TRUMP 9

SEE TRUMP 10 1219

est 1019

of course some neglected again

1219 bak

trump retweets — the deletes — article outing name of alleged Ukraine whistleblower

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/trump-runs-the-country-just-like-his-bankrupted-businesses-the-national-debt-is-skyrocketing-while-economic-growth-lags-behind/

an 1219

Trump runs the country just like his bankrupted businesses: The national debt is skyrocketing while economic growth lags behind

why Trump’s embrace of Eddie Gallagher is so dangerous

an 1219

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-trumps-trade-war-hurt-the-very-individuals-it-was-supposed-to-help/

no lnx

How Trump’s trade war hurt the very individuals it was supposed to help

Written by Sarah Toce / Salon December 30, 2019

President Donald Trump’s trade war raised prices for consumers and hurt the manufacturing industry, according to a report from economists on the Federal Reserve Board.

“The first comprehensive estimates” of the trade war’s effect on American manufacturers show that the tariffs have hurt the industry more than they helped, wrote Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce, two senior economists at the Federal Reserve’s Industrial Output Section.

“We find that U.S. manufacturing industries more exposed to tariff increases experience relative reductions in employment as a positive effect from import protection is offset by larger negative effects from rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs,” the report said.

In short, the economists concluded that the tariffs gave a “small boost” to manufacturers, which was “offset by larger drags from the effects” of rising costs and retaliatory tariffs.

Mother Jones summarized the main findings in a handy chart:

The report looked at a wide range of effects on the impacted sectors. In some cases, the tariffs were simply contradictory. While import tariffs may have helped protect some manufacturers from foreign competitors, tariffs on imported materials have increased costs for those same companies. Retaliatory tariffs imposed by China and other countries in response to the U.S. tariffs further “put U.S. firms at a disadvantage in those markets,” Flaaen and Pierce wrote.

As a result, manufacturing employment fell, and consumer prices increased. The economists acknowledged that their analysis only examined short-term trends, while long-term trends could show different effects. Trump has argued that the tariffs provide leverage for ongoing trade negotiations, but extensive data thus far shows that his trade war has devastated manufacturers, farmers and other industries.

The economists cited extensive existing research showing that “the majority of U.S. tariff increases are absorbed by U.S. retailers” and are almost entirely passed on to consumers in price increases. Some studies have found that American companies which engaged in trade with China saw “lower stock returns and higher default risk.” The report also acknowledged the political implications of the trade war, citing a study which concluded that it could “explain a shift in voting away from Republican House candidates in the 2018 election.”

The report follows months of extensive reporting on the ongoing manufacturing recession. It confirms what thousands of manufacturing firms have been saying for months: Tariffs are having the opposite effect of what the president claimed.

“There’s been a lot of anecdotal evidence about how tariffs are behind the manufacturing slump. Now the Federal Reserve proves it, finding that the trade war is hurting the sector it was ostensibly supposed to help,” ProPublica reporter Lydia DePillis tweeted. “The [White House] would say that it takes a while for supply chains to adjust, and manufacturers will recover as they find alternative input sources. Also theoretically, mounting pressure will eventually force the Chinese to knuckle under in a way that will rebalance global trade. Given that we haven’t yet seen the text of the Phase One trade deal with China that’s supposed to be signed imminently, that promise remains … theoretical.”

But the economists did not only find that the trade war is failing to help manufacturers. Their research suggests that tariffs simply do not work in any economy that relies on global supply chains.

“Our results suggest that the traditional use of trade policy as a tool for the protection and promotion of domestic manufacturing is complicated by the presence of globally interconnnected supply chains,” Flaaen and Pierce wrote. “While the potential for both tit-for-tat retaliation on import protection and input-output effects on the domestic economy have long been recognized by trade economists, empirical evidence documenting these channels in the context of an advanced economy has been limited.”

Igor Derysh is a New York-based political writer whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald and Baltimore Sun.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/trump-turns-back-on-workers-as-companies-force-employees-to-train-their-cheaper-foreign-replacements-report/

no lnx

Trump turns back on workers as companies force employees to train their cheaper foreign replacements: report

Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story December 29, 2019

President Donald Trump’s claims that he is bringing jobs back to America are being called nothing more than hot air in a report stating U.S. companies are instead forcing their employees to train their foreign replacements and they will be out of a job once the training is over.

According to a report at Axios, “Opponents of job outsourcing are making a holiday-season appeal to President Trump: Stop U.S. companies from forcing American workers to train the very same cheaper foreign laborers who will soon replace them.”

The reports states: “AT&T is poised to send thousands into the new year hunting for new jobs after assigning them to train their own foreign replacements, according to conversations with current and former workers and documents obtained by Axios,” adding, “Many have worked for the company for over a decade. They aren’t being offered severance or early retirement, and may not easily find a comparable job elsewhere with similar pay.”

According to Sara Blackwell, a lawyer who represents displaced Americans workers, “American workers are tired of waiting for President Trump to do something on this issue. They’ve gone from great hope in President Trump’s administration, to great discouragement.”

Focusing on AT&T, the report continues, “Despite receiving a $3 billion tax cut last year, AT&T announced new and expanded alliances with big outsourcing companies to replace workers with foreign or cheaper domestic talent. Like many major U.S. companies, AT&T has been shifting jobs for years now — but 2019 was especially noteworthy, as workers claimed that as many as 3,000 finance jobs were being outsourced to Accenture. AT&T denied the 3,000 figure, but declined to provide Axios with its own number.”

Speaking with numerous AT&T workers, many acknowledged they will soon be out of a job, stating they were told “they were needed for a ‘knowledge transfer” — then tapped to train people on work visas or overseas who would replace them.”

That, in turn, changed their plans for the immediate future.

“Folks aren’t going on vacation, they’re cutting back on their Christmas shopping,” one employee confided. “If you know that you’re going to be losing your job, you don’t want to spend the money.”

Axios reports they asked for a comment from the White House of the job transfers and were rebuffed.

You can read more here.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/robert-reich-here-are-5-ways-to-stop-corporations-from-ruining-the-future-of-work/

mma 1219

Media Matters' Alex Kaplan passed this along:"Trump on Friday went on a spree amplifying nearly 20 times accounts supporting the insane and dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory. The conspiracy theory, which involves an anonymous user on a far-right message board claiming to have inside information on a secret plot by Trump against the “deep state” and pedophiles, has been tiedto multiple acts of violence and warned about in an FBI memo as a potential domestic terror threat. It comes as Trump has already amplified dozens of accounts supporting the conspiracy theory over the past two years."

Also: A noted white nationalist fabricated a claim about guns and Virginia’s Democratic governor that has spread in the past week throughout social media and on far-right message boards. The hoax has drawn tens of thousands of engagements and views, and some have issued calls to violence in response.

Finally: A pro-Trump subreddit is full of calls for violence in response to proposed Virginia gun safety laws.

an 1219

no lnx

Internet skewers ‘nutbag in chief’ Trump for tweet attacking California and New York: ‘Dude, just golf today’

Written by Matthew Chapman / Raw Story December 28, 2019

On Saturday, President Donald Trump tweeted a random attack on the states of New York and California, demanding that their governors call him and “politely” ask him to fix their “TREMENDOUS Homeless problems.”

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

California and New York must do something about their TREMENDOUS Homeless problems. They are setting records! If their Governors can’t handle the situation, which they should be able to do very easily, they must call and “politely” ask for help. Would be so easy with competence!

It was the latest of several tweets Trump has leveled at states like California, which are struggling with high homelessness due in large part to rising income inequality. He has attempted to use these attacks to change the subject from impeachment, at one point even demanding that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who represents San Francisco, focus on cleaning up her “filthy dirty” district instead.

Commenters on social media roundly scorned the president’s latest outburst:

Jeff Tiedrich

@itsJeffTiedrich

Replying to @realDonaldTrump

the Republican Party must do something about their TREMENDOUS lunatic president problem

David Jolly

@DavidJollyFL

Replying to @realDonaldTrump

Dude, just golf today.

2,109

5:45 AM - Dec 28, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

222 people are talking about this

Some Other Cow

@whiskyfoxtrotta

Replying to @realDonaldTrump

#OhHoney, you've been a New Yorker for decades and had the means to personally do something about homelessness but, instead, you had to be sued for housing discrimination. https://www.clearinghouse.net/chDocs/public/FH-NY-0024-0034.pdf … Spoiler: rather than lose the suit, you settled.

April

@speakout_april

Replying to @DavidJollyFL @realDonaldTrump

Things Trump said could be done “easily and quickly”......

-healthcare

-trade deals

-Denuclearization of NK

-eliminating ISIS

-lowering the national debt

THREE YEARS in and Trump hasn’t accomplished any of those things. In most cases he’s made things worse. #SaturdayThoughts

...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/trump-faces-evangelical-criticism-heres-how-hes-trying-to-control-the-damage/

no lnx

Trump faces evangelical criticism — here’s how he’s trying to control the damage

Written by Alex Henderson December 27, 2019

Although President Donald Trump was raised Presbyterian and has never been a Christian fundamentalist, far-right white evangelical Protestants have been a key part of his base. Trump obviously realizes that if the 2020 presidential race is close, he is going to need a heavy evangelical turnout — and journalist Rashaan Ayesh, in Axios, outlines the steps he is taking to keep his far-right evangelical supporters energized.

Trump was recently the target of a scathing op-ed by a white evangelical fundamentalist: Christianity Today Editor-In-Chief Mark Galli, who is retiring in January. Regardless, he is generally quite popular among white evangelicals, some of whom are furious with Galli for that op-ed. A group of almost 200 evangelicals signed a letter condemning the op-ed and voicing their support for Trump. And according to Ayesh, Trump is doing everything he can to keep it that way.

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

A far left magazine, or very “progressive,” as some would call it, which has been doing poorly and hasn’t been involved with the Billy Graham family for many years, Christianity Today, knows nothing about reading a perfect transcript of a routine phone call and would rather.....

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

....have a Radical Left nonbeliever, who wants to take your religion & your guns, than Donald Trump as your President. No President has done more for the Evangelical community, and it’s not even close. You’ll not get anything from those Dems on stage. I won’t be reading ET again!

66.1K

Last week, Ayesh notes, Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign announced that he will be present on Jan. 3 for an event in Miami celebrating the launch of the coalition Evangelicals for Trump. And on Christmas Eve, Trump and First Lady Melania Trump attended holiday services at a fundamentalist church in West Palm Beach, Florida — not the Episcopal church they were married in.

Ayesh cites some Pew Research Center data to illustrate Trump’s popularity among white evangelicals: according to Pew, about 81% of evangelicals in the U.S. voted for Trump in 2016. In contrast, Jews and Latino Catholics were, Pew reported, “strong” supporters of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. It should also be noted that Mainline Protestants such as Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Lutherans represent a non-fundamentalist form of Protestant Christianity, and that Trump had a non-evangelical upbringing; so his decision to court evangelicals in 2016 was — like many things Trump does — motivated by self-interest. Trump may not embrace evangelicals’ view of the world, but he wants their votes.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/germans-think-trump-is-bigger-threat-to-world-peace-than-dictators-as-he-becomes-a-global-laughing-stock/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/here-are-5-of-donald-trumps-most-appalling-scandals-of-2019/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/trumps-most-fanatical-right-wing-followers-are-going-ballistic-over-impeachment-and-talking-of-civil-war

https://earther.gizmodo.com/trump-wages-war-against-the-true-enemy-of-the-state-le-1840611817

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/the-year-trump-botched-us-foreign-policy

note djt said same thing when trying to get fbi comey to lay off mike flynn; unclear what good guy means, but prolly One of Us, and/or more likely, loyal to me

Trump hints he may pardon ‘good person’ Roger Stone of ‘very unfair’ convictions Matthew Chapman / Raw Story

NOT INCOHERENT:

note for context, djt killd electric car subsidy

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/observers-stunned-after-trump-delivers-moronic-and-unhinged-diatribe-against-wind-power/

no lnx

Observers stunned after Trump delivers ‘moronic’ and ‘unhinged’ diatribe against wind power

Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams December 23, 2019

In a speech to the right-wing Turning Points USA conference in Florida on Saturday, President Donald Trump launched into an incoherent diatribe against wind power in which he said in the same breath that he “never understood wind” and has studied windmills “better than anybody,” pointed out for no apparent reason that the earth is “tiny” compared to the rest of the universe, and claimed there are “bird graveyards” under wind turbines.

“I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much,” Trump told the audience of mostly high school and college students. “It’s very expensive. They’re made in China and Germany mostly—very few made here, almost none. But they’re manufactured tremendous, if you’re into this, tremendous fumes, gases are spewing into the atmosphere.”

“You know we have a world, right?” the president added. “So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything. You talk about the carbon footprint. Fumes are spewing into the air, right? Spewing. Whether its in China, Germany, its going into the air. Our air, their air, everything. Right?”

Trump went on to rant about the threat wind turbines pose to birds, without noting that fossil fuel plants are far more deadly.

“They’re noisy. They kill the birds,” Trump said. “You want to see a bird graveyard? You just go. Take a look. A bird graveyard. Go under a windmill someday. You’ll see more birds than you’ve ever seen ever in your life.”

Watch:

Aaron Rupar

@atrupar

If a guy at the bar sounded like this you’d slide a couple stools down as quickly as possible

Embedded video

Aaron Rupar

@atrupar

Trump’s nuts rant about wind energy: “I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much... Gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes & everything.”

Embedded video

Activist Matt Ortega tweeted in response to the president’s speech that “Trump says he doesn’t understand wind then proved it.”

Trump’s remarks were so bizarre that environmentalists and other observers had a difficult time critiquing them, aside from noting that they were completely “unhinged.” Vox‘s David Roberts wrote that while was no decipherable argument in Trump’s speech, that won’t stop mainstream media outlets from presenting the president’s remarks as a “coherent point about wind power.”

Earther‘s Matt Novak wrote Monday that Trump’s speech would “be almost funny if it wasn’t coming from the most powerful person in the world—a man who’s setting energy policy while climate change makes the world less inhabitable for all of us.”

“All in all, the speech was suitably unhinged for a president who has mostly lost touch with reality,” Novak added. “But President Trump has learned that he can say whatever he wants now and his supporters will stick with him.”

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19122019/trump-climate-policy-record-rollback-fossil-energy-history-candidate-profile

Been There

When U.S. government scientists released their latest volume of the National Climate Assessment, it revealed much about the robust, sobering scientific consensus on climate change. It also revealed the striking disconnect between President Donald Trump and essentially every authoritative institution on the threat of global warming. The president rejected the assessment's central findings—based on thousands of climate studies and involving 13 federal agencies—that emissions of carbon dioxide are caused by human activities, are already causing lasting economic damage, and have to be brought rapidly to zero.

"I don't believe it. No, no, I don't believe it," Trump said. Immediately, his cabinet members launched attacks on the report, portraying it as "alarmist" and clinging to Trump's agenda of fossil fuel energy expansion that the science says is at the root of the problem.

Done That

When Trump delivered his first major energy speech in the fracking fields of North Dakota as a candidate in May 2016, he called for American domination of global energy supplies. To make that happen, he wanted an end to all of President Barack Obama's executive actions involving greenhouse gas emissions.

"We are going to turn everything around," Trump declared. "And quickly, very quickly."

As president, he has rolled back regulations on energy suppliers at a rapid clip slowed only at timesby the courts, while auctioning off millions of acres of new drilling leases on public land. Last year, domestic oil production hit a record high. The result of this, among other things, was the reversal of three consecutive years of declining U.S. carbon emissions.

His administration has undone or delayed—or tried to—most regulatory and executive actions related to climate change, while proposing new ones to accelerate fossil fuel development. Columbia University's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law counts 131 actions toward federal climate deregulation since Trump took office. In the absence of any comprehensive national climate law, those moves have led to an erosion of the federal government's main regulatory levers for cutting global warming emissions.Trump began the process of withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate treaty, the agreement signed by nearly all nations to reduce fossil fuel emissions. He replaced Obama's Clean Power Plan, intended to sharply reduce emissions from U.S. power plants. He took the first step to weaken fuel economy standards for cars, the single most important effort for reining in the largest driver of U.S. emissions.

Several of those actions, including rollbacks of significant rules on methane, cross-state air pollution regulations and energy efficiency, have been blocked or delayed by judges who have questioned the administration's broad view of its legal authority. Some of those setbacks may be temporary, though, and the courts have yet to rule on the most consequential deregulatory actions. According to the administration's agenda for 2020, the president will try to fast-track as many more as possible before the end of his first term.

Getting Specific

Promoting unfettered oil, natural gas and coal development. Right out of the gate, Trump greased the wheels for fossil fuel development. He issued a sweeping executive order directing all departments to target for eliminationanyrules that restrict U.S. production of energy. He set guidance to make it more difficult to put future regulations on fossil fuel industries, and he moved to discard the use of a rigorous "social cost of carbon," a regulatory measurement that puts a price on the future damage society will pay for every ton of carbon dioxide emitted. He swiftly signed memorandums to revive the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, projects blocked by Obama. And later, with the Keystone XL still stalled, he issued executive orders aimed at speeding approval and construction of fossil fuel projects by limiting state environmental reviews.

Fossil fuel infrastructure adds to greenhouse gas emissions, in part by leaking methane into the atmosphere. Trump's administration ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to stop gathering data from oil and gas companies needed to rein in leaks of this potent short-lived climate pollutant. It later loosened methane regulations for projects on public and private land, despite the support for them among the industry's biggest companies. It sought drilling in pristine areas where oil companies have long sought to drill. The administration moved to lift Obama's offshore Arctic drilling ban and approveda plan to drill wells there. It pushed to drill in the previously off-limits Beaufort Sea, in 1.6 million acres of the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and in nearly all of the Outer Continental Shelf. It proposed to expedite oil and gas permits on national forest lands, and it has limited how climate change can be used in determining endangered status for species, further opening doors to drilling in sensitive areas.

Trying to restore King Coal to its throne. Many of Trump's regulations have been tailored to favor the coal industry, often at the expense of cheaper, cleaner energy. Robert Murray, founder of the now-bankrupt coal company Murray Energy and one of Trump's closest industry allies, gave the president a "wish list" early on that has become of virtual template for the administration's rollback of regulations. The administration swiftly lifted an Obama moratorium on new coal leases on federal lands. It rolled back a stream protection rule designed to reduce the environmental and climate impact of mountaintop removal coal mining, and it has proposed allowing coal plants to emit much more CO2 by weakening New Source Review, which requires big emitters to modernize pollution controls when they make major modifications to their facilities. It pushed a coal bailout rule that would have rewarded electric companies for keeping big stockpiles of fuel on hand. (U.S. regulators rejected it.) It alsofurther relaxed coal ash rules, allowing coal utilities to keep unlined coal ash ponds open for years, making it less expensive to burn coal to produce electricity.
Suppressing climate and related science. In almost every agency overseeing energy, the environment and health, Trump selected top officials who dispute the mainstream consensus on the urgency of climate action. People with little scientific background, or strong ties to industries they would be regulating, were appointed to scientific leadership positions. One of the administration's first actions was to order scientists and other employees at EPA and other agencies to halt public communications. Several federal scientists working on climate change have said they were silenced, sidelined or demoted. At least three—a senior employee at the Department of Interior, one at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and another at the National Park Service—invoked whistleblower protections. Independent science advisors, such as members of the EPA's Board of Scientific Counselors, have also been sidelined. Scientific content on government websites has been altered and the public's access to data reduced. Climate data from the government's open portal website was removed. So was the EPA's climate change website. The words "climate change" have been purged from government reports, and other reports have been buried, including by officials at the Department of Agriculture. The administration even edited a major Defense Department report to downplay its climate findings. Through speeches and tweets, the president has repeatedly spread misinformation to the public through his climate denial and denigration of renewable energy.

EPA, meanwhile, is working to finalize its proposal to suppress the types of scientific evidence the agency can use in writing its rules. This includes prohibiting the use of well-established, long-term scientific studies underpinning the nation's air pollution rules, a change the fossil fuel industry had sought for years. Known as the "secret science" rule, it has been lambasted by scientists and health experts worldwide. Related, the White House issued a memo offering new ways for fossil fuel and other industries to challenge science-based policies.

Undermining clean energy development and energy efficiency.In its budget proposals, the Trump administration has made clear its resolve to retreat from a federal role in advancing a clean energy economy and maintaining global leadership in the technology. It has proposed repeatedly to radically slash funding for the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), a move that would cripple support for novel and promising technologies for advanced wind turbines, high-tech materials, energy-efficient buildings and more. He has tried to eliminate tax credits for electric vehicles and made several attempts to eliminate the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program, an incubator for cutting-edge energy research and development. Congress has largely rebuffed this scale of funding cut.

The administration issued in 2019 its final rule to dramatically weaken energy-efficient light bulb standards that Congress voted to phase in a decade ago. The standards would have eliminated inefficient light bulbs nationwide, saving some 1.5 trillion kilowatt-hours by 2030 and hundreds of millions tons of CO2. And it delayed for three years standards to substantially cut the energy that household and commercial appliances consume, moving to enact them only after a federal appeals court ruledthe hold was illegal.

Trying to undercut California's world-leading climate progress. After freezing Obama's national fuel-economy improvements, the administration stripped California of its legal authority to enact the nation's toughest fuel-efficiency standards, a move that could squelch the nascent U.S. market for zero-emission vehicles at a critical time. It sued the state over its cap-and-trade agreement with Quebec to lower fossil fuel emissions, arguing that California exceeded its authority when it launched. It has threatened action against California on air and water pollution. Those moves run counter to the administration's hands-off approach and deregulatory agenda. Because of that—and because California has among the best compliance records in the nation on water pollution and has invested billions to improve air quality—former federal officials have said the efforts reek of political score-settling.

Our Take

In the Trump administration's early days, climate policy optimists gamely sifted through the president's statements, his administration's actions, and other nations' reactions for grains of hope. Perhaps Trump would be persuaded to maintain the United States' seat at the table in international climate negotiations. Perhaps the efforts of his early, scandal-plagued cabinet members to erase climate regulation would fail. Or perhaps other nations would step up to fill the climate leadership void created by Trump, and the world would forge ahead with the action needed to address the climate crisis, leaving the United States behind.

All such hopes have been in vain. Although Trump occasionally feigns concern about climate—"I think about it all the time," he once said—his policy has been an unmitigated and relentless drive toward fossil energy development. The missteps of his former EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, and others in the first round of appointees, have been erased by seasoned Washington bureaucrats and lobbyists who now are at the helm of the environmental agencies. And instead of racing to grasp the leadership baton dropped by Trump, China, the European Union and other large carbon polluters are falling behind both in their own ambition and in support for the nations most vulnerable to climate change.

Trump's intentions, and his administration's deleterious impact on global climate progress, will be evident to voters in 2020 in a way that many failed to grasp four years earlier. The only question is whether those who care about the planet's future can unite as a political force in a way that eluded them in 2016.

==

OMG:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,_2000

The Donald Trump presidential campaign of 2000 for the nomination of the Reform Party began when real estate magnate Donald Trump of New York announced the creation of a presidential exploratory committee on the October 7, 1999 edition of Larry King Live.Though Trump had never held elected office, he was well known for his frequent comments on public affairs and business exploits as head of The Trump Organization. He had previously considered a presidential run in 1988 as a Republican, but chose not to run. For 2000, Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura persuaded Trump to seek the presidential nomination of the Reform Party, which was fracturing despite achieving ballot access and qualifying for matching funds as a result of the presidential campaign of businessman Ross Perot, the party's 1996 presidential nominee. Trump's entrance into the Reform Party race coincided with that of paleoconservative commentator Pat Buchanan, whom Trump attacked throughout the campaign as a "Hitler-lover."

kpfa greg? eggers new satire bk capt aND glory went to early trump rally, says it's entertainment, andrew dice clay

sort of explains dingell? provocateur?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/senior-gop-congressman-warns-trump-could-lose-michigan-alone-thanks-to-hateful-attack-on-late-rep-dingell-hes-playing-with-fire/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/putin-told-me-ex-white-house-officials-reportedly-said-trumps-view-of-ukraine-was-poisoned-by-the-russian-president

n o lnx

‘Putin told me’: Ex-White House officials reportedly said Trump’s view of Ukraine was poisoned by the Russian president

Written by Cody Fenwick December 19, 2019

Though the Ukraine scandal suddenly burst on to the scene of American politics in September and quickly led to President Donald Trump’s impeachment this week, its origins have been festering for much longer, a new report from the Washington Post found on Thursday.

Multiple former White House officials told the Post that Trump’s negative view of Ukraine was influenced directly by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Based in part on discussions he had with Putin, these officials said, Trump came to believe that Russia didn’t interfere in the 2016 election, but Ukraine had instead.

It was this conspiracy theory that Trump referenced in his infamous July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump pushed Zelensky to conduct two investigations. One, which has received the most attention, was of Joe Biden and his son. But the other referenced the cybersecurity company Crowdstrike and a “server” from the 2016 election, the subject of a baseless conspiracy theory about Ukraine.

Fiona Hill, who served under Trump’s former nationals security adviser John Bolton on the National Security Council as an expert in Russia, testified to Congress that this conspiracy theory is a myth intentionally propagated by Russian intelligence in order to deflect blame for its crimes and to undermine Ukraine. Reports have found that lawmakers have been briefed by U.S. intelligence officials on these findings, as well.

While some White House officials only inferred that Trump’s belief in the Ukraine conspiracy came from Putin, others had more direct evidence, according to the report. The Post explained:

One former senior White House official said Trump even stated so explicitly at one point, saying he knew Ukraine was the real culprit because “Putin told me.”

Two other former officials said the senior White House official described Trump’s comment to them.

The report also found that many White House officials tried to disabuse Trump of this false notion, but they failed. Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, has publicly bought into these theories.

In July 2017, when Trump had his much-discussed first meeting with Putin at the G-20, the pair spoke for a total of about three hours. One hour-long informal meeting at a dinner during that time was not initially disclosed by the White House.

The Post story continued:

Three former senior administration officials said Trump repeatedly insisted after the G-20 summit that he believed Putin’s assurances that Russia had not interfered in the 2016 campaign. The officials said Kelly, national security adviser H.R. McMaster and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson all tried to caution Trump not to rely on Putin’s word, and to focus on evidence to the contrary that U.S. intelligence agencies had collected.

Over the next several months, Trump privately told aides on several occasions that he believed Ukraine had interfered and tried to help Clinton win the White House, former officials said.

“The strong belief in the White House was that Putin told him,” one former official said.

timing bizzaRE unles smash and grabv window?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/the-trump-administration-just-declared-war-on-social-security/

no lnx

The Trump Administration just declared war on social security

Social Security Commissioner Andrew Saul, Image via Screengrab CSPAN.]

Written by Alex Lawson / Independent Media Institute December 18, 2019

American workers contribute to Social Security with every paycheck. When they do, they are earning comprehensive insurance protections. Social Security insures against the loss of wages due to old age, disability, or (for the surviving family of a worker) death. While Social Security is best known as a retirement program, disability and survivor’s benefits are equally essential.

An attack on any part of Social Security is an attack on the entire system and all current and future beneficiaries. The latest proposal from Donald Trump’s administration, which is designed to rip benefits away from hundreds of thousands of Americans with disabilities, amounts to a declaration of war on Social Security.

The Trump administration proposal would require millions of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) beneficiaries to re-prove their eligibility for benefits as often as every six months—far more frequently than is currently the case.There is no justification for this policy. The United States already has some of the strictest eligibility criteria for disability benefits in the world. More than half of all claims are denied.

We should be making it easier for workers to claim the Social Security benefits they’ve earned with every paycheck, not harder. And ripping benefits away from current beneficiaries, who rely on them to survive, is even worse.

We know what the effects of the Trump proposal would be, because Ronald Reagan implemented a very similar benefit cut back in the 1980s. Reagan’s policy ripped away the benefits of 200,000 Americans with disabilities. The New York Times reported that “people with obvious physical and mental disabilities” lost their benefits “without having been interviewed.”

Ultimately, Reagan was forced to reverse his attack on Social Security after massive public outcry, and bipartisan condemnation from Congress—but not before 21,176 people died, including several who died by suicide, “because their benefits were cut off.”

Donald Trump himself might not be a diligent student of history, but his advisers—men like Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s chief of staff and a longtime enemy of Social Security—know exactly what they are doing. They want to resurrect Reagan’s Social Security cut knowing full well that it killed people.

This could impact any of us, even those of us who are currently healthy. Imagine that you are hit by a car tomorrow, and suffer life-altering injuries that prevent you from working. You’re faced with crushing medical bills, and you’ve lost your income. In such situations, SSDI benefits are a crucial lifeline. Donald Trump wants to rip that lifeline away.

Trump and Mulvaney are targeting people with disabilities first, because they perceive them as politically vulnerable. But if they are allowed to get away with this attack, it will be only the beginning. They want to destroy every part of Social Security, including retirement benefits, and turn it over to their criminal friends on Wall Street.

We must stop Trump’s plan. The Social Security Administration is collecting comments on the proposal until the end of January. You can comment opposing the plan here. Everyone must also call their elected officials. Congressional condemnation played a huge role in forcing Ronald Reagan to reverse his version of the attack, and it can stop Trump in his tracks.

If we let the politicians in Washington, D.C., take away some people’s earned benefits, it means they can take away all of our earned benefits.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Alex Lawson is the executive director of Social Security Works, a non-profit advocacy group that supports expanding benefits to address America’s growing retirement security crisis. Lawson has appeared on numerous TV and radio outlets and is a frequent guest host of The Thom Hartmann Program, one of the top progressive radio shows in the country.

no lnx

Inside the bizarre crafting of Trump’s ‘ridiculous’ letter to Pelosi — which left White House lawyers in the dark

Written by Shira Tarlo / Salon December 18, 2019

White House lawyers were reportedly left out of the drafting of President Donald Trump’s scorching, six-page letter delivered Tuesday to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

The rambling letter, which accused Pelosi and House Democrats of engaging in a three-year crusade to undermine the results of the 2016 election, was allegedly drafted last week by some of the president’s closest advisers.

Senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, director of the Office of Legislative Affairs Eric Ueland and Michael Williamson from the chief of staff’s office produced a draft of the letter, without the input of White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, even though he is expected to play a large role in a likely Senate trial. Trump was also revealed to have been very involved in the process.

A couple of days after it was first generated, the White House Counsel’s office was reportedly given a copy of the document last week and recommended edits and changes. It is unclear if the president incorporated any of the inputs from Cipollone.

Senior White House officials told The Washington Post that White House lawyers “were not pleased” that the letter was released a day before the House of Representatives is expected to vote on whether to impeach the president.

Josh Dawsey

@jdawsey1

Sr. White House official confirms this and says lawyers were not pleased to be left out for much of the drafting of a letter released the day before an impeachment vote. https://twitter.com/KFaulders/status/1207086075535077377 …

Katherine Faulders

@KFaulders

WH lawyers were cut out of the process of drafting Trump’s 6-page letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi about the House impeachment vote, @jonkarl reports. At POTUS direction, the letter was drafted by Leg Affairs Director Eric Ueland, Stephen Miller & counselor to CoS Michael Williams.

House Democrats have unveiled two articles of impeachment against Trump for abuse of power and obstructing Congress.

At the heart of the charges are the president’s purported efforts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate his domestic political rivals, including former Vice President Joe Biden, and his decision to temporarily withhold nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine.

In the letter, Trump accused Pelosi of having “cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment” and claimed that she was “declaring an open war on American Democracy” by pursuing his impeachment.

“You dare to invoke the Founding Fathers in pursuit of this election-nullification scheme — yet your spiteful actions display unfettered contempt for America’s founding and your egregious conduct threatens to destroy that which our Founders pledged their very lives to build,” Trump wrote. “It is a terrible thing you are doing, but you will have to live with it, not I!”

The president declared that he had been “deprived of basic Constitutional Due Process” from “the beginning of this impeachment scam.” He alleged that “more due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials.”

Moments after releasing the letter publicly, Trump told reporters inside the Oval Office that he did not take any responsibility for conduct which has led to the House’s planned vote Wednesday on his impeachment. The president denied any wrongdoing and insisted that Democrats’ actions would leave a “mark on this country.”

“The whole impeachment thing is a hoax. We look forward to getting on to the Senate. We are not entitled to lawyers. We are not entitled to witnesses. We are not entitled to anything in the House, it’s a total sham,” Trump told reporters. “This has been a total sham from the beginning — everybody knows it.”

Pelosi, meanwhile, told reporters Tuesday night that she had not “fully read” the letter, but that it was “ridiculous” and “really sick.”

“I don’t have a reaction. It’s ridiculous,” she said. “I mean, I haven’t fully read it. We’ve been working. I’ve seen the essence of it. It’s really sick.”

Manu Raju

@mkraju

Pelosi's first reaction to Trump's letter. "I don't have a reaction. It's ridiculous," she told me. I asked her why no reaction: "I mean, I haven't full read it. We've been working. I've seen the essence of it. It's really sick."

Embedded video

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/the-trump-doctrine-how-the-presidents-foreign-policy-is-shaped-by-the-one-world-leader-who-actually-wanted-him-to-win/

...And that means we’re in real danger: There’s only one country on earth whose leaders haven’t at some point evinced an antipathy toward our Dear Leader—and that’s Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

While it’s true that various Ukrainian officials expressed concerns about the possibility that Trump might become President of the United States, that isn’t exactly surprising: Trump repeatedly displayed his affinity for Putin and suggested that he should be allowed to take the Crimea region from Ukraine. It’s easy to see why Ukrainians might have been apprehensive that he could become the leader of the free world.

But they weren’t alone: You can find leaders and officials in almost every country who were worried about Trump, for many, obvious reasons. In fact, you don’t need to be a member of an intelligence service to have been aware of this. You only needed to have met almost anyone from anywhere outside the U.S.

...

1219 kos

t**rump criticizes own security staff for not roughing up a woman protesting his Pennsylvania rally**

' a national disgrace’: Trump proposes Social Security change that could end disability benefits for hundreds of thousands

"The Trump administration is attacking another vulnerable population: those who…

djt appointees hand McDonald’s a win in labor case, this week in the war on workers

Laura Clawson / Daily Kos

djt named marketer of year?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/is-donald-trump-a-supporter-of-israel-sure-hes-also-an-anti-semite/

no lnx

..."These are the folks who believe that there will be a millennium in the future, a golden age, where Christ reigns on Earth, [and] they believe that before Christ will return, there will be a tribulation where Christ defeats evil,” Elizabeth Oldmixon, a politics professor at the University of North Texas, told Vox in 2017. “There will be natural disasters and wars, and perhaps an Antichrist, as the book of Revelation notes. Then at the end of that period, the people of the Mosaic covenant, including the Jews, will convert. Then after their conversion, the great millennium starts.”

She later added that in this theological vision Jews will “end up with the rest of the unsaved, which means they’ll be wiped out and sent to hell.”

It’s not a huge leap to argue that people who only support what they perceive to be current Jewish interests in order to eventually convert them or else annihilate them aren’t exactly philo-Semites. If someone believes that Jews will go to hell unless they convert to Christianity, they are intrinsically hostile to Jews. It’s that simple. They may temporarily align themselves with Israel out of expedience, but that does not negate their underlying hostility, nor does it wipe away the fact that the same mentality that causes them to support ostensibly pro-Jewish policies could easily be flipped to back anti-Semitic positions later on.

Jews are never well served when a group’s legitimate criticisms are silenced. That same precedent is always likely to be used against us.

If there is one sentence in Kushner’s editorial that is most chilling, it is this one: “Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.”

It is there that the true threat of Trump’s executive order becomes clear. If implemented, that doctrine could be used to pressure universities into silencing students who criticize the State of Israel. This is problematic for two reasons: 1) Israel, particularly under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has committed a significant number of human rights violations. The historical suffering of the Jewish people doesn’t mean that the Jewish state gets a pass for criminal actions. (2) One of the core principles of liberal ideology is free speech. When any core tenet of liberal democracy is violated — for any group and for any reason — Jews are ultimately threatened by the precedent thereby established.

As Hasia Diner, a professor of American Jewish history at New York University, told Salon in August, this philosophy helps explain why Jews have consistently voted for Democratic political candidates since the 1920s.

They have done so for the most part because they have accepted the basic premises of the party: calls for state responsibility for the welfare of its citizens, a state that is active for those who find themselves in need, and efforts, like civil rights broadly understood, which envision an society in which access to resources are not tied to race, religion or national origin, This formula appealed to most of them throughout this period because it worked for them and helped strengthen their own place in America as it also worked for others.

Diner later noted that Jews have also not been particularly inclined to abandon the Democratic Party over the issue of Israel. The statistics back up her assertion: No Democratic presidential candidate has lost the Jewish vote since 1924. While most of them have been accused by the right of insufficient support for Israel, the only one who ever earned less than 60 percent of the Jewish vote was Jimmy Carter in 1980. Since he lost that election to Ronald Reagan by an overwhelming margin, it wasn’t just Israel that accounted for his poor showing among Jewish voters.

...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/trump-is-a-malignant-cult-leader-who-employs-universal-mind-control-techniques-former-cult-member

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Trump is a ‘malignant’ cult leader who employs ‘universal mind control’ techniques: Former cult member

Written by Brad Reed / Raw Story December 13, 2019

A former member of the Unification Church cult led by Sun Myung Moon sees a lot of similarities between the man he once blindly followed and President Donald Trump.

In an interview with Vox, author Steven Hassan, who has written a new book called The Cult of Trump, explains why he believes Trump fits the exact profile of a malignant cult leader.

“I began this book with the assumption that Trump is a malignant narcissist,” he tells Vox. “Actually, watching him and listening to him reminded me of Sun Myung Moon, the leader of the cult I joined in college, in that both have a kind of God complex where they’re the only one with the answers, the only one who can fix things.”

He then points to statements by prominent evangelical leaders who believe that Trump was chosen by God to lead the United States, and also dives into how Trump was exposed at a young age to a prosperity gospel preacher named Norman Vincent Peale.

“Peale preached a cultish prosperity gospel, where everything’s about how God is going to bless you with material rewards,” he said. “It’s not about spirituality or Christ or anything like that. It’s all about turning self-confidence into a religion.”

Hassan concludes that the religious devotion Trump inspires is akin to mass brainwashing.

“The bottom line is that I see very sophisticated mind-control techniques being used through the media, through religious broadcasters and radio talk-show hosts,” he says. “It’s a black-and-white, all-or-nothing, good-versus-evil, authoritarian view of reality that is mostly fear-based.And there’s a deliberate focus on denying facts in order to protect the image of the leader. These are universal mind-control techniques common to all destructive cults, and something I call “phobia introduction.” Irrational fears are drilled into people’s minds so that they can’t even imagine leaving the group or questioning the leader without terrible things happening to them.”

Read the whole interview here.

~ mick, office personnel?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/trump-gives-up-on-fight-to-shutter-federal-agency-because-his-television-told-him-to/

chill greta chill, go to movie w/ friend, anger mamgt

Trump claims oceans will rise less than an inch

President Trump dismissed the possibility of sea-level rise this week by suggesting that ocean water might climb imperceptibly over the next two centuries, a claim that's contradicted by government measurements.

By Scott Waldman in Climatewire 6:16 AM EST

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/trump-is-seriously-pissed-at-fox-news-believes-the-network-has-screwed-him-on-impeachment-report/

no lnx

...fox News’ evening opinion hosts — including Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity — have been relentless Trump cheerleaders, mindlessly echoing Trump’s talking point that the impeachment efforts of House Democrats are nothing more than a shameless partisan attack and are devoid of merit. But Napolitano and Wallace, although right-of-center politically, have delved into the actual facts surrounding Trump, impeachment and the Ukraine scandal — and Trump isn’t happy about it.

Sherman explains, “The network’s legal commentator, Judge Andrew Napolitano, declared Trump’s defiance of Congress ‘an impeachable offense’ — a position that directly contradicted the House Republicans’ handpicked witness, George Washington University law scholar Jonathan Turley. Trump has also been engaged in a running war with Fox News anchor Chris Wallace; after Trump tweeted last month that Wallace was ‘nasty,’ fellow Foxer Neil Cavuto rushed to Wallace’s defense.”

Trump, in response, has bashed Fox News on Twitter for being — as he sees it — an inconsistent part of his right-wing anti-impeachment defense team. Sherman notes that on December 8, Trump tweeted, “Don’t get why @FoxNews puts losers on like @RepSwalwell (who got ZERO as presidential candidate before quitting), Pramila Jayapal, David Cicilline and others who are Radical Left Haters? The Dems wouldn’t let @FoxNews get near their bad ratings debates, yet Fox panders. Pathetic!”...

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/our-reality-tv-president-wants-a-show-trial-in-the-senate/

no lnx

Our reality TV president wants a show trial in the Senate

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly December 11, 2019

On Tuesday, House Democrats announced two articles of impeachment against Donald Trump.

The first article charges him with abuse of power for pressuring Ukraine to assist him in his re-election campaign by damaging Democratic rivals. The second article charges him with obstruction of Congress for blocking testimony and refusing to provide documents in response to House subpoenas in the impeachment inquiry.

The House Judiciary Committee plans to vote on the articles of impeachment Thursday, with the full House taking them up during the third week of December.

At this point, both parties seem to have agreed to delay the Senate trial until January, after the holidays. But following weeks of partisan feuds, CNN is reporting that the next conflict seems to be between the president and Senate majority leader.

In conversations with the White House, the Kentucky Republican has made clear he hopes to end the trial as soon as he can, an effort to both get impeachment off his lap and protect his conference from potentially damaging votes should the process break out into partisan warfare. That will include a continuous whip count until McConnell feels he has the votes to acquit the President and end the show. He has even floated a 10-day minimum during these talks, one person said.

But the show is exactly what Trump wants. He’s made clear to advisers privately that rather than end the trial as quickly as possible, he is hoping for a dramatic event, according to two people familiar with his thinking. He wants Hunter Biden, Rep. Adam Schiff and the whistleblower to testify. He wants the witnesses to be live, not clips of taped depositions. And he’s hoping to turn it into a spectacle, which he thinks is his best chance to hurt Democrats in the election.

Trump has been anticipating this for weeks now.

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Dec 5, 2019

The Do Nothing Democrats had a historically bad day yesterday in the House. They have no Impeachment case and are demeaning our Country. But nothing matters to them, they have gone crazy. Therefore I say, if you are going to impeach me, do it now, fast, so we can have a fair....

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

.....trial in the Senate, and so that our Country can get back to business. We will have Schiff, the Bidens, Pelosi and many more testify, and will reveal, for the first time, how corrupt our system really is. I was elected to “Clean the Swamp,” and that’s what I am doing!

You can feel the tension rising by watching his Twitter feed lately.

President Donald Trump put out more than 100 tweets on Sunday, sharing attacks on the impeachment inquiry with his 67 million followers.

The commander-in-chief tweeted a total of 105 times yesterday, or a little more than four times per hour on average, with most of his activity taking place between 10 a.m. and 6.30 p.m…Trump’s tweets and re-posts on the platform were largely aimed at the impeachment process and Democrats leading the inquiry.

Of course Trump wants a show in the Senate. He’d love to give media commentators the “pizzazz” they’ve been missing in the impeachment hearings so far. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the president attempted to bring in Mark Burnett to produce the whole thing. They could rig it so that Trump flew in to testify on Marine One at night under the spotlights.

I’m kidding. But only a little bit. We have a reality TV president who has been cooped up in the White House (when he’s not playing golf), while this whole impeachment saga unfolds. For someone whose ego demands to be center stage at all times, I’m sure that’s been excruciating. Now Trump sees himself on the verge of finally getting to jump into the spotlight. He’s obviously ready to roll.

But it also isn’t surprising that the kind of spectacle Trump craves is anathema to McConnell, who just wants to keep his head down, clear the president, and get on with his Senate race in Kentucky. After the holidays, we’ll get to see who prevails on this one.

Nancy LeTourneau is a contributing writer for the Washington Monthly

thanos ultra masc. // 2016? deplorable a-teamish movie poster?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/trump-campaign-tweets-video-of-president-as-murderous-comic-book-villain-who-loses-in-the-end/

no lnx

Trump campaign tweets video of president as murderous comic book villain who loses in the end

Trump Screengrab via Trump War Room.

Written by Aldous J. Pennyfarthing / Daily Kos December 11, 2019

Republicans don’t do pop culture very well. Remember Mike “My Reproductive Organs Should be Declared an EPA Superfund Site” Huckabee doing a parody of Adele’s “Hello” during his 2016 presidential run/cringeworthy performance art piece?

It, uh, wasn’t good.

And now, courtesy of Donald Trump’s reelection campaign:

Kevin M. Kruse

@KevinMKruse

So you're arguing that Trump is Thanos ("The Mad Titan") who wants to kill half of all living things, but in the end winds up defeated and dying, taking all of his sycophantic followers down with him?

Great work, everyone. https://twitter.com/TrumpWarRoom/status/1204503645607333888 …

Trump War Room (Text TRUMP to 88022)

@TrumpWarRoom

House Democrats can push their sham impeachment all they want.

President Trump's re-election is ????????????????????.

Embedded video

In case you don’t feel like watching Donald Trump as Thanos from the Marvel Universe (because why would you, honestly?), the video shows Trump snapping his fingers and saying “I am inevitable” before it cuts to a shot of Nancy Pelosi and other House Democrats dissolving into dust.

So what are they trying to say? That Trump can’t be stopped even though he’s a giant, evil bully who indiscriminately commits crimes? And the Democrats are crime-fighting heroes? And in the end Trump will lose? Because, uh, that’s what ultimately happens, you morons....

‘Nakedly authoritarian’: Trump taunts security guard for not being rough with woman protester

Just hours after House Democrats unveiled articles of impeachment, President…

2x? meh

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/trump-loves-the-massive-grift-hes-running-on-the-nation-and-knows-he-cant-win-a-fair-election/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/trump-sounded-like-press-secretary-at-the-saudi-embassy-after-pensacola-shooting-conservative-columnist/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/trump-brings-pardoned-us-war-criminals-onstage-at-florida-republican-fundraiser/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/donald-trump-sounds-like-a-complete-lunatic-because-hes-isolated-himself-in-a-far-right-media-bubble/

no lnx

Donald Trump sounds like a complete lunatic because he’s isolated himself in a far-right media bubble

Written by Joshua Holland / Raw Story December 8, 2019

This article was paid for by AlterNet subscribers. Not a subscriber? Try us and go ad-free for $1. Prefer to give a one-time tip? Click here.

Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.

If you have an older relative who spends way too much time stewing in the conservative media, you may have experienced a moment when you not only disagreed with him, but you realized that you had no earthly clue what he was going on about. Perhaps it was when he started talking about the UN plot to eliminate golf courses and replace paved roads with bicycle paths. Maybe he stopped you in your tracks with a discourse on why flies were attracted to Barack Obama, or complained about the government insisting on referring to Christians as “Easter-worshippers” or expressed outrage over 9/11 hijackers being given leniency by Muslim jurists.

A study of media citations conducted by researchers at Harvard in 2017 found that publications from the far-left to the center-right tended to reference reporting from mainstream news organizations, whereas the right-wing media were more walled off, citing mostly opinion pieces from like-minded sources. As a result, people who tend to consume mostly conservative media often come to the erroneous belief that the rest of us will be familiar with whatever controversies are raging within that bubble when in fact we have no idea what they’re even talking about.

While I don’t have an angry uncle who reads Breitbart every morning, I have had some of these odd interactions with conservatives on social media. And I was reminded of these bewildering exchanges on Friday, when Donald Trump, president* of the United States of America, addressed a pressing national problem…

We have a situation where we’re looking very strongly at sinks and showers and other elements of bathrooms, where you turn the faucet on in areas where there’s tremendous amounts of water, where the water rushes out to sea because you could never handle it, and you don’t get any water. You turn on the faucet, you don’t get any water. They take a shower and water comes dripping out. It’s dripping out–very quietly dripping out. People are flushing toilets 10, 15 times as opposed to once… So we’re looking very seriously at opening up the standard. And there may be some areas where we go the other way–desert areas–but for the most part, you have many states where they have so much water that it comes down. It’s called rain. They don’t know what to do with it.

Many normal people were flummoxed by the Commander-in-Chief’s soliloquy. Some wondered whether his cheeseburger-rich diet was contributing to this flushing problem. But those of us who follow far-right nonsense know that low-flow toilets, mandated by a law signed by George HW Bush almost 40 years ago, have long been a bugaboo of the far-right.

When that law first passed, there was something to the gripe–the first generation of low-flow toilets did lack flushing power, and people did need to flush more than once, which undermined the goal of sparing water. Within a few years, however, manufacturers figure out how to make a toilet that can basically flush a bowling ball with 1.6 gallons of water. Most people adapted to these fixtures without much fuss a couple of decades ago, but on the far-right they have lingered as a grievance against government overreach ever since.

Great Moments In Presidential Speeches:

FDR: “We have nothing to fear, but fear itself”

JFK: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country”

Trump: “Flush ten, fifteen times”

— Tomi Flushing T Ahonen 10, 15 Times (@tomiahonen) December 7, 2019

This is not the first time Trump has come off as a doddering weirdo by referencing obscure right-wing conspiracy theories that most people have never encountered as if they’re legitimate issues of concern.

When he warned that wind-turbines cause cancer, he was referencing some junk science that came out of Australia a decade ago that conservative bloggers pounced on to attack Obama’s clean energy initiatives. He was also echoing the discourse in the fever swamps when he alluded to being personally attacked by an ISIS terrorist during a campaign rally and claimed that Antonin Scalia’s death seemed fishy because he was found with a pillow covering his face (he wasn’t). And Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was reportedly caught completely off guard on that fateful July 25 phone call when Trump started babbling about Crowdstrike and a nonexistent Ukrainian oligarch hiding a nonexistent server somewhere in his country.

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012

As a raging narcissist who is also wildly incompetent, Trump must find solace in the right-wing media, where he is lauded as a heroic figure who can do know wrong. Like your angry old uncle, it represents a haven from the real world. And it’s where Trump picks up all kinds of nonsense that he then embarrassingly spouts to real reporters as if they’ll know what he’s prattling on about. It would all be quite comical if it weren’t coming out of the mouth of the most powerful man on Earth.

And with that, let’s move on to our roundup…

see blt

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/report-points-to-trump-1-as-the-ringleader-of-a-global-conspiracy/

"huge" rudy

called a rant but actually kinda coherent tho outdated: his big claim is regs hold back economy (and he boasts about stock mkt, job mkt) but this seinfeld andy roony gubmint do-gooder meddle in yopur personal life govt can do nothing right just plays into general aggrievement bs

Read the whole stream of consciousness rant to get a sense of what it was like:

The light bulb — they got rid of the light bulb that people got used to. The new bulb is many times more expensive and — I hate to say it — it doesn’t make you look as good. Of course, being a vain person, that’s very important to me. It’s like — it gives you an orange look. I don’t want an orange look. Has anyone noticed that? So we’ll have to change those bulbs in at least a couple rooms where I am in the White House. … We have a situation where we’re looking very strongly at sinks and showers. And other elements of bathrooms — where you turn the faucet on, in areas where there’s tremendous amounts of water, where the water rushes out to sea because you could never handle it — and you don’t get any water. You turn on the faucet and you don’t get any water. They take a shower and water comes dripping out, just dripping out, very quietly, dripping out. People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once. They end up using more water. So EPA is looking at that very strongly, at my suggestion. You go into a new building, or a new house or a new home, and they have standards where you don’t get water. You can’t wash your hands practically, so little water comes out of the faucet. And the end result is you leave the faucet on and it takes you much longer to wash your hands. .. For the most part. you have many states where they have so much water, it comes down — it’s called rain. They don’t know what to do with it. … A lot of things we do are based on common sense. If I didn’t get elected you wouldn’t have a steel industry. … We weren’t going to have a steel industry.

So there’s a lot going on here, so much so that we might have to leave it to the historians to unravel what he’s on about. Clearly, Trump seems to be referring to things he’s heard about or discussed over the years or in meetings but with little comprehension. While he lists a series of consumer complaints, he isn’t able to actually point to any specific regulations that they are the result of, or how those regulations were developed or could be improved.

Trump held undisclosed meeting with Turkey’s dictator Erdoğan at NATO

David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement December 4, 2019

Not the first time a foreign power has been the first to reveal Trump met with their top leaders.

Trump Knew of Whistleblower Complaint When He Released Ukraine Aid

goes to hosp [MRI stroke?] ~ hillary conspir theory

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/trump-often-stumbles-slurs-gets-confused-and-cant-remember-what-hes-said-or-been-told-anonymous-senior-official

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/the-pentagon-faces-a-massive-purge-after-the-gallagher-affair

hegs driver on trump seal pardon? war crimes 2x called them warriors ~ deep state?!

, U.S. Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer (no relation to the white nationalist of the same name) was forced outafter losing a power struggle with Fox News host Pete Hegseth. Hegseth has been aggressively lobbying the Trump administration to intervene in the cases of multiple convicted war criminals, including Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who had been accused of war crimes during a 2017 deployment to Iraq. Hegseth devoted numerous Fox & Friends segments to their causes, repeatedly hosted their family members and lawyers to ask the president for pardons, and privately urged the president to do so.⁠

Gallagher was acquitted in July on charges related to the murder of a teenage prisoner of war, but was demoted after being convicted of posing for photos with the body. While Trump pardoned the Navy SEAL and restored his rank, Navy officials subsequently sought to convene a review board to remove Gallagher from his elite unit and strip him of his Trident pin. This process reportedly continued even after Trump tweeted his disapproval of the move.

Following several attacks from Hegseth on Spencer and the Navy during the course of Sunday morning’s Fox & Friends broadcast, Trump announced his displeasure with the Navy and Spencer’s termination on Twitter.

GAME OVER?!

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/welcome-to-the-new-mainstream-gop-conservative-website-delivers-sobering-news-about-republicans-descent-into-the-alt-right/

no lnx

'Welcome to the new mainstream GOP': Conservative website delivers sobering news about Republicans' descent into the alt-right

Written by Alex Henderson November 27, 2019

Founded by Charlie Sykes and Bill Kristol in December 2018, The Bulwark has become a refuge for conservatives who are disdainful of Donald Trump's presidency. And contributor Laura K. Field, in a November 27 article, delivers some sobering news to The Bulwark's right-wing anti-Trump readers: the alt-right fringe has become the mainstream of the Republican Party.

Most of The Bulwark's readers probably knew that already, but Field (who has held faculty positions at Georgetown University and American University) offers a lot of evidence to drive the point home. Under Trump, Field laments, alt-right figures likeSteve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka and Stephen Miller have become "the face of today's conservatism and today's Republican Party."

Field demonstrates the prominence that extremists have achieved in the GOP by discussing an event held during Donald Trump Jr.'s recent book tour in support of "Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us." The writer notes that when the tour took Trump Jr. to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Trump Jr. and the group Turning Point USA were described as "mainstream conservatives" - and Trump Jr. was heckled by supporters of antisemite Nick Fuentes.

"This shift in language represents a victory for Don Jr., as well as for the extremists who attacked him," Field explains. "Now that Junior has been upstaged by the neo-fascist far right, he gets to be cast as mainstream. And if Turning Point USA counts as establishment, it means that the extremists aren't so far out there anymore. It's a win-win for them all."

Field goes on to say that many of the people who defined "movement conservatism" in the past have been marginalized in the modern GOP.

"You don't have to lionize the old GOP to see that many of the think tanks, magazines and intellectuals that made up movement conservatism since the Reagan years have slid into irrelevance under Trump, while talk radio and Fox News have grown in influence," Field observes. "Individuals and organizations dedicated to defending Trump and promoting Trumpism have prospered."

Field also laments that recently, "e-mails were leaked that definitively proved Stephen Miller's white supremacy, and not a single Republican member of Congress has joined the call for his resignation."

The leaked e-mails that Field is referring to were exchanges between Miller and journalist Katie McHugh, formerly of Breitbart News, in 2015 and 2016. Some of the e-mails show Miller recommending that McHugh use white nationalist websites like VDare and American Renaissance as sources of information.

Field wraps up her article on a troubling note, warning that extremists such as Fuentes won't be disappearing from the GOP anytime soon.

"The extreme environmentalists and Green New Dealers are fighting for the future of life on this planet; Nick Fuentes and his ilk want a white Christian ethnostate," Field writes. "That conservatives today aren't reeling at this difference tells us all we need to know about the successes of the alt-right…. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the new mainstream GOP."

no lnx

FOIA requests find 95 newly undisclosed Trump appointees

Written by Derek Kravitz / ProPublica December 24, 2018

We have obtained a list of 95 new Trump administration appointees made over the past six months. Following a pattern we’ve detailed before, many of the hires previously worked on President Donald Trump’s campaign or at conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation. In other cases, appointees seem to have little work experience at all.

We compiled the information from Freedom of Information Act requests and have added the appointees to our Trump Town app, which lets you search the disclosures of nearly 3,000 of them.

Here are a few of the recent appointments:

Lynn DeKleva, who worked for decades at chemical giant DuPont, was appointed to a job as an environmental engineer in the Environmental Protection Agency’s chemical safety and pollution prevention office in October. Typically, environmental engineering positions are not political appointments. DeKleva did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comments. The EPA said in a statement that DeKleva “brings considerable product stewardship experience and knowledge with her to assist” the agency.

Ileana Garcia, a co-founder of the campaign’s Latinas for Trump, was appointed in October as deputy press secretary in the Department of Homeland Security.

Todd Thurman, a Heritage Foundation staffer who used to write for the Daily Signal and Breitbart, was appointed as the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s digital strategy specialist in September.

Antonin Scalia, the namesake grandson of the late Supreme Court justice, was appointed in September as a temporary assistant in the State Department. Scalia graduated from college last year. Scalia and the State Department did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comments.

Do you know something about one of the Trump administration staffers in Trump Town? Send us an email at trump@propublica.org or send a Signal message to 347-244-2134.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/new-york-times-reporters-stand-by-story-revealing-navy-secretary-spencer-threatened-to-resign-over-trump-plan-to-reverse-seals-punishment/

conspir get more wacko

https://theintercept.com/2019/11/22/sure-even-fox-questions-trumps-ukraine-conspiracy-theory/

All the President’s Crimes

“ARE YOU SURE THEY DID THAT?” EVEN FOX QUESTIONS TRUMP’S UKRAINE CONSPIRACY THEORY

Robert Mackey

The hosts of “Fox and Friends” appear to be losing patience with Donald Trump’s conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election.

aha: djt trying to shore up the core of the base, not just evang but dominionist?!

1119 bibi corruption charges

coup rhet

us djt declares settlements legal; bernie pro-palestine in campaign

1119 LCV

details: The new rule would prevent policy makers from using any study if the study's data, code, and models aren't made public.

It sounds innocuous enough, but in practice, the EPA currently relies on public health studies based on confidential medical information — data that is incredibly private and should never be made public. These public health studies are absolutely critical to implementing virtually every law that protects the water we drink and the air we breathe.

Scientists within the EPA are raising the alarm. This policy has been designed and pushed forward by lobbyists for the oil industry and big tobacco. Politically-appointed leaders within the EPA have pushed aside the agency's Science Advisory Board in an end-run to stop the EPA from fulfilling its mission.

Trump absurdly claims that Ivanka has created 14 million jobs Igor Derysh / Salo

Trump blames Mike Pompeo for State Department officials’ devastating testimony in impeachment inquiry: ‘Rein your people in!’

President Donald Trump unloaded recently on Secretary of State Mike

new icon

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/donald-trumps-body-count-hes-not-just-a-narcissist-and-a-liar-hes-a-killer

Donald Trump’s body count: He’s not just a narcissist and a liar — he’s a killer

President Donald J. Trump delivers remarks on the federal judicial confirmation milestones, Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2019, in the East Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

Written by Lucian K. Truscott IV / Salon November 16, 2019

There was a moment early in the testimony last Wednesday by longtime diplomat and Army veteran Bill Taylor that was lost in the drama of everything else he had to say about Donald Trump’s attempt to extort the Ukrainian government. That was when Taylor dropped the fact that he had been on the “front line” of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia only the previous week and that on the day he was there, “a Ukrainian soldier was killed and four were wounded.”

This article first appeared in Salon.

The death of one soldier somewhere near the border with Ukraine and Russia may not seem like a very important event in the greater scheme of things as the House of Representatives considers the impeachment of Donald Trump. But it was important enough tor Taylor that he mentioned it in the fifth paragraph of his opening statement. He wanted to get it on the record early in his testimony that “even as we sit here today, the Russians are attacking Ukrainian soldiers in their own country and have been for the last four years.”

What happens in the background of practically everything that Donald Trump does or fails to do is that people are dying. This is why the impeachment hearings are about more than Rudy Giuliani running around trying to get Ukrainian prosecutors to investigate Joe Biden and his son or some spurious right-wing conspiracy theory that it was Ukraine, rather than Russia, that meddled in the 2016 election. Ukraine is quite literally fighting for its life against Russian aggression on its eastern border. As Taylor’s testimony made clear, the fact that Trump ordered that American military aid to Ukraine be withheld had deadly consequences.

While Donald Trump stood at a podium next to Vladimir Putin, as he did last year in Helsinki, and called the Russian president a “strong leader,” Ukrainians were being killed by Russian military forces that had invaded their country under Putin’s orders. At the same time Donald Trump stood next to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as he did in the White House on Wednesday, and referred to the Turkish president as “a tough guy who deserves respect,” Kurds were being killed by Turkish forces who invaded Syria with Trump’s explicit approval. Last summer, when Donald Trump sat across a table in Osaka, Japan, from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and called him “a friend of mine” who is doing “a spectacular job,” Yemeni civilians were being killed by American supplied “smart bombs” and armed drones, and the dismembered body of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, murdered by Saudi assassins last year in Turkey, still had not been found.

This week, while Donald Trump tweeted conspiracy theories about Joe Biden and launched personal attacks on former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch as she testified on Capitol Hill, two more school children lay dead and four more lay severely wounded in a hospital, shot by yet another mass killer on a rampage at a high school in Santa Clarita, California. The shooting in California came on the heels of an Oval Office meeting in late September between Trump and National Rifle Association Wayne LaPierre, during which LaPierre asked Trump to “stop the games” about gun control legislation and promised NRA support for Trump in his fight against impeachment, according to The New York Times. Trump spoke at the NRA convention in April of this year, and has long had a cozy relationship with the gun lobby. The NRA reportedly spent $30 million in support of Trump’s election in 2016.

Look at just a few of the mass killings that have happened since Trump took office: Las Vegas, October 2017: 58 dead, 413 wounded. Sutherland Springs, Texas, November 2017: 26 dead, 20 wounded. Pittsburgh, October 2018: 11 dead, 7 wounded. Parkland, Florida, February 2018: 17 dead, 17 wounded. Virginia Beach, Virginia, May 2019: 13 dead, 5 wounded. El Paso, Texas, August 2019: 22 dead, 24 wounded. Dayton, Ohio, August 2019: 10 dead, 27 wounded. Midland, Texas, August 2019: 8 dead, 25 wounded.

Donald Trump didn’t pull the trigger in Las Vegas or El Paso or Parkland or Dayton or this week in Santa Clarita. Donald Trump is not personally firing the artillery shells that are killing soldiers in Ukraine, nor is he gunning down Kurds in Syria or dropping smart bombs on civilians in Yemen. But unless he is impeached or defeated in the election of 2020, this is Donald Trump’s government, and it is exercising Donald Trump’s policies, and it’s Donald Trump’s Republican Party that stands in the way of sane gun legislation.

Every time you hear dry, foreign-relations talk about Russia or Turkey or Saudi Arabia “seeking influence in the region,” whether the region is the Middle East or Eastern Europe, what they’re really talking about is dead bodies. That’s the way these corrupt, dictatorial friends of Donald Trump “seek influence.” They order military forces under their command to kill people. That killing produced dead bodies, lots and lots of dead bodies. Taylor testified that more than 13,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since the Russians invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea. Estimates of the dead in Yemen run as high as 100,000, according to no less an authority than Fox News. More than 100 people have been killed and tens of thousands of refugees have been displaced since Turkey invaded northern Syria, according to NBC News.

Every time you hear Donald Trump tell his screaming fans at one of his rallies that he’s going to “protect your Second Amendment,” what he’s really saying is that he’s going to protect the right of the next mass killer to go out and buy an assault rifle and all the ammunition he can carry, because that’s what it takes to produce the dead bodies that result from these mass killings.

The hearings into the impeachment of Donald Trump are supposedly about the president trading military support of Ukraine for investigations into his political rival Joe Biden. We’ve heard lots of talk about the “violation of norms” and “obstruction of justice” and “foreign meddling in our elections” and “witness tampering” and even “bribery and extortion.”

But there are other consequences of Donald Trump’s presidency. So long as he remains president, the dead bodies will continue to pile up in Ukraine and Syria and Yemen and in the schools and Walmarts and churches and synagogues of the United States of America. The dead bodies will be Trump’s, but the shame will be ours.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/a-telling-moment-from-the-impeachment-hearing-suggests-trump-has-an-insurance-policy-on-mike-pence/

no lnx

A telling moment from the impeachment hearing suggests Trump has an insurance policy on Mike Pence

President Donald J. Trump, joined by Vice President Mike Pence, addresses his remarks Monday, August 5, 2019, in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House on the mass shootings over the weekend in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon November 14, 2019

Why don’t Republicans just give up and cut Donald Trump loose? That question has been on the minds of most political observers since the beginning of Trump’s presidency, and it’s only grown more intense in the wake of scandal after scandal after scandal, in which the lying, cheating, grifting, thieving sleazebag who bigoted his way into the White House continues to make fools of everyone who supports and defends him.

The mystery only deepened after the first day of public impeachment hearings on Wednesday, when the only answer Republicans had in the face of truly overwhelming evidence of Trump’s criminality was to issue a torrent of nihilistic nonsense that didn’t even try to make sense. While Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, seemed to be getting a Christian Bale-in-“American Psycho” sense of joy from all the lying, many other Republicans seemed confused, tired or flailing. Trump can wear out even the notoriously sturdy ability to lie that defines the modern Republican politician. It can’t feel great, constantly debasing themselves for a man who never shows gratitude but only keeps upping the ante, seeing how many more crimes he can commit that they’ll cover up.

The typical answer most pundits look to is this idea that Trump’s wild popularity with the almighty base protects him. Other elected Republicans are afraid that loyalty to Trump exceeds loyalty to the party, and they would lose any conflict between the two.

There’s reason to be skeptical of this view. As the blogger Atrios pointed out, Sarah Palin was once “treated as the most important voice in politics and now she is a trivia question,” and therefore “the GOP could drop their latest messiah and 5 minutes later no one would remember.” Truthfully, the same would happen if the Republicans decided, en masse, to kick Trump to the curb — their base would go along and many of them would probably also be quietly relieved to quit pretending that Trump is a voice worthy of respect.

But there’s a strong alternative explanation: Republicans have good reason to fear that if Trump goes down, he’s taking Vice President Mike Pence with him. If that happens, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who is third in line under the Constitution, would become president. Republicans may be genuinely worried that they can’t toss Trump to the curb without losing the White House entirely.

That might initially sound odd, since Pence’s name has come up only rarely in the discussion of the Ukraine scandal. He was barely mentioned during the many hours of testimony from Ambassador Bill Taylor and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent on Wednesday. But even though that mention of Pence was brief, if one reads between the lines a bit, it was also illuminating.

In his opening statement, Taylor said that on Sept. 1, Trump suddenly canceled a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, claiming Hurrican Dorian as an excuse. (In reality, Trump played golf.) In his stead, Trump sent Pence. Taylor, who received a readout of the meeting, says that Zelensky asked right away about the military aid that Trump was withholding — aid that Trump was clearly using as leverage to extort Zelensky to back up Trump’s conspiracy theory about his presumed Democratic 2020 opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Pence “did not respond substantively,” Taylor recounted, but did say that Trump “wanted the Ukrainians to do more to fight corruption.”

To the average observer, that language sounds bland and unimportant. But those who have been following this scandal closely know that “fighting corruption” was Trump’s code phrase for opening up phony investigations to damage his political enemies and bolster right-wing conspiracy theories.” We know Trump doesn’t actually want to fight corruption, because his actual behavior and associations in Ukraine indicates a general pro-corruption point of view — and also because of common sense. We also know that while Pence might not be the sharpest pencil in the drawer, he is probably smart enough to know that “fighting corruption” was Trumpian code for “do this corrupt thing for me, or else.”

Trump’s last-minute delegation of this task to Pence has been understood as part of his larger campaign to intimidate Zelensky into doing his bidding. But it might also have served another function: To implicate Pence in the extortion scheme against Ukraine. This was right when Trump and his co-conspirators, mainly his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, were starting to sweat about getting caught. A whistleblower complaint had been filed just a couple weeks before, and career diplomats and security officials were starting to make internal complaints about the situation. No doubt Trump’s mind was very fixated on CYA at that point.

While the average viewer might not pick up these implications, Republicans in Congress watching the proceedings certainly would. Knowing that Pence toed the Trumpian line by responding to requests for aid with coded language about “fighting corruption” — language we know Zelensky understood, at this point, to mean “spread conspiracy theories about Biden” — means that Pence is implicated.

So far, Pence has avoided much scrutiny, but as Republicans are no doubt aware, Trump has no morals, no loyalty and no limits. If he senses he’s going down, there is no reason to believe he will hesitate to expose Pence’s role in this, in hopes of taking his sanctimonious veep down the slippery slide with him. Republicans have to know there’s a not-small chance that if they admit that Trump committed an impeachable offense and remove him from office, they then might face an impeachment trial for Pence too, and the prospect of a President Pelosi. (Along with a mad scramble to find someone to nominate for the 2020 presidential election.)

So they’re stuck with the guy they’ve got, who is a cunning enough criminal to know how to protect himself with his posse of lackeys, even if he’s bad at hiding incriminating evidence. Also, standing by Trump makes clear how much Republicans are sacrificing the long-term viability of their party to protect their power in the short term.

After all, while the almighty base that supports Republicans and Trump is immovable for now — drunk on Fox News propaganda, and unwilling to engage any evidence that shakes them from their GOP faith — they are also, like all human beings, mortal. (And, on average, a lot older than other voters.) There’s little reason to believe that that thisnihilistic circus act being put on by Republicans will attract the newer, younger voters the party needs for its long-term health.

Republicans themselves see this, which is why they’ve focused so heavily on winding down the idea of democracy, by packing the courts and gerrymandering the voting map so that no matter how many more votes Democrats get, they never win full power. It may very well work. But the fact that they have completely abandoned any pretense of trying to argue their point and persuade voters, as the first day of impeachment hearings showed, is remarkable in itself. And if Republicans had any lingering hope that they could stanch the bleeding by replacing Trump with Pence, that seems to have gone up in smoke.

don jr boo ucla no q&a

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/trump-faces-lock-him-up-chants-and-impeach-signs-as-he-delivers-veterans-day-speech-in-new-york/

...Trump continued his strategy of using his office for political gain, including re-election, by delivering for the first time a speech in New York City on Veterans Day. Trump recently attended several sporting events where there were protests against him, and today was no different.

Surrounding Madison Square Park in Manhattan are several tall buildings, some of which featured signs that read “Impeach,” “Impeach and convict,” and “Dump Trump.” Outside the Manhattan park where Trump was speaking chants of “lock him up” and “impeach and remove

...

Trump's Paris Climate Accord Divorce: Why It Hasn't Happened Yet and What to Expect

BY MARIANNE LAVELLE

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/after-being-caught-running-fraudulent-fundraisers-trump-will-use-white-house-for-new-maga-campaign-event/

grift

for nearly two years the Trump re-election campaign has been running apparently fraudulent fundraising contests that promise breakfast, lunch, or even dinner with the President – reportedly at least sixteen separate contests over the course of nearly two years. There was just one winner announced and that person never dined with the president.

That’s called fraud. It’s illegal. >(Don’t expect anyone to prosecute Trump or the campaign for it.)

Well-known veteran journalist and founder of both Popular Information and ThinkProgress, Judd Legum, has been chasing down this story for months, and publishing the results in his email newsletter and to Twitter.... === The Conversation Donald J. Trump Foundation is now defunct and the state of New York has ordered the president to give US$2 million to a group of nonprofits out of his own pocket as restitution for breaking the law by misusing charitable funds.

I’m an expert on charitable tax law who used to work at the Internal Revenue Service. I find Trump’s admissions of impropriety in the settlement to a lawsuit New York authorities filed against him startling. But although this saga may appear to have concluded, I don’t believe that the full repercussions of his legal woes have become clear. Judge Saliann Scarpulla found that four members of the Trump family and their fellow officers and directors violated their fiduciary duties to avoid the illegal practice of “self-dealing” – when the people who run a charity benefit from it – and broke other rules and regulations.

Trump served as the foundation’s president for three decades after its 1987 founding. He abdicated that role three days after his inauguration.

Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. all belonged to the Trump Foundation board, which never met between 1999 and 2018, although Ivanka stepped down during when she joined the Trump administration. According to the settlement made public on Nov. 7, the directors also failed to “provide oversight, set policy or approve the direction, operations or acts of the foundation"

...

but of course 1119

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/11/4/headlines/epa_slated_to_roll_back_rules_to_protect_waterways_from_toxic_coal_ash

https://www.thedailybeast.com/dc-wise-man-had-early-access-to-trumps-pro-russia-speech

dC. Wise Man Had Early Access to Trump’s Pro-Russia Speech

Photos obtained by The Daily Beast show that controversial think tank chief Dimitri Simes was closer than previously known to the speech’s drafting.

Betsy Swan

Political Reporter

Updated 09.06.18 9:49PM ET / Published 09.06.18 4:54AM ET

EXCLUSIVE

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast

In the morning of April 21, 2016, a staffer at the Center for the National Interest, a Washington D.C., think tank, wandered into the office of Dimitri Simes, the group’s president.

The staffer saw a pile of papers on the desk titled “FOREIGN POLICY AND DEFENSE OUTLINE.” The staffer realized the papers were the detailed outline, in bullet-pointed paragraphs, of a major foreign-policy address that then-candidate Donald Trump was set to deliver six days later as a guest of the center. The staffer used a cellphone to snap pictures of all five pages of the document.

More than two years later, Maria Butina, who once wrote for the center’s magazine and occasionally emailed with Simes, was arrested as an accused Kremlin agent. Subsequently, the person provided the photos to The Daily Beast. The photos’ metadata confirm they were taken on a cellphone on the morning of April 21, 2016. A second former staffer told The Daily Beast that he saw the same documents on Simes’ desk.

The pictures provide new insight into the creation of Trump’s historic foreign-policy speech. They also indicate that Simes was closer than previously known to the drafting of that speech. (Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of the center’s magazine, wrote for Politico shortly after the speech that he didn’t know what was going to be in it. “I was curious as anyone to see what Trump would actually say,” he wrote.)

“The Committee has reason to believe that Mr. Simes played a central role in drafting portions of the speech related to Russia.”

— House Intelligence Committee Democrats

It isn’t unusual for a think tank chiefs to preview drafts of a speeches presented at their invitation. But Simes’ proximity to the speech shows that he had an early view into the crafting of a speech that would have historic significance for American foreign policy. Democrats on the House intelligence committee tried to investigate Simes’ relationship to Trump’s campaign, but Republican committee Chairman Devin Nunes blocked their efforts.

Presented with this account and with the pictures of the document, the center’s executive director, Paul Saunders, declined to comment. Heilbrunn emailed that he did not receive any preview of the speech. Simes did not respond to a request for comment but wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Sept. 5, 2018, that his think tank’s interaction with the Trump campaign had a “small scope.” Michael Glassner, the chief operating officer at Donald J. Trump for President, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. J.D. Gordon, a foreign-policy adviser to Trump on the 2016 campaign, told The Daily Beast he was not familiar with the document.

The pictures demonstrate that significant changes were made from the speech’s detailed outline to its final version—including the removal of lines condemning bigotry, praising legal immigration, and disparaging Russia.

The speech Trump ultimately delivered—a transcript is available here—had some notable differences from the lengthy outline that found its way to Simes’ desk. The document on Simes’ desk listed four main weaknesses in American foreign policy: overstretched resources, an unclear understanding of foreign-policy goals, allies afraid they cannot trust the U.S., and the disrespect of rivals.

The speech Trump delivered a week later, on April 27, included one more bullet-pointed weakness: “Our allies are not paying their fair share,” Trump proclaimed. The same concern is detailed in the document from Simes’ desk, but with less prominent billing. It’s a talking point Trump has been hammering for nearly two decades and continues to use in meetings with America’s NATO allies.

The outline also criticized American intervention in the Balkans under the Clinton administration—a move also criticized by the Kremlin. “Look what happened in the 1990s,” the outline said. “Even after the attacks on the USS Cole and our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, we continued to pursue nation-building in the Balkans. Then we got hit on 9/11, because our leaders were not sufficiently focused on the security of the American people.”

When Trump delivered his speech a week later, he didn’t mention the Balkans.

The outline also included a line speaking out against prejudice. “I reject bigotry of all kinds,” the document from Simes’ desk reads. “And I reject Senator Cruz’s proposal to patrol Muslim neighborhoods in our country. That is wrong.” In his final speech, Trump didn’t speak about bigotry in general or Cruz’s proposal to patrol Muslim neighborhoods in particular.

sparked by activ mean doc:

Was the Mayflower Hotel Event Really ... - Washington Monthly

https://washingtonmonthly.com › 2017/07/24 › was-the-mayflower-hotel-e...

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Was the Event Really Jared Kushner's Idea? ... With respect to my contacts with or representatives during the campaign, ... — introduced by Zalmay Khalilzad, a former Bush ... “I fully support President tough stance [on Syria],” said Simes, according to ...Jul 24, 2017 - Mayflower HotelRussiaRussianTrump's speechPutin's

Mueller report reveals Kushner's contacts with a 'pro-Kremlin ...

https://www.politico.com › story › 2019/04/29 › mueller-report-jared-kush...

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Donald gives a foreign policy at the in ... Also in attendance was a tall, bearded émigré with a booming voice. .... that "some tend to exaggerate flaws,” according to Mueller.Apr 29, 2019 - TrumpspeechMayflower HotelRussianPutin's

D.C. Wise Man Had Early Access to Trump's Pro-Russia Speech

https://www.thedailybeast.com › dc-wise-man-had-early-access-to-trumps-...

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D.C. Wise Man Had Early Access to Pro- .... and the the future president delivered at the in ...Sep 6, 2018 - Trump'sRussia SpeechspeechMayflower Hotel

A closer look at the meetings with Russians the Trump team ...

https://abcnews.go.com › Politics › story

Oct 12, 2017 - When and where: April 2016, Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. ... With whom: Russian President Vladimir Putin and the other world leaders .... would like candidate Trump's speech and his ideas for a fresh approach to ...

How Jared Kushner Helped the Russians Get Inside Access to ...

https://www.newyorker.com › news › ryan-lizza › how-jared-kushner-help...

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Ryan Lizza on how Jared Kushner's contact with interests during the ... they met in April, 2016, at the , in Washington, D.C., during a ... itself extended an olive branch to Vladimir , ...Jul 25, 2017 - RussianMayflower HotelTrump's speechPutin

===

mega ride or die:

President Donald Trump’s evangelical Christian supporters laid hands on and prayed for the president this week in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, just days before the House of Representatives voted to pass impeachment inquiry procedures.

Among those in attendance, hate group head Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council; Former GOP Congresswoman and failed presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann; Fox News contributor, and anti-Muslim, anti-Catholic, and Judaism Dallas megachurch pastor Robert**Jeffress;** Focus On The Family and Family Research Council founder Dr. James Dobson; American Values President Gary Bauer; Prosperity Gospel pastor Paula White Cain; and others.

desperate trump pander before 2020, esp if stock mkt shaky, withdraw troops syria

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/gop-tax-scam-2-0-warnings-as-trump-pushes-another-round-of-tax-cuts-ahead-of-presidential-election

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/how-pro-trump-memes-mirror-the-frightening-ways-nazi-propagandists-got-their-message-to-the-people/

no lnx

How pro-Trump memes mirror the frightening ways Nazi propagandists got their message to the people

Written by Christopher Brauchli / Common Dreams October 27, 2019

150

[A]fter the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a peace. . . which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.

—Atlantic Charter issued August 14, 1941

It was all in good fun It took place for Trump supporters the weekend of October 14, 2019, at the Trump National Doral Miami. That was the Trump-owned resort that was to be the site of the G-7 meeting in 2020, until it wasn’t. It had been selected by Trump for the meeting of the G7 because, as Mick Mulvaney, Acting Chief of Staff explained: “Trump still considers himself to be in the hospitality business.”

The event was organized by American Priority, a group that pretends to promote free speech. It was attended by, among others, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and Donald Trump Jr. In a room adjacent to the main ballroom at the hotel, a video that was produced by an anonymous person operating under the name of: “The GeekzTeam” was shown on a revolving loop. The video includes the logo for the trump 2020 campaign. According to the New York Times‘s description of the video, Mr. Trump’s head is superimposed on the body of a man entering the “Church of Fake News. ” As he walks down the aisle he stops, pulls out a gun, and opens fire on parishioners who have the faces of his critics, or the logos of media organizations superimposed on their bodies. Among his victims are “Black Lives Matter”, and “Vice News.” He continues walking down the aisle and as he approaches the alter, he is shown striking John McCain in the back of the neck, hitting Rosie O’Donnell in the face, and then stabbing her in the head. He sets fire to Bernie Sanders’ hair. The video ends with Trump standing on the church altar and admiring the victims of his violent behavior.

Reports suggest that there are many similar memes, as they are known, available on the internet, all depicting violent acts against critics of trump. The Trump himself tweeted a video in which he participates in a wrestling match and body slams and beats up the CNN logo. That tweet went viral among his supporters.

Although lacking internet, the Nazis knew the value of film in order to get their message to the people. In 1930 the party established a film department. In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote that: “The picture, in all its forms, including the film, has better prospects. In a much shorter time, at one stroke I might say, people will understand a pictorial presentation of something which it would take them a long and laborious effort of reading to understand.”

In 1932, Hans Traub, a Nazi propagandist, said that film is a “formidable means of propaganda.” Explaining its importance he said that: “Achieving propagandistic influence has always demanded a ‘language’ which forms a memorable and passionate plot with a simple narrative. . . . the most effective is the moving picture. . . . it has an unimaginable richness of rhythm for intensifying or dispelling emotions.”

Discussing films made in Nazi Germany, “Facing History and Ourselves” observes that although many films were made to glorify the Nazis, others were made to “dehumanize, criminalize, and demonize vulnerable minorities-particularly Jews.” The Trump and his supporters know how that works.

Noel King of NPR conducted an interview of Taika Waititi, the director of the movie, “Jojo Rabbit” on October 18, 2019, the date the movie was released. The movie is a satire of Nazi Germany, and is about a 10-year old boy named Jojo Rabbit. Jojo is in the Hitler Youth Movement and he wants to be the best Nazi he can be. In the film Jojo says “I swear to devote all my energies and my strength to the savior of our country, Adolf Hitler.”

The NPR interview concludes with a lengthy commentary from Mr. Waititi, that is especially timely in today’s world. “So we think we live in the safety of 2019? Yes, we don’t have to worry about Hitler and his retribution on us for making jokes about him. [But} I mean, this film shouldn’t really need to be made. In 2019 do I really need to make a film with the heart of the message being, you shouldn’t be a Nazi. At the end of World War II, there was a very clear and simple law. If you’re a Nazi, you go to jail because there’s no room in this world for you and those ideas. Now, sadly, in America and other places, the law now is, if you’re a Nazi feel free to go down to the town square and have a little rally because we’ve got this thing called freedom of speech. And you can sort of say what you want, and you’re protected by that. It’s become very twisted. And if anyone says [about this movie] “oh, well, another World War II film-we get it. That was 80 years ago.” Well, we obviously don’t get it-because we’re getting dangerously close to this sort of thing happening again. And we’re living in a world where there are world leaders who are very happy to promote hate and intolerance and ideas that were prevalent in the ’30s.'”

Mr. Waititi got that right. Think Orban, Assad, Duterte, Putin, Xi, el Sisi, Erdogan, and, Trump, the spoiled, petulant, mendacious occupant of the White House, to name just a few. It’s frightening.

mma

uS. Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor was deposed this week in a closed-door hearing before three House committees. In testimony obtained by several media outlets, Taylor explained in detail how Trump worked to withhold aid from Ukraine in exchange for announced investigations into the Bidens. Following Taylor's detailed and credible testimony, Republicans and right-wing media worked tirelessly to discredit Taylor, a career civil servant.

Taylor's testimony on Tuesday contradicted the administration's insistence that Trump did not pressure the Ukrainian president, laying out explosive details of exactly how Trump urged President Zelensky to "go to a microphone and say he is opening investigations of [Democratic presidential candidate Joe] Biden and 2016 election interference." This is an explicit quid pro quo arrangement.

While a large focus of right-wing media's spin has focused on disputing the meaning of a quid pro quo arrangement, conservative media has also spent ample time tearing down Taylor's testimony and credibility. Here are some examples of both.

Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade said that "you have to suspend disbelief" to believe that Trump denied aid to Ukraine based on Taylor's testimony.
Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt said, "It sounds like Bill Taylor didn't like the Rudy Giuliani track. He was disappointed with the way the president was handling things and Rudy Giuliani was Rudy Giuliani was handling things. It doesn't mean that there was quid pro quo."
On The Ingraham Angle, host Laura Ingraham smeared Taylor as "a 'Never Trumper' himself" before implying that strong reactions to his testimony from members of Congress are all "spin."
Conservative commentator Bill Mitchell said on Twitter that Taylor "is clearly a#DeepState hack.His wild accusations against Trump were destroyed under Republican cross examination."

After right-wing media spent days attacking Taylor, the lawyer for U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland told the Wall Street Journal that Sondland told House investigators that Trump's actions amounted to a quid pro quo.

OMFG

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/that-1970s-scourge-acid-rain-is-back/

1970s scourge acid rain is back

Sarah Okeson / DC Report

Starting in the 1970s acid rain turned hundreds of lakes and streams in Adirondack Park in upstate New York so acidic that fish could not survive. Acid rain can be…

no lnx

That 1970s scourge acid rain is back

Written by Sarah Okeson / DC ReportOctober 26, 2019

Starting in the 1970s acid rain turned hundreds of lakes and streams in Adirondack Park in upstate New York so acidic that fish could not survive. Acid rain can be so toxic that it etches paint off cars.

The good news: some naturally reproducing trout were recently found in one body of water in the Adirondacks. Lake Colden had been without such naturally grown fish for 32 years. This revival comes after decades of government work to reduce the toxic air emissions that cause acid rain.

The bad news: Team Trump seems determined to create a comeback for acid rain. That would mean 500 other Adirondack ponds and lakes would continue without naturally breeding fish. Worse, some of the sprawling park’s 2,300 other bodies of water might also become too toxic for other wildlife such as crayfish, salamanders and frogs. And because acid rain leaches aluminum in the soil it also kills trees.

For people in the Northeast, it would also mean more asthma and heart disease as people breathe in air laced with greater amounts of sulfur dioxide, a toxic gas that causes acid rain.

The Trump EPA wants to squash Obama era rules that would force owners of electric power plants to clean up their toxic wastes.

To understand how Team Trump helps polluters and hurts everyone else, consider the coal-burning Martin Lake Power Plant in east Texas. It spews more sulfur dioxide than any other power plant in America. Last year it spit out 56,198 tons of sulfur dioxide, a 54% increase over 2017.

Acid rain, then and now.(From Environmental Defense Fund)]

Now the Trump EPA wants to squash Obama era rules that would force owners of this and other power plants to clean up their toxic wastes. Owners who escape these clean-up costs reap bigger profits. The rest of us pay the price: more sickness, shorter lives for some and hundreds of lakes with no fish surrounded by dying forests.

To help polluters escape those costs the Trump administration puts executives, lawyers and lobbyists for polluting companies in charge of various units of the Environmental Protection Agency and other regulatory bodies. Instead of enforcement of clean air laws, Team Trump runs a protection racket for polluters.

Plant Owners Identified

The Texas power plant is owned byLuminant Generation Co., part of Vistra Energy. One of Vistra’s lobbying firms once employed a lawyer who was hired to head the Trump EPA air office. Vistra is one of nine politically connected polluters being scrutinized by Congressional investigators. In 2018 alone it gave more than $101,000 to members of Congress at a three-to-one ratio favoring Republicans.

The lawyer was Bill Wehrum, who oversaw the Trump EPA’s air policy office until he resigned in June during a federal ethics investigation.Previously Wehrum was a partner at Hunton & Williams where he made $2.1 million. That law firm is now known as Hunton Andrews Kurth. A Congressional report dubbed the law firm “industry’s secret pipeline to EPA.”

Vistra Energy paid $140,000 inlobbying feeslast year to Hunton Andrews Kurth.

Wehrum was accused of repeatedly violating his ethics pledge and legal duty to refrain from EPA matters involving his former clients. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, known as CREW, in May filed a detailed 14-page complaint against Wehrum with the EPA’s acting inspector general.

Other big sulfur dioxide polluters include DTE Energy Co., represented by Hunton Andrews Kurth in a long battle with the EPA over pollution from its coal-fired power plant in Monroe, Mich. David Harlow, attorney for the EPA Office of Air and Radiation, previously represented DTE for Hunton Andrews Kurth.

Lobbyists As Regulators

Soon after Harlow and Wehrum joined the EPA, the agency changed its position on a core issue in DTE’s case, adopting the company’s view.

overview 1019 AN

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/how-turkey-scored-the-trumps-green-light-to-occupy-a-massive-region-in-syria/

mick co-signs quid pro quo, get over it

TRUMP 9

Trump hints he may pardon ‘good person’ Roger Stone of ‘very unfair’ convictionsMatthew Chapman / Raw Story

Been There

Done That

Getting Specific

Our Take

==

Trump absurdly claims that Ivanka has created 14 million jobsIgor Derysh / Salo

Trump's Paris Climate Accord Divorce: Why It Hasn't Happened Yet and What to Expect

Trump hints he may pardon ‘good person’ Roger Stone of ‘very unfair’ convictions Matthew Chapman / Raw Story

Trump absurdly claims that Ivanka has created 14 million jobs Igor Derysh / Salo