[A]t the very least the historical record should show that we made note and attempted to raise a red flag at every step downward to the valley of hell. And today is a fairly important milestone: the president of the United States just demanded "retribution" against comedy shows he found offensive, and again declared the media the "enemy of the people," a phrase with clear fascist historical precedents.
Nauert's nomination began to falter after the White House was alerted to a problem in her background: She had in the past employed an immigrant nanny who was in the U.S. legally but wasn't authorized to work, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Two years ago, when Donald Trump was running for president, he proudly declared that he employed no undocumented immigrants in the construction of his grand Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.That doesn't appear to be true for some of his other properties.When Victorina Morales went to work in 2013 as a housekeeper at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, "I told them that I don't have papers, I don't speak English and that I was an immigrant," she told NBC News on Thursday in an interview."They said, 'No, it doesn't matter,'" she said.Morales left Guatemala and illegally crossed the U.S. border in 1999, according to The New York Times, which she and a second woman who used to work at the golf club, Sandra Diaz, approached to tell their story in an article published earlier Thursday.Morales, who still works at the golf club, told NBC News that she knows she could be fired or deported for having come forward.
McGovern didn't win the presidency, but the way he amassed the delegates necessary for the nomination became Carter's road map. And the themes Carter struck: "I'll never lie to you" and "a government as good as its people" had their roots in post-Watergate disillusionment and Caddell's theory about alienated voters--a theory that would eventually lead him to supporting Donald Trump. [...]He was a mixed blessing for the administration during Carter's four years in the White House. No one ever doubted his brilliance, but it didn't always mesh with the reality as others saw it. In the summer of 1979, his poll numbers sinking, Carter retreated to Camp David for ten days to re-think his presidency. With Caddell advising him, Carter emerged to deliver what became known as the "malaise" speech. Carter never used the actual word, but Caddell did, and the rhetoric that Carter used about the public's "crisis of confidence" echoed themes that Caddell had voiced since the McGovern campaign - and that he would continue to emphasize throughout his life.In a retrospective on the McGovern campaign in Vanity Fair in November 2012, Caddell recalled his meeting with Gary Hart, then McGovern's campaign manager, at the Miami airport. "We're in the corridor waiting for different flights, and I'm telling him my theory about alienated voters, and how the people who'd voted for Wallace in the South in 1968 were the same people who voted for Bobby Kennedy in the North. I said that the war was a one-dimensional issue. There was a lot of sentiment against it, but also a lot of support for it, especially among blue-collar voters. My argument was that McGovern was a prairie populist and that, if he used populist issues, he could appeal to that alienated vote. [...]Last year, in November, Caddell spoke on a panel with former Trump strategist Steve Bannon at David Horowitz's Restoration Weekend Conference in Florida. He cited a raft of numbers that explained Trump's victory in 2016, according to an article on the Breitbart news site. Seventy-five percent of Americans believed the country was in decline; only 15 percent of U.S. citizens believe that if you work hard, you will succeed, while 85 percent of Americans think the rich and powerful rigged the system for their benefit."This is ultimately the truth," Caddell said. "Political leaders are more interested in protecting their power and privilege than doing what is right for the American people, 81 percent of Americans agree." He declared "Make America Great Again" the greatest slogan of his lifetime.
After bottoming out in 2011, incomes are rising for American households - and those headed by a Millennial (someone age 22 to 37) now earn more than young adult households did at nearly any time in the past 50 years, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of new census data. [...]Incomes of households headed by 54- to 72-year-olds, Baby Boomers today, are at record levels, while those of current Generation X households (ages 38 to 53) are about the same as the peak earnings of similarly aged households in the past.
Owners and coaches already had given depositions in Kaepernick's case and the details that emerged from those proceedings did not look good for the NFL.For one, the depositions showed just how much league owners were petrified of President Trump, who had loudly criticized the player protests. According to The Wall Street Journal, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones testified in a deposition that in a phone conversation with Trump, the president told him, "This is a very winning, strong issue for me" and "Tell everybody, you can't win this one. This one lifts me."Trump felt that public sentiment was on his side when it came to the player protests, and was warning that he would not back off. That conversation with Jones, and separate ones with Miami owner Stephen Ross and New England Patriots owner Bob Kraft, suggested that the league was allowing their fear of Trump to influence how it dealt with Kaepernick and the other protesters.Had Kaepernick's case gone further, there was no question that more sensitive and damaging information would have come out. Who knows what was said about Kaepernick or other players in texts and emails. Even if Kaepernick lost the case, the NFL would have been left with a significant mess.There are some who already are criticizing Kaepernick for settling, not realizing how rare it is to see the NFL backed into a corner, especially by a player. Tom Brady, arguably the greatest quarterback ever, couldn't beat the NFL in court. Even he eventually had to accept his four-game suspension for Deflategate in 2016.
In August, Sam Patten, a US political consultant who had worked for Cambridge Analytica on campaigns in the US and abroad, struck a plea deal with Mueller after admitting he had failed to register as a foreign agent for a Ukrainian oligarch.He became a subject of the special counsel's inquiry because of work done with Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign manager, in Ukraine. He had also set up a business with Konstantin Kilimnik, a key figure who Mueller has alleged has ties to Russian intelligence and who is facing charges of obstruction of justice. In a 2017 statement to the Washington Post, Kilimnik denied any connection to intelligence services. Kaiser, however, is the first person connected directly to both the Brexit and Trump campaigns known to have been questioned by Mueller.The news came to light in a new Netflix documentary, The Great Hack, which premiered at the Sundance film festival last month and is expected to be released later this spring. Film-makers followed Kaiser for months after she approached the Guardian, including moments after she received the subpoena. She claims the summons came after the Guardian revealed she had visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange while still a Cambridge Analytica employee in February 2017, three months after the US election.One part of Mueller's investigation focuses on whether the Trump campaign sought to influence the timing of the release of emails by WikiLeaks before the election. Investigators are looking at communications between them. In the film, Kaiser says that she has gone from being a cooperating witness to a subject of investigation because of her contact with Assange.In October 2017, it was revealed that Alexander Nix, the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, had contacted Assange in August 2016 to try to obtain emails from Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign - which indictments from Mueller's team say were obtained by Russian military intelligence - to use in Donald Trump's campaign. When Kaiser gave evidence to parliament last year, she was asked about her relationship with Assange and WikiLeaks but failed to reveal that she had met Assange.In the documentary, Kaiser is shown after receiving an email from the Guardian last June asking about meeting Assange and alleged donations of cryptocurrency to WikiLeaks. Kaiser did not respond to the email at the time, but on camera says: "She knows I met Assange. And she knows I donated money to WikiLeaks in bitcoin."
As for a healthy skepticism with regard to the claims of evolution, let's not forget the missing links. Let's not forget that Science has been trying to make the "accident" of evolution happen for over a century without success. It has worked with countless generations of fruit flies, trying to make evolution work, i.e., playing at God by interfering in the "accidental" processes of nature in order to prove the theory of "accidental" evolution. This is, of course, a delightful paradox: Darwinian evolutionists have been practicing intelligent design, i.e., interfering as outside agents into natural processes, in order to disprove the notion of intelligent design! And yet what is the result of all of these countless experiments by numberless scientists to make evolution work (evolution by design)? The result is a complete failure to turn fruit flies into anything but fruit flies. All of the genetic tampering with this primitive species has made mutants, to be sure, but they are mutant fruit flies. We have very large fruit flies; we have blind fruit flies; four legged fruit flies; fruit flies that can't fly; and, for all I now, fruit flies that are allergic to fruit. But the one thing they all have in common is the fact that they are still fruit flies.Isn't this curious? And, so my microbiologist friends inform me, what is true of fruit flies is true of even more basic life forms, such as bacteria. It seems that the best efforts of evolutionist microbiologists have failed to turn basic elements, such as E. coli, into different types of bacteria. If science cannot make evolution work from one species to the other, even when applying its own intelligent design to the most basic life forms, is it really outrageously unscientific to request an element of skepticism about evolution across countless different species, beginning with inanimate specks of dust (rock) and ending with Man?
Abe did indeed nominate Trump, Japan's Asahi Shimbun newspaper reports, but there was a twist: The Japanese leader did it at the request of the White House. "The U.S. government 'informally' asked Tokyo to nominate Trump after he met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore in June," the paper reported, citing unnamed Japanese government sources. Abe was "acceding to a request from Washington" when he made the nomination last autumn, the paper said.
The explosive assertion that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein considered secretly recording President Donald Trump has been backed up in private testimony to Congress by two FBI lawyers.Both officials also told lawmakers that there was simultaneous talk in the spring of 2017, just months after Trump's inauguration, that two unidentified Cabinet officials were on board with the idea of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump as president.Sally Moyer, who worked in the FBI's Office of General Counsel, wasn't in the room when Rosenstein allegedly raised the idea of wearing a wire in order to secretly record interactions with Trump. But she testified behind closed doors in October 2018 of being told that the conversation had taken place during a high-level Justice Department meeting in the days after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey on May 9, 2017.
For decades, Sunni jihadism has been characterized by transnational terrorism, suicide bombing, and excommunication. These three pillars not only attracted the ire of American and European governments, but turned off many of the jihadists' target constituents, namely Sunnis living in the Muslim world. Yet there are signs that Sunni extremists are changing their ways, drifting away from the global agenda that reached its apotheosis in al-Qaeda's attack on the World Trade Center, and toward a hyperlocal one.The transformation is happening in various countries, including Afghanistan, Yemen, and Mali. Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda's offshoot in Syria, provides an illustrative example of how the jihadist threat is changing across the region.In 2016, Jabhat al-Nusra put together a lengthy training manual for its new recruits. In the roughly 200-page book, obtained by me, the group argues the merits of country-focused jihad over global jihad. It advises followers that al-Qaeda's stated strategy of going after the "far enemy" was not set in stone, and that, in the current moment, a focus on anything other than the local fight would be an "unacceptable distraction."Throughout the Syrian War, the group has put that theoretical injunction into practice. Its leader, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, even pledged in an interview with Al Jazeera in May 2015 that Syria would not be used as a launchpad for jihadists to attack the West, based on orders from al-Qaeda's central leadership. The group established a political office and reached out to countries including Turkey to sell itself as a reliable partner, one that poses no threat to anyone outside Syria.Simultaneously, the group has moved away from the other two pillars of suicide bombing and excommunication, part of the grander effort not to alienate locals.
Before the violent demonstration of Dec. 1, 2018, on the Champs Elysées, one could wonder about the nature of the Yellow Vests movement, given its spontaneous and "apolitical" appearance. The media were complacent, intellectuals divided: Was it a democratic insurrection against oligarchy or a populist revolt seeking some new form of authoritarianism? Was it a protest of the poorest people against growing inequalities, or of the lower middle class of neglected rural territories against "wired" cities? The last battle of endangered professions and regions unable to find their place in the new digital-robotic economy? An expression of concern about painful economic reforms to come, notably on pensions? Such social and political factors may be at play, but there is more and, unfortunately, it is not reassuring.First, the urban violence, insults, and vandalism that characterized the Yellow Vests demonstrations are not the collateral damage of a peaceful mobilization. Yellow Vests leaders cynically admit this fact in their oft-repeated media slogans: "We firmly condemn violence, but we have to admit that it is efficient." Indeed, their violence was instrumental in the retreat of the government.Instead of organizing and channelling their demonstrations, Yellow Vests stick to a strategy of unpredictable gatherings and do nothing to help the police in preventing vandalism and violence. This guerrilla strategy is by no means spontaneous. It requires careful organization. After six weeks, the spontaneity of the movement, maybe genuine at the beginning, has become a myth: Leaders and spokesmen have emerged on Facebook, all sticking to the same talking points, including the insistence on the "horizontality" of a movement without leaders, and the denial of their own accountability: "I speak only for myself, others may think differently, and I will follow them." "I am satisfied with the measures announced by the government, but since my fellow men aren't," etc. etc.Second, anger against Macron has evolved into a watchword that overshadows all other demands: the "Citizen's Initiative Referendum." It sounds like participatory democracy, but it is not. The main point of these referendums, it has emerged, is not to decide policy questions but to nullify elected representatives. Yellow Vests want the referendum to be free from any legal or constitutional checks (for instance if it contradicts human rights or international obligations). It is not meant to empower civil society, but to give unlimited force to individual resentments, and to surmount the political process in its entirety. While Yellow Vests stay programmatically "apolitical," in Facebook groups they endlessly repeat their hostility to the EU, even promoting a "Frexit," and vent the most extreme clichés against Jews, migrants, George Soros, Freemasons, homosexuals, etc. Behind their "righteous anger," fake news and conspiracy theories flourish, spread by overheated social networks.The populism of this new movement goes along with distrust of media and elites ("them") and credulity to any hoax circulating on Facebook ("we"). Before the Yellow Vests, belief in conspiracy theories was already high in France, like everywhere else in the Western world. According to a national poll in December 2017, 35 percent of respondents believe that the American government took part in the Sept. 11 attacks, a statement that attracted 47 percent belief among young people (ages 18-34). Twenty-two percent of respondents suspected or are sure that the Islamist attacks in Paris in January 2015 (17 killed: satirical journalists, policemen, customers of a kosher grocery store) were in fact planned or manipulated by the French secret service. This last figure jumps to 34 percent among the 18-24 age group. Fifty-five percent of respondents believe that the Department of Health conspires with drug companies to hide to the public the harmfulness of vaccines.
The reason so many Republicans are opposed to Trump's move here is that the wall is small ball. If you're going to trample on Congress and put political and legal capital on the line for a fight that goes to the Supreme Court, at least make it a battle that's worth the cost. No one really believes a few more miles of the wall -- for which Trump will raid Department of Defense coffers -- will do much to halt drug or human traffickers. The spending bill Trump signed to avoid another damaging shutdown, in fact, includes far more money for border security, with high-tech monitoring technologies that would likely provide a much more cost-effective way to secure the 2,000-mile barrier with Mexico.Trump considers his Game of Thrones solution (Spoiler: It didn't work in Westeros either) a political imperative -- a way of showing the base he's fighting for tough immigration policy. Even if held up in court, he's doing everything he can to fulfill a central campaign promise. In a typically entertaining zigzagging Rose Garden appearance on Friday, Trump declared that he didn't really need the emergency order, but "I just want to get it done much faster."So then why not go big? Declare a national emergency to change the asylum rules, or end family reunification (aka "chain migration"), or change the system to favor high-skilled immigrants. Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals -- still in legal limbo nearly seven years later -- accomplished a policy goal to remove the threat of deportation for hundreds of thousands of people, in a wild executive overreach of Congress that proved to be an effective election-year play for the Latino vote. But Obama wasn't fiddling with appropriations accounts.Republicans' chief concern right now? That the next Democratic president will use the Trump precedent to declare a national emergency on gun control -- there was another mass shooting in Illinois on Friday -- or climate change and sidestep Congress to enact the liberal policies she or he wants.