Wow indeed. Thanks, Rocketman. It was there all along, but who would've thought?!
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by Elvis » Tue Feb 07, 2017 3:40 pm
by 82_28 » Tue Feb 07, 2017 3:52 pm
by Searcher08 » Tue Feb 07, 2017 4:08 pm
by seemslikeadream » Tue Feb 07, 2017 4:41 pm
Melania Trump says White House could mean millions for brand
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertai ... f8c64ac4c7
Trump makes false statement about U.S. murder rate to sheriffs’ group
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/tru ... b5b9d56030
Republicans Introduce Bill to "Terminate the Environmental Protection Agency"
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3937 ... ion-agency
On Trump, Keep it Simple (In 5 Points)
Pablo Martinez Monsivais
ByJOSH MARSHALLPublishedFEBRUARY 6, 2017, 4:23 PM EDT
After a tumultuous and chaotic two weeks of the Trump presidency, we are now seeing a new raft of counter-intuitive articles ranging from 'Does Trump Even Want to Succeed as President?' to 'How Trump Has Everyone Just Where He Wants Them and Is Kicking Ass.' We should all bear in mind that while generally unpopular, Trump has extremely high levels of approval among Republican voters and continues to maintain near lockstep allegiance from congressional Republicans. But on Trump, in trying to figure out what and how he's doing, we should keep it simple. Because at this point we know Trump quite well.
1: Trump is a Damaged Personality: Trump is an impulsive narcissist who is easily bored and driven mainly by the desire to chalk up 'wins' which drive the affirmation and praise which are his chief need and drive. He needs to dominate everyone around him and is profoundly susceptible to ego injuries tied to not 'winning', not being the best, not being sufficiently praised and acclaimed, etc. All of this drives a confrontational style and high levels of organizational chaos and drama. This need for praise and affirmation and a lack of patience for understanding the basic details of governing are a volatile and dangerous mix. They catalyze and intensify each other. Perhaps most importantly, the drive to be the best and right drives promises, claims and policy pronouncements which may contradict his already existing positions or be impossible to fulfill. Often, because of this, they are simply forgotten. That is because the need to be right, best and praised drives everything. Everything else is subsidiary and subject to change in an evolving situational context. Once this is clear, much of the chaos becomes logical and predictable. It's folly to imagine that Trump might pivot or grow up or simply be normal. It is no more likely that a chronically anxious adult would suddenly become serene or a charisma-less person would suddenly grow a charisma organ. This is Trump and he will never change.
2: Trump is a Great Communicator: Trump has an intuitive and profound grasp of a certain kind of branding. It's not sophisticated. But mass branding seldom is. It is intuitive, even primal. 'Make America Great Again' may be awful and retrograde in all its various meanings. But it captured in myriad ways almost every demand, fear and grievance that motivated the Americans who eventually became the Trump base. It is almost certainly the case that MAGA is entirely Trump's invention, not the work of any consultant or media specialist but from Trump himself. The Trump Trucker baseball cap, a physical manifestation of Trumpite branding, is similarly ingenious. In conventional design terms it is almost ridiculous. Loud red, simple font and campaign logo on an intentionally cheap design. But you cannot see that cap, even at a great distance, and not know what it means. It embodies as an artifact what Trump represents. Despite his manic temperament, impulsiveness and emotional infantility, this acumen gives him real and in some ways profound communication skills. The two don't cancel each other out. They are both always present. They grow from the same root.
3: Trump's Hold on His Base Is Grievance: People continue to marvel how a city-bred, godless libertine who was born to great wealth could become and remain the political avatar of small town and rural voters of middling means. The answer is simple. Despite all their differences, Trump meets his voters in a common perception (real or not) of being shunned, ignored and disrespected by 'elites'. In short, his politics and his connection with his core voters is based on grievance. This is a profound and enduring connection. This part of his constituency likely amounts to only 25% or 30% of the electorate at most. But it is a powerful anchor on the right. His ability to emerge undamaged from an almost endless series of outrages and ridiculousnesses is based on this connection. To paraphrase McLuhan, with Trump, the medium is the message and Trump is the medium.
4. Trump is Possible Because of Partisan Polarization: Partisan polariziation is profoundly important for Trump. In a less polarized partisan environment Trump never would have been elected and, if he had, might already be looking at possible impeachment. I think the greatest single explanation of Trump is that his politics profoundly galvanized a minority of the electorate and only a minority of the electorate. Almost everyone who wasn't galvanized was repulsed. But once he had secured the GOP nomination with that minority, the power of partisan polarization kicked in to lock into place perhaps the next 15% to 20% of the electorate which otherwise would never have supported him. The fact that partisan identification proved stronger than that repulsion is the key reason many, including myself, wrongly discounted Trump's ability to win. As long as Trump remains "us" to Republican voters I see little reason to think anything we can imagine will shake that very high level of support he gets from self-identified Republicans. That likely means that, among other things, no matter how unpopular Trump gets, Republican lawmakers will continue to support him because the chances of ending their careers is greater in a GOP primary than in a general election.
5: Trump is Surrounded By Extremists and Desperados: Trump is primarily driven by impulse, grievance, the need to dominate and the need to be praised. There are core political beliefs Trump has had for decades which we should expect him to stick to. They almost all turn on being taken advantage of by other countries - whether in terms of trade or defense. The common thread is a deep belief in zero-sum relationships, whether in business or foreign affairs. As business columnist Joe Nocera put it after decades of observing Trump: "In every deal, he has to win and you have to lose." But if Trump's ideology is fluid, he has drawn around him advisors who can only be termed extremists. I believe the chief reason is that Trump's authoritarian personality resonates with extremist politics and vice versa. We should expect them to keep catalyzing each other in dangerous and frightening ways.
What does all this mean? We should not think in terms of counter-intuition or 12 dimensional chess. Trump wants to be President and he wants to win and be the best. But he is generally unpopular, has a policy agenda which has great difficulty achieving majority support and a temperament which makes effective governance profoundly difficult. That mix makes the praise and affirmation he craves as President extremely challenging to achieve. Like many with similar temperaments and personalities he has a chronic need to generate drama and confrontation to stabilize himself. It's that simple. It won't change. It won't get better.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/on- ... n-5-points
by seemslikeadream » Tue Feb 07, 2017 7:01 pm
by seemslikeadream » Tue Feb 07, 2017 11:07 pm
Terrorism list doesn't show what White House claims
David Jackson and Gregory Korte , USA TODAY Published 7:18 p.m. ET Feb. 7, 2017
List contradicts Trump claim the media fails to report terror attacks
The White House just released this list of 78 terror attacks calling coverage of these events a media fail. Elizabeth Keatinge
WASHINGTON — The White House's list of 78 terrorist incidents it claims have been under covered by the media was hastily assembled to defend President Trump's latest broadside on the "dishonest press" and doesn't show what the administration says it does.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Tuesday that the list demonstrated "the reason the president is acting in so many of the ways he has, with executive order and otherwise" — connecting the president's claims to the legal battle over his order banning people from seven predominately Muslim countries from traveling to the United States. "And I think what we need to do is to remind people that the Earth is a very dangerous place these days," he said.
A USA TODAY analysis of the incidents in the White House list published Monday night found that it has little bearing on the fight over the travel ban.
► Most of the incidents were perpetrated by home-grown terrorists, with only 11 involving a demonstrated connection to the seven banned nations.
► Only 10 of the incidents happened on U.S. soil.
► While some of the incidents involved dozens of deaths, 38 had no fatalities.
► Three of the incidents aren't even properly classified as terrorist incidents, according to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. They include an attack by a French national who killed his British backpacking companion in Australia after she rejected his advances.
The list was compiled after the president made his false claim that news organizations ignored or downplayed terrorist attacks tied to Muslims. But the White House's list included well-chronicled, large-scale attacks — including shootings and bombings in San Bernardino, Calif., Orlando, Brussels and Paris.
And the list contained several errors, including the date of a 2015 attack in Bosnia-Herzegovina. That attack, which killed two soldiers, was perpetrated by a French national who was said to have fundamentalist views, although no terror group claimed responsibility.
Nevertheless, the White House claimed the events have not received "the spectacular attention they deserve."
The debate over terrorism coverage is the latest example of White House staffers left to justify Trump's unfounded assertions after the fact. Trump has previously made widely disputed claims about the crowd size at his inaugural, widespread voter fraud and cyber attacks on the Democratic National Committee.
In releasing the list of terror incidents, White House officials said Trump was arguing that terrorist attacks have become so pervasive that they do not spark the intensity of coverage they once did. That criticism echoes complaints in some conservative web sites that the mainstream media are engaged in a campaign of misinformation to play down what they call the "jihadist" nature of some of the attacks committed by "Islamists."
InfoWars, a conspiracy-minded web site with a radio show that has interviewed Trump, is one outlet pushing this line. Sample recent headline: "FAKE NEWS: MAINSTREAM MEDIA WHITEWASHES ISLAMIC TERROR IN BERLIN: Propagandists desperate to hide the obvious."
"The terror list was both an attempt to flood the zone and move the goalposts," said Nicole Renee Hemmer, assistant professor at the University of Virginia's Miller Center. "It was an absurd list, mixing non-terror events with very small events with huge, arguably over-covered events like the Sydney cafe attack."
Unreported terror attacks? Here are more than 200 articles on USA TODAY covering White House's list
That incident, in which a lone gunman took hostages in a 16-hour standoff in Australia, was initially categorized as a terror attack but later attributed by prosecutors to "a complex, disturbed individual desperate for recognition."
Hemmer said it's succeeded in changing the subject: "It's so muddied the waters that few people are talking about the actual claim Trump made, that news media are essentially colluding with terrorists by not covering attacks," he said.
And it's the second time in a month that Trump has attacked the media in a speech to a national security audience. He also bemoaned the "dishonest" media during a meeting at the CIA the day after his swearing-in, including his claims about crowd size at the inaugural.
The latest controversy began at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa on Monday, when Trump addressed the military command at the forefront of the war on terror. "You've seen what happened in Paris and Nice. All over Europe it's happening. It's gotten to a point where it's not even being reported. And in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn't want to report it. They have their reasons and you understand that," he said.
Asked to explain those remarks Tuesday, Trump turned the subject to the coverage of him.
"I happen to know, because I'm reported on possibly more than anybody in the world. I don't think you'll say anything about that," he said. "I understand the total dishonesty of the media better than anybody and I let people know it. I mean, the media is a very, very dishonest arm and we'll see what happens."
The White House list sent several news organizations checking their archives for quick audits of their news coverage. USA TODAY found more than 200 stories about the incidents. The attacks that went unreported involved two or fewer deaths.
After checking its archives, NBC News said it covered 57 of the 78 attacks on the Trump list, incidents that resulted in the deaths of 745 people. "By contrast," the network reported, "the 21 attacks NBC News did not cover were smaller incidents in places like Egypt, Bosnia or Bangladesh, resulting in the deaths of just eight people, total.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/poli ... /97584338/
by seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 08, 2017 8:50 am
Turkey dismisses 4,400 public servants in latest post-coup attempt purge
Dismissals come hours after first phone call between presidents Trump and Erdoğan hints at closer ties between US and Turkey
Trump stresses 'close' relationship with Turkey in first call with Erdogan
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/08/politics/ ... ogan-call/
by seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 08, 2017 11:45 am
Trump Firm Loses Bid to Limit Cleanup Liability for Property
By BARRY MEIERFEB. 7, 2017
Chemical containers at the Titan Atlas Manufacturing site in North Charleston, S.C. President Trump’s eldest son helped start the company in 2010. It failed two years later. Credit Kate Thornton for The New York Times
South Carolina regulators on Tuesday rejected an effort by the Trump Organization to limit its environmental cleanup liabilities at an industrial site once owned by President Trump’s eldest son.
The decision is a rebuke of the Trump Organization and could result in millions of dollars in added costs for the company. It followed a refusal by the organization to provide regulators with required information about business and financial relationships between the president and his son Donald Trump Jr.
The Trump Organization had no immediate comment.
The issue grew out of the younger Mr. Trump’s involvement in Titan Atlas Manufacturing, a company that he helped start in 2010 in North Charleston, S.C., and that failed two years later.
In 2014, Donald J. Trump, while he was still running the Trump Organization, bailed out his son, who was then facing payment of a $3.65 million bank loan to Titan Atlas. The elder Mr. Trump created an entity called D B Pace, which took over the loan and the six-acre Titan Atlas site.
Last year, D B Pace applied to take part in a state program that would limit the company’s liabilities for pollution on the property, like chemical contamination of groundwater.
To qualify for such protection, however, the buyer of a contaminated property must not be affiliated with a former owner or have had earlier involvement with the site. The safeguard is in place to prevent polluters from evading their legal responsibilities.
A Trump Organization lawyer, Michael Cohen, stated in D B Pace’s application that it met that standard because it had no ties to Titan Atlas and had never been involved in the management of the North Charleston property.
But in December, an article in The New York Times reported that filings in a lawsuit by a former tenant showed that Donald Trump Jr. and Mr. Cohen had managed the Titan Atlas property for two years before D B Pace applied to the state’s program. Last month, the South Carolina Health and Environmental Control Department sent a letter to Mr. Cohen, demanding information about all familial, corporate and financial relationships between the principals of D B Pace and Titan Atlas.
In the letter Tuesday to the Trump Organization affiliate, South Carolina officials said that D B Pace had decided not to provide the required information. For that reason, the agency said, it would not allow the company to participate in the program, known as the “brownfield” cleanup program.
Had the application gone through, the Trump Organization’s costs would have probably been minimal because its environmental obligations would have been limited to controlling the spread of existing pollution on the property. But now, it is likely to be legally responsible for pollution at the site caused by Titan Atlas.
The decision by the Trump Organization appears to reflect a financial gamble that any environmental costs from the Titan Atlas site might be less than the financial damages it could face by disclosing ties between D B Pace and Titan Atlas.
D B Pace has taken the position in a $4.5 million lawsuit brought by a former tenant at the Titan Atlas warehouse that Donald Trump Jr. had nothing to do with the building’s management. However, court papers show that the younger Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen, the lawyer, repeatedly rejected requests from the tenant to fix the building’s leaky roof unless the tenant extended its lease.
The roof failed in late 2015 after days of rain, and the tenant, Saint-Gobain Adfors, has claimed it lost $4.5 million in stored products.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/busi ... .html?_r=0
by Iamwhomiam » Wed Feb 08, 2017 11:48 am
by SonicG » Wed Feb 08, 2017 9:26 pm
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump was confused about the dollar: Was it a strong one that’s good for the economy? Or a weak one?
So he made a call ― except not to any of the business leaders Trump brought into his administration or even to an old friend from his days in real estate. Instead, he called his national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, according to two sources familiar with Flynn’s accounts of the incident.
Flynn has a long record in counterintelligence but not in macroeconomics. And he told Trump he didn’t know, that it wasn’t his area of expertise, that, perhaps, Trump should ask an economist instead.
Trump was not thrilled with that response ― but that may have been a function of the time of day. Trump had placed the call at 3 a.m., according to one of Flynn’s retellings ― although neither the White House nor Flynn’s office responded to requests for confirmation about that detail.
For Americans who based their impression of Trump on the competent and decisive tycoon he portrayed on his “Apprentice” TV reality shows, the portrait from these and many other tidbits emerging from his administration may seem a shock: an impulsive, sometimes petty chief executive more concerned with the adulation of the nation than the details of his own policies ― and quick to assign blame when things do not go his way.
Unsurprisingly, Trump’s volatile behavior has created an environment ripe for leaks from his executive agencies and even within his White House. And while leaks typically involve staffers sabotaging each other to improve their own standing or trying to scuttle policy ideas they find genuinely problematic, Trump’s 2-week-old administration has a third category: leaks from White House and agency officials alarmed by the president’s conduct.
“I’ve been in this town for 26 years. I have never seen anything like this,” said Eliot Cohen, a senior State Department official under President George W. Bush and a member of his National Security Council. “I genuinely do not think this is a mentally healthy president.”
There is the matter of Trump’s briefing materials, for example. The commander in chief doesn’t like to read long memos, a White House aide who asked to remain unnamed told The Huffington Post. So preferably they must be no more than a single page. They must have bullet points but not more than nine per page.
Small things can provide him great joy or generate intense irritation. Trump told The New York Times that he’s fascinated with the phone system inside the White House. At the same time, he’s registered a complaint about the hand towels aboard Air Force One, the White House aide said, because they are not soft enough.
He’s been particularly obsessed with the performance of his aides on cable television. Past presidents typically didn’t make time to watch their press secretary’s daily briefings with reporters, but Trump appears to have made it part of his routine. “Saturday Night Live’s” weekly skewering of his administration is similarly on his must-watch list ― with his reaction ranging from unamused to seething.
Information about Trump’s personal interactions and the inner workings of his administration has come to HuffPost from individuals in executive agencies and in the White House itself. They spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing their jobs.
While some of the leaks are based on opposition to his policies – the travel ban on all refugees and on visitors from seven predominantly Muslim nations, for instance – many appear motivated by a belief that Trump’s words, deeds and tweets pose a genuine threat.
When Trump tweeted about North Korea’s missile technology three weeks before he took office, for example, it scrambled then-President Barack Obama’s national security apparatus, which saw a risk in provoking an unstable young dictator who possessed nuclear weapons.
Richard Nephew, a State Department expert on Iran sanctions under Obama, said some of the leaks from the agencies are likely efforts to let the public know that their advice has not been followed, in the event something bad happens down the road. “This, I think, is about making it clear that these folks have tried to do the right thing and there is only so much they can do with a hostile administration,” Nephew said.
Perhaps along those lines, The Associated Press reported the details of a phone call Jan. 27 between Trump and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, noting that Trump said Mexico had “bad hombres” and that he might need to send U.S. troops to take care of things. (The White House later said Trump had been joking around.) The Washington Post detailed a Jan. 28 conversation between Trump and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in which Trump angrily denounced an agreement to resettle refugees held by Australia in the United States.
The New York Times, meanwhile, painted a portrait of a brooding commander in chief, wandering the White House alone in a bathrobe at night, watching too much cable television and venting his frustrations through angry tweets.
“I think it’s a cry for help,” said Elizabeth Rosenberg, a counterterrorism expert at the Treasury Department under Obama. She said many staffers still working in the national security agencies under Trump see what’s happening and are driven by a simple motive: “Incredulity, and the need to share it.”
The White House has denied many of these accounts, including the idea that Trump owns (let alone wears) a bathrobe. Others dispute the premise that Trump staffers undermining his competence is unusual. Ron Kaufman, who worked in George H.W. Bush’s White House in the late 1980s and early 1990s, argued that the Trump administration’s leaks are par for the course for a young administration. “There’s always leaks,” Kaufman said. “Every president in history has said the press hates me and there’s too many leaks.”
And Republican National Committee member Randy Evans, a veteran of Newt Gingrich’s leak-prone House speaker’s suite in the 1990s, said he doesn’t “get that sense” that Trump’s staffers are questioning his fitness for the job.
“Not yet, anyway,” Evans said. “We’re just too early in the process…. I think you see a lot of political jockeying going on and a lot of self-importance going on.”
The idea that Trump is temperamentally ill-suited for the presidency is nothing new. It was the main argument against him during both the GOP primaries a year ago and the general election last summer and fall. At times, Trump seemed to embrace the characterization, wearing it as a badge of honor for his status as an anti-establishment “outsider.”
But what were only hypothetical concerns on the campaign trail are now life-and-death decisions inside the White House – as evidenced by the death of a Navy commando in a botched raid in Yemen on Jan. 29. Trump approved that raid following a dinner meeting that included his top political adviser, former Breitbart News Chairman Stephen Bannon, whose permanent membership in the National Security Council was itself the basis of widespread leaks and warnings from the national security establishment.
“The intelligence community is desperately looking for a way to get some leverage in altering dangerous policies away from a catastrophic vector,” said Rick Wilson, a former Pentagon official familiar with intelligence issues who has become a vocal Trump critic.
Evans said at some point the White House will have to get serious about harmful leaks if they want to control their message, just as Gingrich’s office had to two decades ago. He described the method of intentionally releasing tidbits to various staffers to see what turned up in print. “If the administration gets serious about leaks, they’ll do the blue-dye test and find them,” Evans said.
But to Cohen, who now teaches at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, the problem is not the leakers. It’s the president. Because Trump has shown no true affection or respect for anyone outside his immediate family, Cohen said, he cannot expect that of his staff. “This is what happens when you have a narcissist as president.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tru ... 61313a1fbb
by Elvis » Wed Feb 08, 2017 11:07 pm
“I think it’s a cry for help,” said Elizabeth Rosenberg, a counterterrorism expert at the Treasury Department under Obama.
http://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/strangers/the-teacher-who-couldnt-read
John Corcoran graduated from high school and college and then spent 17 years as a high school teacher without knowing how to read or write. How on earth did he pull that off? And why? This is his story.
“The intelligence community is desperately looking for a way to get some leverage in altering dangerous policies away from a catastrophic vector,” said Rick Wilson, a former Pentagon official familiar with intelligence issues who has become a vocal Trump critic.
by seemslikeadream » Thu Feb 09, 2017 10:59 am
THE RIGHT WING
'Explaining Hitler' Author Breaks Silence: Trump Uses 'Mein Kampf Playbook' to Normalize Tyranny
"The truth is always worth knowing. Support your local journalist."
By David Edwards / Raw Story February 8, 2017
Historian Ron Rosenbaum spoke out this week about how President Donald Trump is using Adolf Hitler’s “playbook” from Mein Kampf for undermining democracy.
In a recent column for Los Angeles Review of Books, the author of Explaining Hitler breaks his silence about the recent U.S. election, and about how the “normalization” of Trump is strikingly similar to the Nazi Party’s march to power.
“What I want to suggest is an actual comparison with Hitler that deserves thought,” he writes. “It’s what you might call the secret technique, a kind of rhetorical control that both Hitler and Trump used on their opponents, especially the media.”
According to Rosenbaum, Trump is using the Mien Kampf “playbook” to throw the media off balance and to normalize actions and statements that would have been unthinkable just months ago.
“It looked like the right-wing parties had been savvy in bringing [Hitler] in and ‘normalizing’ him, making him a figurehead for their own advancement,” Rosenbaum notes. “Instead, it was truly the stupidest move made in world politics within the memory of mankind. It took only a few months for the hopes of normalization to be crushed.”
“Hitler’s method was to lie until he got what he wanted, by which point it was too late,” the column continues. “There is, of course, no comparison with Trump in terms of scale. His biggest policy decisions so far have been to name reprehensible figures to various cabinet posts and to enact dreadful executive orders. But this, too, is a form of destruction. While marchers and the courts have put up a fight after the Muslim ban, each new act, each new lie, accepted by default, seems less outrageous. Let’s call it what it is: defining mendacity down.”
Rosenbaum suggests that the signs were there before Trump took office: “The way Trump’s outrageous conduct and shamelessly lying mouth seemed so ridiculous we wouldn’t have to take him seriously. Until we did.”
We had heard allegations that Trump kept Hitler’s speeches by his bedside, but somehow we normalized that. We didn’t take him seriously because of all the outrageous, clownish acts and gaffes we thought would cause him to drop out of the race. Except these gaffes were designed to distract. This was his secret strategy, the essence of his success — you can’t take a stand against Trump because you don’t know where Trump is standing. You can’t find him guilty of evil, you can’t find him at all. And the tactics worked. Trump was not taken seriously, which allowed him to slip by the normal standards for an American candidate. The mountebank won. Again.
Suddenly, after the inconceivable (and, we are now beginning to realize, suspicious) Trump victory, the nation was forced to contend with what it would mean, whether the “alt-right” was a true threat or a joke to be tolerated. Did it matter that Trump had opened up a sewer pipe of racial hatred? Once again, normalization was the buzzword.
The historian concludes by recalling the final months of the Munich Post — before it was shut down by Hitler.
“The era of normalization had begun everywhere else, but the Munich Post resisted,” he writes. “Soon their office was closed. Some of the journalists ended up in Dachau, some ‘disappeared.’ But they’d won a victory for truth. A victory over normalization.”
“They never stopped fighting the lies, big and small, and left a record of defiance that was heroic and inspirational,” Rosenbaum states. “They discovered the truth about ‘endlösung’ [the Nazi plan for the extermination of the Jews] before most could have even imagined it. The truth is always worth knowing. Support your local journalist.”
http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/how- ... ed-tyranny
Against Normalization: The Lesson of the “Munich Post”
By Ron Rosenbaum
20828 114 225
FEBRUARY 5, 2017
THE TRUMP-HITLER COMPARISON. Is there any comparison? Between the way the campaigns of Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler should have been treated by the media and the culture? The way the media should act now? The problem of normalization?
Because I’d written a book called Explaining Hitler several editors had asked me, during the campaign, to see what could be said on the subject.
Until the morning after the election I had declined them. While Trump’s crusade had at times been malign, as had his vociferous supporters, he and they did not seem bent on genocide. He did not seem bent on anything but hideous, hurtful simplemindedness — a childishly vindictive buffoon trailing racist followers whose existence he had mainstreamed. When I say followers I’m thinking about the perpetrators of violence against women outlined by New York Magazine who punched women in the face and shouted racist slurs at them. Those supporters. These are the people Trump has dragged into the mainstream, and as my friend Michael Hirschorn pointed out, their hatefulness will no longer find the Obama Justice Department standing in their way.
Bad enough, but genocide is almost by definition beyond comparison with “normal” politics and everyday thuggish behavior, and to compare Trump’s feckless racism and compulsive lying was inevitably to trivialize Hitler’s crime and the victims of genocide.
¤
But after the election, things changed. Now Trump and his minions are in the driver’s seat, attempting to pose as respectable participants in American politics, when their views come out of a playbook written in German. Now is the time for a much closer inspection of the tactics and strategy that brought off this spectacular distortion of American values.
What I want to suggest is an actual comparison with Hitler that deserves thought. It’s what you might call the secret technique, a kind of rhetorical control that both Hitler and Trump used on their opponents, especially the media. And they’re not joking. If you’d received the threatening words and pictures I did during the campaign (one Tweet simply read “I gas Jews”), as did so many Jewish reporters and people of color, the sick bloodthirsty lust to terrify is unmistakably sincere. The playbook is Mein Kampf.
I came to this conclusion in a roundabout way. The story of Hitler’s relation to the media begins with a strange episode in Hitler’s rise to power, a clash between him and the press that looked like it might contribute to the end of his political career. But alas, it did not. In fact, it set him up for the struggle that would later bring him to power.
It was one of the crucial, almost forgotten incidents in the dark decades before World War II — the November 1923 Munich “Beer Hall Putsch,” Hitler’s violent attempt to take over all of south Germany in preparation for a strike against Berlin.
Hitler and his swelling Nazi party had been threatening a power move for months. Threatening first violence, then alliance with one of the other factions. Hitler was keeping them off balance, promising he’d not use force with one, scheming to use it with another, finally betraying his word to all.
At the very apex of the Beer Hall Putsch, a clash between his militia and Munich’s chief opposition newspaper, the Munich Post, may have changed the course of history, giving evidence that Hitler had the potential for a far more ambitious course of evil than anyone in Germany believed. Only the reporters who had been following Hitler seemed able to imagine it.
On the night of November 8, 1923, amid a clamorous political meeting in the Bürgerbräukeller, a huge echoey beer hall where political meetings were often held, Hitler stood up, fired a pistol into the air, and announced his militia had captured the three top leaders of southern Germany’s Bavarian province and handcuffed them in a back room in the beer hall. The next morning, he declared, his Stormtrooper militia would capture the capitol buildings and then head north to Berlin.
It didn’t happen. That morning there was a firefight on the bridge to the city center that ended with Hitler’s forces having failed to cross that bridge, Hitler flinging himself — or being flung — on the ground amid gunfire in ignominious defeat.
What caused his defeat? Some have suggested (myself among them) it was Hitler’s fateful decision to detach his elite private militia, the forerunner of the SS — the Stosstrupp Hitler — and send them on a mission to trash and pillage the offices of the Munich Post, the newspaper he called “the poison kitchen” (for the slanders about him they were allegedly cooking up).
Trash and pillage they did. I saw a faded newsprint photograph of the after-action damage to the Munich Post — desks and chairs smashed, papers strewn into a chaos of rubble, as if an explosion had gone off inside the building.
By the mid-’90s, when I first saw that picture, the memory of this chief anti-Hitler newspaper during his rise to power from Munich to Berlin had virtually disappeared from history. But while researching my book, I’d found a cache of back issues crumbling away in the basement archive of a Munich library, seemingly untouched for years.
Cumulatively, the stacks of issues told the story of a dozen-year-long struggle between Hitler and the paper, which began soon after the mysterious Austrian-born outsider appeared as a fiery orator and canny organizer on the Munich streets in 1921.
The Munich Post never stopped investigating who Hitler was and what he wanted, and Hitler never stopped hating them for it.
As Hitler sought to ingratiate himself with the city’s rulers (though never giving up the threat of violence), the Post reporters dug into his shadowy background, mocking him mercilessly, exposing internal party splits, revealing the existence of a death squad (“cell G”) that murdered political opponents and was at least as responsible for Hitler’s success as his vaunted oratory.
And in their biggest, most shamefully ignored scoop, on December 9, 1931, the paper found and published a Nazi party document planning a “final solution” for Munich’s Jews — the first Hitlerite use of the word “endlösung” in such a context. Was it a euphemism for extermination? Hitler dissembled, so many could ignore the grim possibility.
The Munich Post lost and Germany came under Nazi rule — but, in a sense, the paper had also won; they were the only ones who had figured out just how sinister Hitler and the Nazis were. I believe Hitler knew this. And so, back in 1923, when Hitler had thrown the opposition into disarray and division, he saw the chance to eliminate the Munich Post. And he took it and tried, though he failed at that, too.
After the 1923 fiasco, Hitler served nine months of a five-year sentence for rebellion and pledged to stay out of politics. But his parliamentary party didn’t quit, and eventually Hitler had demonstrated enough neutral behavior (discounting the murders committed by the Nazi death squads not directly connected to him) that he was allowed to campaign again. Was it a mistake? Had he learned a lesson? As it turned out, Hitler used the tactics of bluff masterfully, at times giving the impression of being a feckless Chaplinesque clown, at other times a sleeping serpent, at others yet a trustworthy statesman. The Weimar establishment didn’t know what to do, so they pretended this was normal. They “normalized” him.
And so they allowed him and his party back onto the electoral lists, the beginning of the end. Democracy destroying itself democratically. By November 1932, his party had become the largest faction in the Reichstag, though not a majority. After that election though, it looked as if he’d passed his peak: his total vote had gone down. It looked like the right-wing parties had been savvy in bringing him in and “normalizing” him, making him a figurehead for their own advancement.
Instead, it was truly the stupidest move made in world politics within the memory of mankind. It took only a few months for the hopes of normalization to be crushed. As Sir Richard Evans, the leading British historian of the period has proven at painstaking length, the Reichstag Fire was not a Hitler plan to excuse a takeover through martial law. It had indeed been the work of a Dutch man, Marinus van der Lubbe. But Hitler, ruthlessly and savagely, took advantage of it, instituting martial law and crushing electoral democracy. There would have been another excuse. Once in power Hitler was going to go on maximizing it until the “final solution.”
And the Munich Post never stopped reporting on this ultimate aim and on Hitler’s use of murder, decrying any attempts to “normalize” the tyrant. They kept fighting until two months after his January takeover. In March 1933, when the Nazis ruled the media and the Post was “legally” shut down. There had been a few other brave journalistic souls — Konrad Heiden, Fritz Gerlich. But swiftly, oh so swiftly, the order of the day became “gleichschaltung” — “realignment,” or forced conformity, savage normalization. Goebbels and other Nazi propagandists made it their crusade to get the German body politic “adjusted” to the new reign of terror. “Gleichschaltung” meant normalize or else.
Hitler’s method was to lie until he got what he wanted, by which point it was too late. At first, he pledged no territorial demands. Then he quietly rolled his tanks into the Rhineland. He had no designs on Czechoslovakia — just the Sudetenland, because so many of its German-born citizens were begging him to help shelter them from persecution. But soon came the absorption of the rest of Czechoslovakia. After Czechoslovakia, he’d be satisfied. Europe could return to normal. Lie!
There is, of course, no comparison with Trump in terms of scale. His biggest policy decisions so far have been to name reprehensible figures to various cabinet posts and to enact dreadful executive orders. But this, too, is a form of destruction. While marchers and the courts have put up a fight after the Muslim ban, each new act, each new lie, accepted by default, seems less outrageous. Let’s call it what it is: defining mendacity down.
And look where it got us. Perhaps we should have seen it — the way Trump’s outrageous conduct and shamelessly lying mouth seemed so ridiculous we wouldn’t have to take him seriously. Until we did.
Give him the harmless attention he seems to crave and he’ll no longer be a nuisance. The whole thing would be childish if it didn’t seem sinister in retrospect. It recalled to me a conversation I had with Alan Bullock (1914-2004), Oxford University historian and author of Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (1952), the first substantive biography of the dictator.
Bullock, then nearing 80, told me how students of Hitler were often misled to focus on his vicious anti-Semitism. In fact, Bullock had initially argued, it was likely he had believed in nothing and just used the Jew-hatred to advance his cause with the nitwit thug segment of the German people. Just as Trump appealed to his nitwit thug racist, anti-Semite followers. Hitler was a “mountebank,” Bullock exclaimed, a con man who played the Jewish card, using it to whip up rowdy enthusiasm and give the impression of a movement. This is the comparison I’d been seeking.
Bullock, as I’ve written, would later change his mind to incorporate the vision of Hitler offered by Hugh Trevor-Roper, who found the anti-Semitic ideology to be primus inter pares in Hitler’s fevered brain. Be that as it may, he saw that this tactic of playing the fool, the Chaplinesque clown, had worked over and over again, worked like a charm. It kept the West off balance. They consistently underestimated him and were divided over his plans (“what does Hitler really want?”). The tactic became irresistible, as repeated always success does.
Few took Hitler seriously, and before anyone knew it, he had gathered up the nations of Europe like playing cards.
Cut to the current election. We had heard allegations that Trump kept Hitler’s speeches by his bedside, but somehow we normalized that. We didn’t take him seriously because of all the outrageous, clownish acts and gaffes we thought would cause him to drop out of the race. Except these gaffes were designed to distract. This was his secret strategy, the essence of his success — you can’t take a stand against Trump because you don’t know where Trump is standing. You can’t find him guilty of evil, you can’t find him at all. And the tactics worked. Trump was not taken seriously, which allowed him to slip by the normal standards for an American candidate. The mountebank won. Again.
Suddenly, after the inconceivable (and, we are now beginning to realize, suspicious) Trump victory, the nation was forced to contend with what it would mean, whether the “alt-right” was a true threat or a joke to be tolerated. Did it matter that Trump had opened up a sewer pipe of racial hatred? Once again, normalization was the buzzword.
And I remembered the Munich Post, defending Weimar Germany. I reflected on how fragile democratic institutions could be in the face of organized hatred. Hitler had been tricky about his plans until he got the position and the power to enact them. Trump had been tricky, neither accepting nor rejecting the endorsement of KKK leader David Duke. David Duke! The KKK! In this century! He claimed he didn’t know who he was. He couldn’t be disqualified because of someone he didn’t know. That’s where we all went wrong, thinking he was stupid and outrageous, not canny and savvy and able to play the media like Paganini. The election demonstrated the weakness of a weak democracy, where basic liberties could be abolished by demagoguery and voter suppression.
And after Trump’s victory I began to follow the debate over how much deference Trump was owed, how much responsibility he had for the hate speech the alt-right morons cheered. Some found solace in the hashtag #notmypresident. David Remnick seemed to have woken the next morning with an especially felicitous gift of disgust, writing: “The fantasy of the normalization of Donald Trump — the idea that a demagogic candidate would somehow be transformed into a statesman of poise and deliberation after his Election Day victory — should now be a distant memory, an illusion shattered.”
He was joined in that spirit of defiance by Teju Cole in The New Times Magazine, Jamelle Bouie in Slate, Masha Gessen in The New York Review of Books, Charles M. Blow in The New York Times, and, most recently, Charles P. Pierce in Esquire.
It looked like a movement was building. What form it would take was unclear.
But now, a couple months later, the momentum is dissolving. The default position is normalization. Should we be content with that? Or should we resist, be it by taking to the streets or simply by “preferring not to,” Bartleby-style?
While sifting through possible courses of action, I remembered something sad — possibly the saddest thing I had ever read: the last few issues of the Munich Post. They had put up a brave front. Somehow, most touchingly, they had continued the serialization of a novel begun before Götterdämmerung, the way a normal newspaper might in normal times. It was a novel by the elusive, pseudonymous B. Traven, called The White Rose. It’s a novel about corporate greed and land-grabbing in Mexico’s oil fields — a text of protest perhaps more relevant to our current struggle than to the struggles of Germany in the 1930s.
I had to search another Munich archive to find the very final issues of the Munich Post, but they were even more dispiriting than I could imagine. The paper went down fighting a lie, fighting Nazi murderers, refusing to normalize the Hitler regime.
A week after Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, the Munich Post published their regular murder survey under the headline “Nazi Party Hands Dripping with Blood,” enumerating the bloody casualties: 18 dead, 34 wounded in street battles with the SA Stormtroopers.
These are the headlines that followed in daily succession:
“Germany Under the Hitler Regime: Political Murder and Terror”
“Blood Guilt of the Nazi Party”
“Germany Today: No Day Without Death”
“Brutal Terror in the Streets of Munich”
“Outlaws and Murderers in Power”
“People Allow Themselves to Be Intimidated”
The era of normalization had begun everywhere else, but the Munich Post resisted.
The Munich Post lost, yes. Soon their office was closed. Some of the journalists ended up in Dachau, some “disappeared.” But they’d won a victory for truth. A victory over normalization. They never stopped fighting the lies, big and small, and left a record of defiance that was heroic and inspirational. They discovered the truth about “endlösung” before most could have even imagined it. The truth is always worth knowing. Support your local journalist.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/nor ... nich-post/
by Cordelia » Thu Feb 09, 2017 3:26 pm
by seemslikeadream » Thu Feb 09, 2017 7:17 pm
Siding against Trump, appellate judges rule to continue travel ban suspension
President Donald Trump's travel ban faced its biggest legal test yet Tuesday as a panel of federal judges prepared to hear arguments from the administration and its opponents about two fundamentally divergent views of the executive branch and the court system.
By MARISA KENDALL | mkendall@bayareanewsgroup.com |
PUBLISHED: February 9, 2017 at 2:19 pm | UPDATED: February 9, 2017 at 3:14 pm
SAN FRANCISCO — A panel of federal appellate judges on Thursday upheld the suspension of President Donald Trump’s immigration order, a decision that means for now, immigrants from affected countries can continue to enter the U.S.
Legal experts say it’s likely the issue will head to the Supreme Court, where a vacancy left by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death last year could result in a 4-4 tie. If that occurs, the Ninth Circuit’s ruling will stand.
Trump’s Jan. 27 executive order, which temporarily blocked refugees and citizens of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen from entering the United States, sparked a massive outcry across the nation as travelers who had been on U.S.-bound flights when the order hit were detained at airports and prohibited from continuing their journeys.
A Seattle judge on Friday put Trump’s order on hold, restoring travel and prompting some immigrants to rush into the U.S. while the window was open. The administration appealed the Seattle judge’s ruling, and on Tuesday the Ninth Circuit grilled the lawyers on both sides, asking tough questions during oral arguments held via telephone.
Thousands of people tuned in to listen to the court’s live stream of the proceedings Tuesday, underscoring the significance of the case. And the court has been flooded with filings from third parties weighing in on the immigration ban. More than 130 tech companies, former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and John Kerry, and California’s Attorney General are among those who voiced their opposition to the ban.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/02/09/t ... -expected/
by seemslikeadream » Fri Feb 10, 2017 8:44 am
The real Victors in Judges’ ban on Trump’s Ban: US Universities
By Juan Cole | Feb. 10, 2017 |
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –
A three-judge panel from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday denied the Trump administration’s request that the Executive Order banning Muslims from 7 countries from coming to the US be reinstated. It was set aside by a Temporary Restraining Order issued by a Federal judge in Seattle.
One thing about this decision leapt out at me: that Trump’s actual opponents are in the main the University of Washington Seattle, Western Washington University at Bellingham, the University of Minnesota, and other state institutions of higher education in the two states that brought the suit against the EO.
That the universities should stand, at least temporarily, in the way of President Bannon’s plans to ban Muslims from the US, is poetic justice. Universities are everything that Fascists hate. They are machines for shredding the fake news on which the progress of Fascism depends. They promote rational tools of thought. They are cosmopolitan and international. They are based on merit and discount race. Fascism maintains that whites are superior to other races in every way, including in intelligence. But physics doesn’t care if you are white or brown. Physics only cares if your formula is correct, i.e. matches up with reality. Alt-NeoNazis like Bannon have no advantage in the university, despite their status as wealthy white males, unlike the situation in populist politics. Indeed, the irrational and apocalyptic discourse of a Bannon is looked down on and ridiculed by the university community.
It is no accident that one of the first things the Nazis did on coming to power in 1933 was to fire the Jewish university professors. That was only the beginning of the neutering and gutting of the universities under Fascism.
The Trump administration argued that Washington State and Minnesota had no standing to sue over the EO, since it had nothing to do with them. Judge James Robart found that the states did have standing to sue, on several grounds. One is that the states fulfill the role of parents or guardians for refugees resident in the state. Washington has at least 25,000 residents from the seven countries being banned, and has the obligation to look out for their interests. Another basis for their standing is that these states are economically harmed by the EO.
The main example of economic harm cited in the TRO is the harm to universities. Everything is telegraphic at this stage in the proceedings, so not a lot of detail is offered. But we can imagine the sorts of harm implied here. I noted last fall,
“There are about 1 million international students studying in American universities– nearly 5% of the country’s undergraduate population. Very large numbers of them are on government scholarships or are from wealthy families in their home countries, and the bulk of them pay full tuition. But they also rent apartments and go out to eat, and shop. These international students bring in $30 billion a year to the US economy.”
That is, the universities have students from these countries who were getting locked out of the country despite valid visas and travel documents, or even green cards (permanent residency). That is a loss of tuition, dormitory fees, etc. In addition, the universities employ professors and researchers from the 7 countries, and so would lose their contribution to e.g. research on a scientific project, where those non-citizen researchers may have been playing a crucial role. To have these researchers suddenly and arbitrarily deprived of the ability to follow through on their commitments to these projects is a clear loss to the universities. The numbers of university-related people would be even greater if green card holders and those with dual citizenship are affected, as was initially asserted by the Trump administration. In the face of massive protests, it backed off these extreme positions, but only via a note from the press secretary. The EO could still at any moment be interpreted to sweep up permanent residents and even US citizens.
The ruling says,
“The States argue that the Executive Order causes a concrete and particularized injury to their public universities, which the parties do not dispute are branches of the States under state law . . . Specifically, the States alleged that the teaching and research missions of the universities are harmed by the Executive Order’s effect on their faculty and students who are nationals of the seven affected countries. These students and faculty cannot travel for research, academic collaboration, or for personal reasons, and their families abroad cannot visit. Some have been stranded outside the country, unable to return to the universities at all. The schools cannot consider attractive student candidates and cannot hire faculty from the seven affected countries, which they have done in the past.”
The three-judge panel in San Francisco found that the universities do indeed have “third party standing” because their interests are “inextricably bound up with the activity the litigant wishes to pursue…” Moreover, in other cases schools have been allowed to assert the rights of their students. And, the quality of their faculty obviously deeply affects the universities.
So the 3 judges found that the states do have standing to sue, reaffirming the lower court opinion. But note that while the states might have other interests in the EO besides those of the universities, it is these educational harms that are foregrounded in both of the initial decisions staying the EO until larger issues can be addressed.
The Trump administration also tried to argue that the president’s EO is not subject to review by the courts because he has the right to exclude any class of aliens by fiat if he fears they are a danger to national security. The judges laughed this unreviewability argument right out of court, citing previous court reviews of precisely this sort of policy, as when Bush tried to deny habeas corpus (the right to be produced before a court when charged with a crime) to detainees (‘enemy combatants’) charged with terrorism, and the Supreme Court slapped him down.
A further consideration in upholding the TRO is the Executive Order’s violation of the Establishment Clause. The 1st Amendment in the Bill of Rights forbids the government to make one particular religion a state religion. The panel accepted the States’ argument that statements of Trump, Rudy Giuliani and others make it clear that the EO is a Muslim ban and if so, that it violates the first amendment. The judges argue that courts have often taken the legislative history into account in striking down laws that have the effect of discriminating with regard to religion. This argument appears to be controversial among the legal scholars, but they do give a lot of case law for this way of proceeding. Those who cite previous instances of US visa or refugee preference for minorities, it seems to me, are on thin ground because those took place before the 1965 Immigration Act, which forbids such discrimination. Likewise, lots of unconstitutional things were done on racist grounds in the past that would not pass muster today. I think both statute and current Supreme Court approaches to the Establishment Cause tell against the discrimination mandated in the EO.
As the case moves through the courts, the deference to the president on national security issues may reemerge as a decisive consideration. This dispute is by no means over, and precedent probably is on the side of the EO. But in these essential first weeks, we can be proud that the universities took a leading role in standing against this Muslim ban, against this affront to the constitution, against this nasty piece of Neofascist bigotry.
Appendix:
http://www.juancole.com/2017/02/victors ... ities.html
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