What the Heck?! Thread (Closed)

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Blackstone

Brigadier
Flynn resigned Monday night. It was just a matter of time, and given how other advisors and officials in the Trump administration like to play fast and loose with the facts, Flynn wouldn't be the last to leave under a cloud.

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AssassinsMace

Lieutenant General
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Maybe Trump read the fake news story that came out within 24 hours of the Virginia Tech massacre by the Chicago Sun Times that the shooter was a Chinese national sent on a mission on orders from Beijing.
 
oops
Trump Calls the News Media the ‘Enemy of the American People’
President Trump, in an extraordinary rebuke of the nation’s press organizations, wrote on
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on Friday that the nation’s news media “is the enemy of the American people.”

Even by the standards of a president who routinely castigates journalists — and who on Thursday devoted much of a 77-minute news conference to criticizing his press coverage — Mr. Trump’s tweet was a striking escalation in his attacks.

At 4:32 p.m., shortly after arriving at his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Fla., Mr. Trump took to Twitter to write:
18trumptweet-web-jumbo-v3.png


The message was swiftly deleted, but 16 minutes later Mr. Trump posted a revised version. Restricted to 140 characters, he removed the word “sick,” and added two other television networks — ABC and CBS — to his list of offending organizations.

The president has referred to the media as the “opposition party” to his administration, and he has blamed news organizations for stymieing his agenda. But the language that Mr. Trump deployed on Friday is more typically used by leaders to refer to hostile foreign governments or subversive organizations. It also echoed the language of autocrats who seek to minimize dissent.

“Oh boy,” Carl Bernstein, the journalist who helped to uncover the Watergate scandal, said on Friday, after a reporter read him Mr. Trump’s tweet.

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is demonstrating an authoritarian attitude and inclination that shows no understanding of the role of the free press,” he added.

Historians pointed out similarities between Mr. Trump and
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, who in 1972 told his national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, “The press is the enemy.”

Mr. Bernstein said the president’s language “may be more insidious and dangerous than Richard Nixon’s attacks on the press.”

“But there is a similarity in trying to divide the country, and make the conduct of the press the issue, instead of the conduct of the president,” he said.

Mr. Trump and his top advisers strongly believe that an elitist news media lost its credibility by failing to anticipate his political rise.

Still, the notion of the news media as an enemy of the public — especially when voiced by a sitting president — went a step beyond Mr. Trump’s usual rhetorical turns.

Mr. Trump’s tactic of pitting the press against the public was mirrored in a survey distributed by the president’s team on Thursday, which urged Trump supporters “to do your part to fight back against the media’s attacks and deceptions.”

Survey questions included, “Do you believe that the mainstream media has reported unfairly on our movement?” and “On which issues does the mainstream media do the worst job of representing Republicans? (Select as many that apply.)”

Mr. Trump has deleted tweets in the past, sometimes to correct for typos or to refine his message, and publications are
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of these fleeting missives.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump expressed his distaste for journalists in more populist terms, saying, “much of the media in Washington, D.C., along with New York, Los Angeles in particular, speaks not for the people, but for the special interests.”

“The public doesn’t believe you people anymore,” Mr. Trump added. “Now, maybe I had something to do with that. I don’t know. But they don’t believe you.”

Correction: February 17, 2017
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of the headline with this article misquoted the tweet President Trump wrote. He described the nation’s news media as the “enemy of the American people,” not the “enemy of the people.”

source:
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right now top headline(s) from the four servers I check more or less regularly, in the order I usually visit those servers, redirect me to:

  1. Vědci objevili unikátní soustavu planet. Jsou obyvatelné a kousek od Země

    Zdroj:
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  2. Historyczne odkrycie! NASA: Znaleziono 7 podobnych do Ziemi planet, aż trzy w tzw. "sferze życia"
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  3. Найден близнец Солнечной системы. LIVE
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  4. Astronomers discover 7 Earth-sized planets orbiting nearby star
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now I read
The story of the week is Trump, Russia and the FBI. The rest is a distraction
The White House reportedly tried to influence an active counter-intelligence investigation. All else,
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, is designed to deflect attention


Narrative switching. That is what the Trump administration is desperately trying to do around Russia right now. The White House
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in the middle of an active investigation involving counter-intelligence. This was not only foolhardy but also suspicious, as it directly undermined their apparent objective: distracting us.

On 14 February,
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that advisors and associates of Donald Trump may have been in direct and continuous contact with officers of the Russian intelligence agency, the FSB, during a tumultuous election campaign in which the American democracy itself was hacked. A major party – now in opposition – was
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.

According to the Times, intercepted telephone calls and phone records indicated to American counter-intelligence officers direct contact with the Russians.

The stakes are high. Most Democrats and more than a few Republicans believe this investigation could unearth details that could plunge the nation into a political and constitutional crisis not seen since the secession of the South in 1860 and 1861.

The Trump administration has repeatedly
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. However, its denials have always been couched in the most legalistic terms and each falls apart with every new revelation. It doesn’t help that Trump himself calls the allegations “
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” then validates the reporting by attacking the leaks – suggesting that they are true.

Now,
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, we learned on Thursday that Trump chief of staff Reince Priebus had reportedly contacted the deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, and requested that the bureau publicly characterize the Times story as not being serious – in McCabe’s reported words, “total BS”.

When this was rebuffed by McCabe, Priebus reportedly went to FBI director James Comey, who allegedly also refused to comment publicly. Priebus then allegedly asked both if he could quote them anonymously as “top intelligence officials”, saying the story was totally wrong. According to CNN, McCabe and Comey agreed to let him do that, despite the fact that the
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and the White House are prohibited from communicating about open investigations.

The White House then turned to other intelligence officials and to members of Congress.
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, House and Senate intelligence committee chairs Devin Nunes and Richard Burr were asked to push back against Russian stories that did not favor the administration. They told the Post they did so.

No matter what the contention, the fundamental fact exists that the FBI, based on McCabe’s and Comey’s remarks, has inadvertently verified that there is, in fact, a counter-intelligence investigation going on involving the associates of the president. Until now the investigation had only been reported through anonymous sources.

This bungled attempt to manage the media reveals the fear in the White House: that there may actually be a smoking gun that ties Trump to Moscow’s hacking.

It is always possible that Trump’s then campaign manager, Paul Manafort, former adviser Carter Page and others may have been in contact with Russians as part of foreign policy development. But given the political environment in the summer of 2016, after the hack of the Democratic National Committee, it is very hard to believe that any continuous and repeated contact with the Kremlin was completely innocent.

Priebus’s clumsy attempt to perform perception management judo only added fuel to the fire. Then it was raked over with Trump’s often incomprehensible flamethrower rhetoric when he declared CNN reporting “fake news” and had them banned,
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, from a press gaggle on Friday.

Any investigation involving Trump advisers and Russian intelligence is serious stuff. If born out, it has the potential to become the greatest political scandal in American history. But this meddling by the White House is one step too far. It is not typical Washington pushback. It smacks of a strategy of cover-up.

It is high time for the House and Senate to form independent select subcommittees to ferret out the truth. The key questions are simple. What did Trump and his staff know about the hacks? When did they know it and were they complicit in any way?

If American citizens worked alongside a foreign power to interfere in American democracy, it must be found out and quickly. It is crucial to retain the trust in our president and the electoral process. The stakes are nothing less than the legitimacy of American liberal democracy.
source is The Guardian
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Equation

Lieutenant General
Here's a good read that I agreed with.

Stop Belittling the Holocaust With Your Stupid Nazi Analogies
[QUOTE
When the Associated Press dropped a breathless piece contending that the Trump administration was "considering" and "weighing" using 100,000 National Guard troops to help round up illegal immigrants, the media erupted into its usual hysterics. Soon, the White House denied it had ever considered the memo (and so far, there is no reason to believe it is lying). We soon learned the memo itself doesn't say anything about 100,000 National Guardsmen rounding up illegal immigrants. We can theorize about who leaked the story, but it looks to be the epitome of President Donald Trump's Yogi Berraisms about a real story being fake news.

As always, none of this stopped the shameful Hitler and Nazi analogies from immediately clogging up social media. Comparing everything to 1932 is now a big part of our national discourse, Not only by angry partisans but also people who should know better than to habitually make these correlations.

This isn't Mel Brooks'Springtime for Hitler. Whether you're a fan or a detractor of Trump, these gross equivalences belittle the memory of millions who died in unimaginably horrifying ways. Moreover, exaggeration and historical illiteracy undermines the very cause these people claim to care about, unless that cause is desensitizing people to the terror of the Holocaust.


Jamil Smith, a senior national correspondent for MTV News, was just one of the high-profile journalists to use this intellectually lazy analogy. "First, they came for the undocumented," he tweeted. (In his next tweet about the memo draft, he contends, "Whether or not it's true doesn't matter," which is emblematic of much punditry today.) He is, of course, referring to Martin Niemöller's famous poem, which reads:

"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out / Because I was not a Socialist. / Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out / Because I was not a Trade Unionist. / Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out / Because I was not a Jew. / Then they came for me / and there was no one left to speak for me."

People love to use this poem as a cudgel against anyone who fails to match their own hyperbole on political issues, appropriating the suffering of others for their causes. Implied, of course, is that those who do not share their outrage are ignoring an event that is in some ways akin to the Holocaust. It's a convenient formulation because, after all, you'd be hard-pressed to disprove events that haven't yet transpired. And if, for some reason, Trump's term doesn't actually turn into a Hitlerian nightmare of the left's imagination, then they'll tell you it was because they took Niemöller's warning to heart and stopped the impending evil.

So it's a win-win.

First of all, even if the authorities—even the National Guard (which I think would be an incredibly horrible idea)—were to start deporting illegal immigrants, not one of those unfortunate people would ever be sent to anything resembling the ovens of Treblinka and Auschwitz. Not their children. Not anyone else in this country. Most often, in fact, deported illegal immigrants, who have broken the law, are going back to their home in Mexico, where they can often apply for legal entry into the United States.

Every year, more than a million people become American citizens. So we are hardly in the early staging plans of "total measures." In fact, we function under immigration laws that were written by representatives of the electorate, and the constitutionality of those laws is weighed by a judicial system.

If your argument is that all deportations are, in and of themselves, the actions of a proto-Nazi regime, then I would ask, why aren't you comparing President Barack Obama, who deported 2.4 million people from 2009 to 2014, to Himmler? Or I would say to stop commandeering the horrors of history for short-term political gain and come up with a better analogy.
][/QUOTE]
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