Mike Flynn Might Be Done - but Trump's Nightmare Has Just Begun
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=43437"><span class="small">Richard Wolffe, Guardian UK</span></a>
Tuesday, 14 February 2017 09:23
Wolffe writes: "This resignation and scandal is not a surprise. After all, we have a president who is too careless to handle a national security incident in a confidential manner."
Michael Flynn walks down the West Wing Colonnade. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Mike Flynn Might Be Done - but Trump's Nightmare Has Just Begun
By Richard Wolffe, Guardian UK
14 February 17
This resignation and scandal is not a surprise. After all, we have a president who is too careless to handle a national security incident in a confidential manner
ast your mind back to four months ago, when Donald Trump was just a long-shot candidate with a hot-headed adviser by the name of Michael Flynn.
It was the homestretch of the presidential election and national security wasn’t some side issue, mentioned in passing. Trump promised he would be a tough national security president with the toughest national security team.
In fact, one of his favorite arguments was that Hillary Clinton couldn’t be trusted with the country’s national security because, he claimed, she couldn’t be trusted with her private email server.
It sounded ridiculous at the time. But after a month of this gonzo president, our memories are already fading. Propaganda will do that to you, as George Orwell warned us all in 1984. Sometimes two and two are four. Sometimes they are five.
Still, it’s true that the Trump campaign seized on the preposterous FBI investigation into Clinton’s emails to issue this press release: “Clinton’s Careless Use of a Secret Server Put National Security At Risk.”
Less than a week later, at their second presidential debate, Trump took the attack one step further, threatening to jail Clinton if he ever took power: “She didn’t know the word – the letter C on a document. Right? She didn’t even know what that word – what that letter meant.”
Let’s just pretend that Trump knew that C means Confidential, not Classified, as he was suggesting. Let’s even play along with the notion that Clinton’s server was a security risk to the country.
Now: what do Michael Flynn and Mar-a-Lago mean for national security?
To the fee-paying members of Trump’s Florida club, it means greater access to watch the president and Japanese prime minister reacting to the news of a North Korean missile launch in real time: huddling over documents and making phone calls on cellphones in public.
Or as one guest, Richard DeAgazio, put it on Facebook: “HOLY MOLY!!! It was fascinating to watch the flurry of activity at dinner when the news came that North Korea had launched a missile in the direction of Japan. The Prime Minister Abe of Japan huddles with his staff and the President is on the phone with Washington DC…Wow…the center of the action!!!”
Never mind classified information. Here is a president who is so careless that he can’t handle a national security incident in a confidential manner.
This kind of spectacle does wonders for the fees at Mar-a-Lago, where initiation has just doubled from $100,000 to $200,000 since its owner became president. But it does little for the national security of the country or its allies.
In case you think this is just one small lapse over dinner, Mr DeAgazio also posted to Facebook photos of the military aide carrying the nuclear codes that are frighteningly close to Trump’s trigger-happy mouth.
These are just minor details in the life of a commander-in-chief whose national security adviser was himself a national security risk.
Michael Flynn was so careless about his cellphone conversations, and so mistaken about his foreign policy priorities, that he called the Russian ambassador to the US before taking office.
Clearly clueless about how such conversations are transcribed by all parties, he talked about President Obama’s sanctions against Russia for interfering with the election that ended with Trump in the White House.
Then he denied talking about those sanctions at all, allegedly misleading the vice-president Mike Pence, who in turn misled the American people on national television about the same call.
Based on those reports that he misled the vice-president, Flynn could have been compromised by Russian blackmail. But then again, the Russians might already have enough ammunition against him if he accepted secret payments from the Kremlin when he traveled to Moscow in 2015.
Thank goodness for the independence and counter-intelligence activities of the justice department, who allegedly warned the White House that Flynn was a possible blackmail target several weeks ago.
Why didn’t Trump do to Flynn what he has done to so many reality TV contestants in his only real preparation for his current job? Why didn’t he just fire him instead of allowing him to quit?
After all, that is exactly what he did to the woman who warned him that Flynn was compromised. Acting attorney general Sally Yates was removed from her job for defending the Constitution by refusing to uphold the travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries that remains blocked by several federal courts.
We can’t be sure what’s going on underneath Trump’s coiffured combover. Unless he’s watching cable news and simultaneously tweeting about his thoughts in real time.
Instead we have to rely on his public comments about Vladimir Putin’s Russia and his own United States. Comments like the ones he made barely a week ago, when Bill O’Reilly of Fox News dared to suggest that Putin was a killer. “We’ve got a lot of killers,” said Trump. “What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”
Trump is correct: his version of America is not so innocent. It’s the kind of place where a candidate can accuse his opponent of running a foundation that is “a criminal enterprise” for accepting money from foreign governments. Then, once that candidate becomes president, he can allow foreign governments to give his businesses money in Washington DC and Mar-a-Lago.
Perhaps Trump’s real problem with the Clinton Foundation wasn’t about Hillary’s character. It was just professional jealousy.
The only things protecting Trump from impeachment for his egregious behaviour are his poll numbers and the false sense of security they give to Republicans in Congress.
Sadly for Trump, those numbers are tumbling faster than the ratings of Celebrity Apprentice. In just three weeks, Trump has lost 5 points in his Gallup approval polls to hit 40%.
It took Richard Nixon four years to reach this low point, just a year before he quit the presidency. At this rate, Trump will reach Nixon’s all-time low of 24% approval before the end of April.
We have barely begun to scrape the surface of Trump’s fatal compromises with Russia. It was only last week that US officials say they corroborated some of the communications in the famous British dossier detailing those compromising situations.
Trump can pretend all he likes. He can bluster his way through TV interviews and at the presidential podium about everything from the tiny crowds at his inauguration to supposed illegal voting by non-citizens.
But sooner or later, the presidency – and the constitution it is supposed to defend – catches up with you. A commander-in-chief can’t compromise his own nation’s security and expect to keep his job.
Flynn’s short White House career may be over. But Trump’s nightmare-a-lago has only just begun.
After Miller's Mega-Lies, Time to Rev Back Up the Reality Based Community
Tuesday, 14 February 2017 09:22
Cole writes: "Stephen Miller, a snot-nosed kid with a bad attitude, advertised as White House senior policy adviser, delivered himself of some stern jeremiads on Sunday on Meet the Press, along with many Big Lies of which Josef Goebbels would be jealous."
After Miller's Mega-Lies, Time to Rev Back Up the Reality Based Community
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
14 February 17
tephen Miller, a snot-nosed kid with a bad attitude, advertised as White House senior policy adviser, delivered himself of some stern jeremiads on Sunday on Meet the Press, along with many Big Lies of which Josef Goebbels would be jealous.
It is dreary to see a Republican White House once again fall into the clutches of grandiose fantasists and drooling conspiracy theorists. We saw this with Karl Rove and Irv “Scooter” Libby in the Bush years. The arrogance, the big globe-straddling ambitions, the spit in the face of average people, and above all the Big Lie. What is it about today’s Republican Party that drives it into the arms of high-end hucksters and confidence men? Maybe it’s the cognitive dissonance of being a servant to the .01% but pretending to want to help average folks.
After denouncing the third branch of government, given powers of legislative review by the Constitution, Miller said:
“our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.”
We have seen these unimaginative scenarios so many times. The media as the enemy (you can’t outdo tricky Dick Nixon on that one). The whole world having to be impressed. Have you *met* any French people? Believe me, Stephen, they aren’t impressed. They can’t get past those ears, and wonder what happened to your hair. And we haven’t even gotten to your boss. And, then, sigh, the unquestioned power of the president. What’s the matter, “unitary executive” too hard for you to say?
Then there were Miller’s Giga-lies about undocumented people voting in the millions. Or maybe they are tera-lies. A lot of bytes go into a lie that huuuje.
But it is banal and ennui-inducing by now. We’ve been there, done that. We had to form a whole new internet group the last time, the “Reality-Based Community.” I guess it is time to dust back off that blogger.com comment section from 2004.
The key quote that kicked off the Community appeared in an article by Ron Suskind on October 17, 2004 in the New York Times entitled, “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush.” It is said that the Bush administration official who delivered himself of this famous quote was stragegist Karl Rove, who connived at a Permanent Republican Majority and urged a war on Iraq as a way to make sure George W. Bush got to be a two-term president (the longer in office, the more money to be made). So this is what is attributed to him:
““We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Rove did not mean to admit that he is detached from reality, any more than Kellyanne Conway intended to admit that she maintains a whole warehouse of alternative facts. Rove meant to say that George W. Bush had a big ol’ reality-creation machine on the back of his flatbed truck, and when you ran it, why it tinkered with dimensional space and made things turn out right for rich old cranky white men.
As for being an empire, no. The days of empire are over with. The “natives” or “wily oriental gentleman” as the Victorians called them all seem to have C4 plastic explosives now, if not, as with Pakistan and India and China, hundreds of nuclear warheads. Sticky wicket, old man, wot? Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani of Najaf in Iraq, an elderly Iranian gentleman, pushed you and George around like the paper tigers you were, and he even did it nonviolently. Other impudent imperial subjects regularly blew up the poor 18-year-olds you sent over there to do God knows what. Since you were so big on turning Iraq into a shining beacon on the hill, I hear they need a good electoral consultant in Falluja these days, and maybe you’d be so kind as to volunteer?
In other words, that reality creation machine on W’s flatbed truck was on the blink. So it got Rove and Bush into an Iraq War that is still going on and will cost us $6 trillion and which even other Republicans won’t stand behind. It deregulated the hell out of Wall Street and so sent the big investment banks right to Gehenna, along with millions of mortgages, leaving average people so impoverished that a lot of them are still drinking themselves to death or hanging themselves in the closet over it. And then your attempt to punish Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame for questioning your phony cover story of Iraqi nuclear weapons (“WMD”) got your aide Scooter Libby in big doodoo. Very judicious doodoo. And your climate denialism will drown your great grandchildren, or give them heat stroke. See if you can please re-set that particular reality you created with 5-6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year from our one country.
So yes, Karl, I get to study what you wrought to the universe, and the resets and the twists and turns. I even wrote a whole book, Engaging the Muslim World, about what you got wrong in one part of the globe. There are lots of such books to be written. We writers will write them for a long time. But alas reality is a harsh mistress and doesn’t like to be fucked with. Guess what happens to people who try to create an alternate reality?
I don’t even understand the ambition. Reality is all we have to hold on to. We shouldn’t want to mess with it. But it is just as well, since even “empires” can’t. Especially when the whole idea of empire is past its expiration date and smells like a pile of two-week-old corpses.
And I see your whippersnapper of a protegé, Mr. Miller, out before the cameras just like you were 13 years ago, strutting like a meerkat that caught a cobra by the tail, and lying his bony ass off. Brings a tear to my eye. Not nostalgia. It’s just, I know how this movie ends.
The Real Reason Republicans Want to Pull the Plug on Obamacare
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=39255"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Website</span></a>
Monday, 13 February 2017 14:42
Reich writes: "Don't be fooled by Trump's and Republican promises to 'repeal and replace' Obamacare. They could repeal it, but they can't and won't replace it."
Former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star)
The Real Reason Republicans Want to Pull the Plug on Obamacare
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Website
13 February 17
on’t be fooled by Trump’s and Republican promises to “repeal and replace” Obamacare. They could repeal it, but they can’t and won’t replace it. They’ve tried for years to come up with a replacement that keeps at least as many people covered. Their “replacement” never appears.
So why do Republicans want to repeal Obamacare and leave millions without insurance? Because it would mean a huge tax windfall for the wealthy.
Repealing Obamacare will put an average of $33,000 of tax cuts in the hands of the richest 1 percent this year alone, and a whopping $197,000 of tax cuts into the hands of the top 0.1 percent.
The 400 highest-income taxpayers (with incomes averaging more than $300 million each) will each receive an average annual tax cut of about $7 million.
It would also increase the taxes of families earning between $10,000 and $75,000 – including just about all of Trump’s working class voters.
So what do we end up with when Republicans repeal Obamacare?
– 32 million people losing their health insurance,
– tens of thousands of Americans dying because they don’t get the medical care they need,
Excerpt: "The National Park Service's anti-Trump rebels are mounting a potentially radical defense of the commons against capital."
Grand Canyon National Park in October 2016. (photo: HarshLight/Flickr)
The National Park Service Goes Rogue
By Not An Alternative, Jacobin
13 February 17
The National Park Service’s anti-Trump rebels are mounting a potentially radical defense of the commons against capital.
hortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the official National Park Service (NPS) Twitter account was caught retweeting crowd size photos that poked fun at Trump’s poorly attended ceremony. Hours later, the Badlands National Park in western South Dakota began tweeting out facts about human-induced climate change. Then the Death Valley National Park posted tweets about the park’s history as an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II.
The subsequent days brought more rumblings of dissent. Hundreds of “alternative” NPS social media accounts began to appear, run by anonymous NPS employees upset at the Trump administration’s attempt to obstruct evidence of human-caused climate change. A Rogue EPA popped up, followed by a Rogue NASA, USDA, Forest Service, and so on. Some tweeted climate facts relevant to their particular agency or park. Others took it a step further, highlighting the catastrophic ecological impacts of Trump’s border wall and approval of the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines.
Last weekend, in a front-page article, the New York Times reported that its interviews with dozens of current and recently departed federal employees “reveal a federal workforce that is more fundamentally shaken than usual by the uncertainties that follow a presidential transition from one party to another.” The subhead inside put it even more starkly: “‘Sense of Dread’ Among Civil Servants Stirs Talk of Resistance to Trump.”
Ideologically fractured, divided, and contested, government agencies in the age of Trump present themselves not just as sites of struggle but as opportunities for real left advances — especially against a president with little knowledge about the workings of the federal bureaucracy.
And the National Park Service — an unlikely agent of rebellion considering its history — has emerged as one of the most prominent figures.
Which People?
US national parks do not have a rosy founding story.
The earliest ones were set up as racist and settler colonialist expressions of the American ruling class. The wealthy hunters, administrators, and scientists responsible for building the network of parks had explicit connections to the burgeoning eugenics movement. They believed that the preservation of natural spaces went hand in hand with the preservation of the white race. Their vision of nature — as purity, retreat, and recreation — served their class position.
In 1872, when the federal government established Yellowstone as the country’s first national park, it did so for “the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” But the “people” largely meant propertied white men. While the Nez Perce, Crow, Shoshone, and Bannock lived in the region, and though their paths crisscrossed the park, white explorers deemed the land “primeval solitude,” having “never been trodden by human footsteps.”
It wasn’t just indigenous peoples who were scorned by the park’s founders. Eastern conservationists were distraught by the presence of poor white poachers and trappers, who they sometimes referred to as “white Indians.” As the founder of the hunting conservationist Boone and Crockett Club in 1887, a young Teddy Roosevelt and his upper-class hunting partners were increasingly dismayed by those threatening to “waste and destroy” the park. They fought to establish a military presence in the parks to preserve the environment for their exclusive use.
In 1916, at the behest of Stephen Mather, a millionaire who made his money in the Borax industry, Woodrow Wilson established the National Parks Service as a division of the Department of the Interior. Mather would become the first director and greatest champion of the NPS, leveraging his wealth to market the parks while partnering with corporations to promote tourism and travel.
Double Agencies
National parks, then, were not established as oases of socialism. They were created according to a vision of nature as the province of the white and wealthy. But when we reduce the park system to its historic wrongs, we obscure its power and potential in the present. The NPS is not only an agency historically linked to settler colonialism. It is also an emblem of mass desire.
In 2015, over three hundred million people visited US national parks. National parks stand as a reminder that there is more to life than work and consumption. They provide access to a world of beauty and leisure beyond what is given and constrained by capitalism. They stand against the plunder of natural resources for profit, protecting land and water for the future.
Eighty-four million acres of national park territory have been extracted from the property market and secured for public use. With a mission to “preserve unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations,” the NPS carves out zones of resistance to privatization. As the fossil fuel industry anticipates the opening of millions of acres of federal lands for energy development, national parks and monuments have become central battlegrounds over the future of the commons.
The complicated history and radical potential of the NPS can be seen in the figure of Smokey Bear, who has recently been taken up as a mascot of anti-Trump resistance.
Created by the US Forest Service for a 1944 campaign about the dangers of forest fires, Smokey Bear remains a beloved and nostalgic symbol of Americana, standing for an idealized version of the American past in which the protection of nature was conceived as a priority rather than an obstacle to progress. Yet he can also be viewed as an icon of racism, class hierarchy, and settler colonialism, a border guard of the institutions that prevented indigenous peoples, the poor, immigrants, and most people of color from enjoying natural resources.
Split between a cherished ideal and a brutal history, Smokey Bear is contradictory. But when Smokey says “resist,” he takes the side of the common and commands others to follow, hailing a collective force against the Trump administration and its racist, anti-science, and ecocidal policies. The new popular meme thus announces a split forming within the NPS itself — a break with its conservative history.
The Resistance
Over 1.4 million people now follow the most popular Rogue NPS page. The page advocates resistance to border walls, privatization of public lands, and suppression of science. Stealing the NPS name and enlisting it in the growing resistance to privatization, resource extraction, climate denial, and racism, the Rogue NPS models a National Park Service that stands up for a concept of nature as common.
The Rogue NPS movement is more than cute memes captured in the circuits of communicative capitalism. It marks a symbolic strike against the Trump administration. It bites the hand that feeds it, refusing the power of the powerful. It also tells us that there are people within government agencies who are eager to fight Trump.
For the Left, the rogue agencies challenge us to rethink our tactics in this convulsive era. They remind us that the people who staff the NPS, EPA, NPS, NOAA, and other public institutions are not merely state functionaries. They are also producers of common knowledge, even potential agents of subversion.
These institutions do not only or always serve the ends of capitalism or the state, but are themselves divided from within. If the kernel of a left vision concentrated within these agencies has been rendered latent and buried in the interest of state and capital, the current moment has brought this vision to the surface.
Hamdallah writes: "With each new settlement, the prospect of peace and the formation of a Palestinian state become even more unattainable."
An Israeli soldier aims his weapon at Palestinian protesters during clashes after a protest against the settlement of Qadomem, in the Occupied West Bank. (photo: Mohamad Torokman/Reuters)
Israel Wants Settlements, Not Peace
By Rami Hamdallah, Al Jazeera
13 February 17
With each new settlement, the prospect of peace and the formation of a Palestinian state become even more unattainable.
srael is above international law, or so it seems. On December 23, the United Nations Security Council passed resolution 2334, re-affirming the illegality of Israeli settlements.
The vote was significant for two reasons: Unlike previous UNSC resolutions targeting Israel, it was not vetoed by the Obama administration, who decided to abstain. Secondly, it demonstrated an international consensus on the illegality and illegitimacy of Israel's settlement enterprise, and showed that these settlements constitute an obstacle to peace.
These points were reiterated by then-US Secretary of State John Kerry in his December 28 speech, and subsequently in the January peace conference held in Paris, which was one of the largest peace conferences ever held in terms of high-level participation.
The fact that even Israel's staunchest ally, the United States, affirmed the illegality of settlements, did nothing to change the course of the Benjamin Netanyahu government.
On the contrary, since the UN Security Council passed the resolution, Israel hurried to approve the construction of even more houses in illegal settlements on Palestinian land. Within one month, the government gave the green light for the construction of more than 6,000 housing units - a higher number than the total number of settlement housing units approved in all of 2016.
The 'regularisation bill'
In parallel, the Israeli parliament passed a legislation - dubbed the "regularisation bill", but essentially a land theft - enabling settlers to "legally" steal Palestinian land, thereby accelerating construction of settlements.
The bill also retroactively "legalised" existing outposts, which are considered illegal even under Israeli law. Yet under international law, both settlements and outposts are illegal. There is no such thing as a legal settlement.
Although the government of Israel and settlers have been building settlements and outposts in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem for nearly half a century, this law crosses a dangerous red line, to the point where even Israel's attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, declared that it violated the Fourth Geneva Convention and that he would not defend the bill if it was challenged in an Israeli court.
Make no mistake: soon, thousands of settlers will scramble to establish new settlements - and that is in addition to the thousands of settlement housing units that will be sponsored and built by the Israeli government itself.
The continued Israeli policy of building settlements makes the establishment of a viable, contiguous Palestinian state increasingly impossible and seriously threatens the two-state solution. But settlements are not merely a factor to be dealt with in future negotiations: their presence has serious consequences for Palestinians, even now.
The building and expansion of settlements is pushing Palestinians out of the Area C, which constitutes 60 percent of the West Bank and is under full Israeli control.
Settlers routinely attack or harass Palestinians living close to settlements and they also vandalise Palestinian properties in complete impunity, with the aim of forcing Palestinians to relocate to overcrowded cities outside the Area C.
Moreover, in order to expand or build new settlements, Israeli bulldozers routinely demolish Palestinian homes and other Palestinian infrastructures in the Area C.
Farmers and Bedouins, who need large tracts of land to grow crops and herd cattle, have been hit the hardest and forced to change their traditional lifestyle, losing their means of livelihood in the process.
Taking concrete steps
The international community cannot afford to ignore Israel's settlement frenzy. Following the announcements for renewed settlement construction and the passing of the so-called "regularisation bill", world powers, rights-based groups and UN officials, including Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, promptly issued condemnations.
Yet, past experience has shown that these statements are ineffective and have never deterred Israel. The same can be said about UNSC resolution 2334, which was adopted under Chapter VI of the UN Charter, meaning that it doesn't obligate Security Council members to take concrete steps if Israel violates the resolution.
Now, more than ever, the international community must take concrete steps, such as economic and diplomatic sanctions, against Israel. This is not simply a moral or legal obligation: it is also in everyone's interests.
International law and international humanitarian law, much of which has been drafted following the horrors of World War II, is meant to prevent the re-occurrence of such tragedies. Countries that flaunt international law (and are allowed to get away with it) invalidate basic human rights, pushing humanity back towards darker ages, when colonialism and ethnic cleansing were the norm.
Palestinians might be the ones who are most affected by Israel's settlement enterprise, but in the long term, we will all be affected.
Dr Rami Hamdallah is the Prime Minister of the State of Palestine.
THE NEW STREAMLINED RSN LOGIN PROCESS: Register once, then login and you are ready to comment. All you need is a Username and a Password of your choosing and you are free to comment whenever you like! Welcome to the Reader Supported News community.
ast your mind back to four months ago, when Donald Trump was just a long-shot candidate with a hot-headed adviser by the name of Michael Flynn.
tephen Miller, a snot-nosed kid with a bad attitude, advertised as White House senior policy adviser, delivered himself of some stern jeremiads on Sunday on Meet the Press, along with many Big Lies of which Josef Goebbels would be jealous.
on’t be fooled by Trump’s and Republican promises to “repeal and replace” Obamacare. They could repeal it, but they can’t and won’t replace it. They’ve tried for years to come up with a replacement that keeps at least as many people covered. Their “replacement” never appears. 
srael is above international law, or so it seems. On December 23, the United Nations Security Council 
