Without Truth there is no Trust.

Trust is a transaction between leaders and those they lead. Throughout our history, the deeply held beliefs of various Presidents have taken the nation into war, delayed the pursuit of peace, alienated allies, appeased enemies. At other times, presidential beliefs have conquered the continent, freed the slaves, taken us to the moon because the President firmly believed we could get there. As citizens, it is vital that we be able to believe our President; it is also vital that we know what he believes, and why. This President has made both a severe challenge.
Nancy Gibbs, EDITOR This appears in the April 03, 2017 issue of TIME.


Without truth there is no trust.

Speaking on national television the night before that 1970 election, Senator Ed Muskie of Maine addressed the real choice confronting the voters: "There are only two kinds of politics. They're not radical and reactionary or conservative and liberal or even Democratic and Republican. There are only the politics of fear and the politics of trust. One says you are encircled by monstrous dangers. Give us power over your freedom so we may protect you. The other says the world is a baffling and hazardous place, but it can be shaped to the will of men. "Cast your vote," he concluded, "for trust in the ancient traditions of this home for freedom."

The Man Who Wants to Unmake the West

 

Europeans are starting to worry that Steve Bannon has the EU in his cross hairs. Here's how the White House could genuinely help pull it apart. To Bannon, a strengthened EU is nothing less than a risk to civilization: a body that dilutes national identity and whose border policies allow Islam to invade the West, one refugee at a time.

Bannon was an executive at Breitbart News, an activist-editor-gadfly known mostly on the far right, and the “Brexit” campaign was something of a pet project. He hitched onto the Tea Party movement early in Barack Obama’s presidency and noticed a similar right-populist wave rising across the Atlantic, where fed-up rural, white Britons were anxious about immigration and resentful of EU bureaucrats. The cause touched on some of Bannon’s deepest beliefs, including nationalism, Judeo-Christian/Catholic nationalist identity and the evils of Big Government.

Bannon’s vision, as laid out in public remarks and private conversations, opposes international organizations in favor of empowering nation-states.

Bannon’s public remarks, and accounts from people who have spoken with him, make clear he believes Brexit and Trump’s election are part of something bigger, a global political revolt that could restore what he calls lost “sovereignty” on the continent.

Bannon told an audience of religious conservative activists at the Vatican in 2014. “That is really the building blocks that built Western Europe and the United States, and I think it’s what can see us forward.”

To Bannon, however, a strengthened EU is nothing less than a risk to civilization: a body that dilutes national identity and whose border policies allow Islam to invade the West, one refugee at a time. Bannon, who did not respond to interview requests, has repeatedly made clear his views about Europe. Most revealing is the widely read transcript of his Vatican talk, in which Bannon declared that “the world, and particularly the Judeo-Christian West, is in a crisis." Europe’s citizens, he said, are restless for “sovereignty for their country, they want to see nationalism.” And, Bannon added: “They don’t believe in this kind of pan-European Union."

Bannon has approvingly cited Maurras’ distinction between the “legal country,” led by elected officials, and the “real country” of ordinary people, as a frame for the populist revolt underway.

Bannon “made it clear he had lost faith in Europe as secularism and arriving Muslim immigrants had eroded traditional Christian values as the founding pillar of our civilization,” Rose wrote. “Losing the Christian faith, in his view, has weakened Europe—it’s neither willing nor able to confront Islam’s rising power and some European Muslims’ insistence on privileged treatment of their religion."

Bannon’s solution? Rebuilding the firm borders between European states—to keep the Muslim immigrants out, and to keep in the religious and national identity. “I have admired nationalist movements throughout the world,” Bannon told the Wall Street Journal shortly after the U.S. election. “I have said repeatedly, strong nations make great neighbors."

 

 

 

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/trump-steve-bannon-destroy-eu-european-union-214889

 

 

 

But do they? Many a European leader, not to mention historian, disagrees. Runaway nationalism led to, among many other horribles, Franz Ferdinand’s assassination and World War I, and gave us Hitler, Mussolini and Milosevic. Those things, in turn, drew America’s military across the Atlantic.

 

“I don’t get it. Americans have spent a lot of their history either fighting against Europeans or fighting on behalf of Europeans against other Europeans,” says Charles Kupchan, who served until January as the top official for European affairs at the Obama White House. “Anybody who wants to bring Europe down risks putting us back in the 19th century or the early 20th century.”

 

European officials note that this happens to be a goal of Russia’s president, Putin, who is busily undermining the post-Cold War internationalist order in favor of a nationalistic, geography-based power politics. A U.S. effort to dismantle the EU, one Western European government official says with distaste, “would put America on the same side as Putin.”

 

The thought is rattling Europe at the highest levels. In January, Donald Tusk, president of the EU’s European Council—who calls himself “an incurably pro-American European who is fanatically devoted to trans-Atlantic cooperation”—sent a letter to member states characterizing the Trump administration as a menace to the Union, alongside the likes of Russia and radical Islam. “[W]ith the new administration seeming to put into question the last 70 years of American foreign policy,” Tusk wrote, America now had to be considered not a stalwart friend of the EU but a “threat.”

 

Wolfgang Ischinger, former German ambassador to the United States, put it in starker terms in remarks at a February security conference in Munich attended by top Trump officials. “Is President Trump going to continue a tradition of half a century of being supportive of the project of European integration, or is he going to continue to advocate EU member countries to follow the Brexit example?” Ischinger asked. “If he did that, it would amount to a kind of nonmilitary declaration of war. It would mean conflict between Europe and the United States. Is that what the U.S. wants?

 

 

 

 

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is a favorite target of Breitbart, almost always in the context of her “open door” migrant policy. The news site, formerly run by Bannon, is working toward opening a bureau in Berlin in time for the country’s general election later this year, in which Merkel will seek a fourth term.

 

Not long ago, Breitbart cautiously praised Emmanuel Macron, a center-of-left French presidential candidate running as an independent, as a “French Tony Blair” willing to consider dismantling an unreformed European Union. But the site has since changed its tone, going all in for Marine Le Pen, while deriding the “Pro-EU Macron,” in articles such as, “France Blames Russia For Poor Performance of Left-Wing Presidential Candidate.”

 

In a January letter to EU member states, Donald Tusk, the European Council president, lamented the rise of “national egoism” within Europe, taking a shot at the kinds of Euroskeptic movements Bannon has encouraged. Still, after a February meeting with Mike Pence, Tusk said the U.S. vice president had committed America’s “unequivocal support for the idea of a united Europe.”

 

 

 

Elections to watch:

Netherlands- March- Dutch election results: Europe's far-right populists fail first test

France - Spring

Germany - September

Italy - Summer

 

and Mexico - Summer 2018

Deep States and Demagogues

It really is an upside down world when I am posting a Bret Stephens column. As a political junkie, the world has titled off its axis a little too much for comfort. It is indeed, a lopsided world for many of us.

But as the Turkish example reminds us, whatever else exists in Washington, it isn’t a deep state. When Mr. Trump demanded the resignations of 46 U.S. attorneys, they all left, except for Manhattan’s Preet Bharara, who asked for a firing and got it. The CIA is run by a Trump appointee, and the only generals in charge of federal departments are the ones the president nominated to their positions. The GOP establishment has rolled over for the new president. As for the “corporatist, globalist media” that Steve Bannon rails against, it also includes Fox News. This is paranoid time. Specifically, we are again in territory best identified by Richard Hofstadter in “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” The paranoid style can be evidence of irrationalism bordering on mental illness. It can also be a form of a cunning instrumentalism to destroy your political opponents by stoking hysterical fears in your supporters. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a master of the latter method. What about Mr. Trump? Conservatives used to understand the ideological provenance of words and the consequences that flow from treating political differences as mortal threats to the state. Too bad too many intelligent conservatives gave up worrying about the use of language sometime last year. They will come to regret what they’ve allowed, perhaps only when they, too, become its victims. ~Conservative Opinion Writer Bret Stephens

https://www.wsj.com/articles/deep-states-and-demagogues-1489446006

Republicans are defining lunacy down

Children sitting in Professor Trump’s history class would learn that Obama was America’s first Muslim president; that his co-religionists celebrated in the streets following the 9/11 attacks; that their vaccination schedule is the dangerous scam of greedy doctors; that Ted Cruz’s father might have been involved in the death of John F. Kennedy; that Hillary Clinton might have been involved in the death of Vince Foster; that unnamed liberals might have been involved in the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. More recently, Trump has claimed — based, so far, on nothing — that Obama ordered the bugging of Trump Tower. And Trump’s allies, with the White House’s blessing, have alleged the existence of a “deep state,” conducting what talk radio host Mark Levin calls a “silent coup.” Trump does not support things because they are true; they are true because he supports them. And he expects everyone who works for him to publicly and vocally embrace his version of reality. Day by day, Republicans are lowering their standards of sanity to defend an administration seized by conspiracy thinking. If they do not stand up to this trend, they will be defining lunacy down. ~Conservative writer Michael Gerson
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/republicans-are-defining-lunacy-down/2017/03/13/7f505ba4-0821-11e7-b77c-0047d15a24e0_story.html?utm_term=.93e7412f7449

States are writing bills to require presidential candidates to release tax returns

States are writing bills to require presidential candidates to release tax returns: They're responding to President-elect Donald Trump's decision to not release his tax returns during the presidential campaign, breaking decades of precedent.

Immigration Reform under the GOP?

http://itep.org/itep_reports/2017/03/undocumented-immigrants-state-local-tax-contributions-2.php

http://itep.org/itep_reports/2017/03/undocumented-immigrants-state-local-tax-contributions-2.php