US President-elect Donald Trump has told Russian President Vladimir Putin that he is looking forward to having a strong and enduring relationship with Russia.

Trump, Putin Agree to Normalize US-Russia Ties

Both Agree to Need to Improve ‘Extremely Unsatisfactory' Relations

by Jason Ditz, November 14, 2016 ANTIWAR

Officials have confirmed that Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President-elect Donald Trump spoke on the phone on Monday evening. Putin is said to have called Trump to congratulate him on winning last week’s presidential election.

The two are said to have agreed on the need to resolve “extremely unsatisfactory” Russo-American relations, planning for a personal meeting and joint work toward the normalization of ties between the two major nations. According to the Kremlin, the agreement was for a dialogue “on the basis of equality, mutual respect, and non-intervention in each other’s domestic affairs.”

Such a productive first phone call is unsurprising, as during the campaign Trump had talked of improving relations with Russia, and since the election Russian government officials have said they saw the election of Trump as America’s rejection of Hillary Clinton’s calls for further hostility toward Russia.

This is the first major attempt to improve relations between the two sides since the 2009 “reset,” which came in the wake of President Obama’s election. That reset was mostly forgotten by the late years of the Obama presidency, with the US launching a massive military buildup along Russia’s border in Eastern Europe, and the two sides engaged in a virtual proxy war in Syria.

While the 2009 “reset” was mostly aimed at getting access to Russian airspace for supply shipments for the Afghan War, the Trump normalization effort is likely to be much more ambitious, with Trump expressing his aversion to hostility toward nuclear-armed Russia, and already talking about a dramatic shift in Syria policy which would see the US ending support for the rebellion against Syria, a key Russian ally.

All conversations between Putin and Trump are likely to be heavily scrutinized, however, as the Clinton campaign didn’t just campaign on its own hostility toward Russia, but accused Russia of plotting to get Trump elected. With post-election acrimony within the US still high a week later, those allegations arr likely to remain a talking point for many opposed to normalization.

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Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz

• ICC Prosecutors: US Likely Committed War Crimes in Afghanistan - November 14th, 2016
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• Iraqi Kurdish Forces Destroying Arab Homes in Apparent War Crimes - November 13th, 2016
• 23 Civilians Killed Across Northern Syria as Fighting Resumes in Aleppo - November 13th, 2016
• Trump Likely to End US Backing of Syria Rebels, May Back Assad - November 13th, 2016

Lock Her Up - How the Neocons Lost - Trump Fought Them, Beat Them and Better Not Waiver Against Them

Neocons Trying to Sneak Into Trump Administration

Fiercely Opposed to His Election, ‘ Never Trump’ Crowd Now Seeks Influence

by Jason Ditz, November 11, 2016

It’s a cliche to say that the cushiest positions of influence in any US administration go to figures who were seen to have brought something to the table during the campaign. Yet with the election of Donald Trump, a lot of high-ranking neoconservatives are expecting the exact opposite, figuring that they can step right into positions of power and influence despite openly campaigning against Trump.

There are more than a few people who would normally be in line for top positions in a Republican White House, but who were very publicly part of the “Never Trump” crowd, attacking him throughout the primary and the general election. These same people are now making public their “willingness” to work with Trump.

In other words, they want the usual spoils of victory, but having positioned themselves as so firmly in opposition to Trump’s worldview, and to Trump in general, it’s not at all clear how willing Trump’s transition team is to consider such candidates for important positions.

The early indications are that a lot of the foreign policy-related positions are going to be going to high-ranking former military officials who backed Trump’s candidacy, with officials noting that long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have left them with a lot of such officials to choose from.

For many of the neocons, this is likely less about getting cushy jobs or fancy titles and more about ensuring that the US remains aggressively interventionist abroad. Indeed, many of these people split with Trump in the first place over concerns he was insufficiently hawkish, and now want jobs that would put them in a position to shift he new administration in those same hawkish directions.

Will Trumpism Save Western Civilization? Next France?

After Trump Win, Parallel Path Is Seen for Marine Le Pen of France’s Far Right

By ADAM NOSSITERNOV. 11, 2016 NY TIMES

Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Front party, spoke about the results of the American presidential election on Wednesday in Nanterre, near Paris.

November 12, 2016. Photo by Yoan Valat/European Pressphoto Agency. Watch in Times Video »

HÉNIN-BEAUMONT, France — It was a moment of intense French patriotism on a sunny Friday, Armistice Day. A band blared “La Marseillaise,” the national anthem. Shouts of “Vive la France!” filled the chilly November air. And there, too, was Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front party, beaming.

Before Donald J. Trump’s presidential victory in the United States this week, Ms. Le Pen was considered a disruptive political force but far from a true threat to become president herself when France votes next spring. Not anymore.

Since Wednesday, French news outlets, along with Ms. Le Pen’s mainstream political rivals, have been repeating the same thing: It could happen here.

And Ms. Le Pen is not alone. From the Balkans to the Netherlands, politicians on the far right have greeted the election of Mr. Trump with unrestrained delight and as a radical reconfiguring of the political landscape — not just in the United States, but in Europe as well.

They are seeing it as a sign that their time has finally arrived, and that the politics of heightened nationalism, immigrant-bashing and anti-globalization have overturned the pro-globalization, pro-immigration consensus.

“It shows that when the people really want something, they can get it,” Ms. Le Pen said in an interview on Friday in this far-right bastion, in France’s depressed postindustrial north.

“When the people want to retake their destiny in hand, they can do it, despite this ceaseless campaign of denigration and infantilization,” she said.

Far-right leaders competed in their fervor to support Mr. Trump. Those already in office, like Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, took the news of Mr. Trump’s victory as a vindication of their stances. Those seeking office, like Ms. Le Pen or Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, saw it as a hopeful sign for their own aspirations, proclaiming that a revolutionary new order was born this week.

That revolution, they said, has overthrown what they called the “elites” — the mainstream news media and establishment politicians — who are in a tacit alliance.

The enthusiasm of the far right was in striking contrast to the coolness of Europe’s mainstream leaders to the week’s news. Some of them, like Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, offered veiled criticism even as they sent Mr. Trump pro forma letters of congratulation.

“It’s the emergence of a new world,” Ms. Le Pen said, after being the first to lay a wreath at the monument here to France’s World War I dead. “It’s the end of the 20th century.”

Even more ecstatic was Mr. Wilders, leader of the Dutch far-right Freedom Party. “Congratulations! A historic victory! A revolution! We will return our country to the Dutch,” Mr. Wilders said on Wednesday on Twitter. He expanded on his thoughts in an op-ed for Breitbart, writing, “We are witnessing the same uprising on both sides of the Atlantic.”

Mr. Wilders, who sports his own Trumpian mane of swept blond hair, is on trial in the Netherlands on charges of hate speech for suggesting that the country was home to too many Moroccans. He refused to attend the trial or to disavow the remarks.

His party is allied with Ms. Le Pen’s National Front in the European Parliament, and both are staunchly anti-immigration. He attended several Trump rallies, and like Ms. Le Pen, he is seeking to be his country’s leader.

Populist leaders, not necessarily of the far right, who have mounted insurgent challenges to longstanding political orders were similarly buoyed by Mr. Trump’s victory, like Beppe Grillo, the leader of the Five Star Movement in Italy.

“They called us sexists, homophobes, demagogues and populists,” Mr. Grillo wrote in a blog post. “They don’t realize that millions of people already no longer read their newspapers and no longer watch their television.”

The idea that Mr. Trump’s supporters had delivered a double blow — to the establishment’s ideas and to the “elite” itself — had wide support.

“The left and the corrupt establishment, which considers itself so superior, are being punished blow by blow by the voters and voted out of various positions of responsibility,” said Heinz-Christian Strache, leader of the Freedom Party of Austria, a serious contender to win the country’s presidency on Dec. 4.

Ms. Le Pen in many ways stands as the most prominent leader of Europe’s far right. The French political establishment was in consensus this week that the news from the United States had put new wind in her political sails.

“Mrs. Le Pen could win in France,” said the former Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, usually known for his sobriety.

A cartoon on the front page of the leading daily Le Monde this week showed a grinning Mr. Trump giving the V for victory sign while a winged Ms. Le Pen happily flew away, with the caption, “Marine Le Pen feels wings grow.”

Some analysts, however, pointed out that she faces significant barriers.

For months, it has been an article of faith in France that Ms. Le Pen will reach the runoff in next year’s presidential elections, but will find it impossible to break through the 30-percent barrier that has roughly comprised the National Front’s share of the vote.

In France, voters on the left and right routinely join in the final round of voting, to form what is called a “republican front” to defeat the candidate of the far right.

Experts suggested on Friday that similar logic might operate next year, and that Ms. Le Pen is no Mr. Trump.

“Le Pen is the candidate of a party that is on the margins of the system,” said Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on Europe’s far-right parties. “Donald Trump was the candidate of the Republican Party. He had resources that were not comparable to hers.”

Ms. Le Pen was in friendly territory here on Friday in this worn, old former coal-mining town, where unemployment reaches 20 percent, twice the national average.

It is one of 11 or so towns in France ruled by the National Front, and it was difficult to find an opposing voice on Friday. “You’re a fantastic woman!” a woman called out to Ms. Le Pen as she ascended the steep steps of the old city hall building. Others crowded around to have cellphone pictures taken with her.

The National Front mayor here, Steeve Briois, is a favorite of Ms. Le Pen’s. 

“France is no longer France,” Mr. Briois said in his speech in the council chambers on Friday — the same line Mr. Trump used after the terrorist attack in Nice in July.

Mr. Briois said later he was aware that Mr. Trump had spoken those words, and he agreed with them.

“There is the same desire to change politics in France,” Mr. Briois said. As in the United States, he added, “a lot of French are victims of globalization and immigration.”

“So, we’ve got to change our politics,” he said. “And the only one who can do it is Marine Le Pen.”

They are not “Immigrants”. They are “Illegal Immigrants”

‘Unwavering strength': Alabama immigrants, advocates vow to fight Trump policies

Alabama

Carlos Ramos, an undocumented Mexican immigrant who illegally crossed the border into the United States in 2000 and now lives in Alexander City, said that though he is concerned about a Donald Trump presidency, he plans to fight back against any new anti-immigration policies.

"I feel like everybody; I feel scared, I feel sad. I can't believe it. But this happened in our state, in Alabama, and so many people left the state and got paranoid and some other people, we stood up and fought,” the 43-year-old said, referring to H.B. 56, a sweeping 2011 anti-immigration state law that caused some immigrants to leave Alabama.

At the time, the state was on the cutting edge of a GOP-led experiment in instituting harsh laws to encourage "self deportation" that many see echoed in president-elect Donald Trump's immigration proposals. Ramos said the Latino and immigrant communities in Alabama are stronger as a result of having made it through the crackdown.

"This is going to be the whole country," said Ramos, "but I feel some good things will happen because we need more people and this a good time to get out and do something. We have to be prepared to fight, not to leave."

'Unwavering strength'

It does worry us, but at the same time we have gone through very dark and tough times

Immigrants and their advocates across the United States were stunned by the election of Donald Trump as America’s 45^th president Tuesday, a development that many people believe poses an existential threat to the nation's ranks of undocumented immigrants.

But in Alabama, representatives of pro-immigrant groups say that they and even some of the undocumented immigrants they work with are not as concerned as some of their counterparts in other states.

That confidence and lower level of panic is rooted in the fact that Alabama’s immigrant community has already lived through H.B. 56, which was widely described as the country's harshest immigration law at the time.

An expansive piece of legislation, it required local police to question people they believed might be undocumented immigrants, made it illegal to rent a home to an unauthorized immigrant and even asked schools to inquire about the immigration status of students.

Though the time under H.B. 56 was one of fear and uncertainty for many Alabama immigrants that compelled thousands to move out of the state, those who remained say they were emboldened by the experience.

Yazmin Contreras, a community organizer at Adelante Alabama Worker Center, a nonprofit immigrant rights organization headquartered in Hoover, said there is real concern about what immigration policies Trump – who has proposed mass deportations and building a massive wall on the Mexican border – may push.

"There are some people that are obviously worried about what immigration will look like under a Trump presidency," Contreras, who is a daughter of Mexican immigrants, said Wednesday. “I think that the unknown is the part people are most worried about because no one really knows what a Trump presidency will look like and what he will do in office."

The Birmingham-based Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice (ACIJ) seconded those concerns in a Wednesday statement, but like Adelante, its members believe that Alabama’s immigrant community is uniquely suited to respond to any harsh immigration laws under Trump.

"With the unexpected news of a soon-to-be Trump presidency, most in our community became worried for their futures, panicked even," the ACIJ statement said. “But with only a few hours to digest this harsh reality, what has emerged from our community is unwavering strength and resilience."

‘Dark and tough times'

Contreras said that the H.B. 56 battles taught her and many other Alabama advocates and immigrants that mass deportation and other anti-immigration measures will never actually be implemented in the U.S., and that that gives the state’s pro-immigrant movement strength and resolve.

“It does worry us, but at the same time we have gone through very dark and tough times, and I think if anything the nation will see what we experienced at the local level here," she said.

"H.B. 56 was created to scare people off and get rid of the undocumented immigrants in this state, and I think people quickly realized we are part of this state and this economy and that we helped build this place. So I don't think that as a nation that is going to happen. He's not going to be able to deport 11 million people, and as far as the wall – that would cost how many millions?"

So immigrants and their advocates like Contreras and Ramos and ACIJ Executive Director Sarai Portillo say they will stand and fight as they did back in 2011.

"This is the beginning of a new era," Portillo said. "This is the continuation of the struggle for respect for rebel dignity, for respect and appreciation for human rights as citizens or undocumented migrants, and for respect for the struggles of our predecessors in this country. We will go ahead, with no room for doubt."

Playing Nice Won’t Work - Not with the Left, not with the Elite and not with the Permanently Offended

Do We Need the Advice of George Will?

A Disruptive yet Ruinous Triumph for the GOP

November 9, 2016 1:32 PM

Will the Republican party learn the wrong lessons from its election victory?

At dawn Tuesday in West Quoddy Head, Maine, America’s easternmost point, it was certain that by midnight in Cape Wrangell, Alaska, America’s westernmost fringe, there would be a loser who deserved to lose and a winner who did not deserve to win. The surprise is that Barack Obama must have immediately seen his legacy, a compound of stylistic and substantive arrogance, disappearing, as though written on water in ink of vapor.

His health-care reform has contributed to three Democratic drubbings. The 2010 and 2014 wave elections, like scythes in a wheat field, decapitated a rising generation of potential party leaders. Then came Tuesday’s earthquake, which followed shocking increases of Obamacare’s prices. This law has been as historic as Obama thinks, but not as he thinks: It might be the last gasp of progressivism’s hubris expressed in continentwide social engineering imposed from the continent’s eastern edge. Hillary Clinton’s proposed solution to Obamacare’s accelerating unraveling was a “public option”: intensified government manipulation to correct the consequences of government manipulation of health care’s 18 percent of the economy. Her campaign’s other defining proposal, “free” tuition in public higher education, insulted the intelligence of voters aware that “free” means “paid for by others, including you.”

Obama’s foreign-policy legacy, aside from mounting chaos worldwide, was the Iran nuclear agreement. By precedent and constitutional norms, this should have been a treaty submitted to the Senate. Instead, disdainfully and characteristically, he produced it as an executive agreement. Because the agreement lacks legitimizing ratification by senators, the president-elect will feel uninhibited concerning his promise to repudiate it.

The simultaneous sickness of both parties surely reveals a crisis of the American regime. The GOP was easily captured, and then quickly normalized, by history’s most unpleasant and unprepared candidate, whose campaign was a Niagara of mendacities. And the world’s oldest party contrived to nominate someone who lost to him.

EDITORIAL: President-Elect Trump

To an electorate clamoring for disruptive change, Democrats offered a candidate as familiar as faded wallpaper. The party produced no plausible alternative to her joyless, stained embodiment of arrogant entitlement. And she promised to intensify the progressive mentality. “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep it”? Actually, you can’t even keep your light bulbs.

Americans perennially complain about Washington gridlock, but for seven decades they have regularly produced gridlock’s prerequisite — divided government. From 1944 through 2016, 22 of 37 elections gave at least one house of Congress to the party not holding the presidency; since 1954, 21 of 32 did; since 1994, eight of twelve. Republicans now lack excuses: If 40 Democratic senators block repeal of Obamacare (or Supreme Court nominees), the Republicans’ populist base will demand Democratic behavior — revision of Senate rules to make this body more majoritarian.

For constitutional conservatives, the challenge is exactly what it would have been had Clinton won.

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For constitutional conservatives, the challenge is exactly what it would have been had Clinton won: to strengthen the rule of law by restoring institutional equilibrium. This requires a Republican Congress to claw back from a Republican executive the legislative powers that Congress has ceded to the administrative state, and to overreaching executives like Obama, whose executive unilateralism the president-elect admires.

From Clinton’s nastiest aspiration, we are now safe. She promised Supreme Court justices who would reverse Citizens United, thereby eviscerating the First Amendment by empowering the political class to regulate the quantity, content, and timing of campaign speech about itself. This will never happen.

RELATED: What Now, Mr. President?

Demography need not dictate for Republicans a grim destiny but it soon will, unless they act to counter adverse trends. Republicans should absorb Tim Alberta’s data in National Review: Arizona whites have gone from 74 percent to 54 percent of the population in 25 years; minorities will be a majority there by 2022. Texas minorities became a majority in 2004; whites are now 43 percent of the population. Nevada is 52 percent white and projected to be majority-minority in 2020. Georgia is 54 percent white, heading for majority-minority in 2026. Because of inexorably rising minorities, Clinton, an epically untalented candidate, did better than Obama did in 2012 in Georgia, Texas, Arizona, and where one in eight Americans lives — California.

The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on, perhaps soon to inscribe this: In 2016, Republicans won a ruinous triumph that convinced them that they can forever prosper by capturing an ever-larger portion of an ever-smaller portion of the electorate.

This kamikaze arithmetic of white nationalism should prompt the president-elect to test his followers’ devotion to him by asking their permission to see the national tapestry as it is and should be.

— George Will is a Pulitzer Prize–winning syndicated columnist. His e-mail address is georgewill@washpost.com. © 2016 Washington Post Writers Group

Trump Won - He defeated Bush, Obama and Clinton and Liberated the American People from The Permanent War Party

The Democratic Party Establishment Is Finished

What a joke.

By Jim Newell SLATE

The Democrats will now control next to nothing above the municipal level. Donald Trump will be president. We are going to be unpacking this night for the rest of our lives, and lives beyond that. We can’t comprehend even 1 percent of what’s just happened. But one aspect of it, minor in the overall sweep, that I’m pretty sure we can comprehend well enough right now: The Democratic Party establishment has beclouded itself and is finished.

I think of the lawmakers, the consultants, the operatives, and—yes—the center-left media, and how everything said over the past few years leading up to this night was bullshit.

The midterm losses? That was just a bad cycle, structurally speaking; presidential demographics would make up for it. The party establishment made a grievous mistake rallying around Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t just a lack of recent political seasoning. She was a bad candidate, with no message beyond heckling the opposite sideline. She was a total misfit for both the politics of 2016 and the energy of the Democratic Party as currently constituted. She could not escape her baggage, and she must own that failure herself.

Theoretically smart people in the Democratic Party should have known that. And yet they worked giddily to clear the field for her. Every power-hungry young Democrat fresh out of law school, every rising lawmaker, every old friend of the Clintons wanted a piece of the action. This was their ride up the power chain. The whole edifice was hollow, built atop the same unearned sense of inevitability that surrounded Clinton in 2008, and it collapsed, just as it collapsed in 2008, only a little later in the calendar. The voters of the party got taken for a ride by the people who controlled it, the ones who promised they had everything figured out and sneeringly dismissed anyone who suggested otherwise. They promised that Hillary Clinton had a lock on the Electoral College. These people didn’t know what they were talking about, and too many of us in the media thought they did.

We should blame all those people around the Clintons more than the Clintons themselves, and the Clintons themselves deserve a ridiculous amount of blame. Hillary Clinton was just an ambitious person who wanted to be president. There are a lot of people like that. But she was enabled. The Democratic establishment is a club unwelcoming to outsiders, because outsiders don’t first look out for the club. The Clintons will be gone now. For the sake of the country, let them take the hangers-on with them.

What was the line? Hillary Clinton would do well in a general election, because she’d been “vetted” for 20-some years and there was nothing new Republicans could try? Just writing that, I recognize that it’s the funniest line I’ve ever seen, and yet it was the exact argument Clinton used in two separate campaigns for the Democratic nomination.

The ace ground game, the brilliant ad-makers, the top Hollywood talent, and the best analytics operation ever assembled? This was all a joke. The best analytics team in the world, apparently, couldn’t find in their numbers that it was worth making a single stop to Wisconsin following the convention in a campaign against a Republican whose base appeal was in the Rust Belt. Not that an extra visit would have changed the result.

Think of how wrong the entire national media conversation was—and yes, I contributed my fair share—about how the Republicans were being torn apart as a party. I prewrote a piece Tuesday afternoon, to be published in the event of the expected Clinton win, pushing back against both myself and other members of the media, arguing that Democrats and Republicans were both in existential trouble and that, in the short-term context of a decaying political system, Republicans might even have the edge: Democrats could win the presidency most of the time but never a majority of state governments or the House; while Republicans could always win the majority of state governments and the House, and occasionally—probably in 2020, I thought—the White House. This was wrong. Republicans don’t have a slight edge over Democrats in a decaying political system. 

Republicans are ascendant. Trump has given them a mission. The country is now theirs.

Whoever takes over what’s left of the Democratic Party is going to have to find a way to appeal to a broader cross section of the country. It may still be true that in the long term, Republicans can’t win with their demographics, but we found out Tuesday that the long term is still pretty far away. Democrats have to win more white voters. They have to do so in a way that doesn’t erode the anti-racist or anti-sexist planks of the modern party, which are non-negotiable. If only there were a model for this.

The few Democratic leaders who remain are going to say that it was just a bad note struck here or there, or the lazy Bernie voters who didn’t show up, or Jim Comey, or unfair media coverage of Clinton’s emails, to blame for this loss. I am already seeing Democrats blaming the Electoral College, which until a few hours ago was hailed as the great protector of Democratic virtue for decades to come, and Republicans were silly for not understanding how to crack the blue “wall.” They will say, just wait for Republicans to overreach. Then we’ll be fine.

Don’t listen to any of this. Everything is not OK. This is not OK.

Read more Slate coverage of the 2016 campaign.

Is This the Campaign Hillary Clinton Wanted?

By Jim Newell

TRUMP WILL WIN!