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OpEdNews - 4/28/2018 - (1 of 3) - from Alternet
"We May Be on the Verge of a Human-Made Climate Disaster.
Is Europe about to experience famine?"
By Thom Hartmann:
New research shows that we may well be on the edge of a civilization-destroying climate change event. And we must do something about it.
Most Americans are at least vaguely familiar with the Irish Potato Famine of 1845, but few could tell you much at all about the much larger planet-wide famine of 1816. But Europeans can tell you all about the "Year Without a Summer," because their news sometimes references it in the context of global climate change. It's one of the deepest fears of many Europeans.
The reason a famine from 200 years ago spooks modern Europeans is because climate change could bring it back, only this time it would be long-lasting rather than just hanging on for one year. As such, it could throw Europe and parts of North America into prolonged famine, disease, depopulation, civil strife, and war" just as climate change has the Mideast in the past decades.
But first, to understand the Year Without a Summer and how it informs us about this new danger, step into the Wayback Machine.
In 1815, Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies erupted, throwing an enormous amount of ash into the upper atmosphere. As this layer of ash circled the globe, it cooled the planet -- for the next year -- by somewhere between .7 degrees and 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit.
That was enough to throw Europe into the worst famine of the entire 19th or 20th centuries.
As Wikipedia (and hundreds of other sources) notes:
"Cool temperatures and heavy rains resulted in failed harvests in Britain and Ireland. Families in Wales traveled long distances begging for food. Famine was prevalent in north and southwest Ireland, following the failure of wheat, oat, and potato harvests. In Germany, the crisis was severe; food prices rose sharply. With the cause of the problems unknown, people demonstrated in front of grain markets and bakeries, and later riots, arson, and looting took place in many European cities. It was the worst famine of 19th-century Europe."
And this was just one single year of less than 1 degrees Celsius of cooling.
Imagine if the cold never ended, but persisted decade after decade, and the cold was far greater than just a one-degree drop. Europe would experience widespread famine and massive political disruption.
Climate change disrupting entire civilizations is not merely hypothetical. Scientists (including political scientists) now know that over the past 30 years global warming pushed the desert south in Syria and other parts of the Middle East, displacing over a million farming families as their farms turned to dust and sand, setting up today's Syrian Civil War (and conflicts from Egypt to Libya to Tunisia).
With just a few years of prolonged crop-unfriendly weather, Europe would be in even worse shape than Syria is today. Chaos, death, famine, and disease would rule the continent, while demand for food would trigger crises across the world.
https://www.opednews.com/articles/1/We-May-Be-on-the-Verge-of-by-Thom-Hartmann-Climate-Change_Disaster_Famine_Water-180428-225.html
cont'd...
Meanwhile, after swatting dung flies away, back to one of the truly big issues, if not the biggest, facing life on Mother Earth: anthropogenic climate disruption.
Thom Hartmann's bio from his homepage:
Thom Hartmann is a progressive national and internationally syndicated talkshow host whose shows are available in over a half-billion homes worldwide. He's the New York Times bestselling, 4-times Project Censored Award winning author of 24 books in print in 17 languages on five continents. Leonardo DiCaprio was inspired by Thom's book "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight" to make the movie "The 11th Hour" (in which Thom appears), and Warner Brothers is making a movie starring DiCaprio and Robert De Niro from the book Thom co-authored with Lamar Waldron, "Legacy of Secrecy."
Talkers Magazine named Thom Hartmann as the 8th most important talk show host in America in 2011, 2012, and 2013 (10th the two previous years), and for three of the past five years the #1 most important progressive host, in their “Heavy Hundred” ranking. His radio show is syndicated on for-profit radio stations nationwide by Westwood One, on non-profit and community stations nationwide by Pacifica, across the entire North American continent on SiriusXM Satellite radio (The Progress, Channel 127), on cable systems nationwide by Cable Radio Network (CRN), on its own YouTube channel, via Livestream on its own Livestream channel, via subscription podcasts, worldwide through the US Armed Forces Network, and through the Thom Hartmann App in the App Store. The radio show is also simulcast as TV in realtime into nearly 40 million US and Canadian homes by the Free Speech TV Network on Dish Network, DirectTV, and cable TV systems nationwide.
Thom has spent much of his life working with and for the international Salem relief organization (www.saleminternational.org) and he and his wife Louise founded a community for abused children in New Hampshire (www.salemchildrensvillage.org) and a school for learning disabled and ADHD kids (www.hunterschool.org). His book "Attention Deficit Disorder: A Different Perception" sparked a national debate, both in the psychology/psychiatry community and among the general public, on ADD/ADHD and neurological differences ranging from giftedness to autism. His book "Rebooting The American Dream" so inspired Senator Bernie Sanders that he wrote a cover letter to accompany the delivery of the book to his 99 colleagues in the United States Senate and he read from it extensively on the floor of the Senate during his famous filibuster.
As an entrepreneur, he's also founded several successful businesses which still are operating, and lived and worked with his wife, Louise, and their three children on several continents.
An inveterate traveler and sometimes a risk-taker, Hartmann has often found himself in the world's hot spots on behalf of the German-based Salem international relief organization or as a writer, a situation which causes his friends to sometimes wonder aloud if he works for the CIA (he does not and never has). He was, for example, in The Philippines when Ferdinand Marcos fled the country; in Egypt the week Anwar Sadat was shot; in Uganda during the war of liberation by Tanzania; in Hungary when the first East German refugees arrived; in Germany when the wall came down; in Beijing during the first student demonstrations; in Thailand when the military coup of 1991 occurred; in Barbados during the 2004 anti-government strikes and shutdowns; in Bogota and Medellin, Colombia, during the spate of killings of presidential candidates; in Israel, in the West Bank town of Nablus, the week the Intifada started there; on the Czech border the week Chernobyl melted down; in Kenya during the first big wave of crackdowns on dissidents; at dinner in Moscow with Vladimer Putin and Mikhael Gorbachev as Donald Trump was sweeping the Republican field Christmas 2016; and in Venezuela during the 1991 coup attempt. He has been successful in avoiding some disasters, however. For example, he was out of the country when George H.W. Bush picked Dan Quayle as his running mate.
He was born and grew up in Michigan, and retains strong ties to the Midwest, although he and Louise have lived in New Hampshire, Vermont, Georgia, Germany, and Oregon...and now live with a small menagerie in Portland, Oregon.
#40;
LMAO! Glad you appreciate the level of communication intended. Hey, just returning the salute there, óinseach. (In the pic, which one are you anyway? Holding the Trump sign? Ms. Congeniality front and center?)
Téigh trasna ort féin is so befitting, though, considering all the dust you're kicking up, the poorly sourced, widely debunked, far-right lies and conspiracy theories you shamelessly spread (mixed up with meaningless anecdotes), to which you seem thoroughly addicted. Unfortunately, you may be too old to grow out of such gross, long-term distortions of reality, HotGranny. Sad. To which loony bin should flowers be sent?
As explained before:
"You had ample opportunity to come clean as a Trump troll, to do your homework, and to speak to the big issues of our time on Thom's Blog; instead, as a dumbed-down Republican and fascist follower, you've chosen to display abject ignorance, proving yourself over and over to be hopelessly scatterbrained, deliberately deflecting, intellectually dishonest, and a habitual purveyor of despicable right-wing lies -- in other words, a willfully ignorant Trump troll. What you clueless eejits call "opposing opinions" are nothing but flat-out lies easily proven as such. And I don't suffer fools or liars gladly."
BTW, isn't it obvious from the ridiculous nonsense you post that not only do you simply disagree with just about everything Thom Hartmann, but you don't even read his articles or listen much to him on air -- reading and listening for total comprehension, that is? Added to intellectual negligence, laziness and dishonesty, what little is gleaned usually is distorted.
Yet, as most arrogant pissants do, Trump trolls (A Limbot, for god sakes!) refuse to seriously engage with the truly big issues facing humankind that Thom continuously brings up, while expecting others to follow into the ground endless right-wing memes of little value, obscuring the truth.
No thanks, óinseach, I'll stick with truthtellers rather than liars. After all, this is Thom's site, meant for getting at the truth of things --the big things, not yours for disseminating regressive garbage -- the little things.
So, by all means, "Téigh trasna ort féin!"
FYI: Virtually all your posts regarding politics contain some element of mistruth. (Focusing on fan base rather than the veracity of important issues is rather childish, don't you think?) Therefore, the following post corrects the record about Thom's popularity as a progressive talk-show host and respected author, taken directly from his home page bio:
‘Human Caravan’ Turns Down Asylum Offer By Mexico Government – Declares Intent To Keep Marching Into AmericaPosted on October 27, 2018 by DCWhispers
It is a move that will do nothing to diminish the belief by many that the ‘human caravan’ marching from Central America to the United States is nothing more than a paid political stunt intended to create chaos and division at the U.S./Mexico southern border. The self-proclaimed ‘refugees’ have been granted asylum by the Mexican government. These refugees refused which would indicate they are not refugees at all—but something else entirely.
DianeR,
Not sure, but when I went back later it looked like he took the apple with him...it was gone....LOL Maybe there was a worm in there ??? At first I thought it was stuck on his beak but when he saw me he tossed it and came runnin over.
DS,
I think Thom's 130 fans already looked at your posts from Opednews.
I think my Turkeys have more fans than that, and rightly so.
So dumb & childish...your middle finger salutes..............grow up!
HotCoffee, love the turkey story. Do you suppose the turkey was rewarding you for providing their food?
cont'd (3 of 3) ...
OpEdNews - 5/1/2018 - From Common Dreams
"Fascists Compete To Own America.
Now might be a really good time to examine the origins and nature of the whole right-wing collusion between business and government."
By Thom Hartmann:
Instead, as Hitler did with the trade union leaders and the Jews, they point to a "them" to pin with blame and distract people from the harms of their economic policies.
In a comment prescient of Donald Trump's recent suggestion that America itself is at risk because of brown-skinned immigrants, Wallace continued:
"The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination..."
But even at this, Wallace noted, American fascists would have to lie to the people in order to gain power. And, because they were in bed with the nation's largest corporations -- who could gain control of newspapers and broadcast media -- they could promote their lies with ease.
"The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact," Wallace wrote. "Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy."
In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism the Vice President of the United States saw rising in America, he added:
"They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection." (emphasis added)
In contrast to GOP fascism, the progressive vision of an egalitarian America in which very large businesses and media monopolies are broken up under the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act (which Reagan stopped enforcing, leading to the mergers and acquisitions frenzy that continues to this day) was the driving vision of the New Deal (and of "Trust Buster" Teddy Roosevelt a generation earlier).
As Wallace's President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said when he accepted his party's renomination in 1936 in Philadelphia, "...out of this modern civilization, economic royalists [have] carved new dynasties.... It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction.... And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man...."
Speaking indirectly of the fascists that Wallace would directly name almost a decade later, Roosevelt brought the issue to its core:
"These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power." But, he thundered, "Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!"
Standing up to corporate and billionaire power, now firmly in charge of the Trump administration, we again stand at the same crossroad Roosevelt and Wallace confronted during the Great Depression and World War II.
Fascism is rising in America, this time calling itself "conservativism." The Republican politicians and their billionaire donors' behavior today eerily parallels that day in 1936 when Roosevelt said, "In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for."
It's particularly ironic that the very news media trashing Michelle Wolf seems blind to the fact that the billionaire Koch Network and its related organizations now have more employees and a larger infrastructure and better funding than the GOP. Republicans are so beholden to fossil fuel billionaire's money that they're willing to lie about basic science and put our entire species at risk.
Like Eisenhower's farewell address, which also warned about the "misplaced" rise of corporate power in the defense industry, President Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace's warnings about the rise of corporate and billionaire power are more urgent now than ever before.
https://www.opednews.com/articles/3/Fascists-Compete-To-Own-Am-by-Thom-Hartmann-American-Facism_American-Hegenomy_American-History_American-Presidents-180501-19.html
cont'd (2 of 3) ...
OpEdNews - 5/1/2018 - From Common Dreams
"Fascists Compete To Own America.
Now might be a really good time to examine the origins and nature of the whole right-wing collusion between business and government."
By Thom Hartmann:
"American fascism will not be really dangerous," he added in the next paragraph, "until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information..."
Noting that, "Fascism is a worldwide disease," Wallace further suggest that fascism's "greatest threat to the United States will come after the war" and will manifest "within the United States itself."
In Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here," a conservative southern politician is helped to the presidency by a nationally syndicated radio talk show host. The politician -- Buzz Windrip -- runs his campaign on family values, the flag, and patriotism, while being covertly supported by the richest and most powerful of America's corporate elite. Windrip and the talk show host portray advocates of traditional American democracy as anti-American.
When Windrip becomes president, he opens a Guantanamo-style detention center, and the viewpoint character of the book, Vermont newspaper editor Doremus Jessup, flees to Canada to avoid prosecution under new "patriotic" laws that make it illegal to criticize the president.
As Lewis noted in his novel, "the President, with something of his former good-humor [said]: 'There are two [political] parties, the Corporate and those who don't belong to any party at all, and so, to use a common phrase, are just out of luck!' The idea of the Corporate or Corporative State, Secretary [of State] Sarason had more or less taken from Italy."
And, President "Windrip's partisans called themselves the Corporatists, or, familiarly, the 'Corpos,' which nickname was generally used."
Lewis, the first American writer to win a Nobel Prize, was world famous by 1944, as was his book "It Can't Happen Here." And several well-known and powerful Americans, including Prescott Bush, had lost businesses in the early 1940s because of charges by Roosevelt that they were doing business with Hitler.
These events all, no doubt, colored Vice President Wallace's thinking when he wrote:
"Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after 'the present unpleasantness' ceases."
Fascists have an agenda that is primarily economic. As the Free Dictionarynotes, fascism/corporatism is "an attempt to create a 'modern' version of feudalism by merging the 'corporate' interests with those of the state."
Feudalism, of course, is one of the most stable of the three historic tyrannies (kingdoms, theocracies, feudalism) that Thomas Jefferson identified as the ones that ruled nations prior to the rise of American republican democracy, and can be roughly defined as "rule by the rich."
Thus, the neo-feudal/fascistic rich get richer (and more powerful) on the backs of the poor and the middle class, an irony not lost on author Thomas Frank, who notes in "What's The Matter With Kansas" that, "You can see the paradox first-hand on nearly any Main Street in middle America -- 'going out of business' signs side by side with placards supporting [the Republican president]."
The businesses "going out of business" are, in fascist administrations, usually those of locally owned small and medium-sized companies. As Wallace wrote, some in big business "are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage."
He added:
"Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise [companies]. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself."
But American fascists who would want former CEOs to fill the roles as the leaders of the GOP, and write legislation with corporate interests in mind, don't generally talk to We The People about their real agenda, or the harm it does to small businesses and working people.
https://www.opednews.com/articles/2/Fascists-Compete-To-Own-Am-by-Thom-Hartmann-American-Facism_American-Hegenomy_American-History_American-Presidents-180501-19.html
cont'd...
(1 of 3)
OpEdNews - 5/1/2018 - From Common Dreams
"Fascists Compete To Own America.
Now might be a really good time to examine the origins and nature of the whole right-wing collusion between business and government."
By Thom Hartmann:
Given how reactive hard right snowflakes have gotten in response to a few truth-based jokes from Michelle Wolf, and that Mick Mulvaney has confessed to running a pay-for-play operation out of his congressional office, and Trump is daily breaking the Constitution's emoluments clause, now might be a really good time to examine the origins and nature of the whole right-wing business/government model known as "fascism."
Although most Americans remember that Harry Truman was Franklin D. Roosevelt's Vice President when Roosevelt died in 1945 (making Truman President), Roosevelt had two previous Vice Presidents -- John N. Garner (1933-1941) and Henry A. Wallace (1941-1945).
In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, "write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?"
Vice President Wallace's answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.
"The really dangerous American fascists," Wallace wrote, "are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information."
And [he] continued, "With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."
In this, Wallace was using the classic definition of the word "fascist" -- the definition Mussolini had in mind when he claimed to have invented the word. (It was actually Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile who wrote the entry in the Encyclopedia Italiana that said: "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." Mussolini, however, affixed his name to the entry, and claimed credit for it.)
As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."
Mussolini was quite straightforward about all this. In a 1923 pamphlet titled "The Doctrine of Fascism" he wrote, "If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government." But not a government of, by, and for We The People -- instead, it would be a government of, by, and for the most powerful corporate interests in the nation.
In 1938, Mussolini brought his vision of fascism into full reality when he dissolved Parliament and replaced it with the "Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni" -- the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Corporations were still privately owned, but now instead of having to sneak their money to folks like Mick Mulvaney or Scott Pruitt and covertly write legislation in a soundproof telephone booth, they were openly in charge of the government.
Vice President Wallace bluntly laid out in his 1944 Times article his concern about the same happening here in America:
"If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. ... They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead."
Nonetheless, at that time there were few corporate heads who would run for political office, and, in Wallace's view, most politicians still felt it was their obligation to represent We The People instead of corporate cartels.
https://www.opednews.com/articles/Fascists-Compete-To-Own-Am-by-Thom-Hartmann-American-Facism_American-Hegenomy_American-History_American-Presidents-180501-19.html
cont'd...
ALERT! (#33)
You are plagiarizing other people's work without proper attribution and are copying long passages without permission, which are both illegal and unethical. (However, you may post Thom's own material in full, with accreditation, since this is his website.
Imigh leat, óinseach! Téigh trasna ort féin.
Official Site of The LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT
All Most Wantedhttp://www.lapdonline.org/all_most_wanted
Notice something here? Ok lets move north to San Jose.
http://www.sjpd.org/boi/wanted/
Santa Rosa?
https://srcity.org/1050/Most-Wanted
Get the picture???
The pre-war co-op on New York’s Upper West Side, across the street from Central Park, was the fictional home of “Seinfeld” character Elaine Benes.
In real life it’s where an accused Sinaloa drug kingpin stashed fentanyl to be weighed, bagged and labeled for sale on New York streets under the names “UBER,” “Panda,” and “Wild Card.”
When narcotics agents raided Apartment 6D in August, they found 1,100 glassine envelopes of the deadly synthetic heroin, plus everything else needed for a distribution mill: bags of bulk fentanyl, stamps, ledgers, gloves, masks, rubber bands, a heat sealing device and a gun stuffed between couch cushions.
The iconic building was the final stop on just one artery of an illicit pipeline stretching all the way back to China.
Flowing in one direction, this fentanyl pipeline runs through Mexican cartel strongholds and heads north on well-established drug trafficking routes. It funnels 80 percent of the drug through the San Diego border before dispersing throughout the U.S.
The pipeline flows in another direction, as well, direct from Chinese laboratories to U.S. customers through the mail, bringing small, hard-to-detect packages of extremely pure fentanyl to suburban doorsteps.
Both channels are feeding a deadly epidemic, moving a drug so potent that the equivalent of a few grains of table salt can be fatal.
In 2016, fentanyl-type drugs were responsible for killing nearly 20,000 people in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Sealing the fentanyl pipeline, however, has proven to be thus far an insurmountable challenge. The effort involves navigating delicate political relations with China and Mexico, addressing weaknesses at U.S. borders and within international mail systems that continue to allow narcotics to slip through unnoticed, battling nimble and powerful drug traffickers, and trying to keep up with enterprising chemists who constantly skirt drug controls with new formulations.
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/public-safety/sd-me-fentanyl-pi...
As a fresh wave of refugees from the so-called North Triangle reaches the U.S.-Mexico border, Trump isn't the only one asking if Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador are keeping their end of the bargain.
"The violence is bad, the conditions horrible, but at the same time it is not the responsibility of the U.S.A. to solve all the problems of other countries," says Ana Quintana, executive director of the Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies.
Over the past decade, U.S. taxpayers have provided $1.5 billion in aid to El Salvador, $1.4 billion to Guatemala and $1.1 billion to Honduras, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Yet according to the thousands of migrants seeking asylum in the U.S., all three countries remain mired in poverty and beset by gang and drug violence. Corruption, they say, has never been worse.
The Thom Hartman Program 8/28/18.
One-party-rule, billionaire-funded autocrats are very actively subverting our democracy. The Russians are rank amateurs in comparison.
Time once again to reexamine what fascism means in modern-day America:
"All Jews must die!" -- Robert Bowers
This didn't happen in a vacuum and, lamentably, is not a random, one-off act of horrible gun violence. Right-wing hate, anger, and violence are on the rise, especially after the installment by a non-democratic, slave-era institution of an illegitimate , white supremacist, misogynistic asshole as fake president. (He lost the popular vote by a huuuge margin, and is one of the most unpopular presidents in history.)
The "invasion" white folk should be worrying about is populated primarily by White male homegrown terrorists who've been hopelessly indoctrinated by radical Christian nationalism and by far-right hate groups, whose members invariably vote either Republican or Libertarian, which is a particular nasty form of extreme Republicanism promoted by the vast, well-funded propaganda network of the billionaire class, of which Charles Koch has been the leading fomenter. This "vast right-wing conspiracy" (Hillary was absolutely correct in that assessment) pours more money into our election process than either major party. Virtually all of that money, save for the few pennies thrown at Republican-light Democrats, is lavished on Republican corporate stooges.
So, why is this frightening derailment of democracy not of utmost concern for most rank-and-file Republicans? Oh that's right, their fascist candidates are the major beneficiaries of billionaire donor largesse.
One-party rule! USA! USA! USA!
Good day DianeR,
Notice that the horde is mostly young men and when the run into any confrontation ( like a border fence ) they push the vey few women and children to the front for protection.
Hardly anyone looks like they have missed a meal for quite some time.
If dems want them here so much, they should sponser them and take them into their homes and sign up to be legally financially responsible for those they sponsor. Otherwise our resources should go to the homeless we have now.
Any democratic parent would feed and cloth their own child before feeding the child of a stranger down the street. It's just basic human instinct. However it's the Dems with the high fences in a gated community that want to bring these folks into the poorist communities.
More sad news this morning....more people hurt...so sad!
On the turkey front...I was late feeding them this morning and saw a Turkey running over to see me with an apple in his mouth. Never saw that before.
Enjoy!
Morning HotCoffee,
The horde at the border is interesting. Many are thinking it is promoted and financed by an ousted leftist political party in Venezuela. Promise made to relatively ignorant people, rumors passed on, and all of a sudden the ball gets rolling. Problem is, if the doors are opened without proper procedure, they cannot be closed again.
Best thing we can do is process them one individual at a time through one door at the border. After a five or six year wait in line, they may decide it may be better to stay in Mexico.
Hope everyone enjoyed the chili dogs.
cont'd... 3 of 3
OpEdNews - 4/12/2018 -- From AlterNet
"Donald Trump and Paul Manafort Revived Nixon's Race-Based Hate Strategy for the 21st Century.
Just as conservative politicians easily use racism to generate votes, power, and money, the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. was also the result of racism for profit and political gain."
By Thom Hartmann and *Lamar Waldron:
That was likely because the FBI withheld key files about both men from the Committee. Though, as mentioned earlier, the Committee in 1979 "concluded that there was a likelihood of conspiracy" in King's assassination, and "financial gain was Ray's primary motivation."
Not that you'd know about the Committee or its conspiracy conclusion from the mainstream press coverage of King's assassination.
That's largely because some key files about King's murder -- including those about Marcello and Milteer -- are still being withheld from Congress, despite the 1992 JFK Act which required their release by October 2017.
When the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and other agencies made last-minute appeals to keep certain files secret, Trump created a new deadline of April 26, 2018. However, many of the most important files about King's and JFK's murders won't be released then, because they aren't even on the master list -- prepared by the National Archives -- of documents and tapes that might be released.
Luckily, key files have sometimes slipped through the declassification process and historians, journalists, and researchers often share their efforts, so more information about King's murder continues to come to light. For the past four years, Waldron has been working on an as-yet-unpublished new book about King's assassination, which includes new information about Milteer and Marcello's roles in the crime, from exclusive files about each.
King's 1968 murder and Nixon's Southern Strategy were created the same year, and both continue to have enormous impact on America today. There are also surprising connections between the players involved in each.
For example, Justice Department files show that Nixon received two separate million-dollar bribes from Carlos Marcello and his associates, one in September 1960 (when Nixon was vice president) and the other for President Nixon's December 1971 release of Jimmy Hoffa from prison (with special conditions the Mafia wanted).
Nixon was also the first proponent of Donald Trump running for president, according to the man who introduced them, Roger Stone, and all three had ties to Roy Cohn, the notorious Mafia lawyer and fixer. Donald Trump even boasted, in 1985, that Roy Cohn was his most important mentor.
Cohn, who got his start with Joe McCarthy and became a mob favorite, wasn't a typical lawyer; Cohn specialized in using threats, intimidation, and blackmail to get what he wanted (for himself and for his Mafia clients).
Ironically, in 1985 -- the same year Cohn was mentoring Donald Trump -- FBI files show that Carlos Marcello tried to hire Roy Cohn to help spring him from prison.
If cream rises to the top, one wonders what the reverse of that is, where men like Nixon, Marcello, Milteer, Cohn, Trump, etc., always seemed to find a new low.
* Lamar Waldron, called "one of the best investigative journalists" by the Chicago Tribune, most recently authored The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination.
https://www.opednews.com/articles/3/Donald-Trump-and-Paul-Mana-by-Thom-Hartmann-Conspiracy_Hate-Groups_Hate-Racism-Bigotry_Nixoncare-180412-493.html
cont'd...
OpEdNews - 4/12/2018 -- From AlterNet
"Donald Trump and Paul Manafort Revived Nixon's Race-Based Hate Strategy for the 21st Century.
Just as conservative politicians easily use racism to generate votes, power, and money, the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. was also the result of racism for profit and political gain."
By Thom Hartmann and Lamar Waldron:
After the notorious political hatchet man Lee Atwater joined Manafort's firm, Atwater masterminded the infamous "Willie Horton" attack ad for George H. W. Bush that doomed Michael Dukakis's race for the presidency.
Atwater summed up the Reagan/Bush version of Nixon's Southern Strategy best, in 1981, when he pointed out to a group of Republican political operatives that, in the 1950s, white politicians could simply use the N-word, repeatedly.
"By 1968," however, Atwater explained that instead of the N-word, white politicians instead used terms like "forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff," including "economic things" like "cutting taxes" a byproduct of [which] is blacks get hurt worse than whites."
When Paul Manafort moved from being Trump's business associate to being his campaign manager, Trump began using more subtle racist appeals, straight out of Nixon's Southern Strategy.
These include Trump echoing Nixon to the word, saying he'd protect (white) Americans from threats to "our way of life"; exploiting exaggerated fears of crime; and even proclaiming himself the "law and order" candidate, just like Nixon.
The result? Southern states provided more than half of Trump's electoral votes, and he won white voters by 21 percent, according to Facing South (whose work by Facing South's Sue Sturgis we've cited extensively).
Donald Trump's words and actions continue to this day to echo the racial politics of 1968, from his support of the Charlottesville racists to his public support by former Klan leader David Duke. Just like Nixon, Trump combines the more refined Southern Strategy of Nixon with the populist platitudes of George Wallace, to pander to bigotry and create fear of minorities in white working-class voters -- all while enriching himself and his cronies.
As in 1968, creating such an atmosphere is dangerous, since it helped lead to the assassination of Martin Luther King. Just as conservative politicians easily use racism to generate votes, power, and money, King's murder was also the result of racism for profit and political gain.
As we extensively documented in our book Legacy of Secrecy, Martin Luther King's assassination resulted from a bounty on his life put out by four Georgia white supremacists, led by Joseph Milteer.
For years, Milteer and his associates had been collecting money weekly at one of Atlanta's largest factories (whose peak employment was over 7,000), promising the white factory workers a plot to kill King, who was also based out of Atlanta.
By late 1967 and early 1968, Milteer's contributors were getting anxious: Not only was King still alive, but no serious attempt to assassinate him had been reported in the press. (That was because Milteer and his associates had been using the money not to kill King, but to buy up large tracts of undeveloped mountain land in North Carolina.)
Eager to placate their contributors, but unable to find a hitman on their own, Milteer turned to the Mafia for help, according to Justice Department files that were previously withheld from congressional investigators.
Those Justice Department files say that "a well-placed prote'ge' of [godfather] Carlos Marcello in New Orleans" revealed that that Mafia in New Orleans "agreed to 'broker' or arrange the assassination [of King] for an amount somewhat in excess of three hundred thousand dollars" on behalf of "an elite" group of "wealthy segregationists," and specified Milteer's tiny hometown of Quitman (not a typo), Georgia, as their base.
In addition, Milteer had ties with Marcello's organization going back to 1963, when Milteer accurately predicted JFK's murder on a Miami police informant tape less than two weeks before the crime, saying that JFK would be shot "with a high-powered rifle from a tall building" and that authorities "will pick up somebody within hours" just to throw the public off." Milteer even mentioned an earlier plot to kill King on that same 1963 police undercover tape.
In late 1967 and early 1968, James Earl Ray was a very low-level drug runner involved with Marcello's organization, according to government files and the congressional investigation. Other files say the King contract had two parts, one for the actual shooter and a smaller amount for a "spotter," to track King's movements, so the shooter could remain out-of-sight until the last possible moment. It's not clear to this day if Ray was hired as the hitman or the spotter.
Tragically, while the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigated Milteer and Marcello for JFK's murder (and concluded that "Marcello had the motive, means, and opportunity to assassinate President Kennedy"), the Committee -- chaired by Rep. Louis Stokes -- didn't include Marcello or Milteer in their investigation of King's murder.
https://www.opednews.com/articles/2/Donald-Trump-and-Paul-Mana-by-Thom-Hartmann-Conspiracy_Hate-Groups_Hate-Racism-Bigotry_Nixoncare-180412-493.html
cont'd...
OpEdNews - 4/12/2018 -- From AlterNet
"Donald Trump and Paul Manafort Revived Nixon's Race-Based Hate Strategy for the 21st Century.
Just as conservative politicians easily use racism to generate votes, power, and money, the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. was also the result of racism for profit and political gain."
By Thom Hartmann and Lamar Waldron:
April 10th marked the 50th anniversary of the funeral of assassinated Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., capping a week of extensive press coverage about his life and death. However, all that coverage missed two key points that are even more important today than in 1968, when King was killed.
First is the matter of who paid for Dr. King's assassination. None of the recent press coverage noted that an extensive congressional investigation of King's murder "concluded that there was a likelihood of conspiracy" in King's assassination, and that "financial gain was [James Earl] Ray's primary motivation." Newly released files -- previously withheld by the FBI from Congress -- now show who paid for King's murder, and why.
The second major point overlooked by the press coverage is how Richard Nixon's racially divisive "Southern Strategy" of 1968 led directly to and paved the way for Donald Trump's successful racist campaign and governance strategy, with Paul Manafort being the surprising connection.
For two generations, conservative leaders -- from politicians to billionaires to media figures -- have used Nixon's proven techniques of "Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear" (FIBS) to divide-and-conquer white working-class Americans and acquire political power. In the absence of our media calling them out for FIBS, Nixon's strategy has repeatedly produced a Republican president and Congress, and held a right-wing Supreme Court.
But the most recent presidential race especially showcased the "Bigotry" part of Nixon's successful formula, in particular his "Southern Strategy," which allowed Nixon to use coded racist appeals designed to secure racist voters without turning off moderate voters.
For example, Nixon could avoid using the more direct racist appeals of a candidate like George Wallace by focusing instead on issues like his opposition to "forced busing" and his support for "preserving neighborhoods."
Nixon could proclaim himself the "law and order" candidate in public, all while in private he was involved in shady real estate deals, getting huge sums (legal and illegal) from corporations and his wealthy supporters (including foreign dictators who funneled money to him personally and supported his campaigns), and even committing treason (sabotaging LBJ's Vietnam peace deal in 1968) to win the election.
If those techniques sound familiar in the age of Trump, it's no accident.
Paul Manafort -- Trump's longtime associate and former campaign manager--has a long history of helping conservative Republican presidential candidates effectively apply Nixon's Southern Strategy.
In 1980, Manafort was the Southern campaign coordinator for candidate Ronald Reagan. In that capacity, Manafort had Reagan speak at a county fair in Mississippi just a few miles from where three Civil Rights workers (Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner) were murdered by racists in 1964.
Instead of using his speech to condemn those killings, Reagan instead spoke of his support for "states' rights," a term racist Southern politicians used in the 1960s to justify their discrimination and Jim Crow laws. (The term was so well known that the notorious white supremacist -- and convicted church bomber -- J. B. Stoner named his organization the National States' Rights Party.)
https://www.opednews.com/articles/Donald-Trump-and-Paul-Mana-by-Thom-Hartmann-Conspiracy_Hate-Groups_Hate-Racism-Bigotry_Nixoncare-180412-493.html
cont'd...
More right-wing Trump/Republican lies (IOW, another day in Trumpistan):
Republicans’ New Campaign Strategy: Lie, Then Lie Some More
And the near-constant, albeit couched (sometimes not so much), incitements to violence at Trump's never-ending campaign rallies, coupled with his tacit support and admiration of the world's most ruthless strongmen, lead to predictable results:
When you boil all the Republican blah-blah-blah, hollow words and phony excuses down to a blob of ink, it's nothing but naked racism.
And never forget that the desperate, persecuted human beings, and God's sacred children, streaming out of the dysfunctional, drug-gang infested Latin American countries are the hapless victims of America's wicked, fascistic foreign policies, propping up corporate-friendly autocrats who sold out their own people and democracies for the promise of concentrated wealth and power -- an evil policy that stretches back decades.
History is not kind to America's ruthless election interference, military excursions, and CIA/NSA interventions in foreign countries in favor of anti-democratic military juntas at the behest of the uberwealthy and at the expense of the people. And now the greed of the past is coming back to haunt us. Karma's a bitch!
At least our Southern neighbors understand the true meaning of compassion and empathy in welcoming strangers, which is clearly laid out in the Christian Bible as the way to heaven. Of course, phony radical Christianists on the right fringe (meaning the Republican Party) don't really think any of that sissy stuff actually applies to themselves; it might tarnish their own macho image as rugged individualists protecting a hallowed "way of life" (meaning white-man privilege).
Wake up!
BTW, Trump has made immigration and asylum into an even bigger mess through inherently racist, irreligious cruelty, while a Republican congress rocks on their shriveled up nuts, fools who simply can't govern, who can't even face down a deranged orange baboon with an addled brain.
Whackjob, conspiracy nut ejecta on George Soros, a small sampling: