Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

[Michael Scally MD]

BULLY LAURA IS ALL BARK
https://claytoonz.com/2018/03/31/bully-laura-is-all-bark/

The viewpoints of survivors of horrific tragedies are not infallible. You can disagree and challenge their opinions. While nearly every survivor of the Parkland school shooting is in favor of gun control and a ban on assault-style weapons, Kyle Kashuv, another student from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, disagrees with his classmates and thinks there shouldn’t be any bans. You can’t agree with Kashuv and David Hogg both.

I disagree with Kashuv, yet I don’t feel the need to call him a Nazi or a “crisis actor” manipulated and tutored by adults. I’m not going to doctor photos of him tearing the Constitution in half. I’m not going to vilify him by questioning his citizenship or by calling him a lesbian, even if that would work in this situation. I’m also not going to tell him to shut up because he’s too young to have an opinion.

Conservatives don’t work that way. Much has been said about the way they have vilified the Parkland students over the past month. This tactic isn’t new. It’s how they treat political opposition. Obama was born in Kenya, remember? Conservative commentator Laura Ingraham, who has a show on Fox News called “The Ingraham Angle,” bullied David Hogg this week. The problem for Ingraham is, Hogg fights back. He does it better and much more eloquently.

Ingraham is an old school bully. She started her journalism career by outing homosexual students when she was editor of the Dartmouth Review in 1985. She apologized for her homophobia in 1997. Her apology for attacking Hogg came a lot sooner.

While doing interviews advocating for gun control, Hogg has talked about the normal details of a high school student’s life he still has to deal with, like rejections from colleges. Getting rejections from schools you apply to is a rite of passage for high school seniors. Hogg wasn’t whining about it. He was just mentioning it, as has several of his other classmates. Ingraham used it to belittle the student.

Ingraham tweeted, “David Hogg @davidhogg111 Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA…totally predictable given acceptance rates.)” For the record, he’s been accepted by three other colleges.

Hogg replied with a tweet of his own, “Soooo @IngrahamAngle what are your biggest advertisers … Asking for a friend.” Shortly after that, he listed twelve of her sponsors and told his over 690,000 followers to pick a number and contact them.

Ingraham backed down after many of her show’s advertisers started pulling out. Again, she tweeted, “On reflection, in the spirit of Holy Week, I apologize for any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of Parkland.” Laura will also be taking a vacation next week, which I’m sure is a coincidence. I hope her substitute hosts understand why the only sponsors are the Catheter Cowboy and the My Pillow guy.

Hogg has not accepted her apology because he realizes it’s not an apology. She apologized for offending, not for her statement. Words, Laura. Use your words. She only issued that after her sponsors started dropping out. And, what if it wasn’t Holy Week? Eat crap and I hope you end up at Fountainhead Tech? Shouldn’t Ingraham have reflected before she bullied a student who had watched his classmates gunned down?

When Jimmy Kimmel criticized Republicans for trying to destroy Obamacare, Ingraham felt he wasn’t qualified to talk about policy and said, “leave it to the pros, Jimmy.” Well, Miss Pro, you just got taken to school on policy and politics by a high school student.

Companies and organizations that don’t want to be embarrassed by being associated with horrible and reprehensible people should stop associating with horrible and reprehensible people. The bullying b.s. that comes from Ingraham’s mouth is not a new development. When NBA players criticized Trump, she told them to “shut up and dribble.” Where was your boycott then?

I understand corporations don’t want to play politics and only see green money, not blue and red. But, maybe you should have a conscience before a Fox News troglodyte attacks students who survived a school shooting. It’s not like you couldn’t predict it. If you end your association with Fox News, this will happen less and less.

Laura Ingraham shouldn’t just lose sponsors. She should lose her show. The only drawback to that justice will that it would probably land her a job in Trump’s White House.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

WTFU ...

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Back on Feb. 16, the New Hampshire Bar Association held its annual mid-year meeting. This year the program was a little different. Instead of the usual continuing legal education event, the bar brought in two historians, Anne O’Rourke and Willliam Meinecke Jr., from the United States Holocaust Museum to look at how German lawyers and judges responded to the destruction of democracy and the establishment of the Nazi state.

Their presentation showed that the worst horrors of the Nazi regime did not arrive full-blown. Rather, the road to fascism was taken in gradual incremental steps, each one preparing the way for the next.

While German lawyers and judges might have opposed Hitler’s authority and the legitimacy of the Nazi regime, they failed to do so. Not only did they fail, they collaborated and interpreted the law in ways that broadly facilitated the Nazis’ ability to carry out their agenda.

Admittedly, there was a very narrow window to dissent. Courts interpreted every appearance of coolness toward the regime as a breach of professional standards. Insufficient enthusiasm for the regime could be a basis for getting disbarred.

O’Rourke and Meinecke pointed to a number of decrees by the Nazis that they used to consolidate their power and advance their program. After the February 1933 fire in the Reichstag, the German parliament, the Nazis suspended critical provisions of the German constitution, including right to assembly, freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

They also removed all restrictions on police investigations. They rounded up political opponents, particularly communists, socialists and social democrats, holding them in preventive detention and sometimes disappearing them altogether. Relying on the Reichstag Fire Decree, the Nazis held people without specific charges. Defendants had no right to appeal, no access to a lawyer or right to judicial review.

The German Supreme Court did not balk at the new power arrangement. Sadly, the court failed to challenge or protest the loss of its judicial authority.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Mister Sandman]

To be clear, I have no problems with conservatives, we simply have different opinions but I will indeed show despise for trump’s supporters because there is a lack of ethics and a gigantic dose of hypocrisy that is embedded. For me supporting trump and Pence has nothing to do with conservatives but has much more meaningful aspects: discerning truth and understanding ethics in behavioral aspects. I can’t feeling a full world apart from any of you trump supporters....

 

[Mister Sandman]

Dozens of local TV news anchors were forced to recite a speech about 'false news' controlling 'exactly what people think'
Business Insider

or at least unstopped - at Sinclair Broadcast Group, which over the last few days has required dozens of new anchors on its roughly 200 local TV stations to read a dark message about "members of the media [who] use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control 'exactly what people think'." The message goes on to warn, "This is extremely dangerous to a democracy." It also echoes one of President Trump's favorite issues: The idea that the news is always biased. "Some media Read the full story

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

It is often said that Russia is a competitor to western democracy. But that is misleading. The country is run for the benefit of Vladimir Putin and his oligarchic circle. Its regime is a model only to other budding kleptocrats.

Most of the world aspires neither to Russia’s politics nor its living standards. Alas, the west’s chief ideological threat comes from within. Mr Putin’s wealth extraction machine reveals the west’s moral failings. His abettors could not do it without our connivance.

This is especially true of the US and Britain. In contrast to most western democracies, the US and UK permit anonymous ownership. Most democracies legally require the beneficial owner of an asset, such a company or property, to be made known. Not so in the largest English-speaking democracies. Roughly $300bn is laundered in the US every year, according to the US Treasury. Britain and its offshore financial centres take in about $125bn. Most of it goes undetected. The largest foreign share of it is Russian, according to Anders Aslund, a leading specialist on Russia’s economy. Estimates of Mr Putin’s personal wealth range from $50bn to $200bn. Even the lower figure would exceed the gross domestic product of most UN member states. Yet we have taken few steps to disrupt it.

Western expulsion of 130 Russian diplomats certainly looks like action — and is far better than doing nothing. Alone, however, it will do little to disrupt the merry-go-round. Indeed, traditional tit-for-tat expulsions offer an illusion of crisis that suits Mr Putin. It is kabuki theatre Russian-style. Why else would Donald Trump or Theresa May agree to it?

The motivations of the US president and British prime minister deserve scrutiny. The brazenness of the nerve agent poisonings in the UK this month made them impossible to ignore. It was as though Mr Putin left his signature.

...

The US, like Britain, is hospitable to ill-gotten money. But in one key respect America is more deeply compromised.

It is often forgotten that Mr Putin blamed Hillary Clinton for the 2015 leak of the Panama Papers, which exposed the network of shell companies, associates and methods by which he and his friends salted away their money. To give one example, the leaks showed the net worth of Mr Putin’s closest friend, Sergei Roldugin, to be about $130m. Mr Roldugin plays the cello for a living.

Another associate was Mikhail Lesin, Mr Putin’s former senior adviser, and a founder of the television network RT (formerly Russia Today). Mr Lesin fell out with Mr Putin. He was found dead in a Washington DC hotel in 2015. Though his body was severely battered, the US authorities took months to rule the death accidental. Mr Lesin was meant to give evidence to federal investigators the next day.

Is it any surprise Mr Putin has grown so bold? Russia’s attempts to sway the 2016 US election were partly payback for the Panama Papers.

Most of the west has the Russia threat back to front. Russia’s economy is no larger than Italy’s and its military is in disrepair. It is run by an autocrat who dares not release his grip for fear of losing everything. The weapon Mr Putin fears most is transparent accountancy. Tellingly, he stores his wealth in jurisdictions where property rights are secure and the rule of law still holds.

On top of that the west offers a dictator’s bargain: the greed of a system that has lost its moral compass. All that was true before the gift of Mr Trump’s election. How much juicier is it now?

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[Michael Scally MD]