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MUNICH -- Vice President Mike Pence vowed Saturday that the United States will hold Russia accountable even as President Trump searches for new common ground with Moscow at the start of his presidency.

Pence, in an address to the Munich Security Conference, also offered assurances to European allies that the U.S. strongly supports NATO. He said the U.S. would be unwavering in its commitment to trans-Atlantic institutions like NATO.

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In his first overseas trip as vice president, Pence sought to calm nervous European allies who remain concerned about Russian aggression and have been alarmed by Mr. Trumps positive statements about Russian President Vladimir Putin. The address to foreign diplomats and security officials also sought to reassure international partners who worry that Mr. Trump may pursue isolationist tendencies.

Pence said the U.S. would demand that Russia honor a 2015 peace deal agreed upon in Minsk, Belarus, to end violence in eastern Ukraine between government forces and Russia-backed separatists.

Know this: The United States will continue to hold Russia accountable, even as we search for new common ground which as you know President Trump believes can be found, Pence said.

Pence met afterward with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who addressed the conference just before the vice president. Merkel stressed the need to maintain international alliances and told the audience, with Pence seated a few feet away, that NATO is in the American interest.

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European countries along Russias border are rattled by the prospect of deeper U.S.-Russia ties after Mr. Trump suggested sanctions imposed after Russias annexation of Crimea could be eased in exchange for a nuclear weapons deal, and after the president referred to NATO as obsolete in an interview before his inauguration. Mr. Trump has since tempered his language, stressing the importance of the NATO alliance during his telephone conversations with foreign leaders.

Pence also scheduled meetings Saturday with the leaders of the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko - countries dealing with the threat of Russian incursion. Pence also planned to meet with Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim.

The visit, which includes a stop in Brussels on Sunday and Monday, comes amid worries in Europe about Russian aggression, Mr. Trumps relationship with Putin and whether the new president may promote isolationist tendencies through his America First mantra.

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The vice president has sent reassuring messages through his own engagement but that hasnt been enough to dispel the concerns that you see in many parts of Europe, says Jeff Rathke, a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. There are such grave challenges that the U.S. and Europe faces that it only heightens the desire for additional clarity from Washington.

Pences stature within the administration was also under scrutiny because of the recent dismissal of Mr. Trumps national security adviser, retired Gen. Michael Flynn. Flynn was forced to resign Monday following reports he misled Pence about contacts with a Russian diplomat. The vice president learned that he had been misled through media accounts about two weeks after the president was informed.

After Flynns ouster, Mr. Trump has had trouble finding a replacement. Retired Vice Adm. Robert Harward turned down the post after the White House rejected Harwards request to hire his own staff, CBS News chief White House correspondent Major Garrett reported this week.

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CBS News has learned former CIA Director David Petraeus is no longer being considered for the position. One other candidate is Mr. Trumps acting National Security Adviser Keith Kellogg.

On Saturday, Mr. Trump was focused on his thank you rally in Melbourne, Florida, some three months after the election, CBS News correspondent Manuel Bojorquez reports. He said the crowds are expected to be massive.

Pence is also expected to meet with the leaders of Iraq and Afghanistan, where the U.S. is embroiled in two separate wars. Mr. Trump has made clear his intention to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. But he also said the U.S. may get a second chance to take Iraqi oil as compensation for its efforts in the war-torn country, a notion rebuffed by Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who will be meeting with the vice president.

Mr. Trumps immigration and refugee ban has ruffled feathers with a number of Muslim-majority countries affected by the order currently tied up in court, including Iraq - a close ally in the fight against ISIS.

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In Munich, the American allies were searching for clues from Pence as to how the Trump administration plans to deal with Russia in the aftermath of Flynns departure, U.S. inquiries into Russias involvement in the presidential election and Mr. Trumps past praise for Putin.

In his remarks, Pence also reinforced the Trump administrations message that NATO members must spend more on defense.

NATOs 28-member countries committed in 2014 to spending 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense within a decade. But only the U.S. and four other members of the post-World War II military coalition are meeting the standard, Pence said.

Failure to meet the commitment, he said, erodes the very foundation of our alliance.

Let me be clear on this point: The president of the United States expects our allies to keep their word, to fulfill this commitment and, for most, that means the time has come to do more, Pence said.

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Mike Pence promises to hold Russia accountable - CBS News

The vice president dodges the question of whether he believes in evolution but he has his own version of intelligent design as he rides the wave of a new kind of ignorance.

One of the first priorities of demagoguery is the fostering of ignorance. Lies require collaboration from those who are being lied to, and for a propaganda machine to be effective it needs a special kind of public ignorance.

This can happen in societies that otherwise seem to be sophisticated and highly advanced scientifically. Invariably the case of Germany in the early 1930s is cited as proof. That, however, carries the danger of false analogies and misses what is immediate and novel. Propaganda and the nurturing of ignorance have moved on apace since the Nazis and Joseph Goebbels.

The Trump White House is demonstrating in its own innovative ways just how far habitual lying can clear the way for the triumph of ideology over truth. This cant be simplified by charging Trump himself with being a pathological liar. His administration has invented a new and distinctly American propaganda machine that is built on lies. But not enough attention has been given to its willing partner in this exercise: a carefully nurtured kind of public ignorance that it can exploit.

One reason this isnt being discussed is that politicians are rightly wary of insulting any constituency by calling it ignorant. Hillary Clintons basket of deplorables was a disastrously patronizing misjudgment. But in the context of the Age of Trump, ignorance is not actually a pejorative term, its a description of a set of beliefs in which knowledge and truth are less persuasive than prejudice and fear.

This process began long before Trump decided to run. Years of talk radio diatribes fueled by Obama-phobia and Fox News harangues prepared the soil and then Breitbart, the alt-right, and fake news softened it further. Trump understood this better than anyone and harvested its fruits.

In fact, the bedrock beneath this process was much older and a uniquely American phenomenon, a widespread consensual ignorance. There is a strain of dogmatic religious activism here that does not exist to anything like the same extent in other advanced democracies. It uses religionor misuses religionto resist or rollback changes in social behavior and to suggest who the alien other should be.

This consensual ignorance involves accepting a set of ordained beliefs while at the same time rejecting others that are not ordained, no matter whether they are based on facts. What begins as a theological system easily slips into a secular one: the habit of denying what is an inconvenient truth or of simplifying a complex exterior world into stereotypical threats.

This is not the ignorance of unlearned knowledgeits more potent than that. Its a tutored ignorance, and in its most basic form its anti-scientific.

And that is why the present and future influence of Vice President Mike Pence needs to get close attention.

The Bible tells us that God created man in His own image, male and female; He created them, Pence has said. And I believe that God created the known universe, the Earth, and everything in it including man, and I also believe that some day, scientists will come to see that only the theory of intelligent design provides an even remotely rational explanation for the known universe.

Pence also argued that evolution should not be taught in schools without a parallel commentary of Biblical explanations as being equally valid.

With Pence in the White House it could be that control of the most scientifically advanced country in the world has now fallen into the hands of people to whom science is an enemy. The EPAs website has already been purged of any references to Obamas climate action plan and carbon pollution as a cause of climate change. Universities across the nation have teams working to safeguard masses of government data that contradicts White House dogma before it, too, is wiped.

Thats why this is a good moment to consult the man who, more than any other, had to struggle with how to argue that the advance of science was not a threat to the Christian faith, Charles Darwin.

The idea that when Darwin published On The Origin of Species in 1859 he provoked outrage from Biblical literalists is nonsense. Victorian Britain was a scientific powerhouse, science teaching was a key part of the drive toward universal public education and one branch of science in particular, paleontology, was assembling through the evidence of fossils a picture of the Earths evolution that already made the idea that our planet was only 6,000 years old risible. In the introduction to his book Darwin reviewed the work of 34 scientists who had paved the way for his breakthrough theory of natural selection.

Nonetheless the popular press took the opportunity to stir up a circulation-building debate between two sides cast as the sacred and profane. Cartoons appeared in which Darwin was half-man and half-ape, even though his revelatory theory, the tree of life, was more about the evolution of butterflies than about homo sapiens.

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Darwin was very careful to accept why Victorians might have problems grasping the scale of what he had revealed.

The belief that species were immutable productions was almost unavoidable as long as the history of the world was thought to be of short duration the chief cause of our natural willingness to admit that one species has given birth to clear and distinct species is that we are always slow in admitting great changes of which we do not see the steps.

After the first edition of On The Origin of Species had been subjected to review by his peers and publicly debated, Darwin incorporated some of the responses in later editions. One clergyman, Charles Kingsley, spoke for many who had no problem reconciling Darwins science with the work of the Creator. Darwin wrote of Kingsley: he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Diety to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.

Darwin himself was an agnostic. Whether he actually believed that the hidden architecture of life that he had described for the first time had divine origin doesnt really matter. He was not a dogmatic scientist. He was open-minded and prepared to concede to those like Kingsley if they were not dogmatists and were comfortable that their own beliefs were not under threatand recognized that science was an engine of social progress.

Darwin recalled that Sir Isaac Newton had been attacked for the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of the attraction of gravity by people who saw it as subversive of religion. Darwin himself was the beneficiary of a long-established British tolerance for unsettling scientific ideas. Science had not yet locked itself into the confines of a profession with its own hierarchy. From Newton onwards there were as many gentlemen amateurs probing for scientific truths as there were vocational scientists at work in Englandand some of them were clergymen.

All of which makes it strange that anyone today would think it reasonable to persist, as Pence does, with the idea of intelligent design. Indeed, Darwin saw that idea coming and dealt with it dismissively: It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the plan of creation unity of design etc and to think that we give an explanation when we only re-state a fact.

All along, Pence has been very careful not to make a specific denial of evolution. His classic evasion came in a 2009 interview with Chris Matthews on MSNBC:

Matthews: Do you believe in evolution, sir?

Pence: I embrace the view that God created the heavens and the earth and the seas and all thats in them.

Matthews: But do you believe in evolution as the way he did it?

Pence: The means, Chris, that He used to do that, I cant say.

Thats what intellectual cowardice sounds like as a politician dances within the boundaries of his base, and it becomes much more consequential now that that man is at the heart of White House policy makingPence is the essential conduit between Trump and the agenda of Congressional Republicans. He is also the quiet agent of the religious right, supported by fellow believer Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

This movement may sail under religious colors but its agenda reflects the way that religion has become a euphemism for atavism. Buried within the code of Make America Great Again there was always the promise of restoring a repressive social order.

When so-called fundamentalists and evangelists embrace a crotch-grabbing sexual predator they display a shameless level of cant but it doesnt seem to bother them. Is this really theology or a return to a kind of muscular Christianity based on a 1930s model of a white mans world? Whatever the truth, the primary targets are clear: Planned Parenthood, abortion clinics, voting rights, gun regulations, any extension of LGBT rights, and even roll back gay marriage.

There is no Darwin-like tolerance of opposing beliefs here. No open debate with enlightened values. The Christian right movement in this country has reached the level of an intrusive crusade, sensing that its moment has come, and is bent on policing the personal choices and lives of others, particularly women.

Trumps White House may be in chaos but that chaos hides the long game that Pence has the patience and guile to pursue. The continuing barrage of propaganda and outrageous lies still finds a ready audience among his constituency, where the mainstream media has no credibility. Consensual ignorance provides its own extensive comfort zone where yesterday has a lot more to recommend it than tomorrow.

Whether or not Pence really believes the earth is only 6,000 years old is immaterial. His version of intelligent design is really not about Old Testament divine creation but a new social orderor, rather, an old social order that was supposed to be long extinct.

Excerpt from:
Charles Darwin Would See Right Through Mike Pence - Daily Beast

Donald Trump.

Andrew HarrerPool/Getty Images

On Friday, the AP reported that the Trump administration is considering plans to mobilize 100,000 National Guard troops in 11 states to round up, detain, and deport undocumented immigrants. The memo, allegedly written by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and addressed to both Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, would militarize immigration enforcement in four states on the Mexican border and seven states contiguous to those four. Governors would be allowed to decide whether the National Guard in their state participated. The memo purports to serve as guidance for implementing the Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements executive order Trump issued in January. It has reportedly circulated among DHS staff for two weeks.

If implemented, this plan would clearly constitute a deportation forcethe kind that Trump boasted about during his campaign. The establishment Republicans who were brought in to sand down Trumps rougher edges, however, routinely denied that Trump said exactly what he indisputably said about his deportation force. Most notoriously, at the vice presidential debate, Tim Kaine described Trumps plan for a deportation force, and Mike Pence called his claim nonsense. Paul Ryan also told a DACA beneficiary that there would be no deportation force.

Now it appears that Trump may do precisely what he said he would do throughout his campaign. The White House promptly denied the AP story, and Press Secretary Sean Spicer told an AP reporter, I wish you guys asked before you tweeted on Friday morning. AP reporters say that they asked both the White House and the Department of Homeland Security for comment but were not answered. Perhaps we should take Friday mornings denials about as seriously as we took Pences and Ryans claims about the deportation force before Trump entered the Oval Office.

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Here's the Plan for the Deportation Force Pence and Ryan Denied Would Ever Exist - Slate Magazine (blog)

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Traveling on behalf of President Donald Trump, Mike Pence will meet with German ChancellorAngela Merkel in Germany at the Munich Security Conference. Pence will also speak at the conference. After Munich, Pence will travel to Brussels, Belgium, to meet with European Union and NATO representatives.

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The theme in both Munich and Brussels will be reassurance according to a senior White House foreign policy adviser. The Vice President will outline the United States priorities for the transatlantic relationship as well as allow him to forge personal relationships with Americas most valued allies and partners. Pence is expected to repeatedly emphasize the need for NATO allies to increase burden sharing and show that the organization has the capability to defend against threats.

During his speech to the Munich Security Conference, the vice president will seek to reassure allies of the United States commitment to European partners and the transatlantic alliance. VP Pence is scheduled to make the second speech on the day he addresses the conference. According to the senior adviser, Pence will reaffirm the U.S.s commitment to NATO that the country has met its obligations while also calling out some members. The aim is to accelerate the efforts of these members.

VP Pence is also expected to speak of conflicts in Eastern Ukraine and the Minsk agreement as a framework for peace between Ukraine and Russia.

The heavy emphasis on reassurance for U.S. allies will be used to remedy any possible divisions that have been derived through media, perceptions or otherwise, according to the adviser. If U.S. allies need reassurance, Pence will convey that the U.S. will be there for her allies as they have been there for her.

In Brussels, the vice president will meet with EU and NATO representativesaccording to the senior White House foreign policy adviser.

As for whether the administrations loss of Gen. Mike Flynn will impact the vice presidents trip, a senior administration official expressed surety that U.S. allies wont question Pences position to speak on behalf of the Trump administration on any matter.

The senior administration official made clear that Vice President Pence works in tandem with the president, is traveling on behalf of the president, and his role will be to represent President Trump.

Follow Michelle Moons on Twitter @MichelleDiana.

Excerpt from:
VP Mike Pence to Meet with Angela Merkel, Speak at Munich Security Conference - Breitbart News

Wall Street Journal (subscription)

Mike Pence Caught in Power Struggle Wall Street Journal (subscription) Mike Pence showed his clout inside the White House with the Monday firing of Mike Flynn, who allowed the vice president to espouse false information about the national security adviser's conversations with Russian officials. But Mr. Pence also learned ... Pence's sphere of influence questioned in wake of Flynn falloutCNN Trump: I fired Flynn because of what he told PenceCNBC Mike Pence's delayed knowledge of Flynn's fibs hint he is outside Trump's inner circleChicago Tribune NBCNews.com -BuzzFeed News -Business Insider -New York Times all 8,332 news articles »

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Mike Pence Caught in Power Struggle - Wall Street Journal (subscription)