Orson bashing Hillary already...

[Le Chiffre]

...and it's not even 2016 yet:

[Le Chiffre]

Trump a modern-day Orson Welles? Gimme a break:
http://www.carrollspaper.com/Content/Op ... 4/25/20495

Back in 1938 Orson Welles famously exposed the Great American Gullibility. With his Mercury Theatre on the Air, Welles, adapting “War of the Worlds,” used a series of simulated news bulletins to convince radio listeners that aliens were attacking Earth.

Earthlings of 2015, welcome to Mars.

With each new outrage, provocation, charge and recrimination — the most recent always more eye-rolling than the previous — one has to wonder: Is Donald Trump channeling Orson Welles?

Trump, the orange-haired ringleader of “The Apprentice,” surely will reveal footage, back-stage, behind-the-scenes stuff, of his merry troupe plotting all sorts of mayhem for the Republican presidential field, all done in jest, all aimed at proving what saps the media are, what dopes Americans have become in our obese consumption of junk-food news.

It would be one hell of a documentary. And I think that’s what Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is about, a film exposing the absurdity of our politics, indeed American life itself, today.

Donald Trump's ex-wife Once Said Trump Kept a Book of Hitler's Speeches By His Bed:
http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-t ... bed-2015-8

According to a 1990 Vanity Fair interview, Ivana Trump once told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that her husband, real-estate mogul Donald Trump, now a leading Republican presidential candidate, kept a book of Hitler's speeches near his bed.

"Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler's collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed ... Hitler's speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist," Marie Brenner wrote.

[tonyw]

And she deserves it!

[Wellesnet]

Donald Trump on "Citizen Kane":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upC8pX3RY0A

[tonyw]

As mentioned elsewhere, Jonathan, Joe, and James our critical Holy Trinity, now have a rival!

[Le Chiffre]

I get the impression from this video that Kane struck a chord inside Trump, to some extent. His analysis demonstrates some serious thought, for him. His punchline though, “Get yourself a different woman”, underscores one of the main problems he’ll have if, by some minor miracle he gets the Republican nomination. Of course, two weeks ago I would have said MAJOR miracle, so he’s got more loyalty and resilience then I would have thought, especially after the backtracking and damage control he had to do this weekend.

He’s this year’s Newt Gingrich, with his larger-then-life mouth, but his star power completely dwarfs Newt’s. Unbelievable that he’s still so far in the lead after what he’s pulled – or maybe not so unbelievable since he’s got the whole GOP by the throat - but a big backlash seems to be building inevitably: Hispanics, Veterans, and now women: you have to wonder how many harpoons this white whale can take before he finally sinks.

[tonyw]

Yet the backlash factor could work to his advantage with atavistic voters admiring him for articulating their worst behavioral traits. I'm sure somewhere he has his Mr. Bernstein ready with a future newspaper headline "Fraud at the Polls" if he does not reach the Oval Office and a future movie screenplay MR. TRUMP GOES TO WASHINGTON.

[Wellesnet]

GOP's Trump problem will fade, but Democrats' Bernie Sanders troubles are just beginning:
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la ... olumn.html

The Democratic Party has always had internal conflicts. Franklin D. Roosevelt's coalition contained socialist Jews and blacks and Southern segregationists. That coalition held for 20 years after his presidency. But the Obama coalition seems to be fraying while he's still in office, and none of his presumptive heirs have the charisma or skills to repair or sustain the coalition.

Meanwhile California representative Kevin McCarthy ruined his chances for Speaker of the House when he all but admitted inadvertently that the commision to investigate Benghazi was created primarily to attack Hillary's chances for the White House.
As commentator Michael Kinsley famously quipped, a political gaffe occurs when a politician accidentally tells the truth.

NYT - TO KEEP AMERICA SAFE, EMBRACE DRONE WARFARE:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/opini ... egion&_r=0

TARGETED killing using drones has become part of the American way of war. To do it legally and effectively requires detailed and accurate intelligence. It also requires some excruciatingly difficult decisions...Critics assert that a high percentage of the people killed in drone strikes are civilians — a claim totally at odds with the intelligence I have reviewed — and that the strikes have turned the Muslim world against the United States, fueling terrorist recruitment. Political elites have joined in, complaining that intelligence agencies have gone too far — until they have felt in danger, when they have complained that the agencies did not go far enough.

The program is not perfect. No military program is. But here is the bottom line: It works. I think it fair to say that the targeted killing program has been the most precise and effective application of firepower in the history of armed conflict. It disrupted terrorist plots and reduced the original Qaeda organization along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to a shell of its former self.

Bill: The hundreds or thousands of drone strikes are only part of the extreme violence that the US and its allies have perpetrated in the Muslim world since Bush/Cheney invaded and occupied Iraq and Afghanistan and Obama/Clinton helped overthrow Libya and supported insurgencies against secular Syria.

The way out of this forrest/quagmire is not easy. It requires acknowledgement of the mistakes and/or fraud that got our military into places where they could defeat enemy armies but could not build enlightened secular governments. It requires demonstrating to the world that we are a nation of laws and that no one, not even presidents and vice-presidents are immune from prosecution for fraud and war crimes.

Until we are brave enough to admit our mistakes and to prosecute culpable persons and to cease our firing at them, Muslims can be expected to perceive us as hypocritically unjust and to maintain or increase their resistance and their own violent retribution.

[tonyw]

Do you mean Hillary and Bernie as "presumptive heirs"? Surely, successors since neither have any relation to his legacy but represent other constituencies.

[Le Chiffre]

I was tempted to call Bernie Sanders this year's Henry Wallace, but maybe he's more like FDR, with his focus on income inequality instead of racial inequality, as the recent "Black Lives Matter" disruptions of his speeches seemed to illustrate. And yes, Hillary's much more of a pro-Israel hawk than Obama.

Meanwhile, here's some found-footage with overdubbing manipulation by BLR worthy of F FOR FAKE-

First Republican debate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufGlBv8Z3NU

1st Democratic debate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_yxGsWHx9o

[Wellesnet]

According to this website, Jeb Bush is the ninth cousin (thrice removed) of Orson Welles:
http://famouskin.com/famous-kin-chart.p ... ncis+cooke

While Trump is the new Faust:
http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2015/11/21 ... new-Faust-

“The only thing interesting about Trump publicly confessing proclivities which expose his ignorance, bigotry, and willingness to say anything which might win him some votes, is that instead of being ridiculed and dismissed by the American public as a lunatic, he continues to build a substantial constituency among normally silent Americans,” Grossman said.

“Trump is the new Faust, a Mephistopheles-like character who is willing to contract even with Satan if it helps him realize his ambitions and spread his unique brand of hate,” he added.

[Le Chiffre]

EXCLUSIVE: Newt Gingrich: ‘The Country Is in Rebellion,’ Trump Can ‘Kick Down the Doors’
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government ... ick-doors/

Newt Gingrich told Breitbart News that the country is in rebellion against the coastal power centers and that Donald Trump might be the candidate who can “kick down the doors” of the establishment.

Former House speaker Gingrich weighed in on Trump’s rise.

“I think he represents a different era” in the same conservative movement, Gingrich said. “The system has become so incompetent and outrageously bureaucratic. The centers of power are so, so in New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, that the whole rest of the country is in rebellion. And people are looking for somebody who can kick down the doors.”

“It’s a very deep, very real movement,” he said.

So what's new with big Welles fan Glenn Beck?

During his “whirlwind” trip traveling across Europe and the Middle East, Glenn made a stop in Sweden (widely considered the most liberal of all European countries) to document what is going on there with regard to the refugee crisis. Glenn called into his radio program from Sweden Tuesday to share what he’s been seeing with listeners. “This is probably the most tolerant place as far as immigration in the world,” Glenn said. He went on to describe how in the 1980s, Sweden decided to open its arms and offer “free everything” to all immigrants, including free lessons in the Swedish language. “They just expected people to assimilate and matriculate into Swedish citizens,” Glenn said. “What they didn’t understand was, there’s no intention of becoming Swedish for most of these people.” Glenn said Sweden is now at a tipping point where the Swedish people will be the minority within the next 10-12 years. “They’re currently being taught that there is no Swedish culture — that’s what they’re teaching their students — there is no inherent Swedish culture,” Glenn said. “And the Muslim culture is a culture that is deep and rich with meaning, but not the Swedish culture.” He went on to talk about the rise of fascism in Sweden and other European countries, where people are begging their governments, saying, “You don’t understand, fascism is coming because you won’t listen to the people.”

"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator." --George W. Bush, December 18, 2000

"Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. "Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they'd say ‘They live well but they're all alcoholics'. In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefited us many times over." Instead, America has "no intellectual class" and is "rotting away at a funereal pace. We'll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together...Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush." - -
Gore Vidal, "We'll Have a Dictatorship Soon" (2009)
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2009/0 ... ip-soon-us

[Le Chiffre]

Orson's ninth cousin appears to be running out of time (and money).

"Why I feel bad for Jeb Bush":
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the ... eb-bush-2/

"He entered the race way back last spring as the clear front-runner — a status confirmed upon him by his last name, his expected financial juggernaut and the depth of his résumé.

But, early on, it became clear that Bush wasn't just rusty at this campaign thing, he simply wasn't all that good at it. It also became clear that Bush was badly miscast for an election cycle in which the Republican base wanted anger from its candidates. The rise of Donald Trump — and his relentless attacks on Bush as a "low-energy person" — only served to highlight the disconnect between Bush and his party's base."

Old and White: "Lets not forget Jeb stole the election for his MIA-when-his-country-needed-him sociopath brother! However Joe Liebermann might have done things that would have made Dick Cheney look relatively easy going. Is someone going to write a song for the Bush Brothers called "Stand by Your War"?"

EK: Trump is demonstrating to all the world that the GOP establishment and its puppet media outlets are something like the Wizard of Oz, full of sound and fury but lacking any substance at all.

Dog: Maybe this'll put to rest the idea that you can buy votes. Yes, money matters. You certainly can't mount a serious campaign if you're struggling to raise funds. But Trump has shown that you don't have to spend a lot of money to win and Sanders has shown that you don't have sell your soul to big donors either. The real question is not whether Jeb! will drop out, but when and if it'll be before or after Kasich. My bet is that Carson will drop out before either of them. But what should really be entertaining is when Jeb! has to endorse Rubio.

Tim Miller, Jeb Bush's Communications Director, said that he and many political operatives didn’t take Trump seriously, because he had already previewed a run for president multiple times before choosing against it.

But that began to change when Trump appeared at the mid-June Iowa State Fair and began attacking Jeb Bush for being a “puppet” controlled by lobbyists.

Miller recalled: "I remember sitting in front of my computer watching a livestream of him land his helicopter and do a press conference for a thousand media members at the Iowa State Fair where he was just unleashing into Jeb in the kind of personal terms that no other candidate would feel comfortable doing, and you know at that point we kind of realized we had kind of a monster on our hands and we had to deal with him differently."

Miller admitted that Bush was perhaps the imperfect messenger to attack Trump, pointing out that he was always going to be seen as a spokesman for the Republican establishment.

“I honestly don’t think that’s Jeb … there’s no way to brand him in any sort of authentic way as not kind of part of the establishment,” he said. “So his attacks on Trump in a lot of ways built Trump up.”

[Le Chiffre]

White Americans long for the 1950s:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the ... imination/

Basically, what's changed since the 1950s is that white Americans no longer have an exclusive or almost-exclusive hold on the best housing, jobs, schools or the ballot box.

A full 60 percent of black Americans and 54 percent of Latinos told PRRI researchers that American culture has mostly changed for the better since the 1950s. In contrast, only 42 percent of white Americans agreed. In fact, 57 percent of white Americans told pollsters that the American way of life has mostly changed for the worse over the past 60 years.

Apparently life was very good for these Americans, when segregated public facilities were a legal requirement in the South and Southeast and a social norm in many other places. Most people of color could not obtain credit or a loan from most "mainstream" banks. Most women of all races and ethnicities could not do so either. This was a vastly different America, one where life was not at all easy for a whole lot of people. Still, this is the America for which apparently many white Americans long.

Denver Post on the sick reasoning behind necessary victims used by Timothy McVeigh in 1994, during the Clinton Adminstration:
http://extras.denverpost.com/bomb/bombp11.htm

The Turner Diaries, a novel first printed in May 1978, depicts the violent takeover of the United States including the bombing of FBI headquarters in Washington, an attack on a newspaper and the systematic killing of Jews and non-whites.

It was the preferred reading material of convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

The goal of the revolutionaries in The Turner Diaries is the creation of an "Aryan" or white world.

Prosecutors claim that The Turner Diaries may have been a blueprint for the Oklahoma City bombing. Some watchdog groups also claim it was the basis for the exploits of The Order - the neo-Nazi group that assassinated Denver radio talk show host Alan Berg.

The book was written by Georgia native William L. Pierce, a former follower of American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell.

In the novel, a stolen truck loaded with a deadly mixture of heating oil and ammonium nitrate fertilizer is driven into the basement of FBI headquarters at 9:15 a.m. in Washington and detonated. Approximately 700 people are killed. The same type bomb was used in the Oklahoma City blast, where 168 people were killed and 500 injured.

At another point in the book, the white revolutionaries target the Washington Post, bombing the pressroom of the paper, after deciding against an all out assault on the newsroom with fragmentation grenades and machine guns.

Earl Turner, the novel's protagonist, said that the killing of innocents was necessary to win the revolution. "... there is no way we can destroy the System without hurting many thousands of innocent people - no way," said Turner. "It is a cancer too deeply rooted in our flesh.

Witnesses testified that McVeigh held similar thoughts, that he wanted to make a statement against the government.

"It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."
-- Joseph Stalin

[Wellesnet]

Trump and Paul Ryan on a collision course?:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/25/us/po ... .html?_r=0

Trump and Ryan: Matter and Anti-matter:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016 ... atter.html

As House speaker, Paul D. Ryan will chair the Republican National Convention this summer. Many of his views are diametrically opposite the front runner for the nomination, Donald J. Trump.

“Everything about this cycle has presented a departure from routine,” said Kevin Madden, a Republican consultant. “In normal circumstances, you would expect the party to adjust to the nominee’s agenda. But in this case, you have a front-runner running on rhetoric, not substance.”

Though the majority of Republicans are desperately hoping for the dust to settle and for Senator Marco Rubio to emerge as their nominee — his Capitol Hill endorsements stack up daily — some still murmur privately that in the event of Mr. Trump’s domination, they would like to see Mr. Ryan somehow emerge as a brokered nominee at the Republican National Convention in July.

*

Newt Gingrich on "The alternative universes of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders":
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... /?page=all

Trump and Sanders are mirror images of the same phenomenon. There is a huge alienated, angry block on the right and a big alienated, angry block on the left.

Each candidate is living in an alternative universe which has virtually nothing to do with the establishment politics of the two parties.

Because they exist in alternative universes from the normal political and news media establishment, neither man worries about the kind of implementation details that are the gold standard of the traditionalists on both the right and the left.

Because both Trump and Sanders are appealing to people who are deeply alienated from the current system, their supporters ignore all the traditional attacks that would work against normal candidates.

And because their supporters are signing up for a vision of a boldly different future, they shrug off the kind of mistakes and misstatements that would destroy normal candidates.

Sophisticated, experienced analysts keep underestimating both candidates because they translate them back into the centrist politics that have dominated Washington in the modern era, in which left and right competed for the center.

Trump and Sanders have blown up that model with campaigns that appeal to and grow universes on the left and right. Only when analysts realize that we now have a three-universe political environment — traditional centrist deal-makers, populist conservative nationalists, and culturally radical socialists — will they begin to understand the dynamic we are living through.

FDP: One of them is on one end of the political spectrum when it comes to his political beliefs and the other is on the other end of the spectrum--however, they are VERY much the same in what they represent, a profound change, VERY much the same in that neither would be successful in their campaigns were it not for the current climate of dissatisfaction among members of the public.

*

From Orson Welles's "The Smiler With the Knife" screenplay:

John: The American public will never stand for a dictator.

Strangeways: You mean they'll never give a politician that much power. How about a hero? We like heroes over here and this one won't talk like a dictator. He'll look like a movie star and everybody'll love him.