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The Trump administration's approach to big government seems positively schizophrenic. But then you'd expect that, wouldn't you? The president has no coherent political philosophy. He has a collection of grievances.

So what excuse do his critics have? They haven't sounded much more coherent than he has lately, either.

We are led to understand, from about 9 billion different ominously titled think pieces, that Trump is a brutal authoritarian who is only waiting for the right moment to declare martial law and round up the dissidents. Some of that is good old-fashioned fear-mongeringthe same sort of thing you hear from the right when Democrats are in power. (Remember Obama's "FEMA camps" or the NRA's Wayne LaPierre warning about "jack-booted thugs" during the Clinton administration?)

But there also is some truth to the charge: As noted in this column about a year ago, Trump is perhaps the most maximum of Maximum Leaders the country has seen since FDR. In Roosevelt's defense, at least he was trying to stop the Nazi war machine. Trump has gone to war against Latino fence-jumpers looking for work and members of the media who don't kiss his ring. Not quite the same.

Moreover, Trump is engaged in some rather martial projects, such as a big hike in Pentagon spending and a hugely expensive wall along the southern border. He also wants to hire 5,000 more Border Patrol agents and 10,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. (And this after the number of border and customs agents already has doubled during the previous two administrations.) Oh, and the president also wants to build a huge tariff wall to stop the Yellow Peril of Chinese products from invading our shores.

Trump's vision of America isn't so much a shining city on a hill as it is a fortified garrison.

At the same time, we are all supposed to recoil from the recent assertion by Trump's Rasputin, Steve Bannon, that the administration aims for the "deconstruction of the administrative state."

Some of the White House's critics seem to be rather fuzzy about exactly what that means, while others seem to think it means "literally dismantling the departments of Education and the EPA and Energy." It's no big secret, though: Georgetown Law's Jonathan Turley explained it clearly when he testified before Congress a little while back. The administrative state is the unaccountable part of the executive branch that has arrogated to itself the functions of the other two branches by (a) cranking out rules far faster than Congress writes laws, and (b) conducting judicial proceedings 10 times as frequently as actual federal judges do.

Policy wonks contend that this has been made possible by excessive judicial deference to executive agencies, and particularly by a Supreme Court decision known as Chevron. Whether Chevron deference is good for America or not is a fair question, but as topics go it's drier than chalk dust.

Still, assume for the sake of argument that Trump's critics are right and he does want to dismantle much of the apparatus of the federal government. (After all, he did say he would like to cut regulations by 75 percent.)

If that's true, then much of the concern about Ein Trump Autokratie goes away. Take the Federal Communications Commission: Trump recently named Ajit Pai its chairman. Pai opposes tight regulatory constraints on the internet, which makes progressives sad. But it also makes autocratic rule harder. If Trump wanted to control the internet, he would have renamed Pai's predecessor, Tom Wheeler, a progressive who favors stringent government oversight.

Likewise, if Trump really were to eliminate the Department of Education, then people who draw devil's horns on pictures of Secretary Betsy DeVos could stop worrying that she would ram school choice down the throats of liberal enclaves. By the same token, shuttering the Department of Energy would make it virtually impossible for the administration to manipulate research or to stop the energy market's shift away from fossil fuels and toward renewables.

Shutting down the EPA also would take a big stick away from Trump's meaty paw. Remember, it was only a few years ago that EPA administrator Alfredo Juan "Al" Armendariz was caught on videotape saying that his philosophy of governance was "kind of like how the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They'd go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they'd find the first five guys they saw, and they would crucify them. And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years." (He later resigned.)

Nor could the EPA do what it tried to do to Mike and Chantell Sackett: Force them to obey a compliance order, or face ruinous fines, without so much as a court hearing. The EPA insisted that its bureaucratic edicts lay beyond the reach of judicial reviewa stance that epitomizes the worst of the administrative state. A unanimous Supreme Court ultimately ruled otherwise.

Granted, it's possible to impose a military junta while leaving the private-sector economy alone. But for real old-fashioned totalitarianism you need a huge, centralized bureaucracy. Liberals who fear right-wing presidents might be wise to keep that in mind.

This column originally appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Read more here:
Liberals Can't Decide if Trump Is an Autocrat or Anarchist - Reason

Liberals entered the 2016 election year using the same weapon against their Republican opponents that they've used for the past fifty years: Republican candidate X is a racist. There need not be any evidence to support the claim. Every Democrat candidate can count on his cohorts in the media to assist him in painting Republican candidate X as a racist, with the assurance that whoever the Republican candidate is, he will not fight back.

With over thirty years in the public eye, the minute Donald Trump came down the escalators at Trump Tower and officially declared that he was entering the race for the presidency of the United States of America as a Republican, he all of sudden became a racist, too. What liberals and the media did not count on was Donald Trump fighting back. Not only did they not expect him to fight back, but they surely didn't think he would target the black community with a plan for better education and prosperity. In fact, Trump has been talking about rebuilding the inner cities since 1980s.

Now that Donald Trump has won the presidency, liberals are still trying to paint him as a racist bigot and anti-Semitic, while at the same time he is signing executive orders that prove the opposite. During Black History Month, President Trump met at the White House with the leaders of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to discuss his plans for an HBCU executive order. The liberal media immediately began trying to somehow spin it negatively. The Washing Post made the following comments:

Advocates of HBCUs are mindful of skepticism about this outreach.

"It is unprecedented," said Johnny Taylor, president of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, which supports HBCUs. "It's really, really bizarre, is the only thing I can say. It's so counterintuitive you can't make it up."

Taylor said he has spent a lot of time on the phone in recent days, talking with presidents and chancellors who are skeptical of the motives. "People said, 'What's this about? Is it just a photo op? Is this some sort of a planned effort to convert our campuses to support the Republican Party?'

"People were really, really suspicious about it."

But Marybeth Gasman, a professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions, said that over the past 50 years, such schools have had bipartisan support. Funding levels have stayed relatively the same, by and large, over that time. Meetings with members of Congress happen routinely, she said.

Both Bush presidencies were supportive of historically black colleges, Gasman said. And every president since Jimmy Carter has issued an executive order about them. She was dismissive of the idea that Omarosa Manigault, director of communications for the White House Office of Public Liaison and an alumna of historically black universities, would be a powerful ally for the schools. "She may have gone to HBCUs," Gasman said, "but she really knows nothing about education."

The Root magazine had the following headline about Trump's executive article: "Trying to One-Up Obama, Trump Will Sign Executive Order Supporting HBCUs: Report," along with the following comments:

Perhaps after the now infamous Frederick Douglass debacle kicking off Black History Month, President Donald Trump wants to make it right with the blacks

According to a BuzzFeed report, the White House is working on an executive order supporting historically black colleges and universities a way to crow, since some believe that President Barack Obama did not do enough for the predominantly African-American institutions during his two terms in office.

After the White House photos of the HBCU leaders with President Trump inside the Oval Office were published, the liberal media focused on a photo of Kellyanne Conway sitting with her knees on the couch in an attempt to distract from the beautiful and powerful sight of several black leaders posing with the supposedly racist Trump. Liberals' cries of racism are beginning to sound ridiculous in the face of reality. While Democrat officials are pouting and boycotting, President Trump is busy fulfilling his campaign promises. He knows that for America to be great, all of her citizens must have an opportunity and access to a good education as well as good-paying jobs. If President Trump is able to do all that he has promised for the inner cities, liberals' invented terms like "systemic racism" and "legacy of slavery" will sound foolish even coming from a far-left demagogue.

Christian Commentary (http://patriciascornerblog.com), or contact the author at patdickson@earthlink.net. Follow her on Twitter at @Patrici15767099.

Liberals entered the 2016 election year using the same weapon against their Republican opponents that they've used for the past fifty years: Republican candidate X is a racist. There need not be any evidence to support the claim. Every Democrat candidate can count on his cohorts in the media to assist him in painting Republican candidate X as a racist, with the assurance that whoever the Republican candidate is, he will not fight back.

With over thirty years in the public eye, the minute Donald Trump came down the escalators at Trump Tower and officially declared that he was entering the race for the presidency of the United States of America as a Republican, he all of sudden became a racist, too. What liberals and the media did not count on was Donald Trump fighting back. Not only did they not expect him to fight back, but they surely didn't think he would target the black community with a plan for better education and prosperity. In fact, Trump has been talking about rebuilding the inner cities since 1980s.

Now that Donald Trump has won the presidency, liberals are still trying to paint him as a racist bigot and anti-Semitic, while at the same time he is signing executive orders that prove the opposite. During Black History Month, President Trump met at the White House with the leaders of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to discuss his plans for an HBCU executive order. The liberal media immediately began trying to somehow spin it negatively. The Washing Post made the following comments:

Advocates of HBCUs are mindful of skepticism about this outreach.

"It is unprecedented," said Johnny Taylor, president of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, which supports HBCUs. "It's really, really bizarre, is the only thing I can say. It's so counterintuitive you can't make it up."

Taylor said he has spent a lot of time on the phone in recent days, talking with presidents and chancellors who are skeptical of the motives. "People said, 'What's this about? Is it just a photo op? Is this some sort of a planned effort to convert our campuses to support the Republican Party?'

"People were really, really suspicious about it."

But Marybeth Gasman, a professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions, said that over the past 50 years, such schools have had bipartisan support. Funding levels have stayed relatively the same, by and large, over that time. Meetings with members of Congress happen routinely, she said.

Both Bush presidencies were supportive of historically black colleges, Gasman said. And every president since Jimmy Carter has issued an executive order about them. She was dismissive of the idea that Omarosa Manigault, director of communications for the White House Office of Public Liaison and an alumna of historically black universities, would be a powerful ally for the schools. "She may have gone to HBCUs," Gasman said, "but she really knows nothing about education."

The Root magazine had the following headline about Trump's executive article: "Trying to One-Up Obama, Trump Will Sign Executive Order Supporting HBCUs: Report," along with the following comments:

Perhaps after the now infamous Frederick Douglass debacle kicking off Black History Month, President Donald Trump wants to make it right with the blacks

According to a BuzzFeed report, the White House is working on an executive order supporting historically black colleges and universities a way to crow, since some believe that President Barack Obama did not do enough for the predominantly African-American institutions during his two terms in office.

After the White House photos of the HBCU leaders with President Trump inside the Oval Office were published, the liberal media focused on a photo of Kellyanne Conway sitting with her knees on the couch in an attempt to distract from the beautiful and powerful sight of several black leaders posing with the supposedly racist Trump. Liberals' cries of racism are beginning to sound ridiculous in the face of reality. While Democrat officials are pouting and boycotting, President Trump is busy fulfilling his campaign promises. He knows that for America to be great, all of her citizens must have an opportunity and access to a good education as well as good-paying jobs. If President Trump is able to do all that he has promised for the inner cities, liberals' invented terms like "systemic racism" and "legacy of slavery" will sound foolish even coming from a far-left demagogue.

Christian Commentary (http://patriciascornerblog.com), or contact the author at patdickson@earthlink.net. Follow her on Twitter at @Patrici15767099.

View original post here:
Liberals losing the 'Trump is a racist' narrative - American Thinker (blog)

Last fall, as Native American protesters gathered at Standing Rock to stop the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline, several of my friends checked in at the protest on Facebook. They were nowhere near South Dakota. They had heard through urgent posts by other friends who were not present, either that fake geo-tagging would protect protesters at the site from monitoring by law enforcement. NPR reported that more than a million people checked in at the protest camp, a digital version of the I am Spartacus strategy.

But the local Sheriffs office told reporters that it hadnt been monitoring protesters using Facebook geo-tags. And leaders of the protest said they had never asked far-flung allies to change their locations on social media.

The geo-tagging fad was a harmless way for people to express solidarity with the protesters. It was also, arguably, part of a bigger problem with how information spreads online in the Trump era.

Fake news, as defined by the Columbia Journalism Review, is misinformation crafted to influence public opinion or cull digital advertising dollars. When researchers from Stanford and New York University analyzed misinformation that spread on social media during the 2016 election, they found that more fake news articles were pro-Trump than pro-Clinton.

But in the months since the election, President Trump has made fake news his primary critique of any unfavorable coverage. The president applies the label to everything from independent polls finding scant support for his policies to leaked reports that his administration is in disarray.

If the term has been rendered meaningless, the underlying notion still holds up: People are too quick to share articles that confirm their beliefs. (In December, a Pew study found that 23% of U.S. adults had shared a made-up news story, either knowingly or not.) And despite liberals self-perception that we are more fact-oriented than your average Trump supporter, this is not a weakness limited to the right.

To spread misinformation, you dont have to share a post with a clicky headline from a dubious source. Sometimes all you have to do is take a funny meme a bit too seriously. Take, for example, a well-circulated animated GIF of Melania Trump during the inauguration ceremony. The clip shows her smiling while her husband is facing her, then dropping the smile as soon as he turns away. For those of us who want to believe that even those closest to the president secretly hate him, the GIF was a balm. This Melania Trump GIF is all of us, crowed Cosmopolitan. Melanias perceived unhappiness became one of the more popular liberal memes of the week, with captions like, Blink twice if you want us to save you.

The joke faded faster than Melanias smile when advocates for survivors of abuse published blog posts imploring us to take seriously the suggestion that domestic violence might be an issue in the White House. The blog Queerty claimed it had found another candid video of Donald Trump treating Melania like crap. An online joke had become a pretty serious story and allegation with scant evidence to back it up.

A few sites, including Mediaite, posted the inauguration footage in full, which placed the short viral clip in context. It appears the smile drops quickly from Melanias face because the GIF was captured during a prayernot exactly a moment for joking around on the dais. But the corrective was lost in a deluge of memes. No one shared it in my feed. I only found it because I went looking for it.

Was the Melania smiling meme fake news? Probably not as most on the left would define it, because no one intended to mislead the public or drive clicks to a single website. But political wishful thinking carried the story past the point of absurdity.

Memes arent the only unlikely way that alternative facts circulate in liberal circles. Like our counterparts on the right, those of us on the left dont always trust established journalistic institutions to cover certain issues thoroughly especially when it comes to marginalized people who arent likely to be perceived as advertisers or subscribers. Groups including Native American activists, transgender teens and immigrants in the country illegally have long relied heavily on word of mouth for information.

When immigration officers stepped up enforcement efforts, resulting in raids across the country, gossip spread across social media faster than journalists were able to confirm or debunk it. Reports of ICE #raids and #checkpoints NEED TO COME WITH PICTURES OR FACEBOOK LIVE, tweeted Fusion immigration reporter Jorge Rivas. Rumors are spreading and it's causing even more anxiety.

The root cause of left-wing rumor-mongering is fairly obvious. When the front-page headlines sound like conspiracy theories and plotlines from House of Cards,its easy to conflate unsourced rants on blogs and in public forums with reported facts. Cognitive scientists have found that its much harder for us to skeptically assess stories that confirm our beliefs rather than challenge our view of the world.

Fake news isnt just a problem that afflicts others. The burden falls on all of us to read news items critically before we share them no matter what our political persuasion or how pure our intentions.

Ann Friedman is a contributing writer to Opinion. She lives in Los Angeles.

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Original post:
It's not just Trump supporters who spread fake news. Liberals do it too - Los Angeles Times

Mark Rutte, Dutch prime minister and leader of the Liberal Party (VVD), speaks to supporters during a campaign event in Wormerveer, Netherlands, on Saturday, Feb. 25.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Ruttes Liberals are making up ground onpopulist frontrunner Geert Wilders in the polls, suggesting that voter support is crystallizing in the final weeks of the campaign in favor of keeping Rutte in power.

Two polls released on Tuesday showed Wilderss anti-Islam Freedom Party with a one-seat advantage or even with the Liberals. Thats down from a lead of as many as 12 seats at the start of the year.

Two weeks to the day before the March 15 vote, the poll movement -- in so far as any polls can be taken seriously -- mirrors the last election in 2012, when major shifts only became apparent in the final stretch of the campaign. In the event, Rutte and Labor outperformed expectations and went on to form a coalition, while the Wilders challenge faded.

For a table of the latest Dutch polling intentions, including averages, click here

Another surge for the Liberals is really a possible scenario, Andre Krouwel, a professor of political science at Amsterdams VU University, said in a phone interview. Rutte managed to do this four years ago by mobilizing center-right voters that either considered voting for the Christian Democrats or the Freedom Party.

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The Netherlands is a bellwether for elections in Europe this year that will determine whether the populist surge that delivered the Brexit vote in the U.K. and helped Donald Trump into the White House will spread to the European Unions core. Wilders, like his fellow populist leader Marine Le Pen in France -- which votes in presidential elections in April and May -- is running on an anti-immigrant, anti-euro platform that blames the EU for taking away control from the nation state.

The Dutch election is being closely watched in neighboring Germany, which goes to the polls in September. Chancellor Angela Merkels chief of staff, Peter Altmaier, a Dutch speaker from the far west of Germany, welcomed recent poll trends that suggest waning support for populist parties across Europe, adding that hes not very impressed with Wilders.

Im happy to see -- as in France, as in Germany, in Austria as well as the Netherlands -- that the poll numbers for the PVV are going down, Altmaier said at an event in Berlin on Tuesday, referring to the Freedom Party by its Dutch acronym. I hope that a government can be formed very swiftly after the election without the PVV.

An EenVandaag poll published Tuesday put the Freedom Party and the Liberals on 22 seats apiece, the first time the parties have tied in about 20 months. A separate poll published by Kantar Public put the Freedom Party ahead with 28 seats, unchanged from a week ago, to 27 seats for the Liberals, up two.

Rutte predicted on Monday that his party would win 41 seats, matching its performance in 2012, while the Freedom Party would take 15 seats as it did the last time around.

I dont think the Liberal Party will lose, Rutte said at an event at Twente University. This is not what I hope but what I expect.

Ruttes confident tone two weeks before the elections reflects polls that suggest the gap with Wilders is closing, as well as the requirement for coalition partners.

No party ever wins a majority in the lower house of the Dutch Parliament, making coalitions inevitable. A coalition needs to have the support of parties totaling at least 76 seats to ensure it can get its legislation through. That further complicates Wilderss path to the premiership since he lacks the allies needed to form a government.

Almost all the established Dutch parties, including the Liberals and Labor, have ruled out governing with Wilders. That, however, hasnt stopped them from courting his followers. Immigration featured in a televised debate among party leaders on Sunday evening, with Labor and the opposition Christian Democrats both arguing for a halt to new arrivals.

Labor under Deputy Prime Minister Lodewijk Asscher would take 12 seats according to the EenVandaag poll, down from 38 seats in 2012, while the Christian Democrats led by Sybrand van Haersma Buma were on 19 seats.

Even if Wilders narrowly beats Ruttes party, its the Liberals who would most likely form the government at the head of a five-party coalition, Jesse Groenewegen and Nic Vrieselaar of Rabobank wrote in a paper outlining election scenarios in early February.

Most parties have set up a cordon sanitaire around the Freedom Party, they said. Assuming Wilders wants to govern rather than head the opposition, any delegation he sends to sound out coalition options will quickly return empty-handed.

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Dutch Election Far From Over as Rutte's Liberals Reel in Wilders - Bloomberg

Some liberals have suddenly decided they like former President George W. Bush after histhinly veiled attacks against President Donald Trump.

During an interview with NBCs Matt Lauer on The TODAYShow Monday, Bush seemed to indirectly criticize President Trump by paying tribute to the importance of freedom of religion and a free press.

You know things are bad when George W. Bush starts sounding like a member of the Resistance.

I just saw George Bush give a shout out to atheists! Oh sh*t, Im turning into Trump, tweeting back to the tv, tweeted a clearly excited Bill Maher.

This is the same Bill Maher who built a career on eight years of hurling over-the-top insults at Bush.

President Bush is supporting Arnold [Schwarzenegger] but a lot of Republicans are not, because he is actually quite liberal. Karl Rove said if his father wasnt a Nazi, he wouldnt have any credibility with conservatives at all, Maher said in 2003.

Former Republican turned left-leaning punditMatthew Dowd also had words of praise for his former boss who he once eagerlybashed. I had a very public break with President Bush in 2007, but always maintained he was a good man. His speaking out in [the] last day shows just that, Dowd said.

When asked by LifeZette Editor-in-Chief Laura Ingraham via Twitter if his speaking out might display a hypocrite with an agenda, Dowd asserted that Bush was moved to comment Because [he] supports the first amendment.

In addition to comments on television, the former-president also indirectly panned Trump toPeople Magazine. I dont like the racism and I dont like the name-calling and I dont like people feeling alienated, he told People on Monday. Nobody likes that.

The sudden warmingof liberal hearts when it comes to Bush hasnt gone unnoticed. George W. Bush: hero of the left. Strange times, tweeted University of California, Irvine political science professor Rick Hasen.

"You know things are bad when George W. Bush starts sounding like a member of the Resistance," echoed George Takei of Star Trek fame.

Bush appears to have fallen for same sort of apocalyptic demonizing about Trump that was once directed at him.

The only difference is that he is no longer in office, hence the mainstream media is no longer doing everything in theirpower to make the American people believe that Bush is Hitler those efforts are now reserved solely for Trump.

"Bush's decision to invade Iraq is now held up as his biggest blunder. Yet for being on the same page with Hillary Clinton, Bush was rewarded with the Bushitler [sic] meme," wroteKyle Smith in the New York Post. "It wasn't just random protesters who made the fascist comparisons: Keith Olbermann, Naomi Wolf and Chris Matthews all invoked Hitler and or/fascism in discussing Bush," Smith continued.

Read more:
Liberals Warm to Bush After Trump Digs - LifeZette