monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

That is so true.

Trump’s approval rating is at an all-time high (44%). Is it because he’s whipped up the racists or because Rs and others are sick of this Mueller thing—or a combination?

It been since the early 60s that you could get away with being a open racist and also hit back at the very idea that we can have a black president thanks to Trump that is now allow.

Send those black US born women congress person back as a chant did not happen even in the 60s that I know of.

Hell I can remember similar white mobs cursing at black children that needed to be surrounded by federal troops with fix bayonets in order to go to school and thanks once more to Trump we are going back to that time period.

What others? On what reasoning (if that term is even appropriate in this context)?

A lot of progressives are sick of it. Mueller is sick of it.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/3194049002

Since I don’t think you know what a progressive is: here’s an introduction to what we think of the entire mueller investigation:

https://www.mintpressnews.com/lessons-for-the-progressive-left-from-the-failed-mueller-inquiry/256542/

The left never had a dog in this race. This was always an in-house squabble between different wings of the establishment. Late-stage capitalism is in terminal crisis, and the biggest problem facing our corporate elites is how to emerge from this crisis with their power intact. One wing wants to make sure the pig’s face remains painted, the other is happy simply getting its snout deeper into the trough while the food lasts.






Russia-gate was never about substance, it was about who gets to image-manage the decline of a turbo-charged, self-harming neoliberal capitalism.

The leaders of the Democratic Party are less terrified of Trump and what he represents than they are of us and what we might do if we understood how they have rigged the political and economic system to their permanent advantage.

For them, it may look like Russia-gate was a failure, but it was actually a success. It deflected the left’s attention from endemic corruption within the leadership of the Democratic Party, which supposedly represents the left. It diverted the left’s political energies towards the convenient bogeymen targets of Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

What Mueller found – all he was ever going to find – was marginal corruption in the Trump camp. And that was inevitable because Washington is mired in corruption. In fact, what Mueller revealed was the most exceptional forms of corruption among Trump’s team while obscuring the run-of-the-mill stuff that would have served as a reminder of the endemic corruption infecting the Democratic leadership too.

An anti-corruption investigation would have run much deeper and exposed far more. It would have highlighted the Clinton Foundation, and the role of mega-donors such as James Simons, George Soros and Haim Saban who funded Hillary’s campaign with one aim in mind: to get their issues into a paid-for national “consensus.”

Further, in focusing on the Trump camp – and relative minnows such as Paul Manafort and Roger Stone – the Russia-gate inquiry actually served to shield the Democratic leadership from an investigation into the much worse corruption revealed in the content of the Democratic National Committee emails. It was the leaking / hacking of those emails that provided the rationale for Mueller’s investigations. What should have been at the front and center of any inquiry was how the Democratic Party sought to rig its primaries to prevent party members selecting anyone but Hillary as their presidential candidate.

So, in short, Russia-gate has been two years of wasted energy by the left, energy that could have been spent both targeting Trump for what he is really doing rather than what it is imagined he has done, and targeting the Democratic leadership for its own, equally corrupt practices.



No. 2: Trump Empowered
But it’s far worse than that. It is not just that the left wasted two years of political energy on Russia-gate. At the same time, it empowered Trump, breathing life into his phony arguments that he is the anti-establishment president, a people’s president the elites are determined to destroy.

Trump faces opposition from within the establishment not because he is “anti-establishment” but because he refuses to decorate the pig’s snout with lipstick. He is tearing the mask off late-stage capitalism’s greed and self-destructiveness. And he is doing so not because he wants to reform or overthrow turbo-charged capitalism but because he wants to remove the last, largely cosmetic constraints on the system so that he and his friends can plunder with greater abandon – and destroy the planet more quickly.

The other wing of the neoliberal establishment, the one represented by the Democratic Party leadership, fears that exposing capitalism in this way – making explicit its inherently brutal, wrist-slitting tendencies – will awaken the masses, that over time it will risk turning them into revolutionaries. Democratic Party leaders fear Trump chiefly because of the threat he poses to the image of the political and economic system they have so lovingly crafted so that they can continue enriching themselves and their children.

Trump’s genius – his only genius – is to have appropriated, and misappropriated, some of the language of the left to advance the interests of the 1 percent. When he attacks the corporate “liberal” media for having a harmful agenda, for serving as propagandists, he is not wrong. When he rails against the identity politics cultivated by “liberal” elites over the past two decades – suggesting that it has weakened the U.S. – he is not wrong. But he is right for the wrong reasons.

The corporate media and the journalists they employ are propagandists – for a system that keeps them wealthy. When Trump was a Republican primary candidate, the entire corporate media loved him because he was TV’s equivalent of clickbait, just as he had been since reality TV began to usurp the place of current affairs programs and meaningful political debate.

The Russians never tried any of this **** when Obama was in charge.



https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-49079719

Well. They did actually try a lot of ****. Obama just let it slide.

https://www.hudson.org/research/14142-5-times-the-obama-administration-helped-russia-at-the-united-states-expense

If Russian President Vladimir Putin really did think a Donald Trump presidency would be good for Russia, the first year of that presidency must be quite the disappointment. There has been no indication that the Trump administration’s policies are influenced by Russian preferences.

Perhaps that’s why some found interesting a recent Daily Beast article claiming Trump National Security Council senior staffer Kevin Harrington recommended withdrawing U.S. troops from Eastern Europe to curry favor with Russia. This, the article states, was “something that smelled, to a colleague, like a return on Russia’s election-time investment in President Trump.”

Sure, it’s the speculation of an anonymous source, but it would be bad, if true. Then the article goes on to say a second anonymous former colleague “noted that Harrington’s proposal was largely politely brushed aside, even at the uniquely chaotic early days of the Trump era.” Oh.

Yes, that was a horrible, dangerous, unbelievably stupid idea. It was also rejected. It never approached the possibility that it could become a reality—unlike all the times people in the Obama administration had ideas about capitulating to the Russians and then those ideas becoming reality.

Here are just five times the Obama administration considered then carried out bad policies that helped Russia and hurt the United States.

1. Choked at Russia’s Cyberattacks and Election Meddling

While there is no evidence that anything Russian efforts did affected the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, the intelligence community assesses Russia interfered in the months leading up to it to sow public discord and undermine confidence in the democratic process. The Obama administration knew about this for months. But President Obama opted to not call Russia out on it publicly or inform the American people.

In fact, his administration didn’t even draw public attention to this until October, just weeks before the election. In a hearing on the subject, Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff asked Obama Homeland Security Director Jeh Johnson, “Why wasn’t it more important to tell the American people the length and breadth of what the Russians were doing to interfere in an election than any risk that it might be seen as putting your hand on the scale? Didn’t the public have a compelling need to know?”

Indeed. Even Tom Donilon, a former Obama national security advisor, argues Obama should have made “aggressive public attribution” that Russia was responsible, long before the administration did.

Then there was all that Russian hacking that went on throughout the Obama presidency. The Russians pilfered American intellectual property and attacked private companies, Nasdaq, and banks, as well as government agencies, including the Pentagon.

2. Abdicated Leadership on Syria to Russia

The Islamic Republic of Iran funds and exports terrorism that has directly led to the deaths of American soldiers. Syria is a proxy state of Iran, and in 2011 an uprising challenged its brutal dictator Bashar al-Assad. In 2015 President Obama drew his infamous red line, threatening a U.S. military response if Assad used chemical weapons against the Syrian people.

Later that year, Assad used chemical weapons, killing more than 1,500 people. President Obama failed to enforce the red line, instead choosing to accept a deal with Russia to “remove” all of Syria’s chemical weapons. After some of the chemical weapons were removed, President Obama declared victory, saying, “American diplomacy, backed by the threat of force, is why Syria’s chemical weapons are being eliminated.”

Months later, Secretary of State John Kerry boasted, “We struck a deal where we got 100 percent of the chemical weapons out.” That was false. Assad continued to use chemical weapons against his own people. According to former Obama administration officials, Obama’s failure to punish Assad and enforce prohibitions on chemical weapons was directly due to his administration’s desire to assuage Russia, Syria’s—and Iran’s—ally.

3. Cancelled U.S. Missile Defenses In Eastern Europe

Russia’s government strongly opposed Bush administration plans to deploy ballistic missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic. The pretext for their disapproval was that the system would weaken the effect of the Russian offensive force.

This was always nonsense. The defenses’ 10 interceptors and associated radar could not handle the massive offensive Russian force. The plan was to deploy the system to provide additional coverage of the U.S. homeland and European allies from Iranian long-range ballistic missiles. The placement in Poland provided an optimal angle from which to shoot at any incoming missiles. Russians actually opposed this because it would entail placing U.S. forces in Poland.

It took courage from the Polish and Czech governments to stick their necks out and push for these deployments, knowing it would anger the Russian government. This is why the missile defense initiative took on a greater political significance beyond the mere technical protection it would offer. Then in 2009, just as President Obama was kicking off his “Russia reset,” he pulled the rug out from under the Poles and Czechs and cancelled the missile defense plan.

Polish newspapers called the decision a betrayal and some Polish politicians wondered publicly if the United States under President Obama’s leadership was demoting Poland’s allied status. In 2012, still smarting over the cancellation, Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski said, “Our mistake was that by accepting the American offer of a shield we failed to take into account the political risk associated with a change of president… We paid a high political price.” Jan Vidim, a Czech lawmaker, told the Associated Press, “If the Administration approaches us in the future with any request, I would be strongly against it.”

Obama defenders will dispute this and argue the cancelation was due to the missile defense system’s ineffectiveness or that the administration merely wanted a different kind of missile defense architecture. WikiLeaks released the State Department cables in 2010, revealing that appeasing Russia was a motivator for canceling the plan with Poland.

But President Obama wasn’t done using missile defense as a negotiating chip with the Russians. Three years later the infamous “hot mic” incident occurred when President Obama met then Russian President Medvedev and was caught asking Medvedev to communicate to Putin, then prime minister, that he should give Obama “space” on “all these issues, but particularly missile defense” until after the U.S. presidential election, because once he had the headache of the American peoples’ wishes behind him, he’d have “more flexibility.” You can watch and listen to the exchange here.

4. Allowed Russia to Sell S-300 Air Defenses to Iran

Should the United States or Israel decide it is in their interest to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, the Iranians wouldn’t have a robust air defense system to shoot down the attacking aircraft. Unless, of course, the Russians sold the powerful S-300 air defense system to the Iranians, which they did.

The United States firmly opposed and prevented the Russians from doing this for years, threatening sanctions if they so dared. But in pursuit of the Iran deal, in 2010 the Obama administration opted not to prohibit the Russian sale of the S-300s to Iran. The Russians delivered the systems to Iran and Iran promptly deployed them around its nuclear facility at Fordow. The Obama administration declined to impose sanctions on Russia despite its clear violation of laws that opposed the move.

5. Ignored Russia’s Treaty Violations

U.S. congressmen from both parties grew increasingly frustrated when repeatedly seeking answers from the Obama administration over reports that Russia was violating the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, negotiated by President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev, that abolished an entire class of missiles. In 2014 the Obama administration finally publicly admitted that Russia had been violating the treaty as early as 2008.

What made this episode especially maddening was that the Obama administration negotiated yet another arms-control treaty with the Russians, the New START Treaty, and rushed it through the Senate, all while Russia was cheating on INF and appearing to keep this violation from Congress. (By the way, Russia is still cheating.)

So far, the Trump administration has been moving forward with a variety of initiatives that would strengthen U.S. security despite Russian objections. This includes its energy policy, arming Ukraine, rolling back Iran’s influence, investing in U.S. military preparedness, and significantly improving the U.S. nuclear deterrent and missile defense system.

The Trump administration should keep this up, and if it starts to do otherwise, it deserves every bit of criticism and condemnation from both ends of the political spectrum that is likely to follow. Thankfully, it certainly seems as though the policy of Russian appeasement ended with Trump’s predecessor’s second term.

I don’t mind someone being batshit crazy. Hell, we’re all at least a little nuts - and whats’ normal, anyway? What I mind is someone claiming to speak for all or most of a group as large as those who call themselves progressives, then braying about how “we” think that the Russia investigation is a rigged hoax; that “we” don’t really have a dog in the fight of overthrowing Trump; that “we” see Obama and especially Clinton as equally or more corrupt, etc.

From talking to and listening to progressives all day every day... That [iain’t[/i] how and what “we” think. There’s an offshoot of the TYT/Tulsie/Bernie bot offshoot that certainly does. But it is not all, or even most progressives that believe all that horseshit Lash is peddling.

I interact with a large group of progressives, and most of them do believe what the article stated. They share the same beliefs you would find espoused in Truthdig and Truthout—the same beliefs you’ll find shared by Glenn Greenwald.

It’s the same.

If you don’t share those basic beliefs, you need to call yourself something other than progressive.

Democrats do not equal progressive.

Bill Clinton—written by and for progressives

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/american-history-for-truthdiggers-bill-clinton-the-new-democrat/

Excerpt:

The ascendant political right—in Congress, the conservative media and the pulpits of evangelical mega-churches—absolutely loathed the man, and even more so his ambitious wife, Hillary. Republicans exaggerated, cried wolf, one might say, depicting the Clintons as extreme leftists out of touch with middle (“real”) America and, indeed, even unpatriotic. They stifled the president at nearly every turn, at least when he attempted even marginally liberal policies. Yet just as often the conservatives sided with him, forming alliances of convenience, as Clinton showed his true colors, which were centrist and even right-leaning. Indeed, it would be apparent, in hindsight, that the 42nd president was the first outright neoliberal chief executive, tacking right time and again and paving the way for the rise of neoconservative Republican power.

Perhaps it should have been little surprise that Clinton never lived up to his idols, JFK and FDR, or managed to bolster the standing of the flailing Democratic Party. After all, in a three-way race, Clinton earned only 43 percent of the popular vote in winning his first presidential term in 1992. This meant that 57 percent of Americans voted for the Republican George H.W. Bush or the fiscally austere deficit hawk Ross Perot, who ran as a third-party candidate.

Clinton was truly a new breed of Democrat. More interested in winning than liberal dogma, he read the tea leaves of the “Reagan Revolution” and decided to undercut his conservative opponents by taking right-facing positions. Did he really believe that such once-Republican policies were in the nation’s best interest? Or did he just do what was necessary to win? The question will undoubtedly be argued forever. What’s certain is Clinton did not occupy the liberal ground once traveled by George McGovern, or even Jimmy Carter. He was a corporate Democrat, one who deftly convinced all parties in the waning Democratic coalition that he was “on their side,” while often selling them out soon afterward. This went for blacks, Hispanics, gays, union workers and the very poor. Clinton even spoke differently depending on his audience, managing, despite his inconsistent policies, to win the adoration of many of those he would abandon once in the White House.

———————————
Kamala Harris is no progressive, nor is anyone who’d vote for her. She’s a conservative Democrat.

You guys who try to shut down all alternatives to your corporate narrative need to understand a lot of people have quite different, legitimate opinions that are widely shared.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/noam-chomsky-the-real-election-meddling-isnt-coming-from-russia/

Alan MacLeod: It’s now been almost 30 years since its publication, and the media landscape has, in many ways, changed greatly since 1988. I think perhaps the largest difference is the arrival of the internet and social media. One 2016 study showed that half of all British people get their news online now, with online news having overtaken television in its reach, and having far superseded it among those under 45 years old. Twenty-five percent of the UK receives its news primarily through social media like Facebook or Twitter. In the United States, two-thirds of the adult population get news through social media, and that figure is growing at nearly 10 percent a year. Even the majority of over-50s use social media for news. Could you speak about the internet and social media, its usage and the evolving media landscape with regard to the propaganda model?

Noam Chomsky: I don’t think the internet and social media changes the propaganda model at all. The propaganda model was about the major media institutions and they remain, with all the social media and everything else, the primary source of news, information and commentary. The news that appears in social media is drawn from them. So, if you look at the news on Facebook, it comes straight from the major media. They don’t do their own investigations.

As far as the major media are concerned, there is no fundamental difference. In fact, in some ways, they are a little more independent than they were back in the 1980s, partly because of changes in the society, which have opened things up to an extent. But fundamentally, they are the same. In fact, Ed and I did a second edition of Manufacturing Consent about 16 years ago, and we talked about the internet and whether to write anything about it, and we decided just to leave it alone.

As far as social media are concerned, they are interesting in themselves. There has been a certain amount of study of them. What they have done is create bubbles. If you read the New York Times—which, incidentally, young people did not read much in the 1980s, either—but if you read the New York Times or the Washington Post, or even if you watch television news, you get a certain range of opinion, not very broad—it goes from center to far-right, but at least there is some discussion, and occasionally you get a critical voice here and there.

On social media, that has declined. People tend to go to things that just reinforce their own opinions, so you end up with bubbles. And it is all across the spectrum. The people on what is called the left see the left media, the people on the right see the right media. And the level of material is, of course, much more shallow.

The mainstream media, as we wrote in Manufacturing Consent, are a very significant source of news and information, and provide very valuable material. The first thing I do every day is read the New York Times, as it is the most comprehensive journal. You have to critically analyze what you read and understand the framework, what is left out and so forth, but that is not quantum physics; it is not hard to do. But it is a source of news.

On social media, you do not find that. There are exceptions; there are internet journals that are very good—for example, The Intercept—but most of it [internet and social media] is pretty shallow, and has led to a decline in understanding of the world in many ways.

This is the globalist situation that is actually destroying people's faith in the dogma or pragmatisim of party politics.

Winning at any cost in Australia means cosying up to separatist and extremist alike, for the sake of control.

That, of course, comes with a hefty price tag, or a heavy toll.

Either way, not a grand result.

Always with the personal attack—never with the refutation of content. Lowest form of interaction.

That you have witnessed three years of the foulness and madness of Trump with your own eyes, and still consider him no more of an existential threat than Hillary Clinton would’ve been, is all anyone needs to know about your “alternative views “.

You must be watching with different eyes.

Got a list for us to see? I'm seeing record job numbers, and no new invasions.

Clinton promised war right away with Iran. We’d already be three years deep in it.

You’re just a foul mouthed arm chair cowboy who enjoys putting people down.

You idolize Obama and can’t tolerate criticism of him.

Was Obama responsible for those items detailed or not? See if you can muster more than a quip or a put down.

I wouldn’t even interact with you at all except for not being able to stomach the sheer volume and intensity of stench you try to pass off as progressive. It is strangely comforting though, in a familiar oh-there’s-that-wall-I-used-beat-my-head-against way, that you’re still just a foul mouthed old lady that hits lower, and hollers foul louder than anyone.

I won’t be reading anymore of your stench, but feel free to barf on.

For wastes of my time, I may as well list by name the angels dancing on the head of the nearest pin - for all the attention you’ve ever paid to any list of Trump’s transgressions.

I'll translate that for the readers; "He's got nothing, folks".