monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Olivier5 wrote:

Yes, because we accept and care for all the crazies here.

I see no reason to accuse him of craziness. His views and opinions are just as valid as anyone else's. And he has just as much right to post his views and opinions in this thread as anyone else does.

WASHINGTON – A federal judge postponed until Friday a decision on whether the White House violated the First Amendment by taking away a CNN reporter’s press pass after his contentious exchange with President Donald Trump.

U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, had scheduled an oral ruling for 3 p.m. Thursday. But he delayed the decision until 10 a.m. Friday without explanation.

CNN filed the case after the White House revoked the credential that allowed one of its reporters, Jim Acosta, access to the complex following a Nov. 7 news conference.

The White House argued that the revocation was lawful because Acosta “disrupted the fair and orderly administration of a press conference during an exchange with the president.” The White House said no reporter has a First Amendment right to access to the grounds, and that CNN has 50 other workers with White House credentials.

CNN asked the court to force the White House to restore Acosta’s credentials. The network's lawyers argued that the administration’s decision to kick him out violated the First Amendment and his due process rights, and that the White House had offered no notice or opportunity to fight the decision.

“Our Constitution, well-established law, and the core principles of our democracy establish that the White House cannot be permitted to cast out and punish reporters with whom it disagrees,” CNN's lawyers said in a written argument.

Much of the debate focused on a 1997 case at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which CNN said prevented revoking credentials “based on arbitrary or less than compelling reasons.”

But the Justice Department argued the case was narrower than CNN described and focused on a Secret Service denial of access.

Also Thursday, the White House Correspondents Association filed an argument in the case warning that the court could set a “dangerous precedent.”


“The WHCA brief highlights the danger posed to all journalists, and to the American public, if the President’s claim is permitted to stand,” said Olivier Knox, the group’s president.

Other media organizations, including Gannett Co., the parent of USA TODAY, said this week that they planned to file briefs with the court supporting CNN.

If Trump is allowed to deny access to any reporter he considers “bad” or “rude” or “fake news,” he would have “unbridled discretion to decide who can report from inside the White House,” according to the WHCA’s argument.

“The president’s view of the law is wrong,” the argument said. “While he may have absolute discretion to exclude a member of the press from his Trump Tower residence, he does not have absolute discretion to exclude a member of the press from the White House,” the seat of the executive branch and an iconic place for civil discourse.

It is perhaps the central irony of our politics today: We live in an incredibly polarized and partisan moment, but our political parties have never been weaker.

As odd as it sounds, political parties in democracies have an important anti-democratic function. Traditionally, the parties shaped the choices put to voters. Long before voters decided anything in the primary or general elections, party bosses worked to groom good candidates, weed out bad ones, organize interests, and frame issues.

In the modern era, the story of party decline usually begins in the aftermath of the 1968 presidential election. The move toward primaries and the democratic selection of delegates took power away from the bosses.

After Watergate, there were more reforms, curbing the ability of the parties to raise and spend money freely. This led to the rise of political-action committees, which raise cash independent of the formal party structure. As the Kentucky Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell said during the floor debate over the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance bill in 2001: “We haven’t taken a penny of money out of politics. We’ve only taken the parties out of politics.”

Outside groups — the National Rifle Association, Planned Parenthood, unions, etc. — often do more to effectively organize voters around single issues or personalities than the parties do. The Kochs, Tom Steyer, George Soros, and Sheldon Adelson serve as party bosses, only outside the parties.

Technology is another, less obvious force siphoning power from the parties. For instance, as political historian Michael Barone has noted, the telephone dealt a grievous blow to political conventions, where insiders have outsize power.

“Until the 1960s, the national convention was a communications medium,” Barone writes. “Political leaders in the various states seldom met each other, outside of sessions of Congress, during the four years between presidential elections.”

The telephone eliminated the need for the face-to-face negotiations. Today, political conventions are little more than infomercials for presidential candidates.

The Internet and cable TV have accelerated the eclipsing of parties. Opinion websites and TV and radio hosts now do more to shape issues and select candidates than the parties do. It’s a bit like comic books. Readership of comics has been in steady decline, but movie studios and toy manufacturers still feed off the brands created generations ago.

The weird thing is that the American people didn’t seem to notice. The largest voting bloc in America today call themselves independents, but most of them tend to be as partisan as everybody else, while “pure independents” are less likely to vote at all.

And yet, Americans keep talking about partisan politics as if the parties are in charge, and base voters on the left and the right keep railing against the party establishments like mobs unaware that they’re kicking dead horses.

Among the many problems with the rotting out of the parties is that the rot spreads. The parties are supposed to be where politics happens. McConnell’s point about money in politics is analogous to the larger trend. When you take political power out of the parties, other actors seize it.

When wielded by people who aren’t supposed to be in the politics business, that power corrupts. This is why every Academy Awards ceremony is peppered with asinine political jeremiads, and why late-night-comedy hosts serve as de facto Democratic-party organizers.

It’s why people such as Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, act like social-gospel ward heelers. It’s why the cable-news networks spend so much of their time rallying voters in one direction or another. And it’s why countless pundits and allegedly objective reporters serve as unofficial political consultants.

It’s also why Donald Trump could leverage his celebrity to seize the GOP nomination, and why someone like Oprah Winfrey could be next.

There are other, larger forces at work. The decline of strong independent institutions — religious, civic, and familial — has people searching for other outlets to find a sense of meaning and belonging. Identity politics, populism, and nationalism are filling that void.

That’s happened before, but when it did, the parties were there to filter, constrain, and channel those passions in a healthy direction. The Potemkin parties can’t, or won’t, do that anymore. The result is a nation of partisans decrying partisanship.

The “boycott, divestment and sanctions” (BDS) movement is not antisemitic.

 a desperate attempt to gain sympathy by hijacking and then misapplying a long-loathed term in hopes of sowing distrust and confusion.

Right-wingers accusing other people of antisemitism because they oppose the political actions of the Israeli state should be seen for what it is — a desperate attempt to gain sympathy by hijacking and then misapplying a long-loathed term in hopes of sowing distrust and confusion.

In mid-1940, Stern became convinced that the Italians were interested in the establishment of a fascist Jewish state in Palestine. He conducted negotiations, he thought, with the Italians via an intermediary Moshe Rotstein, and drew up a document that became known as the "Jerusalem Agreement". In exchange for Italy's recognition of, and aid in obtaining, Jewish sovereignty over Palestine, Stern promised that Zionism would come under the aegis of Italian fascism, with Haifa as its base, and the Old City of Jerusalem under Vatican control, except for the Jewish quarter. In Heller's words, Stern's proposal would "turn the 'Kingdom of Israel' into a satellite of the Axis powers."

Late in 1940, Lehi, having identified a common interest between the intentions of the new German order and Jewish national aspirations, proposed forming an alliance in World War II with Nazi Germany. It offered a rebellion against Britain in return for transferring the Jews of Europe to Palestine, which would result in recreation of a Jewish State. Late in 1940, Lehi representative Naftali Lubenchik went to Beirut to meet German official Werner Otto von Hentig (who also was involved with the Haavara or Transfer Agreement, which had been transferring German Jews and their funds to Palestine since 1933). Lubenchik told von Hentig that Lehi had not yet revealed its full power and that they were capable of organizing a whole range of anti-British operations.[citation needed] The Lehi documents outlined that it's rule would be authoritarian and indicated similiarites between the organization and Nazis.

The decline of strong independent institutions — religious, civic, and familial