Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

The Wall Street Journal editorial page is a different matter, however. The move from grudging defense of a Trump presidency to full-blown, Fox-like rationalization has been ongoing since Trump won the nomination.

The Journal editorial page was long thought to be the crown jewel of fiscal conservatism — a staunch defender of open markets, legal immigration and economic freedom. Internationally, it was anti-communist and supportive of U.S. leadership in the world.

Jay Rosen of New York University tells me via email, “From my perspective the Oct. 25 editorial was an important event because it combines so effectively with this development, in which the Journal reporters were told to stand out by their greater willingness to give Trump the benefit of the doubt — greater, that is, than the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Politico, Bloomberg and others in their peer group.” He continues, “The implicit appeal is not to impersonal and timeless standards of veracity but to an ideological position that, according to the newsroom editors, the others guys have taken while the Journal does not.” He argues, “This is an attempt to give intellectual respectability within the news tribe to ‘the enemy of the people’ attacks. The editors were saying to their reporters: Okay, maybe not enemies of the people, but they’re acting like enemies of Trump! We don’t do that.”

Like many Austrian fraternities, Germania zu Wiener Neustadt sometimes uses a songbook at its get-togethers. It looks ordinary enough, with its red cover, gold crest, and curling script. The cover is studded with metal nails called “Biernagel” that keep the book slightly elevated so it doesn’t get wet when lying in beer.Unlike most other songbooks, however, it contains lyrics about killing Jews. “Step on the gas,” one line reads. “We’ll manage the seventh million.”

The party had gotten negative press just two weeks earlier, when its minister of the interior proposed “concentrating refugees into camps.” The Jewish community of Vienna, where the majority of the country’s 12,000 to 15,000 Jews live, has been boycotting the FPÖ; it refused to participate in the government’s official Holocaust memorial ceremony last month.

Austria has many high school and university student associations. What makes these fraternities (“Burschenschaften”) unique is that they’re infused with German nationalism. They originated in German university towns in the first half of the 19th century and stood for a united German nation. During the Nazi era, the fraternities were merged with the Nazi students’ associations. They reemerged after the war. Today, not all members of these fraternities are far-right extremists, anti-Semites, or neo-Nazis; some are right-wing conservatives who adhere to old traditions, like a mask-free fencing ritual that often leaves members with scarred faces.

In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.

Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945.

Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) plans to give a speech in the coming days that compares President Trump’s public criticism of the news media to similar comments once made by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. A spokesman said that Flake, who will retire after this year amid intense political pressure sparked by his criticism of the president, plans to deliver the speech Wednesday before Trump announces the winners of his self-described “fake news” awards.

“It is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies,” Flake will say, according to the excerpts. “It bears noting that so fraught with malice was the phrase ‘enemy of the people,’ that even Nikita Khrushchev forbade its use, telling the Soviet Communist Party that the phrase had been introduced by Stalin for the purpose of ‘annihilating such individuals’ who disagreed with the supreme leader.”

On MSNBC Sunday night, Flake said that in addition to Stalin, Mao Zedong, the former leader of the Chinese Communist Party, also referred to the media as the  “enemy of the people.” And he repeated his point that Khrushchev later forbade the use of the term. “I don’t think that we should be using a phrase that’s been rejected as too loaded by a Soviet dictator,” Flake said on “Kasie DC.”

Islam is one of the world's great religions. Let me be explicit about what I, as a historian of Islam who is not a Muslim, mean by that

Islam has brought comfort and peace of mind to countless millions of men and women. It has given dignity and meaning to drab and impoverished lives. It has taught people of different races to live in brotherhood and people of different creeds to live side by side in reasonable tolerance

It inspired a great civilization in which others besides Muslims lived creative and useful lives and which, by its achievement, enriched the whole world

urging the country to undertake “a new national, social, industrial and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal era.

Entire industries were retooled to meet wartime needs, and the material culture of American life was transformed beyond imagining: food production, housewares, automobiles, home building, highways, television, film, clothing, travel and music all underwent phenomenal metamorphoses from the 1930s to the 1950s, spurred by wartime consumption, government investment and a metastasizing military.

First, climate change is not a war. There is no clear enemy to mobilize against, and thus no way to ignite the kind of hatred that moved Americans against Japan during World War II. No clear enemy also means no clear victory.

“So actually in the Constitution of the United States, [if you] are found guilty of being a socialist member you either go to prison or are shot,” Garcia told Michels.

Anthony Johnstone, a law professor at the University of Montana, told The Washington Post that “nothing in the Constitution of the United States authorizes the government to punish socialists or anyone else on the basis of their political beliefs.” In fact, the First Amendment prohibits punishing political speech, and the Constitution of Montana “expressly prohibits discrimination on the basis of political beliefs,”

People often misunderstand the Treason Clause in Article III of the Constitution, interpreting it to justify punishment of political opponents, Johnstone said. The framers, he said, “were careful to define treason narrowly so it could not be used for merely political purposes.”

“There is so much negative energy; it’s so angry,” says the former four-term Democratic senator from California. “You can be angry about the unfairness in the world. But this becomes a personal, deep-seated anger at anyone who doesn’t say exactly what you want to hear.”

Boxer’s story is one of the milder ones The Times tells about the Internet trolls whose goals seem to have less to do with building Sanders up than with hounding and humiliating anyone who stands in their man’s way.

When Mr. Sanders’s supporters swarm someone online, they often find multiple access points to that person’s life, compiling what can amount to investigative dossiers,”

Instead of self-confident and self-centered answers, the author humbly asks fundamental questions: What is economics? What is its meaning? Where does this new religion, as it is sometimes called, come from? What are its possibilities and its limitations and borders, if there are any? Why are we so dependent on permanent growing of growth and growth of growing of growth? Where did the idea of progress come from, and where is it leading us? Why are so many economic debates accompanied by obsession and fanaticism?

The majority of our political parties act with a narrow materialistic focus when, in their programs, they present the economy and finance first; only then, somewhere at the end, do we find culture as something pasted on or as a libation for a couple of madmen.

most of them—consciously or unconsciously—accept and spread the Marxist thesis of the economic base and the spiritual superstructure.

If Foucault’s thought offers a radical critique of all forms of power and administrative control, then as the cultural left becomes more powerful and the cultural right more marginal, the left will have less use for his theories, and the right may find them more insightful.

political ambiguity, Shullenberger notes, has often attached to interpretations of Foucault’s ideas, which in his lifetime made enemies on the Marxist left and found strange affinities with Islamic radicalism and neoliberalism.

you could say that the French philosopher was a satanic figure in multiple senses of the term: personally a wicked hedonist who rejected limits on adult appetites (whether or not the Tunisia allegations are true, Foucault explicitly argued for the legitimacy of pederasty) and philosophically a skeptical accuser, like the Satan who appears in the Book of Job, ready to point the finger at the cracks, cruelties and hypocrisies in any righteous order, to deconstruct any system of power that claims to have truth and virtue on its side.

like most Americans, they don’t rank foreign policy at or near the top of their concerns. In fact, for Jews, Israel ranks dead last in their list of concerns. We can speculate whether that is a function of the current Israeli government; a sense that Israel is a robust and successful nation that does not require our constant attention; a widening rift between Israel and diaspora Jewry; or whether, just as with every other group of Americans, Jewish Americans’ domestic concerns that affect their lives swamp issues related to foreign affairs.

Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) say Jews in the United States are less secure compared to two years ago. A majority (59 percent) think President Trump is at least partially responsible for recent targeted attacks on synagogues, and a plurality (38 percent) have concerns that President Trump is encouraging violent ultra-right extremists. A broad majority (71 percent) disapprove of President Trump’s handling of anti-Semitism, including a 54 percent majority who strongly disapprove.

Should we be surprised that the friend (Trump) of their enemy (white nationalism) is their enemy? The president denies that their enemy is even a threat and therefore earns their enmity. Trump’s replacement rhetoric (the United States is “full”), his blood-and-soil nationalism and his contempt for the rule of law strike at the heart of Jews’ worries about their safety and security in a multiethnic society. Their ancestors left places such as Russia so as not to be at the whim of anti-Semitic autocrats; the United States was supposed to be their refuge.

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.

Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.

It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.