monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Debra Law wrote:

It's the ideology that counts. For instance, that is why it is repugnant for present day Republicans to take credit for the emancipation of slaves because Abe Lincoln was a Republican. I understand that modern day conservatives often take credit for the past achievements of progressives. But please, give me an example from our country's ongoing "culture wars" where conservatives were the ones who stepped forward to champion the cause of the oppressed.

I agree with your opening statement about ideology, but dispute your conclusion about championing the oppressed. Republicans have always been for individual liberty and freedom of action, . . .

. . . while modern Democrats , seeing themselves as champions of the oppressed, busily create authoritarian structures to give themselves more power and control of public money, ostensibly on behalf of chosen oppressed people, whom they treated loke pawns in their overly complex plans - all of which act to expand their personal and political power. Whether this is forethought and deliberate or merely a pleasant byproduct of sappy thinking is largely immaterial. Liberal politicians and bureaucrats are always among the chief beneficiaries of such programs.

The plantations Democrats propose and operate today are merely contemporary models for the benign elements of the plantations of the 18th and early 19th centruies. In fact they have done real harm, rewarding self-destructive behavior on the part of those they are "helping", encouraging the rise of the worst, most exploitive leaders from within those groups, all while ignoring, and sometiomes hindering, constructive individual behavior for self-improvement on the part of theose they are "helping".

If a person pays for a business, then they should be given the same liberties on how they run that businesses.

Yep the racists moved to the party who passed the Civil Rights laws, that makes total sense. How do you explain the Dems being the party who controlled the south from the time of ReConstruction until the first GOP governor was elected on the mid 1990's?

Now we have another example. We learned overnight that Trump's designated National Security Advisor Michael Flynn met secretly in Trump Tower with the chief of the Austrian Freedom Party. The Austrian Freedom Party is not just any foreign political party or even any right-wing populist party. The Freedom Party was founded in 1956 by former Nazis, though that lineage can be slightly misleading. It is not and was never simply a refounding of the Austrian Nazi party. Still, it is a far right nationalist party, made up in its early years disproportionately of former Nazis which for many of these early years was shunned in national politics but also provided a home for people who were shunned by or unwilling to join the country's big two political parties. In more recent years it has had surges of popular support as a far-right anti-immigrant party.

The party made news yesterday for a new pact it has signed with Vladimir Putin's United Russia party but also for the meeting with Flynn. What's critical though is that both were only revealed in a Facebook post (first reported by the Times) by party leader Heinz-Christian Strache. Before he posted the news on Facebook, we didn't know this meeting had happened.

I DO put religion in a different category than sexual preference,

In the most recent episode of my podcast, I talked with Josh Green about Donald Trump's and Steve Bannon's plan to bust apart the EU by first striking a free trade agreement with the UK and then trying to break up the EU by striking individual bilateral trade agreements with Germany, France, Italy, etc.

Whether or not that is really plausible, whether that is something a Trump administration could really pull off, the goal is wild and extremely newsworthy. Yet, there's virtually no discussion of it.

I want to focus on another aspect of Josh's post above:

Quote:

In the most recent episode of my podcast, I talked with Josh Green about Donald Trump's and Steve Bannon's plan to bust apart the EU by first striking a free trade agreement with the UK and then trying to break up the EU by striking individual bilateral trade agreements with Germany, France, Italy, etc.

Whether or not that is really plausible, whether that is something a Trump administration could really pull off, the goal is wild and extremely newsworthy. Yet, there's virtually no discussion of it.

I haven't listened to that podcast yet (I'll do that in a bit and probably post a bit more on this) but a few days ago, I did note what Bannon/Breitbart are up to re expanding their operation into at least two European nations (France, Germany) with the goal of supporting far right parties there. WTF?

The first thing we can note about this is that these operations won't be news-gathering in intent nor in operation. They will be political advocacy operations. The game will be propaganda.

This is very important.

Marie Brenner's 1990 profile of Donald Trump for Vanity Fair captured the real estate mogul in turmoil, as he struggled to hold onto his empire amid a nasty divorce fight. It's a juicy piece, but one anecdote in particular stands out: that Trump owned a copy of Adolf Hitler's speeches and allegedly read them for inspiration:

Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler's collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler's speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.


"Wow," you're thinking. "But did Trump also respond to this allegation in a shady and kind of revealing way?"

Yes:

"Did your cousin John give you the Hitler speeches?" I asked Trump.

Trump hesitated. "Who told you that?"

"I don't remember," I said.

"Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he's a Jew." ("I did give him a book about Hitler," Marty Davis said. "But it was My New Order, Hitler's speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I'm not Jewish.")

Later, Trump returned to this subject. "If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them."

OK, so what if I wanted a Muslim wedding planner to plan my Christian wedding, with an open bar, a preacher, maybe some ham and bacon, and while getting married to my gay lover. Would they be legally required to do so??

Someone with a better understanding of the law re religious exemptions can correct me if I have this wrong.

First, let's note that you've introduced the category error here of placing two religious groups/values in contest whereas the cases you allude to have in contest a commercial enterprise (which holds religious views) with a non-religious party - gay persons.

In the example you bring up, I think that (and I may be wrong) religious exemptions in existing civil rights law would grant the Muslim operation leeway to refuse.

@Deborah - what's your understanding of this?