalem. He seems to feel more antagonism towards the Jewish left in America than the Palestinians who claim East Jerusalem as a capital and whose state he has no interest in. Will Trump enrage the Arabs? Or will he get away with a little domestic rearrangement of the Israel embassy on the grounds that the Gulf Arabs, at least, know that Israel’s anti-Shiism – against Syria, Iran and Hezbollah – fits in rather well with the Sunni potentates who’ve been funding Isis and Jabhat al-Nusrah and all the other jolly jihadis?

I suspect that “post-truth” has more to do with social media than mendacious elections. The use of social media in reporting the battle of eastern Aleppo has been extraordinary, weird, dangerous, even murderous, when not a single Western journalist could report the eastern Aleppo war at first hand. Much damage has been done to the very credibility of journalism – and to politicians – by the acceptance of one side of the story only when not a single reporter can confirm with his or her own eyes what they are reporting.

We handed journalism to social media – and the armed men who control the areas from which these reports came know that they can pull the same trick again next time. They will, in Idlib. But this problem in the region is much, much bigger than a Syrian province. It’s now about the malleability of facts across the whole Middle East.

The 250,000 “trapped” Muslims of eastern Aleppo – now that 31,000 have chosen to go to Idlib, many more to western Aleppo – appear to have been somewhat fewer than 90,000. It’s now possible that at least 160,000 of the civilians “trapped” in eastern Aleppo did not actually exist, but no one says so. That vital statistic of 250,000, the very punctuation mark of every report on the besieged enclave, is now forgotten or ignored (wisely, perhaps) by those who quoted it.

Nor does anyone tell us about the civilians of Palmyra now that Isis has returned. And what about Mosul? Weren’t we about to liberate one million civilians trapped there by the jihadis – no less deserving, surely, than the 250,000 or 100,000 or 90,000 or fewer civilians trapped in eastern Aleppo?

Now the Americans say that Iraqi forces are “regrouping” and “repositioning” around Iraq’s second city; but “regrouping” and “repositioning” is what the British Expeditionary Forces did on their retreat to Dunkirk.

How can we complain about the lies of Trump and the Brexiteers when we journalists are chopping up the facts of the Middle East? Still, I notice in our newspapers and on television, Israel’s wall is a “security fence”, its colonies are “settlements” which are “disputed” rather than illegal.

Can we really shake our heads in disbelief at electoral lies when we have been lying to our readers and viewers for years?

My favourite journalistic philosopher, Fintan O’Toole of The Irish Times, got it right this month when he wrote that “the mendacity of politics in 2016 has indeed been astonishing both in its brazenness and in its effectiveness. The claim by the Leave side in the Brexit referendum that £350m a week would be taken from the United Kingdom’s contribution to the European Union’s budget and put into the National Health Service was quickly and comprehensively demolished. Being caught out in a lie did not matter... it was a proof of a weird kind of authenticity. Flagrant lies showed that you were not one of the experts that the leading Brexiteer Michael Gove invited UK voters to despise and ignore...”

Lying, according to O’Toole, “floats freely, with no pretence to be anchored in evidence”. Nowhere could this be more fearfully represented than in denial of the Jewish Holocaust (or the Armenian Holocaust, for that matter) when social media – O’Toole specifically names Facebook and Google – “now direct users towards fake news stories and sickening neo-Nazi propaganda with barely a shrug of the shoulders. The companies evoke in their defence a notion of the ‘diversity of perspectives’, an Orwellian euphemism in which the belief that the Holocaust never happened is as valid as the knowledge that it did.”

I’ve never accepted the nonsense about Nazism and the American right. Trump is not Hitler, although there is a kind of theatrical fascism about his performance. He’s more buffoon than satanic, more Duce than Fuehrer. Cesare Rossi, an early collaborator of Mussolini, once described his leader as moving quickly “from cynicism to idealism, from impulsiveness to caution, generosity to cruelty... moderation to intransigence. It was as though he never knew his genuine self and was always striving after some counterfeit impersonation.” Could there be a better description of Trump? As Mussolini’s philosopher of fascism, Giovanni Gentile, said, “laughter is of the devil, and true believers do not smile except in bitter sarcasm.”

That grim use of the word “laughter” is a key to this. The Second World War finished before I was born. But there are distressing habits which those on the right of European politics demonstrate when they wish to sneer at their enemies, characteristics which I find deeply disturbing. It is the politics of “the last laugh”; of the humiliation of those who thought they knew better and must now rue the day of their supposed superiority. Just count how many headlines and writers have referred to Trump’s “last laugh”. It is vicious and vengeful.

Most of us remember Nigel Farage’s disgraceful – and untrue – words to the European Parliament on 28 June when he claimed that most members “have never done a proper job”. But it was his other remark which was so frightening: “Isn’t it funny? When I came here 17 years ago and I said I wanted to lead a campaign to get Britain to leave the European Union, you all laughed at me – well, I have to say, you’re not laughing now, are you?”

Those words jogged my memory. Where I had I heard this sneer before?

Then, quite by chance, there I was in Poland a few days ago, reading the late Martin Gilbert’s Auschwitz and the Allies, about the US and British failure to respond militarily to news of the Nazi death camps. And there I read these words, uttered by Adolf Hitler on 30 September 1942: “In Germany, too, the Jews once laughed at my prophecies. I don’t know whether they are still laughing, or whether they have already lost the inclination to laugh, but I can assure you that everywhere they will stop laughing.” In 1925, newly released from prison, Hitler had written a lengthy editorial in Volkischer Beobachter, attacking Jews, Marxists and the Weimar Republic. And that was 17 years before his 1942 “not laughing” speech.

Contempt lies deep in the antechamber of an angry man. No, Farage is not a Nazi and nor is Trump. Nor are the tinpot right-wing European politicians who frighten us with their racist dialogue. What is terrifying – and deeply akin to fascism – is our ability to “think” our way from truth into lies.

Today we don’t need rallies or newsreels because we have the internet and social media, the addiction of our age. It is a dependency on a drug which under the infamous “diversity of perspectives” presents morality and immorality as part of a landscape that spreads out flat to the horizon. Even we humble reporters can see what is happening. To an extent never witnessed before, a lot of people have started believing things that aren’t true. And it is acceptable to do this. And we help them.

Today, you can not only deny history – the Armenian and Jewish Holocausts, Anne Frank’s diary, the gas chambers of Auschwitz – you can also tell fibs, big or small, about almost anything which annoys you. The Middle East, with our journalistic help, is deep in the same false world. Every dictator is now fighting “terrorism” – along with the US, Nato, the EU, Russia, Hezbollah, Iran, the entire Arab Gulf (minus Yemen, for rather embarrassing reasons), China, Japan, Australia and – who knows? – Greenland as well.

But justice is not on the menu. This is a word which few politicians, statesmen, even journalists, any longer use. Neither Trump nor Clinton, nor the Brexiteers, have talked about justice. I’m not talking about justice for victims of “terror”, or Brits who think they’ve been cheated by the EU, but real justice for entire nations, for peoples, for the Middle East, even – dare I mention them? – for Palestinians. They do not live in a “post-truth” world. They’ve been living among other people’s lies for decades.

The only effect of last year’s political earthquakes is that we shall feel less guilty in repeating all these lies. They have now – like war – become normal, a “diversity of perspectives”, part of a familiar, fraudulent world in which untruthfulness has acquired a “weird authenticity”.

Trump is Hitler. Trump is Jesus. National suicide is reincarnation. We may not yet have understood this. But there are many in the Middle East who will understand us. Maybe they’ll have the last laugh.