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saberal

Sen. Rubio & Rep. Malliotakis: Biden's human rights choice - turn blind eye to UN corru... - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...o-rubio-rep-nicole-malliotakis

US politics

shared by saberal on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • President Joe Biden has made his intentions to return to the failed foreign policies of the past very clear. This includes the Biden administration’s intent for the United States to "re-engage immediately and robustly" with the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) without receiving any commitments for much needed institutional reforms. 
  • More than 60 years later, the basic rights of the Cuban people remain nonexistent. Shamefully, Cuba is a current member of the UNHCR, where they are given a platform to speak on human rights. This is an absolute slap in the face to the Cuban people.  
  • In a matter of years, Maduro transformed Venezuela from one of the wealthiest countries in South America into an economic catastrophe, where Venezuelans cannot access basic essentials. The illegitimate regime has killed and tortured dissidents, independent reporters, university students and civilians. This is the same regime that was found to have committed crimes against humanity by the U.N. Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela. 
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  • America’s presence on the council, alongside these nations, only legitimizes the hypocritical abuses that have plagued this body for years. For the sake of those suffering under repressive regimes, President Biden must make the right choice and stand for human rights. 
  • The bottom line is this: returning to the UNHRC would require a dramatic overhaul of this corrupt body to implement its founding mission. Oppressed peoples around the world are watching in the hopes that America will stand with them and against their oppressors.  
anonymous

Cyber Week in Review: April 23, 2021 | Council on Foreign Relations - 0 views

www.cfr.org/...yber-week-review-april-23-2021

cybersecurity russia

shared by anonymous on 25 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • the Russian government announced that it would expel ten U.S. diplomats and blacklist eight former and incumbent U.S. officials that were “involved in drafting and implementing anti-Russia policy.” The expulsions come after the Biden administration attributed the SolarWinds breach to Russia and implemented economic sanctions.
  • The UK government has launched a security campaign this week meant to educate domestic audiences on strategies used by foreign spies to steal sensitive or classified information. The campaign, titled “think before you link,” is a response to an increasing number of British nationals being targeted by malicious state actors masquerading as online recruiters
  • The new campaign is meant to combat these foreign actors by giving “practical advice on how to identify a malicious online profile, how to respond if approached, and how to minimize the risk of being targeted in the first place.”
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  • Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rand Paul (R-KY) introduced legislation on Wednesday that would bar government and local law enforcement agencies from purchasing the location data of U.S. citizens without a warrant. The “Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act” [PDF] would also criminalize the police use of “illegitimately obtained” data from technology brokers such as Clearview AI, a biometrics firm that has scraped and sold billions of photos from social media and other websites
  • Facebook announced that it had broken up two separate Palestinian hacker groups—one with alleged ties to the Palestinian Preventive Security Service (PSS), the intelligence service of the Palestinian Authority, and the other, known as Arid Viper, with reported links to the Hamas militant group.
  • the PSS-backed hackers are believed to be based in the West Bank and target entities primarily in Palestine and Syria, with a lesser focus on Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, and Libya. Their targets include journalists, critics of the Palestinian government, human rights activists, and military groups such as the Syrian opposition and Iraqi military.
katherineharron

Fact-checking Trump's impeachment debate in the House - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

trump

shared by katherineharron on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Only 13 months after the House first impeached President Donald Trump, lawmakers were back on Wednesday voting to impeach Trump an unprecedented second time for a US president. During the debate on the resolution, which charges that Trump incited a violent insurrection against the government on January 6, some of Trump's allies were still using many of the same arguments they did a year ago to criticize Democrats and defend Trump's actions.
  • Rep. Tom McClintock said that Trump's remarks at the Washington, DC, rally that preceded the Capitol insurrection were overly confrontational and sometimes inaccurate
  • "But what did he actually say? His exact words were: 'I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.' That's impeachable? That's called freedom of speech," McClintock said.
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  • Trump, for example, urged Republicans to stop fighting like a boxer "with his hands tied behind his back," saying, "We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. And we're going to have to fight much harder."
  • Trump alleged that there would be dire consequences if his supporters did not take immediate action -- saying that, if Biden took office, "You will have an illegitimate president. That's what you'll have. And we can't let that happen." And he said, "We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."
  • In sum: McClintock and other Trump allies are entitled to argue that all of these Trump comments are not impeachable, even that they are not incendiary. But he left a misleading impression when he posed the question, "but what did he actually say?" and did not mention the most contentious things Trump actually said.
  • "And I also want to thank my Democratic colleagues for finally joining Republicans in condemning mob violence after six months of refusing to acknowledge it."
  • Republicans are entitled to argue that Democrats should have issued such condemnations more forcefully or frequently, but it's just inaccurate to say or suggest they didn't issue the condemnations at all.
  • Mueller never said Trump did nothing wrong. In fact, Mueller's final report explains that there was strong evidence that Trump obstructed justice, on several occasions. But Mueller decided not to make a decision on whether to charge Trump, for many reasons, including Department of Justice policy that a president "cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office."
  • And according to figures released by the Justice Department, the investigation actually cost $32 million, not $40 million.
  • Jordan also said, as he has as far back as 2019, that the whistleblower who filed the primary 2019 complaint about Trump's dealings with Ukraine "worked for Joe Biden."
  • It's possible the whistleblower interacted with Biden in the course of their job duties in the government, but that's substantially different than working for Biden himself. The whistleblower's lawyers said in 2019 that "our client has spent their entire government career in apolitical, civil servant positions in the Executive Branch" and that "in these positions our client has come into contact with presidential candidates from both parties in their roles as elected officials -- not as candidates."
saberal

Lankford Apologizes to Black Constituents for Election Objections - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lankford-apology-election.html

US politics history Culture

shared by saberal on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Senator James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican who spent weeks trying to reverse the results of the presidential election before changing his mind at the last moment, apologized on Thursday to Black constituents who felt he had attacked their right to vote.
  • “After decades of fighting for voting rights, many Black friends in Oklahoma saw this as a direct attack on their right to vote, for their vote to matter, and even a belief that their votes made an election in our country illegitimate,” he wrote,
  • Democrats in Congress have viewed Mr. Lankford as a rare, cooperative partner on voting rights, and his decision to join those Republicans seeking to disenfranchise tens of millions of voters — many of them Black citizens living in Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee and Atlanta — came as a surprise.
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  • he had never intended to “diminish the voice of any Black American.” Still, he added, “I should have recognized how what I said and what I did could be interpreted by many of you.”
  • Mr. Lankford and other Republicans had claimed that by challenging the election results, they were exercising their independence and acting in the interests of constituents who were demanding answers.
  • In a joint statement that night with Senator Steve Daines, Republican of Montana, Mr. Lankford called on “the entire Congress to come together and vote to certify the election results.”
  • Mr. Lankford has faced calls from Black leaders to resign from the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, which is designed to commemorate the racist massacre in the city’s Greenwood district, an affluent Black community known as Black Wall Street. The massacre, which took place 100 years ago this spring, was one of the worst instances of racist violence in American history. A white mob destroyed the neighborhood and its Black-owned businesses, and up to 300 residents were killed.
Javier E

Ibram X. Kendi, Prophet of Anti-racism | National Review - 0 views

www.nationalreview.com/...x-kendi-prophet-of-anti-racism

anti-racism racism activism politics history Culture

shared by Javier E on 23 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Kendi now has four books at or near the top of the best-seller lists, including Stamped from the Beginning, which is a history of American racism that won the National Book Award in 2016, and two books on racism for younger readers. Racism is Kendi’s thing. His newest, How to Be an Antiracist, reappeared at the top of the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list this summer
  • Boston University announced it would offer Kendi, 38, the most prestigious tenured chair at its disposal, making him only the second holder of the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities.
  • The chair has been vacant since the death of the novelist and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel four years ago.
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  • The “antiracism” of which Kendi is the most trusted exponent is not just a new name for an old precept. It is the political doctrine behind the street demonstrations, “cancelings,” Twitter attacks, boycotts, statue topplings, and self-denunciations that have come together in a national movement
  • His parents moved to Manassas, Va., where he attended Stonewall Jackson High School. He won an oratory contest for a Bill Cosby–style exhortation calling on blacks to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, a performance that (on one hand) he remembers with shame but that (on the other) he begins the book with.
  • the anti-racism movement has grown to the point where Ibram X. Kendi can be said, for better or for worse, to be changing the country.
  • Kendi’s devout parents were drawn through their churches into political activism in the 1970s
  • Anti-racists assume that the American system of politics, economics, and policing has been corrupted by racial prejudice, that such prejudice explains the entire difference in socioeconomic status between blacks and others, that the status quo must be fought and beaten, and that anyone not actively engaged in this system-changing work is a collaborator with racism, and therefore himself a legitimate target for attack.
  • Asante’s goals were polemical as much as scholarly. “The rejection of European particularism as universal is the first stage of our coming intellectual struggle,” he taught Kendi
  • “What other people call racial microaggressions I call racist abuse,” he writes. “And I call the zero-tolerance policies preventing and punishing these abusers what they are: antiracist.”
  • the autobiographical parts of this book show him to be tentative, even anguished, about identity
  • His mentor in Philadelphia was Molefi Kete Asante, notorious at the dawn of political correctness a generation ago as the author of Afrocentricity (1980), which stressed that, long before the high point of Greek culture, Egyptians, who lived in Africa, were building the Pyramids.
  • The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. . .
  • As a prose stylist, Kendi is clear, direct, and even witty.
  • we must understand what Kendi means by “racism” in the first place.
  • “Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.”
  • it uses the concept of racism to define the concept of racism. It will seem less strange, and more powerful, when examined through the lens of academic race theory.
  • As the Minnesota legal theorist Alan David Freeman noted in his landmark 1978 essay “Legitimizing Racial Discrimination through Antidiscrimination Law,” the beneficiaries of a racist system (Freeman calls them “perpetrators”) are likely to view its dismantling as an ethical challenge. Getting over such a system means adopting an attitude of fairness and treating everyone the same.
  • The historic victims of that system, however, have a different perspective. They look at the system as having taken from them concrete things that were theirs by right — above all, jobs, money, and housing. They will not consider the problem fixed until those deprivations have been remedied
  • Kendi has done a bit of everything. He is an ideological everyman of race consciousness, his life a Bunyanesque pilgrimage from the Valley of Assimilation to the Mountains of Intersectionality.
  • ideas about race and racism are central to Kendi’s system of thought, and you will understand why when you focus on its one truly original element: His “antiracism” is not a doctrine of nondiscrimination. In fact, it is not even anti-racist, as that term is commonly understood.
  • He does not even pay lip service to neutral treatment
  • If practical equality for blacks is the imperative, discriminating on their behalf is going to be necessary
  • He wants not pious talk but the actual policies that will redistribute the advantages, the stuff, that whites have undeservingly acquired. “What if instead of a feelings advocacy,” he asks at one point, “we had an outcome advocacy that put equitable outcomes before our guilt and anguish?”
  • The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. 
  • It is why this book really is as “bold” as reviewers say it is, and why the judges who in 2016 gave Kendi the National Book Award were right to say he “turns our ideas of the term ‘racism’ upside-down.”
  • Kendi has decided that the two approaches to civil rights described by Freeman are not simply different perspectives on the same issue; they are mutually incompatible — one must destroy the other. “There is no neutrality in the racism struggle,” he insists. The old view of the perpetrators — that everything will be well as long as we treat people with equality, neutrality, and respect — is no longer just a different approach to the problem. It is illegitimate. It is a “racist” obstruction.
  • But also Oscar Lewis, once considered the hippest of radical anthropologists, for describing a “culture of poverty” in La Vida (1966) and other books.
  • To allude to color blindness or talk of a “post-racial society,” to back religious freedom or voter-ID laws . . . these are racist things, too. Even the overarching vision that rallied white liberals to civil rights — the belief that blacks could, and should, assimilate into American society — becomes morally suspect
  • Assimilation, Kendi announces at the start of his second chapter, expresses “the racist idea that a racial group is culturally or behaviorally inferior.” The idea is racist, Kendi reasons, because it is assumed the out-group would be improved by joining the in-group.
  • Also racist are those intellectuals and politicians whose explanations lessen in any way the weight of white racism among the causes of inequality:
  • Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, naturally, for their ideas on black family structure in Beyond the Melting Pot (1963)
  • Ihad to forsake the suasionist bred into me, of researching and educating for the sake of changing minds,” Kendi writes. “I had to start researching and educating to change policy.” Something similar is inscribed on Karl Marx’s gravestone in Highgate Cemetery in London. It is the credo of an activist, not a scholar
  • Kendi grants that blacks, too, can be racist, but we must understand the grudging sense in which he concedes this
  • He believes blacks can collaborate with the structures of white racism, as turncoats, agents, and enforcers
  • When Kendi opposes “racism,” he means only the treatment of blacks by European-descended peoples since the Age of Discovery, especially under the American system of slavery and Jim Crow.
  • But the racism itself is always white, no matter what the color of the person practicing it
  • He explicitly does not mean that he considers it wrong to discriminate by race in any abstract ethical sense.
  • On the contrary: He is carrying out the de-universalization of Western values that his mentor Asante urged.
  • To oppose reparations for slavery (or to have no opinion on the matter) is racist.
  • In African-American studies departments you can address racial problems in an atmosphere of esprit de corps and ideological unanimity.
  • their very isolation has turned them into mighty bases for consciousness-raising, dogma construction, and political organizing
  • It is from these hives of like-minded activists that the country’s human-resources departments have been staffed.
  • Those who are confident that Kendi’s argument is something they can take or leave probably do not understand what civil-rights law has become
  • The word “racist” is a powerful disciplinary tool; whoever controls its deployment can bend others to his will
  • it has become clear that corporations fear the word “racism” so much that they will betray their employees and permit their lives to be destroyed rather than risk being accused of it.
  • All this requires is a few redefinitions, and here the law appears to be on Kendi’s side. With its Bostock decision this spring, the Supreme Court went into the business of policing transphobia,
  • In Kendi’s book — which, it bears repeating, has been for much of this summer the best-selling nonfiction book in the United States — the line between white supremacists and climate-change deniers, between white supremacists and opponents of Obamacare, is hard to draw or discern
  • It is difficult to imagine a reform more likely to drive American ethnic (and other) groups apart than the much-discussed project of defunding, or even abolishing, urban police forces
  • The same can be said for the wave of iconoclasm. Satisfying though it may be to throw ropes around a monument of Andrew or Stonewall Jackson and pull it down on one wild night, the effect is to add a grievance to American history, not remove one
  • In light of these unintended consequences, one assertion of Kendi, mentioned earlier, is particularly troubling, because even a skeptical reader will need to pause over the author’s point. This is Kendi’s dismissal of assimilation — the belief that blacks can “join” American society on equal terms — as racist. “While segregationist ideas suggest a racial group is permanently inferior,” Kendi writes, “assimilationist ideas suggest a racial group is temporarily inferior.”
  • . For a couple of decades after the passage of civil-rights legislation, such black socioeconomic inequality as remained could be wished away by well-meaning people of all persuasions, whether quota Democrats or enterprise-zone Republicans
  • the persistence of this inequality through two whole generations puts those promises in a different light. The difference between “temporary” and “permanent” disadvantage looks like a rhetorical one. The dream, as Langston Hughes put it, has been deferred. A radical temptation arises.
  • Kendi, terrible simplificateur that he is, has picked up the gauntlet. As he sees it, there are only two explanations for this delay: Either you believe the problem is with blacks, unable to make it in a system that has been designed fairly for everyone, or you believe the problem is with whites, who have designed an unfair system that keeps blacks down.
Javier E

77 Days: Trump's Campaign to Subvert the Election - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-election-lie.html

trump election 2020 coup Politics conspiracy history gop

shared by Javier E on 03 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Thursday the 12th was the day Mr. Trump’s flimsy, long-shot legal effort to reverse his loss turned into something else entirely — an extralegal campaign to subvert the election, rooted in a lie so convincing to some of his most devoted followers that it made the deadly Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol almost inevitable.
  • with conspiratorial belief rife in a country ravaged by pandemic, a lie that Mr. Trump had been grooming for years finally overwhelmed the Republican Party and, as brake after brake fell away, was propelled forward by new and more radical lawyers, political organizers, financiers and the surround-sound right-wing media.
  • Across those 77 days, the forces of disorder were summoned and directed by the departing president, who wielded the power derived from his near-infallible status among the party faithful in one final norm-defying act of a reality-denying presidency.
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  • Throughout, he was enabled by influential Republicans motivated by ambition, fear or a misplaced belief that he would not go too far.
  • For every lawyer on Mr. Trump’s team who quietly pulled back, there was one ready to push forward with propagandistic suits that skated the lines of legal ethics and reason
  • That included not only Mr. Giuliani and lawyers like Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, but also the vast majority of Republican attorneys general, whose dead-on-arrival Supreme Court lawsuit seeking to discount 20 million votes was secretly drafted by lawyers close to the White House, The Times found.
  • With each passing day the lie grew, finally managing to do what the political process and the courts would not: upend the peaceful transfer of power that for 224 years had been the bedrock of American democracy.
  • The vote-stealing theory got its first exposure beyond the web the day before the election on Mr. Bannon’s show. Because of the Hammer, Mr. McInerney said, “it’s going to look good for President Trump, but they’re going to change it.” The Democrats, he alleged, were seeking to use the system to install Mr. Biden and bring the country to “a totalitarian state.”
  • with the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, backing him, Mr. Barr told the president that he could not manufacture evidence and that his department would have no role in challenging states’ results, said a former senior official with knowledge about the meeting, a version of which was first reported by Axios. The allegations about manipulated voting machines were ridiculously false, he added; the lawyers propagating them, led by Mr. Giuliani, were “clowns.”
  • Yet as the suits failed in court after court across the country, leaving Mr. Trump without credible options to reverse his loss before the Electoral College vote on Dec. 14, Mr. Giuliani and his allies were developing a new legal theory — that in crucial swing states, there was enough fraud, and there were enough inappropriate election-rule changes, to render their entire popular votes invalid.
  • As a result, the theory went, those states’ Republican-controlled legislatures would be within their constitutional rights to send slates of their choosing to the Electoral College.
  • Yet as the draft circulated among Republican attorneys general, several of their senior staff lawyers raised red flags. How could one state ask the Supreme Court to nullify another’s election results? Didn’t the Republican attorneys general consider themselves devoted federalists, champions of the way the Constitution delegates many powers — including crafting election laws — to each state, not the federal government?
  • In an interview, Mr. Kobach explained his group’s reasoning: The states that held illegitimate elections (which happened to be won by Mr. Biden) were violating the rights of voters in states that didn’t (which happened to be won by Mr. Trump).
  • The lawsuit was audacious in its scope. It claimed that, without their legislatures’ approval, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had made unconstitutional last-minute election-law changes, helping create the conditions for widespread fraud. Citing a litany of convoluted and speculative allegations — including one involving Dominion voting machines — it asked the court to shift the selection of their Electoral College delegates to their legislatures, effectively nullifying 20 million votes.
  • One lawyer knowledgeable about the planning, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said: “There was no plausible chance the court will take this up. It was really disgraceful to put this in front of justices of the Supreme Court.”
  • The next day, Dec. 9, Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana sent an email to his colleagues with the subject line, “Time-sensitive request from President Trump.” The congressman was putting together an amicus brief in support of the Texas suit; Mr. Trump, he wrote, “specifically asked me to contact all Republican Members of the House and Senate today and request that all join.” The president, he noted, was keeping score: “He said he will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review.”
  • Some 126 Republican House members, including the caucus leader, Mr. McCarthy, signed on to the brief, which was followed by a separate brief from the president himself. “This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!” Mr. Trump tweeted. Privately, he asked Senator Ted Cruz of Texas to argue the case.
  • By the time the bus pulled into West Monroe, La., for a New Year’s Day stop to urge Senator John Kennedy to object to certification, Mr. Trump was making it clear to his followers that a rally at the Ellipse in Washington on Jan. 6 was part of his plan. On Twitter, he promoted the event five times that day alone.
  • But talk at the rally was tilting toward what to do if they didn’t.“We need our president to be confirmed through the states on the 6th,” said Couy Griffin, the founder of Cowboys for Trump. “And right after that, we’re going to have to declare martial law.”
  • Though Ms. Kremer held the permit, the rally would now effectively become a White House production. After 12,000 miles of drumbeating through 44 stops in more than 20 states, they would be handing over their movement to the man whose grip on power it had been devised to maintain.
  • Mr. Barr had resigned in December. But behind the back of the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, the president was plotting with the Justice Department’s acting civil division chief, Jeffrey Clark, and a Pennsylvania congressman named Scott Perry to pressure Georgia to invalidate its results, investigate Dominion and bring a new Supreme Court case challenging the entire election. The scheming came to an abrupt halt when Mr. Rosen, who would have been fired under the plan, assured the president that top department officials would resign en masse.
  • But Mr. Cruz was working at cross-purposes, trying to conscript others to sign a letter laying out his circular logic: Because polling showed that Republicans’ “unprecedented allegations” of fraud had convinced two-thirds of their party that Mr. Biden had stolen the election, it was incumbent on Congress to at least delay certification and order a 10-day audit in the “disputed states.” Mr. Cruz, joined by 10 other objectors, released the letter on the Saturday after New Year’s.
  • The rally had taken on new branding, the March to Save America, and other groups were joining in, among them the Republican Attorneys General Association. Its policy wing, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, promoted the event in a robocall that said, “We will march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal,” according to a recording obtained by the progressive investigative group Documented.
  • Mr. Stockton said he was surprised to learn on the day of the rally that it would now include a march from the Ellipse to the Capitol. Before the White House became involved, he said, the plan had been to stay at the Ellipse until the counting of state electoral slates was completed.
  • Defiantly, to a great roar from the plaza, Ms. Chafian cried, “I stand with the Proud Boys, because I’m tired of the lies,” and she praised other militant nationalist groups in the crowd, including the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters.
  • Speakers including Mr. Byrne, Mr. Flynn, Mr. Jones, Mr. Stone and the Tennessee pastor Mr. Locke spoke of Dominion machines switching votes and Biden ballots “falling from the sky,” of “enemies at the gate” and Washington’s troops on the Delaware in 1776, of a fight between “good and evil.”“Take it back,” the crowd chanted. “Stop the steal.”
  • “What we do now is we take note of the people who betrayed President Trump in Congress and we get them out of Congress,” he said. “We’re going to make the Tea Party look tiny in comparison.”
brookegoodman

For Impeachment Witnesses, Testifying Can Cost $15,000 or More - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...impeachment-lawyers.html

politics us trump

shared by brookegoodman on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • a parade of State Department officials began trooping to Capitol Hill this month to testify in the impeachment inquiry imperiling President Trump
  • This time, instead of high-rolling players in Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, many of the witnesses are career government workers who helped shape or carry out policy toward Ukraine.
  • On civil-servant salaries, they have racked up bills of $15,000 or more for lawyers who can guide them through the morning-to-dusk sessions before congressional inquisitors.
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  • Even if a client pays in full, representing a single congressional witness is far less profitable than the corporate work that is the lifeblood of many Washington law firms.
  • “You do these cases because you believe in the client or you believe in the cause or you believe in the process, not because they are financially rewarding.”
  • So far, nearly a dozen witnesses have cooperated with the inquiry, most of whom are still in the government.
  • Witnesses still in government service could be risking their jobs by cooperating in defiance of a White House directive declaring the inquiry illegitimate.
  • Three days before Ms. Hill was to testify, two lawyers from the counsel’s office argued to him in a telephone conversation that the discussions she was privy to were protected by executive privilege.
  • Neither that whistle-blower nor a second one is paying them, but a charitable organization established to aid whistle-blowers has raised about $220,000 to cover their firm’s work.
brickol

Ex-White House chief Kelly claims he warned Trump about impeachment | US news | The Gua... - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...ial-philip-reeker-donald-trump

politics us trump

shared by brickol on 26 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • ohn Kelly, the former White House chief of staff, said he “felt bad” for having left Trump’s side, because his advice was not followed and the president therefore faced impeachment.
  • Kelly said that on leaving, he “said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t hire a ‘yes man’, someone who won’t tell you the truth’”. “Don’t do that,” the retired marine general said he told Trump. “Because if you do, I believe you will be impeached.”
  • Trump denies having done so but the House foreign affairs, intelligence and oversight committees have heard extensive testimony to the contrary.
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  • The former South Carolina congressman Mick Mulvaney replaced Kelly and still fills role in an acting capacity. He is under pressure, having told reporters Trump did make Ukraine the subject of a quid pro quo, withholding nearly $400m in US military aid while asking for political favours, the issue at the heart of the impeachment inquiry.
  • Taylor testified that he was told the aid would be withheld until Ukraine conducted the investigations Trump requested. Sondland and Taylor have testified and detailed their concerns about the influence of Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
  • Taylor wrote that he thought it was “crazy” to withhold aid for help with a political campaign.
  • The top US diplomat for Europe told the committees he had not known US aid may have been withheld in order to pressure Ukraine’s new president to conduct investigations helpful to Trump, a source told Reuters. The source said Reeker was prepared to say he had largely left Ukraine policy to Kurt Volker, then US special representative for Ukraine negotiations, and others.
  • Another diplomat, George Kent, testified that he was told to “lie low” and defer to three political appointees. Yovanovitch has accused the Trump administration of recalling her based on false claims.
  • The House committees have scheduled several depositions for next week, all behind closed doors. On Monday, former deputy national security adviser Charles Kupperman is due to testify. On Tuesday, lawmakers expect Alexander Vindman, the National Security Council’s top expert on Ukraine.
  • On Friday this week, Kupperman received a subpoena. He asked a federal court if he should comply or follow Trump’s directive not to, because he “cannot satisfy the competing demands of both the legislative and executive branches”. Without the court’s help, he said, he would have to make a decision that could “inflict grave constitutional injury” on Congress or the presidency.
  • Also on Friday, a federal judge rejected a claim by Trump and his Republican allies that the impeachment process was illegitimate because the full House had not voted to authorize it. The judge ordered the administration to give the judiciary committee secret material from the former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 US election.
  • The impeachment inquiry is expected to lead to a House vote before Christmas, most likely sending Trump to the Senate for trial. A conviction is unlikely but the White House and Republicans have faced criticism for their response so far, chaotic and confrontational rather than coordinated and effective.
anniina03

An Envoy's Damning Account of Trump's Ukraine Pressure and Its Consequences - The New Y... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mp-ukraine-william-taylor.html

politics trump policy economics

shared by anniina03 on 23 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • William B. Taylor Jr., the top American diplomat in Ukraine, laid out in visceral terms the stakes of what he saw as an illegitimate scheme to pressure the Kiev government for political help by suspending American security aid.
  • Mr. Taylor described a president holding up $391 million in assistance for the clear purpose of forcing Ukraine to help incriminate Mr. Trump’s domestic rivals.
  • the Ukraine scandal also extends to matters of life and death, as well as geopolitics on a grand scale.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • “If Ukraine succeeds in breaking free of Russian influence, it is possible for Europe to be whole, free, democratic and at peace,”
  • Yet in the publicly released portion of his testimony, Mr. Taylor neither described any direct conversation with Mr. Trump himself nor made any reference to documents or recordings that would explicitly implicate the president. Instead, he provided a road map for investigators by quoting others around Mr. Trump describing his actions and statements.
  • “We must support Ukraine in its fight against its bullying neighbor,” he told House investigators. “Russian aggression cannot stand.”
  • He recalled being stunned to learn during a secure video conference call on July 18 that the aid to Ukraine had been delayed with no explanation other than that “the directive had come from the president to the chief of staff to” the Office of Management and Budget.
  • “I and others sat in astonishment,” he testified. “The Ukrainians were fighting the Russians and counted on not only the training and weapons, but also the assurance of U.S. support.”
  • 13,000 Ukrainians had been killed in the war, one or two a week. More Ukrainians would undoubtedly die without the U.S. military assistance.”
  • Mr. Sondland explained that Mr. Trump saw it through a transactional lens. “When a businessman is about to sign a check to someone who owes him something, he said, the businessman asks that person to pay up before signing the check,” Mr. Taylor said, quoting Mr. Sondland. Mr. Volker “used the same terms several days later.”
Javier E

Kings, Presidents and Foreign Subversion | Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...sidents-and-foreign-subversion

presidency authority power fiduciary

shared by Javier E on 10 Dec 19 - No Cached
  • After the Stuart Restoration, Charles II sought to loosen his dependence on Parliament by among other things receiving subsidies (large cash payments) from Louis XIV, King of France. The ability to supply tax revenue for impoverished Kings is basically the root of all parliamentary power in what is now the United Kingdom. At the time the King being in the pay of a foreign King wasn’t without controversy. But it didn’t seem absurd on its face, as it would to us today, because in many ways the theory was that the King owned the country.
  • But the King owned his power. His sovereignty and the bundle of powers he used to enforce it were his. Any sense of what was in the public interest or his personal interest was an irrelevancy or not even entirely comprehensible because again, he was King. He didn’t just have the powers. He owned them. In a sense he owned the whole country.
  • This is a critical backdrop to all those provisions in the US Constitution about foreign subversion and subsidies. Seen through this perspective, which is the proper one, there are numerous provisions in the Constitution meant to ensure that the President remains beholden to the Constitution and the Congress. He doesn’t own his powers.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The US constitution gives the President a great deal of power. That power has been added to immensely by constitutional interpretations from the 20th century and especially those from the late 20th century tied to the President’s powers as “commander-in-chief” of the US armed forces.
  • ut the powers are real and they were a key element behind the passage of the constitution itself in 1787
  • There was a growing consensus that the Articles of Confederation that preceded them, designed in the context of extreme wariness of monarchical and executive power, simply lacked the energy and executive power to defend itself and what remained a generally weak country. A great deal of the debate in essays of ‘The Federalist’ grapple with how to make an executive potent and yet restrainable.
  • But the key through-line through the whole constitutional document is that the powers of the President are given to him or her for the specific and sole purposes of protecting the constitution, enforcing the laws and protecting the national interest. They are not owned but on loan.
  • The President is a fiduciary of the American people, much as a financial advisor or lawyer or trustee to whom you give a great deal of power but only to act on your behalf. The moment they start using the power you’ve given them to act on your behalf but rather use it to solicit money for themselves the power instantly becomes illegitimate.
  • the President has no power at all to use these powers – which are vast and on loan – to enrich himself or to retain his hold on power
  • It really is like you’re a rich person with wealth manager managing your assets and you find out they made the decision to manage your assets by giving every third dollar to themselves. But, instead of hoping a plane to Uruguay as most self-respecting crooked wealth managers might, this one said: No, this was the decision I made. My power is complete. Don’t second guess me!
  • This is why all the chatter about well Presidents do quid pro quos all the time, or they withhold aid from countries or they bargain over things with foreign leaders. Well, sure they do. But they can do that because they’re advancing what they understand to be the national interest. Your wealth manager or lawyer can make deals on your behalf but not theirs. It’s really not complicated
Javier E

Virginia Democrats won an election. Gun owners are talking civil war | US news | The Gu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rol-second-amendment-civil-war

guns debate virginia right-wing

shared by Javier E on 12 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • “As white people, taking away privilege can feel like an attack, when it’s just a leveling of the playing field. And I think that’s where a lot of people are right now: they’re feeling attacked, and this is a way they can lash out,” Christensen said. “It almost seems like people are looking for a reason to pull a Bundy and attack the government.”
  • White supremacist and anti-government groups are gravitating towards the standoff over gun rights in Virginia because they see it as a opportunity for radicalization and recruitment, said Daryl Johnson, a former lead analyst for domestic terrorism at the Department of Homeland Security.
  • “The story they’re telling is that the Jews and immigrants are responsible for turning Virginia blue, and they’re coming to take your guns,” Friedfeld said. (Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire philanthropist and presidential candidate, is Jewish, and the gun violence prevention advocacy group he founded touted an investment of $2.5m in Virginia’s 2019 elections to back local lawmakers who support gun control.)
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • To white supremacists, Virginia looks like a perfect example of their ideology: “You’ve got white replacement. You’ve got what they’re calling Jewish gun grabbers, and the people rising up, saying the government is illegitimate.”
  • Winkler, the gun law expert, said he believed responsibility would ultimately come back to the NRA if the tensions in Virginia did spark any violence. For decades, the NRA has been pushing “overheated rhetoric about the second amendment protecting your right to rise up against the government”, he said. “This is the natural result.”
clairemann

Opinion | Why We Are Introducing an Article of Impeachment - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mp-article-of-impeachment.html

policy US Politics trump gop

shared by clairemann on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump has done everything but concede to the democratic will of the American people. He unleashed an avalanche of lies and baseless claims of fraud — conspiracy theories that filled his supporters with a delusional belief that the election had been stolen from him. He filed a bevy of absurd lawsuits. He attempted to cajole and intimidate officials at all levels of government into subverting the election and keeping him in office. And then, running out of recourse, legitimate and illegitimate, he incited an insurrection against the government and the Constitution that he swore to uphold.
  • marks one of the lowest points in our country’s 245-year experiment in democracy.
  • From Andrew Jackson to Richard Nixon, we have seen presidents abuse their power, but we had never witnessed an American president incite a violent mob on the citadel of our democracy in a desperate attempt to cling to power.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Some argue that another impeachment trial would further divide our country and further inflame Trump supporters. But the truth is that we do not have a choice. This impeachment charge is meant to defend the integrity of the republic. Both Democratic and Republican members of Congress must attend to the duties of their oath. Failing to act would set an irresponsibly dangerous precedent for future presidents who are about to leave office.
kaylynfreeman

Opinion | Why We Are Introducing an Article of Impeachment - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mp-article-of-impeachment.html

politics crisis trump US history

shared by kaylynfreeman on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • He unleashed an avalanche of lies and baseless claims of fraud — conspiracy theories that filled his supporters with a delusional belief that the election had been stolen from him. He filed a bevy of absurd lawsuits. He attempted to cajole and intimidate officials at all levels of government into subverting the election and keeping him in office. And then, running out of recourse, legitimate and illegitimate, he incited an insurrection against the government and the Constitution that he swore to uphold.
  • we had never witnessed an American president incite a violent mob on the citadel of our democracy in a desperate attempt to cling to power.
  • The attempted coup at the United States Capitol last Wednesday, which took place as lawmakers inside counted the electoral votes that would formalize Joe Biden’s overwhelming election by the American people, marks one of the lowest points in our country’s 245-year experiment in democracy.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The American people witnessed Mr. Trump’s actions for themselves. We all saw his speech on Jan. 6. We watched his fanatics storm the Capitol at his request. Five people died, including a U.S. Capitol Police officer and four of the president’s supporters. We fear what Mr. Trump may do with his remaining time in office.
  • What happened last Wednesday was an abomination. There is no question about that. There is also no question that Mr. Trump becomes more of a threat to public safety by the moment.The only question now is what Congress will do about it.
rerobinson03

'It's Just Crazy' in Pennsylvania: Mail Voting and the Anxiety That Followed - The New ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nia-presidential-election.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Armstrong County, northeast of Pittsburgh, is one of Pennsylvania’s smaller counties with 44,829 registered voters. But it is a microcosm of the high tension, confusion and deep uncertainty that have accompanied the broad expansion of mail-in voting this year, during an election of passionate intensity.
  • With all Pennsylvania voters eligible for the first time to vote by mail, more than three million ballots were requested statewide — nearly half the total turnout from 2016. One in five voters in Armstrong County requested a mail-in ballot.
  • The state-run portal intended to track mail ballots was unreliable, Ms. Kuznik said. By using a database available only to election officials, she was able to reassure voters about the status of a ballot — in nearly all cases, it had been received.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Many election analysts believe Pennsylvania is the knife’s edge on which the race is balanced, the closest of the three “blue wall” states where Joseph R. Biden Jr., if he sweeps them, has his most likely path to the White House.
  • A New York Times/Siena College poll of Pennsylvania on Sunday showed Mr. Biden with a lead of six percentage points, and a margin of error of 2.4 points.
  • With more Republicans expected to vote on Election Day and Democrats favoring mail ballots in Pennsylvania, when to count and report results have become partisan flash points. Mr. Trump has demanded, without a basis in law, that the vote leader on election night be named the winner.
  • there are wide differences among counties, with some not expecting full results for days.
  • The state’s largest cities, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, are aiming to report results of mail-in ballots on Tuesday night, according to an aide to a top Democratic official briefed on statewide preparations. But many second-tier counties, including in the Philadelphia suburbs, will be slower. “Erie, Berks, Bucks, Delaware and Lackawanna are real problems,” the aide said. “Their reporting of mail-in votes could go into Wednesday, which will create a lot of election night anxiety.”
  • “They’ll still be separating envelopes and ballots on Wednesday, probably Thursday,” he said.
rerobinson03

Did President Trump Keep His First-Term Promises? Let's Look at 5 of Them - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-first-term-promises.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Has he kept the promises that helped get him here? And do his supporters care? A recent survey from New York University found that those who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 thought he had broken fewer than one promise out of five. Those who voted for Hillary Clinton said he broke more than four out of five.
  • In reality, Mr. Trump has broken about half of 100 campaign promises, according to a tracker by PolitiFact. T
  • Supporters of Mr. Trump who spoke to The New York Times said overwhelmingly that they were pleased with how he had lived up to his pledges. Here’s a look at how he fared on some of his signature promises.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Over the past four years, the Trump administration had constructed 371 miles of border barriers, as of Oct 16. And it is on pace to reach 400 miles next week. However, all but 16 miles of the new barriers replace or reinforce existing structures.
  • Alan Sanchez, 57, a defense contractor from Maricopa, Ariz., conceded that the president did not get it done. But he said he did what he could.
  • The yearslong Republican campaign to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act came to a head unsuccessfully and dramatically in the first year of Mr. Trump’s presidency, when Senator John McCain of Arizona cast the decisive vote against the effort.
  • His campaign boasts that he has flipped the balance of three federal appeals courts and shifted nine appeals courts to the right. His nomination of Justice Amy Coney Barrett in the weeks before the election could reshape abortion rights, immigration law and the government’s regulatory power. Confirming a Supreme Court justice so close to an election was unprecedented, and Democrats framed it as an illegitimate power grab by Republicans.
  • The Department of Homeland Security has argued that the new barriers have reduced the personnel needed to staff certain sectors, and reduced unauthorized immigration. In Mr. Trump’s first year in office, illegal border crossings did decline to the lowest point since the 1970s, but then increased to the highest point in a decade in the 2019 fiscal year before decreasing again this year during the pandemic.
  • The 2017 tax cuts are one of the biggest legislative achievements of Mr. Trump’s first term in office, and one celebrated by his supporters.
  • Some critics, however, have noted that the final tax cut that Mr. Trump signed into law was far smaller than what he promised as a candidate. The Tax Policy Center, run by the Brookings Institution, estimated that it was only one-quarter the size of the plan Mr. Trump campaigned on four years ago
  • Mr. Trump said he would cut the top corporate income tax rate to 15 percent from 35 percent, for example. His final bill brought it down to 21 percent.Those nuances, however, have been left out of his rallies, where Mr. Trump has been telling his supporters (falsely) that he succeeded in passing the “biggest tax cut in history.”
  • While most Americans got a tax cut, high earners received 60 percent of the total tax savings.
  • He vowed to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement or withdraw from it entirely, pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and raise tariffs.He has delivered on those promises.
  • Though some experts are skeptical that Mr. Trump’s trade policies have been economically beneficial — with the conservative Tax Foundation estimating that the tariffs have brought in revenue, but reduced wages, gross domestic product and job growth — supporters have been delighted.
xaviermcelderry

'It's Just Crazy' in Pennsylvania: Mail Voting and the Anxiety That Followed - The New ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nia-presidential-election.html

shared by xaviermcelderry on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The rapid-fire calls were pouring in to Marybeth Kuznik, the one-woman Elections Department of Armstrong County, a few days before Election Day. “This is crazy,” she told an anxious caller. “Crazy, crazy, crazy. It’s a good thing because everybody should vote,” she added, “but it’s just crazy.”
  • Armstrong County, northeast of Pittsburgh, is one of Pennsylvania’s smaller counties with 44,829 registered voters.
  • With all Pennsylvania voters eligible for the first time to vote by mail, more than three million ballots were requested statewide — nearly half the total turnout from 2016.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Many callers were alarmed that they had not received a ballot. For some, it was because they had not checked a box on their application for a mail ballot for the primary, asking to receive a general-election mail ballot. “There was a little wee tiny box on there to check,” she told one voter. “Don’t worry about it. Just go and vote.”
  • She told an upset caller that his ballot had been mailed on Oct. 16, two weeks earlier. “It’s kind of a long time if you haven’t gotten it,” she said. The voter could either visit Ms. Kuznik’s office to have the original ballot canceled and a replacement issued, or vote using a provisional ballot in person on Tuesday.
  • Ms. Kuznik said: “Yeah, I apologize, it’s been very, very busy here. But we will get you a ballot. We want you to vote.”
  • “We’ll go as quickly as we can, but we’re not going to rush it,” she said. “It’s not the Super Bowl. Nobody’s going to hoist a trophy on election night.”
  • Many election analysts believe Pennsylvania is the knife’s edge on which the race is balanced, the closest of the three “blue wall” states where Joseph R. Biden Jr., if he sweeps them, has his most likely path to the White House.
  • “Hold on for a minute,” Ms. Kuznik told a phone caller while helping Ms. Nason. “I’m right in the middle of processing a voter, and I will look up and see what’s going on with that.”
  • A complicated two-envelope ballot, uncertainty over the reliability of the Postal Service and a glitchy online system for tracking returned votes have caused Ms. Kuznik to be bombarded by callers. And, though to a lesser extent, she has also been visited by a stream of walk-ins at her small second-floor office in the county administration building, where an American flag was stuck into a dying plant above her desk.
  • The state-run portal intended to track mail ballots was unreliable, Ms. Kuznik said. By using a database available only to election officials, she was able to reassure voters about the status of a ballot — in nearly all cases, it had been received
  • With more Republicans expected to vote on Election Day and Democrats favoring mail ballots in Pennsylvania, when to count and report results have become partisan flash points. Mr. Trump has demanded, without a basis in law, that the vote leader on election night be named the winner. Democrats are braced for early returns from in-person voters to show a significant Trump lead, with the tide shifting bluer as mail ballots are reported.
  • In Armstrong County, the plan is to open mail ballots and flatten them out in a workroom behind Ms. Kuznik’s office. Workers escorted by sheriff’s deputies will carry the ballots to the public works garage, where the county keeps its scanners
leilamulveny

Opinion | How Could Joe Biden Really Want This Job? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...joe-biden-2020.html

biden new york times politics

shared by leilamulveny on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • a pandemic that may be approaching its peak, an economic catastrophe that’s nowhere near its end, a nation more nastily divided than at any point in his career, a Democratic Party whose lidded tensions could boil over at any moment, and an opponent who, if defeated, would not go gently and would command his conspiracy-minded followers to rage in concert with him.
  • “Biden may see the most complicated set of problems in several generations,”
  • Editors’ Picks
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • ut that’s a veritable rom-com next to the horror show of 2020, whose full terrors took shape after Biden committed to his presidential bid. He knew going in that Trump would fight dirty, exit messy and bequeath an even more toxic political environment than he inherited. He couldn’t foresee the breadth and depth of America’s hurt right now.
  • Knowing that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to vote by mail, Trump falsely claimed (again) that ballots received after Election Day, even if they’re in perfect accordance with a state’s requirement of a postmark by Election Day, are illegitimate. He applauded supporters of his who swarmed around and trapped a Biden-Harris campaign bus.
  • Biden would also confront a restive crew in his own party. If Democrats controlled the Senate, their fury during Trump’s presidency would transform into an insistence on any or all of the following: sweeping action to address climate change; sweeping action to expand health insurance; the sweeping aside of the filibuster; the expansion of the Supreme Court; an immigration overhaul; the placement of high-profile progressives in high-profile cabinet slots; the destruction of what stretches of the border wall Trump managed to construct; and the investigation and even prosecution of his henchmen.
  • But if Trump is ousted, the glue dissolves, laying bare the distance between Biden and many younger Democrats.
  • But it’s not just American politics that’s in disarray. It’s our whole information ecosystem. Trump’s presidency fortified the alternate realities that Americans live in, the contradictory sets of facts that they accept and the competing truths that they tell
kaylynfreeman

Don Lemon Questions CNN's Choice To Air Trump 'Propaganda' Speech | HuffPost - 0 views

www.huffpost.com/...nda_n_5fa1cd5fc5b6128c6b5d4c19

politics US trump

shared by kaylynfreeman on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • CNN’s Don Lemon questioned his own network’s choice to air a speech President Donald Trump delivered at his campaign’s Virginia headquarters on Tuesday while voters were still casting their ballots, calling the president’s remarks “propaganda.”
  • not much of what he said, if anything, was true,” Lemon said, after fact-checking multiple components of Trump’s remarks. 
  • “losing is never easy”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “There were states in 2016 that the president did not know that he won until the votes were counted after Election Day,” Lemon pointed out. “There’s nothing unusual about the votes being counted after Election Day.”
  • Trump railed against the Supreme Court ruling that allowed Pennsylvania to extend its vote-counting deadlines. He complained that the results should be known on election night and claimed “a lot of bad things happen” with ballots when votes are counted in the subsequent days.
  • Trump planned to make a premature and illegitimate declaration of victory on Tuesday night, even though large numbers of mail-in ballots will not yet be counted. Newsrooms have faced pressure not to carry such an event over concerns that it would undermine the Democratic process.
Javier E

Trump's Forever Campaign Is Just Getting Started - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...617021

trump campaign 2020 politics gop trust

shared by Javier E on 07 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • think about what a belief in birtherism really implied. If you doubted that Barack Obama was born in the United States—and about a third of Americans did, including 72 percent of registered Republicans—then that meant you also believed that Obama was an illegitimate president. That meant, in other words, you believed that everyone—the entire American political, judicial, and media establishment, including the White House and Congress, the federal courts and the FBI, all of them—was complicit in a gigantic plot to swindle the public into accepting this false commander in chief.
  • That third of Americans went on to become Trump’s base. Over four years, they continued to applaud him, no matter what he did, not because they necessarily believed everything he said, but often because they didn’t believe anything at all
  • If everything is a scam, who cares if the president is a serial liar? If all American politicians are corrupt, then so what if the president is too? If everyone has always broken the rules, then why can’t he do that too?
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Not all of this was Trump’s doing. Many Americans had lost trust in democratic institutions long before he arrived on the scene
  • One recent survey showed that half of the country is dissatisfied with our political system; one-fifth told pollsters that they would be happy to live under military rule. Trump not only exploited this democratic deficit to win the White House, but he expanded it while in office
  • He is launching that strategy right now. And to be clear: It is a strategy, not a random reaction to events. Trump is no good at governing, but he has long understood, with the intuition of a seasoned con man, how to create distrust, and how to use that distrust to his advantage.
  • The journalist Lesley Stahl has said he once told her that he attacks the media to “discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.”
  • Now, having spent months talking darkly about the rules being rigged against him, he has laid a set of traps designed to discredit and demean the electoral system so that some Americans, at least, lose their faith in it
  • Above all, though, the Biden illegitimacy myth will function as a prop for Trump’s own fragile ego. Unable to cope with the loss of the presidency, unable to accept that he was beaten, Trump will now shield himself from the reality of defeat by pretending it didn’t happen. His personal need to live in a perpetual fantasyland, a world where he is always winning, is so overpowering that he will do anything to maintain it.
  • In his narcissistic drive to create this alternative reality, he will deepen divisions, spread paranoia, and render his supporters even more fearful of their fellow citizens and distrustful of their institutions.
Javier E

Opinion | The Republican Party's future: Being terrorized by its unhinged base - The Wa... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...errorized-by-its-unhinged-base

gop conformism elite

shared by Javier E on 21 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Go back to 2009 and the rise of the tea party movement, and you should recall the general feeling of chaos that gripped our politics. Amid a national economic crisis, a movement sprang up that was both genuinely grass-roots and assisted by elite Republicans. It was loud and aggrieved, and it filled the Republican Party with fear.
  • It did so because, from the beginning, its targets were not only Obama, whom it saw as an illegitimate president, but because it regarded as a quisling any Republican whose opposition to Obama was not strong, outraged or effective enough.
  • Its members have spent four years swimming in Trump’s sea of paranoia and misinformation, and the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump will become their foundational belief. Any Republican who dismisses it will be branded a traitor to the cause.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Despite the fact that Fox News hosts have been relentlessly pushing bogus claims of voter fraud and questioning the legitimacy of the election, significant portions of the GOP base have decided that the network’s commitment to Trump has waned, and, therefore, it must be part of the anti-Trump conspiracy. “Fox News sucks! Fox News sucks!” chanted the MAGA faithful at last week’s march of dead-enders in Washington.
  • the strategy Fox has always used to maintain the loyalty of its viewers — telling them that every other news source is fatally infected with liberal bias — is now being deployed by those minor-league outlets against Fox itself.
  • If their critique is that Fox News is too establishment, they’re not wrong: From its founding in 1996, the network has always been equally devoted to the twin goals of making money and advancing the interests of the Republican Party. It represents and defines the center of gravity in the party, even as that center of gravity may shift.
  • Keep your eye on the likely 2024 presidential candidates — Sens. Ted Cruz (Tex.), Josh Hawley (Mo.), Marco Rubio (Fla.), Tom Cotton (Ark.), as well as former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley — as they jockey for advantage and try to find the party’s key points of influence. Once they start appearing on Newsmax, claiming the election was stolen, and giving winks and nods to QAnon and other conspiracy theories, you’ll see how deeply the madness has penetrated the GOP.
  • Though many of the Republican leaders who were reviled by the tea party, such as former speaker John Boehner and former congressman Eric Cantor, are no longer around, the ones still in office remember well what it was like. And now they’re going to have to go through it all over again.
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