rigorousintuition.ca

A draft executive order circulating among the Trump administration lays out a plan to filter out immigrants who might require public assistance, and to deport immigrants already living in the United States who depend on a form of welfare.

wait, SLAD, howd you miss this one?

8bitagent » Wed Feb 01, 2017 6:17 am wrote:wait, SLAD, howd you miss this one?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/201 ... lfare.html

A draft executive order circulating among the Trump administration lays out a plan to filter out immigrants who might require public assistance, and to deport immigrants already living in the United States who depend on a form of welfare.

The problem for Democrats, progressives, centrists, the left, moderate Republicans, etc wanting to mount a block to the Trump-Bannon (Pence who?) regime is that they are exhausting themselves
hyperventilating over every little news piece on social media and elsewhere, not seeing the "5-d" chess going on. Bannon is I would assume probing, testing. So far the cards and planets seem to be aligning
against Democrats. It's why I agree with many that the Democratic party should just be abandoned. Progressives having faith in yet another middle of the road corporatist Dem dream team to stop a Trump train should
start organizing now. Meanwhile, the left should save some of their outrage, shock and hyperventilating..the real head spinning horror show has barely begun

Nothing says Trump-Putin bromance like gold-plated iPhones


Toting the two gold-plated icons around will cost you about $6,658 (£5,335, AU$8,820), but no one said dabbling in international politics would come cheap.

...

Now that Caviar's bringing Trump and Putin together, a word of caution to the company: We're only in week two of the new administration here. You might want to pace yourself.
https://www.cnet.com/news/donald-trump- ... ld-caviar/

Is ‘Massive Voter Fraud’ Trump’s Reichstag Fire Audition?
02/01/2017 12:41 pm ET

Dr. Milton Mankoff
Sociologist and psychotherapist interested in world affairs, culture, media and human behavior.

CARLOS BARRIA / REUTERS
The Reichstag fire in February 1933 destroyed the German parliament building a month after Hitler’s ascension to power. It is generally believed to have been caused by a lone arsonist, but falsely characterized by the Nazis as a Communist Party plot against the new regime, providing the pretext for the rapid destruction of civil liberties and democracy in Germany. Donald Trump, the impatient aspiring autocrat, has perhaps decided, though probably ignorant of history, to create what one might consider a ‘Reichstag’ incident — massive voter fraud produced Hillary Clinton’s popular vote victory — until something better comes along. After all, when he eventually meets Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, he would want to have proven his capacity to join their club: elected leaders who subvert their nation’s democratic institutions.

Although serious journalists scoff and others play stenographer, Trump continues to contend his embarrassing three-million-vote loss of the popular vote to Clinton was a mirage. In his view, millions of illegal immigrants voted against him. While this “plot” to defeat him failed, he is still obsessed, angry and in denial that his triumph was not a reflection of the popular will; one can only imagine his reaction had Clinton won. Ironically, given his fan base, Trump’s ticket to the White House — the Electoral College — was created by the Founding Fathers to thwart the potentially unruly passions of small landholders begrudgingly entitled to the franchise.

While Trump is delusional about voter fraud, he is a cunning opportunist. Moreover, his Machiavellian chief strategist and senior counselor, Steve Bannon, formerly head of Breitbart News, and the renowned political dirty trickster, Roger Stone, a longtime intimate, are masters of the art of propaganda. This troika appreciates that claims regarding voter fraud could be exploited to justify mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, limit legal immigration, and the suppression of non-white, largely Democratic, voters for 2018, 2020 and beyond.

Trump’s designs to re-shape the electorate would, of course, require implementation by Congress and state governments. Even if legislators and governors know voter fraud is a fiction they also realize a sizable segment of their constituents believe the propaganda. The public positions and decisions of government officials, if not based on their own “drinking the Kool-Aid” or wealthy donor preferences, are invariably pragmatic, reflecting what they must pretend to believe to appease an aroused base. Regarding voter suppression, some might have benefited from it already, or believe they have or will. They need little prompting to make it even more cumbersome for those likely to be supporting Democrats to cast ballots.

Therefore, it is not enough for the media to expose the fallacious claims of Trump’s latest outburst. They also need to consider what may be his more ambitious goal: de facto autocratic rule built upon and promoting white supremacy. Autocratic rule, or at least, a severely compromised form of democracy as one finds in Russia and Turkey, would require compliant legislative and judicial branches of government and an intimidated or weakened news media.

Efforts to decrease the potential number of Democratic-leaning voters are also required to sustain the sweeping Trump and GOP victories already accomplished. Therefore, enacting effective policies to disenfranchise non-whites, along with college students, while justifying them in the name of race-neutral “voter integrity,” is perceived as critically important. Evidence suggests, however, that voter suppression now — when non-Hispanic whites still make up about 62 percent of the population and Hispanic self-identifying whites another 8 percent — is a less significant factor than the general demoralization of poor non-white citizens. Likely due to non-existent or ineffectual government programs, their perception is that voting makes little tangible difference in their lives. The malign neglect of this population by the Trump Administration’s expected gutting of social services and health care, will probably have an even greater “selective” voter discouragement payoff. The potential caveat, however, is if the Ayn Rand devotees in the GOP Congress overreach and crush large swaths of their white supporters by taking away their safety net as well.

Racism — the “dark-side” face of Trumpism — might be an excellent “means to an end” for achieving autocratic rule; but, it could be an “end” as well. Trump has a long record of racist and ethnocentric words and deeds. Technically, “nationalism” — the preferred term of those, like Trump and Bannon, who claim that they simply seek to support beleaguered and marginalized whites, not white domination — is not as objectionable as its bedfellows — “alt-right,” “white nationalism,” or, “white supremacy.” However, given the enormous economic, political and cultural dominance of “whiteness” in the demographically inter-connected, largely urban, American economy, it is a fairy tale to deny their fundamental equivalence. There is no alternate reality in which “separate but equal” will ever exist in the United States or defending traditional white skin privileges won’t disadvantage non-whites.

There will be many more opportunities for a future Reichstag pretext. Many will fail, but there will be others based upon imagined or exaggerated threats. Only a few need to succeed and correctly identifying them as such — not merely as the reflection of a deranged personality — is essential for those who would seek to defend our vulnerable democratic institutions.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-milton ... 96662.html

TOP NEWS
Tue Jan 31, 2017 | 1:59 PM EST
Covering Trump the Reuters Way

In a message to staff today, Reuters Editor-in-Chief Steve Adler wrote about covering President Trump the Reuters way:

The first 12 days of the Trump presidency (yes, that’s all it’s been!) have been memorable for all – and especially challenging for us in the news business. It’s not every day that a U.S. president calls journalists “among the most dishonest human beings on earth” or that his chief strategist dubs the media “the opposition party.” It’s hardly surprising that the air is thick with questions and theories about how to cover the new Administration.

So what is the Reuters answer? To oppose the administration? To appease it? To boycott its briefings? To use our platform to rally support for the media? All these ideas are out there, and they may be right for some news operations, but they don’t make sense for Reuters. We already know what to do because we do it every day, and we do it all over the world.

To state the obvious, Reuters is a global news organization that reports independently and fairly in more than 100 countries, including many in which the media is unwelcome and frequently under attack. I am perpetually proud of our work in places such as Turkey, the Philippines, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Thailand, China, Zimbabwe, and Russia, nations in which we sometimes encounter some combination of censorship, legal prosecution, visa denials, and even physical threats to our journalists. We respond to all of these by doing our best to protect our journalists, by recommitting ourselves to reporting fairly and honestly, by doggedly gathering hard-to-get information – and by remaining impartial. We write very rarely about ourselves and our troubles and very often about the issues that will make a difference in the businesses and lives of our readers and viewers.

We don’t know yet how sharp the Trump administration’s attacks will be over time or to what extent those attacks will be accompanied by legal restrictions on our news-gathering. But we do know that we must follow the same rules that govern our work anywhere, namely:

Do’s:

--Cover what matters in people’s lives and provide them the facts they need to make better decisions.

--Become ever-more resourceful: If one door to information closes, open another one.

--Give up on hand-outs and worry less about official access. They were never all that valuable anyway. Our coverage of Iran has been outstanding, and we have virtually no official access. What we have are sources.

--Get out into the country and learn more about how people live, what they think, what helps and hurts them, and how the government and its actions appear to them, not to us.

--Keep the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles close at hand, remembering that “the integrity, independence and freedom from bias of Reuters shall at all times be fully preserved.”

Don’ts:

--Never be intimidated, but:

--Don’t pick unnecessary fights or make the story about us. We may care about the inside baseball but the public generally doesn’t and might not be on our side even if it did.

--Don’t vent publicly about what might be understandable day-to-day frustration. In countless other countries, we keep our own counsel so we can do our reporting without being suspected of personal animus. We need to do that in the U.S., too.

--Don’t take too dark a view of the reporting environment: It’s an opportunity for us to practice the skills we’ve learned in much tougher places around the world and to lead by example – and therefore to provide the freshest, most useful, and most illuminating information and insight of any news organization anywhere.

This is our mission, in the U.S. and everywhere. We make a difference in the world because we practice professional journalism that is both intrepid and unbiased. When we make mistakes, which we do, we correct them quickly and fully. When we don’t know something, we say so. When we hear rumors, we track them down and report them only when we are confident that they are factual. We value speed but not haste: When something needs more checking, we take the time to check it. We try to avoid “permanent exclusives” – first but wrong. We operate with calm integrity not just because it’s in our rulebook but because – over 165 years – it has enabled us to do the best work and the most good.

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN15F276

article posted by seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 01, 2017 1:23 pm wrote:It is generally believed to have been caused by a lone arsonist

JackRiddler » Wed Feb 01, 2017 6:15 pm wrote:

article posted by seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 01, 2017 1:23 pm wrote:It is generally believed to have been caused by a lone arsonist

No, it's not. Certainly not and never "generally." Recent work, such as the book by Benjamin Hett, has also reestablished the idea of Nazi authorship of the crime as the majority view among Anglophone historians concerned with the question.

.

stillrobertpaulsen » Wed Feb 01, 2017 6:44 pm wrote:

JackRiddler » Wed Feb 01, 2017 6:15 pm wrote:

article posted by seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 01, 2017 1:23 pm wrote:It is generally believed to have been caused by a lone arsonist

No, it's not. Certainly not and never "generally." Recent work, such as the book by Benjamin Hett, has also reestablished the idea of Nazi authorship of the crime as the majority view among Anglophone historians concerned with the question.

.

Not even that recent - I seem to recall reading in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer, which I believe was published first in the 50s or 60s, that while incarcerated, Herman Goering admitted that either he met with Marinus van der Lubbe, or one of his associates met with and helped coordinate the Reichstag attack.

ON EDIT: I'm going to try to find that section tonight and see if I read that right.

WHITE HOUSE
President Trump Threatens to Send U.S. Troops to Mexico to Take Care of 'Bad Hombres'
Associated Press
5:44 PM CST
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump threatened in a phone call with his Mexican counterpart to send U.S. troops to stop "bad hombres down there" unless the Mexican military does more to control them itself, according to an excerpt of a transcript of the conversation obtained by The Associated Press.
The excerpt of the call did not make clear who exactly Trump considered "bad hombres," — drug cartels, immigrants, or both — or the tone and context of the remark, made in a Friday morning phone call between the leaders. It also did not contain Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto's response.
http://time.com/4657474/donald-trump-en ... d-hombres/

Report: Trump lashes out at Australian PM on phone call
BY MAX GREENWOOD - 02/01/17 09:07 PM EST 422


President Trump may be off to a rocky start with one of the United States’ closest allies: Australia.

In a Saturday phone call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Trump lambasted an agreement between the two countries over refugee resettlement and bragged about the size of his Electoral College victory, as well as the fact that he had held several calls with other world leaders that same day, The Washington Post reports.

“This was the worst call by far,” Trump allegedly told Turnbull during their conversation, according to senior U.S. officials briefed on the phone call. Trump also spoke with Shinzo Abe of Japan, Angela Merkel of Germany, François Hollande of France and Vladimir Putin of Russia that day.
http://thehill.com/homenews/administrat ... -pm-report

Trump and Saudi King Agree to More Military Intervention, Collaboration, Aggression Against Iran
Trump and King Salman planned to create "safe zones" in Syria and Yemen and to address Iran's supposed "destabilizing regional activities."
By Ben Norton / AlterNet January 30, 2017

President Donald Trump and the monarch of the repressive Saudi regime spoke on the phone for more than an hour on Sunday. They agreed to more military intervention, political and economic collaboration, and aggressive action against Iran.

According to a White House statement, "The two leaders reaffirmed the longstanding friendship and strategic partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia."

The official Saudi Press Agency said Trump and Saudi King Salman agreed on everything they discussed. It reported that the leaders stressed the "depth and strength of the strategic relations between the two countries."

The two planned greater military intervention in the Middle East, and the creation of so-called safe zones in Syria and Yemen. The details of how such zones would be created are not clear, but if they were instituted, it would likely take direct U.S. military involvement.

Hillary Clinton ran her 2016 presidential campaign against Trump on a pledge to create a "safe zone" in Syria, though she had previously acknowledged that instituting a safe zone could “kill a lot of Syrians” and lead to “American and NATO involvement where you take a lot of civilians.”

Reuters reported, citing a senior Saudi source, that the two leaders "agreed to step up counter-terrorism and military cooperation and enhance economic cooperation."

The White House said Trump and Saudi King Salman also "agreed on the importance of strengthening joint efforts to fight the spread of radical Islamic terrorism."

Saudi Arabia, a close U.S. ally since the 1930s, is a theocratic absolute monarchy that brutally represses all internal dissent, beheads nonviolent protesters and funds and spreads extremist Islamism throughout the globe. A leaked 2014 email from Hillary Clinton revealed, citing Western intelligence sources, that the U.S.-backed regimes in Saudi Arabia and Qatar supported the genocidal militant group ISIS.

Saudi Arabia also has the world's second-largest oil reserves, plays a leading role in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and has been offered more than $115 billion in weapons deals by the U.S. government in the past eight years. U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia continue uninterrupted under Trump.

While agreeing on Middle East policy, Trump and King Salman took a hard line against Iran, Saudi Arabia's arch nemesis. The White House said they agreed to address Iran's supposed "destabilizing regional activities." Reuters reported, according to the Saudi source, that, "Trump agreed with Riyadh's suspicion of what it sees as Tehran's growing influence in the Arab world."

Trump's administration is full of anti-Iran hawks.

Saudi Arabia, which speaks of itself as the "home of Islam," has remained silent on Trump's extremist anti-Muslim policy, while massive protests have errupted throughout the U.S. and the world. Iranians are the group most affected by Trump's immigration ban, whereas Saudis are not targeted.

The Saudi Press Agency summarized the discussion, writing, "The views of the two leaders were identical on the files that were discussed during the call, including the fight against terrorism, extremism, their finance, formulating the appropriate mechanisms for that, and confronting those who seek to undermine security and stability in the region and interfere in the internal affairs of other states."


The White House noted that President Trump likewise "voiced support for the Kingdom's Vision 2030 economic program," a plan to revamp the Saudi economy that includes few political reforms and does not guarantee equal rights for women, who face systematic subjugation.

"Both leaders expressed a desire to explore additional steps to strengthen bilateral economic and energy cooperation," the White House statement added.

The Saudi Press Agency said the two leaders invited each other to visit their respective countries.
http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-projec ... yria-yemen

trumpy dumbty’s Longtime Doctor Says President Takes Hair-Growth Drug
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/01/us/p ... .html?_r=0

The two planned greater military intervention in the Middle East, and the creation of so-called safe zones in Syria and Yemen. The details of how such zones would be created are not clear, but if they were instituted, it would likely take direct U.S. military involvement.

Alena Smith @internetalena
First, he came for Australia, and I said nothing, because I was so confused

Jeff Shesol @JeffShesol
We are going to build a Great Barrier Reef, and Australia is going to pay for it

Ronald Klain ✔@RonaldKlain
If you chose Australia in the office pool on "which country's leader will be the first Trump hangs up on," you are a better guesser than me

Kunal Shah @kunalshah
I’m with Trump on this one. Australia has been insufferable since 22 wolverine movies ago.

Mike Smith ‏@msmithedinburgh 1h1 hour ago
Tomorrow's State Dept briefing to #trump #australia

Luther Blissett » Wed Feb 01, 2017 10:59 am wrote:

8bitagent » Wed Feb 01, 2017 6:17 am wrote:wait, SLAD, howd you miss this one?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/201 ... lfare.html

A draft executive order circulating among the Trump administration lays out a plan to filter out immigrants who might require public assistance, and to deport immigrants already living in the United States who depend on a form of welfare.

The problem for Democrats, progressives, centrists, the left, moderate Republicans, etc wanting to mount a block to the Trump-Bannon (Pence who?) regime is that they are exhausting themselves
hyperventilating over every little news piece on social media and elsewhere, not seeing the "5-d" chess going on. Bannon is I would assume probing, testing. So far the cards and planets seem to be aligning
against Democrats. It's why I agree with many that the Democratic party should just be abandoned. Progressives having faith in yet another middle of the road corporatist Dem dream team to stop a Trump train should
start organizing now. Meanwhile, the left should save some of their outrage, shock and hyperventilating..the real head spinning horror show has barely begun

The problem is that almost any one of these issues could be the 5-dimensional chess game.

Everyone with whom I organize agrees that the democratic party is done and that a new party is needed. Even some neoliberals are being radicalized.