blueseas
blueseas's JournalWeek 9: Experts in authoritarianism advise to keep a list of things subtly changing around you...
A blog writer is keeping track:
https://medium.com/@Amy_Siskind/week-9-experts-in-authoritarianism-advise-to-keep-a-list-of-things-subtly-changing-around-you-so-4bc574668100#.1wvwrroah
This was not a good week for our country: this is the longest, and most troubling list. I want to note that the purpose of the authoritarian list is to highlight subtle changes, and so business as usual, as upsetting as it may be — like the GOP’s attempt to repeal the ACA — are not covered. Again, this is a list that is not meant to be partisan, but rather to capture changes in the fabric of our country, so we can refer back, and recall what used to be normal and acceptable.
In Trump Nation, healing is overrated
Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don't know what to do.’’ — Donald J. Trump
At inauguration time, magnanimity usually prevails. Winners reach out to losers and a brief honeymoon ensues. But many Trump supporters say there’s little this president-elect can, should, or probably will do to mollify Hillary Clinton supporters.
Erwin Jackson, a Tallahassee, Fla., landlord, says political healing is overrated anyway: “I’m not worried about people who are disappointed. I’m excited. The Democrats are in denial. Healing is something they’re gonna have to work out on their own.’’
Pat Acciavatti, a retired excavating company owner in St. Clair Township, Mich., agrees: “When Obama won, and when Bill Clinton won, I just shut up, hung my head and took my medicine. I wasn’t protesting in the street.
More:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/01/17/post-election-political-healing-trump-nation-says-democrats-heal-thyself/96483356/
Republicans to skip Obama inaugural, head out of town FROM Jan 19 2013
A look back at history:
“It’s a good time to lay low,” said John Feehery, the president of Quinn Gillespie Communications and a former top congressional aide.
As Democrats prepare to mark Obama’s second inauguration on Monday by bundling up along the parade route or donning party gowns or tuxedos, Republicans are spending the long Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend with quick vacation getaways, quiet time at home or trips to the movie theater.
Few plan any “mourning parties” or “bawls” that have been the staples of past inaugural festivities for the party out of power. But invites to pricey balls and swanky soirees tend to be scarce if your candidate lost and watching television provides a constant reminder of November’s elections.
“Invitations must have gotten lost in the mail!” former Romney adviser Ed Gillespie wrote in an email saying he had no major plans for the weekend.
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/node/46068
What The Trump Era Will Feel Like: Clues From Populist Regimes Around The World
This column is about what life will be like under Trump, based on discernible patterns in other countries where populists gained power, especially those with possible murky Russian ties. I write this not as the kind of airy opiner now ubiquitous via the internet – just one more shrill partisan voice in the noise – but as a professional with specific two-decades-long experience in the subject. Experience on the ground that is, as a reporter and commentator. I have now covered upwards of a dozen countries that have buckled under the emergent wave of populist leaders, from the Far East to the Mideast to Europe and the Americas. Many of the countries have done so quite democratically, at first. That emergent wave has crashed onto US shores in a fashion thoroughly precedented abroad.
Recently, I wrote about how I'd seen all the tricks in the Trump campaign before, actually in Tbilisi, Georgia, during the 2012 national elections when the pro-US candidate lost to a pro-Russian populist. At that time, no one was ready to believe the Russians capable of influencing Western style elections. Many still don't, even after Trump. We now have enough experience of populists in power in the West and elsewhere to guess intelligently at what's to come in the US;
http://www.forbes.com/sites/melikkaylan/2017/01/10/what-the-trump-era-will-feel-like-clues-from-populist-regimes-around-the-world/#152b152d61aa
In short - media control and chaos - they are messing with your mind.
Stay focused. Diversionary tactics are in play - RESIST
Stay focused. Diversionary tactics are in play.
RESIST. Call - (202) 224-3121 to reach your congressional members:
Hearings for Tillerson, DeVos, Chao, Pompeo set for today:
1. tell them you are unequivocally opposed to confirmation of Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State, Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education, Elaine Chao for Secretary of Transportation, and Rep. Mike Pompeo for CIA Director. Tell them that you expect that to vote against confirmation of these folks.
2. tell them that you are unequivocally opposed to repeal of Dodd-Frank and demand that they reject repeal. This is critical. Dodd-Frank limits the ability of banks to gamble with our money and repeat of the financial mess of 2008.
Far Right Politician Marine Le Pen is having coffee at Trump Tower
Marine Le Pen, an alarming person who would like to lead France into far-right nationalism and xenophobia, is in New York. She is in Trump Tower. But her aides say she’s not planning to meet with Donald Trump or his transition team staff, good heavens no. She’s just using her “private visit” to New York to have coffee in the charming, slightly damp environs of the Trump Tower basement, they told Bloomberg. As one does!
Le Pen is running for president in France; she’s the leader of the country’s National Front and the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, an elderly racist and anti-Semite. Le Pen essentially expelled her father from the party in 2015, and has been trying to give the National Front a more humane, less overtly Nazi-ish makeover. But she’s still making Islamophobia and opposition to immigration a cornerstone of the party’s belief system, supports a ban on letting Muslim women wear headscarves, and wants to leave the European Union to promote what she has called “a grand return of nationalism.” She was spotted in Trump Tower on Thursday morning, according to Bloomberg, where she had very little interest in clarifying what she was doing there:
http://theslot.jezebel.com/far-right-french-pol-marine-le-pen-just-casually-droppe-1791120897?utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_source=jezebel_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
A breakdown of trust between Donald Trump and Americas spy chiefs
The president-elect’s attacks on his eyes and ears around the globe could prove to be self-defeating.
SNIP:
“I WON”. It is hard to overstate the psychological weight carried by those two words, offered by President-elect Donald Trump as evidence that “the American public” does not care that he has not released his tax returns. The defiant words were flung out near the start of a rowdy press conference in the marble and brass lobby of Trump Tower in Manhattan—the businessman’s first formal question-and-answer session with reporters in half a year.
Many mainstream Republicans, including members of Congress or business types excited by the chance to advance a conservative agenda of tax cuts and deregulation once they control the White House and both chambers of Congress, had hoped that by this moment, nine days from his inauguration, victory might make Mr Trump more magnanimous.
Snip: A man constantly in campaign mode will struggle to make America great again.
LINK:http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2017/01/not-magnanimous-yet?cid1=cust/ddnew/n/n/n/20170111n/owned/n/n/nwl/n/n/NA/email
The center has fallen, and white nationalism is filling the vacuum
Racism has the power to transform both right and left.
In 1992, a magnetic young Democrat swept aside twelve years of unbroken Republican rule by campaigning on a platform that seemed to cross the old left-right divide. Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, the first Democratic president elected after the Cold War, was the great prophet of the Third Way, a seemingly post-ideological marriage of “pro-growth” economic thinking and moderate social liberalism.
SNIP:
It would be tempting to argue that Trump’s full-on embrace of white identity politics makes him an aberration among Republican officials. But it’s more likely that he is leading the party toward a destination it was already headed for.
That’s the view of political scientist Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America. In an August piece for Vox, Drutman described Trump’s ascension as “the logical culmination of Republicans’ 50-year ‘Southern strategy’ to make politics primarily about race and identity instead of economics.”
Trumpism speaks directly to white identity and white fear.
SNIP:
And 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton — identified as a candidate of the Third Way mainly because her husband is Bill Clinton — put forward a policy agenda that would have distributed significant amounts of wealth to the entire working class, white people included.
MORE https://thinkprogress.org/the-center-has-fallen-and-white-nationalism-is-filling-the-vacuum-beb0611dfe94#.ben2y7fkh
A-Day-in-the-Life-of-Joe-Republican
Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards.
With his first swallow of water, he takes his daily medication. His medications are safe to take because some stupid commie liberal fought to ensure their safety and that they work as advertised.
All but $10 of his medications are paid for by his employer's medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance - now Joe gets it too.
He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs. Joe's bacon is safe to eat because some girly-man liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.
In the morning shower, Joe reaches for his shampoo. His bottle is properly labeled with each ingredient and its amount in the total contents because some crybaby liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained.
MORE:
http://www.gbpotus.com/single-post/2017/01/02/A-Day-in-the-Life-of-Joe-Republican
What Those Who Studied Nazis Can Teach Us About The Strange Reaction To Donald Trump
While it’s important to watch the president-elect closely, we also must be mindful of our own response to him.
SNIP:
The word Gleichschaltung is often translated from the German as “coordination” and refers to the process of ― politically speaking ― getting in line. It often appears in books about the Nazi era. German Jewish philologist Victor Klemperer and German journalist Joachim Fest wrote about the personal cost of coordinating in their respective memoirs. German author Sebastian Haffner and Americans including journalist William Shirer wrote about the propaganda and politics of coordination.
MORE:
While on the campaign trail in February, Trump urged followers to “knock the hell” out of protesters, promising to pay their legal bills if they were arrested and charged. That same February in Fort Worth, he promised a crowd that he would “open up our libel laws” so that news outlets can be sued for writing “false” or “purposely negative” articles. In July, he urged Russia to interfere in the election on his behalf, later saying he was joking. In September, he urged still other supporters to “monitor” polling stations. In October, he promised when victorious to throw his rival, Hillary Clinton, in jail. And just recently he advocated revoking the citizenship of Americans who burn flags.
So, in the last year, Trump has flirted with or, maybe more his style, groped and pawed at totalitarianism, yet the advice from many is to “give him a chance” ― or to coordinate.
This make sense:
We should not waste our time or imaginations trying to reconfigure Trumpism to explain why all of the “good people” supported him. It is more important to see it for what it is and resist. Hopefully, they will join us. If not, it will not be necessary to call them names, they will have named themselves.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-nazi-propaganda-coordinate_us_58583b6fe4b08debb78a7d5c
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