U.S. Politics 2017 (split fm US Election: 2016)

[jollyjacktar]

In other related news.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/24/politics/secret-service-agent-trump-bullet/index.html

I don't care about politics on this one.  If you are in that job you don't get a say or an opinion.  I hope she gets charged and fired for this.  Not only is it unprofessional it can erode the trust that the President has with his security pers.

Hate the man, fine, but respect the office and the sacred trust YOU signed up for.

Well said and very true.

 

[ModlrMike]

Wait... you mean actions have consequences? When did this start?  >

 

[The Bread Guy]

Wait... you mean actions have consequences? When did this start?  >

Along those lines ...
" ‘SNL’ Writer Suspended* After Tweeting Joke About Barron Trump"

Pick on politicians?  Fair game.  The kids, especially young ones?  They didn't choose their family or dad's career.  C'mon ...

* - "Suspended" has been phrased "fired" and "suspended indefinitely" (with the latter in quotes from "sources") in various media accounts on this one.

 

[mariomike]

If you are in that job you don't get a say or an opinion. 

"the agency is trying to determine if she posted the information while she was working."

It's ok if you are off-duty?

I'm not an HR specialist, but I know guys who have been fired for non-criminal, but unprofessional, off-duty behavior.
Including crap they have posted on social media.

"As a public servant for nearly 23 years"

Maybe remove her from Protection, and transfer her to "Financial Crimes, covering missions such as prevention and investigation of counterfeit U.S. currency, U.S. treasury securities, and investigation of major fraud."

And confidentially offer her an early retirement incentive. 

Edit to add:

"Special agents with 20 years of federal law enforcement service are eligible to retire at age 50. Agents with 25 or more years of service are eligible for retirement, regardless of age."

"I would take jail time over a bullet"

Rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6?

I wonder how difficult it is to actually fire / retire a Secret Service agent with "nearly 23 years" on the job?

Anyone see "Rampart" with the LAPD officer they were trying to fire / retire?

"I'll work Vietnam for all it's worth. I'll have PTSD, DDT, TNT...Ageing orange and the creeping chinese crud before it's over..Not to mention, twenty-four years on the job."

 

[The Bread Guy]

HAD to share this one from FB (source)

 

[The Bread Guy]

Note to #POTUS45:  some of these "black sites" are/were/could have been in countries you've hinted may not get help from the U.S. as part of NATO ...

An executive order apparently drafted by the Trump administration calls for a policy review that could authorize the CIA to reopen “black site” prisons overseas and potentially restart an interrogation program that was dismantled in 2009 after using methods widely condemned as torture.

The document, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, would revoke former president Barack Obama’s decision to end the CIA program and require national security officials to evaluate whether the agency should resume interrogating terrorism suspects ...

Another variation/spin on this story:  "Trump says he believes torture works, but will defer to (SecDef) Mattis, (CIA boss) Pompeo"

 

[Rifleman62]

If you watched the press briefing this was a document as well as another one yesterday that were put out by somebody, but not the WH.

False news, left wing propaganda, to discredit the Trump Administration, or a down right lie by Spicer.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-executive-action-torture-black-site-prisons/

Sean Spicer: Draft order on interrogation methods "is not a White House document"

Note the press briefing was over for a couple of hours before you posted.

Anyone want to post some of the positives that have been going with the Trump administration or just continue to bash and make fun of? Repetitive slams are boring but I read them. It's like one of the fables of Aesop about a wolf.

 

[jmt18325]

It's been said that President Trump has done more for the Canadian economy on his first day, than PM Trudeau managed in his first year. Obviously, the next question is will he do more to the Canadian economy?

I'd like to know who said that, since it's blatantly false.

 

[Jarnhamar]

Dow Jones breaks 20,000 for first time ever and global stocks hit 19-month high as markets reignite 'Trump rally'
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/01/25/ftse-100-jumps-7200-markets-reignite-trump-infrastructure-rally/

 

[FJAG]

Anyone want to post some of the positives that have been going with the Trump administration or just continue to bash and make fun of? Repetitive slams are boring but I read them. It's like one of the fables of Aesop about a wolf.

Actually I quite like his choice of Mattis for SecDef. The guy strikes me as the right man for the times. I can't say the same for the rest of the cabinet picks. I also think that some (but not all) of his border initiatives are positive. A country should have control over it's territory and not have to go through numerous tortuous hoops to get rid of dangerous or undesirable foreigners. The country also needs a rethink on the globalisation of industries and initiatives to repatriate high quality jobs - the concept is laudatory but I think the implementation strategies he's floating will run him headlong into a roadblock with the very institutions (Republicans, big industry and finance) which he needs to court.

The reason that there are so many slams is entirely due to fact that Trump just keeps asking for them. Basically the press does not have to look for things to hound him about because he keeps blabbing out the stupidest things which anyone with a modicum of self control would have kept under wraps. He doesn't need to tweet now that he's won nor does he have to make speeches about how he really won the popular vote because of voter fraud or that he had the most attended inauguration ever. These are the signs of a narcissist with a pathological need exaggerate his accomplishments even by going so far as to blatantly lie (not just presenting alternative facts). That's fair game for the press and his detractors. Even his biggest fans are starting to wish that he's just shut up and get on with the job.

:cheers:

 

[mariomike]

He took to Twitter yesterday to warn that he “will send in the Feds” if Chicago “doesn’t fix the horrible ‘carnage’ going on,”
https://www.rawstory.com/2017/01/crazy-grandpa-yelling-at-the-tv-internet-mocks-trump-after-oreilly-segment-inspires-carnage-tweet/

Seems like something he saw on Fox News set him off,

 

[Kirkhill]

140 words and the press goes haring off into the woods.

Meanwhile he approves oil pipelines, walls, bars muslims (temporarily), bans abortion counselling......

 

[mariomike]

Meanwhile he approves oil pipelines, walls, bars muslims (temporarily), bans abortion counselling......

 

[Fishbone Jones]

THE Mexico City policy has been in place since 1984. It's standing has been reversed by every POTUS since it's inception. What Trump has done, in fact, is stop funding foreign abortions, to a savings of tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money.

 

[dimsum]

A historical look at American media portrayals of pre-WWII Hitler and Mussolini.  Full disclosure: I'm centrist, leaning a little left on certain matters, and believe Idiocracy was made as a warning, not just satire. 

Two paragraphs really stuck out:

1.  "But the main way that the press defanged Hitler was by portraying him as something of a joke. He was a “nonsensical” screecher of “wild words” whose appearance, according to Newsweek, “suggests Charlie Chaplin.” His “countenance is a caricature.” He was as “voluble” as he was “insecure,” stated Cosmopolitan.

2.  “No people ever recognize their dictator in advance,” she reflected in 1935. “He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will.” Applying the lesson to the U.S., she wrote, “When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”

How Journalists Covered the Rise of Mussolini and Hitler
Reports on the rise of fascism in Europe was not the American media's finest hour

By John Broich, The Conversation
SMITHSONIAN.COM
DECEMBER 13, 2016

How to cover the rise of a political leader who’s left a paper trail of anti-constitutionalism, racism and the encouragement of violence? Does the press take the position that its subject acts outside the norms of society? Or does it take the position that someone who wins a fair election is by definition “normal,” because his leadership reflects the will of the people?

These are the questions that confronted the U.S. press after the ascendance of fascist leaders in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

A leader for life

Benito Mussolini secured Italy’s premiership by marching on Rome with 30,000 blackshirts in 1922. By 1925 he had declared himself leader for life. While this hardly reflected American values, Mussolini was a darling of the American press, appearing in at least 150 articles from 1925-1932, most neutral, bemused or positive in tone.

The Saturday Evening Post even serialized Il Duce’s autobiography in 1928. Acknowledging that the new “Fascisti movement” was a bit “rough in its methods,” papers ranging from the New York Tribune to the Cleveland Plain Dealer to the Chicago Tribune credited it with saving Italy from the far left and revitalizing its economy. From their perspective, the post-WWI surge of anti-capitalism in Europe was a vastly worse threat than Fascism.

Ironically, while the media acknowledged that Fascism was a new “experiment,” papers like The New York Times commonly credited it with returning turbulent Italy to what it called “normalcy.”

Yet some journalists like Hemingway and journals like the New Yorker rejected the normalization of anti-democratic Mussolini. John Gunther of Harper’s, meanwhile, wrote a razor-sharp account of Mussolini’s masterful manipulation of a U.S. press that couldn’t resist him.

The ‘German Mussolini’

Mussolini’s success in Italy normalized Hitler’s success in the eyes of the American press who, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, routinely called him “the German Mussolini.” Given Mussolini’s positive press reception in that period, it was a good place from which to start. Hitler also had the advantage that his Nazi party enjoyed stunning leaps at the polls from the mid '20’s to early '30’s, going from a fringe party to winning a dominant share of parliamentary seats in free elections in 1932.

But the main way that the press defanged Hitler was by portraying him as something of a joke. He was a “nonsensical” screecher of “wild words” whose appearance, according to Newsweek, “suggests Charlie Chaplin.” His “countenance is a caricature.” He was as “voluble” as he was “insecure,” stated Cosmopolitan.

When Hitler’s party won influence in Parliament, and even after he was made chancellor of Germany in 1933 – about a year and a half before seizing dictatorial power – many American press outlets judged that he would either be outplayed by more traditional politicians or that he would have to become more moderate. Sure, he had a following, but his followers were “impressionable voters” duped by “radical doctrines and quack remedies,” claimed The Washington Post. Now that Hitler actually had to operate within a government the “sober” politicians would “submerge” this movement, according to The New York Times and Christian Science Monitor. A “keen sense of dramatic instinct” was not enough. When it came to time to govern, his lack of “gravity” and “profundity of thought” would be exposed.

In fact, The New York Times wrote after Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship that success would only “let him expose to the German public his own futility.” Journalists wondered whether Hitler now regretted leaving the rally for the cabinet meeting, where he would have to assume some responsibility.

Yes, the American press tended to condemn Hitler’s well-documented anti-Semitism in the early 1930s. But there were plenty of exceptions. Some papers downplayed reports of violence against Germany’s Jewish citizens as propaganda like that which proliferated during the foregoing World War. Many, even those who categorically condemned the violence, repeatedly declared it to be at an end, showing a tendency to look for a return to normalcy.

Journalists were aware that they could only criticize the German regime so much and maintain their access. When a CBS broadcaster’s son was beaten up by brownshirts for not saluting the Führer, he didn’t report it. When the Chicago Daily News’ Edgar Mowrer wrote that Germany was becoming “an insane asylum” in 1933, the Germans pressured the State Department to rein in American reporters. Allen Dulles, who eventually became director of the CIA, told Mowrer he was “taking the German situation too seriously.” Mowrer’s publisher then transferred him out of Germany in fear of his life.

By the later 1930s, most U.S. journalists realized their mistake in underestimating Hitler or failing to imagine just how bad things could get. (Though there remained infamous exceptions, like Douglas Chandler, who wrote a loving paean to “Changing Berlin” for National Geographic in 1937.) Dorothy Thompson, who judged Hitler a man of “startling insignificance” in 1928, realized her mistake by mid-decade when she, like Mowrer, began raising the alarm.

“No people ever recognize their dictator in advance,” she reflected in 1935. “He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will.” Applying the lesson to the U.S., she wrote, “When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”


This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-journalists-covered-rise-mussolini-hitler-180961407/#9mzwh3Q4bRgTrvgO.99
Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-journalists-covered-rise-mussolini-hitler-180961407/#8yXAoFx8HA4p7uIS.99

 

[kkwd]

Anyone want to post some of the positives that have been going with the Trump administration or just continue to bash and make fun of? Repetitive slams are boring but I read them. It's like one of the fables of Aesop about a wolf.

There is no harm in a little fun. Besides, there are so many memes out there that people feel a need to use, it saves them from adult conversation.

 

[The Bread Guy]

Anyone want to post some of the positives that have been going with the Trump administration or just continue to bash and make fun of?

This is an open forum -- feel free.  Like how he's done on the Day One list?

I know I've been gently poked for not having a sense of humour when it comes to some of the digs going on.  To pass along some sage advice, "we have to remember to check if we are in RADIO CHATTER before we want to "seriously" comment on a less than "serious" thread"

 

[Colin Parkinson]

He took to Twitter yesterday to warn that he “will send in the Feds” if Chicago “doesn’t fix the horrible ‘carnage’ going on,”
https://www.rawstory.com/2017/01/crazy-grandpa-yelling-at-the-tv-internet-mocks-trump-after-oreilly-segment-inspires-carnage-tweet/

Seems like something he saw on Fox News set him off,

Considering the homicide and crime stats that are pretty much breaking with a multi-decade decline in crime and homicide in the rest of the country, Chicago is the US "failed state"

 

[Loachman]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0f222hZtNk

I posted a link to the CNN gigapixel photograph earlier.

 

[Oldgateboatdriver]

I won't comment one way or the other on crowd (or di**) size, as if it mattered, but I am very surprised at you Loachman, for bringing a low angle picture like that in the controversy.

I would have thought that an Army helicopter pilot, of all people, would have known that the closer you are to an horizontal view, the least you can judge appropriately numbers of objects, spacing and existence of gaps. I am sure you know, for instance that when you are flying at tree tops levels over a succession of open fields and forested area, the whole thing looks like it's fully forested unless you happen to be over one of the fields, but from 1000 feet up, you can see all the wooded areas and field s in such a way as to be able to judge their size in relation to one another.

I have done some crowd eval work before, and the best one we ever did was the Tiananmen Square gathering, of which we got good satellite overheads in 3d. We calculated we had an error factor of + or - 5,000, which is pretty good over a crown of approx. one million. Crowd eval is difficult, but the closer you are to a high overhead that shows the whole crowd in one shot and provides scale reference items, the better the eval. The worse is to try to evaluate the size of a crowd by standing at it's front, looking back and just over the heads of the participants: A small crowd looks incredibly big.

You may recall a few years ago when the press got into the "massive human crowds" of refugees on the move in Europe. Some ENG's organization decided - finally - to show some of the "crowds" that had been described as "immense" by other news orgs from above to put it in perspective. Suddenly, the crowds that had been made incredibly large in people's mind by filming them from street level within the actual crowd turned much smaller seen from above, where you could see each group to be perhaps a few hundred people marching as a single group. 

In Washington, while neither is perfect, the view from the Washington monument is orders of magnitude better than the "gigapixel" picture which is taken at a much more horizontal angle, as long as the comparison are made for an equivalent timeframe. 

All this said, I think this horse has been  :deadhorse:

I think everybody should hear the words of a famous Canadian singer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKBC4qynpUk