monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

It was back then that Finkelstein started developing a political method that now reads like a how-to guide for modern right-wing populism. Finkelstein’s premise was simple: Every election is decided before it even begins. Most people know who they will vote for, what they support, and what they oppose. It’s very difficult to convince them otherwise, Finkelstein believed. It’s a lot easier to demoralize people than to motivate them. And the best way to win is to demoralize your opponent’s supporters. That’s what Trump did to great effect against Hillary Clinton, and what he meant when, after the election, he thanked black Americans for not voting.

Finkelstein had long been studying the big political trends, and he settled on simple issues that could do the most damage. In the end, he noticed, it usually comes down to the same concerns: drugs, crime, and race. These are the issues that create the most political division, he wrote in a memo to the Nixon White House in 1970.

Finkelstein’s goal was to polarize the electorate as much as possible, to pitch each side against the other. The fuel: fear. “The danger has to be presented as coming from the Left,” a 25-year-old Finkelstein advised Nixon.

Whoever doesn’t attack first will be beaten, he argued. And Finkelstein made things personal. Every campaign needs an enemy to defeat. He developed negative campaigning into a technique he called “rejectionist voting” — to demonize the enemy so much that even the laziest of voters would want to get out and vote, just to reject them.

Shane Goldmacher
‏Verified account
@ShaneGoldmacher
The first three senators to run for president this cycle are women.

That is a sentence we’ve never been able to write before.

Now isn't this something!

US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is going to make a cameo appearance in the new Lego movie.

Justice Ginsburg, known affectionately to her supporters as the "Notorious RBG", will appear as a Lego minifigure - complete with gavel and robes.

She was not required to do voice work for the film, but has given filmmakers permission to use her likeness.

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part - a sequel to the 2014 film The Lego Movie - is due to be released on 8 February.

Producers Chris Miller and Phil Lord say they were "trying to think of people who should be immortalised in Lego and who seem fun at weddings" when they decided to include the judge.

Her character has already made its first appearance, in a trailer posted to The Lego Movie's Instagram page yesterday.

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part -

ENORMOUS Shift in Latino Approval of the President in a Month

MSM LEAVES THIS OUT

All the media is reporting is that the President’s overall favorability has sunk, but they conveniently left this information out. The President’s favorability with Latinos is at 50 percent, a figure that will undoubtedly alarm Democrats who are counting on them being their pawns.

It will turn Democrats in favor of the wall if this trend continues in polls.

Nice day", and leaves. All class and grace, this guy.

Native elder recounts viral confrontation with ‘ugly, ugly’ MAGA students

Native American tribal elder and Vietnam war veteran Nathan Phillips on Sunday recounted the events leading up to a tense standoff last week with an “ugly mob” of young Catholic students wearing MAGA hats, video of which has gone viral.

According to Phillips, the high school students had just completed their participation in the anti-choice March for Life in Washington, D.C., and had confronted a small group of Black Hebrew Israelites who were proselytizing nearby.

Over the course of an hour, the student group kept growing, until it numbered into the hundreds, Phillips explained to MSNBC’s A.M. Joy.

“They surrounded these black kids, these black guys — taunting them and throwing racial taunts back and forth,” he said.

“First they came, there were about six of them. They went away. They came back with about 20. They went away, came back with about 60. They surrounded these black kids, black guys,” Phillips recounted.

“Taunting them — racial taunts back and forth. We were just at the sidelines watching this. This is about an hour. Then they went away. The 60 came back, 100, maybe 200 of them. They were just a big mob. Just ugly, ugly mob.”

Phillips said he worried that the high school students might actually violently attack the Black Hebrew group. The viral moment with the smirking student arose after he chose to insert himself between the growing confrontation.

“So when I started singing our songs, our prayers to God, that drum is an instrument we use to communicate to God,” he said.

“So when I started the drum beat it was in my mind that, ‘God, look at us here now, you know? I’m praying, God.’ We’re at the end of our indigenous people’s March and we want to end this in a good way. Look at my America. Look at my black and white brothers tearing at each other. We’re at a point where you can’t stand by and watch this.”

“If you’re an American and you see America getting torn apart, being burned down — you gotta do something. You gotta stop it.”

The Indigenous Peoples Movement, which organized Friday’s march, called the confrontation “emblematic of our discourse in Trump’s America.”

Many have pointed out that it has become a common phenomenon for white Trump supporters to harass marginalized people simply by chanting his slogans, as these students did yelling “Build that Wall.”

As Phillips pointed out in a separate interview, indigenous people lived in North America for hundreds of years with no walls at all.

Many of the students were seen wearing clothing that identified them as attending Covington Catholic High School in Park Hills, Kentucky. School officials and the Catholic Diocese of Covington released a joint statement Saturday condemning the students’ behavior. They promised to investigate the incident and “take appropriate action, up to and including expulsion.”

Phillips stopped short of agreeing that the students should be expelled, but did say that the chaperones should be fired for allowing such behavior.

WASHINGTON — When the Trump administration announced last month that it was lifting sanctions against a trio of companies controlled by an influential Russian oligarch, it cast the move as tough on Russia and on the oligarch, arguing that he had to make painful concessions to get the sanctions lifted.

But a binding confidential document signed by both sides suggests that the agreement the administration negotiated with the companies controlled by the oligarch, Oleg V. Deripaska, may have been less punitive than advertised.

The deal contains provisions that free him from hundreds of millions of dollars in debt while leaving him and his allies with majority ownership of his most important company, the document shows.

With the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 election continuing to shadow President Trump, the administration’s decision to lift sanctions on Mr. Deripaska’s companies has become a political flash point. House Democrats won widespread Republican support last week for their efforts to block the sanctions relief deal. Democratic hopes of blocking the administration’s decision have been stifled by the Republican-controlled Senate.

The Treasury Department announced the sanctions last April against Mr. Deripaska, six other Russian oligarchs and their companies, including Mr. Deripaska’s aluminum giant, Rusal, as well as the holding company that owns it, EN+, and another company it controls, EuroSibEnergo. Like other oligarchs, Mr. Deripaska is closely allied with the Kremlin.

The sanctions were in retaliation for “a range of malign activity around the globe” by Russia, Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, said at the time.

The department laid out the broad contours of the agreement in a letter to Congress, which was released publicly. But the confidential document, which was not released publicly but was reviewed by The New York Times, describes the deal in considerably greater detail, including proprietary information about the corporate restructuring, much of it not previously reported.

It shows that the sanctions relief deal will allow Mr. Deripaska to wipe out potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in debt by transferring some of his shares to VTB, a Russian government-owned bank under limited United States sanctions that had lent him large sums of money.

The confidential document, titled “Terms of Removal,” also shows that the agreement would leave allies of Mr. Deripaska and the Kremlin with significant stakes in his companies. The document is signed by executives representing Mr. Deripaska’s three companies as well as the official in the Treasury Department who oversees the division that handled the negotiations.
The department laid out the broad contours of the agreement in a letter to Congress, which was released publicly. But the confidential document, which was not released publicly but was reviewed by The New York Times, describes the deal in considerably greater detail, including proprietary information about the corporate restructuring, much of it not previously reported.

It shows that the sanctions relief deal will allow Mr. Deripaska to wipe out potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in debt by transferring some of his shares to VTB, a Russian government-owned bank under limited United States sanctions that had lent him large sums of money.

The confidential document, titled “Terms of Removal,” also shows that the agreement would leave allies of Mr. Deripaska and the Kremlin with significant stakes in his companies. The document is signed by executives representing Mr. Deripaska’s three companies as well as the official in the Treasury Department who oversees the division that handled the negotiations.
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him the respect you and Trump will never receive.

Native elder recounts viral confrontation with ‘ugly, ugly’ MAGA students

Journalists and Celebs Rush to Delete Tweets Slamming MAGA-Hat Kids