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Donald Trump, The Radical Right Is Setting You Up In Washington!


This post from Russell Simmons speaks directly to what the Trump Presidency could mean. MA

Russell Simons

01/26/2017

I know we haven’t spoken since your run for office. The truth is, I never thought you would become president. I’m sure the comments I made publicly and to the press against your platform broke our friendship apart. That said, I still have some advice for the man I used to consider a friend. You are being set up.

I am convinced you are the Trojan horse. The extremists in the Republican Party and religious right have been praying for a long time to put a candidate in the position to turn back the tide of our forward push for justice and equality, which is in effect the American dream. The pendulum of consciousness always swings towards compassion and justice. There are moments that it swings back but once given a taste of freedom the people will thirst for it and will not let anyone take that away. African-Americans will never again be slaves, women will never again lose their right to vote or go quietly back into the coat hanger days, the LGBTQ community will not go back into the closet, the right to worship as we see fit will not be taken from one — you will have to strip it from everyone.

No American president has ever entered the Oval Office with an agenda so set on trying to undo the civil, social and political gains for equality that have been so long fought. And now we are bracing to have all of our victories overturned. Those lowest common denominator radicals of the Republican party have you locked in a role to do their bidding.

You came into the race as a strong independent voice and now you are going down a path of having the mainstream Republican party impeach you for many of your questionable choices that some of them support privately, but don’t want to carry the weight of.

I find it hard to believe you are comfortable going down in history as being impeached as the president who was taken out for Russian ties or signing off on the Dakota/Keystone pipelines benefiting a company you held stock in? When this happens where will they be? They will tell the American public it was all on you as they reap the rewards of some of the worst decisions a president has made for the people he is supposed to serve. If you are impeached, Vice President Pence will have the position he has always wanted with all the dirty work done for him without having lifted a hand. And in the best case scenario for you, which is you stay for the entire term, you will leave a legacy of heightened racial discord, massive environmental destruction and the shame of having repealed legislation that promoted equality and fairness for all Americans. You will continue to be shunned and protested against by the majority of citizens who will blame you for your radical and dangerous attacks on everything America stands for.

My advice to you is don’t let yourself get played by these suckas in Washington. Or we, the American public, will all pay for your naivety. We will be left to suffer as individuals who must deal with racism being accepted again, women being treated as second class citizens, the aftermath of immigrant families broken up and deported and an environment that will succumb to the mounting crisis of climate change. Future generations will be in an irreversible position of not being able to sustain the Earth they live on. You will be forgotten and dismissed by the radical right when you are long gone. A foolish blip in the big story of a sad American tragedy.

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TOTUS


It is evident that we are in for a rocky four years of governing, we have a President who seems to have no idea of the job he has taken on and seems to believe he can govern alone. Add to this a neer do well Congress and you have a perfect cocktail of ineptitude.MA  

Donald Trump’s Profound Laziness Is Already on Full Display
Jay Willis
January 23, 2017 9:27 AM Getty Images
Welcome to the first “fake it ’til you make it” presidency in American history.
President Donald Trump’s first three days are in the books, and they proved exactly as horrifying and surreal as the last 18 months that Candidate Trump inflicted on America. On Saturday, while on an official visit to Central Intelligence Agency headquarters—and in front of a memorial honoring the men and women of the intelligence community who died in service of their country—Trump rambled angrily about his “running war with the media,” just moments after trotting out newly minted White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer to shout delusional, easily disprovable lies about, of all things, the number of people who attended his inauguration. What’s clear is that unapologetic propagandists now occupy the White House dais, and for the next four years, Americans will be governed by officials who remain wholly uninterested in earning their trust.
Trump’s obsession with crowd size is emblematic of his most crippling insecurity: He has no creativity, no originality, and no clue what to do next. His desperate craving to be liked runs so deep that, as he transformed from political outsider to major-party nominee to president-elect, he began shamelessly borrowing ideas from the types of respected, popular politicians that he wished he could be. His wife’s address at the Republican National Convention lifted entire sections from a speech delivered by the previous First Lady. He stole an inspiring photograph of giddy, euphoric crowds taken at the inauguration of his predecessor, because no such crowds attended his. Even the smallest subjects cannot escape this creatively bankrupt laziness: When planning the inaugural ball, his people requested an exact replica of the cake President Obama had made four years earlier. So, yes, Donald Trump kicked off his presidency by plagiarizing a cake.
The little indiscretions are funny, but they are more revealing than entertaining. For years, the Republican Party has solemnly pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act, that dastardly albatross responsible for making healthcare available to 20 million previously uninsured Americans, as soon as they are given the chance. Every serious GOP presidential candidate—including Trump—made their plan for replacing the ACA a central tenet of their pitch to prospective voters. On his first day in office, Trump’s version of delivering on his promise was issuing an executive order that “directed” federal agencies to try really hard to make Obamacare go away.
It is the policy of my Administration to seek the prompt repeal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Public Law 111-148), as amended (the “Act”). In the meantime, pending such repeal, it is imperative for the executive branch to ensure that the law is being efficiently implemented, take all actions consistent with law to minimize the unwarranted economic and regulatory burdens of the Act, and prepare to afford the States more flexibility and control to create a more free and open healthcare market.
This isn’t leadership. It demonstrates no coherent vision. It’s a feeble, feckless, empty gesture, the kind you make when you (1) know you’re supposed to think that something is bad, but (2) also aren’t really sure what that thing is and can’t be bothered to read the Simple English Wikipedia article describing it, either. Even Trump’s omnipresent campaign slogan—”Make America Great Again”—shows just how brutally bereft of original ideas he is. It’s the sort of vague, aspirational nonsense that one would expect to hear from a man who learned everything he knows about being president of the United States from watching other men play one on TV.
Of course, no newly elected president steps into the White House fully prepared for the myriad challenges he or she will face. But Trump is unwilling or unable to grasp his shortcomings, and instead appears prepared to mask them by employing a two-pronged strategy: Come out with strong, forceful takes on substantively irrelevant subjects that he can easily understand, and glibly borrow from others when it comes to the hard political decisions that Americans expect him to make. This patchwork, smoke-and-mirrors approach to governance isn’t sustainable, but so far, it’s all he’s got.

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No Jedi Mind Trick


Ewan McGregor Praised By Stars For Canceling on Piers Morgan

Ewan McGregor is receiving praise from fellow celebrities for canceling an interview with Piers Morgan in the wake of the journalist’s criticism of the Women’s March.
As Gossip Cop reported, Morgan ripped the Women’s March On Washington in a series of tweets on Saturday. He was immediately hit with a backlash, which only led him to criticize the peaceful protests even more. He went on to write a Daily Mail column blasting Madonna’s Women’s March speech, in which she admitted to thinking about “blowing up the White House.” He also again lambasted the event in general.
Now on Tuesday, McGregor was scheduled to appear on “Good Morning Britain,” for which Morgan is one of the anchors. The actor tweeted, however, “Was going on Good Morning Britain, didn’t realise @piersmorgan was host. Won’t go on with him after his comments about #WomensMarch.” Not surprisingly, Morgan immediately fired back on Twitter, as well as on air. He also quickly wrote a new Daily Mail article slamming the star. The headline: “Memo to anyone who voted for Trump or Brexit — pedophile-loving hypocrite Ewan McGregor holds you in utter contempt. So why on earth would you want to see any of his movies ever again?”
In addition to calling out McGregor’s political views and his work with Roman Polanski, Morgan argued that the T2 Trainspotting actor was unprofessional for bailing at the last minute, after already arriving at the ITV studios. He pointed out that other staffers had been working on the segment, and it been promoted since Monday. He further suggested McGregor could’ve confronted him instead of leaving.
But McGregor is also being cheered for his decision to back out. Patrick Stewart tweeted, “Bravo Ewan. Standing right there with you.” The message was retweeted by Ben Stiller. Vincent D’Onofrio said, “Good man Ewan. I back you 100%.” And Jessica Chastain posted, “You are an incredible human being. Thank you for your support of #WomensMarch and women all over the world.”
As Gossip Cop reported at the time, McGregor was one of the celebrities who tweeted in support of the Women’s March last weekend. He wrote, “I’m with you in spirit today women of the world. My daughters are marching. I’m so proud to see this extraordinary power.”

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House GOP Enacts Rule Allowing Lawmakers To Fire, Slash Salaries Of Individual Federal Employees


It is odd that the Congress is not making moves to slash their own salaries. Just another reason to watch the Congress closely. MA
House GOP enacts rule allowing lawmakers to fire, slash salaries of individual federal employees
5:52 a.m. ET

Peter Weber
At the same closed-door meeting on Monday where House Republicans voted to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics — a move scrapped after a public outcry — the House GOP also adopted a motion by Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) that allows Congress to single out individual federal employees and eliminate their jobs or reduce their pay down to as little as $1, or cut specific federal programs, through amendments to the budget. The procedural mechanism, adopted Tuesday, is called the Holman Rule, named after the Indiana congressman who created it in 1876, The Washington Post explains:
Early in its history, the rule was used to eliminate patronage jobs, particularly customs agents, in the late 19th century before the federal workforce shifted to a nonpolitical civil service. The rule was dropped in 1983, when then-House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill Jr. (D-Mass.) objected to spending cuts proposed by Republicans and conservative Democrats. Griffith, known as the unofficial parliamentarian in the hard-line conservative Freedom Caucus, sought to revive it out of frustration with an $80 million federal program that pays for the care of wild horses on federal land in the West. He considers the program wasteful. [The Washington Post]
Democrats and even some of Griffith’s GOP colleagues opposed the change, arguing that it could be abused to target bureaucrats for political reasons — Donald Trump’s presidential transition team has requested the names of federal workers who focus on climate change, for example — and will gum up the budget process with politically controversial, small-bore amendments. In a concession to skeptical Republicans, the rule expires in a year unless re-authorized. You can read more about the Holman Rule at The Washington Post. Peter Weber

The Empty Talking Heads


 

The two prominent political pundits, explainers and almost human talking heads have uttered (and probably will continue to) statements that are geared more to incite voters more than inform. Without them we would never know how people in the spotlight can influence opinion through faux news and information. Apparently Mr. O’Reilly is in the camp of the alt-right.  MA

Newt Gingrich and Bill O’Reilly are both well known pundits(?) who take to the airwaves at any opportunity to use their celebrity to tout crap! Recently Gingrich offered explanations that Mr. Trump has decided to stop using the “drain the swamp” statement since the Donald was “over it”. Mr. Gingrich is called a Trump ally but it may be more like a self appointed explainer.

This from Mr. O’Reilly:
Fox News host Bill O’Reilly said efforts to abolish the Electoral College system are “all about race.”

O’Reilly said on “The O’Reilly Factor” Tuesday night there is a “hidden reason” for liberals seeking to change the system.

“If the Electoral College were abolished, presidential candidates could simply campaign in the nation’s largest cities, New York, L.A., Chicago, Houston,” he said. “And rack up enough votes to pretty much win any election.”

O’Reilly claimed Democrats wanted to campaign only in cities where “the minority vote usually goes heavily to the Democrats,” effectively “neutralizing the largely white rural areas in the Midwest and the South.”

“Very few commentators will tell you that the heart of liberalism in America is based on race,” O’Reilly said. “It permeates almost every issue – that white men have set up a system of oppression and that system must be destroyed.”

O’Reilly said that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, and to some extent nominee Hillary Clinton, peddled the idea that “so-called white privilege bad, diversity good.”

“The left sees white privilege in America as an oppressive force that must be done away with,” he said.

Summing up his argument, O’Reilly said, “The left wants power taken away from the white establishment, and they want a profound change in the way America is run.”

Calls to abolish the Electoral College have been mounting since Clinton lost the election to President-elect Donald Trump, despite winning nearly 3 million more votes than him. She ended up with a total of 227 Electoral College votes to his 304 – five electors who were supposed to vote for Clinton defected and voted for someone else on Monday, while two refused to cast their ballots for Trump.

To Fix Obamacare, The GOP Needs To Tackle This Major Flaw In The Health Care System


 

Here again the failure of the GOP to fully understand and assist in the creation of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), The GOP effectively denied coverage for many due to their political goals being put ahead of the public good.MA
Rita Numerof, PhD, president of Numerof & Associates
22 Hours Ago
CNBC.com

As Republicans in Washington get set to reshape national health-care policy, it is critical that the surrounding debate distinguishes between two related but distinct issues: access to coverage and access to care.
In other areas of policy, we understand this distinction. We know that the issues of homelessness and affordable housing are linked, but not the same. Solutions for one are not automatically fixes for the other. We see the same thing with other basic health issues like food security and nutrition.
Only in health care do we consider the decades-long challenge of delivering high-quality and cost-efficient care “solved” once everyone nominally has access to some sort of insurance.

But real health-care reform is not just about coverage. Getting people into exchange plans they can barely afford, with heavy (and increasing) deductibles and taxpayer-funded subsidies, is a “homeless shelter” fix. It’s better than being on the streets — for sure — but a homeless shelter isn’t a home any more than a high-deductible “bronze” plan is a real health-care solution for a family that can barely afford to pay the rest of its bills.
If we want to fix this system, it’s time to get serious about replacing fee-for-service provider reimbursement with approaches that link costs to outcomes, like bundled payments and population health.

Health care in a post-Obamacare world: Centene CEO
Thursday, 15 Dec 2016 | 7:15 AM ET | 04:50
“If we are serious about reform, we need to move beyond the current obsession with coverage to a real debate about accountability, transparency, cost and quality.”
The Obama administration has pushed forward on several value-based care initiatives, but one of the most striking success stories we’ve had occurred under the previous Republican administration.
In 2008, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) announced it would no longer pay for so-called never events — preventable incidents like hospital falls or objects left in patients after surgery that should never happen in modern health-care delivery organizations.
This first meaningful connection between payment and outcomes led directly to a 17 percent decline in hospital-acquired conditions from 2012 to 2013. Notably, it took financial incentives/consequences before this happened.
Unfortunately, there are worrisome signs that the incoming Trump administration is less committed to the idea of value-based care. It will be important to differentiate between the baby (payment reform) and the bathwater (onerous regulations and reporting requirements) if we’re ever going to get to true value in health care.
A second key goal for reform is more in keeping with Trump’s campaign messages. Unwinding the existing incentives for consolidation would help preserve the competitiveness of many local markets, and thereby protect working-class families. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) established a bureaucratic labyrinth of new organizational structures, regulations and incentives.
Rather than focusing on the capabilities and culture needed to move toward better outcomes at lower cost, providers and payers have been compelled to invest in new staff and technologies to comply with all these new regulations.
On the provider side, this effort spawned a flood of consolidation, with health-care delivery systems buying or affiliating with other systems, and physicians seeking refuge in employment from proliferating bureaucracy. A grave danger we face as a nation is that all these systems become too big to fail — and, more importantly, too big to care.
Finally, it is past time to require transparency of cost and outcomes, so consumers can make informed choices about their care. Having awareness that not every hospital is performing equally well allows consumers to make judicious decisions, an important first step toward a true market-based health-care system.
Health care is an issue that affects all Americans. It costs too much, it is piecemeal, there is little accountability for outcomes, and it is not consumer-centered.
In virtually every other industry, consumer demand drives service providers and product manufacturers to improve quality and compete on price. In contrast, the approach in health care has always been to try to reduce costs by manipulating organizational structures — as with HMOs or Accountable Care Organizations — while leaving in place the original sin of fee-for-service provider reimbursement.
This will always incentivize volume-driven care decisions, not a focus on outcomes.
If we are serious about reform, we need to move beyond the current obsession with coverage to a real debate about accountability, transparency, cost and quality.
Commentary by Rita Numerof, PhD, president of Numerof & Associates, a firm that helps businesses across the health-care sector define and implement strategies for winning in dynamic markets.

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The internet is broken. Starting from scratch, here’s how I’d fix it.


Informative article on the beginnings of the internet and its subsequent misuse/ abuse. It is a slightly dry read but worth going through and if you think you know it all then you definitely need to read this. MA

Published on December 14, 2016

Walter Isaacson
CEO at Aspen Institute
My big idea is that we have to fix the internet. After forty years, it has begun to corrode, both itself and us. It is still a marvelous and miraculous invention, but now there are bugs in the foundation, bats in the belfry, and trolls in the basement.
I do not mean this to be one of those technophobic rants dissing the Internet for rewiring our brains to give us the twitchy attention span of Donald Trump on Twitter or pontificating about how we have to log off and smell the flowers. Those qualms about new technologies have existed ever since Plato fretted that the technology of writing would threaten memorization and oratory. I love the internet and all of its digital offshoots. What I bemoan is its decline.
There is a bug in its original design that at first seemed like a feature but has gradually, and now rapidly, been exploited by hackers and trolls and malevolent actors: its packets are encoded with the address of their destination but not of their authentic origin. With a circuit-switched network, you can track or trace back the origins of the information, but that’s not true with the packet-switched design of the internet.
Compounding this was the architecture that Tim Berners-Lee and the inventors of the early browsers created for the World Wide Web. It brilliantly allowed the whole of the earth’s computers to be webbed together and navigated through hyperlinks. But the links were one-way. You knew where the links took you. But if you had a webpage or piece of content, you didn’t exactly know who was linking to you or coming to use your content.
All of that enshrined the potential for anonymity. You could make comments anonymously. Go to a webpage anonymously. Consume content anonymously. With a little effort, send email anonymously. And if you figured out a way to get into someone’s servers or databases, you could do it anonymously.
For years, the benefits of anonymity on the Net outweighed its drawbacks. People felt more free to express themselves, which was especially valuable if they were dissidents or hiding a personal secret. This was celebrated in the famous 1993 New Yorker cartoon, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
Now the problem is nobody can tell if you’re a troll. Or a hacker. Or a bot. Or a Macedonian teenager publishing a story that the Pope has endorsed Trump.
This has poisoned civil discourse, enabled hacking, permitted cyberbullying, and made email a risk. Its inherent lack of security has allowed Russian actors to screw with our democratic process.
The lack of secure identification and authentication inherent in the internet’s genetic code has also prevented easy transactions, thwarted financial inclusion, destroyed the business models of content creators, unleashed deluges of spam, and forced us to use passwords and two-factor authentication schemes that would have baffled Houdini.
The trillions being spent and the IQ points of computer science talent being allocated to tackle security issues makes it a drag, rather than a spur, to productivity in some sectors.
In Plato’s Republic, we learn the tale of the Ring of Gyges. Put it on, and you’re invisible and anonymous. The question that Plato asks is whether those who put on the ring will be civil and moral. He thinks not. The Internet has proven him correct.
The Web is no longer a place of community, no longer an agora. Every day more sites are eliminating comments sections.
If we could start from scratch, here’s what I think we would do:
Create a system that enables content producers to negotiate with aggregators and search engines to get a royalty whenever their content is used, like ASCAP has negotiated for public performances and radio airings of its members’ works.
Embed a simple digital wallet and currency for quick and easy small payments for songs, blogs, articles, and whatever other digital content is for sale.
Encode emails with an authenticated return or originating address.
Enforce critical properties and security at the lowest levels of the system possible, such as in the hardware or in the programming language, instead of leaving it to programmers to incorporate security into every line of code they write.
Build chips and machines that update the notion of an internet packet. For those who want, their packets could be encoded or tagged with metadata that describe what they contain and give the rules for how it can be used.
Most internet engineers think that these reforms are possible, from Vint Cerf, the original TCP/IP coauthor, to Milo Medin of Google, to Howard Shrobe, the director of cybersecurity at MIT. “We don’t need to live in cyber hell,” Shrobe has argued.
Implementing them is less a matter of technology than of cost and social will. Some people, understandably, will resist any diminution of anonymity, which they sometimes label privacy.
So the best approach, I think, would be to try to create a voluntary system, for those who want to use it, to have verified identification and authentication.
People would not be forced to use such a system. If they wanted to communicate and surf anonymously, they could. But those of us who choose, at times, not to be anonymous and not to deal with people who are anonymous should have that right as well. That’s the way it works in the real world.
The benefits would be many: Easy and secure ways to deal with your finances and medical records. Small payment systems that could reward valued content rather than the current incentive to concentrate on clickbait for advertising. Less hacking, spamming, cyberbullying, trolling, and the spewing of anonymous hate. And the possibility of a more civil discourse.
Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, is the author of The Innovators and biographies of Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs. This essay is partly drawn from a talk delivered to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Why do Republicans want to repeal Obamacare so much? Because it would be a big tax cut for the rich.


There are graphs associated with this post unfortunately they did not transfer  but you can search out Matt O’Brien @Wonkblog for the details. MA
Wonkblog analysis

By Matt O’Brien
December 16 at 7:50 AM

(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
There are going to be so many tax cuts for the rich, you’re going to get tired of tax cuts for the rich. You’re going to say, “Mr. President, please don’t cut taxes for the rich so much, this is getting terrible.”
And it will start when Republicans repeal Obamacare.
This is the Rosetta Stone for understanding why conservatives have acted like subsidized health care was the end of the republic itself. It wasn’t just that it had the word “Obama” in its name, which, in our polarized age, was enough to ensure that 45 percent of the country would despise it. No, it was that Obamacare was one of the biggest redistributive policies of the last 50 years. The Republican Party, after all, exists for what seems like the sole purpose of reversing redistribution.
A quick recap: Obamacare is a kind of three-legged stool. First, it tells insurance companies that they can’t discriminate against sick people anymore; second, it tells people that they have to buy insurance or pay a penalty, so that everyone doesn’t just wait until they’re sick to get covered; and third, it helps people who can’t afford the plans they have to buy be able to. Which is to say that you need to come up with a whole lot of money to make this work — money that Obamacare gets by taxing the rich. Indeed, at its most basic level, it raises taxes on the top 1 percent to pay for health insurance for the bottom 40 percent.
So undoing Obamacare would undo a lot of taxes at the top, and a lot of subsidies at the bottom. You can see that in the chart below from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. They crunched the numbers to figure out how much getting rid of Obamacare’s taxes and tax credits would help or hurt people at different rungs of the income ladder, and the results were about what you’d expect. The bottom 40 percent are a good deal worse off, the middle 55 percent are mostly unaffected, and the top 1 percent would do pretty, pretty well. In fact, they’d get an average tax cut of around $32,820.  It’s a reverse Robin Hood. It’s taking tax subsidies from the poor to give as tax cuts to the rich. The starkest way to think about that is that the bottom 60 percent would get negative 61.1 percent of the total benefits of getting rid of Obamacare, while the top 1 percent would get 117.5 percent. That’s right: the wealthiest would gain more than the country as a whole would, because the working class wouldn’t be gaining anything at all. They’d be losing tax credits, and the health insurance those bought them.
It’s even more lopsided than it sounds. The 44.8 percent of the total benefits that the 99 to 99.9 percent would get makes them seem like plebes compared to the 72.7 percent that the top 0.1 percent would.
What we can’t say, though, is how much the “repeal” part of “repeal and replace” would make up for the “repeal” part. That’s because Republicans still haven’t figured that out almost seven years later. The problem is that it’s hard to come up with a conservative alternative to Obamacare when Obamacare is the conservative alternative. It’s the market-based way to try to insure the uninsured. Think about it like this: if you want to make insurance companies cover people with preexisting conditions, then you need a mandate, and if you have a mandate, then you need subsidies to make it affordable. Obamacare, in other words, is the If-You-Give-A-Mouse-With-Preexisting-Conditions-An-Insurance-Plan system of health care reform.
Now, maybe Republicans really will put together their own plan . . . but maybe they won’t. It’s hard to see where they’d get the money for one when they’re so committed to getting rid of all the taxes that pay for Obamacare now.
Getting tired of tax cuts for the rich yet?

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

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.