They tried to spin this by telling a reporter this proves the administration is “transparent.” Um, no. We only found out about this call and the one to the Mexican president — in which Trump threatened to send in our military — because of leaks.

His administration is leaking like a sieve, or we’d never hear word one about this stuff.

joemad wrote:

And frankly I don’t buy this idea that he’s just a naive conduit for Bannon. Trump knew exactly what he was choosing in Bannon and there is no other candidate for office last year, in the primaries or since, who would give a Bannon the time of day.

I’m not sure that Trump Bannon. I think Bannon jumped from the Cruz / Fiorina sinking ship to bail out Trump’s campaign….

I think Bannon’s seat on Trump’s team was bench at that time……

Conway is the one who came from the Cruz campaign. She brought Robert Mercer with her, apparently, as a mega-donor. Bannon spent a lot of years trying to ingratiate himself with the far right and their flavors of the week, from Palin, to Cruz to Carson. But he wasn’t a part of their campaigns. He then took over Breitbart and made it Trump-Pravda, according to one of its editors who says he quit in protest. Though his description of principled Breitbart was before Bannon took over is laughable.

Andrew Breitbart was despicable, and his media outlet was despicable while he lived, after his death, before, during and after Bannon. Bannon did, however, link it to and promote white supremacy overtly. So he gets credit for making it despicable times a thousand.

Zooey wrote:

I saw this earlier. I think there was a large consensus that he was running just for Trump promotional purposes, and never imagined he’d win. He didn’t really try to win. He didn’t play the game. He just happened to be the wrong guy at the wrong time.

But I don’t think he is investigating voter fraud in order to flip the election to Clinton. That sounds like crap to me. I think he’s investigating the election because he half believes it, and because Bannon told him to. They will use the results of the investigation to make it even harder for the dispossessed to vote.

Yeah, it’s a kinda weird take from Stern on the Voter Fraud thing. Doesn’t make any sense. And it’s too obviously going to be used to make voting extremely difficult for anyone not voting Republican.

I also think Stern is trying too hard to paint him as a victim. I don’t see Trump that way at all, whether or not he believes a word of the shit he says. Is it really any better to stoke and then ride the wave of white supremacist rage, if he may not necessarily share all of their toxic views?

Otherwise, Stern is probably correct about the mental health aspects. Trump is 70. He may be taking enough of the right drugs to appear amped up in public and impervious to the slings and arrows, etc. But the presidency ages people. It destroys them little by little. Trump isn’t going to be an exception, and he chose to run. I don’t feel sorry for the serial lying, serial sexual predator in the slightest.

Admittedly, the above Business Insider article is an Op Ed, and should be read with that in mind. But the author, Linette Lopez, strikes me as pretty mainstream, and not an ideologue, etc. etc. Regardless, if it’s even just a little bit true, America is in for seriously dangerous times ahead. At a minimum.

In short, if Trump and the religious right get their way, it’s literally going to be hell on earth for LGBTQ folks and women in general.

Also, the “slippery slope” is pretty obvious. How long before this includes any “sin” the religious right says it should include? And how long before that actually gets people killed? Medical care withheld . . . is the most obvious aspect. But it could go well beyond that. Police, fire and rescue, EMT services, etc. etc.

Trump received the highest percentage of white evangelicals since they’ve been tracking this. Roughly 81%.

On the surface, this makes absolutely no sense. A thrice-married adulterer, accused by one wife of rape, someone who bragged about serial sexual assaults, being a peeping Tom at teen beauty pageants, and Mr. “Two Corinthians.” But they back him more than people like Huckabee.

The religious right understood Trump perfectly. Now he’s delivering for them. By Paul Waldman February 2 at 1:24 PM

Many of them cited the Supreme Court as the key to their reasoning. Nothing was more important than keeping the Court in Republican hands, so that Roe v. Wade might be overturned and other rulings friendly to conservative Christians will continue to be handed down. And Trump has delivered on that score; the religious right is beside itself with glee over the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to fill the vacancy the GOP held open for a year.

But that’s hardly all. Trump signed an executive order not just reinstating the “global gag rule” as any Republican president would have done, but massively expanding it, so now foreign NGOs will be barred from receiving not just U.S. family planning aid but all public health aid if they so much as mention abortion (like telling a sex trafficking victim where she can go to get an abortion so she doesn’t have to bear her rapist’s baby).

Trump has promised to repeal the law that prevents churches and other tax-exempt charitable organizations from officially endorsing political candidates, which he did again at the prayer breakfast today: “I will get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution.” And we recently learned that he’s appointing Jerry Falwell, Jr. to lead a task force on deregulating higher education, which just so happens to be a priority of Rev. Falwell’s, since his Liberty University is “essentially a medium-size nonprofit college that owns a huge for-profit [online] college.” Trump may have been pro-choice for much of his life, but he could wind up being the most anti-abortion-rights president in history.

And yesterday, Sarah Posner broke this remarkable story, that the administration may be planning to essentially legalize many types of discrimination so long as they’re being committed by conservative Christians:

Wanted to add this study, too.

This one puts the odds of being killed by a refugee at one in 3.64 billion.

You’re more likely to be killed by your own clothes than by an immigrant terrorist The odds of being killed by a refugee terrorist? One in 3.6 billion. Updated by Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchampzack@vox.com Jan 28, 2017, 11:08am EST

On Friday evening, President Trump issued an executive order barring refugees from entering the country for 120 days — and Syrian refugees indefinitely. It also bans people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the country. The justification, allegedly, is security: The order is titled “Protecting the Nation From Terrorist Attacks by Foreign Nationals.”

But there’s precious little evidence that immigrants and refugees actually pose a serious terrorist risk to the United States. A recent report, from Cato Institute analyst Alex Nowrasteh, is one of the most sophisticated attempts to investigate this question. What it found was striking: The risk of terrorism from immigrants is astonishingly tiny.

Cato is a libertarian think tank that has a noticeably pro-migration stance. But Nowrasteh’s research is on really solid ground: He combed through data on terrorism and immigration from nine different sources, covering 1975 through 2015. He counted any attack on US soil in which an immigrant participated as a terrorist attack by immigrants, even if some native-born Americans also helped in its planning or execution.

Virtually all the deaths from immigrant attacks (98.6 percent) came from one event: 9/11. Other than that, fatal immigrant-linked terrorist attacks in the US were vanishingly rare — and ones linked to refugees specifically rarer still.

The average likelihood of an American being killed in a terrorist attack in which any kind of immigrant participated in any given year is one in 3.6 million — even including the 9/11 deaths. That is a very, very, very low number.

To put that in perspective, I’ve produced the following chart, which compares the average annual likelihood of American pedestrians being hit by a railway vehicle, dying due to their own clothes melting or lighting on fire, and being killed in a terrorist attack perpetrated by an immigrant. It’s quite revealing:

If Trump is not himself a fascist, he certainly appears to be protecting them.

That said, Obama shares some blame for this, as he caved when hit by right-wing whining and moaning in the face of the (Bush admin) report on rising right-wing extremism in America. Caved. Withdrew the report. Cuz, um, Limbaugh and Gingrich, et al.

I know most of this is largely Kabuki, but in a sane world, the Dems would get into office and ignore the right entirely. Wouldn’t listen to a single thing they say and would just conduct the people’s business, no matter how loudly the right screams.

Also, folks: Would it matter, ya think, if every American knew the actual odds of being attacked by terrorists, much less refugees?

How likely are foreign terrorists to kill Americans? The odds may surprise you — Dave Mosher and Skye Gould Jan. 31, 2017, 9:36 PM

zn wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Hey, WV,

You should read Grand Hotel Abyss by Stuart Jeffries. I’m 120 pages into it and will probably do a little summary here shortly.

It’s a great group bio of the Frankfurt School so far. Too may excellent takeaways to list, but commodification of society is huge, as is commodity fetishism, alienation and reification, due to capitalist internal mechanics, competitive laws of motion, drive, etc. Reification is an especially interesting dynamic. Boiled down to its essence: Capitalism turned things into people and people into things. Cogs in the machine. At work and at home. As Norman Mailer said in the 1950s (not in the book) Capitalism follows us everywhere.

The author is excellent at making these concepts accessible, quoting the thinkers of the group bio and putting them in proper context.

Chief among them: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Eric Fromm.

Just a personal tidbit about the frankenfurter school…I saw Marcuse’s last lecture in San Diego. Way way back when.

…

I forgot to mention Marcuse. The author hasn’t dealt with him as much as others so far (especially Benjamin), but I imagine this will change as the book progresses. It’s set up, more or less, chronologically.

What are your memories from his lecture?

My own take is that Dore sets up a false premise, and just makes bad deductions from that point.

Sorry, but it’s absolutely not true that “everyone is okay with bombing the shit out of Muslims” — much less that it’s “good.” That’s a false narrative from the getgo.

Ironically, the people most likely to BE okay with that? Trump, Bannon, Flynn, Eric Prince and the Alt-Right, etc. etc.

Interesting intro by Fareed Zakaria here:

Note especially after the 1.22 minute mark, and then again from roughly 2.10 to 2.20.

No one from the seven countries listed has killed an American on American soil, but two of the countries Trump doesn’t include total nearly 3,000 — Saudi Arabia and the Arab Emirates. Just a coincidence, no doubt, that Trump has business holdings in the countries NOT on the list.

Also, chances of an American being killed by a refugee? One in 3.64 BILLION.

Zooey wrote:

PA Ram wrote:

I think the Republicans are just waiting for him to dig himself in too deep and then replace him with Pence. They’re just grinning and bearing it right now and trying to keep their distance. They have their own agenda.

I think they will milk him for all they can, let him take all the credit for the most unpopular stuff, and then create some separation on some kind of “principle” so that he is isolated.

I said this during the campaign: Clinton and the Dems made a huge mistake when they let Republicans off the hook for their support of Trump. This mistake came to a head in her speech about “deplorables,” which was yet another major tactical error.

Never punch down.

They needed to wed, link, merge, glue the GOP to Trump, and not give them any escape route. Instead, they chose another form of “triangulation,” and it failed utterly . . . not just in the election, but in its aftermath.

The GOP can do as you and others suggest. If Trump goes down in flames, they’ll just reclaim their “distance,” insert Pence, and likely get even more of their agenda passed, because there won’t be the endless “flood the zone” distractions from the narcissist in chief.

The Dems keep finding ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Zooey wrote:

This is not going to end well for Trump. I am pretty close to taking it for granted now that he will not make it four years without being impeached. And for a guy with his ego, I don’t know how he survives the humiliation on the biggest stage of all.

Anyway, I’m wondering how this can/will happen. Obviously, it will have to be Republicans in charge of the impeachment since they are in the majority, but it runs the risk of being suicidal. Somehow McConnell, Ryan, and Kaine have to cast themselves as the heroes of the narrative, saving America.

I dunno, but I can’t take 200 weeks of this shit.

Saw a tweet today that likened this administration to what would happen if all those angry sports radio callers were to suddenly be put in charge of the NFL.

Agreed.

Good analogy too. I think another one is that America has its first Internet troll as president, and he’s surrounded himself with Internet trolls advising him, and their target audience is the vast pool of lower level Internet trolls.

As a kind of offshoot of the “angry sports show callers” . . . This article is mostly spot-on about this dynamic:

Forget Big Brother. Fear Little Brother. This is who he is.

Excerpt:

This month in the District, a gunman shot up Comet Ping Pong pizzeria, threatening customers and workers and terrorizing an entire neighborhood. For months, Internet conspiracy theorists have accused Comet’s owners and leading figures of the Democratic Party of running a child pornography ring out of the restaurant, complete with satanic symbols and underground tunnels. And what did Comet Ping Pong owner James Alefantis do to earn such venom? He emailed with Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, about hosting a fundraiser.

. . . .

This is Little Brother — millions of irrational people spreading lies, sowing doubt and fomenting violence. Thanks to Little Brother, the government — Trump and his incoming administration, in this case — doesn’t have to directly threaten the political opposition or spread propaganda on its own. Leaders only need to find indirect ways to validate supporters’ most vile emotions and make lying acceptable, as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) did recently when he said it was all right for Trump to spread falsehoods. Little Brother and his NRA-protected guns can take it from there.

Nature versus Nurture is key for the author of the Guardian article, obviously. And right-libertarians should definitely read it. Time and time again, I hear them say that “inequality” is natural, and just, and fair, because people are wildly different when it comes to intelligence, effort and skills. But in no cases can those things be considered as something any individual ever accomplishes on their own, or in a vacuum. Their birth lottery gifted them their intelligence; their upbringing, nutritional history and environment in general likely was essential in their “effort” quotient; and their skills were likely gained due to all of the previous factors, plus access to education the less fortunate can never gain.

Yes, we can choose to act from the baseline we’re born into. Rise and fall from there. I agree with Sartre and Camus about that. But it’s absurd to believe that people born into plenty, with their already sky-high baseline, don’t have massive advantages that amplify those choices and make them far, far easier. Not to mention if you’re born already inches from a homerun . . . That’s light years from being born thousands of miles from the stadium, with shackles on your legs, etc. etc.

None of this is even “radical” per se. It’s really just common sense.

On trade, he never told us one single detail about any of the new trade agreements he would make. He just stayed in the realm of the bumper sticker. His analysis was absurd, as well, because he puts all the blame on the government and foreign workers, and never on the corporations who make these trade agreements behind the scenes anyway . . . . and when they don’t do so directly, those in power are working on behalf of Capital, regardless.

Match that with his frequent campaign call to massively deregulate business — which means being anti-labor and anti-environment automatically — and there never was going to be any benefits for workers or the planet. On trade he was always going to be worse than the neoliberal Clinton, who was always going to be worse than the social democrat Sanders, who was always going to be worse than socialists, proper who chose some accommodation, who were always going to be worse than left-anticapitalists in general.

Etc.

The fear of a war with Russia always puzzled me. That’s something you don’t even see (pushed) among the Republican side of the neocon continuum. They may be crazy, but they’re not that crazy. Mutually Assured Destruction has penetrated their otherwise surreally hawkish minds, etc, etc.

Trump, however, has talked about war with Iran, using nukes against “Islamic terrorists,” “eradicating Islamic terrorism,” etc. etc. And every Muslim I know, many of whom were originally from Iran, Palestine or Kuwait, was petrified by the idea of a Trump victory. Not only because of his call to ban all Muslims from entering the country, registering those still here, and shutting down all mosques . . . but because they feared he would go to war with Iran and start WWIII. They also saw him as far too cozy with Netanyahu and Likud.

It just never made any sense to me that any leftist anywhere would prefer Trump on balance. Just Trump’s seriously close connection to the Alt-Right was enough all by itself. Throw in the Nazi-like call to ban all Muslims, his warmongering regarding Iran, his shady business dealings, his seven bankruptcies, his endless lies, including the one that said Climate Change was a Chinese hoax . . . Oh, yeah, and his bragging about sexual assault.

It still baffles me to no end.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by Billy_T.