Category: Latest News

For a president-elect who touts ‘America first,’ Russian hacking poses a problem

The following article by Dan Balz was posted on the Washington Post website December 17, 2016:

President-elect Donald Trump speaks in Hershey, Pa., during his “thank you” tour. (Don Emmert/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)

Presidents often are tested early, by unexpected crises or provocations by foreign adversaries. President-elect Donald Trump’s first test has come even before he is sworn in, and so far, he has responded with denial, equivocation and deflection.

The test has come over Russia’s brazen intrusion into the U.S. election process through its hacking of the servers at the Democratic National Committee and the email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager. Continue reading “For a president-elect who touts ‘America first,’ Russian hacking poses a problem”

Trump’s Twitter falsehoods fire up his base, provoke opponents and distract from larger issues

The following article by Cathleen Decker was posted on the L.A. Times website December 15, 2016:

Dawn had barely broken Thursday when Donald Trump once again broadcast via Twitter a provably false claim: that the Obama administration had not raised an alarm about Russian interference in the presidential election until after Hillary Clinton’s defeat.

In fact, on Oct. 7, the administration issued an official statement accusing the Russians of being behind the cyberattacks that appear to have harmed Clinton’s campaign. Continue reading “Trump’s Twitter falsehoods fire up his base, provoke opponents and distract from larger issues”

FBI in agreement with CIA that Russia aimed to help Trump win White House

The following article by Adam Entous and Ellen Nakashima was posted on the Washington Post website December 16, 2016:

FBI Director James B. Comey and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. are in agreement with a CIA assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election in part to help Donald Trump win the White House, officials disclosed Friday, as President Obama issued a public warning to Moscow that it could face retaliation. Continue reading “FBI in agreement with CIA that Russia aimed to help Trump win White House”

A Handy 14-Point Guide To Identify Fascist Leaders

The following article by Kali Holloway was posted on the Alternet website December 8, 2016:

In 1995, Umberto Eco, the late Italian intellectual giant and novelist most famous for The Name of the Rose, wrote a guide describing the primary features of fascism. As a child, Eco was a loyalist of Mussolini, an experience that made him quick to detect the markers of fascism later in life, when he became a revered public intellectual and political voice. Eco noted that fascism looks different in each incarnation, morphing with time and leadership, as “it would be difficult for [it] to reappear in the same form in different historical circumstances.” It is a movement without “quintessence.” Instead, it’s a sort of “fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions,” he wrote.

Eco’s famous 14-point list outlines what the author dubbed “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism”—and it fits hand in glove the political persona created by Donald Trump. Hours after 60 million Americans voted to give the presidency to a dangerously incompetent narcissist whose campaign was based on nativist fear-mongering and racist appeals, British historian Simon Schama lamented that Trump’s newly sealed win would “hearten fascists all over the world.” Sure enough, congratulations poured in from far-right admirers around the world, who recognized Trump as one of their ilk. Continue reading “A Handy 14-Point Guide To Identify Fascist Leaders”

From Nixon To Trump: Democracy and Indecency

The following article by Rick Perlstein was posted on the National Memo website December 2, 2016:

shutterstock_364331684-668x501This January marks my 20th anniversary writing about the American right wing as a historian and a journalist. Wearing my historian’s hat, I’ve documented lunatic John Birch Society members convinced that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a “conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy”; underground militias stockpiling guns against imminent Communist invasion, threatening death to congressmen who dared abet the evil socialist agenda; drunken louts in a Queens, New York, bar describing Richard Nixon’s impeachment as a liberal coup, opining, “If I was Nixon, that’s what I’d do—I’d shoot every one of them.” I stroked my chin, and explained how such maniacal, anti-democratic, and violently anarchic rage had always been part of the story, though really only at the margins of the American conservative movement.

At the same time, as a citizen and as a journalist, I documented that margin encroaching on the center, until, with Donald Trump’s apotheosis, it seems now to have consumed the entire damned thing.

Let’s look at the score. Continue reading “From Nixon To Trump: Democracy and Indecency”