It’s pretty frustrating for most Republicans

Dec 1st, 2017 4:21 pm | By

Oh really. Is that what happens.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Thursday said he is fed up with the media’s portrayal of President Donald Trump. “What concerns me about the American press is this endless, endless attempt to label the guy as some kind of kook not fit to be president,” Graham told CNN. “It’s pretty frustrating for most Republicans, quite frankly, that it’s 24/7 attack on everything the president does or thinks. It gets a little old after a while.”

Yeah, it does! Damn right it does. It gets old being shamed and degraded hour after hour by this appalling evil toxic malevolent zero of a man.

It’s pretty frustrating for all decent people seeing a bad-in-every-way psychopath usurping the presidency and destroying everything he can reach.

He’s not fit to be president. He could hardly be less fit unless he drive iron spikes straight into his brain.

This is very different from the stance Graham took in early 2016, when Trump was running for president in the Republican primary. Back then, Graham, who supported Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign at the time and had previously run in the primary himself, called Trump a “kook” and “crazy” in an interview with Fox News. He said his party had gone “batshit crazy” because it was backing Trump. He also tweeted that Trump is “not fit to be President of the United States.”

But now he’s fallen into line because TAX CUTS…and he has the gall to pretend to think the rest of us should too.

He must be batshit crazy.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 3 comments
Tags:


No ideology but efficiency

Dec 1st, 2017 12:07 pm | By

Dexter Filkins at the New Yorker looks at Tillerson’s demolition of the State Department.

In only ten months, Tillerson, the former C.E.O. of ExxonMobil, has presided over the near-dismantling of America’s diplomatic corps, chasing out hundreds of State Department employees and scaling back the country’s engagement with the world. Most alarming has been the departure of dozens of the foreign service’s most senior officials—men and women who had spent their careers living and working abroad, who speak several languages, and who are experts in their fields. As I detailed in my recent Profile of Tillerson, he came into the job proposing to cut the State Department’s budget by a third, with plans to eliminate more than a thousand jobs and dramatically scale back the already measly sums America spends on refugees, democracy promotion, women’s rights, and the prevention of H.I.V. At the same time, the Trump Administration was proposing to dramatically increase spending on defense—by fifty-eight billion dollars, an amount that is larger than the State Department’s entire budget.

It’s what stupid people would do, I suppose – miss the point of diplomacy altogether, and go all out for the loud bangs.

Tillerson’s vision was of a vastly diminished role for America in the world, and a more militarized one.

As far as I could gather, Tillerson doesn’t have much of an ideology, apart from efficiency. As the C.E.O. of Exxon, Tillerson showed himself willing to make deals with any regime or any dictator, no matter how noxious the human-rights record or how corrupt, in order to secure more oil. He shared caviar with Vladimir Putin in New York, lobbied to undo sanctions against Iran, and set up subsidiaries that did business with Syria, Iran, and Sudan, whose regimes were all under American sanctions. When asked about these decisions, Tillerson did not seem much troubled by doing deals that were wildly at odds with his country’s foreign policy; Exxon, which operates in nearly as many countries as the State Department, was too important for that. “I’m not here to represent the United States government’s interest,’’ he told an audience in Texas while still at Exxon. “I’m not here to defend it, nor here to criticize it. That’s not what I do. I’m a businessman.”

Neoliberalism in a nutshell. “I have no concern with anything but higher profits for my company. I am an empty suit.”

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 5 comments


Numbered days

Dec 1st, 2017 11:15 am | By

Jennifer Rubin must have written this at top speed, because there are words missing. It’s about how dire this could be for Donnie from Queens.

The Post reports, “Former national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty Friday to lying to the FBI. … Flynn’s admission … is an ominous sign for the White House, as court documents indicate Flynn is cooperating in the ongoing probe of possible coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to influence the 2016 election.” ABC News reports, “Michael Flynn promised ‘full cooperation to the Mueller team’ and is prepared to testify that as a candidate, Donald Trump ‘directed him to make contact with the Russians.’ ” That could be direct testimony implicating the president of campaign collusion.

Flynn’s plea marks a dangerous turn. Flynn was a White House adviser, not a campaign aide. Moreover, there is no passing him off an errand boy or bit player. “Trump developed a close rapport with Flynn on the campaign trail, where the general delivered fiery denunciations of Hillary Clinton, including leading a ‘lock her up’ chant at the Republican National Convention, and he gave Trump much-needed national security credentials,” The Post reports. “Flynn, however, had a mixed reputation among other Trump aides, who thought he gave the president questionable information and questioned some of his business dealings.”

Fiery denunciations, was it, when he himself is as crooked as ZZZZZZZ.

And, of most concern to Trump, Flynn could provide evidence relating to interference with the Russia probe, including Trump’s efforts to get then-FBI Director James B. Comey to lay off Flynn. The ABC News report, if accurate, suggests it is the latter, with fatal consequences for the Trump presidency.

Trump’s defenders will argue that this still does not touch on the underlying issue of collusion with Russia. That’s true but misses the point. If there was collusion, Flynn almost certainly would have known about it. He was both Trump’s closet foreign policy adviser and a pro-Russia operator who traveled to Russia to give a lavishly compensated speech and appeared on RT, Russia’s propaganda network, which he asserted was no different than any American news outlet. (RT has since be required to register as a foreign agent.) Trump can claim all he wants that the Russia investigation is a hoax, but if Flynn provides direct evidence implicating Trump, the president’s days in office are numbered.

Fingers crossed.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 8 comments
Tags:


It begins

Dec 1st, 2017 10:12 am | By

Here we go.

President Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, pleaded guilty on Friday to lying to the F.B.I. about conversations with the Russian ambassador last December during the presidential transition, bringing the special counsel’s investigation into the president’s inner circle.

Mr. Flynn, who appeared in federal court in Washington, acknowledged that he was cooperating with the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into Russian interference in the 2016 election. His plea agreement suggests that Mr. Flynn provided information to prosecutors, which may help advance the inquiry.

Benjamin Wittes will need a whole set of baby cannons for this boom.

Mr. Flynn pleaded guilty to making false statements to F.B.I. agents about two discussions with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey I. Kislyak. Lying to the F.B.I. carries a penalty of up to five years in prison.

In one of the conversations described in court documents, the men discussed an upcoming United Nations Security Council vote on whether to condemn Israel’s building of settlements. At the time, the Obama administration was preparing to allow a Security Council vote on the matter.

Jesus.

One: you wouldn’t forget that. If you were Flynn it wouldn’t just slip your mind that you had chatted with the Russian ambassador about a UN vote on Israel’s activities.

Two: the Trumpers weren’t in office yet. Obama was still president. Trumpists weren’t supposed to be meddling with policy in someone else’s administration.

But after accepting Mr. Flynn’s resignation, the president repeatedly said he thought Mr. Flynn was “a very good person” who had been treated poorly. The day after Mr. Flynn resigned, Mr. Trump told the F.B.I. director at the time, James B. Comey, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” according to a memo Mr. Comey wrote describing that meeting.

In a news conference on Feb. 15, two days after Mr. Flynn’s resignation, the president blamed the media.

“General Flynn is a wonderful man. I think he has been treated very, very unfairly by the media, as I call it, the fake media in many cases,” Mr. Trump said. “And I think it is really a sad thing that he was treated so badly.”

This is the guy who is supposed to be so concerned about national security that he absolutely has to retweet Britain First videos that blame random Muslims for everything.

Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Flynn was a brash, outspoken critic of former President Barack Obama, asserting that Shariah, or Islamic law, was spreading in the United States under his watch — a claim that was repeatedly debunked — and saying that the United States is in a “world war” with Islamist militants.

…

Investigators working for the special counsel have questioned witnesses about Mr. Flynn’s dealings with the Turkish government and whether he was secretly paid by Turkish officials during the campaign. After he left the White House, Mr. Flynn disclosed that the Turkish government had paid him more than $500,000 to represent its interests in a dispute with the United States.

Creeping Sharia! Turkey v the US!

Confused, isn’t he.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 2 comments
Tags:


Goodbye to economic sanity

Dec 1st, 2017 9:38 am | By

Stan Collender at Forbes:

If it’s enacted, the GOP tax cut now working its way through Congress will be the start of a decades-long economic policy disaster unlike any other that has occurred in American history.

There’s no economic justification whatsoever for a tax cut at this time. U.S. GDP is growing, unemployment is close to 4 percent (below what is commonly considered “full employment“), corporate profits are at record levels and stock markets are soaring. It makes no sense to add any federal government-induced stimulus to all this private sector-caused economic activity, let alone a tax cut as big as this one.

But they’re not doing it as stimulus, they’re doing it to make very rich people even richer.

This is actually the ideal time for Washington to be doing the opposite.  But by damning the economic torpedoes and moving full-speed ahead, House and Senate Republicans and the Trump White House are setting up the U.S. for the modern-day analog of the inflation-producing guns-and-butter economic policy of the Vietnam era. The GOP tax bill will increase the federal deficit by $2 trillion or more over the next decade (the official estimates of $1.5 trillion hide the real amount with a witches brew of gimmicks and outright lies) that, unless all the rules have changed, is virtually certain to result in inflation and much higher interest rates than would otherwise occur.

The GOP’s insanity is compounded by its moving ahead without having any idea of what this policy will actually do to the economy. The debates in the Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committees and on the House floor all took place before the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis and, if it really exists, the constantly-promised-but-never-seen report from the Treasury on the economics of this tax bill.

That’s because all they care about is getting something passed and making rich people richer. That’s it. It’s a party of psychopaths.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 6 comments


The nearby men’s room had a fireplace

Dec 1st, 2017 9:30 am | By

A few years ago Soraya Chemaly pointed out that very mundane bit of everyday sexism, the long line to get into the women’s restroom.

Faced with a long restroom line that spiraled up and around a circular stairwell at a recent museum visit, I opted not to wait. Why do we put up with this? This isn’t a minor pet peeve, but a serious question. Despite years of “potty parity” laws, women are still forced to stand in lines at malls, schools, stadiums, concerts, fair grounds, theme parks, and other crowded public spaces. This is frustrating, uncomfortable, and, in some circumstances, humiliating. It’s also a form of discrimination, as it disproportionately affects women.

After counting the women, I tweeted, “Dear @britishmuseum there are FIFTY women and girls standing in line for the loo while the men’s room has zero line #everydaysexism.” Immediately, people responded with the suggestion that women use the men’s room. But even more responses were defensive, along the lines of “How on god’s green earth did you arrive at the conclusion that this was sexist?”

Let me count the ways.

Women need to use bathrooms more often and for longer periods of time because: we sit to urinate (urinals effectively double the space in men’s rooms), we menstruate, we are responsible for reproducing the species (which makes us pee more), we continue to have greater responsibility for children (who have to use bathrooms with us), and we breastfeed (frequently in grotty bathroom stalls). Additionally, women tend to wear more binding and cumbersome clothes, whereas men’s clothing provides significantly speedier access. But in a classic example of the difference between surface “equality” and genuine equity, many public restrooms continue to be facilities that are equal in physical space, while favoring men’s bodies, experiences, and needs.

Everyday is every day – needing to pee while away from home does tend to occur several times every day for people who work, go to school, do sport, socialize, shop, visit theaters and libraries…the list is endless. New building design is starting to catch up but there are still quite a few old buildings around.

In the United States, for example, women in the House of Representatives didn’t get a bathroom near the Speaker’s Lobby until 2011. Prior to that, the nearest women’s room was so far away that the time it took women to get to the bathroom and back exceeded session break times. The nearby men’s room, meanwhile, had a fireplace, a shoeshine stand, and televised floor proceedings.

Close by and a fireplace.

Additionally, old building codes required more space for men, as women’s roles were restricted almost entirely to the private sphere. That reality has often confused the “is” with the “ought.” As scholar Judith Plaskow noted in a paper on toilets and social justice, “Not only does the absence of women’s bathrooms signify the exclusion of women from certain professions and halls of power, but it also has functioned as an explicit argument against hiring women or admitting them into previously all-male organizations.” She cites examples, including Yale Medical School and Harvard Law School, both of which claimed that a lack of public facilities made it impossible for women to be admitted as students.

We’d love to but we just ain’t got the terlets.

And when things are fixed…men complain.

When spaces are changed so that everyone experiences equal waiting time, backlash has been quick. In 2004, for example, new rules resulted in men waiting in line to use the bathrooms at Soldier Field in Chicago. They complained until five women’s rooms were converted to men’s. The result was that, once again, women’s wait times doubled. No protests have yielded a commensurate response to reduce them. That women are socialized to quietly deal with physical discomfort, pain, and a casual disregard for their bodily needs is overlooked in the statements, “No one is making them wait,” or “Why don’t they demand changes?”

Yeah, why don’t women do more demanding? It’s not as if they ever get punished for doing that.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 12 comments
Tags:


The worldwide conspiracy

Nov 30th, 2017 5:50 pm | By

The Times gives Trump credit for accomplishing something – uniting people in the UK in loathing of him.

One member of Parliament called him a “fascist.” Another described him as “stupid.” A third wondered aloud whether President Trump was “racist, incompetent or unthinking — or all three.”

The stream of criticism that began after Mr. Trump shared anti-Muslim videos from a far-right British group on Wednesday morning turned into a gusher on Thursday, after he rebuked Prime Minister Theresa May in a nighttime tweet, telling her: “Don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom.”

Mr. Trump’s one-two punch managed to generate rare unanimity in a Britain that is deeply divided over the contentious process of leaving the European Union.

Ya gotta admire that. He does do a remarkably thorough job of being awful – he’s awful in every possible way. There’s nothing to like about him at all, no matter how trivial.

Members of the opposition Labour Party had been among the first to pounce on Mr. Trump’s tweets, but they were joined on Thursday by several members of Mrs. May’s Conservative Party.

One of them, Peter Bone, called on Mrs. May to persuade Mr. Trump to delete his Twitter account. Another, Tim Loughton, urged Twitter to take down Mr. Trump’s account “as it would that of any other citizen of the world who peddled such hate.”

A third Conservative lawmaker, Paul Masterton, lamented: “Just because somebody stops using Twitter, it does not mean that they cease to be a twit.”

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 6 comments
Tags:


It’s been too long since we had a nice big bubble

Nov 30th, 2017 1:10 pm | By

A historian of the Depression points out that this “make the rich richer” approach to taxation has been tried before.

The crash followed a decade of Republican control of the federal government during which trickle-down policies, including massive tax cuts for the rich, produced the greatest concentration of income in the accounts of the richest 0.01 percent at any time between World War I and 2007 (when trickle-down economics, tax cuts for the hyper-rich, and deregulation again resulted in another economic collapse).

Yet the plain fact that the trickle-down approach has never worked leaves Republicans unfazed. The GOP has been singing from the Market-is-God hymnal for well over a century, telling us that deregulation, tax cuts for the rich, and the concentration of ever more wealth in the bloated accounts of the richest people will result in prosperity for the rest of us. The party is now trying to pass a scam that throws a few crumbs to the middle class (temporarily — millions of middle-class Americans will soon see a tax hike if the bill is enacted) while heaping benefits on the super-rich, multiplying the national debt and endangering the American economy.

Even though 2008 isn’t even (quite) a full decade ago. Remember 2008? When all the wheels came off?

In 1926, Calvin Coolidge’s treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, one of the world’s richest men, pushed through a massive tax cut that would substantially contribute to the causes of the Great Depression. Republican Sen. George Norris of Nebraska said that Mellon himself would reap from the tax bill “a larger personal reduction [in taxes] than the aggregate of practically all the taxpayers in the state of Nebraska.”

Same now for Trump and the other richies. Same for Trump’s whole damn cabinet of richies.

A few months after he became president in 1981, Ronald Reagan praised Coolidge for cutting “taxes four times” and said “we had probably the greatest growth in prosperity that we’ve ever known.” Reagan said nothing about what happened to “Coolidge Prosperity” a few months after he left office.

Growth in prosperity! Followed by a plunge off a cliff into the deepest and longest depression in recent history. Sound like a bubble much?

When Bill Clinton proposed a modest increase in the top marginal tax rate in his 1993 budget, every Republican voted against it. Trickle-down economists proclaimed that it would lead to economic disaster. But the tax increase on the wealthy was followed by one of the greatest periods of prosperity in American history and resulted in a budget surplus. When the Republicans came back into power in 2001, the administration of George W. Bush pushed the opposite policies, which had invariably produced calamity in the past. Predictably, that happened again in 2008.

And now they’re determined to do it yet again.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 1 Comment »


Pertaining to compiling the articulated contextualization and intentional facilitation

Nov 30th, 2017 12:08 pm | By

The presidents (two, apparently) of the Laurier Student Union have issued A Statement. It is exactly what you’d expect – loaded with the dreariest bureaucratic jargon imaginable. It’s as if they’re afraid even to talk in a human way, let alone saying anything that might trouble The Orthodoxy.

To undergraduate and graduate students of Wilfrid Laurier University,

Laurier has been the center of a contentious debate pertaining to academic freedom and freedom of expression.

See what I mean? “Pertaining to” ffs – what’s wrong with “about” or “on”?

Now that the University has publicized the composition of the Task Force on Freedom of Expression, the student body has an opportunity to directly contribute to this important discussion. As Presidents of your Union and Association, and student representatives on the task force, we have a duty to listen to our membership and ensure your perspectives are heard.

Whose perspectives? Which perspectives? All of them? Something tells me they don’t actually mean all of them.

We want to acknowledge that the events of last week, and the subsequent discourse associated with this topic, has caused harm for some Laurier students. The dominant narrative surrounding this story has too often discounted the lived experiences of transgender and non-binary students, and as a result, questioned their very existence.

Emphasis mine. No. Questioning people’s claims about themselves is not denying their existence. That dishonest bit of rhetoric ought to be retired.

Normally, all things being equal, of course we take people’s claims about themselves at face value, and of course it’s rude not to. But sometimes things turn out not to be equal and then we do ask questions; that’s just how these things work. We follow the social rules in general, but there may be exceptions. If people make eccentric claims about themselves, there may be reasons to question those claims. That’s not denying the existence of the person making the claim.

The principles of academic dialogue and freedom of expression are integral components of university learning. While debate is a productive tool of learning, it requires proper contextualization and intentional facilitation by instructors and teaching assistants. In this environment students learn to think critically, understand the nuance of complicated topics, and listen to the perspectives of their classmates. Educational engagement with challenging material should not willfully incite hatred or violence.

What are we supposed to think after reading that paragraph? That Lindsay Shepherd willfully incited hatred or violence or both.

Over the coming weeks and going into next semester, our goal is to facilitate sessions for students to ensure all voices are heard. We will then compile the feedback and articulate it to the committee to assist in the process of achieving their mandate.

Well that’s reassuring.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 13 comments
Tags:


Assassinée pour ses convictions

Nov 30th, 2017 11:31 am | By

Speaking of Brendan Cox and Jo Cox…

Via Facebook:

Street sign in Morlande, a district of Avallon, Burgundy, France. It says: “Jo Cox Street, British MP, assassinated because of her convictions, 22 June 1974 – 16 June 2016.”

In English it would say that.

No automatic alt text available.

Untranslated it says

Rue Jo COX

Députée Brittanique

Assassinée pour ses convictions

22 juin 1974-16 juin 2016

H/t Stewart

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 3 comments
Tags:


Many layers of humiliation

Nov 30th, 2017 10:36 am | By

Julian Borger wonders how that “special relationship” is going these days.

It was some poor official’s job this morning to tell Theresa May that while she slept, the relationship with the US became special for all the wrong reasons.

It is at least historic. No US president in modern times has addressed a UK prime minister with the open peevishness and contempt of Donald Trump’s tweet telling May to mind her own business.

He’s draining the swamp.

There are many layers of humiliation here for May to get her head around over breakfast. Not only is it personally demeaning, it is also politically toxic.

The prospect of a successful or at least survivable Brexit is posited on a strong relationship with Washington. In that regard, May’s successful rush to Washington in January to become the first foreign leader received at the Trump White House was presented as a coup.

Under EU rules, the two countries are not allowed even to start negotiating a trade deal until the UK is truly out of Europe, but the warm words and the pictures of the Trump and May holding hands at least struck an encouraging tone. The prime minister got to Washington in time to help the state department and Congress stop the president lifting sanctions on Russia, and squeezed out of him his first grudging words of support for Nato.

But after that it was all ↓↓↓

So what now? May and Europe want to salvage the nuclear deal with Iran that Trump wants to destroy, and they also agree on not getting into the jolly little nuclear war with North Korea which Trump is doing his best to set off.

The irony is that it is just such European unity of purpose that May is committed to undermine. Having a US president who is so erratic and extreme that he makes disagreements with EU seem petty by comparison is a bad look for a prime minister championing Brexit.

Tragic, isn’t it. The Brexit vote happened before Trump was nominated.

Can we do 2016 over again?

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 12 comments
Tags:


Not welcome

Nov 30th, 2017 10:04 am | By

Trump’s contemptuous tweet at Theresa May yesterday didn’t go down very well in the UK.

Trump’s message came in response to criticism from the British prime minister’s spokesman over the president’s retweeting of incendiary videos posted by the deputy leader of a British far-right group.

 

Justine Greening, the education secretary, said never mind the tweet, look at the bigger picture: allies, important, mustn’t let a tweet distract, etc.

Sajid Javid, the local government secretary, who is Muslim, took a much harder line. He posted on Twitter: “So POTUS has endorsed the views of a vile, hate-filled racist organisation that hates me and people like me. He is wrong and I refuse to let it go and say nothing.”

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who has previously clashed with Trump, also issued a strongly-worded statement of condemnation, calling on the prime minister to demand an apology.

Brendan Cox, widower of Jo Cox, an MP murdered last year by a man reportedly shouting “Britain first” as he shot and stabbed her, told CNN: “I think we probably got used to a degree of absurdity, of outrageous retweets and tweets from the president, but I think this felt like it was a different order.

“Here he was retweeting a felon, somebody who was convicted of religiously aggravated harassment, of an organisation that is a hate-driven organisation on the extreme fringes of the far, far right of British politics. This is like the president retweeting the Ku Klux Klan.”

US Democrats joined the condemnation. Keith Ellison, the deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee and a Muslim member of Congress, branded the president “a racist”.

But the White House defended the retweets. The principal deputy press secretary, Raj Shah, told reporters on Air Force One: “We think that it’s never the wrong time to talk about security and public safety for the American people. Those are the issues he was raising with the tweets this morning.”

No, they are not. The three tweets had nothing to do with security and public safety for the American people. Trump didn’t mention security and public safety for the American people in those tweets. It would be as if Trump retweeted three racist videos of immigrants from North Korea and then his press people talked about Kim’s nukes – or, for that matter, it would be as if May or Merkel or Macron retweeted three xenophobic videos of Americans behaving badly and their press people said “But Trump!”

They should cancel the state visit.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 10 comments
Tags:


Issue a a prohibition order

Nov 30th, 2017 9:07 am | By

Britain’s ambassador to the US made a formal protest yesterday.

Theresa May condemned the president’s decision on Wednesday to share propaganda videos tweeted by the deputy leader of Britain First and is expected to address the issue again in a speech in the Middle East on Thursday.

But government sources revealed that Sir Kim Darroch, the ambassador to Washington, had already raised the issue formally.

In Westminster, MPs lined up to condemn the president’s behaviour, and urge the government to formally cancel the state visit invitation made by May when she became the first world leader to visit the Trump White House last year.

But the home secretary said nope we’re not going to cancel…but she also said that no date had been sent. Could be one of those jam tomorrow things.

Privately, government ministers do not expect such a visit to take place in the foreseeable future, amid concerns about the possibility of widespread protests.

And there’s zero reason to think Trump will become less awful (and plenty of reason to think he will only become worse), so “foreseeable future” probably means ever.

Chris Bryant, a senior Labour backbencher, has written to May urging her to go further, and officially ban Trump from entering the UK on the grounds he is condoning fascism and his presence is “not conducive to the public good”.

Bryant, a former Foreign Office minister, said the prime minister should issue a prohibition order against the president like those that apply to other far-right figures from the US.

Wouldn’t that be great? It won’t happen, but it’s a lovely fantasy.

He cited the cases of two US far-right bloggers, Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, who were banned by May in 2013 from entering the UK to take part in English Defence League rallies, as precedents for taking action against Trump.

In his letter to May, he said: “I am writing to you to ask you and the home secretary to take immediate action to ban the president of the United States, Donald Trump, from entering the United Kingdom, due to his apparent support for far-right groups in this country.

“In retweeting Jayda Fransen’s posts, it is absolutely clear to me that President Trump is supporting and condoning fascism and far-right activity. This activity has frequently taken the form of violence on our streets. Ms Fransen herself has a long history of racism and Islamophobia, some of it criminal. Many of the people you have rightly banned from entering the UK were guilty of less than this.”

In parliament, Doughty said the president’s decision to share Britain First material showed he was “racist, unthinking or incompetent – or all three”.

Oh yes, he’s all three, and more.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 12 comments
Tags:


Trumpy’s ready to make a change

Nov 30th, 2017 8:54 am | By

Well Trump has his faults but at least he’s good at managing his own people.

Oh wait, no he’s not.

The White House has developed a plan to force out Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, whose relationship with President Trump has been strained, and replace him with Mike Pompeo, the C.I.A. director, perhaps within the next several weeks, senior administration officials said on Thursday.

People keep quitting or being fired or being told to leave. It’s almost as if he’s not a pleasant guy to work for, or be within a mile of.

It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Trump has given final approval to the plan, but he has been said to have soured on Mr. Tillerson and in general is ready to make a change at the State Department.

Well sure, why wouldn’t he be? Tillerson has been there ten whole months – that’s like forever. Presidents normally get a new Secretary of State every three weeks or so. It’s self-evident that foreign policy goes best when there’s constant turnover in the State Department and nobody knows which end is up.

At the same time, there was some concern in the White House about the appearance of a rush to the exits given that other senior officials may also leave in the early part of the new year. White House officials were debating whether it would be better to spread out any departures or just get them over with all at once.

Appearance? That’s not appearance, that’s reality. Nobody wants to work for this fuck, because he’s crazed and stupid and out of control.

The ouster of Mr. Tillerson would end a turbulent reign at the State Department for the former Exxon Mobil chief executive, who has been largely marginalized over the last year.

Over the last year? He hasn’t even been there for a year. Trump hasn’t been there for a year; none of them have. So what they’re saying is that he’s been marginalized since day one, which is just awesome for our standing as an adult country that can button its pants by itself.

Mr. Tillerson’s departure has been widely anticipated for months, but associates have said he was intent on finishing out the year to retain whatever dignity he could. Even so, an end-of-year exit would make his time in office the shortest of any secretary of state whose tenure was not ended by a change in presidents in nearly 120 years.

Oh, really? I guess I was wrong about the every three weeks thing then.

Also, Tillerson’s concern with his own “dignity” is ridiculous. If you want “dignity” then don’t go to work for Donald Trump. If you go to work for Donald Trump you deserve your fate.

Mr. Pompeo, a former three-term member of Congress, has impressed Mr. Trump during daily intelligence briefings and become a trusted policy adviser even on issues far beyond the C.I.A.’s normal mandate, like health care. But he has been criticized by intelligence officers for being too political in his job.

If Trump trusts him, he must be bad.

Mr. Tillerson’s appointment was something of an experiment from the start. Never before had a president named a secretary of state with no prior experience in government, politics or the military. Mr. Trump, who himself had no government or military experience before this year, bet that Mr. Tillerson would be able to translate his formidable skills in the corporate world to international diplomacy after 41 years at Exxon Mobil.

Blah blah blah – in other words these reckless bozos thought it would be fun to let totally unqualified people destroy the US government and much about the US along with it.

Whatever; Tillerson was there long enough to trash the State Department. Score, huh?

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 5 comments
Tags:


THE THREAT IS REAL

Nov 29th, 2017 3:51 pm | By

Sarah Huckabee Sanders says fake shmake, who cares, the point is, Mooslims are A THREAT and that’s what Trump was saying when he retweeted three grotesque videos on the theme of LOOK OUT MOOSLIMS LOOK OUT THEY WILL EAT US ALL.

The White House has defended the unverified, Islamophobic videos that Donald Trump shared as driving home an important point – regardless of if they are real or not.

“Whether it’s a real video, the threat is real,” Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters. “His goal is to promote strong border security and strong national security.”

What threat is very real? That Mooslims will grab all the statues of “the Virgin Mary” and smash them before our disbelieving eyes? Is that the threat? It doesn’t seem very scary, or very likely, either.

Or is something else the threat? But if something else is the threat then what good is it to post videos that are nothing to do with the threat, especially if they’re fake and they work up hatred against a set of people?

Ms Sanders, however, maintained that the videos did not need to be verified, claiming the media was focusing on “the wrong thing”.

“I’m not talking about the nature of the video,” she said. “…The threat is real, what the President is talking about – the need for national security and military spending – those are very real things, there’s nothing fake about that.”

But the videos have nothing to do with that, plus they’re fake, so wtf?

Of Mr Trump’s retweets, Downing Street said: “It is wrong for the President to have done this.”

Mr Trump’s previously scheduled state visit will continue as planned.

Why?

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 3 comments


“We don’t think that was my voice”

Nov 29th, 2017 12:57 pm | By

He’ll say anything.

Shortly after his victory last year, Donald J. Trump began revisiting one of his deepest public humiliations: the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape of him making vulgar comments about women.

Despite his public acknowledgment of the recording’s authenticity in the final days of the presidential campaign — and his hasty videotaped apology under pressure from his advisers — Mr. Trump as president-elect began raising the prospect with allies that it may not have been him on the tape after all.

Most of Mr. Trump’s aides ignored his changing story. But in January, shortly before his inauguration, Mr. Trump told a Republican senator that he wanted to investigate the recording that had him boasting about grabbing women’s genitals.

“We don’t think that was my voice,” Mr. Trump told the senator, according to a person familiar with the conversation. Since then, Mr. Trump has continued to suggest that the tape that nearly upended his campaign was not actually him, according to three people close to the president.

Liar liar.

Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about the “Access Hollywood” tape are part of his lifelong habit of attempting to create and sell his own version of reality. Advisers say he continues to privately harbor a handful of conspiracy theories that have no grounding in fact.

In recent months, they say, Mr. Trump has used closed-door conversations to question the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. He has also repeatedly claimed that he lost the popular vote last year because of widespread voter fraud, according to advisers and lawmakers.

In other words he’s a liar and a fraud, not just in his money-making habits but in everything. He’s rotten all the way down.

One senator who listened as the president revived his doubts about Mr. Obama’s birth certificate chuckled on Tuesday as he recalled the conversation. The president, he said, has had a hard time letting go of his claim that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States. The senator asked not to be named to discuss private conversations.

Heh heh heh. So funny. Heh heh. That nigger who got to be president was born in NiggerLand, not here. Heh heh heh.

To the president’s critics, his conspiracy-mongering goes to the heart of why he poses a threat to the country.

“It’s dangerous to democracy; you’ve got to have shared facts,” Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, said in an interview on Tuesday. “And on so many of these, there’s empirical evidence that says no: You didn’t win the popular vote, there weren’t more people at your inauguration than ever, that was your voice on that tape, you admitted it before.”

Mr. Flake, who is not running for re-election, said in the interview that he was about to begin a series of speeches on the Senate floor outlining his concerns about Mr. Trump. The first, he said, will be dedicated to what Mr. Flake called the president’s disregard for the truth.

But the ones who are running for re-election or will be in the next one or the one after that – they’re just watching while the country slides into the sewer.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 11 comments
Tags:


New questions about his temperament

Nov 29th, 2017 12:35 pm | By

CNN points out that it’s a little unfortunate that Trump appears to be getting crazier every day right now when North Korea is getting Better and Better and BETTER at lobbing nukes in our direction. Yeah, it is.

[T]he President of the United States is raising new questions about his temperament, his judgment and his understanding of the resonance of his global voice and the gravity of his role with a wild sequence of insults, inflammatory tweets and bizarre comments.

On Wednesday Trump caused outrage and sparked fears of violent reprisals against Americans and US interests overseas by retweeting graphic anti-Muslim videos by an extreme far right British hate group. Earlier this week he used a racial slur in front of Native American war heroes. He’s attacked global press freedom, after cozying up to autocrats on his recent Asia tour.

And now there are reports that the President has revived conspiracy theories about former President Barack Obama’s birthplace and is suggesting an “Access Hollywood” video on which he was heard boasting sexually assaulting women, and for which he apologized last year, had been doctored.

In normal times, it would be a concern that the President is conducting himself in a manner so at odds with the decorum and propriety associated for over two centuries with the office he holds.

And in these times it’s fucking terrifying!

Yeah, we know.

Trump has always crushed convention and been ready to step on racial, cultural and behavioral taboos, evidenced in his response for instance to Charlottesville riots and willingness to exploit foreign terror attacks to push his immigration policies. In many ways his spurning of political correctness has been key to his appeal. But some close observers of the President say they believe he has become even more unmoored in recent weeks.

“Something is unleashed with him lately,” said New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who wrote about Trump’s return to Birther conspiracy theories in on Wednesday morning.

“I don’t know what is causing it, I don’t know how to describe it,” said Haberman, who is also a CNN contributor.

I’ll give it a shot. He’s a poisonous, terrible, malevolent human being, and he’s getting much worse.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 6 comments
Tags:


The president was talking about the need for military spending

Nov 29th, 2017 11:06 am | By

Today’s episode of Downward With Trump:

President Trump shared videos on Twitter early Wednesday morning that supposedly portray Muslims committing acts of violence, images that are likely to fuel anti-Islam sentiments popular among the president’s political base in the United States and that prompted the office of Britain’s prime minister to issue a statement condemning the tweets.

Mr. Trump retweeted the video posts from an ultranationalist British party leader, Jayda Fransen, who has previously been charged in the United Kingdom with “religious aggravated harassment,” according to news reports. The videos were titled: “Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!”“Muslim Destroys a Statue of Virgin Mary!” and “Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death!”

It is unusual to see an American president promote this type of content.

To put it mildly…in fact to put it inaccurately: I don’t think we’ve ever seen a US president do that. Subtler versions, yes, like Reagan launching his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, of all places, but crude exclamatory!!! shit like this? I don’t think so.

The White House spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, defended the president’s tweets to reporters and said the president was talking about the need for national security and military spending.

Oh please. What’s a purported Muslim purportedly destroying a statue of the purported “Virgin Mary” got to do with military spending or national security?

“The threat is real,” Ms. Sanders said. “The threat needs to be addressed. The threat has to be talked about, and that’s what the president is doing in bringing that up.”

By Twitter-ranting about Catholic religious icons. I don’t think so.

British politicians were quick to condemn Mr. Trump’s tacit endorsement of the videos.

The office of Theresa May, the British prime minister, said, “It is wrong for the president to have done this.”

In a statement, the office also said of the far-right party Britain First, for which Ms. Fransen is the deputy: “Britain First seeks to divide communities by their use of hateful narratives that peddle lies and stoke tensions. They cause anxiety to law-abiding people.”

David Lammy, a member of Parliament for the Labour Party, echoed that statement on Twitter. “Trump sharing Britain First. Let that sink in. The President of the United States is promoting a fascist, racist, extremist hate group whose leaders have been arrested and convicted. He is no ally or friend of ours.”

Or of ours.

This reaction is exactly what James R. Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, said he feared when he saw the president’s Twitter posts.

“It has all kinds of ripple effects, both in terms of perhaps inciting or encouraging anti-Muslim violence, and as well causes, I think, our friends and allies around the world to wonder about the judgment of the president of the United States,” Mr. Clapper told CNN on Wednesday.

Britain First was co-founded by a man who later supported Mr. Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign and was part of the efforts to spread anti-Clinton news on social media.

Name of James Dowson.

The official Twitter account of Britain First also wrote to its more than 24,000 followers on Wednesday morning about Mr. Trump’s posts.

“Donald Trump has just retweeted Britain First’s deputy leader Jayda Fransen THREE times,” the group wrote.

The hateful hate-mongering dogwhistling racist Trump retweeted a far-right racist party’s hate-mongering videos THREE TIMES.

Britain First calls itself a “patriotic” political party but has been criticized by human rights groups as being a far-right extremist group that engages in activities calculated to bait Muslims.

Formed in 2011 by former members of the far-right British National Party, the group states on its Facebook page that its mission is to fight “the many injustices that are routinely inflicted on the British people” and to defend British culture against the excesses of left-wing liberalism and political correctness.

Chuka Umunna, a Labour Party member of Parliament, wrote on Twitter that an invitation for Mr. Trump to come to Britain for a state visit should be immediately withdrawn. “The US President is normalising hatred. If we don’t call this out, we are going down a very dangerous road. His invite should be withdrawn,” he wrote.

Can we also withdraw the invitation for him to be the US head of state? Because that would be awesome.

Mr. Trump’s tweets were welcomed by a former Ku Klux Klan leader, David Duke, who wrote on Twitter, “Thank God for Trump! That’s why we love him!”

https://twitter.com/DrDavidDuke/status/935879285562335232

New depths.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 9 comments
Tags:


Would you like that in a 12 or 14?

Nov 29th, 2017 10:41 am | By

Glorious glorious nepotism.

She markets clothes. That’s all. She’s just one of those people who make a living from “branding” and promotion and hype, exploiting her last name to make her tat seem more exciting than it is. If she were on Project Runway she’d be Out in the first round. She has no business at all “meeting with” India’s head of state.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 3 comments
Tags:


No ideas, please, we’re a university

Nov 28th, 2017 5:22 pm | By

Andrew Robinson, associate professor of Human Rights and Human Diversity at Wilfrid Laurier University, thinks their policy on [what they call] gendered violence needs urgent repair.

The public’s reaction to the treatment of a Wilfrid Laurier University grad student at the hands of two professors and a rep from the university’s Diversity and Equity Office (DEO) has been one of horror and outrage. The resounding opinion was that student, Lindsay Shepherd, was completely in the right when she offered both sides of a debate involving the use of non-gender pronouns.

And while the public has agreed Shepherd was right, she wasn’t. At least not according to a disturbing regulatory policy enforced by my university. In fact, in the meeting where Lindsay was subject to a verbal inquisition, Adria Joel, the DEO rep, cites the policy, known as Laurier’s gendered and sexual violence policy (GSVP) as justification for her claim that Lindsay was guilty of “spreading transphobia.”

Yes, I noticed that when I transcribed some of the inquisition. I wondered how they were defining their terms.

While Laurier’s president is avoiding talking about the Gendered and Sexual Violence Policy, I won’t.

The policy has its roots in government legislation. Ontario’s Bill 132, passed in 2016, required universities to have a policy on sexual violence. That law defined “sexual violence” in terms of assault and harassment “targeting a person’s sexuality, gender identity or gender expression.” This is laudable; harassment and assault are wrong (and I condemn in advance anyone who would use this letter as justification for harassing or threatening anyone).

Apparently not satisfied with a definition of sexual violence that was good enough for the Wynne Liberal government, Laurier’s board of governors approved a policy that innovated by creating the following definition of gendered violence:

“An act or actions that reinforce gender inequalities resulting in physical, sexual, emotional, economic or mental harm. This violence includes sexism, gender discrimination, gender harassment, biphobia, transphobia, homophobia and heterosexism, intimate partner violence, and forms of Sexual Violence.

UH oh. You can see the problem without any wrinkling of the brow, I’m sure. It’s in the fact that we know from repeated experience that any dissent from a long list of Revealed Truths will be called “transphobia.” Well there you go: you have performed sexual violence and you must be punished and ostracized. You can’t ask what it means to “identify as” a woman; you can’t ask what it “feels like” to be a woman or how anyone knows; you can’t even ask why people are demanding to know what you believe in the first place. You can’t do anything at all, in fact, if you don’t imitate the jargon exactly and fervently enough for beady-eyed observers.

So, yeah. It’s either march with the Virtuous, or be accused of gendered violence – yes you, a woman, a feminist woman, you are the most likely of all to be accused of gendered violence, because you’re supposed to be centering trans women (who are women), not talking about those hateful privileged cis women.

Unlike the Wynne Liberals’ definition, Laurier’s “gendered violence” doesn’t just prohibit harassment and assault, it prohibits ideas.

Quite. Been there, saw the T shirts.

No one should comfort themselves by thinking that these concerns are limited to Lindsay Shepherd. Every student who registers at Laurier in any of its programs, tacitly agrees to have their personal conduct regulated by the GSVP: in tutorial, in lecture, online, “when on University property or when off campus,” and regardless of the “time of the incident (e.g., evenings, weekends, and holidays).” The sanctions approved by Laurier’s board include disciplinary warning, behavioural contract, suspension, and expulsion.

As for respecting diversity, under the GSVP all views are welcome, so long as they are not all expressed, no matter how reasonably. Inclusion? Violate this orthodoxy, anywhere, anytime, and a fellow student may see that you are included in an investigation under the GSVP.

When Laurier announced the details of its task force on academic freedom last Thursday there was still no mention of the GSVP. The task force is only directed to recommend “a statement on freedom of expression.”

If Laurier really wants to make a statement about its commitment to freedom of expression it will remove its ideological definition of gendered violence from the GSVP, now.

Maybe Laurier merely identifies as making a statement about its commitment to freedom of expression.

Posted in Notes and Comment Blog | 51 comments
Tags: