monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

[VIDEO] Reporter: Clinton on Epstein Plane 27 Times, ‘Almost Every Time’ with Underage Girls

Fox News at Night,” featured Conchita Sarnoff, an investigative journalist who has been following the Jeffrey Epstein alleged sex trafficking saga for more than 10 years. In the interview, Sarnoff says that Clinton was on Epstein’s plane 27 times and that “almost every time” underage girls were on the plane as well. Sarnoff has written a book about the Jeffrey Epstein human trafficking case.

As I think more about President Trump's outrageous speech on the environment, there were the usual features: distortions, misrepresentations, and of course outright lies. If I had submitted the text to my high school English teacher, she would have spilled so much red ink marking it up the paper would have looked like a crime scene. And indeed it was a crime, against facts, science, and the health of our planet.

But I was also struck by something else, which I think we are going to see a lot more of as the campaign heats up: cynicism.

There is no plausible way for a president who claims our climate crisis is a hoax, who demeans data and research, who stocks his administration with oil and gas lobbyists and seeks to undercut our sensitive and hard-fought environmental regulations, to credibly claim to be a steward of our planet. It is so farcical why even pretend? Because he and especially his advisors (otherwise known as enablers and opportunists) know their policies are deeply unpopular.

They know they are losing the political battle over climate and science, like they lost the battle over gay marriage. They can fire up the base as sure as they fire up a coal plant, but in the suburbs and among a growing number of younger and educated voters the polluters are on the wrong side of the electorate. The GOP will not win these voters in large margins, but they know they needs to cut into the lead the Democrats are building. So, the speech.

Expect President Trump to try to moderate his image, not in the cruelty, shortsightedness, or capriciousness of his policies, but in the words he uses. Much of this will be putting a lipstick of lies on the pig. The question is will he get away with it? Will the press say he's "moderating?" Will there be a false equivalence test with the Democratic nominee?

The good news is that a growing number of voters seem to be willing to vote on climate. The bad news is that we have the exact wrong president at the most crucial moment in this crisis. Will he be able to lie his way out of this while his cronies exploit the health of our planet for their financial gain, or will the American people hold him accountable?

I predict we will see a lot more of these kinds of tactics. Will the environment and the president's cynicism, a cynicism based on shameless lies, be at the heart of the framing for the upcoming election?

‘American Carnage’ Shows How War Between Republicans Led to Their Peace With Trump

Over the weekend we learned that President Trump — who has taken credit for an economic turnaround that began under Barack Obama and a hot streak by the Boston Red Sox — insists that he predicted the meteoric rise of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez long before anyone else did. He says that he called her “Evita,” comparing her to Eva Perón, Argentina’s populist first lady and eventual president, ahead of Ocasio-Cortez’s surprise victory in the Democratic primary of 2018.

On Sunday, The Guardian disrupted the publisher’s carefully scheduled rollout of Tim Alberta’s “American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump” by leading with this morsel from Alberta’s reporting. Before the end of the day, the online furor had run its course — from amplification and distrust to playful irony and political mudslinging. Ocasio-Cortez tweeted out Perón quotes about helping the poor; conservatives gleefully used her tweets to bring up how Argentina under the Peróns became a haven for Nazi war criminals.

It’s a sign of the times that Alberta’s doorstop volume was at first reduced to a sound bite from the president, who has an uncanny gift for making everything about him. But “American Carnage” isn’t just another drop in the deluge of Trump books; in fact, it isn’t really a Trump book at all. Instead it’s a fascinating look at a Republican Party that initially scoffed at the incursion of a philandering reality-TV star with zero political experience and now readily accommodates him.

Alberta, a political correspondent for the conservative magazine National Review before moving to Politico, brings more than a decade of reporting and a real understanding of the conservative movement to “American Carnage.” He reminds readers of the 2000 presidential election, when George W. Bush campaigned with the promise of “compassionate conservatism,” reflecting an attempt by the Republican Party to present itself as “warm, aspirational, inclusive,” pursuing minority outreach and immigration reform. Republican pollsters had taken a look at the changing demographics of the country, and the numbers spelled doom. The Republican Party simply couldn’t survive by catering primarily to white people.

Or could it? This question cuts to the heart of what the party is becoming under Trump, who was the preferred candidate of white nationalists. Gone for the most part is the big-tent strategy of appealing to moderates and expanding outreach; if the 2018 midterms were any indication, the Republican electoral plan currently consists mainly of riling up the base, gerrymandering and appointing the judges who will decide the gerrymandering cases.

There are exceptions, of course. Alberta showcases attempts by Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only black Republican in the Senate, to modify some of the more extremist tendencies in the party, devising tax incentives for investment in poor areas and lobbying for bipartisan criminal justice legislation.

But in a book that weighs in at more than 600 pages, Scott’s efforts made me think mostly of the historian Leah Wright Rigueur’s excellent study “The Loneliness of the Black Republican.” As “American Carnage” makes abundantly clear, Trump tapped into and exploited a bigotry that had already been seething, bubbling up to the surface during the Obama administration. Trump might have been a noisy proponent of birtherism, but he was also, Alberta explains, a “latecomer” to the movement. The Republican adviser Karl Rove says he “knew people, smart people, who were into it.”

Rove is one of the more than 300 people Alberta interviewed for this book, which locates Trump’s ascendancy amid a long-brewing civil war in the Republican Party. The narrative begins with the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, when Sarah Palin — a Trumpian politician before Trump became a politician — was transformed into a national figure by the beloved establishment senator John McCain. Rove calls Palin “vacuous” and an “early warning bell”: “We went from wanting people who were experienced and qualified to wanting people who would throw bombs and blow things up.”

This may sound rich coming from someone who had no problem with actual bomb-throwing in the Iraq War, but Rove’s comment reflected a growing awareness among elite Republicans that their grip on the party had been pried loose. What it doesn’t do is acknowledge that those who were “experienced and qualified” enough to serve in a Bush administration remembered for expensive wars and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression might have played a part in their own political demise.

This may sound rich coming from someone who had no problem with actual bomb-throwing in the Iraq War, but Rove’s comment reflected a growing awareness among elite Republicans that their grip on the party had been pried loose. What it doesn’t do is acknowledge that those who were “experienced and qualified” enough to serve in a Bush administration remembered for expensive wars and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression might have played a part in their own political demise.

Not that they have all disappeared — far from it. While Tea Party-adjacent Republicans like Eric Cantor and John Boehner were eventually pushed out by the impatient brawlers of the House Freedom Caucus, certain old-guard figures have since seized on what they need to do to keep their jobs and stay in power. Alberta spells out how Mitch McConnell’s refusal to allow even a hearing for Merrick Garland, Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, encouraged otherwise hesitant social conservatives — ever hopeful of overturning Roe v. Wade — to hold their noses and vote for a libertine Trump.

Alberta, who thanks Jesus Christ in his acknowledgments (“despite my straying from the path, He loves me and forgives me”), seems truly astounded by the about-face of the evangelical Mike Pence, a longtime free-trade conservative who embraced tariffs after becoming Trump’s running mate. The born-again protectionism is one thing, but it’s Pence’s unlikely portrait of Trump as a pious supplicant that gives Alberta pause. “I respect the sincerity of his faith,” Pence told Alberta on the 2016 campaign trail.

“This is when the B.S. detector starts to beep,” Alberta writes. His book generally strikes a tone of measured fairness throughout, but he eventually concludes that “Pence’s talent for bootlicking” is “obscene.”

Unsurprisingly, Republicans who have left office are game to give Alberta some of the saltiest quotes. Boehner, who retired as House speaker in 2015, says Congress is filled with “some of the nicest people” and “some that are Nazis.” Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, fumes at evangelical leaders for supporting a president who “comes along defiling the White House and disrespecting God’s children at every turn, but it’s cool, because he gave them two Supreme Court justices.”

“American Carnage” tells the degrading story of the ultimate devil’s bargain: As chaotic as the current administration is, and as much as the president torpedoes conservative shibboleths like respect for the F.B.I. and the sanctity of families, Republicans have scored some goodies they have long craved — the gutting of environmental regulations, a raft of judicial appointments and an enormous tax cut.

The question is how sustainable any of this is. Zac Moffatt, the digital director for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012, now admits that Romney’s hard-line immigration rhetoric may have had some consequences that were less intended than others.

“Sometimes you have to light a prairie fire to win,” he told Alberta. “But sometimes it comes back and burns your house down.”

“Very special, the kidney has a very special place in the heart, it’s an incredible thing.”

...We started this investigative work when we noticed irregularities in the financing of the Leave campaign to take Britain out of the EU. Since then, the picture that has emerged is of a powerful, well-funded global alliance of ultra-conservatives and far-right political actors, many of whom unite around an economically libertarian but socially conservative worldview.

This political vision is explicit about seeking to shift power away from women and LGBTQI people. It aims to promote the “life” of the unborn (while disregarding the risks of unsafe abortions and pregnancies to women’s lives); the “family,” by which it means a return to traditional gender roles, without any space for LGBTQI people, and putting women back in the home, seen as their “natural” place; and the “freedom” of markets and religious institutions, specifically Christian ones, above all other claims of rights or liberties...

...A recent openDemocracy investigation found that America’s Christian right spent at least $50 million of “dark money” to fund campaigns and advocacy in Europe over the past decade. (By the measures of US political financing, this may not seem like a vast sum, but by European standards it’s formidable. The total spend on the 2014 European elections, for example, by all of Ireland’s political parties combined was just $3 million.)

These numbers are also likely the tip of the iceberg: our analysis looked at only twelve US Christian right groups, and there were many obstacles to disclosure that limited the information we could extract. Institutions registered as churches, for example, are not required to publish their overseas funding. The largest spender appeared to be the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, which spent more than $20 million in Europe from 2008 to 2014, but filings are not available beyond that period, so the true figure could be far larger.

In the summer of 2016, Russian intelligence agents secretly planted a fake report claiming that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was gunned down by a squad of assassins working for Hillary Clinton, giving rise to a notorious conspiracy theory that captivated conservative activists and was later promoted from inside President Trump’s White House, a Yahoo News investigation has found.

Russia’s foreign intelligence service, known as the SVR, first circulated a phony “bulletin” — disguised to read as a real intelligence report —about the alleged murder of the former DNC staffer on July 13, 2016, according to the U.S. federal prosecutor who was in charge of the Rich case. That was just three days after Rich, 27, was killed in what police believed was a botched robbery while walking home to his group house in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C., about 30 blocks north of the Capitol.

Some people are trying.

Mr Morrison took aim at kids skipping school to protest about climate change inaction on Friday, sparking further outrage from the students.

During question time in parliament on Monday, Mr Morrison condemned the school strike for climate action happening in 30 cities and towns across Australia, saying kids should stay in school.

Mr Morrison furiously reacted to Greens MP Adam Bandt who asked if he supported the School Strike 4 Climate Action movement

Sydney school strike lead organiser Jean Hinchliffe, 14, said they were sick and tired of politicians playing politics with their futures.

In the summer of 2016, Russian intelligence agents secretly planted a fake report claiming that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was gunned down by a squad of assassins working for Hillary Clinton, giving rise to a notorious conspiracy theory that captivated conservative activists and was later promoted from inside President Trump’s White House, a Yahoo News investigation has found.

The Media’s 10 Rules of Hate

Pick up any major newspaper, or turn on any network television news broadcast. The political orientation won’t matter. It could be Fox or MSNBC, The Washington Post or The Washington Times. You’ll find virtually every story checks certain boxes.

Call them the 10 rules of hate. After generations of doing the opposite, when unity and conformity were more profitable, the primary product the news media now sells is division.

The problem we (in the media) all have is the commercial structure of the business. To make money, we’ve had to train audiences to consume news in a certain way. We need you anxious, pre-pissed, addicted to conflict. Moreover we need you to bring a series of assumptions every time you open a paper or turn on your phone, TV, or car radio. Without them, most of what we produce will seem illogical and offensive.

In Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky highlighted how the press “manufactured” public unity by making sure the population was only exposed to a narrow median strip of political ideas, stretching from Republican to Democrat (with the Democrat usually more like an Eisenhower Republican).

The difference now: we encourage full-fledged division on that strip. We’ve discovered we can sell hate, and the more vituperative the rhetoric, the better. This also serves larger political purposes.

So long as the public is busy hating each other and not aiming its ire at the more complex financial and political processes going on off-camera, there’s very little danger of anything like a popular uprising.

That’s not why we do what we do. But it is why we’re allowed to operate this way. It boggles the mind that people think they’re practicing real political advocacy by watching any major corporate TV channel, be it Fox or MSNBC or CNN. Does anyone seriously believe that powerful people would allow truly dangerous ideas to be broadcast on TV? The news today is a reality show where you’re part of the cast: America vs. America, on every channel.

The trick here is getting audiences to think they’re punching up, when they’re actually punching sideways, at other media consumers just like themselves, who happen to be in a different silo. Hate is a great blinding mechanism. Once you’ve been in the business long enough, you become immersed in its nuances. If you can get people to accept a sequence of simple, powerful ideas, they’re yours forever. The 10 Rules of Hate:

1. There are only two ideas
2. The two ideas are in permanent conflict
3. Hate people, not institutions
4. Everything is someone else’s fault
5. Nothing is everyone’s fault
6. Root, don’t think
7. No switching teams
8. The other side is literally Hitler
9. In the fight against Hitler, everything is permitted
10. Feel superior

(...) We know you know the news we show you is demeaning, disgusting, pointless, and not really intended to inform.

But we assume you’ll be too embarrassed to admit you spend hours every day poring through content specifically designed to stroke your point of view. Like Tolstoy’s weak hero, you’ll pay to hide your shame.

The idea behind most political coverage is to get you to turn on the TV and within minutes have you tsk-tsking and saying, “What idiots!” And, from there, it’s a short hop to, “**** those commie-loving tree-huggers!” or “**** the Hitler-loving freaks!”

We can’t get you there unless you follow all the rules. Accept a binary world and pick a side. Embrace the reality of being surrounded by evil stupidity. Feel indignant, righteous, and smart. Hate losers, love winners. Don’t challenge yourself. And during the commercials, do some shopping.

Congratulations, you’re the perfect news consumer.