December 21, 2016

NeoNazis beat out far right Zionists as priorities for the Trump team

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/trump-official-boycotts-israeli-gov-t-meeting-over-exclusion-of-far-right-swede

A representative of President-elect Donald Trump's transition team was among a group of conservative lawmakers and officials from the U.S. and Europe who boycotted a meeting with Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely this week over her decision to exclude a far-right Swedish pol from the briefing, the Times of Israel reported Wednesday. A spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry told the Times that the delegation had canceled its briefing with Hotovely (pictured above) because she would not allow the attendance Swedish pol Kristina Winberg, whom the spokesperson described as "a member of a party with neo-Nazi tendencies."

A representative for the group also told the Times that the delegation was boycotting the meeting in protest of Winberg's exclusion.

OF COURSE....

Btw, the hard-right zionist characterization of Hovotely came from Josh Marshall at TPM:

A coalition of neo-Nazis and hard-right Zionists can be unwieldy.

A representative of the Trump transition has decided to boycott a meeting with the Israeli government after the Israeli Foreign Ministry refused to meet with a member of their delegation. Becky Norton Dunlop, deputy to the senior adviser on Trump’s transition team, was in Jerusalem with a delegation of far-right Bannonite European parliamentarians. But Israel said it couldn't meet with Sweden's Kristina Winberg because of her party's "neo-Nazi tendencies." Faced with that rebuke, Dunlop decided to boycott the meeting entirely.

December 20, 2016

Trump National Security Adviser Met With Leader Of Party Founded By Nazis

Source: Huffington Post

General Mike Flynn, Donald Trump’s pick to serve as his national security adviser, met several weeks ago with Heinz-Christian Strache, the head of Austria’s anti-immigrant Freedom Party, which was founded after World War II by former Nazis. What the hStrache described the meeting, which was first reported by The New York Times, on his Facebook page, where he also announced signing a “cooperation pact” with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Although the Times story focused on the Russia pact, the Flynn-Strache meeting is at least as significant. Austrians’ support for far-right parties has increased significantly over the past 15 years. Strache’s Freedom Party received 35 percent of the vote in this year’s parliamentary elections and narrowly lost the race for Austria’s ceremonial presidency earlier this month.

“This is not just any opposition party: It is one with Nazi sympathies,” said Daniel Serwer, a former state department official who’s now a professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. “Nor is Flynn any national security adviser. He is a documented conspiracy propagator. His long-term strategy colleague, Steve Bannon, is an ethnic nationalist and anti-Semite. The president-elect is an anti-Muslim and anti-immigration bigot.”

There’s no doubt that Strache, who worries about “inverse racism, “Austrian youths” being “beaten up in discos” and the “risk of Islamization,” has a lot in common with Flynn, who has also warned of the dangers of Islam and called the religion a “cancer,” and Trump, who called for banning all Muslims from visiting the U.S.

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-flynn-freedom-party-nazis_us_5859367ee4b08debb78af7c2

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This is scary as hell. Flynn was already scary as hell, but now he's going OUT OF HIS WAY to meet with a European neo-Nazi???

December 20, 2016

A few observations on "progressives" I've noticed from this election

this is from many Facebook friends and interactions with people on Facebook who say they are progressives in the past year.

they are white, lower middle class, perhaps struggling a bit financially, 30-60 years old

they appear to be very liberal on social issues, the environment

very anti-war, especially US imperialism

very anti-big banks

they are atheist or not overtly religious

they act as if they are not prejudiced but display some racial insensitivity

they are huge Bernie supporters and invariably think the primary was stolen from him

they lean into the camp of both parties are the same, they have plenty of criticism of Democrats

they appear to have fairly impractical political positions or solutions, have unrealistic expectations of how politics works

they say they would vote for a new FDR

they thought Hillary was horrible, flawed, crooked, they ate up every anti-Hillary piece they could find, many didn't vote for her

they were not big fans of President Obama.

many times they claimed they were Democrats or registered Democrats, but wouldn't be voting Dem anymore

they didn't recognize ( or minimized) the huge danger of Trump and could not bring themselves to vote for Hillary, because their "conscience"

they are a big factor why the Democrats are in the position we are in now.

the question is whether these people can be reached, won over for Dem elections. They are nominal Dems, but are a weak coalition.

And like Bernie Sanders himself, these people are feeling vindicated by the defeat of Hillary, and are pushing that their politics is the right way -- which is questionable!!!

December 18, 2016

David Friedman, Trump's choice for Israel, is a Putin fan

Holy hell. This pattern is making me sick.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/17964

December 18, 2016

Ta-Henisi Coates "My President was Black"

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/my-president-was-black/508793/

A beautiful and very long piece, that speaks to racism and how Obama led to Trump in America.

December 18, 2016

Madonna Opens Up About Facing Sexism and Abuse in Speech

Good stuff

December 17, 2016

"Bernie Sanders anti-political correctness rant proves the left is learning the wrong lessons"

http://qz.com/865263/bernie-sanders-and-political-correctness-democrats-are-learning-all-the-wrong-lessons-from-donald-trump-election-win/

At a town hall in Wisconsin this week with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Bernie Sanders made a powerful case for why the American dream has been eroded by a wealthy corporate assault on the middle class. In a forum that included both conservative and independent voters, Sanders deftly and empathetically answered concerns about raising the minimum wage and free college tuition. He reminded me, again, why I voted for him.

Unfortunately, he also reminded me why many others didn’t. Early in the evening, Chris Hayes asked Sanders why he thought Donald Trump had been so successful. Sanders responded with a rather confusing endorsement of Trump’s attack on political correctness. “I think he said he will not be politically correct,” Sanders explained. “I think he said some outrageous and painful things, but I think people are tired of the same old politically correct rhetoric, and they believe that he was speaking from his heart and willing to take on everybody.”

Sanders then, and also bizarrely, defined political correctness as a phrase describing political double-speak. “It means you have a set of talking points which have been poll-tested and focus-group-tested and that’s what you say rather than what’s really going on. And often, what you are not allowed to say are things which offend very powerful people.”

Apparently he also linked political correctness to talking about trade policy.

Political correctness is mainly about not being a bigot in public.

I saw some where else say that as a Marxist, Sanders really doesn't really like to talk about race (he prefers to talk about class), and he doesn't realize how racist so many people are. I don't know how true that is, but it's an interesting thought.

December 16, 2016

Is Nat'l Security Advisor Flynn the scariest aspect of President Trump?

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/12/scariest-thing-about-trump-michael-flynns-team-of-nutters.html

The most frightening aspect of the looming Donald Trump presidency is not so much the likely outcomes, many of which are horrifying, as the unlikely ones. Running the federal government of the world’s most powerful country is hard, and many things can go wrong. Full control of government is about to pass into the hands of a party that, when it last had it, left the economy and the world in a shambles. These disasters occurred because the party’s ideological extremism made it unequipped to make pragmatic choices, and because its chief executive was a mental lightweight. Sixteen years after it last came to power, the party has grown far more ideologically extreme, and its head of state is much less competent. Many of the tail risks of an extremist party led by an unqualified president are difficult to foresee in advance. But one is especially glaring: the appointment of Michael Flynn to be national security adviser.

National security adviser is a crucial position for any president. It is especially so for a uniquely inexperienced one. (Donald Trump being the only president in American history lacking any public experience in either a civilian or military role.) And it is all the more crucial given Trump’s flamboyant lack of interest in getting up to speed (he confounded his aides by eschewing briefing books throughout the campaign, and has turned down most of his intelligence briefings since the election.) Flynn’s appointment is the one that contains the sum of all fears of Trumpian government.

Flynn’s portrait seems to reflect the worst qualities of Dick Cheney, but in exaggerated form. Flynn avidly subscribes to conspiracy theories. He believes Islamists have infiltrated the Mexican border en masse, guided along the way by Arabic-language signs Flynn claims to have seen himself. He also believes that Democrats have imposed Sharia law in parts of Florida, and shared a now-deleted tweet that suggested Hillary Clinton could have been involved in child sex trafficking. These claims were frequent enough that his subordinates at the Defense Intelligence Agency gave them a name, “Flynn facts,” which means a Flynn belief that is the opposite of a fact.
Compounding Flynn’s susceptibility to conspiracy theories is his professed hostility to any information that undercuts his preconceived notions. According to a former subordinate speaking to the New York Times, in a meeting with his staff “Mr. Flynn said that the first thing everyone needed to know was that he was always right. His staff would know they were right, he said, when their views melded to his.” What makes this so chilling is that it is the pathology that destroyed the Bush administration’s foreign policy, except that what for Cheney was a tragic flaw is, to Flynn, an aspirational credo.

December 16, 2016

My one big regret for this election was not having a Clinton-Sanders ticket

where Bernie was VP. That would have really unified the Dems, brought out a lot of swing voters who liked Bernie, kept centrist Dems and would have almost assured a win, I think. It's really too bad they couldn't work it out.

December 16, 2016

The really weird irony of Rex Tillerson

A really bizarre irony is that Rex Tillerson may be the only person in the Trump administration who believes in the science of climate change.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/12/13/rex-tillersons-view-of-climate-change-its-just-an-engineering-problem/?utm_term=.0bc9ff56c8e7

He's also a fairly rational person in comparison to the most of the other nuts in the cabinet.

Not that he's great as a SoS, of course. The problems with him are he ran a massive and truly evil company, has no diplomatic or government experience and has incredibly close ties to Putin.