This story entitled above appeared in the NYT today (linked below.) Finally, Rex Tillerson talked. What he said, though, surely is not comforting. He ruled out negotiations with the N. Koreans or even China, N. Korea's only ally, to prod North Korea into freezing its nuclear program. N. Korea has tested numbers of missiles recently.
Does he truly think N. Korea is going to stop testing their weapons because of bellicose threats of pre-emptive war from the US? I doubt it.
The recent budget put forth by our non-presidential president has a sharp increase in military spending and nuclear weapons enhancement at the expense of humanitarian programs and wise State Department negotiation policy. It even has proposed cutting the State Department budget 28%. How will that stop N. Korea, not known for a rational thought dictator, from testing more weapons with nuclear capacity? It won't. What it may do is ensure N. Korea develop more quickly a nuclear weapon capable of hitting the US.
China, Japan and other eastern countries that have an existential interest just may be a smidgen worried. I am and all of us should be. This administration with its preemptive war talk threats just may get us all killed.
RESIST and do it now!
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/17/world/asia/rex-tillerson-north-korea-nuclear.html?emc=edit_na_20170317&nl=breaking-news&nlid=75028030&ref=headline
Friday, March 17, 2017
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
Federal Judge Blocks Trump’s Latest Travel Ban Nationwide--yeeeehaaaaa!!!!
TAKE THAT YOU
RACIST KNOW NOTHING PRESIDENT. THE NATION IS BETTER THAN YOU ARE AND
EVERYTHING YOU WANT AND EVERYTHING YOU STAND FOR IS GOING DOWN AND NOT SOON ENOUGH FOR ME. YES, GOD BLESS OUR PROGRESSIVE, HUMANE, DECENT AND EMPATHETIC AMERICA!
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/
TRUMPED BY TRUMP?
Rachel Maddow's expose of Trump's 2005 tax return was, perhaps, disappointing. It did not tell us a lot except it told us what Trump made for the tax year 2005 only and that he paid $38 million in taxes but that was all. It left out REAMS and REAMS of information vitally important to most everyone and that is WHAT are the SOURCES of his wealth?
I believe Trump himself sent those measly two pages of a 2005 tax return to David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize winner, who wrote "The Making of Trump" and studied Trump for 30 years. He brought it to Rachel. It put Trump in a rather positive light but not much more was revealed that needs to be revealed. Perhaps, it will prompt someone to expose what the American public most importantly has to know. We MUST know if our national security is compromised through his association with Russia, China and other adversarial and even non adversarial nations. We MUST know the SOURCES of his wealth and to which banks such as Deutche Bank fined $10 billion for money laundering, the Bank of China which lent Trump massive money, and the troubled Bank of Cyprus with which Wilbur Ross, Trump's Commerce secretary had to cut ties. There is, of course much much more.
Rachel and her staff are NOT stupid. She knows what she is doing and would not be bamboozled by Trump or anyone else. Either she has more OR she ramped this tax part up hoping it will now be a bulls-eye concentration on everything else about which we the people have a right to know prompting other and more important things to see the light of day.
Rachel already has reported on the potential alleged Russian criminal sources of his wealth -- through money laundering of Russian oligarchs, mafia types and kleptocrats as well as his own HUGE conflicts of money making interests illegally making money through his winning the presidency. Rachel has made these complex subjects as clear as she possibly could given the sparse information that one can get about Trump's tax returns. She has made some things transparent but we need to know the details of it all. We need to know SOURCES.
Stay tuned to the myriad of investigations that will be held. In truth, only a special prosecutor can tell the nation what is so necessary for our survival to know. This is serious. We cannot allow us to be trumped by the sleaze of Trump lest this crackpot president steal our national soul laughing all the way to the bank -- Deutche or otherwise!
Saturday, March 11, 2017
What's to Fear?
A Facebook blogger says: "What gets me are evangelical Christians backing Trump--the man who bragged about violating all the seven deadly sins. To me, it shows that they are a political group, not a religious one"
MY COMMENTS: It is ridiculous for those Evangelical and fundamentalist churches to get a tax exemption when they spew their political waste from their pulpits. I cannot believe I am living in the same nation I did just a year ago. That ride down the Trump Tower escalator by Trump to announce his candidacy for president with his paid cheering section above was the kiss of death for our nation unless those who support this mendacious monster grow a brain.
His supporters do not care that he is unethical, that he has, I allege, committed the highest of crimes and misdemeanors including treason for which he should be impeached and convicted because at the core of their love for him is that he has made a place for white supremacist racists who love rounding up brown people and throwing them out of the country. No other candidate would ruin the lives of so many innocents tearing men, women, the sick and the elderly from their children. Even some Republican candidates would not have constructed a religious Muslim ban of entry into this nation or want to eradicate social safety nets and healthcare knowing millions will die. Wingnuts do not care because there is a violence in the soul of the right wing and the extremist loves satisfying his/her hideous mental monstrosity.
What happened to 1/3 of our country? Where does that cruelty come from? Trumpistas would love to send African Americans back to Africa, Hispanics back to where they came from and Muslims back to anywhere but here and Trump gives them a racist forum to do it. No minority is safe -- not blacks, not Hispanics, not Muslims, not Jews, not LGBT people, not the elderly and not the poor. That is why nothing Trump does that is so egregiously unethical and even illegal matters to them. They do not care if people suffer. In fact, I believe, they love it.
I wonder how they will feel when their own children and grandchildren succumb to climate change fossil fuel pollution realities. The preponderance of the right wing is cruel, they are violent and they love guns. Trump is all those things as well or at least pays lip service to them. Why people are what they are is for psychiatrists to analyze the nature and nurture of it all. The bully no matter how much he is analyzed still bullies. What's to fear? Answer: EVERYTHING!
Calling 007
Flynn was a foreign agent when he was in National Security meetings with Trump. Trump has a BIG problem and it is in the link below:
http://www.businessinsider.
http://www.businessinsider.
Thursday, March 09, 2017
An Addendum + a Diagram I suggest you read
I post below the link
to Rachel Maddow's show last evening which starts to draw the
connection between the Trump campaign and Russia beginning first with
the change in the Republican platform at the convention and witnesses
who state unequivocally that the softening of the position with respect
to Russia and Ukraine was done at the behest of Trump himself.
In addition to that Rachel interviewed Representative Swalwell who sits on the House Intelligence Committee. He has drawn incredibly precise diagrams of all the Trump complex connections to Russia making a case for a the mandate of a Special Prosecutor to investigate these matters. I link his site "Protect Our Democracy" below.
In addition to that Rachel interviewed Representative Swalwell who sits on the House Intelligence Committee. He has drawn incredibly precise diagrams of all the Trump complex connections to Russia making a case for a the mandate of a Special Prosecutor to investigate these matters. I link his site "Protect Our Democracy" below.
I
suggest it would behoove you to listen to Rachel's show and to find
also the segment of Representative Swalwell's interview with his
informative diagram of the Trump ties to Russia. It is a mind blowing
matter (I paste one diagram below but there is more to say that Swalwell
posts) that begs insistently for a Special Prosecutor to illuminate the
allegedly utter immoral, unpatriotic, treasonous ties Trump has with
Vladimir Putin to enter our nation to shape policy Putin wants.
This
is an attack upon our country by a president who says he puts America
first when we know he puts himself first. Trump's loyalty is not to this
nation but to his own big con and all the riches he thinks will come
his way as he pulls it off while pulling the wool over his supporters'
eyes. HRC said it best: DEPLORABLE!
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-
https://swalwell.house.gov/
A Mountain of Lies -- Times 10
The lies, upon lies, upon lies, upon lies within the highest echelons of the Trump administration about its connection to Russia are legion. They reach the summit of the mountain of Everest. If this sordid Russian mega scandalous mess and involvement of the Trump administration as deep as the deepest ocean with an unfriendly nation, Russia, does not require -- no, does not mandate -- a special prosecutor than neither did Watergate because THIS is worse -- much worse -- than Watergate. This is Watergate on steroids. Watergate did NOT involve potential treason and Russian interference in a US presidential election with the Trump campaign's knowledge, even encouragement of and acquiescence to it. It is nearly crystal clear that Trump and his administration were connected to Russia in ways few could imagine until Trump from the stage during the campaign begged Russia to hack into the Democrats' email. They did and I allege Trump knew they would. Why would a presidential candidate at the time ask for interference in a US national presidential election by Russia when Russia for decades has been a US adversarial nation unless Trump knew the Russian interference would help get Trump elected and defeat Hillary Clinton. Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister, knew he could not get what he wanted -- more power -- unless Trump won. Putin hated Hillary Clinton whom he knew would not allow him permission to add to Russia's European geography and political control which Russia once held but lost when Communism fell. As I have said often Putin wants Russia's empire back, wants the adulation of his population for it and Trump, the useful idiot, would comply IF Trump won the presidency.
Moreover, Trump knew, although he claimed he did not, that the Platform Committee at the Republican National Convention changed a small paragraph in its platform about US/Russia relations. It called for an improving relationship with Russia heretofore unknown within Republican ideological circles and against US policy for decades. The question is why. The answer for Trump is usually money. The conflicts of business interests of Trump about which he once bragged spread deeply into Russia and among its oligarchs. Putin knows this is potential blackmail he could use against Trump.
According to Politico "Citing anonymous intelligence officials, the Times report named Flynn, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, onetime campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page and Trump confidant Roger Stone as the aides whose communications the FBI had probed for possible contacts with Russia." We know Manafort and Flynn have resigned. Attorney General Sessions should resign also since he lied at his cabinet Congressional hearing. He did, in fact, meet with the Russian ambassador and did so three times!
If the scandal is not investigated in its entirely, with transparency and without partisan bias to illuminate, I believe, this Manchurian presidency operating inside the White House at the highest echelons then Republicans most assuredly will face obliteration in the 2018 midterms and they know it. The treasonous scandal SHOULD be made transparent and involve an unbiased Special Prosecutor.
Since Republicans control the congressional investigations one can be assured the verdict will be skewed away from Trump. This cannot stand and I hope it will not. The American people now know, at least most of them do, that the connection with Russia reaches high into the halls of power. The polling data shows a wide preponderance of the nation think a special prosecutor is a necessity and so do I times 10!
Moreover, Trump knew, although he claimed he did not, that the Platform Committee at the Republican National Convention changed a small paragraph in its platform about US/Russia relations. It called for an improving relationship with Russia heretofore unknown within Republican ideological circles and against US policy for decades. The question is why. The answer for Trump is usually money. The conflicts of business interests of Trump about which he once bragged spread deeply into Russia and among its oligarchs. Putin knows this is potential blackmail he could use against Trump.
According to Politico "Citing anonymous intelligence officials, the Times report named Flynn, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, onetime campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page and Trump confidant Roger Stone as the aides whose communications the FBI had probed for possible contacts with Russia." We know Manafort and Flynn have resigned. Attorney General Sessions should resign also since he lied at his cabinet Congressional hearing. He did, in fact, meet with the Russian ambassador and did so three times!
If the scandal is not investigated in its entirely, with transparency and without partisan bias to illuminate, I believe, this Manchurian presidency operating inside the White House at the highest echelons then Republicans most assuredly will face obliteration in the 2018 midterms and they know it. The treasonous scandal SHOULD be made transparent and involve an unbiased Special Prosecutor.
Since Republicans control the congressional investigations one can be assured the verdict will be skewed away from Trump. This cannot stand and I hope it will not. The American people now know, at least most of them do, that the connection with Russia reaches high into the halls of power. The polling data shows a wide preponderance of the nation think a special prosecutor is a necessity and so do I times 10!
Monday, March 06, 2017
Donald Trump's Worst Deal
The link below is yet another story in Trump's war chest of conflict-of-interest business deals around the globe. It is written by Adam Davidson in "The New Yorker." Trump's conflicts of interest we know are legion and he refuses to divest himself of any them placing them in his children's sighted "blind trust" control which is not a blind trust at all. He will never reveal his income tax filings (as all other modern day presidents have) lest we find proof of exactly what he owns, how interest conflicted his properties are and perhaps even find out the many impeachable offenses -- not the least of which are his well known ties to an adversarial power, Russia. This transaction, however, one among so many others, could be the worst of them all. It involves as Adam Davidson states the fact that "Trump helped build a hotel in Azerbaijan that appears to be a corrupt operation engineered by oligarchs tied to Iran's Revolutionary Guard." That money is used by the Revolutionary Guard of Iran for the funding of terrorist activity all over the world.
Not only is this alleged transaction illegal but it would be, in fact, treason if proven true. I do not use that term in this instance lightly. I take a small bow as I put up the facts of this very illegal Trump transaction in a link on my Facebook page hours before Rachel instructed on it as part of her primary story last evening. She, of course, sets it up much more perfectly than I ever could. I post along with this sordid story by Mr. Davidson Rachel's link below which she entitles "Sketchy Trump deal eyed for potential corruption, ties to Iran" explaining it in understandable almost poetic prose as she details why this is Trump's worst deal and interviews the author of "The New Yorker" article as well. Rachel, in my opinion, is a national treasure.
http://www.newyorker.com/magaz
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-
Sunday, March 05, 2017
Dystopian Devolution
“The Camp of the Saints” "tells a grotesque tale about a migrant invasion to destroy Western civilization."
MY COMMENT:
Steve Bannon, is one of Trump's most trusted advisors. This chilling sociopath, Bannon, sits in a seat on the National Security Counsel and has the president's ear 24/7. Linda Chavez is a supporter of the Trump economic policy said "Trump’s immigration moves are “a kind of purging of America of anything but our Northern European roots.” Bannon, she added, “wants to make America white again.”
How did we get this bastardization of the Democratic Republic our Founders so carefully tried to construct to avoid a demagogue when Drumpf received 3 million less votes than Hillary Clinton? The book entitled above, "The Camp of the Saints," is Steve Bannon's Bible and occupies a high place in the goodreads section of Alt Right wingnut thought. It sits next to other genocidal instructionals, Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and William Luther Pierce (pen name Andrew Macdonald) "The Turner Diaries." The Turner Diaries was the motivation for Timothy McVeigh, the violent anti government right wing extremist and his bombing in 1995 of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City (pic below) killing 168 human beings including children and injuring countless others. This is what the Alt Right supporters of not-my-president, Donald J. Trump, are capable:
"This Stunningly Racist French Novel is How Steve Bannon Explains the World"
By Paul Blumenthal , JM Rieger
"Stephen Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist and the driving force behind the administration’s controversial ban on travelersfrom seven Muslim-majority countries, has a favorite metaphor he uses to describe the largest refugee crisis in human history."
“It’s been almost a Camp of the Saints-type invasion into Central and then Western and Northern Europe,” he said in October 2015.
“The whole thing in Europe is all about immigration,” he said in January 2016. “It’s a global issue today — this kind of global Camp of the Saints.”
“It’s not a migration,” he said later that January. “It’s really an invasion. I call it the Camp of the Saints.”
“When we first started talking about this a year ago,” he said in April 2016, “we called it the Camp of the Saints. ... I mean, this is Camp of the Saints, isn’t it?”
Bannon has agitated for a host of anti-immigrant measures. In his previous role as executive chairman of the right-wing news site Breitbart — which he called a “platform for the alt-right,” the online movement of white nationalists — he made anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim news a focus.
But the top Trump aide’s repeated references to The Camp of the Saints, an obscure 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail, reveal even more about how he understands the world. The book is a cult favorite on the far right, yet it’s never found a wider audience. There’s a good reason for that: It’s breathtakingly racist.
“[This book is] racist in the literal sense of the term. It uses race as the main characterization of characters,” said Cécile Alduy, professor of French at Stanford University and an expert on the contemporary French far right. “It describes the takeover of Europe by waves of immigrants that wash ashore like the plague.”
The book, she said, “reframes everything as the fight to death between races.”
Upon the novel’s release in the United States in 1975, the influential book review magazine Kirkus Reviews pulled no punches: “The publishers are presenting The Camp of the Saints as a major event, and it probably is, in much the same sense that Mein Kampf was a major event.”
Linda Chavez, a Republican commentator who has worked for GOP presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush but opposed Trump’s election, also reviewed the book back then. Forty years later, she hasn’t forgotten it.
“It is really shockingly racist,” Chavez told The Huffington Post, “and to have the counselor to the president see this as one of his touchstones, I think, says volumes about his attitude.”
The cover of this English translation of The Camp of the Saints calls it “a chilling novel about the end of the white world.”
The plot of The Camp of the Saints follows a poor Indian demagogue, named “the turd-eater” because he literally eats shit, and the deformed, apparently psychic child who sits on his shoulders. Together, they lead an “armada” of 800,000 impoverished Indians sailing to France. Dithering European politicians, bureaucrats and religious leaders, including a liberal pope from Latin America, debate whether to let the ships land and accept the Indians or to do the right thing — in the book’s vision — by recognizing the threat the migrants pose and killing them all.
The non-white people of Earth, meanwhile, wait silently for the Indians to reach shore. The landing will be the signal for them to rise up everywhere and overthrow white Western society.
The French government eventually gives the order to repel the armada by force, but by then the military has lost the will to fight. Troops battle among themselves as the Indians stream on shore, trampling to death the left-wing radicals who came to welcome them. Poor black and brown people literally overrun Western civilization. Chinese people pour into Russia; the queen of England is forced to marry her son to a Pakistani woman; the mayor of New York must house an African-American family at Gracie Mansion. Raspail’s rogue heroes, the defenders of white Christian supremacy, attempt to defend their civilization with guns blazing but are killed in the process.
Calgues, the obvious Raspail stand-in, is one of those taking up arms against the migrants and their culturally “cuckolded” white supporters. Just before killing a radical hippie, Calgues compares his own actions to past heroic, sometimes mythical defenses of European Christendom. He harkens back to famous battles that fit the clash-of-civilizations narrative — the defense of Rhodes against the Ottoman Empire, the fall of Constantinople to the same — and glorifies colonial wars of conquest and the formation of the Ku Klux Klan.
Only white Europeans like Calgues are portrayed as truly human in The Camp of the Saints. The Indian armada brings “thousands of wretched creatures” whose very bodies arouse disgust: “Scraggy branches, brown and black … All bare, those fleshless Gandhi-arms.” Poor brown children are spoiled fruit “starting to rot, all wormy inside, or turned so you can’t see the mold.”
The ship’s inhabitants are also sexual deviants who turn the voyage into a grotesque orgy. “Everywhere, rivers of sperm,” Raspail writes. “Streaming over bodies, oozing between breasts, and buttocks, and thighs, and lips, and fingers.”
The white Christian world is on the brink of destruction, the novel suggests, because these black and brown people are more fertile and more numerous, while the West has lost that necessary belief in its own cultural and racial superiority. As he talks to the hippie he will soon kill, Calgues explains how the youth went so wrong: “That scorn of a people for other races, the knowledge that one’s own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity’s finest — none of that had ever filled these youngsters’ addled brains.”
The Camp of the Saints — which draws its title from Revelation 20:9 — is nothing less than a call to arms for the white Christian West, to revive the spirit of the Crusades and steel itself for bloody conflict against the poor black and brown world without and the traitors within. The novel’s last line links past humiliations tightly to its own grim parable about modern migration. “The Fall of Constantinople,” Raspail’s unnamed narrator says, “is a personal misfortune that happened to all of us only last week.”
Stephanie Keith/Getty Images Protesters rally against President Donald Trump’s travel ban at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Jan. 28, 2017, in New York City.
Raspail wrote The Camp of the Saints in 1972 and 1973, after a stay at his aunt’s house near Cannes on the southern coast of France. Looking out across the Mediterranean, he had an epiphany: “And what if they came?” he thought to himself. “This ‘they’ was not clearly defined at first,” he told the conservative publication Le Point in 2015. “Then I imagined that the Third World would rush into this blessed country that is France.”
Raspail’s novel has been published in the U.S. several times, each time with the backing of the anti-immigration movement.
The U.S. publishing house Scribner was the first to translate the book into English in 1975, but it failed to reach a wide audience amid withering reviews by critics. A rare favorable take appeared in National Review. “Raspail brings his reader to the surprising conclusion that killing a million or so starving refugees from India would be a supreme act of individual sanity and cultural health,” then-Dartmouth professor Jeffrey Hart wrote in 1975. “Raspail is to genocide what [D.H. Lawrence] was to sex.” Hart added that “a great fuss” was being made over “Raspail’s supposed racism,” but that the “liberal rote anathema on ‘racism’ is in effect a poisonous assault upon Western self-preference.”
The book received a second life in 1983 when Cordelia Scaife May, heiress to the Mellon fortune and sister to right-wing benefactor Richard Mellon Scaife, funded its republication and distribution. This time it gained a cult following among immigration opponents.
May’s money has also been instrumental in funding the efforts of John Tanton, the godfather of the anti-immigration movement in the U.S. Tanton, who began as an environmentalist and population control proponent, founded a host of groups focused on restricting immigration, including the Federation of American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies, NumbersUSA and U.S. English. May’s fortune has fueled these groups with tens of millions of dollars in contributions over the years.
Linda Chavez was recruited in 1987 to head U.S. English, which advocates for English to be designated the country’s official language. But then a series of disturbing stories painted Tanton’s motives in a racial light. Among other issues, Chavez said she learned that his funding came from the pro-eugenics Pioneer Fund and from May, who Chavez knew had helped publish The Camp of the Saints. Chavez recalled seeing Tanton’s staffers carrying the book around their offices. She quit the group.
Tanton, who insists his opposition to immigration is not connected to race at all, told The Washington Post in 2006 that his mind “became focused” on the issue after reading The Camp of the Saints. In 1995, his small publishing house, Social Contract Press, brought the book back into print for a third time in the U.S., again with funding from May. Historians Paul Kennedy and Matt Connelly tied the book to then-current concerns about global demographic trends in a cover story for The Atlantic.
“Over the years the American public has absorbed a great number of books, articles, poems and films which exalt the immigrant experience,” Tanton wrote in 1994. “It is easy for the feelings evoked by Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty to obscure the fact that we are currently receiving too many immigrants (and receiving them too fast) for the health of our environment and of our common culture. Raspail evokes different feelings and that may help to pave the way for policy changes.”
In 2001, the book was republished one more time, again by Tanton, and again gained a cult following among opponents of immigration like the border-patrolling Minutemen and eventually the online “alt-right.”
Kirk Irwin/Getty Images for SiriusXM On his Breitbart News radio show, Stephen Bannon repeatedly used The Camp of the Saints as a metaphor for migrants and refugees.
Bannon’s alt-right-loving Breitbart has run multiple articles over the past three years referencing the novel. When Pope Francis told a joint session of Congress that the U.S. should open its arms to refugees in September 2015, Breitbart’s Julia Hahn, now an aide to Bannon in the White House, compared his admonition to Raspail’s liberal Latin American pontiff. And the novel’s thesis that migration is invasion in disguise is often reflected in Bannon’s public comments.
The refugee crisis “didn’t just happen by happenstance,” Bannon said in an April 2016 radio interview with Sebastian Gorka, who now works for the National Security Council. “These are not war refugees. It’s something much more insidious going on.”
Bannon has also echoed the novel’s theory that secular liberals who favor immigration and diversity weaken the West.
“Do you believe the elites in this country have the backbone, have the belief in the underlying principles of the Judeo-Christian West to actually win this war?” he asked Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), now the attorney general, in June 2016.
“I’m worried about that. … They’re eroding, regularly it seems to me, classical American values that are so critical to our success,” Sessions replied.
Like Raspail, Bannon has reveled in the past victories of Christendom over Islamic forces.
“If you look back at the long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam, I believe that our forefathers kept their stance, and I think they did the right thing,” he said in a 2014 speech broadcast to a conference at the Vatican. “I think they kept it out of the world, whether it was at Vienna [the Battle of Vienna in 1683], or Tours [the Battle of Tours in 732], or other places. … They were able to stave this off, and they were able to defeat it, and they were able to bequeath to us a church and a civilization that really is the flower of mankind.”
Now Bannon sits at the right hand of the U.S. president, working to beat back what Bannon calls “this Muslim invasion.” And Trump is all in on the project. During the campaign, he called for a ban on all Muslims entering the country. His Jan. 28 executive order, since blocked in the courts, turned this campaign idea into executive policy.
Trump has continued to defend the executive order as a life-or-death national security issue. “We cannot allow a beachhead of terrorism to form inside America,” he said in his first speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday.
Five days earlier, Trump had called his immigration enforcement efforts a “military operation.”
Although Department of Homeland Security officials walked back that statement, the president’s conflation of immigration with warfare did not go unnoticed.
“They see this as a war,” Chavez said.
Chavez, who supports some of Trump’s economic policy proposals, called the direction the White House is taking on immigration and race “extremely dangerous.” She said Trump’s immigration moves are “a kind of purging of America of anything but our Northern European roots.” Bannon, she added, “wants to make America white again.”
MY COMMENT:
Steve Bannon, is one of Trump's most trusted advisors. This chilling sociopath, Bannon, sits in a seat on the National Security Counsel and has the president's ear 24/7. Linda Chavez is a supporter of the Trump economic policy said "Trump’s immigration moves are “a kind of purging of America of anything but our Northern European roots.” Bannon, she added, “wants to make America white again.”
How did we get this bastardization of the Democratic Republic our Founders so carefully tried to construct to avoid a demagogue when Drumpf received 3 million less votes than Hillary Clinton? The book entitled above, "The Camp of the Saints," is Steve Bannon's Bible and occupies a high place in the goodreads section of Alt Right wingnut thought. It sits next to other genocidal instructionals, Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and William Luther Pierce (pen name Andrew Macdonald) "The Turner Diaries." The Turner Diaries was the motivation for Timothy McVeigh, the violent anti government right wing extremist and his bombing in 1995 of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City (pic below) killing 168 human beings including children and injuring countless others. This is what the Alt Right supporters of not-my-president, Donald J. Trump, are capable:
"This Stunningly Racist French Novel is How Steve Bannon Explains the World"
By Paul Blumenthal , JM Rieger
"Stephen Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist and the driving force behind the administration’s controversial ban on travelersfrom seven Muslim-majority countries, has a favorite metaphor he uses to describe the largest refugee crisis in human history."
“It’s been almost a Camp of the Saints-type invasion into Central and then Western and Northern Europe,” he said in October 2015.
“The whole thing in Europe is all about immigration,” he said in January 2016. “It’s a global issue today — this kind of global Camp of the Saints.”
“It’s not a migration,” he said later that January. “It’s really an invasion. I call it the Camp of the Saints.”
“When we first started talking about this a year ago,” he said in April 2016, “we called it the Camp of the Saints. ... I mean, this is Camp of the Saints, isn’t it?”
Bannon has agitated for a host of anti-immigrant measures. In his previous role as executive chairman of the right-wing news site Breitbart — which he called a “platform for the alt-right,” the online movement of white nationalists — he made anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim news a focus.
But the top Trump aide’s repeated references to The Camp of the Saints, an obscure 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail, reveal even more about how he understands the world. The book is a cult favorite on the far right, yet it’s never found a wider audience. There’s a good reason for that: It’s breathtakingly racist.
“[This book is] racist in the literal sense of the term. It uses race as the main characterization of characters,” said Cécile Alduy, professor of French at Stanford University and an expert on the contemporary French far right. “It describes the takeover of Europe by waves of immigrants that wash ashore like the plague.”
The book, she said, “reframes everything as the fight to death between races.”
Upon the novel’s release in the United States in 1975, the influential book review magazine Kirkus Reviews pulled no punches: “The publishers are presenting The Camp of the Saints as a major event, and it probably is, in much the same sense that Mein Kampf was a major event.”
Linda Chavez, a Republican commentator who has worked for GOP presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush but opposed Trump’s election, also reviewed the book back then. Forty years later, she hasn’t forgotten it.
“It is really shockingly racist,” Chavez told The Huffington Post, “and to have the counselor to the president see this as one of his touchstones, I think, says volumes about his attitude.”
The cover of this English translation of The Camp of the Saints calls it “a chilling novel about the end of the white world.” The plot of The Camp of the Saints follows a poor Indian demagogue, named “the turd-eater” because he literally eats shit, and the deformed, apparently psychic child who sits on his shoulders. Together, they lead an “armada” of 800,000 impoverished Indians sailing to France. Dithering European politicians, bureaucrats and religious leaders, including a liberal pope from Latin America, debate whether to let the ships land and accept the Indians or to do the right thing — in the book’s vision — by recognizing the threat the migrants pose and killing them all.
The non-white people of Earth, meanwhile, wait silently for the Indians to reach shore. The landing will be the signal for them to rise up everywhere and overthrow white Western society.
The French government eventually gives the order to repel the armada by force, but by then the military has lost the will to fight. Troops battle among themselves as the Indians stream on shore, trampling to death the left-wing radicals who came to welcome them. Poor black and brown people literally overrun Western civilization. Chinese people pour into Russia; the queen of England is forced to marry her son to a Pakistani woman; the mayor of New York must house an African-American family at Gracie Mansion. Raspail’s rogue heroes, the defenders of white Christian supremacy, attempt to defend their civilization with guns blazing but are killed in the process.
Calgues, the obvious Raspail stand-in, is one of those taking up arms against the migrants and their culturally “cuckolded” white supporters. Just before killing a radical hippie, Calgues compares his own actions to past heroic, sometimes mythical defenses of European Christendom. He harkens back to famous battles that fit the clash-of-civilizations narrative — the defense of Rhodes against the Ottoman Empire, the fall of Constantinople to the same — and glorifies colonial wars of conquest and the formation of the Ku Klux Klan.
Only white Europeans like Calgues are portrayed as truly human in The Camp of the Saints. The Indian armada brings “thousands of wretched creatures” whose very bodies arouse disgust: “Scraggy branches, brown and black … All bare, those fleshless Gandhi-arms.” Poor brown children are spoiled fruit “starting to rot, all wormy inside, or turned so you can’t see the mold.”
The ship’s inhabitants are also sexual deviants who turn the voyage into a grotesque orgy. “Everywhere, rivers of sperm,” Raspail writes. “Streaming over bodies, oozing between breasts, and buttocks, and thighs, and lips, and fingers.”
The white Christian world is on the brink of destruction, the novel suggests, because these black and brown people are more fertile and more numerous, while the West has lost that necessary belief in its own cultural and racial superiority. As he talks to the hippie he will soon kill, Calgues explains how the youth went so wrong: “That scorn of a people for other races, the knowledge that one’s own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity’s finest — none of that had ever filled these youngsters’ addled brains.”
The Camp of the Saints — which draws its title from Revelation 20:9 — is nothing less than a call to arms for the white Christian West, to revive the spirit of the Crusades and steel itself for bloody conflict against the poor black and brown world without and the traitors within. The novel’s last line links past humiliations tightly to its own grim parable about modern migration. “The Fall of Constantinople,” Raspail’s unnamed narrator says, “is a personal misfortune that happened to all of us only last week.”
Stephanie Keith/Getty Images Protesters rally against President Donald Trump’s travel ban at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Jan. 28, 2017, in New York City.
Raspail wrote The Camp of the Saints in 1972 and 1973, after a stay at his aunt’s house near Cannes on the southern coast of France. Looking out across the Mediterranean, he had an epiphany: “And what if they came?” he thought to himself. “This ‘they’ was not clearly defined at first,” he told the conservative publication Le Point in 2015. “Then I imagined that the Third World would rush into this blessed country that is France.”
Raspail’s novel has been published in the U.S. several times, each time with the backing of the anti-immigration movement.
The U.S. publishing house Scribner was the first to translate the book into English in 1975, but it failed to reach a wide audience amid withering reviews by critics. A rare favorable take appeared in National Review. “Raspail brings his reader to the surprising conclusion that killing a million or so starving refugees from India would be a supreme act of individual sanity and cultural health,” then-Dartmouth professor Jeffrey Hart wrote in 1975. “Raspail is to genocide what [D.H. Lawrence] was to sex.” Hart added that “a great fuss” was being made over “Raspail’s supposed racism,” but that the “liberal rote anathema on ‘racism’ is in effect a poisonous assault upon Western self-preference.”
The book received a second life in 1983 when Cordelia Scaife May, heiress to the Mellon fortune and sister to right-wing benefactor Richard Mellon Scaife, funded its republication and distribution. This time it gained a cult following among immigration opponents.
May’s money has also been instrumental in funding the efforts of John Tanton, the godfather of the anti-immigration movement in the U.S. Tanton, who began as an environmentalist and population control proponent, founded a host of groups focused on restricting immigration, including the Federation of American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies, NumbersUSA and U.S. English. May’s fortune has fueled these groups with tens of millions of dollars in contributions over the years.
Linda Chavez was recruited in 1987 to head U.S. English, which advocates for English to be designated the country’s official language. But then a series of disturbing stories painted Tanton’s motives in a racial light. Among other issues, Chavez said she learned that his funding came from the pro-eugenics Pioneer Fund and from May, who Chavez knew had helped publish The Camp of the Saints. Chavez recalled seeing Tanton’s staffers carrying the book around their offices. She quit the group.
Tanton, who insists his opposition to immigration is not connected to race at all, told The Washington Post in 2006 that his mind “became focused” on the issue after reading The Camp of the Saints. In 1995, his small publishing house, Social Contract Press, brought the book back into print for a third time in the U.S., again with funding from May. Historians Paul Kennedy and Matt Connelly tied the book to then-current concerns about global demographic trends in a cover story for The Atlantic.
“Over the years the American public has absorbed a great number of books, articles, poems and films which exalt the immigrant experience,” Tanton wrote in 1994. “It is easy for the feelings evoked by Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty to obscure the fact that we are currently receiving too many immigrants (and receiving them too fast) for the health of our environment and of our common culture. Raspail evokes different feelings and that may help to pave the way for policy changes.”
In 2001, the book was republished one more time, again by Tanton, and again gained a cult following among opponents of immigration like the border-patrolling Minutemen and eventually the online “alt-right.”
Kirk Irwin/Getty Images for SiriusXM On his Breitbart News radio show, Stephen Bannon repeatedly used The Camp of the Saints as a metaphor for migrants and refugees.
Bannon’s alt-right-loving Breitbart has run multiple articles over the past three years referencing the novel. When Pope Francis told a joint session of Congress that the U.S. should open its arms to refugees in September 2015, Breitbart’s Julia Hahn, now an aide to Bannon in the White House, compared his admonition to Raspail’s liberal Latin American pontiff. And the novel’s thesis that migration is invasion in disguise is often reflected in Bannon’s public comments.
The refugee crisis “didn’t just happen by happenstance,” Bannon said in an April 2016 radio interview with Sebastian Gorka, who now works for the National Security Council. “These are not war refugees. It’s something much more insidious going on.”
Bannon has also echoed the novel’s theory that secular liberals who favor immigration and diversity weaken the West.
“Do you believe the elites in this country have the backbone, have the belief in the underlying principles of the Judeo-Christian West to actually win this war?” he asked Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), now the attorney general, in June 2016.
“I’m worried about that. … They’re eroding, regularly it seems to me, classical American values that are so critical to our success,” Sessions replied.
Like Raspail, Bannon has reveled in the past victories of Christendom over Islamic forces.
“If you look back at the long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam, I believe that our forefathers kept their stance, and I think they did the right thing,” he said in a 2014 speech broadcast to a conference at the Vatican. “I think they kept it out of the world, whether it was at Vienna [the Battle of Vienna in 1683], or Tours [the Battle of Tours in 732], or other places. … They were able to stave this off, and they were able to defeat it, and they were able to bequeath to us a church and a civilization that really is the flower of mankind.”
Now Bannon sits at the right hand of the U.S. president, working to beat back what Bannon calls “this Muslim invasion.” And Trump is all in on the project. During the campaign, he called for a ban on all Muslims entering the country. His Jan. 28 executive order, since blocked in the courts, turned this campaign idea into executive policy.
Trump has continued to defend the executive order as a life-or-death national security issue. “We cannot allow a beachhead of terrorism to form inside America,” he said in his first speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday.
Five days earlier, Trump had called his immigration enforcement efforts a “military operation.”
Although Department of Homeland Security officials walked back that statement, the president’s conflation of immigration with warfare did not go unnoticed.
“They see this as a war,” Chavez said.
Chavez, who supports some of Trump’s economic policy proposals, called the direction the White House is taking on immigration and race “extremely dangerous.” She said Trump’s immigration moves are “a kind of purging of America of anything but our Northern European roots.” Bannon, she added, “wants to make America white again.”
Thursday, March 02, 2017
A Trumpian Malignant Mendacious MESS -- Checkmate
The Trump Papers are WORSE -- MUCH worse -- than Watergate. There is no comparison. What idot runs for the presidency with as much financial baggage and potential nefarious activity as a Donald J. Trump? It is why he is so bad at everything he touches. He is a DOPE. Everyone let's him get away with everything -- his wives, his children, the woman he allegedly raped who signed the court dismissal with a confidentiality clause. I am wondering for how much. How about all those Gloria Allred women he is alleged to have abused? How about his friend Epstein who spent years in jail for sex with young girls. Trump said Epstein was a lotta fun and that he stayed at his place. Oh I bet Epstein was a lotta fun -- the rumors swirled. Why were they not chased down? This man wanted to occupy a holy place after all. Only Billy Bush paid for the Access Hollywood tape that was not Billy's fault. Billy should have kept his job and Trump should have been FIRED!
The monstrosity Trump is living at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. on taxpayer dime because some people had their brains tied to their posterior. Why the American electorate who voted for him could be that stupid I will never know. Why was all that was sleazy about this nasty dude dropped? What about all ALL his business conflicts all over the world that just went away into thin air? What about the post office near the White House turned into a Trump hotel where he is still making illegal money. Why when he went to Cuba illegally was that was dropped. He has his baby chicks control his business assets as if they will not say a peep to him. It's ALL unethical if not illegal as the money he allegedly laundered for Russian oligarchs is in the mix. It's ALL coming out. He and his corrupt, evil, sickening minions are going down as he is in DEEP trouble. It is simply NOT too bright to alienate the CIA, Department of Defense, the National Security Agency not to mention the press. It's not smart to alienate the deep state by overturning decades of balance of power politics to deep kiss Putin's ugly mug. This will NOT be let go no matter how much he whines or that he is president of the United States. He is in TOO deep now and big surprise, Donald, this is NOT a corporation (although it sometimes acts like one) and you are not a king!
The question is knowing what he must know about himself so he would not release his tax returns why would he attempt the presidency where the spotlight is on a candidate constantly and will be on him with a 24/7 magnifying glass if he gets the job. Read David K. Johnston who studied Trump for 30 years and knows so much about him and it's not pretty. His book "The Making of Trump" is excellent. All one had to do is read it to know a vote for Trump is a vote for a mephistophelean monster. According to Johnston yesterday Trump has been doing business with the Russians for 30 years!
Republican legislators care about the 1% and their own bank accounts. They care nothing for most everyone else. Why would anyone white, brown, black, yellow, blue collar, white collar, man or woman ever vote for this Cretan when they figured out his CON and that Mitt Romney was right? He put a score of billionaires in his cabinet -- that should say it all not to mention the racists in his administration occupying a seat of political blasphemy in the people's house. The White House today should be painted with the word SHAME AND SHAME ON ANY WHO VOTED FOR THIS MALIGNANT MENDACIOUS MESS. CHECKMATE!
The monstrosity Trump is living at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. on taxpayer dime because some people had their brains tied to their posterior. Why the American electorate who voted for him could be that stupid I will never know. Why was all that was sleazy about this nasty dude dropped? What about all ALL his business conflicts all over the world that just went away into thin air? What about the post office near the White House turned into a Trump hotel where he is still making illegal money. Why when he went to Cuba illegally was that was dropped. He has his baby chicks control his business assets as if they will not say a peep to him. It's ALL unethical if not illegal as the money he allegedly laundered for Russian oligarchs is in the mix. It's ALL coming out. He and his corrupt, evil, sickening minions are going down as he is in DEEP trouble. It is simply NOT too bright to alienate the CIA, Department of Defense, the National Security Agency not to mention the press. It's not smart to alienate the deep state by overturning decades of balance of power politics to deep kiss Putin's ugly mug. This will NOT be let go no matter how much he whines or that he is president of the United States. He is in TOO deep now and big surprise, Donald, this is NOT a corporation (although it sometimes acts like one) and you are not a king!
The question is knowing what he must know about himself so he would not release his tax returns why would he attempt the presidency where the spotlight is on a candidate constantly and will be on him with a 24/7 magnifying glass if he gets the job. Read David K. Johnston who studied Trump for 30 years and knows so much about him and it's not pretty. His book "The Making of Trump" is excellent. All one had to do is read it to know a vote for Trump is a vote for a mephistophelean monster. According to Johnston yesterday Trump has been doing business with the Russians for 30 years!
Republican legislators care about the 1% and their own bank accounts. They care nothing for most everyone else. Why would anyone white, brown, black, yellow, blue collar, white collar, man or woman ever vote for this Cretan when they figured out his CON and that Mitt Romney was right? He put a score of billionaires in his cabinet -- that should say it all not to mention the racists in his administration occupying a seat of political blasphemy in the people's house. The White House today should be painted with the word SHAME AND SHAME ON ANY WHO VOTED FOR THIS MALIGNANT MENDACIOUS MESS. CHECKMATE!
Humpty Dumpty -- the Folly of the Bull Market
In the midst of our political Trumpian chaos do not take as a tranquilizer or be fooled by the skyrocketing Wall Street market. Non-existent regulations led to the 1929 Great Depression. Those New Deal regulations that were supposed to ensure the Depression never happen again were repealed and ultimately led to the credit rating mortgage security monsoon. The Great Recession of 2007 was born. Too-Big-to-Fail Banks were given the much loathed bailouts and Obama's Dodd-Frank regulation was passed. Recent Republican and Trumpian removal of those regulations yet again is music to Wall Street's ears. Trump is talking trillion buck infrastructure and tax cuts for the rich. What's for Wall Street and the 1% not to like? Answer: Nothing. What's for us, the plebeians, not to like? Answer: EVERYTHING. You who voted for the ignoramus Trump or were duped by his "charisma" will feel the ultimate crush when Wall Street comes tumbling down and there is no will to bail banks out again. Can you spell Depression both economic and emotional?
Trump and his tax plan stupidity with his planned infrastructure spending will produce HUMONGOUS national deficits. How much of a ready-to-burst-bubble do you think is there waiting for the right time to explode? A Wall Street gone wild with no oversight will ensure a bust will happen again. Deregulation is poison for the middle class and their 401K's. It is exactly why Social Security/Medicare is so necessary. Ayan Randian unrestrained capitalism gone wild is hazardous to our health and has been proven to be so throughout our nation's history. Even decades long Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan the philosophical devotee of Ayn Rand, admitted he got it wrong when the economy was on the brink of collapse in 2007! Americans with their notoriously bad memory forget. The bull market is great for the 1% but temporary for the rest of us. An unregulated market WILL burst just like it has in so many eras before when Wall Street regulations are relaxed or non-existent. When the market goes wild and unrestrained it ensures an ultimate panic as it goes down. The plummeting millions of dollars will ensure millions of depositors will try in futility to take their money out of failing banks. It will not be such a George Bailey wonderful life!
Children do not know how to stop playing with things that could kill them. An anarchy of greed rules this nation and it is NOT good no matter how much Gordon Gekko of "Wall Street" fame says it is. Like Humpty Dumpty Wall Street WILL come crashing down yet again but no one will have the will this time to put Humpty Dumpty together again. All one has to do is just wait!
Trump and his tax plan stupidity with his planned infrastructure spending will produce HUMONGOUS national deficits. How much of a ready-to-burst-bubble do you think is there waiting for the right time to explode? A Wall Street gone wild with no oversight will ensure a bust will happen again. Deregulation is poison for the middle class and their 401K's. It is exactly why Social Security/Medicare is so necessary. Ayan Randian unrestrained capitalism gone wild is hazardous to our health and has been proven to be so throughout our nation's history. Even decades long Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan the philosophical devotee of Ayn Rand, admitted he got it wrong when the economy was on the brink of collapse in 2007! Americans with their notoriously bad memory forget. The bull market is great for the 1% but temporary for the rest of us. An unregulated market WILL burst just like it has in so many eras before when Wall Street regulations are relaxed or non-existent. When the market goes wild and unrestrained it ensures an ultimate panic as it goes down. The plummeting millions of dollars will ensure millions of depositors will try in futility to take their money out of failing banks. It will not be such a George Bailey wonderful life!
Children do not know how to stop playing with things that could kill them. An anarchy of greed rules this nation and it is NOT good no matter how much Gordon Gekko of "Wall Street" fame says it is. Like Humpty Dumpty Wall Street WILL come crashing down yet again but no one will have the will this time to put Humpty Dumpty together again. All one has to do is just wait!
Sunday, February 26, 2017
HOPE
Hope!!! YES,
THIS IS BIG HOPE. THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS FILLED WITH HISPANICS,
PERSONS OF COLOR, LGBT, THE DISABLED AND MANY MORE. MOREOVER. PEREZ PUT
KEITH ELLISON IN AS DEPUTY CHAIR....HE IS MUSLIM. WE ARE GOING TO
UNITE ALL MINORITIES AND NEVER TAKE OUR EYE
OFF THE BALL AGAIN. WE WILL NEVER FORGET WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DO NOT
PAY ATTENTION AND DO NOT VOTE. WHEN HISPANICS, PERSONS OF COLOR, MUSLIMS, THE
ELDERLY AND THE DISABLED VOTE WE WILL NOT BE STOPPED. THIS IS A GOOD
DAY AND MY SUN IS SHINING THROUGH THE CLOUDS!!!!
The former labor secretary was backed by top Obama administration figures.
huffingtonpost.com|By Zach Carter
https://www.washingtonpost.
MORE HOPE!
Dems Win Special Election, Hold on to Delaware State Senate
Democrats now have control of the Delaware state Senate!!!!
By Associated Press and David Chang
https://www.washingtonpost.
RESIST in Our Time -- Important please read
My Comment: The post below entitled, "Dark Venting," by Leanne Coffman which speaks of the similarity between Trump and the Holocaust. I think it correct. I would, though, point to our huge organization and resistance all over the nation and the world against this Trumpian madness that has infected our country. All that Ms. Coffman says may be true. We MUST, nonetheless, not give up and try to oppose Trump. Many more are on our side and we should not lose sight of that fact.
I am a Jew and the storm cloud of the Holocaust hovers over me BUT Jews of the Holocaust went to their deaths, for the most part, like lambs to the slaughter. Except for the Warsaw Ghetto there were few who resisted. I ask always why? If one is surely going to one's death what is lost by fighting and trying to defend ourselves? Answer: Nothing and so we must do so in our time and RESIST by any legal means necessary!
This essay was shared by, Tom Degan, a Facebook friend. His political ally, Leanne Coffman, A Jewish woman, wrote it and sent it to him. It is called "Dark Venting." I urge you to take the time to read it and think on my Comment above.
Dark Venting by Leanne Coffman
A Jewish friend wisely pointed out to me that I/we should not be too cavalier in making comparisons with the Hitler era to that of Trump now. This week, another friend, who is a German citizen, and I had a conversation about the type of government and societal conditions that existed during the 1920-1940s. Both were correct in that we are not seeing a mass extermination of a race and/or religion of people so we should not equate anything of the Holocaust to present events because that would be quite insensitive.
However, I still find the dictators of that era and the white nationalists who follow Trump similar. I am concerned and for these reasons:
1) Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler, were keen on blaming liberals, immigrants and minorities for societal ills.
2) They despised any in the press that were honest or against them and prevented them from freely speaking.
3) The charismatic, narcissistic leader, Trump, whose speech is populist bombastic adds to that image. Mussolini said, “Italy wants peace and quiet, work and calm. I will give these things with love if possible and with force if necessary.” Trump essentially paraphrases that. A dictator wants to rule and does so if need be by force. I place Trump in the role of dictator-wanna-be, not because he seems to actually be smart enough to figure out its complexities but because his narcissism seeks to be fed and he has surrounded himself with people from a right wing extremist group, who are about white nationalism that rules by force and lies, but not through diplomatic compromise.
4) The callousness of a significant percent of our electorate is hideous. I see a lot here in the rust belt where care for society is met with hatred, disgust and sometimes threats by Trumpian followers.
5) Additionally -- knowing that a person such as Bannon is at the right hand of Trump, along with others who share similar ugly views, is not comforting to me. Bannon has been quoted as saying that he comes to "destroy" aspects of our government and I truly believe he means it. His brand of racism and hatred have no business shaping our policies or whispering in the US President's ear.
This cannot end well. I honestly do believe that martial law is not far behind. In fact, I could imagine that martial law and/or extreme civil unrest is only months away.
I can also imagine people being destroyed for speaking the truth, either professionally or personally, through threats or real actions by this government and/or the groups who align with Trump.
Fear of reprisal will most certainly be a tool used by this administration if this continues.
There will never be a period in time that compares to the horrors of the Holocaust but I do believe millions will be harmed here and around the world by this presidency, from loss of healthcare (which will impact the poor and fragile the most) to environmental harm that will impact the planet. Our people will lose their rights and their freedoms. Potential wars and civil unrest will become the norm.
We will never recover from this in our lifetimes because, I believe, it takes longer to rebuild than to destroy.
Our global reputation has been damaged. Even if we elect someone else in four years that is markedly different, the world knows there is a significant percentage of Americans who align with at least some of Trump's policies. Racism in our country will not diminish in four years and we have shown its ugliness to the world.
The environmental losses from climate change and the healthcare onslaught will cost at least some Americans the quality of their lives and could result in their untimely deaths. The refugees we could be saving will perish due to our callousness and immigrants' lives will be destroyed by the Trumpian roundup crackpot insanity. Those things are realities from which we may not recover. No new election will bring back those lives.
The America I loved is not dead, but her pulse is weak. I will fight for her life as I have means to do so but I'm well aware that neither I nor anyone reading this may see a full recovery in our time.
I am a Jew and the storm cloud of the Holocaust hovers over me BUT Jews of the Holocaust went to their deaths, for the most part, like lambs to the slaughter. Except for the Warsaw Ghetto there were few who resisted. I ask always why? If one is surely going to one's death what is lost by fighting and trying to defend ourselves? Answer: Nothing and so we must do so in our time and RESIST by any legal means necessary!
This essay was shared by, Tom Degan, a Facebook friend. His political ally, Leanne Coffman, A Jewish woman, wrote it and sent it to him. It is called "Dark Venting." I urge you to take the time to read it and think on my Comment above.
Dark Venting by Leanne Coffman
A Jewish friend wisely pointed out to me that I/we should not be too cavalier in making comparisons with the Hitler era to that of Trump now. This week, another friend, who is a German citizen, and I had a conversation about the type of government and societal conditions that existed during the 1920-1940s. Both were correct in that we are not seeing a mass extermination of a race and/or religion of people so we should not equate anything of the Holocaust to present events because that would be quite insensitive.
However, I still find the dictators of that era and the white nationalists who follow Trump similar. I am concerned and for these reasons:
1) Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler, were keen on blaming liberals, immigrants and minorities for societal ills.
2) They despised any in the press that were honest or against them and prevented them from freely speaking.
3) The charismatic, narcissistic leader, Trump, whose speech is populist bombastic adds to that image. Mussolini said, “Italy wants peace and quiet, work and calm. I will give these things with love if possible and with force if necessary.” Trump essentially paraphrases that. A dictator wants to rule and does so if need be by force. I place Trump in the role of dictator-wanna-be, not because he seems to actually be smart enough to figure out its complexities but because his narcissism seeks to be fed and he has surrounded himself with people from a right wing extremist group, who are about white nationalism that rules by force and lies, but not through diplomatic compromise.
4) The callousness of a significant percent of our electorate is hideous. I see a lot here in the rust belt where care for society is met with hatred, disgust and sometimes threats by Trumpian followers.
5) Additionally -- knowing that a person such as Bannon is at the right hand of Trump, along with others who share similar ugly views, is not comforting to me. Bannon has been quoted as saying that he comes to "destroy" aspects of our government and I truly believe he means it. His brand of racism and hatred have no business shaping our policies or whispering in the US President's ear.
This cannot end well. I honestly do believe that martial law is not far behind. In fact, I could imagine that martial law and/or extreme civil unrest is only months away.
I can also imagine people being destroyed for speaking the truth, either professionally or personally, through threats or real actions by this government and/or the groups who align with Trump.
Fear of reprisal will most certainly be a tool used by this administration if this continues.
There will never be a period in time that compares to the horrors of the Holocaust but I do believe millions will be harmed here and around the world by this presidency, from loss of healthcare (which will impact the poor and fragile the most) to environmental harm that will impact the planet. Our people will lose their rights and their freedoms. Potential wars and civil unrest will become the norm.
We will never recover from this in our lifetimes because, I believe, it takes longer to rebuild than to destroy.
Our global reputation has been damaged. Even if we elect someone else in four years that is markedly different, the world knows there is a significant percentage of Americans who align with at least some of Trump's policies. Racism in our country will not diminish in four years and we have shown its ugliness to the world.
The environmental losses from climate change and the healthcare onslaught will cost at least some Americans the quality of their lives and could result in their untimely deaths. The refugees we could be saving will perish due to our callousness and immigrants' lives will be destroyed by the Trumpian roundup crackpot insanity. Those things are realities from which we may not recover. No new election will bring back those lives.
The America I loved is not dead, but her pulse is weak. I will fight for her life as I have means to do so but I'm well aware that neither I nor anyone reading this may see a full recovery in our time.
Wednesday, February 22, 2017
The Beat Goes On -- Anti-semitism in my time
Anti-Semitic acts are not new to me. Throughout my life I have experienced them often. I add to the veracity of those who encounter this hate and are voicing their hurt and anger today. I empathize with other minorities who are now suffering from the bastardization of an allegedly democratic Trump presidency. It is no coincidence that hate crimes across the nation are significantly higher. Our complaints about Anti-Semitism are real as it simmers under mankind's historical surface rearing its ugliness, in our time, when social, cultural and historical events dictate. We are able to even wax predictive of its emergence.
I remember well the experiences of this, the longest hatred, throughout my life. Sometimes I fought back and other times I did not want to get into an emotionally-charged blood-pressuring raising event. Now, I would not hesitate to defend myself and my people, the DNA of whom I share.
Some examples:
When we first moved into our home I played with children in my neighborhood. At the age of about 8 one girl with whom I was playing told me Jews were Christ killers. I stood incredulous, did not know what she meant nor how to defend myself against an attack which I had never heard but knew then I was innocent. It was explained to her by another older girl in the neighborhood that the Jews did not kill Christ and that the Romans did. That, what should have been an unnecessary explanation mantra, would be repeated by me again like a nursery rhyme with a bad ending I had learned. At eight years old I had to begin thinking about a 2000 year-old hatred that the mind of a child could not comprehend.
Another girl in third grade told me the same thing. Equipped with my new retort, that the Romans did it, we verbally sparred. The teacher refereed the dispute but was not, I thought, as vociferously against the girl who levied the accusation. It was, after all, the 1950's when we did not talk about such things. This is an era in which Trump and his minions would like to return to "make America great again.” One will pardon me if I think it was not so great then.
A new German girl enrolled in my elementary school. We sat together in the lunchroom. When she saw my Jewish star I wore around my neck, she picked it up off my chest, scowled angrily and threw it back down. I sat silently.
In my workplace some women were discussing what they bought and one said that she "Jewed" a guy down to get the best price reflecting the stereotype of Jews and money. It felt as if she shot an arrow into the bulls eye of my heart but I said nothing.
The worst though, by far, was a verbal exchange with an older woman with whom I worked as we discussed the 1978 television mini-series "Holocaust." She said and I quote "Well that's what you get for killing one of your own." She meant, of course, the killing of Christ, who was after all, a Jew, was justification for the Holocaust. I will never forget that.
One hears those things repeated by anti-Semites today. After 2000 years the mantra of the responsibility for deicide STILL haunts the Jew. I believe that accusation above any other explains the etiology of anti-Semitism's spread even in our time and has been justification for all the other stereotypes with which Jews have been tainted throughout centuries. As Jews dispersed from the Middle East 2000 years ago the specter of hate for the Jew morphed into the culture within the area Jews immigrated and was subject to the trajectory of its history.
Jews never do well when the government in which they live is extremist Fascist right nor do they prosper in a nation that is extremist Communist left. Jews do much better, as I aver most others do, in civil libertarian democracies where religion is separate from the state. The truth of this should register in the Jewish mind.
When I was a youth a country club near me was off limits to Jews. Today it is not but the social sickness of anti-Semitism is, like a polio virus, still around. If one does not inoculate oneself from its infection the consequential horror of it will, one can be sure, result. To stay silent today is not an option and there are 6 million reasons why it should never be. The beat of anti-Semitism goes on even reaching the halls of power in the radical so called "Alt Rightnativism of Trump's base stretching even into the White House itself. Why am I am NOT surprised that the beat goes on and that it never seems to stop?
Anti-Semitism is, indeed, the longest hatred stretching over continents. When will it ever end?
I remember well the experiences of this, the longest hatred, throughout my life. Sometimes I fought back and other times I did not want to get into an emotionally-charged blood-pressuring raising event. Now, I would not hesitate to defend myself and my people, the DNA of whom I share.
Some examples:
When we first moved into our home I played with children in my neighborhood. At the age of about 8 one girl with whom I was playing told me Jews were Christ killers. I stood incredulous, did not know what she meant nor how to defend myself against an attack which I had never heard but knew then I was innocent. It was explained to her by another older girl in the neighborhood that the Jews did not kill Christ and that the Romans did. That, what should have been an unnecessary explanation mantra, would be repeated by me again like a nursery rhyme with a bad ending I had learned. At eight years old I had to begin thinking about a 2000 year-old hatred that the mind of a child could not comprehend.
Another girl in third grade told me the same thing. Equipped with my new retort, that the Romans did it, we verbally sparred. The teacher refereed the dispute but was not, I thought, as vociferously against the girl who levied the accusation. It was, after all, the 1950's when we did not talk about such things. This is an era in which Trump and his minions would like to return to "make America great again.” One will pardon me if I think it was not so great then.
A new German girl enrolled in my elementary school. We sat together in the lunchroom. When she saw my Jewish star I wore around my neck, she picked it up off my chest, scowled angrily and threw it back down. I sat silently.
In my workplace some women were discussing what they bought and one said that she "Jewed" a guy down to get the best price reflecting the stereotype of Jews and money. It felt as if she shot an arrow into the bulls eye of my heart but I said nothing.
The worst though, by far, was a verbal exchange with an older woman with whom I worked as we discussed the 1978 television mini-series "Holocaust." She said and I quote "Well that's what you get for killing one of your own." She meant, of course, the killing of Christ, who was after all, a Jew, was justification for the Holocaust. I will never forget that.
One hears those things repeated by anti-Semites today. After 2000 years the mantra of the responsibility for deicide STILL haunts the Jew. I believe that accusation above any other explains the etiology of anti-Semitism's spread even in our time and has been justification for all the other stereotypes with which Jews have been tainted throughout centuries. As Jews dispersed from the Middle East 2000 years ago the specter of hate for the Jew morphed into the culture within the area Jews immigrated and was subject to the trajectory of its history.
Jews never do well when the government in which they live is extremist Fascist right nor do they prosper in a nation that is extremist Communist left. Jews do much better, as I aver most others do, in civil libertarian democracies where religion is separate from the state. The truth of this should register in the Jewish mind.
When I was a youth a country club near me was off limits to Jews. Today it is not but the social sickness of anti-Semitism is, like a polio virus, still around. If one does not inoculate oneself from its infection the consequential horror of it will, one can be sure, result. To stay silent today is not an option and there are 6 million reasons why it should never be. The beat of anti-Semitism goes on even reaching the halls of power in the radical so called "Alt Rightnativism of Trump's base stretching even into the White House itself. Why am I am NOT surprised that the beat goes on and that it never seems to stop?
Anti-Semitism is, indeed, the longest hatred stretching over continents. When will it ever end?
Tuesday, February 21, 2017
More Bomb Threats Close Jewish Community Centers Across The Nation
My comment: There are no words!! Trump has unleashed the wind and I HOPE will reap the whirlwind! Hosea 8:7 "For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind."
America, this is whom you put into office -- a right wingnut fruitcake. Trump can declare all he wants that he loves the Jews -- that is NOT what the politicos with whom he surrounds himself say. Bannon is an antisemite you can READ what he says and he has the president's ear. DO NOT BE FOOLED BY THIS PILLAR OF MENDACITY LIES. HE IS AS RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL THE ANTISEMITIC ACTS AS IF HE DID THEM HIMSELF BECAUSE HE DID THROUGH HIS VIOLENT SPEECH AND THROUGH THOSE TO WHOM HE ENTRUSTS POWER. HE IS A BIG TIME ANTISEMITE AND I DO NOT CARE THAT HIS DAUGHTER CONVERTED AND HIS SON IN LAW IS JEWISH BECAUSE DONALD J. TRUMP DOES NOT CARE. HE CARES ABOUT HIMSELF AND WOULD SELL HIS MOTHER'S EYEBALLS FOR CASH! THAT IS HIS BIG CON. AMERICA, YOU'VE BEEN HAD!
“I’ve never seen a string of attacks like this that are targeting the same kind of institution in the same kind of way. This is new.”
By Matt Ferner
Jewish Community Centers were shaken by another wave of bomb threats, forcing evacuations in 10 states Monday.
Eleven Jewish Community Centers received threatening calls Monday, said Marla Cohen, communications manager for JCCA, the Jewish Community Center Association.
Incidents were reported at Jewish Community Centers in St. Paul, Minnesota; Buffalo and Amherst, New York; Birmingham, Alabama; Houston; Cleveland, Ohio; Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin; Nashville; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Tampa, Florida; and Chicago.
Law enforcement officials were investigating the threats and, as of late Monday, centers were being reopened after explosive devices were not found.
For some of these organizations, it was not the first threat made in recent weeks. There have now been at least 67 incidents at 56 Jewish Community Centers in 27 states and one Canadian province since the start of 2017, Cohen told The Huffington Post.
Monday’s incidents are part a sharp rise in threats made against JCCs around the nation since Donald Trump began his presidential campaign, which was frequently criticized for winking at white nationalists and not forcefully condemning hate speech and extremism.
The far-right has become emboldened under Trump, and while the number of Americans who directly support hardened hate groups remains far lower than in earlier decades, the number of hate groups in America is rising, according to a recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate and extremism around the nation.
Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project at SPLC, said that this series of bomb threats since the new year is “unprecedented.”
“I’ve been working at SPLC since 1999. I’ve never seen a string of attacks like this that are targeting the same kind of institution in the same kind of way. This is new,” Beirich said.
She added that it remains unclear who is making these threats, if it’s one person or more, but it has rattled communities around the U.S.
“This threatens an entire community. It’s very scary,” Beirich said. “You’re terrorizing whole families and children. There are usually day care centers that serve an entire population in the area. These threats can make it impossible for those communities to function normally.”
Anti-Semitic hate crimes comprise the largest portion of religiously motivated attacks in the United States. But Trump has yet to address the issue. In news conferences last week, the president had multiple opportunities to address concerns over rising anti-Semitism, but each time he either downplayed or denied the rise. When a Jewish reporter asked Trump explicitly about the recent spike in bomb threats against JCCs, Trump cut him off, told him to sit down and told the reporter his question wasn’t fair and claimed to be the “least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life.”
Deputy White House Press Secretary Lindsay Walters didn’t specifically address anti-Semitism, but did say in response to the latest bomb threats Monday, “Hatred and hate-motivated violence of any kind have no place in a country founded on the promise of individual freedom,” adding Trump has “made it abundantly clear that these actions are unacceptable.”
The Anti-Defamation League said it was “deeply disturbed” by the latest wave of bomb threats this week and issued bomb threat guidance for all Jewish institutions.
“We are confident that JCCs around the country are taking the necessary security protections, and that law enforcement officials are making their investigation of these threats a high priority,” said ADL Chief Executive Jonathan A. Greenblatt in a statement.
The FBI and Department of Justice have said they are “investigating possible civil rights violations in connection with the threats” to JCCs.
UPDATE: This story has been updated with the fact that a JCC in Cleveland was also threatened Monday.
Monday, February 20, 2017
Russian Roulette??? Russian Ambassador To UN Dies Suddenly In New York
What's with the UN ambassador for Russia dying "suddenly a day before his birthday and why have I heard no condolences from Putin? Just askin!
Vitaly Churkin would have turned 65 tomorrow
Andrew Kelly / Reuters
MOSCOW, Feb 20 (Reuters) - Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, died suddenly at work in New York on Monday, the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
The ministry gave no details on the circumstances of his death but offered condolences to his relatives and said the diplomat had died one day before his 65th birthday.
“The outstanding Russian diplomat passed away at his work post,” it said.
Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for the U.N. secretary-general’s office, said: “He has been such a regular presence here that I am actually quite stunned. Our thoughts go to his family, to his friends and to his government.”
Churkin was a pugnacious defender of Russian policy, notably its intensive bombing of the Syrian city of Aleppo last year to crush rebels opposed to President Bashar al-Assad.
When then-U.S. envoy to the U.N. Samantha Power accused Syria, Russia and Iran last year of bearing responsibility for atrocities there, Churkin said she was acting like Mother Teresa and forgetting her own country’s track record in the Middle East.
Sunday, February 19, 2017
The Lady Plumber -- Scroll down it all to know what one person can do and endure
THE LADY PLUMBER
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You wonder what criteria is used to select people for the 'nobel' peace prize.
.
Remember this lady?
WHAT A WOMAN
Irena Sender
Irena
Sendlerowa
Died: May 12, 2008 (aged 98)
Warsaw ,
Poland
>
During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the
Warsaw ghetto,
as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an ulterior motive..
Irena smuggled Jewish infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried.
She also carried a burlap sack in the back of her truck, for larger kids.
Irena kept a dog in the back that she trained to bark
when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto.
The soldiers, of course, wanted nothing to do with the dog
and the barking covered the kids/infants noises.
During her time of doing this, she managed to
smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants.
Ultimately, she was caught, and the Nazis
broke both of her legs and arms and beat her severely.
Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she had smuggled
out in a
glass jar that she buried under a tree in her back yard.
After the war, she tried to locate any parents that
may have survived
and tried to reunite the family.
Most had been gassed.
Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted.
In 2007 Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize.
She was not selected.
In 1965, Sendler was recognized by
Yad Vashem in Israel as one of the
Polish Righteous among the Nations[30][31] and a tree was planted in her honor
at the entrance to
the Avenue of the Righteous.[32] However, there was no further public recognition of her wartime resistance and humanitarian work until after the
end of communist rule in Poland. The story was suppressed by the Communist Government.
In 1991, Sendler was made an honorary citizen of Israel.[33] On
12 June 1996, she was awarded the Commander's Cross of the
Order of Polonia Restituta.[34][35] She received a higher version of this award, the Commander's Cross
with Star, on 7 November 2001.[36]
Nevertheless, Irena Sendler's achievements remained largely unknown to the world until 1999, when students at a high school in
Uniontown, Kansas, along with their teacher Norman Conard, produced a play based on their research into her life story, which they called
Life in a Jar. It was a surprising success, staged over 200 times in the US and abroad, and significantly contributed
to publicising Sendler's history worldwide.[37]
In March 2002, B’nai Jehudah Temple of Kansas City presented Sendler,
Conard and the students who produced the play with its annual
award “for contributions made to saving the world” (Tikkun Olam Award).[38] The play was adapted for
television as The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler (2009), directed by
John Kent Harrison, in which Sendler was portrayed by actress
Anna Paquin.[39][40][41]
In 2003,
Pope John Paul II sent Sendler a personal letter praising her wartime efforts.[42][43]
On 10 November 2003, she received the
Order of the White Eagle, Poland's highest civilian decoration,[44] and the Polish-American award, the
Jan Karski Award "For Courage and Heart", given by the
American Center of Polish Culture in
Washington, D.C.[45]
In 2006, Polish NGOs
Centrum Edukacji Obywatelskiej and Stowarzyszenie Dzieci Holocaustu, the
Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Life in a Jar Foundation established the "Irena Sendler's Award: For Repairing the World" (pl:Nagroda
imienia Ireny Sendlerowej „Za naprawianie świata”), awarded to Polish and American teachers.[46][47]
The Life in a Jar Foundation is a foundation dedicated to promoting the attitude and message of Irena Sendler.[47]
In 2007, she was nominated for the
Nobel Peace Prize.[48][30][49][50]
On 14 March 2007, Sendler was honoured by the
Polish Senate,[51] and a year later, on 30 July, by the American Congress.[52] On 11 April
2007, she received the
Order of the Smile; at that time she was the oldest recipient of the award.[53] In 2007 she became an honorary citizen of the cities of
Warsaw and
Tarczyn.[citation needed]
On the occasion of
the Order of the Smile, award she mentioned that the award from children
is among her favorite ones, along with the Righteous among
the Nations award and the letter from the Pope.[54]
.
It is now more than 65 years since the Second World War in Europe ended.
This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, In memory of the six million Jews, 10 million
Ukrainians, 6 million Russians, 1 million Byelorusyns, 1 million Baltics, 10 million Christians and 1,900 Catholic priests who
were murdered, massacred.
Now, more than ever, with
Iran and others claiming the HOLOCAUST to be 'a myth', it's imperative
to make sure the world never forgets, because there are others who would like to do it again.
This e-mail is intended to reach 40 million people worldwide!
Join us and be a link in the memorial chain and help us distribute it around the world.
Please send this e-mail to people you know and ask them to continue the memorial chain.
Please don't just delete it.
It will only take you a minute to pass this along.
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