Skip navigation

Category Archives: Trumpedation

No Original Thoughts


The President’s address to Congress was measured and calm(?) almost like being sedated. The message was still a collection of  talking points that brought nothing new to the fore. Looking at his selections for his cabinet speaks volumes on where he thinks he wants to go. His selections are more like looking through the phone  book for a service, the areas that will create the most problems: Attorney General-Jeff Sessions an avowed Racist, still!, Betsy DeVos, wealthy with no idea about public education. These are just two of the many pulled out the hat with no real vetting (or extreme vetting as Mr. Trump is so fond of saying). This lack of “vetting” is rampant through his selections of staff and  the executive orders he has signed. It appears too me that he is more concerned with the fanfare over the signing rather that the context and the long range effect of these orders. One that stands out is the rolling back EPA rules on clean water, do we want a nation of Flint Michigan’s? The oil pipeline reversal again we are stealing from the Native Americans. Let us not begin on the ACA repeal and replace. With all of the evidence of the overall devastation the repeal would cause this train is still on the tracks. The majority Dupublicans are sitting back as if nothing is wrong while many of them have been shouted out and down in their town hall meetings. Many of the Dupublicans have elected not to have town halls because they appear to be afraid to face their constituents whom they have lied to time after time. We as voters have an opportunity to reverse this impending disaster, all we need to do is vote and call, text or email your Congressional representative, this is our voice and we need to use it whenever possible and continue to do so as long as we have poor government from the local to Federal levels. Now to put a fine point on this administration, TOTUS the current White House resident has tweeted that the Obama administration bugged his office in Trump tower. Apparently the way this engineer of the Crazy Train copes with issues is to tweet something outrageous with little or no truth to change the conversation. If there is a betting line on his tenure I will put money on 2018.

Please Donate

Please Donate

Trump’s Help For Harley Is Hurting The Bike Maker


A little more evidence that the current White House resident is not as in touch with world events as he would (or his staff) would like you to believe.MA

David Kiley, Contributor
2 days ago

© Provided by Forbes Media LLC
There aren’t too many brands that are as iconically “American” as Harley Davidson. And when Donald Trump invoked the “Hogs” in his speech to the nation Tuesday night, he thought he was calling attention to unfair trade deals inhibiting American companies and workers abroad.
Not so fast. It turns out that the high tariffs faced by Harley when trying to sell its bikes overseas would have been substantially removed by the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Trump squashed his first days in office. In Vietnam, for example, Harley faces a 74% tax. It would have been zero if the U.S. signed on to TPP. Indeed, Harley’s CEO and chief lobbyist publicly advocated for TPP last year.

Trump repeatedly called TPP a U.S. “job killer.” Trade experts disagree, arguing that it was just the opposite, but got caught up in the political rancor and rhetoric of a campaign, rightfully referred to as “the silly season.”
Trump seems fairly fact-challenged in his use of Harley to call attention to unfair trade. He complained that there is one country that charges a 100% tariff on imported motorcycles. That’s true. It’s India. But Harley has a factory in India that supplies bikes to consumers there, so those bikes aren’t subject to the tariff. India, a developing country, put heavy tariffs on some categories of products to force companies to build factories in their country and create jobs for their working class. Indonesia, another country with a tariff, hits imported motorcycles with a 40% tax for the same reason.
In a statement, Harley-Davidson said it opened the plant in India in 2011 “to improve production flexibility, market responsiveness and strengthen operations in the country.” It doesn’t address whether the tariff played a part in its decision, but it did, of course.
India is a huge market for motorcycles and scooters – 16.5 million per years. Harley has less than a 1% share of that market. But that is because Harley does not make the kinds of bikes that are most popular in India, where there are many manufacturers vying for share at much lower price points.
Tariffs on motorcycles are common across the Asia-Pacific region. Besides India and Indonesia, China levies a 30% tariff, as does Malaysia. Thailand hits Harley with a 60% tariff, and Taiwan’s tariff is 20%. Malaysia and Singapore were also part of TPP, and there was hope that Indonesia would have joined it eventually.
The 12 countries in TPP account for one-third of global trade, according to The Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Harley relies heavily on overseas sales. Last year, the company reported 40% of its sales were outside the U.S. And despite the tariffs in Asia, it had a record year in the Pan-Asian region, selling 33,000 bikes – not bad considering Harley’s bikes are among the most expensive available in those markets.
Ironically, while Harley has been a big loser from Trump’s pull-out from TPP, the big winner is China, the country he has been most vocal about in terms of wanting to make it harder for Chinese goods to get into the U.S.
Without the U.S. in TPP, China is free to dominate the Pan-Pacific region through trade. “China’s ambitious One-Belt-One-Road and Asian Infrastructural Investment Bank initiatives will also be strengthened by a perceived or actual U.S. pullback from Asia [as a result of leaving the TPP],” says Linda Lim, professor of a strategy at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.
No wonder Harley CEO Matthew Levatich seems uneasy in the spotlight with Donald Trump using Harley as a poster-brand for his supposed fair-trade policy. The new president already killed the one deal that would have helped the motorcycle company.
The focus on Harley isn’t all bad, though. Shares of Harley climbed 3.58% Wednesday, compared with the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which was up 1.46%.

Please Donate

Please Donate

President Millard Fillmore- Then And Now


The parallels to todays TOTUS are remarkable.MA

By Jeff Jacoby Globe Columnist February 19, 2017
HISTORY DOESN’T REPEAT itself. But it has an unnerving tendency to rhyme.
Consider, on this first Presidents’ Day under Donald Trump, another New Yorker
who occupied the highest office in the land.
When Millard Fillmore became the nation’s 13th president upon the death of
Zachary Taylor in 1850, he immediately plunged the White House and the Whig
Party — one of the nation’s two dominant political parties — into turmoil. On the
day he took the oath of office, Fillmore petulantly dismissed every member of
Taylor’s Cabinet, which he resented for having ignored him when he was vice
president. As a result, it took weeks — in one case, more than two months —
before the new president’s Cabinet members were approved. The Whigs, already
riven by patronage quarrels and North-South tensions, grew even more polarized
over Fillmore’s policies. He was off to a bad start.
To an American looking back from 2017, the disorder that followed Fillmore’s
accession might almost prefigure the pandemonium in the Trump White House.

There are other echoes.

John Tyler is a good reminder: Running mates matter
When President William Henry Harrison died in April 1841, Tyler took control by
declaring he was more than just a caretaker.
Fillmore presented himself as a loyal Whig, but his political career had begun with
the Anti-Masons, a political movement tied to a bizarre hostility toward
Freemasons. He was attracted, writes Paul Finkelman, a legal historian at Albany
Law School, “to oddball political movements, conspiracy theories, and ethnic
hatred.” Even after becoming a Whig, he trafficked easily with anti-Catholic and
anti-immigrant groups.
Fillmore served four terms in the House of Representatives, where he energetically
supported higher tariffs. When he ran for governor of New York in 1844, he kept
talking about tariffs — mostly, suggests Finkelman, to avoid talking about slavery.
Though antislavery sentiment was strong in New York, and though Fillmore, like
most Northern Whigs, was conventionally opposed to the practice, he shunned the
abolitionists. The most urgent moral issue of the day left him personally unmoved.
He seemed to believe that Whigs could avoid the controversial politics of slavery
altogether.
His unwillingness to condemn the spread of black servitude helped Fillmore lose
the governor’s race. So did his hostility to Irish immigrants and his coziness with
nativists. Nonetheless, Fillmore had a following, and at the Whig convention in
1848, he captured the vice presidential nomination. The ticket was headed by
Taylor, a hero of the Mexican War and a Southern planter, and Fillmore was seen
as an ideal ticket-balancer: He was from a key antislavery state, which would
appeal to Northerners, but had never been actively antislavery, which would
reassure Southerners.
Taylor was president for only 16 months; he died of cholera after eating tainted
food. During his brief administration, however, he turned firmly against the
Southern “fire-eaters” who had expected him, a fellow slaveholder, to sympathize
with their cause. The nation was being roiled by sectional bitterness, especially
over the extension of slavery to the vast territories that had been wrested from
Mexico. In Congress, Henry Clay proposed a series of bills that came to be called
the Compromise of 1850, but it was a lopsidedly pro-slavery package, and Taylor
refused to support it.
Vice President Fillmore, on the other hand, was in favor of appeasing Southern
interests. He backed Clay’s legislation; if it came to a tie in the Senate, he said, he
would vote against Taylor and in favor of the compromise.
With Taylor’s sudden death, pro-slavery forces thus found themselves with an
unlikely friend in the White House — a Northern Whig from an abolitionist state,
who was willing to open the Southwest to slavery. The Compromise of 1850,
passed by Congress and signed by Fillmore, undid the 30-year-old Missouri
Compromise, which had permanently barred slavery north of Missouri’s southern
border. Clay’s legislation did clear the way for California to enter the union as a
free state, and it shuttered the slave markets of Washington, D.C. But those sops to
Northern sentiment did nothing to halt the advance of slavery, or to restore
harmony to a Whig Party increasingly at war with itself.
But of all the components of the compromise, the worst was the Fugitive Slave
Act.
Rarely has there been a more repugnant law. For the first time in US history, the
Fugitive Slave Act created a national system of law enforcement. Its purpose:
hunting escaped slaves and returning them to bondage. Federal commissioners
were appointed nationwide, and empowered not only to adjudicate fugitive slave
claims, but to assemble local posses to capture slaves on the run. The law imposed
harsh penalties on anyone caught aiding a fugitive slave. And even free blacks
were at risk of being seized and charged as runaways, since the law, with grotesque
disregard for due process, forbade accused fugitives from testifying in their own
behalf.
Fillmore enforced the law with determination, and dispatched federal troops to
prevent opponents from interfering. He denounced Northern communities that
vowed to resist the law — “sanctuary cities” aren’t a 21st-century innovation —
and piously proclaimed that “without law there can be no real practical liberty.”
Scores of fugitives were captured and returned to the South during Fillmore’s
presidency. When antislavery activists in Boston rescued a captured slave from the
US marshals holding him, Fillmore repeatedly ordered that the rescuers be
prosecuted. In a Pennsylvania case, the administration went further, charging 41
Americans with treason for refusing to join a slave-catching posse.
Fillmore denounced Northern communities that vowed to resist the Fugitive Slave
Law. ‘Sanctuary cities’ aren’t a 21st-century innovation.
By the end of Fillmore’s term, the Whig Party was fractured beyond repair.
Democrats won the 1852 election in a landslide. The Whigs vanished from US
politics, supplanted by a new, unequivocally antislavery Republican Party.
Fillmore, however, turned elsewhere. He migrated to the anti-immigrant, anti-
Catholic “Know-Nothing” Party, running as its presidential nominee in 1856. His
slogan was “Americans Must Rule America.” Five years later, Americans were
ripping America apart in a ghastly Civil War that Fillmore had helped make
inevitable. As Abraham Lincoln labored to preserve the union and emancipate the
slaves, Fillmore watched from the sidelines, harshly criticizing.
Today, the 13th president is lost in obscurity. Fate has been kinder to him than he
deserved.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com

Please Donate

Please Donate

President Trump and the end of the American Century


Matt Bai
National Political Columnist
Yahoo News January 19, 2017

It’s inauguration week just as the Framers must have imagined it: citizenry streaming into the capital from every state to celebrate the most sober and symbolic moment in the democracy, even as the soon-to-be president tears into an American hero, fends off criticism from allies, deflects a sexual harassment suit and wails that his public approval ratings are rigged.
This is how the Trump presidency begins, and the American Century ends.
I don’t say this in a way that’s gloomy or hysterical; don’t count me among those who assume the nation is headed off a cliff. (Count me, instead, among those who think the odds of us doing all this again in three years or less are about 50-50.)
I’m only saying that political epochs, like the one into which every one of us was born, have demarcation points that can only be clearly seen in retrospect. And we’re living through one right now.
Any calendar will tell you, for instance, that the 19th century ended in 1901, the year President McKinley was assassinated and Teddy Roosevelt took his place. But most historians would argue that, for any practical purpose, the previous century of British dominance — Pax Britannica and all that — really saw the curtain fall in 1914, at the onset of the First World War.
The empire would hold together for another 30 years after that, give or take, but beginning with the campaign against Germany and its allies, the orchestra was playing Britain off-center stage. The costs of planetary preeminence, already a burden in peace, were unsustainable in war.
The 20th century as we think of it probably began about 30 years later, after Franklin Roosevelt solidified American dominance over the western half of a globe riven by ideology. From then on, Washington was at the epicenter of world events, the seat of unrivaled might among free nations.
America was the most expansive country in the world, but whereas Britain had chiefly expanded its physical domain, we expanded our standard of living at a staggering rate. We expanded our markets to much of the world, education to all reaches of the country and — at long last — civil rights to the citizenry.
We expanded the cultural reach of America — movies and sitcoms, soft drinks and sports teams, transcendent celebrity and defiant individualism — to every hamlet on earth where you could string an electrical wire.
But just as the British Empire strained to maintain its momentum in the decades leading up to World War I, so too did our vast expansion run up against the boundaries of time and technology.
Globalism, made possible by cheaper technologies and transportation, gave rise to competitors, even as automation made our own workers redundant. Factory towns cratered. The price of maintaining global hegemony, both in lives and in credit, became harder to justify.
Government continued to grow, but now so did the chasm between the rich and everyone else.
Still, well into the 21st century, the nation’s political establishment clung tenaciously to this ideal of an essential, expansive America. It was at the heart of George W. Bush’s calamitous adventure in Iraq and of his party’s bid to create a new federal program for prescription drugs. It was the vision behind Barack Obama’s health care plan, his pact with Iran and his failed effort to forge a new market in Asia.
And it’s precisely what Donald Trump’s election repudiates.
Trump has said all kinds of conflicting things about almost everything; I expect he’ll contradict himself a half dozen times on the Capitol steps alone. But in this one respect he has been faithful: He believes the time has come for withdrawal and isolation, rather than expansion and globalism.
Trump rejects free trade. He rejects our disproportionate role in the military defense of Europe and the West. He rejects the diversifying of our culture and the opening of our borders.
He embraces the kind of tariffs that were once thought the relic of an old international system. He would cede the shaping of markets to a Chinese leadership that now, improbably, seems to be the world’s largest cheerleader for trade. He imagines profound beauty in a wall.
Ronald Reagan, to whom Trump would like to compare himself, defied his critics by reaffirming our global ambition to enemies abroad. Trump launches his presidency by telling our allies we’ve had enough.
His antipathy toward the political establishment is an antipathy toward globalism itself. His ambition is personal, not national. His promise to make America great is a promise only to a subset of Americans to whom modernity has been callous.
It is a vision that resonates widely. In fact, it is the only aspect of Trump that does.
A poll by the Washington Post and ABC News this week found that Trump arrives in Washington with the lowest approval rating of any president-elect in 40 years — about half as much support as Obama had at the same time in 2009. Remarkably, though, Trump inspires enviable confidence when it comes to creating jobs and stopping terrorism.
Americans may not countenance a literal wall, but they see promise in the idea of hunkering down for a while, of trying to do a little less abroad and at home.
You can say this is only a momentary digression. You can imagine that Trump represents a kind of national catharsis, after which we will get ourselves together and continue on with the sober business of statecraft and global leadership.
But here’s the thing: Once you leave a vacuum, it’s not so easy to step back in and say you were only messing around. Economic rules get written. Rising powers exploit the moment. The world looks elsewhere for predictability.
This is what Vladimir Putin understands, by the way. This is why he loves Trumpism. Russians are nothing if not patient, and they’ve been waiting about 75 years for this moment. Even as Trump prepares to place his hand on a Bible, the world is shucking its reverence for American democracy, aghast at our penchant for triviality. When I was in Australia last summer, when Trump was just a nominee, the comment I heard again and again from the political elite was some version of: What exactly do you people think you’re doing? Do you not get how much the world relies on your stability? Yes, we get it. And apparently we’re tired of it. No offense, but we’re all expanded out over here.
Of course America can still be great in the decades ahead. (And yes, Mr. President-elect, it is.) We’re bound by demographics to become a more diverse, more enlightened country, not less so. We remain the world’s leading exporter of culture and consumerism. We’re awash in technological talent, and we command more military machinery than any nation in history.
But like the British before us, we’re increasingly reconciled to being one power among many — to act modestly on our own behalf, rather than grandly in the service of what Joe Biden, speaking at Davos this week, called the “liberal international world order.”
The vastness of America’s vision gives way now to the smallness of Trump’s appeal. The American Century recedes, 140 characters at a time.

Please Donate

Please Donate

“It will not get better”: Former Bush administration official has a warning about President Trump’s administration


A short read that sums up a Trump (TOTUS) Presidency and its effect.MA

Ex-Condoleezza Rice aide Eliot A. Cohen also has strong words for conservatives who are working with Trump
Matthew Rozsa

Topics: Donald Trump, Eliot A. Cohen, Frank Lavin, Lezlee Westine, richard w. painter, News, Politics News.

Yet another former official for President George W. Bush has gone on the record criticizing President Donald Trump — this time it’s Eliot A. Cohen, who served as a counselor to former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice from 2007 to 2009.
Trump’s first week as president has already been marred by a “dark and divisive inaugural speech, extraordinary attacks on a free press, a visit to the CIA that dishonored a monument to anonymous heroes who paid the ultimate price, and now an attempt to ban selected groups of Muslims,” Cohen wrote in The Atlantic. He pointed out that “because the problem is one of temperament and character, it will not get better.”
Cohen predicted that Trump’s poor character and choice of advisers will “probably end in calamity — substantial domestic protest and violence, a breakdown of international economic relationships, the collapse of major alliances, or perhaps one or more new wars (even with China) on top of the ones we already have.” Cohen continued, “It will not be surprising in the slightest if his term ends not in four or in eight years, but sooner, with impeachment or removal under the 25th Amendment. The sooner Americans get used to these likelihoods, the better.”
He went on to condemn his conservative friends who are thinking of working with or even for the dangerous new president.
“For the community of conservative thinkers and experts, and more importantly, conservative politicians, this is a testing time,” Cohen wrote. “Either you stand up for your principles and for what you know is decent behavior, or you go down, if not now, then years from now, as a coward or opportunist. Your reputation will never recover, nor should it.”

That said, Cohen ended his article on an optimistic note: “In the end, however, he will fail,” Cohen predicted. “He will fail because however shrewd his tactics are, his strategy is terrible — The New York Times, the CIA, Mexican Americans, and all the others he has attacked are not going away. With every act he makes new enemies for himself and strengthens their commitment; he has his followers, but he gains no new friends.
Added Cohen: “He will fail because he cannot corrupt the courts, and because even the most timid senator sooner or later will say ‘enough.’ He will fail most of all because at the end of the day most Americans, including most of those who voted for him, are decent people who have no desire to live in an American version of Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, or Viktor Orban’s Hungary, or Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Cohen is not the first former Bush administration official to speak out against Trump. In an opinion piece for The New York Times posted earlier this month, former chief White House ethics lawyer Richard W. Painter slammed the president’s numerous conflicts of interest:
“He continues to refuse to release his tax returns, even though many of his cabinet nominees will have to disclose theirs in order to get confirmed by senators skeptical of, among other things, foreign business entanglements,” Painter wrote. “He also did not announce a divestment of ownership interest in his businesses, even though this is a step that his own cabinet appointees will have to take in order to comply with a federal conflict of interest law. Instead, Mr. Trump will simply turn management of the businesses over to a trustee chosen by him, and to two of his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric. This is not a separation at all, and from a conflict of interest vantage point, it won’t work.”
advertisement
Similarly Lezlee Westine, who served as White House director of public liaison and deputy assistant to the president under Bush, endorsed Hillary Clinton in August. Although she didn’t directly attack Trump, her reasons for endorsing Clinton seemed to indicate that she was concerned about Trump’s lack of experience.
“Our nation faces a unique set of challenges that require steady and experienced leadership,” Westine said. “That is why today I am personally supporting Hillary Clinton. She has the expertise and commitment to American values to grow the economy, create jobs and protect America at home and abroad.”
The former political director for president Ronald Reagan, Frank Lavin, returned to the themes of Trump’s character when endorsing Clinton that same month.
“Trump falls short in terms of the character and behavior needed to perform as president,” Lavin wrote. “This defect is crippling and ensures he would fail in office.”

Matthew Rozsa is a breaking news writer for Salon. He holds an MA in History from Rutgers University-Newark and his work has appeared in Mic, Quartz and MSNBC.

Please Donate

Please Donate

The Other Shoe


The slide to anarchy has begun. President Trump has begun his breakdown of the American way. The great white Dope has signed an executive order banning Muslims and firing the acting attorney general because of questions of its legality. It appears that the new President is actually running  (ruining) the country like his businesses. It is unfortunate his supporters will find out the hard way  what the rest of us already knew and suspected,  he is not capable of running the country. His picks for his cabinet, his selections for other high posts in his administration speaks volumes as to where we will end up. We can only hope that the Neer do well Congress has enough initiative and intelligence to realize that no matter what they as a party think, this president is  inept and potentially dangerous. Even in writing this I feel we have a hard row to hoe. This type of government is not what the  framers of the Constitution envisioned. What is left for all of us to do is write, call and demand a change (impeachment?) in leadership. We potentially have a “Sith Lord” in command attempting to rule with impunity. How long will it take before our 535 step up and do the right thing as they should have done before the election?

Please Donate

Please Donate

What To Watch For


This incoming administration will be interesting to watch for an assortment of reasons. To start the financial affairs of the President elect have yet to be sorted out. We need to look at the role of his family in the White house and beyond, the cabinet choices and if the entertainer really wants the job! No matter what is said on the campaign trail, no amount of glib talk, tweets or fast talking will run the Government (which is in reality is the job of the cabinet members). The long time hands on management method of running his companies may prove to be his worst asset. The President of the United States has to be free of all potential conflicts of interest in order to spend 105% of his time on Government work. There is no alternate method. When the reality of the job hits, we may see some really bad actions on his behalf and from the Congress. It is already evident that Congress is in free fall (no matter what Congressional leaders  say). To his agenda: his cabinet picks are the first step in “draining the swamp” for better or worse. Trump’s election while seeming to be a God send for the Dupublicans is a wake up call to all of us. The statements made during and after the campaign will be the movie that voters want to see and if it doesn’t live up to the hype, the Dupublicans, “conservatives” and Trump supporters will be the recipients of “surprise” shifts in national attitude. This  shift will become evident in the next General elections. Remember that Bernie Sanders was not as far away from Trump’s agenda except for the soaring , ranting and irrational rhetoric. I fully expect pushback on this but looking at what has occurred now and in the past I will be proven correct in total or part. It is well to remember that we have a Congress composed of  too many self serving people that we have elected to office too many times and who have  done things in our names to their benefit. Be cautious when you hear “the American People” in any sentence spoken by a member of Congress because we probably did not agree to or know about whatever it is.

Please Donate

Please Donate

The Moment That Made Trump Possible


This is not to negate Trump supporters or the people who voted for him because of the poor showing by the Government overall. Many of Trump supporters are ordinary people who are not satisfied with their situations and the government’s role in those situations. The fringe elements are just that (like ISIS), people who see an opening to foment their own brand of hate and dissension. If Mr. trump does anything correctly, it may be in his cabinets selections for better or worse. MA

Matt Bai 3 hours ago
Donald Trump said a lot of things about a lot of people on his journey to the White House. He mocked a war hero for getting captured. He accused a rival’s dad of consorting with President Kennedy’s killer. He likened another opponent — soon to be a member of his Cabinet — to a child molester.
But nothing Trump unleashed during the campaign reverberated through Washington’s vast governing apparatus like the 14-word sentence released by his transition team this week, after intelligence agencies issued their finding that the Russians had tried to intervene in our election — a charge that Trump, betraying more than a little insecurity, dismissed as “ridiculous” and politically motivated.
“These are the same people,” the statement read, “that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”
Oh. That again.
Capital insiders were horrified that Trump would brutalize the nation’s top spies in the same way he went after Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz — and this after refusing to sit for intelligence briefings. They shouldn’t have been.
Because all Trump did, really, was to acknowledge the subtext of his own political ascent. If there’s one thing that enabled his assault on the country’s governing and media establishments, it’s the calamitous series of events that began in September 2001. Trump could never sail on with such impunity were it not for the invasion of Iraq and everything that followed.
By now it should be clear: He is the vehicle of our reckoning.
There was a time, not long ago, when it was possible to believe that no one would pay a very steep price for that cascade of failure during the Bush years, when just about every trusted institution in American life seemed to collapse of its own dereliction.
Disgraced pundits kept on pontificating. The CIA kept right on stonewalling — successfully — to keep its history of torture sealed off from public view. The parties in Washington kept on fighting like spoiled brats. The bankers kept on making money and loaning it out.
A decade passed, and American voters seemed to have settled into their cynicism, in the same way baseball fans still filled the stadiums after the steroid debacle and Catholic parishioners still lined the pews after coming to terms with chronic abuse.
But politics is like that. The larger the shock to the system, the longer it takes for the effects to surface. Pain and resentment ricochet through the years, rattle around in the culture, until all at once the ground beneath us opens

Destiny


The Dupublican party now in control of both houses of Government has stated that they can now proceed with the changes to make government better for America (not necessarily for the people as they want you to believe). As voters we need to be extremely vigilant in listening to what the Administration says it is and will do for us. You have remember we are in a time where politicians lie with regularity to further their own ends. The access to many types of media has led many to believe what is put out electronically as fact. You must remember that no matter what is done to us in or names, the elected  official will not suffer like many of us will. They are protected by us in that we fail to understand what they have enacted to protect themselves and feather their own nests. We all want change but we must be careful what we ask for. I would really like to believe things will get better with the Trump administration but unfortunately the selections and statements (tweets) he has made so far are not encouraging. It is now up to the statesmen in the Congress to control this chaos wrought by the self servers in the Dupublican party. This will clearly be a case of “lying down with dogs and waking up with fleas”. It is unfortunate that too many people are so desperate to blame the president (no matter who it is) that they lose sight of the real power in Government. Now on the promise of “draining the swamp” Mr. trump will be taking the helm of the country with the theme of making America great again. The greatness has never left America, what has gone is our apparent inability or desire to pay attention to our Congress. The partisan politics has allowed the rise of Donald Trump whose sole objective in life is materialistic and self serving. Along with this Presidency come the rise (possible insurgency) of radical groups in America. Compare the potential uprisings to what is occurring and has occurred in the Middle East (third world?) . With a leader who ignores anything that DOES NOT BENEFIT HIM where are we going?  It is unfortunate that we have fallen to a low that allows for the rise of Donald trump, the Greatness (?) of America was determined when Trump won the Presidency with the backing of avowed racist organizations not the Americans who are in desperate need.  Destiny, the future will show us where it lies.

KKK, Other Racist Groups Disavow The White Supremacist Label


Aside from the obvious, these individuals, groups, klaven, or whatever they are called  apparently have never listened to themselves. First the idea that American was made for Whites doesn’t take into account that the Native Americans were here before Columbus (who was slave trader aside from being an explorer). There were the Pilgrims as far as we know who were essential persecuted  religious folk who attempted to “whiten” the Native Americans with their own version of how things should be. From that time on it would always be that the native Americans were savages (hard to believe that a person would protect themselves from  invaders who were trying to change their way of life rather than understand it). To move along: since the first “whites” arrived on the North American continent, the Native Americans have suffered diseases, rape, murder and displacement almost to extinction. These are the same events that occurred in Africa ( the Dark Continent) precipitated by the various wars in ancient Europe and Egypt when Black and brown  ( so called Yellow skinned folk in the east) residents   were stolen, sold, raped and displaced. The nature of those events brought millions to North American shores ( the ones who survived the trip). Given this information who would you consider to be the  bad actors in this? There is a line where the interviewee mentions “mongrelizing your seed” – what would you consider the uncounted rapes of the captives?- I think the last line of the post below shows how out of touch these folks are and will not hesitate to create whatever dissension they can to further their agenda to the detriment of us all!-MA

JAY REEVES,
Associated Press 20 hours ago

PELHAM, N.C. (AP) — In today’s racially charged environment, there’s a label that even the KKK disavows: white supremacy.
Standing on a muddy dirt road in the dead of night near the North Carolina-Virginia border, masked Ku Klux Klan members claimed Donald Trump’s election as president proves whites are taking back America from blacks, immigrants, Jews and other groups they describe as criminals and freeloaders. America was founded by and for whites, they say, and only whites can run a peaceful, productive society.
But still, the KKK members insisted in an interview with The Associated Press, they’re not white supremacists, a label that is gaining traction in the country since Trump won with the public backing of the Klan, neo-Nazis and other white racists.
“We’re not white supremacists. We believe in our race,” said a man with a Midwestern accent and glasses just hours before a pro-Trump Klan parade in a nearby town. He, like three Klan compatriots, wore a robe and pointed hood and wouldn’t give his full name, in accordance with Klan rules.
Claiming the Klan isn’t white supremacist flies in the face of its very nature. The Klan’s official rulebook, the Kloran — published in 1915 and still followed by many groups — says the organization “shall ever be true in the faithful maintenance of White Supremacy,” even capitalizing the term for emphasis. Watchdog groups also consider the Klan a white supremacist organization, and experts say the groups’ denials are probably linked to efforts to make their racism more palatable.
Still, KKK groups today typically renounce the term. The same goes for extremists including members of the self-proclaimed “alt-right,” an extreme branch of conservatism mixing racism, white nationalism and populism.
“We are white separatists, just as Yahweh in the Bible told us to be. Separate yourself from other nations. Do not intermix and mongrelize your seed,” said one of the Klansmen who spoke along the muddy lane.
The Associated Press interviewed the men, who claimed membership in the Loyal White Knights of the KKK, in a nighttime session set up with help of Chris Barker, a KKK leader who confirmed details of the group’s “Trump victory celebration” in advance of the event. As many as 30 cars paraded through the town of Roxboro, North Carolina, some bearing Confederate and KKK flags.
Barker didn’t participate, though: He and a Klan leader from California were arrested hours earlier on charges linked to the stabbing of a third KKK member during a fight, sheriff’s officials said. Both men were jailed; the injured man was recovering.
Like the KKK members, Don Black said he doesn’t care to be called a white supremacist, either. Black — who operates stormfront.org, a white extremist favorite website, from his Florida home — he prefers “white nationalist.”
“White supremacy is a legitimate term, though not usually applicable as used by the media. I think it’s popular as a term of derision because of the implied unfairness, and, like ‘racism,’ it’s got that ‘hiss’ (and, like ‘hate’ and ‘racism,’ frequently ‘spewed’ in headlines),” Black said in an email interview.
The Klan formed 150 years ago, just months after the end of the Civil War, and quickly began terrorizing freed blacks. Hundreds of people were assaulted or killed as whites tried to regain control of the defeated Confederacy. During the civil rights movement, Klan members were convicted of using murder as a weapon against equality. Leaders from several different Klan groups have told AP they have rules against violence aside from self-defense, and opponents agree the KKK has toned itself down after a string of members went to prison years after the fact for deadly arson attacks, beatings, bombings and shootings.
The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, which monitor white extremist organizations and are tracking an increase in reports of racist incidents since the election, often use the “white supremacist” label when describing groups like the Klan; white nationalism and white separatism are parts of the ideology. But what exactly is involved?
The ADL issued a report last year describing white supremacists as “ideologically motivated by a series of racist beliefs, including the notion that whites should be dominant over people of other backgrounds, that whites should live by themselves in a whites-only society, and that white people have their own culture and are genetically superior to other cultures.”
That sounds a lot like some of the ideas espoused by today’s white radicals, yet they reject the label. That’s likely because they learned the lessons of one-time Klan leader David Duke, who unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate in Louisiana this year, said Penn State University associate professor Josh Inwood.
“(There was) this peddling of kinder, softer white supremacy. He tried to pioneer a more respectable vision of the Klan,” Inwood said.
Extremist expert Sophie Bjork-James, a scholar at Vanderbilt University, prefers the term “racist right” to describe today’s white supremacists.
“They are not simply conservative or alt-right, but actually espousing racist ideas and racist goals,” she said. “They won’t agree with this label, but I think it is important to be clear about what they represent and what their goals are.”
Whatever you call them, the muddy-road Klansmen said their beliefs have gained a foothold. The popularity of Trump’s proposal to build a wall on the Mexican border — an idea long espoused by the Klan — is part of the proof, they said.
“White Americans are finally, most of them, opening their eyes and coming around and seeing what is happening,” said a man in a satiny green Klan robe.