INTERNATIONAL POLLS CONTRADICT TRUMP

IN SPITE OF TRUMP’S ASSERTIONS, INTERNATIONAL POLL SHOWS OTHERWISE.

The president made his remarks about world respect at a campaign rally, which got far more media attention for his criticism of professional football players who kneel during the pregame national anthem.  Trump, Sept. 22: ‘It’s one of the greatest honors of my life to represent the American people on that world stage. And I will tell you, the world is starting to respect the United States of America again.”

We cannot find any surveys that measure “respect,” and the White House could not provide any.  [They couldn’t even find ‘alternative facts’ to try to justify the President.]  However, the Pew Global Attitudes Project since 2002 has been tracking world confidence in U.S. presidents and world opinion of the U.S. in general. Pew reports a sharp decline in both.

In June, the Pew Research Center released the results of its surveys in 37 countries and found that among those nations “a median of just 22% has confidence in Trump to do the right thing when it comes to international affairs.” By contrast, “a median of 64% expressed confidence” in Obama.

The decline in confidence in the U.S. president has been severe in some countries since Trump took office on Jan. 20, 2017, and it “is especially pronounced among some of America’s closest allies in Europe and Asia, as well as neighboring Mexico and Canada,” Pew found. . . .In addition to Germany, which we mentioned earlier [11 percent], only 14 percent of French citizens surveyed said they had “a lot of confidence” or “some confidence” in Trump — a drop of 70 percentage points from the 84 percent that expressed confidence in Obama.

 

Other notable low confidence scores for Trump: Mexico, 5 percent; Canada, 22 percent; the United Kingdom, 22 percent [Our closest ally]; Japan, 24 percent; and Italy, 25 percent.  [Our NATO allies have an extremely low rating of Trump] . . . The Pew survey shows that Trump received “higher marks than Obama in only two countries: Russia and Israel.” The increase was particularly pronounced in Russia, where 53 percent of those surveyed said they had confidence in Trump. Only 11 percent had expressed confidence in Obama.  [Trump has courted Israeli hardliners, incl. P.M. Netanhayu who will eventually incorporate all the West Bank into Israel in spite of U.N. Resoulitions and internatonal law and the rights of Palestinians.  Trump loves ‘strong men’ like Nethanyahu, Putin and the Phillipines’ brutal maniac.] . . .

The lack of confidence in the current U.S. president is also having an impact on the image of the U.S. in general. . . . “In countries where confidence in the U.S. president fell most, America’s overall image has also tended to suffer more,” Pew reports. “In the closing years of the Obama presidency, a median of 64% had a positive view of the U.S. Today, just 49% are favorably inclined toward America. Again, some of the steepest declines in U.S. image are found among long-standing allies.”…The steepest decline was in Mexico, where only 30 percent of those surveyed said that they had a favorable view of the United States — down from 66 percent in 2016.  “Favorability ratings have only increased in Russia and Vietnam,” Pew reported."  [Government controlled media in Russian are apparently send out favorable reports to their people.  This, is consistent with verified reports from Twitter, Facebook and intelligence sources that Russian companies and individuals, sent out messages unfavorable to Clinton and favorable to Trump.  Who knows what’s going on in Vietnam? They see what Trump supporters refuse to acknowledge. A President who has the wrong temperament to be a good President]   SOURCE:  http://www.factcheck.org/2017/09/worldopinionTrump-u-s/

{National leaderships rarely publicly criticize other national leaderships.  However, I would bet the leadership ratings reflect those leaders attitudes.  How does one conduct successful foreign policy in this atmosphere?}

 

 

FREEDOM LOVERS V. ALTRIGHT

LIBERTARIANS AND FREEDOM LOVERS V. THE ALTRIGHT (E.G., BREITBART, STEVE BANNON AND RICHARD SPENCER)

“Some news outlets have claimed that there's a troubling "pipeline" from libertarianism to the most revolting corners of the alt-right movement.

Their evidence is that white supremacist Christopher Cantwell, the star of a Vice documentary about the racist, tiki torch-wielding Charlottesville mob, was once a figure in the libertarian Free State project, and alt-right icon and white nationalist Richard Spencer himself was once a Ron Paul supporter and self-identified as a libertarian.Anyone who claims to care about individual liberty should reject the overt racism in Charlottesville, the broadly defined alt-right and the watered down "alt-lite" variants represented by provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulous and YouTube personalities Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern, as well as the right-wing nationalism pushed by recently fired White House strategist Steve Bannon.

These expressions of right-wing populism are the antithesis of libertarianism, and they collapse under their own logic.

The alt right claims to be the savior of Western Civilization, which apparently is on the brink of collapse because Muslims and Mexicans are invading our society.

Members of the alt-right often point to the sizable influx of immigrants to Europe in the wake of destabilizing Middle Eastern wars. But America isn't Europe, which is one problem with this framing of "the West" as some sort of monolith.

Here's a straighforward look at immigrants as a percentage of the U.S. population:

Yes, there's an upswing since around the end of the Vietnam War, but, really, it's a return to the historical average.

And what was going on in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as immigrants flooded in? The Second Industrial Revolution! Cars! Steel! Electricity! Telecommunication! And America's rise as a global economic superpower.

Want to Make America Great Again? Maybe free-flowing immigration combined with with an open marketplace is the winning formula.

But let's get back to those "Western values."

America's founders based their ideas on Enlightenment values such as individual property rights and free trade, as articulated by philosophers like John Locke and Adam Smith. Whom did they build their ideas in opposition to? Mercantilists, protectionists, or what today we'd call "economic nationalists."

Post Charlottesville, Trump's recently fired chief strategist Steve Bannon told a reporter that white ethno-nationalists are "losers" and "clowns," and then he made a case for closing the U.S. off to the rest of the world.

President Trump is right when he claims that free trade isn't always a two-way street. But as Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman explained, "Any individual country, on average, benefits from free trade."

Don't believe him? Recent polling finds that the majority of economists agree that free trade is a net benefit, and empirical studies show a correlation between fewer trade barriers and higher per capita GDP.

One study compared countries that opened up trade and cut tariffs to ones that didn't, finding that citizens in the freer trade countries saw their incomes increase by an average of 20 percent more than in closed economies. Through international trade, middle-income consumers have seen their purchasing power grow by close to 30 percent, and low-income consumers benefit roughly twice as much.

And Trump's fans can cheer when he pressures companies to locate their manufacturing plants in America, but these success stories unravel with closer scrutiny.

Just like the progressive left, the alt-right wants to empower the federal government, just as long as the right people are in power doling out benefits to their favorite constituencies.

This is why you'll hear alt-right leaders speaking favorably of single-payer healthcare. Before he was ejected from the White House, Steve Bannon attempted to talk Trump into boosting income taxes to fund his nationalist agenda. Some right-wing populists have even advocated using the power of the state to force private tech companies to be run like quasi-governmental public utilities.

The right may be in for the same sort of harsh lesson as the left about what happens when you opportunistically increase the power of a government you're certain to lose hold of one day.

So why does a philosophy so at odds with its core values attract any defectors from the libertarian movement? What's most appealing are the alt-right's opposition to foreign wars, its nominal defense to free speech, and a valid-sounding critique of PC excess. After all, Milo Yiannopoulis made a name for himself as a provocateur on campus.

But the truth is that the alt-right's commitment to free speech runs about an inch deep.

Many have engaged in similar behaviors as the politically correct progressives they decry, forming online mobs and boycotts to encourage private entities to fire commentators like Kathy Griffin and Reza Aslan for political speech deemed offensive. And they've shut down modernized stagings of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar for the offense of depicting the assassination of a Trump-like character. They've cheered a sitting president's threats to sue publications that criticize him and his willingness to shut out journalists whose coverage he doesn't like.

You can fight for free speech and oppose political correctness without subscribing to this flawed ideology. Libertarians have your back on that. As do many traditional conservatives and some liberals, like Jonathan Rauch, the Brookings Insitution scholar who literally wrote the book on the topic in 1995.

The alt-right's "America First" nationalism engenders a skepticism of foreign military intervention that's sorely lacking in Washington, DC. And this is what's most compelling about the alt-right and the political realignment it's forced, with former conservative hawks like Ann Coulter calling out Trump for troop surges in the Middle East.

But even this anti-interventionism is soft ground because, if you delve into the mind of a figure like Steve Bannon, you'll uncover a nightmare vision of a world already engaged in global, civilizational warfare. And the alt-right's focus on nationalism and racial and ethnic identity doesn't bode well for a more peaceful future if the 20th century is any guide.

The alt-right ultimately amounts to a backwards-looking movement, and that's what's most concerning.

It's telling that their beloved slogan, "Make America Great Again" both harkens back to a mythical time that never existed and was ripped off from Ronald Reagan.

The alt-right is about recapturing a nonexistent past through vague but misleading appeals to Western values.

Libertarians are the true defenders of the Enlightenment and present a forward-looking vision that centers on the power of individuals to create their own experiences, make their own choices, and foster a more peaceful world.

If that's not for you, stick with the alt-right or its spin-offs. Just know what you're signing up for.”[Continue to get yours from Fox and Breitbart]
https://reason.com/blog/2017/08/31/what-the-alt-right-gets-wrong-new-at-rea

 

TRUMP V. NFL PLAYERS, DELIBERATELY TURNING UP THE HEAT,NOT THE LIGHT

One of a real president's jobs is to try to pull the country together.  Trump does just the opposite.  He plays to his hard-core alt-right, white supremacist and nationalist, bromancers etc,.by deliberately antagonizing his opponents.  They will strike back and Trump will use it to fire up the crowds at his rallies.  The adoration of his fans seems to be his primary goal.  Trump is building a cult or personality with some of the worst elements of American society, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, etc.  This is from reason.com.  A Libertarian publication.  They are not a bunch of left-wing politically correct college kids or profs.


2) Donald Trump made the conscious choice to revive a near-moribund social controversy for political advantage. Do you know how many players made any kind of protest gesture during the national anthem the weekend before Trump called them SOBs? Less than 10.

The conclusion here is inescapable. The president of the United States, while claiming to be appalled by scattered incidents of alleged anti-patriotism, voiced his displeasure (at a political rally) in such a way that guaranteed those incidents would multiply. He doesn't want this controversy to die down; he wants it to intensify, in a way that pits American vs. American.

Just look at the follow-up reporting. "He knows it'll get people stirred up and talking about it," a senior administration official reportedly told Politico. Another Trump adviser reportedly told CNN's Jim Acosta that the president is "winning the cultural war...just made millionaire sport athletes his new HRC." At a dinner with conservatives last night, according to multiple outlets, Trump (in a paraphrase by Politico's Josh Dawsey) said "that his NFL feud was going well and he wants to keep it going."

There is something fundamentally unseemly about a governmental chief executive deliberately whipping up us-vs.-them antipathy toward an entire bloc of his own constituents. Republicans (and others) were rightly outraged when New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo asserted three years ago that "extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay" have "no place in the state of New York." Hillary Clinton was rightly excoriated for calling a whole chunk of Trump supporters an irredeemable "basket of deplorables." Even Barack Obama's bitter-clinger comments from 2008, which were made in a semi-private setting and with the patina of trying to understand a certain population, reeked of a kind of collectivist condescension that critics had cause to reject.

Trump's politics of Othering is, has been, and will always be central to his political project, from his birther freelancing to his Mexico-is-sending-us-rapists campaign kickoff to his assertion that District Judge Gonzalo Curiel's Mexican heritage was "an inherent conflict of interest" to his travel ban to his pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and so on. His campaign themes were patterned after the culture-war wedge-issuing of Richard Nixon. "The silent majority is back, and we're going to take our country back," the candidate declared in July 2015. His dark acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention was a virtual Nixonpalooza: "I have a message to every last person threatening the peace on our streets and the safety of our police," he thundered. "When I take the oath of office next year, I will restore law and order to our country. Believe me. Believe me....I am the law and order candidate."

The president's populist advisors welcome racially tinged culture war as advantageous political strategy. "I want them to talk about racism every day," Steve Bannon told The American Prospect just before leaving the White House. "If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats."

The language Trump used in Alabama was telling. In a speech where he mused "Isn't it a little weird when a guy who lives on 5th Avenue in the most beautiful apartment you've ever seen comes to Alabama and Alabama loves that guy?" and said that if he'd lost the election he might have moved "to Alabama or Kentucky," the president railed against the anthem protesters' "total disrespect of our heritage, a total disrespect of everything that we stand for" and diagnosed the NFL's problems in this way: "But do you know what's hurting the game more than that? When people like yourselves turn on television and you see those people taking the knee when they're playing our great national anthem."

http://reason.com/blog/2017/09/26/9-lessons-from-the-trumpnfl-anthem-wars?utm_medium=email

 

TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY IN HISTORY

Under escort from the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, nine black students enter all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Three weeks earlier, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus had surrounded the school with National Guard troops to prevent its federal court-ordered racial integration. After a tense standoff, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent 1,000 army paratroopers to Little Rock to enforce the court order.

On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that racial segregation in educational facilities was unconstitutional. Five days later, the Little Rock School Board issued a statement saying it would comply with the decision when the Supreme Court outlined the method and time frame in which desegregation should be implemented.

Arkansas was at the time among the more progressive Southern states in regard to racial issues. The University of Arkansas School of Law was integrated in 1949, and the Little Rock Public Library in 1951. Even before the Supreme Court ordered integration to proceed “with all deliberate speed,” the Little Rock School Board in 1955 unanimously adopted a plan of integration to begin in 1957 at the high school level. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) filed suit, arguing the plan was too gradual, but a federal judge dismissed the suit, saying that the school board was acting in “utmost good faith.” Meanwhile, Little Rock’s public buses were desegregated. By 1957, seven out of Arkansas’ eight state universities were integrated.

In the spring of 1957, there were 517 black students who lived in the Central High School district. Eighty expressed an interest in attending Central in the fall, and they were interviewed by the Little Rock School Board, which narrowed down the number of candidates to 17. Eight of those students later decided to remain at all-black Horace Mann High School, leaving the “Little Rock Nine” to forge their way into Little Rock’s premier high school.

In August 1957, the newly formed Mother’s League of Central High School won a temporary injunction from the county chancellor to block integration of the school, charging that it “could lead to violence.” Federal District Judge Ronald Davies nullified the injunction on August 30. On September 2, Governor Orval Faubus—a staunch segregationist—called out the Arkansas National Guard to surround Central High School and prevent integration, ostensibly to prevent the bloodshed he claimed desegregation would cause. The next day, Judge Davies ordered integrated classes to begin on September 4.

That morning, 100 armed National Guard troops encircled Central High School. A mob of 400 white civilians gathered and turned ugly when the black students began to arrive, shouting racial epithets and threatening the teenagers with violence. The National Guard troops refused to let the black students pass and used their clubs to control the crowd. One of the nine, 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, was surrounded by the mob, which threatened to lynch her. She was finally led to safety by a sympathetic white woman.

Little Rock Mayor Woodrow Mann condemned Faubus’ decision to call out the National Guard, but the governor defended his action, reiterating that he did so to prevent violence. The governor also stated that integration would occur in Little Rock when and if a majority of people chose to support it. Faubus’ defiance of Judge Davies’ court order was the first major test of Brown v. Board of Education and the biggest challenge of the federal government’s authority over the states since the Reconstruction Era.

The standoff continued, and on September 20 Judge Davies ruled that Faubus had used the troops to prevent integration, not to preserve law and order as he claimed. Faubus had no choice but to withdraw the National Guard troops. Authority over the explosive situation was put in the hands of the Little Rock Police Department.

On September 23, as a mob of 1,000 whites milled around outside Central High School, the nine black students managed to gain access to a side door. However, the mob became unruly when it learned the black students were inside, and the police evacuated them out of fear for their safety. That evening, President Eisenhower issued a special proclamation calling for opponents of the federal court order to “cease and desist.” On September 24, Little Rock’s mayor sent a telegram to the president asking him to send troops to maintain order and complete the integration process. Eisenhower immediately federalized the Arkansas National Guard and approved the deployment of U.S. troops to Little Rock. That evening, from the White House, the president delivered a nationally televised address in which he explained that he had taken the action to defend the rule of law and prevent “mob rule” and “anarchy.” On September 25, the Little Rock Nine entered the school under heavily armed guard.

Troops remained at Central High School throughout the school year, but still the black students were subjected to verbal and physical assaults from a faction of white students. Melba Patillo, one of the nine, had acid thrown in her eyes, and Elizabeth Eckford was pushed down a flight of stairs. The three male students in the group were subjected to more conventional beatings. Minnijean Brown was suspended after dumping a bowl of chili over the head of a taunting white student. She was later suspended for the rest of the year after continuing to fight back. The other eight students consistently turned the other cheek. On May 27, 1958, Ernest Green, the only senior in the group, became the first black to graduate from Central High School.

Governor Faubus continued to fight the school board’s integration plan, and in September 1958 he ordered Little Rock’s three high schools closed rather than permit integration. Many Little Rock students lost a year of education as the legal fight over desegregation continued. In 1959, a federal court struck down Faubus’ school-closing law, and in August 1959 Little Rock’s white high schools opened a month early with black students in attendance. All grades in Little Rock public schools were finally integrated in 1972.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/central-high-school-integrated

 

VIOLENCE IF TRUMP IMPEACHED?

There is political violence by both the left and right in this country.  Both sides often have some armed men in military gear appearing.  However, this seems to be much more frequent among right-wing groups such as Texas Freedom Force.

 … “speculation is rife not just regarding whether the president will be impeached but what would happen in an increasingly divided United States if he were removed from office.

Trump’s longtime friend and former adviser Roger Stone, who is embroiled in investigations into whether Russia colluded with the Trump campaign, said last month that impeaching the president would lead to a “spasm of violence in this country, an insurrection, like you’ve never seen.”  [If Trump is out, who will pardon Stone?].  A few days later, televangelist Jim Bakker went a step further, saying outright that there would be “civil war in the United States of America.”  [You remember Jim Bakker, convicted of multiple felonies, ex-federal prison preacher.  He now has another television evangelism show.  His delusional cult-of personality fan base can’t let go.  Go figure].

Given the violence that's sprung up between supporters and opponents of Trump during his campaign and since he entered office, such talk, while hyperbolic, does not seem entirely baseless.”

Libertarians and others who value America’s peaceful democracy need to speak out against these speakers. Does the frequent appearance of armed right-wingers in public suggest they are trying to intimidate opponents and send a quiet message that ‘if you mess with Trump there will be violence”?  Do they need these weapons and military dress and gear to defend themselves in public places? I have yet to hear of a right-wing protestor killed or even seriously injured.

http://www.newsweek.com/trump-impeachment-civil-war-president-666177?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=DailyNews&spMailingID=2279512&spUserID=NTAwMjU0NjIxODMS1&spJobID=870707839&spReportId=ODcwNzA3ODM5S0”

 

 

 

 

 

"Freedom lovers" who voted for Trump--had enough?

'FROM REASON.COM   “It's almost nine months into Donald Trump's presidency and here's a question for the old "Libertarians for Trump" crowd: How much more winning can you take?

There was a small but vocal band of limited-government folks who vocally supported the billionaire real estate mogul on the grounds that he couldn't possibly be as bad as Hillary Clinton or even most of the other Republican candidates, especially when it came to foreign policy.

Leading the pack was economist Walter Block, who beat me in a competitive debate in New York City right before the election. Block's argument was that "the perfect is the enemy of the good" and "the Donald is the most congruent with [the libertarian] perspective" especially on foreign policy.

Trump has turned out to be anything but an isolationist. He promised to bring fire and fury to North Korea, "the likes of which this world has never seen before."


He bombed Syria on the same humanitarian grounds he explicitly denounced during his campaign. He escalated war efforts in Yeman and Iraq, And more recently, announced plans to "win" in Afghanistan. His secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, declared that while the United States might not walk away with a "battlefield" victory in the graveyard of empires, neither will the Taliban. That's not inspirational, it's stupid.

Apart from his foreign policy follies, this anti-free-trader and nativist has turned out to be even less libertarian than advertised during the campaign. He's continued giving mealy-mouthed support to white supremacists and pardoned Joe Arpaio, "America's toughest sheriff," who was found in contempt of court after he continued to illegally racially profile and detain Latino suspects. And his attorney general is walking back a decade of incremental progress on criminal justice reform.

There's no question that the Trump administration is doing some good things, such as deregulatory moves related to the FCC, the FDA, and the EPA. His Education department is supporting school choice to the extent that the federal government can do so.

His deregulatory push is all to the good, but it's overwhelmed by Trump's other policies.

There's also no question that at this point Trump is doing virtually everything else he can do to alienate libertarians who believe in shrinking the size, scope, and spending of government.

And the excuse that Hillary Clinton would have been worse is getting older than Bernie Sanders.

The perfect is the enemy of the good, but what Donald Trump has shown us so far just isn't good enough.”

Produced by Todd Krainin. Written by Nick Gillespie. Cameras by Jim Epstein. Production assistance by Andrew Heaton.

 http://reason.com/reasontv/2017/09/06/libertarians-trump-winning?utm_medium=email

 

What is the consensus of real, modern historians about the cause of the civil war?

Opinions are like noses, everyone has one.  Informed opinions based on real research by lots of real historians, i.e., an examination of real facts, should be the basis of opinions.

What Twenty-First-Century Historians Have Said about the Causes of Disunion: A Civil War Sesquicentennial Review of the Recent Literature

Michael E. Woods

Michael E. Woods

Michael E. Woods received his Ph.D. in May 2012 from the University of South Carolina, where he is now a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History.

Journal of American History, Volume 99, Issue 2, 1 September 2012, Pages 415–439, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jas272

Published:

01 September 2012

Professional historians can be an argumentative lot, but by the dawn of the twenty-first century, a broad consensus regarding Civil War causation clearly reigned. Few mainstream scholars would deny that Abraham Lincoln got it right in his second inaugural address—that slavery was “somehow” the cause of the war. Public statements by preeminent historians reaffirmed that slavery's centrality had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Writing for the popular rCivil War magazine North and South in November 2000, James M. McPherson pointed out that during the war, “few people in either North or South would have dissented” from Lincoln's slavery-oriented account of the war's origins. In ten remarkably efficient pages, McPherson dismantled arguments that the war was fought over tariffs, states' rights, or the abstract principle of secession. That same year, Charles Joyner penned a report on Civil War causation for release at a Columbia, South Carolina, press conference at the peak of the Palmetto State's Confederate flag debate. Endorsed by dozens of scholars and later published in Callaloo, it concluded that the “historical record … clearly shows that the cause for which the South seceded and fought a devastating war was slavery.”¹