*president trump is seriously dangerous*

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Re: *president trump is seriously dangerous*

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 28, 2017 8:28 am

After Trump Massacres in Mosul, Campaign against ISIL Halted
By Juan Cole | Mar. 26, 2017 |

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –
Candidate Donald Trump called last year for carpet-bombing of Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) in Iraq and Syria. It is possible that Trump has loosened the rules of engagement for the US Air Force, which is providing air support to the Iraqi Army. Looser rules could well be producing more casualties.
This allegation is supported by an NYT piece today that quotes and Iraqi officer to this effect:

Dubai’s al-Khaleej reports that after a US airstrike on West Mosul on Thursday that is alleged to have killed over 200 innocent civilians, the Iraqi Army has paused its campaign to take the rest of the Western part of the city. That is, Trump may actually have hamstrung the anti-Daesh fight by policies that led to a civilian massacre from the air.
The Iraqi Observatory for Human Rights is reporting that an Iraqi civilian defense force is reporting that 500 corpses of civilians killed by air strikes have been discovered in Mosul.
Old Mosul is densely populated and it is possible that Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) still has some 300,000 people there under its sway. The Iraqi army and the US-coalition are attempting to dislodge Daesh, but never called for a civilian exodus. Hence, civilians are caught in the crossfire.
The US military admitted to carrying out the deadly strike, but were careful to underline that it had been called for by the Iraqi Army. Trump’s war strategy seems to be so unsuccessful that the US Air Force is trying to pass the blame for it off onto the Iraqi Army!
The Mosul judicial council has called for declaring Mosul a disaster zone. The judges added,
“The indiscriminate strikes on West Mosul by the fighter jets of the coalition must cease.”
They called for a review of military planning for Mosul. They noted that they had been calling since Thursday for civil defense units to help with saving civilians. The coalition planes had been trying to hit three houses used by Daesh.
——-
Related video:
https://www.juancole.com/2017/03/massac ... ainst.html


WORLD
Will Donald Trump Escalate the Devastating War and Hunger in Yemen?
Unless an urgent effort is made to find a political solution, almost 7 million people in Yemen will starve.
By Medea Benjamin / AlterNet March 27, 2017

This week marks the beginning of year three of the Saudi-led military intervention in the civil war in Yemen, an intervention that has resulted in an epic tragedy of destruction and starvation. Tens of thousands of Yemenis marked the occasion by pouring into the streets of the capital, Sanna, to call for an end to the Saudi airstrikes that have been supported by the US military. But instead of pushing to jumpstart stalemated negotiations to end the conflict, the Trump administration seems anxious to get more deeply involved in the war by supporting an attack on the key port of Hodeidah and resuming halted weapons sales.

Greater US support for the Saudis, who intervened in Yemen to try to stop the Iran-friendly Houthis from coming to power, is part of Trump’s “get tough” policy on Iran. But further escalation of the war in Yemen, particularly an offensive to seize Hodeidah from the Houthi rebels, will mean even more death and hunger for the Yemeni people. Jeremy Konyndyk, who was the director of foreign disaster assistance at US AID under Obama, said a serious disruption of the Hodeidah port could well “tip the country into famine.”

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has requested for US support for the Hodeidah attack, a request that will reportedly come before Trump’s national security advisors this week. The Obama administration, which had been helping the Saudi bombing campaign from the beginning with weapons and logistics, did not support this particular attack because they thought it would exacerbate the humanitarian crisis since Hodeideh has been the main port of entry for humanitarian supplies.

On March 23, a bipartisan group of ten senators, including Senators Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Marco Rubio (R-FL), urged Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to launch an urgent diplomatic effort to help avert a pending famine in Yemen and three other nations, and included a specific call to keep the Hodeidah port open to humanitarian aid.

Yemen imports 90 percent of its food, and the war, including a Saudi naval blockade and a previous bombing of cranes at the Hodeidah port where all the large grain silos are located, has made it difficult to import sufficient food and humanitarian supplies. Food shipments into Hodeidah have already fallen precipitously, with only a few ships arriving each week, compared to dozens before the war, and more shipping lines are pulling out due to the growing risks.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) says speed is of the essence to prevent a tragedy of massive proportions. “Words cannot capture the extent of the suffering of the Yemeni people,” said ICRC Middle East director Robert Mardini. “Their resilience has reached a breaking point.” Twenty people are dying every day, many of curable diseases because only 45 percent of the health facilities are functioning.”

A UNICEF report shows over 400,000 Yemeni children suffering from severe acute malnutrition, and a child dying every 10 minutes from malnutrition, diarrhea and respiratory-tract infections.

Jamie McGoldrick, Humanitarian Coordinator for Yemen put the tragedy in human terms. “Fisherman can’t fish, farmers can’t farm, civil servants don’t get paid…people having to make life and death decisions: Do you feed your children or do you pay for medical treatment for your child? And that’s a daily call for many families.”

UN and private relief organizations have been mobilizing to respond to the crisis. In February, the UN launched a humanitarian appeal calling for $2.1 billion. As of March, however, only 7 percent of the appeal had been funded and the UN Refugee Agency has received less than half the funds it needs.

While the wealthy nations must open their wallets to feed starving Yemenis, the only way to end the humanitarian crisis is to end the conflict. This would mean a ceasefire, a push for negotiations and in the case of the US, an end to weapons sales to the Saudis.

President Obama supported the Saudis with massive weapons sales during his eight years in office. But just before leaving office in December 2016, when faced with increased pressure from human rights groups and lawmakers after a Saudi strike on a Yemeni funeral killed at least 140 people, President Obama put a halt of the sale of precision-guided munitions to the Saudis.

Trump’s State Department already gave notice to Congress that they have approved a resumption of these sales. If there is no objection from Congress and President Trump signs off on the deal, the deal will go through. Amnesty International urged Trump not to sign off on the sales, saying that new US arms could be used to devastate civilian lives in Yemen and could “implicate your administration in war crimes.”

This is not the time to escalate the war. Unless an urgent effort is made to find a political solution and get massive food aid into the country, almost 7 million people in this war-torn nation will face starvation. Stopping on attack on Hodeidah and making sure the port is secure for food shipments is a critical first step.
http://www.alternet.org/world/trump-esc ... nger-yemen
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They could still get him out of office.
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Re: *president trump is seriously dangerous*

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 28, 2017 11:49 am

Published on
Monday, March 27, 2017
byCommon Dreams
Trump's New Plan: Govt as Company, Citizens as Customers, Kushner as CEO
Presidential son-in-law to head new innovation office tasked with reforming and privatizing federal government
byLauren McCauley, staff writer

Real estate heir Jared Kushner has continued to amass power within the Trump administration, despite the fact that he has never held elected office nor has he been reviewed by the Senate for potential ethics violations. (Photo: Jamel Toppin/ Forbes)
Real estate heir Jared Kushner has continued to amass power within the Trump administration, despite the fact that he has never held elected office nor has he been reviewed by the Senate for potential ethics violations. (Photo: Jamel Toppin/ Forbes)
Bringing President Donald Trump's notion of government as corporate enterprise to fruition, the White House on Monday announced that Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner will be leading a sweeping government overhaul, leaning on business leaders to solve pressing national issues while looking to privatize key government functions.

Trump and Kushner confirmed the move to the Washington Post, which described the new White House Office of American Innovation as a "SWAT team" of professionals with "little-to-no political experience" that will "help find efficiencies" within the federal government, while also reaching out to the private sector to determine what functions could be privately outsourced.

"We should have excellence in government," Kusher told the Post. "The government should be run like a great American company. Our hope is that we can achieve successes and efficiencies for our customers, who are the citizens."

The news that Kushner, the real estate heir married to Ivanka Trump, would be leading this enterprise prompted accusations of nepotism and kleptocracy. As many pointed out, Kushner has continued to amass power within the Trump administration, despite the fact that he has never held elected office nor has he been reviewed by the Senate for potential ethics violations.

In a column titled, "Donald Trump plans to make Jared Kushner America's unelected, unapproved, uncontrolled CEO," Daily Kos columnist and author Mark Sumner observed that while Trump "is anxious to destroy existing offices and departments, he's creating a brand new one, to be led by his 36-year-old son-in-law, a man who has never held elected office, never stood for Senate review, and who isn't screened out by nepotism laws because...no one knows why."

The Post also notes that the new position

represents an expansion of Kushner's already far-reaching influence. The 36-year-old former real estate and media executive will continue to wear many hats, driving foreign and domestic policy as well as decisions on presidential personnel. He also is a shadow diplomat, serving as Trump's lead adviser on relations with China, Mexico, Canada and the Middle East.


What's more, the announcement was made the same day it was revealed that Kushner will be questioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee about meetings he arranged with Russian ambassador Sergey I. Kislyak, including "a previously unreported sit-down with the head of Russia's state-owned development bank," the New York Times reported, as part of the government probe into possible Russian election meddling.

Kushner's ambitions for his new office include "reimagining Veterans Affairs," modernizing the federal government's data infrastructure, "remodeling workforce-training programs," combating opioid abuse, and "developing 'transformative projects' under the banner of Trump's $1 trillion infrastructure plan, such as providing broadband Internet service to every American," according to the Post, which notes that "[i]n some cases, the office could direct that government functions be privatized, or that existing contracts be awarded to new bidders."

The so-called innovation office is also seen as advancing the "deconstruction of the administrative state" envisioned by Trump's chief strategist Steven Bannon, though the Post notes that the White House prefers to brand the effort as "an incubator of sleek transformation as opposed to deconstruction."

Creation of the office follows a recent executive order signed by President Trump which instructed agency heads to flag "unnecessary" programs within their departments to be slashed as part of a grand "reorganizing" scheme.

Kushner will lead a team of Wall Street and corporate alums that includes former Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn; Chris Liddell, who served as chief financial officer for General Motors, Microsoft, and International Paper; real estate heir Reed Cordish; and Dina Powell, former Goldman Sachs executive and former adviser to George W. Bush, among others.


The group also boasts partnerships with Silicon Valley titans including Apple chief executive Tim Cook, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff, and Tesla founder and chief executive Elon Musk.
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/0 ... ushner-ceo




Peter Alexander‏Verified account @PeterAlexander 20h20 hours ago
More
Fmr sr. WH offical: Even House Intel chair must be cleared into WH grounds: "It's just not possible the WH was unaware or uninvolved.”
140 replies 3,456 retweets 5,724 likes
Reply 140 Retweet 3.5K
Like 5.7K
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: *president trump is seriously dangerous*

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 28, 2017 6:50 pm

2,000 Lawyers Just Filed An Official Complaint Against Trump’s Attorney General

BY GRANT STERN

PUBLISHED ON MARCH 28, 2017

Lawyers for Good Government just filed a Bar complaint against former Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions for committing four distinct types of professional misconduct in his two months as Attorney General, according to the Alabama Reporter:

Almost 2,000 attorneys from across the US have signed on to a complaint addressed to the Alabama State Bar Disciplinary Committee asking that Attorney General Jeff Session be disbarred from the Alabama State Bar.
Trump’s Attorney General is racking up the complaints this month, after Massachusetts lawyer J. Whitfield Larrabee filed his own Alabama Bar complaint on March 9th and a criminal complaint to the US Department of Justice on behalf of 23 petitioners spread across the United States just yesterday.

The Lawyers for Good Government cited four specific reasons that Sessions license to practice law should be revoked in today’s complaint. Attorneys from 50 states and the District of Columbia signed today’s complaint, which filed today with the Alabama Bar. (see in full below):

(1) An affirmative misrepresentation of fact under oath during testimony in Mr. Sessions’ Senate confirmation process, specifically to a question propounded by Senator Al Franken.

(2) During Mr. Sessions’ US Senate confirmation hearing, failure to disclose significant facts material to an issue of national significance, that is, contacts with the Russian government during the presidential election.

(3) Perjury committed during Mr. Sessions’ Senate confirmation hearing.

(4) As Attorney General, withholding information about his own discussions with a representative of the Russian government, all while overseeing investigations into Russian interference with the US electoral process and Trump-Russia ties.
“With nearly 2,000 lawyers and the ACLU making ethics complaints against him,” J. Whitfield Larrabee floridly remarked in an interview today about both cases, after seeing today’s complaint, “Jeff Sessions is now subject to more complaints than any lawyer in the history of the United States.”

Larrabee continued:

“The dishonest acts that are substantiated in these Bar complaints indicate that Sessions cannot continue to properly perform his responsibilities without damaging the integrity of the Department of Justice. The Department is a vitally important institution in our democracy. If Sessions does not immediately resign, it is the duty of President Trump to fire him.”
The Alabama Bar has every reason to take action against AG Sessions because their rules are quite explicit. The Bar’s regulatory jurisdiction over a lawyer’s conduct doesn’t end when they become a public servant, it only increases. Their rules say:

“Lawyers holding public office assume legal responsibilities going beyond those of other citizens. A lawyer’s abuse of public office can suggest an inability to fulfill the professional role of attorney. “
The Attorney General is America’s top law enforcement officer, and in just a short amount of time, Jeff Sessions has proven himself incapable of following the law, let alone supervising its enforcement.

Even worse, his insane ideas about Guantanamo Bay and utterly fact-free assertions about legal marijuana – which over half of the states have enshrined in state laws and constitutions – would be best left out of the top law enforcement job in the USA.

America will be a better place when Attorney General Jeff Sessions is out of office and has a whole lot more time to devote to his own, full-time legal defense from the criminal and Bar complaints about his contemptuous lies to Congress.

L4GG Alabama Disciplinary Complaint v Sessions by Grant Stern on Scribd
http://occupydemocrats.com/2017/03/28/2 ... y-general/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: *president trump is seriously dangerous*

Postby Grizzly » Wed Mar 29, 2017 11:28 pm

“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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Re: *president trump is seriously dangerous*

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 30, 2017 9:15 pm

Why would Trump Spend $54 Billion More on the Pentagon? To Start a War, Obviously.
By contributors | Mar. 30, 2017 |

By John Feffer | ( Foreign Policy in Focus
The president apparently wants to put the U.S. on a permanent war footing to sustain his unpopular presidency.
So, let me see if I’ve got this right.
North Korea has been pushing its ally China to rein in the United States. Pyongyang is worried that Washington is about to launch a preemptive attack, so it has tried to use whatever minimal amount of influence it has to persuade China to use its considerable economic leverage with the United States to get those knuckleheads inside the Beltway to listen to reason.
Or maybe I misheard the report on the radio.
How about this: As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump promised to stop reckless U.S. military interventions overseas, like the one he so disliked (after it failed) in Iraq. So, as president, he is withdrawing all troops from Syria, reducing U.S. military presence in Asia, and pulling the United States out of NATO. Oh, and he’s going to cut the military as part of his overall promise to downsize government.
Perhaps I misheard that report as well.
During the Obama administration, the comic duo of Key and Peele famously introduced the “anger translator” who could give voice to what President Obama was really thinking as he provided measured responses to all manner of nonsense lobbed in his direction. Ah, those were halcyon days when we made fun of the American president for not giving voice to his true feelings.
What kind of translator do we need for the Trump era? Perhaps a “reality translator” that reveals the simple, id-like intentions behind the current president’s Tweet-rants and policy proposals.
Type in “Obama bugged Trump Tower” and out comes: “Hey, hey, stop looking at my links to Russia, okay!?” Type in “2017 budget proposal” and out comes: “I’m gonna destroy every potential source of resistance to me and my ambitions.” Type in “Trumpcare” and out comes “I’m going to rob poor Peter to pay propertied Paul.” (To quote just one example: Trumpcare would encourage health care companies to pay their overpaid CEOs even more money!)
I’ve come to the conclusion, after about 60 days of presidential antics, that the problem is not “fake news.” The problem is a fake administration.
It’s no surprise that Donald Trump, as president, just makes things up. He’s been doing that all his career. But now an entire government is being re-engineered around the pathological dishonesty of the executive and his advisors. This is bait-and-switch on a level never seen before in the United States.
It would all be rather amusing if millions of lives weren’t at stake — both domestically through the self-destruction of the federal government and internationally through the very real prospects of war.
This president, with his insuperable ambition to score some “wins,” is in search of some missions to declare accomplished. North Korea and the Islamic State are at the top of the list. But don’t be surprised if the $54 billion that Trump wants to add like an enormous cherry on top of the Pentagon’s over-rich sundae will translate into even more conflicts around the world.
Let’s Go to the Numbers
If Trump’s proposed Pentagon increase of $54 billion were the military budget of a distinct country, it would come in fifth on the list of global military expenditures. Basically, Trump wants to add an entire annual British military budget on top of what the United States already spends — which already towers above any imaginary coalition of potential rivals.
With the rest of his deplorable budget request, Trump will encounter pushback from Congress and cities and major constituencies like the over-65 set. Some of his own voters might finally come to their senses when they realize that Trump the Great is waving his magic hand in the air to distract them from seeing the other hand pick their pockets.
But on the military side, Trump has, if anything, underbid. Congressional hawks are complaining that Trump is not throwing enough money at the Pentagon. They say that he’s only offering a 3 percent increase over what the Obama administration estimated for 2018, that Trump the candidate made even grander promises, that the Pentagon should get at least another $37 billion. If Congress comes back with this figure, it would increase the increase to $91 billion. Trump’s boost alone would then rise to number three on the list of global spenders, after the United States and China.
What does Trump want to spend all this extra money on? He wants a 350-ship navy — even though the Navy is already undertaking a 30-year program to raise the number of ships from the current 272 ships to 308. He has hinted at pulling out of the New START treaty with Russia — once he found out what it was — so that he could build more nukes. There would be more soldiers, including as many as 60,000 more in the Army.
But all of this is just skirting the real issue. Donald Trump wants to spend more money on the military because he wants to go to war.
First: Islamic State
As a candidate, Donald Trump focused most of his martial fury on the Islamic State. He promised to “bomb the hell” out of ISIS and, within 30 days in office, come up with a plan to defeat the entity. When he was elected, radical jihadists predictably rejoiced: Bring it on, they effectively said.
Within 30 days, Trump indeed published a memorandum on defeating ISIS. Bottom line: We need to come up with a plan.
In the absence of a strategy, what Trump has done is chilling enough. He has unleashed the CIA to conduct drone strikes, reversing an Obama administration order. He has continued to sanction B-52 strikes, like the one this month in the Syrian village of Al Jinah that killed dozens of civilians. He’s sending 1,000 troops to join the fight against ISIS in Syria. He wants to rely more on Special Forces in raids like the one in Yemen in January that went so spectacularly wrong, leaving one Navy SEAL and several civilians dead.
In some ways, Trump is merely continuing Obama-era practices. But it promises to be a no-holds-barred version of the last administration counter-terrorism program.
Even our allies in the region are getting concerned. Trump met this week with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, pledging to stand side-by-side with Iraq in the campaign to defeat ISIS.
But after the meeting, Abadi apparently had second thoughts. “Committing troops is one thing. Fighting terrorism is another thing,” he said at the U.S. Institute of Peace. “You don’t defeat terrorism by fighting it militarily. There are better ways.” Perhaps Abadi was thinking of the Trump administration’s initial inclusion of Iraq among the seven countries on the “Muslim travel ban” list. Or maybe he was thinking of Trump’s alarming pledge to seize Iraqi oil now under ISIS control.
Or perhaps the “better ways” simply referred to all the non-military parts of U.S. foreign policy — diplomacy, food aid, cooperation with international organizations — that Trump wants to ax from the federal budget. Even stalwart Trump supporters like Bob Dole are up in arms about humanitarian programs — like the Dole-McGovern initiative that provides school meals to 40 million children around the world — that are now on the chopping block.
What better way of creating the next generation of America haters?
Next: North Korea
Rex Tillerson, the empty suit that Trump has installed in the now supererogatory position of secretary of state, is trying to get back in on the action. On a recent trip to Asia, Tillerson sat down with Chinese premier Xi Jinping to plot the further isolation of North Korea.
Tillerson pointed out that the “strategic patience” approach toward North Korea had failed over the last eight years. That’s obviously true. The alternative, however, was much worse: Tillerson said that all options, including military ones, were on the table.
All of the military options come with unacceptable risks of retaliation and escalation to full-scale war. The United States could try to destroy a single missile launch, take out as much of North Korea’s nuclear complex as possible, or attempt a full regime change a la Iraq. “North Korea would perceive even a limited strike as the start of a war,” Max Fisher points out in The New York Times, “and respond with its full arsenal.”
Given the relatively crude ICBM capability that North Korea currently possesses, the people who would suffer from an escalation would be Koreans, Japanese, and Chinese.
Perhaps Trump is simply trying to scare the Chinese into doing more to rein in its erstwhile ally. But China doesn’t have that kind of influence in Pyongyang (just as it doesn’t have that kind of influence in Washington to change the Trump administration’s policies).
Or perhaps the Trump administration will go to war simply out of a general attitude of un-strategic impatience.
Beyond ISIS and Pyongyang
Building the Navy up to 350 ships and inducting another 60,000 people into the Army have little to do with dealing with either ISIS or North Korea, unless the Trump administration anticipates sending another large occupation force to the Middle East or Asia. Even Trump knows that dispatching tens of thousands of American troops to a warzone is a political mistake.
Partly Trump’s moves are about ensuring that the military is on his side. Partly it’s about tilting government in general away from soft power and toward hard power. Partly it’s about Trump’s personal vulnerability on military matters given his decision not to fight in Vietnam. It wouldn’t be the first time that a guy stocked up on weapons as part of a grand scheme of compensation.
There’s been speculation that Trump is really bulking up for a showdown with China. Given Trump’s phone call with Taiwan, his threats to impose tariffs on Chinese imports, and his bellicose rhetoric about China’s role in the island dispute in the South China Sea, there does seem to be some good evidence for this possibility. But the Trump administration has recently dialed back the hostility. Trump himself assured Chinese leader Xi Jinping of U.S. commitment to the “one-China” policy. Tillerson followed with a visit in Beijing that emphasized “mutual respect.”
The uncomfortable truth is that Trump probably doesn’t have any specific war-fighting scenario beyond laying waste to ISIS territory and declaring mission accomplished over the smoking ruins. Rather, he wants to put the United States on a permanent war footing as a way to sustain his unpopular presidency.
Until a challenger emerges that can focus U.S. national security concerns, Trump will let fire at range of targets such as terrorists, journalists, and Germans. Perhaps his provocative rhetoric and actions will encourage some small country to stand up suicidally against the United States and allow Trump to declare a Grenada-like or Panama-like victory.
Like the $19.5 billion that the Trump administration is giving NASA for its Mars program, Trump’s war plans are a long shot. Casinos know that once a gambler wins on a long shot, they’ll go bankrupt trying to reproduce that once-in-a-lifetime event. Unfortunately, bankruptcy in Trump’s case means collective ruin for the rest of us.
Any chance we can convince NASA to send Trump on its first manned mission to Mars — so that he can return to the planet that birthed him?
John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus and the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands.
Via Foreign Policy in Focus
—–
Related video added by Juan Cole:
The Young Turks: “Trump Calls For HISTORIC Increase In Military Spending”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PJfCnQgt2A
https://www.juancole.com/2017/03/billio ... ously.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: *president trump is seriously dangerous*

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Apr 01, 2017 8:11 pm

Judge: Trump Incited Violence Against Protesters At Kentucky Rally

John Bazemore
ByALICE OLLSTEINPublishedAPRIL 1, 2017, 4:54 PM EDT
26557Views
A federal judge in Kentucky is allowing a lawsuit by three protesters assaulted at a Donald Trump campaign rally last March to move forward, agreeing with the plaintiffs that Trump's call from the podium for his supporters to "get 'em out of here" incited rally-goers to physically attack them.

The three protesters have sued Trump for incitement, vicarious liability, negligence, gross negligence, and recklessness.

The opinion, from U.S. District Judge David J. Hale of the Western District of Kentucky, denied most of Trump's motion to dismiss the charges, saying that his angry demand for the removal of the protesters was "particularly reckless."

He cites testimony from one of the assailants—a known member of a white nationalist group—saying he began shoving the young African American woman protester after hearing Trump's call to "get them out."

A video of the incident went viral last year:

Though Trump's lawyers argue his words were protected speech under the First Amendment, the court disagreed. "It is plausible that Trump’s direction to 'get ’em out of here' advocated the use of force," Judge Hale wrote. "It was an order, an instruction, a command...Trump’s statement at least implicitly encouraged the use of violence or lawless action.”

The judge did not agree, however, that Trump should be held "vicariously liable" for his supporters' physical assault. Hale noted that the men who attacked the protesters were not employed by the Trump campaign and were not under his direct control during the rally.

Here is the federal court ruling:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump ... -incitemet
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
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Re: *president trump is seriously dangerous*

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Apr 06, 2017 5:29 pm

Twitter refuses U.S. order to disclose user behind anti-Trump account

By David Ingram | SAN FRANCISCO
Twitter Inc on Thursday refused to reveal the user behind an account opposed to President Donald Trump's tough immigration policies and said it was challenging the demand for records by the U.S. government in court, according to a lawsuit.

The lawsuit over the account @ALT_uscis, claimed to be run by at least one federal immigration employee, was filed in federal court in San Francisco, where Twitter is based. The acronym CIS refers to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the account's description refers to itself as "immigration resistance."

Following Trump's inauguration in January, anonymous Twitter feeds voicing concerns at more than a dozen U.S. government agencies appeared to challenge the president's views on climate change and other issues. Trump has vowed to build a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico and has promised to deport millions of illegal immigrants.

"The rights of free speech afforded Twitter’s users and Twitter itself under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution include a right to disseminate such anonymous or pseudonymous political speech," Twitter said in the lawsuit.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which is a defendant in the lawsuit, declined to comment on pending litigation. The Justice Department, which typically represents federal agencies in court, also declined to comment.

Esha Bhandari, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the Twitter user in the case, said the government’s request was highly unusual. Requests for social media account information from the U.S. government typically involve a pressing national security or criminal matter, she said.

“We have seen no reason the government has given for seeking to unmask this speaker’s identity,” Bhandari said, adding that the right to anonymous speech against the government is “a bedrock American value” strongly protected under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Shortly after the lawsuit became public, @ALT_uscis tweeted a copy of the First Amendment and a picture of part of the lawsuit to its 45,000 followers, an increase of about 12,000 in a few hours.

Twitter said it received an administrative summons last month demanding that it provide records related to the account.

A copy of the summons filed with the lawsuit says the records are needed for an investigation to ensure compliance with duties, taxes and fines and other customs and immigration matters.

It was not immediately clear how the anonymous account fit into those laws and regulations.

The social media company has a history of challenging other government demands for information on its users, including a 2012 demand from New York prosecutors about an Occupy Wall Street protester. In that case, Twitter was forced to hand over tweets from the protester to a judge, and the protester pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct.

Twitter sued the U.S. Department of Justice in 2014, seeking permission to publicly disclose more information about requests it gets from U.S. authorities for information about its users. The lawsuit was partly dismissed last year.

Among the lawyers representing Twitter in the latest case is Seth Waxman, a former high-ranking Justice Department official under President Bill Clinton.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitt ... SKBN1782PH
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: *president trump is seriously dangerous*

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Apr 08, 2017 6:51 pm

Adam Curtis: Donald Trump Has Become a Deep State Puppet
The legendary documentarian shares his thoughts on the Syrian airstrike and Trump's presidency.
By Jacob Sugarman / AlterNet April 5, 2017

The 2016 election has made soothsayers of any number of historians, academics and philosophers, but one of the few filmmakers who saw Donald Trump coming was the documentarian Adam Curtis. One might even argue that Trump's victory was the closing argument of a thesis he has been refining and developing for the last 15 years.

Since his 2002 opus, The Century of Self, Curtis has traced the myriad ways in which the left has abandoned politics in favor of a radical individualism, online and off, that has allowed reactionary forces to metastasize in the West and across the globe. As he ominously declares at the beginning of his latest film, Hypernormalisation (2016), these forces are now puncturing "the fragile surface of our carefully constructed fake world."

Drawing from the BBC's vast video archive, Curtis' films are ambitious, addictive and haunting. In The Power of Nightmares (2004), he charts the eery parallels between the neoconservative and radical Islamist movements of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and the ways in which our political leaders have preyed upon our fears to maintain their grip on power. The documentary also examines the ways in which we're still living in the shadows of the Cold War, decades after perestroika. The Trap (2007) offers a searing look at how Britain's and the United States' attempts to free themselves from bureaucracy have given rise to a bloodless and oppressive managerialism, while their efforts to spread democracy abroad have yielded only violent mayhem. All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, released in 2011, explores how our reliance on computers to forge a stable world has produced just the opposite.

Curtis spoke with AlterNet last week about a range of subjects, and then a strange thing happened, as he might pronounce in one of his documentaries. The Syrian government launched a chemical weapons assault killing scores of civilians, and the U.S. responded with a missile strike of its own. Or so the dominant political-media narrative would dictate. What follows is a composite of our conversation before and after, over the phone and via email—a fragmented Q&A for a complex and possibly unknowable moment in history.

Jacob Sugarman: So in less than a week since we first spoke, Donald Trump has done a complete about-face on Syria and Bashar al-Assad. Obviously we're just hours removed from the airstrike, but what are your first impressions? Does this signal to you that the Pentagon is dictating his foreign policy? Is this bombing campaign an elaborate piece of political theater or is it more likely the opening gambit in a prolonged assault?

Adam Curtis: No one knows what the attack means, or how it will play out. It is far too early. My first reaction is that what may be happening is that President Trump is stepping for the first time into the real world. But he will discover that the consequences may be very different and far more complex than he imagines.

Firstly, the question that has not really been addressed is, why did the Syrians use chemical weapons? If, as we are constantly being told, the regime is winning the civil war, why did they do something like that? Some analysts and journalists are saying that possibly Assad is not winning; that the Syrian army is exhausted and starting to fall apart; and that the Russians are finding the conflict far more difficult to deal with than they imagined, especially with just dropping bombs. Most of the really hard fighting for Aleppo was not done by the Syrian army but by Hezbollah, which is becoming a really serious army. And behind them are the Revolutionary Guards of Iran.

Secondly, such an intervention leads to the question, who are the goodies and who are the baddies in this war? If President Trump has turned against Assad and will genuinely work for his removal, then who should replace him? This is the reality that President Obama faced and recoiled from because there is no simple answer. Just as the Americans discovered in Afghanistan, which had also been fighting a civil war since 1978, everyone is compromised in some way, because they have all been sucked into a grinding struggle for power. The truth is that no-one in America who is pushing for something to be done about Syria—the liberal humanitarians, the neoconservatives, the globalists in the military—has any real answer about who to support.

The other possibility is that it may be just another part of the pantomime, a missile hit designed to distract from scandals at home. But that takes you back to President Clinton’s missile attack against Osama bin Laden’s training camps in 1998—an attack that many believed was not only a retaliation for the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania but an attempt at distracting attention from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. And looking back that doesn’t seem to have been a very good idea. It had a very counter-productive effect on the Taliban. Up to that point they were really fed up with bin Laden and were looking for ways to be rid of him, even possibly giving him up to the Americans. After the attacks the Taliban stopped all that.

The truth is that we in the West have so simplified our vision of the world, into a battle between good and evil, that we now find it impossible to understand the reality. It was a process that started in the 1990s under Clinton and Blair, but both Trump and his enemies, the liberal interventionists, have inherited that one-dimensional view. It is dangerous because it ignores the realities of power in societies. And Trump may find he is opening the door to something very complicated, not just Syria but the forces that surround it—Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel, all of whom are deeply involved in the conflict.

And it will also have a terrible effect for Trump domestically. All the hard-line isolationists who backed him will be furious. It’s just what Hillary Clinton would have done, they will cry. Trump has become a deep state puppet.

JS: We're more than 70 days into Trump's presidency, just a few weeks short of the juncture when historians and political analysts begin to assess an office in earnest. Do you see America sliding into authoritarianism or fascism, or are the evils of this administration more banal than that?

AC: America is not sliding into fascism. That's just hysteria by the liberals who can't face up to the fact that they lost the election, so they either have to blame the Russians or giant historical forces. Basically, a right-wing president has been elected, and he's created a brilliant machine that captures liberals and keeps them completely preoccupied. What he does is he wakes up in the morning, tweets something that he knows isn't true, they get very upset and spend the whole day writing in big capital letters on social media, "This is outrageous. This is bad. This is fascism." What they're not facing up to is the real question, which is why did Donald Trump win the election? What other forces in the country had they, the liberals, not seen?


They weren't defeated by something as grand as fascism. They were defeated by a man who's connected with a disaffected group in America, like the people who voted for Brexit in my country. I think there's a great deal of narcissism which Mr. Trump has worked at how to play on beautifully.

JS: Your most recent documentary is called Hypernormalisation. Can you explain what a hypenormalised state is and how it creates an opening for somebody like Trump to exploit?

AC: The term was created by a guy called Alexei Yurchak, who wrote a book about the last days of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. What he described was a world where everyone knew that the system in place wasn't working and that the politicians didn't believe it any longer. Yet at the same time, because they didn't have any alternative, everyone just accepted it as normal even though they knew it was abnormal. So he gave it this term hypernormalisation. I'm not trying to say that the West is in any way like the Soviet Union at all. It's very different. What I was trying to argue, or imply in this film gently, was that we may be in a very similar situation where we know that the system has become somewhat corrupted. But more than that, we know that those in charge don't really believe in the system any longer, have no vision of the future. And what's more, they know that we know that.

What Trump is doing is playing with the fakery. It may be instinctive. He's saying things that he knows that we know aren't true, at which point everyone gets locked into a game of what's true and what's not true. This misses the real point of politics, which is to tell a powerful story that offers a vision of the future. I don't think Trump has a vision of the future. I think he's the last of the old politicians.

JS: It doesn't seem like Trump has any kind of ideology beyond a base self-interest, but I don't think the same is true of some of the people in his administration. What do you make of someone like Steve Bannon? Do you see him as a descendent of Leo Strauss, as you've argued the neoconservatives were, or am I giving him more gravitas than he deserves? [Editor's note: This portion of the interview was conducted before Bannon was removed from the National Security Council.]

AC: I think you should pay more attention to the traditional, hard-right-wing people who have risen to power with Trump. Donald comes from the world of finance and he is doing what finance wants to do. I would argue that actually it shows that really nothing has changed, which is a very hypernormal situation. We know that many of the people who possibly should have been prosecuted after the financial crisis of 2008 were not. Now it's carrying on while liberals boo and hiss at the man in charge. Behind the scenery, everyone is just carrying on managing the system in their own interests as they have before.

Steve Bannon? I don't know. We have a phrase in Britain, which is "All mouth, no trousers." He's a degraded clash-of-civilizations man, and he's a bit late to the table on that one because [Jean-Marie Le Pen] tried that in 2004. It didn't work. I'm far more interested in what I would call real power, which is the power of finance. It's really extraordinary that Trump has moved into a position of power. People from the political financial world would never in a million years let him borrow their money, which makes you wonder whether he is a part of the pantomime.

JS: One of the ideas you put forth on the eve of the election is that Trump is actually a product of 1970s counterculture. I'm not sure how many people would make that association.

AC: If you shut your eyes and listen to Donald Trump, or half of what Donald Trump says, he sounds like one of those paranoid hippies who kept talking about The Man, big T, big M. The Man is this sort of corrupt political insider who doesn't care about anything except power and is pulling the wool over your eyes. At the end of the 1960s, the left turned against politics and said, Look, all politics is shit. Everyone is corrupt. Therefore what you have to do is detach yourself from politics and really turn to those who you trust. Out of that you got the politics of individualism, which then rose up and supported Reagan. What's really fascinating, which I shared in a series called "The Century of the Self," is how many people who'd come out of the counterculture ended up voting for Reagan in 1980 because he offered that sort of individualism. But if you listen to Trump, it's the discourse of the counterculture, and he's playing with that.

JS: So if Trump is the apotheosis of this radical individualism and all these cultural signs pointed to him, or someone like him becoming president, are there any markers for what might come next? What gives you hope for the future?


AC: The thing that makes me really sad, and to an extent, angry, is the complete failure of the liberals and the progressives to actually face up to what people like Trump really mean. What it means is that there are groups in this country, many of them poor, many of them part of the working class, who are feeling frightened, alone, and afraid of the future. They voted for Trump or for Brexit in my country as a way of expressing that, because the traditional politics would not let them do it. The liberals would not go and connect with those people. What they do is they spend their time saying they're stupid, which is the most stupid thing you can possibly do.

What the left has got to do is go and find a common line for those people and genuinely offer them something. If they did that, they could make politics noble and important again. But instead they're hunkering down, sneering, and trying to blame Vladimir Putin. I mean, I'm sure Russians did hack practically every server in America, but that's not the real reason why Donald Trump won. Progressives have not faced up to this. In a sense, I'm hopeful because the failure of Trump to be able to deliver what he has promised gives great opportunities for the left to reinvent itself. The only person who interests me is Bernie Sanders. He's going around having what he calls town hall meetings with those people, and I think that's really good.

JS: Why do you think liberals are so frightened of these big animating ideas? I found it very telling how few Democrats were willing to come out in support of a single-payer health care system or even a public option after Trump's latest bill went down in flames, Sanders being a notable exception.

AC: One of the great unanswered questions of my time is why the optimism and idealism of liberals, who used the power of state to change the world for the better, collapsed so quickly and turned to pessimism. If you talk to groups of liberals now, it's like talking to people who think the plane's going to crash all the time. They dream of apocalypse and read books by Cormac McCarthy and say that sugar's going to kill them. Which it may well do, but it's not the biggest thing to worry about. I think it's terribly sad, but Trump has presented a great opportunity for them. As you say, he's failing in all his policies, isn't he? Of course, if they do miss that opportunity, then the real nasty nationalist right will start to make the running, and that's a danger in the future.

JS: I can't help but notice that the kind politics you're advocating sound a lot like those Obama ran on in 2008. Do you think he failed to live up to the promises of that campaign? Is Donald Trump a part of his legacy now?

AC: I don't know, but I don't think so. I think Obama was a very decent guy. Since the early 1990s, real power has shifted away from politicians to all sorts of institutions that we almost don't have the perception apparatus to see or understand. Frankly, a journalist doesn't. I think Obama found himself facing a lot of that. But it's us as well. At the same time that Obama came to power, we, the liberals, the Democrats, the progressives retreated to digital playgrounds owned by five or six very giant corporations. I think they left Obama quite isolated, actually. So far from snarling and spitting at him, which much of the left has done, they should actually turn around and look at themselves and wonder, possibly did we go down the wrong avenue believing all that internet utopianism? I just think that it's time for a little humility among some of the progressives in their attitude to Obama.

As I point out in Hypernormalisation, the Occupy movement had a fantastic slogan and the goodwill of lots of people who would normally never support a rebellious movement like that. Yet when they actually got together, they found they had no ideas. I think it's pretty rich that they then turned around and tried to blame Obama for not having a picture of the future when, quite frankly, they didn't. If you want to change the world, A, you've got to work at it very hard, and B, you've got to challenge power, and that's quite frightening and quite difficult, and you have to have a very strong idea of what you want.

JS: Let's return to the subject of Putin, who makes an appearance in several of your films, Hypernormalisation included. In recent weeks, it seems like a lot of legitimate concerns about the Trump administration's ties to the Kremlin have given way to rampant conspiracy theorizing. How do you explain it?

AC: Russia has been the Other ever since about 1951 for America, and then everyone tried to make it be Islamists. By about 2007 that wasn't working, and everyone now seems to have switched back to Russia. When Barry Goldwater was running for president, the John Birch Society was saying that the president was probably controlled by the Soviet Union. If you listen to the liberals now, they sound remarkably similar.

I am sure that the Russians probably did hack into the Democrats' computers. And I am sure that they may have leaked stuff to meddle with the election and to mess with confidence in the whole democratic process. I would also not be surprised if Donald Trump, and people around him, have had all kinds of dealings with dodgy people in Russia. Given the weird mixture of business and politics in that country, it might be quite likely.


But to an outsider, the way the Democrats and their supporters are obsessing with Russia looks very strange and hysterical. From a distance it seems as if they are desperately trying to avoid facing up to the very powerful reality that was revealed by the election. Instead they seem to be retreating into a kind of magical thinking. Looking for something, anything that will be like a magic wand and wave President Trump away. And then they can go back to normality. It can’t help crossing one’s mind that maybe the Democrats are looking for an excuse that will mean they don’t have to change, that they don’t have to give things up in today’s unequal, brutal and unfair society.

JS: What would you say to those who might feel helpless or even paralyzed by the horrific events that seem to be unfolding almost daily?

AC: Stop. Stop blaming. Stop sitting in the bubble and feeling sad. Stop sneering at the people who voted for Donald Trump and Brexit. Reconnect with them, and make politics noble again. Make it powerful. There are only two ways of changing the world. One is if you've got large amounts of money. The other is to use collective action, the collective power that politics allows you. Too many on the left have embraced a new kind of democracy online and gotten trapped in echo chambers. You can't say "You can't trust any politicians," because actually that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. What I'm saying is get engaged.

During the civil rights movement in America in the late '50s and early '60s, young white activists went down to the South, united with young black activists and worked for years to confront vested interests, ruthless power. Some of them were killed, many were beaten up. Most of them were completely anonymous, but they changed the world. And there is a great hunger for that kind of change.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politi ... ate-puppet
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: *president trump is seriously dangerous*

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Apr 09, 2017 6:49 am

From Syria to Yemen to North Korea, Donald Trump still can’t light his Reichstag Fire
By Bill Palmer | April 8, 2017 | 1

Four weeks after Adolf Hitler became the German Chancellor in 1933, arsonists torched the Reichstag parliament building. Hitler quickly used the attack as an excuse for wiping out his political enemies and seizing total power over Germany, and we know the rest of that horrific story. With Donald Trump sharing so many stances and ambitions similar to those of Hitler, the world has watched carefully to see if he tries to light his own Reichstag Fire. Thus far he keeps coming up empty.



Historians disagree to this day as to whether Hitler was the beneficiary of an extraordinarily well timed gift of good luck with the fire, or whether he hired the arsonists himself. But amid the historically weak start which Donald Trump finds himself off to, with exploding scandals and an imploding approval rating right out of the gate, he can’t afford to wait for a Reichstag Fire to come to him.

Trump began his quest for a game changer by taking a strange flyer on a small scale, high risk, low reward military mission in Yemen which produced no results. Perhaps he was hoping he could capture a terrorist, thus demonstrating a magical military touch right out of the gate, giving him an excuse to seize broader power. But if anything the mission backfired on him. And so this week, in a military exercise which the evidence increasingly suggests was an empty stunt aimed at doing no real damage (link), Trump lit up a Syrian air base with fifty-nine Tomahawk missiles in response to a gas attack on civilians.



That didn’t afford Trump much traction either. In fact the Gallup daily tracking poll pegged Donald Trump at the same exact approval rating the day after the Syria attack as he’d had the day before (link). The incident has also raised questions, both here on Palmer Report (link) and from the likes of MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell (link), as to whether Putin might have arranged the Syrian gas attack just to allow Trump to look victorious by pretending to retaliate. This is not the narrative Trump was looking for.



In other words, whatever Trump’s true goal in Syria, it was not accomplished. And so now tonight he’s dispatched U.S. warships to the Korean Peninsula (source: BBC) in a seeming attempt at provoking some kind of military conflict with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, and perhaps with China in the process. We’ll see how it plays out tonight and tomorrow. But if Donald Trump is still trying to light his Reichstag Fire, he’s come up empty thus far – and as his administration continues to collapse, he may be running out of time
https://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/fr ... fire/2246/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: *president trump is seriously dangerous*

Postby 82_28 » Sun Apr 09, 2017 12:27 pm

I have noted that as this goes on trump has moved onto the hushed illicit salesman voice kinda like a:

Psst. Hey kid. Yeah you. You wanna buy a watch?

And then open up his trench coat lined with stolen watches. Same voice I remember as a kid from some cartoon or something. Can't remember which though. Maybe Inspector Gadget?

Anybody???

On edit: Something akin to this. Sesame Street. But there is another one I was thinking of. But that will do for now.



On another edit: Good thing we don't need no PBS no mo.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: *president trump is seriously dangerous*

Postby SonicG » Tue Apr 11, 2017 8:15 pm

No, he is literally dangerous...

Donald Trump 'carries high-powered rifles with his clubs' when playing golf
Donald Trump reportedly carries high-powered rifles in his golfing bag when he hits the green for a round of golf.

The President is said to have carried rifles alongside his golf clubs in a bag in his trailing cart during a trip to Trump International Golf Course in Florida over the weekend.

According to Palm Beach Daily News, Mr Trump was accompanied by several Secret Service agents who rode both in front, beside and behind the President.

“Hey Dan, see anything strange about those clubs in the back?” one lunch guest inside the club room asked another, gesturing through the window to a golf bag in the trailing cart.

The guest responded: “Sure do. They have triggers.”

“Yep, high-powered rifles nestled in there – just in case, heaven forbid, they are needed - with the woods and the irons and probably one of those little stubby pencils,” reported the local Florida paper.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 78826.html
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Re: *president trump is seriously dangerous*

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Apr 13, 2017 8:40 am

Trump administration moving quickly to build up nationwide deportation force

The Washington Post has obtained a Department of Homeland Security document outlining possible measures to fulfill President Trump’s campaign pledge to create a deportation force for illegal immigrants. (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)
By David Nakamura April 12 at 4:51 PM
The Trump administration is quickly identifying ways to assemble the nationwide deportation force that President Trump promised on the campaign trail as he railed against the dangers posed by illegal immigration.

An internal Department of Homeland Security assessment obtained by The Washington Post shows the agency has already found 33,000 more detention beds to house undocumented immigrants, opened discussions with dozens of local police forces that could be empowered with enforcement authority and identified where construction of Trump’s border wall could begin.

The agency also is considering ways to speed up the hiring of hundreds of new Customs and Border Patrol officers, including ending polygraph and physical fitness tests in some cases, according to the documents.

But these plans could be held up by the prohibitive costs outlined in the internal report and resistance in Congress, where many lawmakers are already balking at approving billions in spending on the wall and additional border security measures.

Administration officials said the plans are preliminary and have not been reviewed by senior DHS management, but the assessment offers a glimpse of the department’s behind-the-scenes planning to carry out the two executive orders Trump signed in January to boost deportations and strengthen border enforcement.

Why Trump’s wall contradicts today’s immigration trends. VIEW GRAPHIC
Gillian Christensen, DHS’s acting spokeswoman, said the agency would not comment on what she called “pre-decisional documents.”

Immigrant-rights advocates called the plans an unnecessary waste of money and resources that are aimed at scaring the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants, many of whom have lived in the country for more than a decade.

Although Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly has said DHS is not pursuing mass deportations, Trump’s executive orders broadly expanded the pool of undocumented immigrants who are deemed a priority for removal.

“This is an administration that very much is interested in setting up that mass deportation infrastructure and creating the levers of a police state,” said Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center. “In these documents, you have more proof and evidence that they’re planning to carry it out.”


That’s 1.3 billion tons a year. Here’s how we can address the problem.
Congressional Democrats, who have opposed Trump’s immigration agenda, have expressed skepticism that Congress would agree to approve funding for many of the expensive initiatives.

For example, Trump has called for CBP to hire 5,000 new agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement an additional 10,000. The DHS assessment said the cost of hiring just 500 agents would reach $100 million.

Republican leaders have proposed delaying a decision on Trump’s initial request of $1.5 billion for the wall and an additional $2.6 billion for more border security next year until after a new spending bill is approved this month in the hope of averting a government shutdown.

Trump said he would deport millions. Now ICE is in the spotlight. Embed Share Play Video2:42
The White House has said they are focused on deporting undocumented immigrants who "pose a threat to this country," but advocates say undocumented immigrants without criminal records are being detained by ICE. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)
“We believe it would be inappropriate to insist on the inclusion of such funding in a must-pass appropriations bill,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and four Democratic colleagues wrote of the wall in a recent letter to the Senate’s Republican leadership.

But the DHS assessment states that Border Patrol is moving forward with the construction of a border wall prototype with $20 million that lawmakers reappropriated in March, with completion of the prototype to be completed July 22.

If Congress were to allocate more funds, the next step for CBP, according to the documents, would be to begin work with the Army Corps of Engineers to launch construction of 34 miles of levee wall or a border barrier in the Rio Grande Valley sector, which the agency calls the “highest-priority area,” as well as 14 additional miles of a border barrier in the San Diego sector.

Cost concerns are peppered throughout the DHS assessment documents. Although ICE has identified 27 potential locations that could increase its detention space by 21,000 beds, that agency “will be unable to secure additional detention capability until funding has been identified,” according to the documents.

In addition, CBP has made contingencies to expand its own detention capacity by 12,500 spaces, but the agency does not spell out whether funding is available for those slots.

CBP also is laying the groundwork to potentially hold immigration-court hearings through video conferences at or near U.S. ports of entry if the government of Mexico agrees to house third-country immigrants awaiting adjudication in the U.S. legal system, the documents show.

The Mexican government has balked at such a procedure, which would raise significant jurisdictional concerns. But if such a procedure were established, it would cost $50,000 per location for the video equipment, the DHS documents state.

Alternative plans to send U.S. judges to the “port courts” are also being considered, although such a procedure would cost $400,000 per location.

“They’re throwing a lot of public resources at a problem that should not be a priority, especially since the number of [border] crossers is down considerably,” said J. Kevin Appleby, a senior director at the Center for Migration Studies.

Government figures show the number of people illegally crossing the border from Mexico has dropped sharply in the first two months of Trump’s administration. The DHS assessment states that 2,100 detention spaces previously reserved by CBP and ICE during an immigration surge late last year are unused.

“Overall, it’s a wasted use of resources that could be used more efficiently,” Appleby said.

One area in which the Trump administration could potentially increase its deportation capacity at relatively lower costs is expanding a program in which ICE grants local law enforcement agencies immigration enforcement powers traditionally reserved for the federal government.

The program — known as 287(g), which is the federal code that established it in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1996 — grew to encompass more than 70 local jurisdictions at its peak. But immigrant-rights groups charged that the program has resulted in civil rights abuses and racial profiling by poorly trained local police and lax supervision by ICE.

Trump’s executive orders instruct ICE to expand the program and allow CBP, which did not previously participate, to launch its own version — in hopes of creating a “force multiplier.”

The DHS assessment states that the ICE review board is considering applications from 18 new jurisdictions and has identified 50 more that are interested in participating.

Yet the documents again raise a cautionary flag about funding, stating that ICE probably will be unable to add more than 20 new 287(g) partnerships this year because of limited resources.

“Up to now, they have really been using scare tactics to put on a show, to demonstrate to supporters they are tough on immigration,” Appleby said. “Eventually, they really have to produce results. Without congressional approval [for funding], they will not reach the deportation numbers under Obama. That will be the test. If in the first year, if there are not a significant number deported, how will they distinguish themselves from the previous administration?”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... 6e80f85ba8
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: *president trump is seriously dangerous*

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Apr 26, 2017 8:39 am

COMMENT MAY 1, 2017 ISSUE
A HUNDRED DAYS OF TRUMP
With his nativist and purely transactional view of politics, he threatens to be democracy’s most reckless caretaker.
By David Remnick
Image
Illustrations by Tom Bachtell
On April 29th, Donald Trump will have occupied the Oval Office for a hundred days. For most people, the luxury of living in a relatively stable democracy is the luxury of not following politics with a nerve-racked constancy. Trump does not afford this. His Presidency has become the demoralizing daily obsession of anyone concerned with global security, the vitality of the natural world, the national health, constitutionalism, civil rights, criminal justice, a free press, science, public education, and the distinction between fact and its opposite. The hundred-day marker is never an entirely reliable indicator of a four-year term, but it’s worth remembering that Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama were among those who came to office at a moment of national crisis and had the discipline, the preparation, and the rigor to set an entirely new course. Impulsive, egocentric, and mendacious, Trump has, in the same span, set fire to the integrity of his office.

Trump has never gone out of his way to conceal the essence of his relationship to the truth and how he chooses to navigate the world. In 1980, when he was about to announce plans to build Trump Tower, a fifty-eight-story edifice on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street, he coached his architect before meeting with a group of reporters. “Give them the old Trump bullshit,” he said. “Tell them it’s going to be a million square feet, sixty-eight stories.”

This is the brand that Trump has created for himself—that of an unprincipled, cocky, value-free con who will insult, stiff, or betray anyone to achieve his gaudiest purposes. “I am what I am,” he has said. But what was once a parochial amusement is now a national and global peril. Trump flouts truth and liberal values so brazenly that he undermines the country he has been elected to serve and the stability he is pledged to insure. His bluster creates a generalized anxiety such that the President of the United States can appear to be scarcely more reliable than any of the world’s autocrats. When Kim In-ryong, a representative of North Korea’s radical regime, warns that Trump and his tweets of provocation are creating “a dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment,” does one man sound more immediately rational than the other? When Trump rushes to congratulate Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for passing a referendum that bolsters autocratic rule in Turkey—or when a sullen and insulting meeting with Angela Merkel is followed by a swoon session with Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the military dictator of Egypt—how are the supporters of liberal and democratic values throughout Europe meant to react to American leadership?

Trump appears to strut through the world forever studying his own image. He thinks out loud, and is incapable of reflection. He is unserious, unfocussed, and, at times, it seems, unhinged. Journalists are invited to the Oval Office to ask about infrastructure; he turns the subject to how Bill O’Reilly, late of Fox News, is a “good person,” blameless, like him, in matters of sexual harassment. A reporter asks about the missile attack on Syria; he feeds her a self-satisfied description of how he informed his Chinese guests at Mar-a-Lago of the strike over “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen.”

Little about this Presidency remains a secret for long. The reporters who cover the White House say that, despite their persistent concerns about Trump’s attempts to marginalize the media, they are flooded with information. Everyone leaks on everyone else. Rather than demand discipline around him, Trump sits back and watches the results on cable news. His Administration is not so much a team of rivals as it is a new form of reality entertainment: “The Circular Firing Squad.”

This Presidency is so dispiriting that, at the first glimmer of relative ordinariness, Trump is graded on a curve. When he restrains himself from trolling Kim Jong-un about the failure of a North Korean missile test, he is credited with the strategic self-possession of a Dean Acheson. The urge to normalize Trump’s adolescent outbursts, his flagrant incompetence and dishonesty—to wish it all away, if only for a news cycle or two—is connected to the fear of what fresh hell might come next. Every day brings another outrage or embarrassment: the dressing down of the Australian Prime Minister or a shoutout for the “amazing job” that Frederick Douglass is doing. One day nato is “obsolete”; the next it is “no longer obsolete.” The Chinese are “grand champions” of currency manipulation; then they are not. When Julian Assange is benefitting Trump’s campaign, it’s “I love WikiLeaks!”; now, with the Presidency won, the Justice Department is preparing criminal charges against him. News of Trump’s casual reversals of policy comes with such alarming regularity that the impulse to locate a patch of firm ground is understandable. It’s soothing. But it’s untenable.

There is frustration all around. During his first hundred days in office, Trump has not done away with populist rhetoric, but he has acted almost entirely as a plutocrat. His Cabinet and his cast of advisers are stocked with multimillionaires and billionaires. His positions on health care, tax reform, and financial regulation are of greatest appeal to the super-wealthy. How he intends to improve the situation of the middle class remains obscure. A report in Politico described thirty staffers holed up in a conference room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, attempting a “rebranding” of this first chapter of the Trump Administration. The aides furiously assembled “lists of early successes” on whiteboards.

One success they can name is the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, although Democrats rightly judge that his seat was stolen from Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland. The first hundred days are marked most indelibly by Trump’s attempted ban of travellers from six Muslim countries, which failed in the courts, and the effort to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act, which imploded in the House of Representatives. The list of domestic initiatives is largely confined to reversals of achievements of the Obama era. Trump has proposed an expansion of the prison at Guantánamo and ordered the easing of Dodd-Frank financial regulations. He has reversed plans to save wetlands and protect waterways from coal waste; he has reversed executive orders that banned gun sales to the mentally ill and that protected L.G.B.T. federal employees from discrimination; his Vice-President voted in a Senate tiebreaker to allow states to defund Planned Parenthood clinics. Trump, because of the lavish travel habits of his family, is shaping up to be the most expensive executive in history to guard. At the same time, his budget proposals would, if passed in Congress, cut the funding of after-school programs, rental-assistance programs, the Community Development Block Grant program, legal assistance for the poor, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Scorekeepers will credit these as promises kept. Guardians of democratic values and the environment, champions of economic opportunity and the national well-being will view them as an ever-growing damage report.

“There’s a slight madness to thinking you should be the leader of the free world,” Obama admitted before he went ahead and ran for President. But even after Richard Nixon’s anti-Semitic rants and Ronald Reagan’s astrology-influenced daily schedule, we are at a new level of strangeness with Donald Trump—something that his biography had always suggested.

Trump emerged from neither a log cabin nor the contemporary meritocracy. He inherited his father’s outer-borough real-estate empire—a considerable enterprise distinguished by racist federal-housing violations—and brought it to Manhattan. He entered a world of contractors, casino operators, Roy Cohn, professional-wrestling stars, Rupert Murdoch, multiple bankruptcies, tabloid divorces, Mar-a-Lago golf tournaments, and reality television. He had no real civic presence in New York. A wealthy man, he gave almost nothing to charity. He cultivated a kind of louche glamour. At Studio 54, he said, “I would watch supermodels getting screwed . . . on a bench in the middle of the room.” He had no close friends. Mainly, he preferred to work, play golf, and spend long hours at home watching TV. His misogyny and his low character were always manifest. Displeased with a harmless Palm Beach society journalist named Shannon Donnelly, he told her in a letter that if she adhered to his standards of discretion, “I will promise not to show you as the crude, fat and obnoxious slob which everyone knows you are.” Insofar as he had political opinions, they were inconsistent and mainly another form of performance art, part of his talk-show patter. His contributions to political campaigns were unrelated to conviction; he gave solely to curry favor with those who could do his business some good. He believed in nothing.

By the mid-nineties, Trump’s investment prospects had foundered. Banks cut him off. He turned to increasingly dubious sources of credit and branding opportunities at home and abroad. A typical deal, involving a hotel in Baku, Azerbaijan (described at length in these pages by Adam Davidson), included as partners an Azerbaijani family distinguished for its outsized corruption and for its connections to some Iranian brothers who worked as a profit front for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. There is little mystery as to why Trump has broken with custom and refuses to release his tax returns. A record of his colossal tax breaks, associations, deals, and net worth resides in those forms. It may turn out that deals like the one in Baku will haunt his Presidency no less than his grotesque conflicts of interest or any of the possible connections to Russia now being investigated by the F.B.I. and congressional committees will.

As Trump struggled in business, he made a deal with NBC to star in “The Apprentice,” which, for fourteen seasons, featured him in a role of corporate dominance. It was there that he honed his peculiar showmanship and connected to a mass audience well beyond New York City, perfecting the persona that became the core of his Presidential campaign: the billionaire populist. That role is not unknown in American history: in the eighteen-seventies, wealthy leaders of the Redeemer movement, a southern faction of the Bourbon Democrats linked to the Ku Klux Klan and other white paramilitary groups, set out to defund public schools, shrink government, lower taxes for land owners, and undercut the rise of a generation of black politicians.

And yet Trump has discovered that it’s far more difficult to manage the realities of national politics than the set of “The Apprentice.” In the transitional period between Election Day and the Inauguration, Obama’s aides were told that Trump, who has the attention span of a hummingbird, would not read reports of any depth; he prefers one- or two-page summaries, pictures, and graphics. Obama met with Trump once and talked with him on the telephone roughly ten times. The discussions did little to change Obama’s mind that Trump was “uniquely unqualified” to be President. His grasp of issues was rudimentary, at best. After listening to Obama describe the framework of the nuclear agreement with Iran—a deal that Trump had previously assessed as “terrible” and vowed to dismantle—he conceded that maybe it made sense after all. In one of the many books published under his name, “Trump: Think Like a Billionaire,” he said, “The day I realized it can be smart to be shallow was, for me, a deep experience.”

On Inauguration Day, at the Capitol, Trump no longer affected any awe of the task before him or respect for his predecessors. He furiously rebuked the elected officials seated behind him and the international order that they served. Using the language of populist demagogues, from Huey Long to George Wallace to Silvio Berlusconi, the new President implied that he, the Leader, was in perfect communion with the People, and that together they would repair the landscape of “American carnage” and return it to its prelapsarian state of grace. In this union, it seemed, there was no place for the majority of the electorate, which had voted for Hillary Clinton. African-Americans, Muslim Americans, Latinos, immigrants—it was hard to tell if Trump counted them as the People, too. More likely, they remained the objects of anxiety, fear, and disdain that they had been during the campaign. As George W. Bush was leaving the grandstand, according to New York, he was heard to say, “That was some weird shit.”

By all accounts, the West Wing has become a battlefield of opposing factions. The most influential of them is also the only one with a guarantee of permanence—the Family, particularly Trump’s daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. (His sons Eric and Donald, Jr., have remained in New York to run the family business. Despite the responsibility to put country before personal profit, the President refuses to divest from the business.) Kushner has no relevant experience in foreign or domestic policy, but he has been tasked with forging a peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, steering U.S. relations with China and Mexico, reorganizing the federal government, and helping to lead the fight against the epidemic of opioid use. It is hard to know if Kushner, as an executive, is in charge of everything or of nothing at all. But, as a counsellor, he clearly is powerful enough to whisper in his father-in-law’s ear and diminish the prospects of rival counsellors, including those of the Administration’s most lurid white nationalist, Steve Bannon. Ivanka Trump’s duties are gauzier than her husband’s, but they seem to relate to getting her father to go easier on L.G.B.T. and women’s-rights issues and calming his temper.

The way that Trump has established his family members in positions of power and profit is redolent of tin-pot dictatorships. He may waver on matters of ideology, but his commitment to the family firm is unshakable and resists ethical norms. The conflicts and the privileges are shameless, the potential revenues unthinkable. On the day that the Trump family hosted Xi Jinping in Palm Beach, the Chinese government extended trademarks to Ivanka’s businesses so that she could sell her shoes and handbags to the vast market from Harbin to Guangzhou.
close dialog


Trump is wary of expertise. During the campaign, he expressed his distrust of scientists, military strategists, university professors, diplomats, and intelligence officers. He filled the executive branch accordingly, appointing a climate-change denier as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency; a Secretary of Education who, during her confirmation hearing, displayed stunning ignorance of public education; an Energy Secretary who previously called for closing the Department of Energy; a United Nations Ambassador whose international experience is limited to trade missions for the state of South Carolina; and a national-security adviser who trafficked in Islamophobic conspiracy theories until, three weeks into the job, he was forced to resign because he lied to Vice-President Pence about his ties to the Russian government.

Trump has left open hundreds of important positions in government, largely because he sees no value in them. “A lot of those jobs, I don’t want to appoint, because they’re unnecessary to have,” he has said. “I say, ‘What do all these people do?’ You don’t need all those jobs.” Among the many federal bureaucracies that are now languishing with countless empty offices are the Departments of State, Treasury, Commerce, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, and Defense. A recent article in The Atlantic described the State Department as “adrift and listless,” with officials unsure of their duties, hanging around the cafeteria gossiping, and leaving work early.
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Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

Trump seems to believe that foreign affairs require only modest depths of thought. It’s the generals who are the authoritative voices in his Administration. To a President whose idea of a strategic move is to “bomb the shit out of” isis, they are the ones who have to make the case for international law, the efficacy of nato, the immorality of torture, and the inadvisability of using the rhetoric of “radical Islamic terrorism.” At the same time, the pace of bombing in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen appears to have increased; tensions with Iran, Russia, and North Korea have intensified. Trump, an erratic and impulsive spokesman for his own policy, needs competent civilian advisers, if only as a counterweight to the military point of view and his own self-admiring caprices. When conservative columnists write about Trump and fondly recall Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” of international relations—a calculated unpredictability directed at the North Vietnamese—they tend to leave out that it did not work. The war in Southeast Asia went on for years after Nixon’s brinksmanship.

The Trump Presidency represents a rebellion against liberalism itself—an angry assault on the advances of groups of people who have experienced profound, if fitful, empowerment over the past half century. There is nothing about Trump’s public pronouncements that indicates that he has welcomed these moral advances; his language, his tone, his personal behavior, and his policies all suggest, and foster, a politics of resentment. It is the Other—the ethnic minority, the immigrant—who has closed your factory, taken your job, threatened your safety.

The Trumpian rebellion against liberal democracy is not a local event; it is part of a disturbing global trend. When the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, and the Soviet Union dissolved, two years later, the democratic movement grew and liberalism advanced, and not only in Eastern and Central Europe. During the course of thirty years, the number of democracies in the world expanded from thirty to roughly a hundred. But, since 2000, nation-states of major consequence—Russia, Hungary, Thailand, and the Philippines among them—have gone in the opposite, authoritarian direction. India, Indonesia, and Great Britain have become more nationalistic. The Arab Spring failed nearly everywhere. The prestige and the efficacy of democracy itself is in question. The Chinese Communist Party, which crushed a pro-democracy movement on Tiananmen Square, in 1989, then set out to make the case that it could achieve enormous economic growth while ignoring the demand for human rights and political liberties. In Russia, Vladimir Putin has suppressed political competition, a nascent independent media, and any hope for an independent judiciary or legislature while managing to convince millions of his countrymen that the United States is hypocritical and immoral, no more democratic than any other country. In Turkey, Erdoğan has jailed tens of thousands of political opponents, muzzled the press, and narrowly won a referendum providing him with nearly dictatorial powers. Western Europe is also in question. In France, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front, is polling credibly in a Presidential campaign guided by two of her longtime associates and fascist sympathizers, Frédéric Chatillon and Axel Loustau.

The stakes of this anti-democratic wave cannot be overestimated. Nor can it be ignored to what degree authoritarian states have been able to point out the failures of the West—including the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Libya—and use them to diminish the moral prestige of democracy itself. As Edward Luce writes, in “The Retreat of Western Liberalism,” “What we do not yet know is whether the world’s democratic recession will turn into a global depression.”

If we were ever naïve enough to believe that progress in political life is inevitable, we are experiencing the contradiction. Freedom House, a nongovernmental organization that researches global trends in political liberty, has identified an eleven-year decline in democracies around the globe and now issues a list of “countries to watch.” These are nations that “may be approaching important turning points in their democratic trajectory.” The ones that most concern Freedom House include South Africa, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Ecuador, Zimbabwe, and, the largest of them, the United States. The reason the group includes the U.S. is Trump’s “unorthodox” Presidential campaign and his “approach to civil liberties and the role of the United States in the world.”

In 1814, John Adams evoked the Aristotelian notion that democracy will inevitably lapse into anarchy. “Remember, democracy never lasts long,” he wrote to John Taylor, a former U.S. senator from Virginia, in 1814. “It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide.” As President, Donald Trump, with his nativist and purely transactional view of politics, threatens to be democracy’s most reckless caretaker, and a fulfillment of Adams’s dark prophecy.

Pushing back against Trumpism will not be easy. Even if the President drops some of his most brutal promises, even if he throws his smartphone into the Potomac, and ceases to titillate his base with racist dog-whistling and to provoke his enemies with a rhetoric of heedless bravado, he still commands a Republican Congress, and he is still going to score some distressing political victories. He is certainly not finished with his efforts to repeal Obamacare in a way that would deprive millions of people of their health insurance; he is certainly not going to relax his effort to enact hard-line immigration restrictions; he is certainly not through trying to dismantle legislative and international efforts to rescue an environment that is already suffering the grievous effects of climate change.

Trump forces us to recognize the fragility of precious things. Yet there are signs that Adams and the doomsayers of democratic values will be proved wrong. Hope can be found in the extraordinary crowds at the many women’s marches across the country on the day after the Inauguration; in the recent marches in support of science and a more compassionate, reasonable immigration policy; in the earnest work of the courts that have blocked the “Muslim ban” and of various senators and House members in both parties who, unlike Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, have refused to put cynicism and expedience before integrity; in the exemplary investigative journalism being done by traditional and new media outlets; in the performance of anti-Trump candidates in recent congressional races in Kansas and Georgia.

The opposition to Trump also has to give deeper thought to why a demagogue with such modest and eccentric experience could speak with such immediacy to tens of millions of voters anxious about their lives and their prospects, while the Democratic nominee could not. The intellectual and political task ahead is at once to resist the ugliest manifestations of the new right-wing populism—the fears it plays on, the divisions it engenders—and to confront the consequences of globalism, technology, and cultural change. Politicians and citizens who intend to defeat the forces of reaction, of Trumpism, need to confront questions of jobs lost to automation and offshoring head on. Unemployment is at five per cent, but that does not provide an accurate picture of an endangered middle and working class.

The political math is clarifying: four hundred and eighty-nine of the wealthiest counties in the country voted for Clinton; the remaining two thousand six hundred and twenty-three counties, largely made up of small towns, suburbs, and rural areas, voted for Trump. Slightly fewer than fifty-five per cent of all voting-age adults bestirred themselves to go to the polls. That statistic is at least as painful to process as the Comey letter, the Russian hack of the D.N.C., the strategic failures of the Clinton campaign, and the over-all darkness of the Trump campaign. It’s a statistic about passivity, which is just what a democracy in the era of Trump can no longer afford.

There is still time for younger politicians to gather themselves for the 2018 midterms and the 2020 Presidential race. One well-established figure, Senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, just published “This Fight Is Our Fight,” a book on the decline of middle-class prospects and conservative ideology since the Reagan era. It’s the sort of manifesto, like “The Audacity of Hope,” that frequently augurs higher political ambition. Warren came by our offices last week for an hour-long interview, and, while she made the ritual demurrals about a run for the Presidency, she spoke with a combative focus on precisely the issues that Clinton ceded to Trump in the 2016 race. Warren will be sixty-nine when it comes time to make a decision, but it would be foolish to think that she is not among those who are testing the waters.

The clownish veneer of Trumpism conceals its true danger. Trump’s way of lying is not a joke; it is a strategy, a way of clouding our capacity to think, to live in a realm of truth. It is said that each epoch dreams the one to follow. The task now is not merely to recognize this Presidency for the emergency it is, and to resist its assault on the principles of reality and the values of liberal democracy, but to devise a future, to debate, to hear one another, to organize, to preserve and revive precious things. ♦
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/ ... s-of-trump
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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seemslikeadream
 
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Re: *president trump is seriously dangerous*

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Apr 26, 2017 12:00 pm

Trump Son In Law Jared Kushner Was Just Told To Lawyer Up Because He Committed A Crime
By Jason Easley on Tue, Apr 25th, 2017 at 6:46 pm
Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) told Trump son in law Jared Kushner that he better hire a lawyer because he committed a crime when he lied about having contacts with foreign governments on his security clearance form.


Trump Son In Law Jared Kushner Was Just Told To Lawyer Up Because He Committed A Crime
Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) told Trump son in law Jared Kushner that he better hire a lawyer because he committed a crime when he lied about having contacts with foreign governments on his security clearance form.

Rep. Lieu tweeted:

Ted Lieu ✔@tedlieu
Dear Jared Kushner: Lying on the SF-86 security clearance form is a crime. Michael Flynn hired a lawyer. You may also want to hire a lawyer.
5:11 PM - 25 Apr 2017
14,639 14,639 Retweets 30,441 30,441 likes



The reason why the stakes are so high for the White House in 2018 goes beyond getting their agenda through a Republican-controlled Congress. If Democrats win back all or part of Congress, they are going to conduct a full investigation into the Trump White House, which will include the Russia scandal, Trump’s conflicts of interest, his family conflicts of interest (Hi, Ivanka), and any crimes committed by his aides and son in law Jared Kushner.

Kushner committed a felony by not disclosing two meetings with high profile Russians during his security clearance hearings.

During a recent appearance on MSNBC’s AM Joy, Lieu called for Kushner’s security clearance to be suspended:


Rep. Lieu’s move beyond suspension to telling Kushner to lawyer up is a sign that the Russia scandal has gone from bad to worse for the Trump family.
http://www.politicususa.com/2017/04/25/ ... crime.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
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