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Marco Rubio calling [Donald] Trump`s ban all Muslims proposal, quote, "offensive and outlandish," it`s the same Rubio who was one upping Trump`s promise to shut down mosques. Mr. Rubio was saying he would shut down not just mosques but any place where Muslims might be radicalized - cafes, diners, any place.
Here in the United States, when the term "fascist" gets used, it`s either talking about other countries, ancient history or it`s used as a sort of insult, right, a sort of generic right wing epithet that people use to criticize politicians who are at most on the edge of mainstream American political thought.
John McCain has refused to ever criticize Sarah Palin, to ever admit there was anything wrong about her choice. He has been capital "L" loyal to her in such an unwavering way, even has his entire party has turned against this is decision that he made for obvious reasons. He has been unflinchingly loyal to her.
This [British] dossier is still considered to be mostly uncorroborated but it`s overall allegation is that the Trump folks knew, the [Donald] Trump folks knew about the Russian campaign to interfere in our election, they supported it, they cooperated with it, and in exchange, they made promises to the Russians.
October 7th [2016], indeed, WikiLeaks released its whole new dump. A whole new bunch of e-mails and documents, this time from [Hillary] Clinton campaign chief John Podesta, e-mails that U.S. intelligence say were hacked by Russia. Apparently, again, they were waiting for the best possible timing on the release.
The Sarah Palin choice both its timing and the fact that it was her, it was really an audacious strategic move by the McCain campaign to try to change the trajectory of the 2008 presidential race and the initial launch was very successful. She didn`t withstand the scrutiny very well though and the close questioning.
I feel that gay people not being able to get married for generations, forever, meant that we came up with alternative ways of recognizing relationships. And I worry that if everybody has access to the same institutions that we lose the creativity of subcultures having to make it on their own. And I like gay culture.
If everybody can author their own story, if media is democratizing because everybody can make a really good-looking website... that's the way we learn now instead of in books. It means that more people get to tell their own story in their own terms rather than having to go through publishers and editors and executives.
The British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley`s group, the black shirts, they were banned in Britain in 1940. And Max Mosley`s dad, Sir Oswald Mosley, ended up spending three years in World War II, 1940 to 1943, interned in the U.K. as basically an enemy of the state. He spent that time in prison, as did Max Mosley`s mother.
Famously in 1936, Oswald Mosley led a march of his British black shirts through a mostly Jewish neighborhood, in the east end of London. What resulted was what they called the "Battle of Cable Street", where Oswald Mosley and his fascists basically got the snot beaten out of them when East London rose up against them and beat them up.
We got the first WikiLeaks publication of documents hacked and stolen by Russian government sources from the DNC, from the Democratic Party, and they started publishing those stolen documents from the DNC right before the Democrats started their convention.Good political timing if you`re trying to help [Donald] Trump and hurt the Democrats.
Who knows what exactly changed Tom Cotton`s mind. I mean, maybe it was that woman who said her husband was dying and only alive thanks to the Affordable Care Act. Maybe it was the young woman on your right side of your screen who said that without the treatment she could only receive through the Affordable Care Act she herself would be dead.
After [Dan Fried] was initially hired into the Foreign Service in 1977, five subsequent presidents of both parties thought it would be a good idea to keep him on. That his deep understanding, his knowledge of all the players and so many of the secrets it would make him an indispensable asset, particularly when it comes to dealing with Russia.
Sir Oswald Mosley thought his job is not just keep Britain from going to war with his beloved Germany, he saw it as his job to organize a complementary fascist movement inside the U.K. So, he formed this organization as the British Union of Fascists in `32. In 1936, they changed their name to the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists
Part of what the [British] dossier says is this, quote, "The operation", meaning the effort to influence our election, "that has been conducted with the full knowledge and support of [Donald] Trump and senior members of his campaign team. In return, in return, the Trump team has agreed to sideline Russian intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue."
It is about something personal and specific, because when the John McCain campaign in 2008 decided to elevate Sarah Palin from total obscurity to make her his vice presidential running mate, they knew they were making a big strategic gamble.They knew they were taking a big risk and it turned out in the end to be a bad choice. It hurt John McCain`s chances.
When Vladimir Putin runs up against American power and American criticism and American leadership that reminds him of what Russia isn`t, when he runs up against people who he worries are funding his dissidents or supporting protests against him, when he runs up against criticism of the way he runs his own country, what he`s running up against is the State Department.
There had been a proposed plank for the platform that said the Republican Party believed the United States should support Ukraine in any way that we could up to and including providing them weapons, so they could fight off Russian incursions into Ukraine.That was the proposed plank in the Republican Party platform. The [Donald] Trump folks didn`t care about anything else.
What's insulting to the American people, the Senate, to this whole process is that the Republicans, with all other nominees, have said Democrats are being obstructionist for wanting to see documents, for wanting to see a paper trail, for wanting to get questions answered in the judiciary committee hearings, and now all of a sudden, the Republicans want those things for this.
The day after the Republican convention ended, there was another political bomb that was dropped on the U.S. presidential election [2016] from Russia. The day after the Republican convention ended, right before the Democratic Convention began we got what U.S. intelligence agencies believed to be the next big Russian incursion into our election. We got the first WikiLeaks dump.
CNN recently ran a sort of roundup article on why some conservatives say that Trump talk is fascist. The roundup included this tweet from Iowa Republican radio host, very influential guy in Iowa Republican caucuses, Steve Deace. Quote, "If [Barack] Obama proposed the same religion registry as Trump, every conservative in the country would call it what it is - creeping fascism."
Senator [Tom] Cotton has campaigned on wanting to kill Obamacare. He voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act back in January, but he now says, despite these marathon all-night sessions going on in the House, Republicans need to do better, they need to start over, they need to come up with something that the Senate says will actually reduce prices for insurance and keep it affordable.
The issues which mattered to me as an activist, mainly things like prison reform and AIDS, have less of a chance of getting covered on my show than things I don't have a personal interest in. It's because I don't trust my antenna about being a good storyteller on those subjects, because I know a lot and therefore lose touch with what the average person might find interesting about them.
What I`m starting to think of as the mythical beast of the Republican establishment, which is the sort of inchoate idea that we keep talking about what they`re going to do and it never seems to have much impact or be manifest in very visible ways, obviously, it is one thing for Donald Trump to have taken a shot like he did early in his campaign at John McCain, calling him not a war hero.
With the Republican Party`s presidential front-runner proposing that all Muslims should be banned from entering the United States, that perhaps there ought to be a national registry of Muslims, that we ought to looking into Muslims having to carry government ID cards that state their religion, now, the word fascist is being used to describe this ascending and leading Republican politician.
The artificial primacy of defense among our national priorities is a constant unearned windfall for some, but it's privation for the rest of America; it steals from what we could be and can do. In Econ 101, they teach that the big-picture fight over national priorities is guns versus butter. Now it's butter versus margarine—guns get a pass. Overall, we're weaker for it, and at enormous cost.
Two committees in the house were up all night long trying to get a version of the repeal of the Affordable Care Act passed. House Republicans are just fighting tooth and nail to pass it in the House, to try to get it into the Senate, to try to make it then so that the Senate will get on board. But you know who one of the Republican senators is who`s not on board with this anymore? Senator Tom Cotton.
New York congressmen have recently been plagued by a string of embarrassing scandals. Shirtless craigslist hunk Chris Lee, nonconsensual staff tickle monster, Eric Massa, naked texter Anthony Weiner, so this guy is now running to join those dubious ranks and win the Michael Grimm seat. And he`s campaigning on the promise that he`s too old to be too gross. And I`m not paraphrasing the campaign pledge.
There are some political issues where mainstream press attention only hurts. We think about activism as being this generic model of consciousness-raising, then hopefully media attention, attraction of new people to your cause, building public support for your cause, then decision-makers reacting to that change in public opinion. That's true for some types of activism, but it is not true for all of them.
Senator John McCain is unlike anybody else in not - not just in the Senate but in American politics. He`s unlike anybody else in American life. In his public life and in his heroics in war. He`s a singular figure in American life and American history. I think for everybody who has ever had a political difference with him that just instantly evaporates in the face of wanting the best for him because of cancer.
Russia and [Vladimir] Putin`s antipathy toward Hillary Clinton from her time as secretary of state, Russia`s antipathy and loathing and fear of the U.S. State Department in general, those two - those things that we know about Russia they put a worrying cast over how successfully the new administration here has hollowed out and emptied out the U.S. State Department in just the few weeks since then been in charge.
David Petraeus, the best known American general of his generation. After commanding the American war effort in both Iraq and Afghanistan, he was serving as CIA director when he stepped down suddenly following revelations that he`d had an extramarital affair. That same investigation that turned up evidence of the affair also eventually turned up evidence that General. Petraeus had passed classified information to his mistress.
News about the Russia connections to the [Donald Trump] administration and what we are continuing to learn about those connections. What`s getting to be, I think, particularly unsettling is that simultaneously we are right now what`s going on, I think, is that we are number one nailing down more direct connections between the Trump campaign and the Russian government at the time the Russian government was influencing our election.
It is hard to stay patient about policy matters where everybody agrees about what needs to be done and then it just doesn't happen, like reforming the immigration system and getting rid of family immigration jails and closing Guantanamo and criminal-justice reform. All these issues, there is basically consensus. There's no rational objections whatsoever, but it can't happen because of other stupid steps we have to take in politics.
we ought to realize by now (see Korea, see Vietnam, see Afghanistan, see Iraq, see Iran) that deploying the US military, or dealing billions of dollars a year of arms to our ally of the moment that can serve as a regional rival to our enemy of the moment, is not always the best way to make threats go away. Our military and weapons prowess is a fantastic and perfectly weighted hammer, but that doesn't make every international problem a nail.
Gay people exist. There's nothing we can do in public policy that makes more of us exist, or less of us exist. And you guys have been arguing for a generation that public policy ought to essentially demean gay people as a way of expressing disapproval of the fact that we exist, but you don't make any less of us exist. You just are arguing in favor of more discrimination, and more discrimination doesn't make straight people's lives any better.
My idea of what was going on in politics was driven by activism. I came out when I was 17, and right away I started working in the AIDS activist movement. For me, politics was about getting drugs approved and getting prisoners access to the same kind of drugs that you could get on the outside. It was about getting needle exchanges approved. That was politics. These were policy problems that were killing people, and we were trying to get them changed.
after a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumbrances to war ... of dropping Congress from the equation altogether, of super-empowering the presidency with total war-making power and with secret new war-making resources that answer to no one but him, of insulating the public from not only the cost of war but sometimes even the knowledge that it's happened - war making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state. It never stops.
One of the manifestations of depression for me is that I lose my will. And I thereby lose my ability to focus. I don't think I'll ever have the day-to-day consistency in my performance that something like This American Life has. If I'm not depressed and I'm on and I can focus and I can think through something hard and without interruption and without existential emptiness that comes from depression, that gives me - not mania. But I exalt. I exalt in not being depressed.
The idea of the Overton Window is that there`s a fairly narrow window of proposals in any particular policy area that people will take seriously that wouldn`t get you written off as a kook. The way to move or expand that window is to advocate super extreme positions which change the realm of what`s politically possible because after something super nuts has been . floated, thereafter, slightly less nuts positions will start to look acceptable and moderate by comparison.
Oswald Mosley`s movement, it was a big movement. It was obviously anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, it was populist. Mosley wanted to replace the parliamentary system of government in Britain with a government that was based on business interests, that was based on the idea that business interests were the real interests of that country and business interests. and reorganizing the government to serve business interests, that would be a way to get stuff done faster and more efficiently.
In that first national election after 9/11 in France, Jean-Marine Le Pen did not win the presidency, but he did get to the final round. He was in the general election. Now, this week, in the first national elections in France after what many people have been calling the French 9/11, the attacks in Paris three weeks ago, this time it`s Jean-Marie Le Pen`s daughter, Marine Le Pen and the National Front, which is still a far right pseudo- fascistic party, they came in first place in France.
If you're working on better conditions for prisoners, if you make that a popular issue and you invite mainstream media to weigh in on that subject, you're going to end up with a much more regressive public-policy environment than if you approach it in a quieter way. It's not because the public is stupid, it's just that people with only a cursory interest in something are going to have a knee-jerk reaction to it. That's impossible to explain in a cable-news media... it doesn't make sense.
I feel like I have more in common with conservative people who have activist causes in their hearts and who are interested in electoral politics than I do with somebody who doesn't care, doesn't have any political interests, doesn't know what policy is, and doesn't think any of it matters to them. If you care, we're actually going to have a basis of conversation. We might supplementally get along very well, and that might be complicated and fun in a way that is more constructive than you'd expect.
Six months after 9/11, Jean-Marie Le Pen was almost elected president of France. There were a number of leaders and a number of parties running in the French national elections that year in the spring of 2002. But it ended up being not just a shock across France, and not just a shock across Europe. But it ended up being almost a worldwide shock when in the spring of 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen came in second in those national elections. That put him in a two-man runoff for the presidency of France, spring of 2002.
Ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. That was the whole idea, right? That‘s why we went. I am reluctant to let that fact disappear down the memory hole, because if — as the war ends, or at least starts to end — if, at this time, the history of the war is written as us going there to topple the regime of a bad man when that frankly isn‘t why were told that we were going there — Aren‘t we still at risk of making this horrific mistake again? And, aren‘t we letting the people who foisted the WMD idea on us, not many years ago, aren‘t we sort of letting them get away with it?
I definitely feel like it took me a while to learn the baseline things you have to do if you want people to hear you. That's why I've had the same haircut for the entire time that I've been on television and that's why I wear literally the same jacket every day. I keep all the clothes I wear on TV in my office on a little hanging rack. My girlfriend calls it all the colors of the German rainbow. Grays, blacks, a slightly greenish gray for the days that I'm feeling particularly festive. I'm not trying to accomplish anything in the way I look other than to be boring enough for people to hear me.