David Rowe is still the best cartoonist (Best Newspaper Illustrator see top image) in the world... Congratulations, David. 

No Is Not Enough looks at how the election of Trump has turbocharged those issues for the progressive movement in the US and elsewhere.

Klein's core thesis is that Trump's elevation to the apex of political power in the West is not an aberration but "the logical conclusion of the worst trends of the past half century", including rising inequality.

As a branding exercise, she writes, it's a triumph: the presidency is the "crowning extension of the Trump brand". Trump's wife Melania and children are "spin-off brands".

"After decades of seeing the public sphere privatised in bits and pieces, Trump and his appointees have now seized control of the government itself. The takeover is complete," she argues.

Klein, who backed Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential nomination contest, takes plenty of swipes against Clinton in her new volume.

read more:

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/donald-trump-ascen...

In the wake of the Brexit vote (and, to a lesser extent, the Dutch rejection of Ukraine-EU links) no word was dirtier to the MSM than “referendum”. The conclusion seeming to be that resorting to plebiscitary democracy was bad for the country, and bad for democracy itself.

David Mitchell wrote that parliament was meant to make hard decisions for us. Natalie Nougayrède argued that “the mob” undermined our “elite institutions”. The New York times featured an article headlined:

Why Referendums (sic) Aren’t as Democratic as They Seem

The article argues that voters will vote to undermine their own best interests, and so they shouldn’t be allowed to. Also it disempowers voters because:

Voters must make their decisions with relatively little information, forcing them to rely on political messaging — which puts power in the hands of political elites rather than those of voters. 

This fallacy was repeated over and over and over and over and over again.

The general message was – Referenda are bad. They cheapen our democracy. Voting can go wrong. People aren’t informed enough. When you take a plebiscite, all you get is the opinion of plebs. Ban them completely.

Bloomberg even had a Justin Fox article headlined:

Voters Are Making a Mess of Democracy

That was a year ago, and things have only got worse since then. Now not only direct democracy, but all kinds of democracy, are being attacked.

read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2017/06/11/after-two-years-of-wrong-votes-the-m...

 

From Ann Coulter (at Breitbart)...

The explosion of violence against conservatives across the country is being intentionally ginned up by Democrats, reporters, TV hosts, late-night comedians and celebrities, who compete with one another to come up with the most vile epithets for Trump and his supporters.

They go right up to the line, trying not to cross it, by, for example, vamping with a realistic photo of a decapitated Trump or calling the president a “piece of s—” while hosting a show on CNN.

The media are orchestrating a bloodless coup, but they’re perfectly content to have their low-IQ shock troops pursue a bloody coup.

This week, one of the left’s foot soldiers gunned down Republican members of Congress and their staff while they were playing baseball in Virginia. Democratic Socialist James Hodgkinson was prevented from committing a mass murder only by the happenstance of a member of the Republican leadership being there, along with his 24-hour Capitol Police protection.

Remember when it was frightening for the losing party not to accept the results of an election? During the third debate, Trump refused to pre-emptively agree to the election results, saying he’d “look at it at the time.”

The media responded in their usual laid-back style:

A ‘HORRIFYING’ REPUDIATION OF DEMOCRACY — The Washington Post, Oct. 20, 2016

DENIAL OF DEMOCRACY — Daily News (New York), Oct. 20, 2016 DANGER TO DEMOCRACY — The Dallas Morning News, Oct. 20, 2016

ONE SCARY MOMENT; IT ALL BOILED DOWN TO … DEMOCRACY — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Oct. 21, 2016

“(Shock) spiked down the nation’s spinal column last night and today when the Republican nominee threatened that this little election thing you got there, this little democratic process you’ve got here, it’s nice, it’s fine, but he doesn’t necessarily plan on abiding by its decision when it comes to the presidency.” — Rachel Maddow, Oct. 20,

“Trump’s answer on accepting the outcome of the vote is the most disgraceful statement by a presidential candidate in 160 years.” — Bret Stephens, then-deputy editorial page editor at The Wall Street Journal

“I guess we’re all going to have to wait until Nov. 9 to find out if we still have a country — if Donald Trump is in the mood for a peaceful transfer of power. Or if he’s going to wipe his fat a– with the Constitution.” — CBS’s Stephen Colbert, Oct. 19, 2016

“It’s unprecedented for a nominee of a major party to themselves signal that they would not accept — you know, respect the results of an election. We’ve never had that happen before. … This really presents a potentially difficult problem for governing …” — MSNBC’S Joy Reid, Oct. 22, 2016

“This is very dangerous stuff … would seriously impair our functioning as a democracy. … This is about as serious as it gets in the United States.” — CNN’s Peter Beinart, Oct. 20, 2016

“Obviously, it’s despicable for him to pretend that there’s any chance that he would not accept the results of this election; it would be — in 240 years you’ve never had anybody do it. …” — CNN’s Van Jones, Oct. 20, 2016

Then Trump won, and these very same hysterics refused to accept the results of the election.

Recently, Hillary announced her steadfast opposition to the winning candidate using a military term, saying she’d joined the “Resistance.”

Imagine if Trump lost and then announced that he’d joined the “RESISTANCE.” He’d be accused of trying to activate right-wing militias. Every dyspeptic glance at an immigrant would be reported as fascistic violence.

But the media seem blithely unaware that the anti-Trump “Resistance” has been accompanied by nonstop militaristic violence from liberals.

When Trump ripped up our Constitution and jumped all over it by failing to concede the election three weeks in advance, CNN ran a segment on a single tweet from a random Trump supporter that mentioned the Second Amendment.

Carol Costello: “Still to come in the ‘Newsroom,’ some Trump supporters say they will refuse to accept a loss on Election Day, with one offering a threat of violence. We’ll talk about that next.”

In CNN’s most fevered dreams about a violent uprising of Trump supporters, they never could have conceived of the level of actual violence being perpetrated by Americans who refuse to accept Trump’s win. (See Hate Map.)

It began with Trump’s inauguration, when a leftist group plotted to pump a debilitating gas into one Trump inaugural ball, military families were assaulted upon leaving the Veterans’ Inaugural Ball, and attendees of other balls had water thrown on them.

Since then, masked, armed liberals around the country have formed military-style organizations to beat up conservatives. In liberal towns, the police are regularly ordered to stand down to allow the assaults to proceed unimpeded.

The media only declared a crisis when conservatives fought back, smashing the black-clad beta males. (“Battle for Berkeley!”)

There is more media coverage for conservatives’ “microaggressions” toward powerful minorities -– such as using the wrong pronoun — than there is for liberals’ physical attacks on conservatives, including macings, concussions, and hospitalizations.

And now some nut Bernie Sanders-supporter confirms that it’s Republicans standing on a baseball field, before opening fire.

In the media’s strategic reporting of the attempted slaughter, we were quickly told that the mass shooter was white, male and had used a gun. We were even told his name. (Because it was not “Mohammed.”)

But the fact that Hodgkinson’s Facebook page featured a banner of Sanders and the words “Democratic Socialism explained in 3 words: ‘We the People’ Since 1776” apparently called for hours of meticulous fact-checking by our media.

Did reporters think they could keep that information from us forever?

The fake news insists that Trump’s White House is in “chaos.” No, the country is in chaos. But just like Kathy Griffin and her Trump decapitation performance art — the perpetrators turn around in doe-eyed innocence and blame Trump

read more Beitbart (lost the link)

-----------

Coulter is a Christian and belongs to the Presbyterian denomination.[82][83] Her father was Catholic and her mother was a Protestant.[84] At one public lecture she said, "I don't care about anything else; Christ died for my sins, and nothing else matters."[85] She summarized her view of Christianity in a 2004 column, saying, "Jesus' distinctive message was: People are sinful and need to be redeemed, and this is your lucky day, because I'm here to redeem you even though you don't deserve it, and I have to get the crap kicked out of me to do it." She then mocked "the message of Jesus... according to liberals", summarizing it as "something along the lines of 'be nice to people,'" which, in turn, she said "is, in fact, one of the incidental tenets of Christianity."

Confronting some critics' views that her content and style of writing is un-Christian-like,[87] Coulter stated that "I'm a Christian first and a mean-spirited, bigoted conservative second, and don't you ever forget it."[88] She also said, "Christianity fuels everything I write. Being a Christian means that I am called upon to do battle against lies, injustice, cruelty, hypocrisy—you know, all the virtues in the church of liberalism".[89] In Godless: The Church of Liberalism, Coulter characterized the theory of evolution as bogus science, and contrasted her beliefs to what she called the left's "obsession with Darwinism and the Darwinian view of the world, which replaces sanctification of life with sanctification of sex and death".[90] Coulter subscribes to intelligent design, a theory that rejects evolution.[91]

read more :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Coulter

 

Note: Gus is a fierce atheist and thinks religion and intelligent design is shit.

 

From a former spy, Philip Giraldi...

 

Yes, I voted for Donald Trump. When people confront me and ask me why, I sort of shuffle off, head down, while muttering something about how “he wasn’t the war candidate.” 

I even stuck with Trump until he launched cruise missiles at an airbase in Syria and overnight became the establishment favorite, with all the media and most politicians singing his praises for attacking a country with which the United States was not at war over an alleged atrocity that did not involve Americans—and could easily have been attributed to the terrorists that Damascus has been fighting. And then he did it again, using fighter bomber aircraft to attack a column of Syrian government-affiliated militiamen who were allegedly approaching and thereby threatening a position inside Syria where U.S.-supported “good” insurgents, accompanied by American advisers, were apparently hunkered down.

Someone should take out a map and show Trump where Syria is and outline its borders while explaining what “sovereign territory” is supposed to mean. If he could grasp the concept, possibly by relating it to Mexico, it just might suggest to him that we Yanks could actually be foreign invaders who have crossed a national border and are killing local people in gross violation of international law.

And then there is the foreign-policy finesse exhibited on his recent World Tour. It began with his predictable slobbering all over the Saudis and Israelis before stiffing the Palestinians. But then he elevated his game by pissing off the Pope, whining to the Germans because there are no Chevys on the streets of Berlin, pushing his way past the Montenegran Prime Minister and, finally, insisting on riding in a golf cart and arriving late to the photo-op ending the G7 meeting in Sicily while everyone else walked the 700 yards. His boorishness manifests itself as a nearly complete unwillingness to make even the smallest gesture that would ease the relations with other countries and leaders who are important U.S. partners. I guess he sees doing so as a sign of weakness. Class act all the way, Donald!

But then again, when I am really down on Trump and what he is doing or not doing, I think of Hillary Rodham Clinton. A good friend of mine Joe Lauria, formerly a Wall Street Journal correspondent, has recently introduced, edited, and provided extensive commentary for a book entitled How I Lost By Hillary Clinton. It is an indictment of the Clinton campaign “in her own words” and includes a foreword by Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, who discusses the leaks of Democratic National Committee (DNC) and John Podesta emails that together provide much of the material included in the text.

read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/resist-this-how-hillary-...

 

Once the attacker was dead and the injured cared for, once quiet had returned to Congress and the investigation had begun, a hint of harmony briefly descended over Washington. Democrats said prayers for Republicans, adversaries found warm words for each other and even Donald Trump acted like a statesman. America is strongest, he said, "when we are unified and when we work together for the common good."

This, from Trump -- arguably America's most divisive figure.

It sounded as if he had forgotten recent months -- the tirades and hate-filled speeches. As if there were no gaping rift between the opposing political camps, right and left, long since unbridgeable. For a moment, it seemed the president had swept aside all the rage -- and the nation was thankful.

What happened on Wednesday in Alexandria, a Washington suburb, was not Donald Trump's fault. The attacker opened fire on Republican members of the House and Senate. It was not an attempted political assassination, but it was an act that was at least partly motivated by politics. The perpetrator, James Thomas Hodgkinson, was a disturbed Bernie Sanders supporter who considered Trump to be a "traitor." It was an attack on democracy, but above all provided evidence of just how toxic the political environment in the United States has become. And of course, this president, both directly and indirectly, bears his share of the blame for this climate.

read more:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/opinion-toxic-political-climat...

 

This toxicity AND divisiveness is nothing new to the USA. Since its inception, the USA has been toxic and has tried to infect the rest of the world with this toxicity, in various ways -- often under the name of democratic freedom, where the elitocracy (kings, despots, business leaders) rule the roost.... 

 

 

Assassination attempts and plots on Presidents of the United States have been numerous: more than 30 attempts to kill sitting and former presidents and presidents-elect are known. Four sitting presidents have been killed, all of them by gunshot: Abraham Lincoln (the 16th President), James A. Garfield (the 20th President), William McKinley (the 25th President) and John F. Kennedy (the 35th President). Two presidents were injured in attempted assassinations, also by gunshot: Theodore Roosevelt (the 26th President) and Ronald Reagan (the 40th President).

Although the historian James W. Clarke has suggested that most American assassinations were politically motivated actions, carried out by rational men,[1] not all such attacks have been undertaken for political reasons.[2] Some attackers had questionable mental stability, and a few were judged legally insane.[3][4] Since the Vice President of the United States has for more than a century been elected from the same political party as the President, the assassination of the President is unlikely to result in major policy changes. This may explain why political groups typically do not make such attacks.[5]

read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_assassi...

 

 

 

In case you somehow missed the latest drama, here’s a quick recap. On Thursday morning Trump, the man who is president of a supposedly civilized country, took to Twitter to attack the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe. He reserved most of his vitriol for anchor Mika Brzezinski who he described as “low IQ”, “Crazy”, and “bleeding badly from a facelift.” 

If all of this sounds horribly familiar it’s because it is. Trump is constantly attacking women’s looks and clearly has a bizarre obsession with bodily fluids. In 2015, for example, he accused then-Fox News Host Megyn Kelly of unfairly targeting him, saying “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.”

Despite the fact that Trump’s latest tweetstorm was entirely in character for the president, there were some in the media who still managed to express surprise at the outburst. Like Michael Grynbaum at the New York Times, for example, who wrote“President Trump assailed the television host Mika Brzezinski on Thursday in unusually personal and vulgar terms.” Sorry, did he say “unusually”? Exactly where has Grynbaum been for the last year? 

And, on CNN, Brian Stelter wrote: “Even by President Trump’s standards, these tweets were shocking.” Again, you’d have to have been hiding under a rock for the last year to think that these latest tweets (although obviously disgusting) were somehow more shocking than the gazillion other ghastly things the president has said and done.

You want to know what’s truly shocking? The fact that, ultimately, Trump’s misogyny doesn’t hurt him at all; if anything it helps him. Sure there may be some short-lived outrage about his comments but let’s all remember how quickly the “grab them by the pussy” incident was forgotten. 

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/29/trump-insults-to-w...

 

Trump is a full blown misogynist, like our own Tony Abbott. Abbott hides his misogyny a bit more than trump but he really hates women in power. Trump actually does not mind women in Power. It is my belief that Ivanka is next on the list of presidential hopefuls and Donald would be chuffed. Tony would hate it that a woman could become PM again in Australia. Trump's beef with Mika is less about misogyny than with Mika's neoconic views of the world that could reflect that of her father (and brothers) that led the USA into too many wars. That Trumps attacks her with "misogynistic vitriol" is to attract attention. The anti-misogynists and the pseudo-feminists will bite and Trump could not care less. 

 

Read from top...

 

 

Jessica Tillipman was recently leading an anti-corruption training in Washington, DC, to a roomful of visiting bureaucrats from Latin America when something odd happened. As she described various measures the United States has in place to guard against self-dealing and conflicts of interest by government officials, she heard snickering.

In the past, she recalls, foreign guests “would look on kind of in awe” as she described the federal government’s elaborate system for preventing graft and corruption. That has all changed since the election of Donald Trump. Now, her international colleagues are quick to point out that the United States can’t even get its own president to abide by the nation’s ethical standards. “It was almost a bit of a joke,” Tillipman, an expert on government ethics and an assistant dean at the George Washing ton University Law School, says of the recent training. “To have countries with their own distinct corruption issues laughing at our current issues—it’s embarrassing.”

For decades, the United States has held itself up as a pillar of open and ethical government. On many fronts, it has led by example, enacting and enforcing some of the world’s toughest anti-corruption and ethics statutes. It has used its reputation and economic clout to prod other countries to clean up their acts, encouraging them to pass anti-bribery and transparency laws and spending millions of dollars training foreign officials in the ways of good governance—efforts that amounted to a type of soft power, smoothing over trade relations and bolstering diplomatic ties. And investors like the predictability of open government and honest business dealings. Yet interviews with more than a dozen experts show that the United States is rapidly tarnishing its squeaky-clean image.

read more:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/07/ethics-violations-corruption...

 

The cleanliness of the USA has always been a facade... What Trump has done is remove the pretend... read the age of deceit... Start at the top:  VIRGIL'S LEGACY REINSTATED...

 

see also: 

 

if you don't know why your country is at war, forget "democracy" and "freedom". think petrodollar...

 

 

 

See toon at top...

Appearing on the CBS Late Show, former US President Jimmy Carter admitted that the United States “apparently” wanted a “kind of jerk” for a president and said that he prays for current US President Donald Trump to keep the country at peace.

Talking to the 93-year old former president Friday, host Stephen Colbert noted that Carter, during his time as president, had an image of a "nice guy," while his predecessor Nixon acted like a "son of a bitch." Colbert noted that Carter has been criticized for his demeanor and asked whether US voters wanted "a kind of jerk" for their president.

"Apparently, from this recent election, yes," Carter replied, sparking laughter from the audience.

At the same time, Carter acknowledged that he prays for Trump.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/201804011063108646-jimmy-carter-prays-donald-trump/

 

Read from top...

 

How do we interpret Trump’s decision to junk the nuclear deal with Iran?

 

Is it simply more neocon warmongering and/or an attempt to please/appease Israel/Saudi Arabia?

YES. EXCEPT IT'S NOT "SIMPLY"... Wait, there's more...

Why is the EU/UK refusing to go along with it at present?

THE EU/UK ARE NOT OPPOSED to go along with Trump. They play the foil in a Laurel and Hardy routine.

Is there a serious chance of war between Iran and the US/Israel, given that Syria remains unconquered?

YES. THIS IS THE PURPOSE OF THE BIGGEST ARMADA ever assembled in history.

Are the US/Israel militarily up to such a task?

TASK? THEY HAVE BEEN PREPARING FOR THIS SINCE WW2. The Russians are also prepared. The planet is on the brink of WW3.

How would such a large scale commitment of manpower and money go over domestically in a US that is sufering the extremes of economic hardship in many areas?

GLORY! GLORY! God bless Ahmerika!

What would Russia’s response be to any acts of overt military aggression toward Iran?

RESERVED BUT STERN AT FIRST. Then, all saddles blazing...

Are there perhaps other, more complex, agendas here that aren’t obvious or clear at this time?

THE FOLLY OF THE US EMPIRE TRYING TO CONQUER ALL. Isn't this enough?

 

https://off-guardian.org/2018/05/09/discussion-thread-what-does-trumps-d...

 

see toon at top.

Hillary Clinton has unleashed a blazing attack on Donald Trump, accusing the man who beat her in 2016 in the race for the White House of cruelty, negligence, corruption, dishonesty, racism and malevolence that have combined to put democracy in America into crisis.

In an afterword to the new paperback edition of her book on her 2016 presidential election defeat, What Happened, Clinton makes her most excoriating takedown yet of Trump’s character and actions since he took office. The essay, published on Monday by the Atlantic, accuses the sitting president of undermining basic democratic values and positioning himself as a tyrant.

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/17/hillary-clinton-trump-es...

 

Read from top.

Political cartoonist David Rowe was sitting up late at night in the aftermath of Donald Trump's unexpected victory in the 2016 US election.

The award-winning satirist for the Australian Financial Review was no stranger to the fickle nature of politics, but this was clearly a bigger moment than most.

"It just came to me. I thought I have got to comment on this, it was pretty historic," he said this week.

What followed was a cartoon of a sly-eyed President-elect lying in bed next to a Statue of Liberty who appears to be waking to an awful realisation.

As Rowe notes: "The eyes just got it."

The cartoon went viral, amassing thousands of likes and shares on social media, including from celebrities like pop star Rihanna.

...

"He's got an amazing face, to start with. So it's just a physical thing that helps," he said.

"Trump has just been a boon for cartoonists everywhere. It's just been incredible, every day.

"In fact, it's almost too easy, there's too much to keep up with, with Trump."

Rowe draws, on average, 14 cartoons every week for the Financial Review, and with multiple Walkley Awards to his name he's now given a lot of free rein.

He has just released a book, Politics Now, which is a collection of 200 of his cartoons over the past five years.

 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-04/cartoonist-david-rowe-on-donald-t...

 

 Read from top.

 

Read especially:

still the best cartoonist...

 

See also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/37168