More weird news from Trump's America

-

Another work week begins, and things in America under President Trump keep getting weirder by the day.

 The microwave ovens have eyes....

 Perhaps one of the loopiest bits of news that caught our eye this morning is Kellyanne Conway's claim that former President Obama could have easily surveilled Trump Tower during the 2016 Presidential election by using....microwave ovens. 

 That's right. You read that correctly. The controversial Counselor to the President defended President Donald Trump's unverified claims that the previous Administration wiretapped his phone system in a 21st Century version of the 1972 Watergate scandal by telling USA Today that there are microwave ovens that turn into cameras.

 As the British newspaper The Telegraph reported recently:

 "She explained on USA Today: “What I can say is there are many ways to surveil each other.
“You can surveil someone through their phones, certainly through their television sets — any number of ways.”
The advisor then claimed monitoring could be done with “microwaves that turn into cameras”, adding: “We know this is a fact of modern life.”
I think the President and Conway have watched too many episodes of Fox's classic techno-thriller TV series 24.   And, like Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), we call on the White House  to either show proof that President Obama really bugged the Trump Tower - or retract this absurd allegations. 
The American Right's love affair with....Russia
Back in the Bad Old Days of the Cold War, American conservatives would have rather jumped off the top floor of the Empire State Building before they said anything positive about any leader in the Russian Kremlin. In the early 1950s, you could find yourself summoned by the House Committee on Un-American Activities if anyone claimed you had said something nice about Joseph Stalin - even if you had said it when we were allied with the Soviet Union during World War II. 
Flash forward to 2017, when the Russian Federation is led by President Vladimir Putin, a former lieutenant colonel in the old KGB and unabashed nationalist who is waging a war by proxy in the former Soviet republic of Ukraine and using Russian ground forces and airpower to support Syrian dictator Bashir Assad in Syria's six-year-old civil war. 
Putin has also used his country's secret services and vast arrays of hackers and cyberwarriors to undermine the stability of such Western bulwarks of democracy as the European Union, NATO, and even the U.S. electoral process. Russia's state-owned RT is one of Putin's most powerful propaganda tools;  RT seeks to burnish Moscow's authoritarian image by disseminating the Kremlin's take on events in Russia and throughout the world, while at the same time creating "fake news" that benefit nationalist movements such as Marine Le Pen's National Front and Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders. 
Now, you'd think that the American ultra-conservative movement, with its emphasis on patriotism and a supposed love of freedom and democracy, would be against Putin, an unabashed authoritarian who invades and intimidates his neighbors and has little tolerance for human rights or democracy. 
Guess what? You'd be wrong. America's ultra-conservatives, including Fundamentalist Christians and Catholics, admire Putin and his way of doing things.
In this week's issue of Time magazine, staff writers Alex Altman and Elizabeth Dias report that Moscow is forging new alliances with influential Republican politicians, writers, and strategists, one of whom is a good friend of Stephen Bannon.
What would right-wing activists in the U.S. have in common with Putin's Russia? More than you might expect. Conservative Christianity has been one common touchstone. The dinner at the George Hotel, hosted by conservative activist and Rockefeller scion George O'Neill Jr., was part of the festivities surrounding the National Prayer Breakfast, an annual event run by evangelicals to forge new, if informal, diplomatic ties through shared spiritual principles. Evangelicals have discovered common ground with Moscow's nationalist and ultraconservative push--led by the Russian Orthodox Church--to make the post-Soviet nation a bulwark of Christianity amid the increasing secularization of the West.
Catholic leaders like Brian Brown have been impressed by the Russian Orthodox Church's decision to tighten policies on abortion and uphold traditional marriage. Since 2014, Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, has worked closely with the church and with Russian anti-abortion and antigay marriage activists like FamilyPolicy.ru. In late January, Brown visited Moscow to seek the Duma's support for his group's new manifesto on those issues. These new bonds with Russia have "been a sea change, both in my own view and also, I think, for many conservatives," Brown says. "Wherever there are folks standing up for marriage, we will meet with them."
So if you expect the Republican-controlled Congress to seriously investigate the Trump Administration's murky connections to Russia, don't hold your breath. 




Sources:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/13/kellyanne-conway-mocked-spy-microwaves-claims-interview-obama/
http://time.com/4696424/moscow-right-kremlin-republicans/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's 'It'?

-
Image
How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It  has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of  It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies.  The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s  Carrie  for director Brian De Palma in 1976),  It  was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like  11,22.63,  the TV version of It avoids the year ...
Read more

Talking About 'Band of Brothers' (HBO Miniseries): Why were there no black soldiers in the Band of Brothers TV miniseries?

-
Image
Band of Brothers,  sadly, reflects one of the sad realities of American society in the 1940s - racial segregation in the armed forces. Although there  were  a few all-Negro (as blacks were referred to in those days) units in the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces that served with distinction in the European Theater of Operations, most black servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in Supply of Services and other support forces. Most of these soldiers were truck drivers, anti-aircraft gunners, barrage balloon handlers, engineers, stevedores, clerks, cooks, corpsmen, and so on. Only late in the war (fall of 1944 and winter/spring 1945) did large numbers of black infantrymen see combat against German forces, and even then they served in all-black units commanded by white officers. © 2001 Home Box Office, Dreamworks SKG, and Play-Tone Pictures The 101st Airborne Division was an all-American unit made up of individuals from many different groups - Easy Company’...
Read more

'The Boy in Striped Pajamas' movie review

-
Image
(C) 2008 Miramax, Heyday Films, BBC Films Writer-director Mark Herman’s 2008 film “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” is a faithful but (necessarily) condensed adaptation of John Boyne’s 2007 novel about a German boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), who befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), an eight-year-old inmate in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.  Like Boyne’s novel, the film is not a definitive history of the Holocaust. It’s not as graphic or historically accurate as Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic “Schindler’s List,” nor was it intended to be. (Indeed, Herman says in the behind-the-scenes featurette “Friendship Beyond the Fence” that he doesn’t consider “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” to be a “Holocaust film.”) Set in the early 1940s at the height of Nazi Germany’s power, the film follows Bruno on a journey that takes him and his family from Berlin to German-occupied Poland. His father Ralf (David Thewlis) is a newly-promoted SS officer with a new posting: commandant...
Read more