Tuesday, May 31, 2016
IAVA CEO: Trump offered money, we ‘politely’ declined | MSNBC
"Founder and CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, Paul Rieckhoff, shares if Donald Trump donated to their organization and also comments on how congress is trying to cut the GI Bill for the first time in history."
IAVA CEO: Trump offered money, we ‘politely’ declined | MSNBC
Monday, May 30, 2016
The pragmatic progressive: what sets Obama apart from Bernie Sanders
"With his efforts to overhaul healthcare and crack down on Wall Street, the president has demonstrated the benefits of practicality and compromise"
The pragmatic progressive: what sets Obama apart from Bernie Sanders
Sunday, May 29, 2016
Chinese detergent firm says media 'over-reacting' to racist ad | World news | The Guardian
"A Chinese laundry detergent company has blamed foreign media for stirring up controversy over an advertisement in which a black man “washed” by its product was transformed into a fairer-skinned Asian man.
Shanghai Leishang Cosmetics said it strongly condemned racial discrimination but blamed foreign media for amplifying controversy over the advertisement, which first appeared on Chinese social media in March but was pulled after it drew protests this week following media reports.
“We express regret that the ad should have caused a controversy,” the statement issued late on Saturday read. “But we will not shun responsibility for controversial content.”
“We express our apology for the harm caused to the African people because of the spread of the ad and the over-amplification by the media,” the company said.
“We sincerely hope the public and the media will not over-read it.”
The ad for Qiaobi laundry detergent drops shows a black man entering a room and attempting to flirt with an Asian woman.
He is carrying a pail of paint, wears dirty clothes and has a soiled face. She feeds him a detergent drop and stuffs his body into a top-loading washer. When the cycle completes, a fair-skinned Asian man in a clean white T-shirt emerges to the delight of the woman.
When speaking to the Chinese nationalist newspaper The Global Times, a Mr Wang of Leishang said the critics were “too sensitive”, and the issue of racial discrimination never came up during the production of the video."
Chinese detergent firm says media 'over-reacting' to racist ad | World news | The Guardian
Rise of Donald Trump Tracks Growing Debate Over Global Fascism - The New York Times
"Charles Grant, the director of the Center for European Reform, in London, distinguished between far-right nationalist parties like Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France and actual fascism.
“Historically, it means the demonization of minorities within a society to the extent that they feel insecure,” he said. “It means encouraging the use of violence against critics. It means a bellicose foreign policy that may lead to war, to excite a nationalist feeling. It takes xenophobia to extremes. And it is contemptuous of a rules-based liberal order.”
Rise of Donald Trump Tracks Growing Debate Over Global Fascism - The New York Times
Saturday, May 28, 2016
Friday, May 27, 2016
Seventeen Words That Spelled Trouble for Hillary Clinton - The New Yorker . This, I think is is actually very reasonable. I alway did this at work. I used my account to send and store my emails for exactly the same reason. "“We should talk about putting you on state email or releasing your email address to the department so you are not going to spam.” (Apparently, some messages from Clinton’s private account were being intercepted by the department’s spam filter.) Clinton replied to Abedin, “Let’s get separate address or device but I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible.
Chinese detergent brand Qiaobi (俏比) ad OMG, this is the most bizarre, offensive and racist commercial I have seen in years. The racist content is pathetically ignorant and backwards and has that annoying Chinese cultural view that it is OK to present men and women as having the mind's of children. What does it say about the intended audience? This is very sad. Wow. I am reminded of the Donny Hathaway song "The World is a Ghetto
Thursday, May 26, 2016
Warren slams Trump as ‘small, insecure man’ for housing position The Morning Joe panel weighs in on Elizabeth Warren’s blistering critique of Donald Trump’s controversial housing comments and assesses whether her attacks will hold ground. - Morning Joe - Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski & Willie Geist on msnbc
Wednesday, May 25, 2016
Donald Trump: The president ISIS wants? Former Senior White House advisor Richard A. Clarke joins Lawrence O'Donnell to offer his assessment of Trump’s foreign policy after “New York Times” columnist Thomas Friedman said ISIS wants Donald Trump to become president because he would "inflame the situation
Albuquerque cops use smoke, horses after anti-Trump protests turn tense | MSNBC
"Albuquerque police threw smoke canisters and used what appeared to be pepper spray on crowds Tuesday after anti-Donald Trump protesters threw rocks and bottles at officers, officials said.
Albuquerque cops use smoke, horses after anti-Trump protests turn tense | MSNBC
There were no arrests during protests outside the Trump rally as of around 9 p.m. local time, (11 p.m. ET) police said. At around 8 p.m., protesters rushed past a barricade and officers in riot gear were called in to block the locked entrance of the venue."
Tuesday, May 24, 2016
A Baffling, Hard-line Choice in Israel - The New York Times
"Avigdor Lieberman’s previous stints as Israel’s foreign minister under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were a disaster for Israeli-American relations. Mr. Lieberman’s ultranationalist positions on Palestinians, settlements and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rendered him effectively unwelcome in Washington and toxic to Palestinians. Yet to shore up his coalition in the Israeli Parliament, Mr. Netanyahu has now offered Mr. Lieberman the office of minister of defense — widely considered to be the second most powerful position in the Israeli government, with a critical role in dealing with the United States and the Palestinians."
A Baffling, Hard-line Choice in Israel - The New York Times
A Baffling, Hard-line Choice in Israel - The New York Times
Despite Obama’s Moves, Asian Nations Skeptical of U.S. Commitment - The New York Times
"SINGAPORE — When President Obama announced Monday that he was ending a half-century-long arms embargo against Vietnam, it was another milestone in his long-running ambition to recast America’s role in Asia — a “pivot” as he once called it, designed to realign America’s foreign policy so it can reap the benefits of Asia’s economic and strategic future.
Yet as Mr. Obama’s time in office comes to an end, Asian nations are deeply skeptical about how much they can rely on Washington’s commitment and staying power in the region. They sense that for the first time in memory, Americans are questioning whether their economic and defense interests in Asia are really that vital.
Mr. Obama is the first president to have grown up in the region — he lived in Indonesia as an elementary school student — and he has never doubted that America is underinvested in Asia and overinvested in the Middle East.
In visit after visit, he has capitalized on the palpable nervousness about Beijing’s intentions while also cautioning that China’s growing influence and power are unstoppable forces of history. In Mr. Obama’s view, that means both the United States and the rest of the region will have to both accommodate and channel China’s ambitions rather than make a futile attempt to contain them, while reassuring the Chinese of America’s peaceful intentions.
At the core, the policy has been building on the two-decade-old opening to Vietnam; the establishment of a new relationship with Myanmar as it lurches toward democracy; closer relations with the two largest treaty allies in the region, Japan and South Korea; and renewed military ties with the Philippines. The administration has also pushed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would set new terms for trade and business investment among the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim nations.
Vietnamese waved flags on Monday as President Obama’s limousine arrived at the presidential palace compound in Hanoi. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
Perhaps most important, Mr. Obama has received unexpected help from the Chinese themselves, who have so overplayed their hand in the South China Sea that smaller neighbors suddenly took a new interest in deepening their relations with Washington.
Countering those developments, though, is the American political mood, which has darkened toward longstanding alliances and international trade itself. For Asian allies, this means the United States might pivot away.
“Every country in Asia views the problem differently, and through their own lenses, but they all see a twofold risk of things getting out of balance quickly,” Kurt M. Campbell, one of the architects of Mr. Obama’s strategy in his first term, said on Monday. “One is that China seriously overplays its nationalism” and that conflict breaks out in the South China Sea.
But Mr. Campbell, who is about to publish an account of Mr. Obama’s efforts titled “The Pivot: The Future of American Statecraft in Asia,” also noted that Asian nations were equally worried that America is no longer willing to be a steadying power.
“Asian countries are prone to anxiety about the behavior of major powers, for good reasons — they have seen a lot go wrong over the past thousand years,” said Daniel R. Russel, the assistant secretary of state for Asia. “And now there is angst about what comes next and the sustainability of the rebalance.”
Despite Obama’s Moves, Asian Nations Skeptical of U.S. Commitment - The New York Times
Yet as Mr. Obama’s time in office comes to an end, Asian nations are deeply skeptical about how much they can rely on Washington’s commitment and staying power in the region. They sense that for the first time in memory, Americans are questioning whether their economic and defense interests in Asia are really that vital.
Mr. Obama is the first president to have grown up in the region — he lived in Indonesia as an elementary school student — and he has never doubted that America is underinvested in Asia and overinvested in the Middle East.
In visit after visit, he has capitalized on the palpable nervousness about Beijing’s intentions while also cautioning that China’s growing influence and power are unstoppable forces of history. In Mr. Obama’s view, that means both the United States and the rest of the region will have to both accommodate and channel China’s ambitions rather than make a futile attempt to contain them, while reassuring the Chinese of America’s peaceful intentions.
At the core, the policy has been building on the two-decade-old opening to Vietnam; the establishment of a new relationship with Myanmar as it lurches toward democracy; closer relations with the two largest treaty allies in the region, Japan and South Korea; and renewed military ties with the Philippines. The administration has also pushed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would set new terms for trade and business investment among the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim nations.
Vietnamese waved flags on Monday as President Obama’s limousine arrived at the presidential palace compound in Hanoi. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
Perhaps most important, Mr. Obama has received unexpected help from the Chinese themselves, who have so overplayed their hand in the South China Sea that smaller neighbors suddenly took a new interest in deepening their relations with Washington.
Countering those developments, though, is the American political mood, which has darkened toward longstanding alliances and international trade itself. For Asian allies, this means the United States might pivot away.
“Every country in Asia views the problem differently, and through their own lenses, but they all see a twofold risk of things getting out of balance quickly,” Kurt M. Campbell, one of the architects of Mr. Obama’s strategy in his first term, said on Monday. “One is that China seriously overplays its nationalism” and that conflict breaks out in the South China Sea.
But Mr. Campbell, who is about to publish an account of Mr. Obama’s efforts titled “The Pivot: The Future of American Statecraft in Asia,” also noted that Asian nations were equally worried that America is no longer willing to be a steadying power.
“Asian countries are prone to anxiety about the behavior of major powers, for good reasons — they have seen a lot go wrong over the past thousand years,” said Daniel R. Russel, the assistant secretary of state for Asia. “And now there is angst about what comes next and the sustainability of the rebalance.”
Despite Obama’s Moves, Asian Nations Skeptical of U.S. Commitment - The New York Times
U.S. Strike on Taliban Leader Is Seen as a Message to Pakistan - The New York Times
"By using the military’s Joint Special Operations Command rather than the C.I.A. to carry out the attack, the United States denied Pakistan the fig leaf of a covert operation, which in the past has given the Pakistanis the ability to claim they had been consulted beforehand.
The fact that the top official of Afghanistan’s Taliban was able to travel freely through Pakistan, and even into Iran, contradicted years of denials by Pakistani officials that they were harboring Taliban leaders. Mr. Obama offered no apology for the decision to strike Mullah Mansour in Pakistani territory, saying it was a simple case of self-defense.
“He is an individual who as head of the Taliban was specifically targeting U.S. personnel and troops inside of Afghanistan who are there as part of the mission I have set to maintain a counterterrorism platform and provide assistance,” Mr. Obama said during a news conference in Hanoi, Vietnam. Killing Mullah Mansour, Mr. Obama said, sent a message that “we’re going to protect our people.”
U.S. Strike on Taliban Leader Is Seen as a Message to Pakistan - The New York Times
The fact that the top official of Afghanistan’s Taliban was able to travel freely through Pakistan, and even into Iran, contradicted years of denials by Pakistani officials that they were harboring Taliban leaders. Mr. Obama offered no apology for the decision to strike Mullah Mansour in Pakistani territory, saying it was a simple case of self-defense.
“He is an individual who as head of the Taliban was specifically targeting U.S. personnel and troops inside of Afghanistan who are there as part of the mission I have set to maintain a counterterrorism platform and provide assistance,” Mr. Obama said during a news conference in Hanoi, Vietnam. Killing Mullah Mansour, Mr. Obama said, sent a message that “we’re going to protect our people.”
U.S. Strike on Taliban Leader Is Seen as a Message to Pakistan - The New York Times
Monday, May 23, 2016
Sunday, May 22, 2016
‘Negro,’ ‘Oriental’ and ‘Indian’ to Be Scrubbed From All Federal Laws - The Root
"As the country begins to reconcile its sometimes inglorious past, as with Confederate statues and heroes being swept into the dustbin of history, President Barack Obama signed a bill taking racially offensive words such as “negro” and “Oriental” out of all Federal laws, reports Mediate.
‘Negro,’ ‘Oriental’ and ‘Indian’ to Be Scrubbed From All Federal Laws - The Root
Sponsored by Congresswoman from Queens, N.Y., Grace Meng, bill H.R.4238 (co-sponsored by all 51 members of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus) will strike words such as “Negro, American Indian, Eskimo, Oriental, or Aleut or a Spanish speaking individual of Spanish descent” and replace them with “Asian American, Native Hawaiian, a Pacific Islander, African American, Hispanic, Puerto Rican, Native American, or an Alaska Native.”
‘Negro,’ ‘Oriental’ and ‘Indian’ to Be Scrubbed From All Federal Laws - The Root
Israel’s Army Goes to War With Its Politicians - The New York Times
"TEL AVIV — IN most countries, the political class supervises the defense establishment and restrains its leaders from violating human rights or pursuing dangerous, aggressive policies. In Israel, the opposite is happening. Here, politicians blatantly trample the state’s values and laws and seek belligerent solutions, while the chiefs of the Israel Defense Forces and the heads of the intelligence agencies try to calm and restrain them.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s offer last week of the post of defense minister to Avigdor Lieberman, a pugnacious ultranationalist politician, is the latest act in the war between Mr. Netanyahu and the military and intelligence leaders, a conflict that has no end in sight but could further erode the rule of law and human rights, or lead to a dangerous, superfluous military campaign."
Israel’s Army Goes to War With Its Politicians - The New York Times
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s offer last week of the post of defense minister to Avigdor Lieberman, a pugnacious ultranationalist politician, is the latest act in the war between Mr. Netanyahu and the military and intelligence leaders, a conflict that has no end in sight but could further erode the rule of law and human rights, or lead to a dangerous, superfluous military campaign."
Israel’s Army Goes to War With Its Politicians - The New York Times
An Openly Gay Man Runs the Army - The New York Times
"Last week an openly gay man, Eric Fanning, became secretary of the Army. Read that sentence again and contemplate what it reveals about how much and how quickly American society has changed. Only five years ago, openly gay people were barred from serving in its armed forces. During Mr. Fanning’s lengthy confirmation process, his sexual orientation was simply not an issue. That is a tribute to those who fought so hard to repeal the ban, and a measure of the nation’s at times uncertain, but as yet unfailing, march toward equality.
In retrospect the fight that convulsed this country over whether gay Americans should serve in uniform seems senseless, almost absurd. Yet it is instructive, if only because a Pentagon plan to allow transgender Americans to serve openly in uniform remains stalled by a similar, albeit quieter, debate.
There is broad agreement that prohibiting openly gay people from serving was a cruel policy that abetted bigotry. It legitimized the notion that being gay was shameful and incompatible with the valorous profession of arms. It cut short the careers of talented people who had been performing vital work in wartime, which weakened the military.
It is embarrassing now, even shocking, to revisit the arguments and laments of those who sought to keep the military gay-free.
In 2007, Gen. Peter Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Chicago Tribune, “I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts.” A year later, Elaine Donnelly, who founded an advocacy group that has sought futilely to keep military personnel policy frozen in the mores of the 1950s, warned during a congressional hearing about “a sexualized atmosphere in our armed forces.” She expressed alarm about “forced cohabitation” and the spread of H.I.V.
Two years after that, when Congress appeared to be on the brink of repealing the ban, Gen. James Amos, then the commandant of the Marine Corps, cautioned that openly gay troops would be a distraction that could cost lives on the battlefield. “We’ve got Marines at Walter Reed with no limbs,” he pleaded in a last-ditch effort to keep service members in the closet. Senator John McCain indulged the general’s fearmongering. “Today is a very sad day,” Mr. McCain said somberly during the Senate debate on Dec. 18, 2010, as he acknowledged that he and other like-minded lawmakers had been outgunned.
The policy was repealed without a hitch. It didn’t result in weakened unit cohesion, lower morale or missing limbs. As service members came out to their supervisors, they were embraced. “Millennials just don’t care about sexuality the way past generations did,” said Lt. Col. Paul Larson, a straight Army infantry officer. “The rest of us didn’t care. We all knew gays were serving with distinction.”
The controversy over lifting the exclusion of openly transgender service members has been less caustic and less public. After Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter pledged last July to repeal that ban within six months, a few senior military officials pushed back. They steered clear of framing their misgivings on morality grounds, instead voicing concerns about “military readiness” and unit cohesion. Gen. Mark Milley, the Army chief of staff, has been one of the leading skeptics at the Pentagon. In a recent interview, he said that “serious, significant issues need to be completely vetted and studied” before transgender people are allowed to serve openly. “I have to focus on the readiness of the force,” he said.
Those concerns cannot be indulged any longer at the expense of the civil rights and dignity of Americans who volunteered to serve in wartime. There is every reason to believe that repealing the transgender ban will be seamless. The Pentagon already has a blueprint of what it would take. Mr. Fanning, who was the first senior defense official to endorse military service by openly transgender people, is well positioned to help overcome the lingering misgivings of those upholding the Pentagon’s last discriminatory personnel policy.
“I’m ecstatic,” said Staff Sgt. Patricia King, a soldier in Colorado Springs who was the first person in the infantry to transition on the job.“To know that the secretary of the Army is supportive of open trans service, supportive of me not only as a soldier but as a person, is a comforting feeling.”
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
A version of this editorial appears in print on May 22, 2016, on page SR8 of the New York edition with the headline: An Openly Gay Man Runs the Army. Today's Paper|Subscribe
Continue reading the main story"
An Openly Gay Man Runs the Army - The New York Times
In retrospect the fight that convulsed this country over whether gay Americans should serve in uniform seems senseless, almost absurd. Yet it is instructive, if only because a Pentagon plan to allow transgender Americans to serve openly in uniform remains stalled by a similar, albeit quieter, debate.
There is broad agreement that prohibiting openly gay people from serving was a cruel policy that abetted bigotry. It legitimized the notion that being gay was shameful and incompatible with the valorous profession of arms. It cut short the careers of talented people who had been performing vital work in wartime, which weakened the military.
It is embarrassing now, even shocking, to revisit the arguments and laments of those who sought to keep the military gay-free.
In 2007, Gen. Peter Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Chicago Tribune, “I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts.” A year later, Elaine Donnelly, who founded an advocacy group that has sought futilely to keep military personnel policy frozen in the mores of the 1950s, warned during a congressional hearing about “a sexualized atmosphere in our armed forces.” She expressed alarm about “forced cohabitation” and the spread of H.I.V.
Two years after that, when Congress appeared to be on the brink of repealing the ban, Gen. James Amos, then the commandant of the Marine Corps, cautioned that openly gay troops would be a distraction that could cost lives on the battlefield. “We’ve got Marines at Walter Reed with no limbs,” he pleaded in a last-ditch effort to keep service members in the closet. Senator John McCain indulged the general’s fearmongering. “Today is a very sad day,” Mr. McCain said somberly during the Senate debate on Dec. 18, 2010, as he acknowledged that he and other like-minded lawmakers had been outgunned.
The policy was repealed without a hitch. It didn’t result in weakened unit cohesion, lower morale or missing limbs. As service members came out to their supervisors, they were embraced. “Millennials just don’t care about sexuality the way past generations did,” said Lt. Col. Paul Larson, a straight Army infantry officer. “The rest of us didn’t care. We all knew gays were serving with distinction.”
The controversy over lifting the exclusion of openly transgender service members has been less caustic and less public. After Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter pledged last July to repeal that ban within six months, a few senior military officials pushed back. They steered clear of framing their misgivings on morality grounds, instead voicing concerns about “military readiness” and unit cohesion. Gen. Mark Milley, the Army chief of staff, has been one of the leading skeptics at the Pentagon. In a recent interview, he said that “serious, significant issues need to be completely vetted and studied” before transgender people are allowed to serve openly. “I have to focus on the readiness of the force,” he said.
Those concerns cannot be indulged any longer at the expense of the civil rights and dignity of Americans who volunteered to serve in wartime. There is every reason to believe that repealing the transgender ban will be seamless. The Pentagon already has a blueprint of what it would take. Mr. Fanning, who was the first senior defense official to endorse military service by openly transgender people, is well positioned to help overcome the lingering misgivings of those upholding the Pentagon’s last discriminatory personnel policy.
“I’m ecstatic,” said Staff Sgt. Patricia King, a soldier in Colorado Springs who was the first person in the infantry to transition on the job.“To know that the secretary of the Army is supportive of open trans service, supportive of me not only as a soldier but as a person, is a comforting feeling.”
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
A version of this editorial appears in print on May 22, 2016, on page SR8 of the New York edition with the headline: An Openly Gay Man Runs the Army. Today's Paper|Subscribe
Continue reading the main story"
Friday, May 20, 2016
Yes, Donald Trump really went to an Ivy League school - Trump has repeatedly lied about his academic record and only entered the the University of Pennsylvania after intervention from a family friend (Traditional Affirmative Action For The Wealthy). - The Washington Post
Trump has repeatedly lied about his academic record and only entered the the University of Pennsylvania after intervention from a family friend (Traditional Affirmative Action For The Wealthy). "When he was young, he went to the private Kew-Forest School in Forest Hills, Queens, where his father, Frederick, a very wealthy real estate developer, was on the governing board. Behavior problems led to Donald’s exit from the school, at which point he was sent to the New York Military Academy at age 13 by his parents, who, according to Biography.com, hoped “the discipline of the school would channel his energy in a positive manner.”
He did well there, and then went to Fordham University, a Jesuit school in the Bronx, for two years, before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania and studied economics for two years, graduating in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree. He took undergraduate classes at Penn’s famed Wharton School of Business. Though he was not enrolled in Wharton’s prestigious MBA program, the Spring 2007 Wharton Alumni Magazine featured Trump, with this headline, “The Best Brand Name in Real Estate.”
The University of Pennsylvania is one of the eight private colleges and universities in the vaunted Ivy League, known for accepting unusually smart students, great test takers, legacies, and the sons and daughters of famous and/or very wealthy people.
How did Trump get into the University of Pennsylvania?
A 2011 Salon magazine article refers to a 2001 book called “The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire,” by Gwenda Blair. It says that Trump’s grades at Fordham, a Jesuit school in New York, had been “respectable,” and that he was admitted to Penn after an interview with a “friendly” Wharton admissions officer who was an old classmate of Trump’s older brother.
The article also points out that Trump has happily allowed the media to report that he graduated first in his class from Wharton, including in New York Times stories in 1973 and 1976 about him. But the story goes on to say: Writing in the New York Times magazine in 1984, William Geist reported that “the commencement program from 1968 does not list him as graduating with honors of any kind,” even though “just about every profile ever written about Mr. Trump states that he graduated first in his class at Wharton in 1968.” … In 1988, New York magazine reported that the idea that Trump had graduated first in his class was a “myth.”
Yes, Donald Trump really went to an Ivy League school - The Washington Post
Bernie Sanders, Eyeing Convention, Willing to Harm Hillary Clinton in the Homestretch - The New York Times
"Defiant and determined to transform the Democratic Party, Senator Bernie Sanders is opening a two-month phase of his presidential campaign aimed at inflicting a heavy blow on Hillary Clinton in California and amassing enough leverage to advance his agenda at the convention in July — or even wrest the nomination from her.
Advisers to Mr. Sanders said on Wednesday that he was newly resolved to remain in the race, seeing an aggressive campaign as his only chance to pressure Democrats into making fundamental changes to how presidential primaries and debates are held in the future. They said he also held out hope of capitalizing on any late stumbles by Mrs. Clinton or any damage to her candidacy, whether by scandal or by the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump."
Bernie Sanders, Eyeing Convention, Willing to Harm Hillary Clinton in the Homestretch - The New York Times
Advisers to Mr. Sanders said on Wednesday that he was newly resolved to remain in the race, seeing an aggressive campaign as his only chance to pressure Democrats into making fundamental changes to how presidential primaries and debates are held in the future. They said he also held out hope of capitalizing on any late stumbles by Mrs. Clinton or any damage to her candidacy, whether by scandal or by the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump."
Bernie Sanders, Eyeing Convention, Willing to Harm Hillary Clinton in the Homestretch - The New York Times
Thursday, May 19, 2016
What Can the U.S. Learn from Radicalization in the French-Speaking World? - A Warning To Trump and Like Minded Islamophobes - The New Yorker
"Late last fall, just a few weeks before the coördinated attacks in Paris, a Brookings Institution researcher named Chris Meserole assembled all the data he could find about which countries isis fighters came from, and began to run programs looking for correlations. Much of the scholarship in the evolving field of terror analysis emphasized jihadists’ networks and their psychological profiles, but Meserole and his collaborator, Will McCants, were interested in a separate line of questions. What was the social position of Sunni Muslims in each country that sent jihadis to Syria, and did any aspects of that position seem to correspond with the number they sent? Meserole thought that some new analytics techniques could help cut through the data, and once he applied them he found several correlations. Two were not especially strong or surprising: countries where Sunni Muslims were densely concentrated in cities, and where they had especially high rates of youth unemployment, tended to produce more isis fighters. But the third was striking. The most powerful variable by far in predicting how many jihadis a country would produce was whether the people in that country spoke French.
The Francophone connection was not, in itself, a satisfying conclusion. Surely the language must be standing in for something else. Eventually, Meserole and McCants thought they saw a more meaningful explanation for France, Belgium, and Tunisia’s high rates of isis fighters: the campaigns against the veil across the Francophone world in 2010 and 2011. In April, 2010, after a high-profile debate, France’s government began enforcing a national law that effectively prohibited Muslim women from wearing the niqab or burqa, which cover the face, in public. In July, 2011, Belgium passed a similar law. (Tunisia, which long had a ban on the veil on the books, had begun enforcing it in 2006.)
Meserole met with a terrorism researcher named Amarnath Amarasingam, a fellow at Dalhousie University, in Nova Scotia, who had been studying the sixteen people who left Quebec to join the fight in Syria. Amarasingam believed that a high-profile, failed campaign to ban the niqab at citizenship ceremonies in Quebec may have played an important role. Fourteen of the sixteen jihadis had left the province after the bill was debated. In interviewing the fighters’ family members, Amarasingham found that the bill had been a “big catalyst” in their radicalization, he told Meserole. It was at that point, Meserole told me, that “I thought we might actually be on to something.” Spokesmen for isis have sometimes said that the group’s goal in recruitment is to eliminate the “gray area” in which people feel both Muslim and part of the West. Maybe the debates over the veil, Meserole and McCants came to believe, had helped do that for them. (Quebec has not had the same strictly secular tradition, which to Meserole made this an especially interesting case of what happened when political ideas were imported directly from France.)"
What Can the U.S. Learn from Radicalization in the French-Speaking World? - The New Yorker
The Francophone connection was not, in itself, a satisfying conclusion. Surely the language must be standing in for something else. Eventually, Meserole and McCants thought they saw a more meaningful explanation for France, Belgium, and Tunisia’s high rates of isis fighters: the campaigns against the veil across the Francophone world in 2010 and 2011. In April, 2010, after a high-profile debate, France’s government began enforcing a national law that effectively prohibited Muslim women from wearing the niqab or burqa, which cover the face, in public. In July, 2011, Belgium passed a similar law. (Tunisia, which long had a ban on the veil on the books, had begun enforcing it in 2006.)
Meserole met with a terrorism researcher named Amarnath Amarasingam, a fellow at Dalhousie University, in Nova Scotia, who had been studying the sixteen people who left Quebec to join the fight in Syria. Amarasingam believed that a high-profile, failed campaign to ban the niqab at citizenship ceremonies in Quebec may have played an important role. Fourteen of the sixteen jihadis had left the province after the bill was debated. In interviewing the fighters’ family members, Amarasingham found that the bill had been a “big catalyst” in their radicalization, he told Meserole. It was at that point, Meserole told me, that “I thought we might actually be on to something.” Spokesmen for isis have sometimes said that the group’s goal in recruitment is to eliminate the “gray area” in which people feel both Muslim and part of the West. Maybe the debates over the veil, Meserole and McCants came to believe, had helped do that for them. (Quebec has not had the same strictly secular tradition, which to Meserole made this an especially interesting case of what happened when political ideas were imported directly from France.)"
What Can the U.S. Learn from Radicalization in the French-Speaking World? - The New Yorker
Donald Trump’s Immigration Plan: Big Promises, Bigger Doubts - The New York Times
"Central to Mr. Trump’s campaign, and to his national security strategy, is his intent to clamp down on illegal immigration, using a vast deportation “force” to relocate people to the other side of a wall, funded by Mexico, that would stretch nearly the length of the southern border.
Mr. Trump has suggested he will flesh out his ideas in a forthcoming speech. But experts across many fields who have analyzed his plans so far warn that they would come at astronomical costs — whoever paid — and would in many ways defy the logic of science, engineering and law.
Mass deportations: Adding chaos to dysfunction
Mr. Trump has a simple plan to reduce the population of 11 million immigrants living illegally in the United States: Deport them.
How? He says he would follow the example of the military-style roundups authorized by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954. The initiative, known as Operation Wetback, expelled hundreds of thousands of Mexicans.
Mr. Trump contends that the start of deportations would show immigrants he meant business and prompt many to leave on their own, and that it would take about two years to finish the job. There, the specifics end.
Donald Trump’s Immigration Plan: Big Promises, Bigger Doubts - The New York Times
Mr. Trump has suggested he will flesh out his ideas in a forthcoming speech. But experts across many fields who have analyzed his plans so far warn that they would come at astronomical costs — whoever paid — and would in many ways defy the logic of science, engineering and law.
Mass deportations: Adding chaos to dysfunction
Mr. Trump has a simple plan to reduce the population of 11 million immigrants living illegally in the United States: Deport them.
How? He says he would follow the example of the military-style roundups authorized by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954. The initiative, known as Operation Wetback, expelled hundreds of thousands of Mexicans.
Mr. Trump contends that the start of deportations would show immigrants he meant business and prompt many to leave on their own, and that it would take about two years to finish the job. There, the specifics end.
Donald Trump’s Immigration Plan: Big Promises, Bigger Doubts - The New York Times
Access to Bay Adds Enticement as U.S. Weighs Lifting Vietnam Embargo - The New York Times
"CAM RANH BAY, Vietnam — The ghosts of the Vietnam War have finally faded at the strategic port of Cam Ranh Bay. More than 40 years ago, United States forces left this massive base where Marines landed, B-52s loaded up for bombing raids, and wounded American soldiers were treated.
Now, some Vietnamese say they are yearning for the American military to return.
“On Facebook, there was a question recently: What do you want from President Obama’s visit?” said Vo Van Tao, 63, who fought as a young North Vietnamese infantry soldier against the United States. “Some people said they wanted democracy. I said I wanted the Americans to come back to Cam Ranh Bay. A lot of people agreed with me.”
Mr. Obama is scheduled to arrive in Vietnam on Sunday, the third visit by an American president since the war ended. The big question he is expected to answer is whether Washington will lift a partial arms embargo and allow Vietnam to buy lethal weapons from the United States. The Communist government has long asked for the ban to be revoked, and American access to Cam Ranh Bay could be part of the payoff.
For the White House, the decision on lifting the embargo has come down to a debate over trying to improve Vietnam’s poor human rights record versus enabling Vietnam to better defend itself against an increasing threat from China in the South China Sea.
Washington has for years made lifting the ban contingent on Vietnam’
Access to Bay Adds Enticement as U.S. Weighs Lifting Vietnam Embargo - The New York Times
Now, some Vietnamese say they are yearning for the American military to return.
“On Facebook, there was a question recently: What do you want from President Obama’s visit?” said Vo Van Tao, 63, who fought as a young North Vietnamese infantry soldier against the United States. “Some people said they wanted democracy. I said I wanted the Americans to come back to Cam Ranh Bay. A lot of people agreed with me.”
Mr. Obama is scheduled to arrive in Vietnam on Sunday, the third visit by an American president since the war ended. The big question he is expected to answer is whether Washington will lift a partial arms embargo and allow Vietnam to buy lethal weapons from the United States. The Communist government has long asked for the ban to be revoked, and American access to Cam Ranh Bay could be part of the payoff.
For the White House, the decision on lifting the embargo has come down to a debate over trying to improve Vietnam’s poor human rights record versus enabling Vietnam to better defend itself against an increasing threat from China in the South China Sea.
Washington has for years made lifting the ban contingent on Vietnam’
Access to Bay Adds Enticement as U.S. Weighs Lifting Vietnam Embargo - The New York Times
Wednesday, May 18, 2016
Memo to House Republicans: Zika Is Not a Game | The Nation
"The White House might not have to beg for so much emergency funding if America’s public health infrastructure hadn't already been starved by budget cuts."
Tuesday, May 17, 2016
Where do we go from here: America after Obama | MSNBC
For African Americans, the election of Barack Obama was part triumph, part miracle.
The triumph was the culmination of more than a half-century of struggle to gain access to the ballot and create political space within the once-hostile Democratic Party for a mobilized Black electorate. The miracle was that the son of an African father and white American mother, virtually unknown just four years before and carrying a name primed to trigger the Islamophobia and xenophobia of fellow Americans like none in our history, actually became the 44th president of the United States. The end of that triumphant, miraculous era means several things to Black Americans.
It means that Black Americans will no longer be able to take for granted that a young and elegant, sophisticated and unapologetically Black family resides, presides and represents this country from the secular sanctuary of the White House; though never again can it be denied that they can and did. For many Black Americans, the mourning has already begun.
Where do we go from here: America after Obama | MSNBC
Looking up - IT IS a bad time to be a middle-aged, middle-class, white American | The Economist
"IT IS a bad time to be a middle-aged, middle-class, white American. Stripped of manufacturing jobs by trade and technology, then skewered by the financial crisis, white men aged 45 to 54 earn 7% less, in inflation-adjusted terms, than in 1987. Their suffering is not just financial. In November Anne Case and Angus Deaton, two economists, found that middle-aged whites were more likely to die in 2013 than they were in 1999. Another study recently found that, since 2001, gains in life expectancy at 40 have been unevenly distributed, benefiting the rich most. Yet the plight of middle-aged, middle-income whites, while distressing, is atypical. Across the whole population, the chance of early death depends ever less on economic circumstances.
Looking up | The Economist
In a recent article in Science, Janet Currie of Princeton University and Hannes Schwandt of the University of Zurich rank America’s counties by the proportion of their residents living in poverty. The poorest areas are clustered in the South; the poverty rate in Holmes County, Mississippi, for example, is over 40%. Counties with the least poverty are likely to be near rich, northern cities; Somerset County, New Jersey, an hour’s drive from Manhattan, has a poverty rate of only 5%. In general, the poorer the county, the more deaths. The researchers examined the strength of this relationship in three-year periods starting in 1990, 2000 and 2010.
Looking up | The Economist
For the poor in the Ivy League, a full ride isn’t always what they imagined - The Washington Post
"NEW YORK — To reach the Ivy League after growing up poor seems like hitting the jackpot. Students get a world-class education from schools that promise to meet full financial needs without making them take out loans. But the reality of a full ride isn’t always what they had dreamed it would be.
For the poor in the Ivy League, a full ride isn’t always what they imagined - The Washington Post
Here at Columbia University, money pressures lead many to cut corners on textbook purchases and skip city excursions routine for affluent classmates. Some borrow thousands of dollars a year to pay bills. Some feel obliged to send money home occasionally to help their families. Others spend less on university meal plans, slipping extra food into their backpacks when they leave a dining hall and hunting for free grub through a Facebook network called CU Meal Share."
For the poor in the Ivy League, a full ride isn’t always what they imagined - The Washington Post
Donald Trump And The Know-Nothing Tide - The New York Times
"On the evidence, ethnocentrism is a pretty basic human instinct. Band together with your own. Keep the outsider down or out. In the 1850s, at another moment of American unease, the Know-Nothings swept Massachusetts and won mayoral elections in Philadelphia and Washington on a nativist platform to “purify” national politics by stopping the influx of Irish and German Catholics. Papist influence was then the perceived scourge through which the Know-Nothing movement, as the Native American Party (later the American Party) was commonly known, built its following. Today the supposed threat is Muslim and Mexican infiltration. Or so Donald Trump, the de facto Republican presidential candidate, would have us believe in his “America First” program.
A know-nothing tide is upon us. Tribal politics, anchored in tribal media, has made knowing nothing a badge of honor. Ignorance, loudly declaimed, is an attribute, especially if allied to celebrity. Facts are dispensable baggage. To display knowledge, the acquisition of which takes time, is tantamount to showing too much respect for the opposition tribe, who know nothing anyway."
The Know-Nothing Tide - The New York Times
A know-nothing tide is upon us. Tribal politics, anchored in tribal media, has made knowing nothing a badge of honor. Ignorance, loudly declaimed, is an attribute, especially if allied to celebrity. Facts are dispensable baggage. To display knowledge, the acquisition of which takes time, is tantamount to showing too much respect for the opposition tribe, who know nothing anyway."
The Know-Nothing Tide - The New York Times
Monday, May 16, 2016
Lin-Manuel Miranda stands with immigrants in Penn graduation speech | MSNBC
“Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda reminded graduates of the contribution of immigrants throughout history in his speech at the University of Pennsylvania commencement Monday.
“In a year when politicians traffic it in anti-immigrant rhetoric, there is also a Broadway musical reminding us that a broke, orphan immigrant from the West Indies built our financial system,” Miranda said. “A story that reminds us that since the beginning of the great, unfinished symphony that is our American experiment, time and time again, immigrants get the job done.”
After Miranda defended immigration in the U.S., students and Penn President Amy Gutmann rose and gave a standing ovation."
To Beat a Nasty, Brutish Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton Will Have to Do Something Different | The Nation
"Trump wins only through psychological voter suppression.
At the same time, it would certainly be foolish to insist, in this year of political surprises, that Trump can’t win. He could—especially if, as Thomas Edsall suggested in a carefully reasoned May 11 column, more white voters are keen to pull the lever for Trump than will admit it to pollsters. Trump’s unlikely but conceivable route to victory lies in only one direction: in the same low turnouts that powered his standing as the presumptive Republican nominee. In other words, by turning the general election into a primary. Trump wins only through psychological voter suppression: a protracted campaign of such ugliness, directed at a Democratic nominee already widely disliked and mistrusted, that vast numbers of voters in key electoral college states become even more alienated from politics than they are now and stay home in November, as they did in March and April. Trump’s road to the White House is therefore through what Jesse Jackson, describing how low Democratic and African-American turnout helped elect Nixon and Reagan, used to call “the margin of our despair.”
Trump’s Asymmetric Warfare - The New York Times
This is true but Elizabeth Warren sure makes me feel good when she slams Trump. "It has been somewhat fascinating and sometimes fun to watch Elizabeth Warren do battle with Donald Trump in alternating salvos of tweets, but in the end I fear that this approach of trying to “beat a bully,” as Warren put it in one of her tweets, is a futile effort.
There is no way to sufficiently sully a pig or mock a clown. The effort only draws one further onto the opponent’s turf and away from one’s own principles and priorities.
There is no way to shame a man who lacks conscience or to embarrass an embarrassment. Trump is smart enough to know what he lacks — substance — and to know what he possesses in abundance — insolence.
So long as he steers clear of his own weakness and draws others in to the brier patch that is his comfort, he wins."
Make America Great Again for the People It Was Great for Already By BRYCE COVER The NY-Times
After serving in the military, helping to defeat Hitler and Tojo my parents returned to a civilian life where the German soldier they fought, could immigrate to America, get a job my college educated parents were forbidden to receive because of race and that same German soldier could live where my parents could not live because of race. I swore to never serve in the US military once I learned this fact. "Which America is he promising to us? If you ask his supporters, they say life has gotten worse for people like them over the last 50 years. It seems safe to assume that, in the eyes of Mr. Trump’s overwhelmingly white male fans, America was greater a half-century ago. Indeed, it was pretty great — for them.
It’s not just that factory jobs were more plentiful or that women and minorities were largely kept from positions of power. Large national programs that radically changed the country kept America great specifically for white men. New Deal-era systems like Social Security and unemployment insurance; rules that demarcated minimum wages and maximum work hours and protected unionization; and the G.I. Bill at the end of World War II substantially transformed the country and created a booming middle class. But they all purposefully left out most women and minorities.
"Make America Great Again for the People It Was Great for Already
It’s not just that factory jobs were more plentiful or that women and minorities were largely kept from positions of power. Large national programs that radically changed the country kept America great specifically for white men. New Deal-era systems like Social Security and unemployment insurance; rules that demarcated minimum wages and maximum work hours and protected unionization; and the G.I. Bill at the end of World War II substantially transformed the country and created a booming middle class. But they all purposefully left out most women and minorities.
"Make America Great Again for the People It Was Great for Already
Sunday, May 15, 2016
Donald Trump To Begin Getting Intelligence Briefings This headline creates a true oxymoron if there ever was one. : NPR
This headline creates a true oxymoron if there ever was one.
Donald Trump To Begin Getting Intelligence Briefings : NPR
Nelson Mandela: CIA tip-off led to 1962 Durban arrest - BBC News
"Nelson Mandela's arrest in 1962 came as a result of a tip-off from an agent of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a report says.
The revelations, made in the Sunday Times newspaper, are based on an interview with ex-CIA agent Donald Rickard shortly before he died.
Mr Mandela served 27 years in jail for resisting white minority rule before being released in 1990.
He was subsequently elected as South Africa's first black president.
The interview appears to confirm long-held suspicions that Mr Mandela was being trailed by the CIA, says the BBC's Karen Allen in Johannesburg.
It is expected to put pressure on the CIA to release documents about its involvement in Mr Mandela's arrest and support for the apartheid government, although it has resisted previous calls for their disclosure."
Nelson Mandela: CIA tip-off led to 1962 Durban arrest - BBC News
How and Why You Diversify Colleges - NYTimes.com
"THERE’S a whole lot wrong with the conversation about including more low-income students at elite colleges, but let’s start here: The effort is too often framed as some do-gooder favor to those kids.
Hardly. It’s a favor to us all. It’s a plus for richer students, who are then exposed to a breadth of perspectives that lies at the heart of the truest, best education. With the right coaxing and mixing on campus, they become more fluent in diversity, which has professional benefits as well as the obvious civic and moral ones.
It’s a win for America and its imperiled promise of social mobility.
“Opportunity for people from every conceivable background is essential to a functioning democracy, and in this country we’re not providing enough of it,” Biddy Martin, the president of Amherst College, told me last week. “I also think it’s a waste not to develop talent in young people wherever it exists, and it exists everywhere.”
So what’s Amherst doing?
Over recent years, it has devoted significantly more energy and resources than it once did into identifying and recruiting promising students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. It works with community-based organizations. It develops relationships with, and sends emissaries to, schools in poorer areas."
Saturday, May 14, 2016
Friday, May 13, 2016
“Do Not Resist” and the Crisis of Police Militarization - The New Yorker
"The answer Atkinson came up with is “Do Not Resist,” a documentary film that traces the transformation of police departments across the United States into forces that often look like our Army and Marines—and all too often act like them. Watching “Do Not Resist,” which won the prize for best documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival last month, is an eye-opening experience. The film takes a series of events that might appear unrelated—the heavy-handed police response to the demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014; the use of heavily armedswat teams in South Carolina to carry out routine drug arrests—and shows that they are part of a pattern that has taken hold in many police departments across the country. “What we discovered is that the there had been a massive change in the tactics used by swat teams,” Atkinson told me. “And that happened as the federal government was giving away military equipment to police departments.”
“Do Not Resist” and the Crisis of Police Militarization - The New Yorker
Why Is Elizabeth Warren Working With a Pro-Trump Republican? | The Nation
"Senators Elizabeth Warren and Tom Cotton sent aletter this week to Richard Ketchum, chairman of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, asking for answers about why widespread malfeasance by financial advisers, including bribery, forgery, and extortion, appears to be going unpunished by the regulators overseeing the industry. “[T]he evidence clearly shows that FINRA’s efforts to date have not been enough to address the incidence of misconduct among financial advisers,” the duo wrote. “Each day that FINRA fails to take stronger action is another day that working families will be exposed to an unacceptably high risk of financial adviser misconduct.”
Why Is Elizabeth Warren Working With a Pro-Trump Republican? | The Nation
Why Is Elizabeth Warren Working With a Pro-Trump Republican? | The Nation
It's Gotten A Lot Harder To Act Like Whiteness Doesn't Shape Our Politics : Code Switch : NPR
"When we don't acknowledge the role whiteness plays in how Americans vote, we're essentially agreeing to misidentify some of the most important dynamics of this election cycle."
It's Gotten A Lot Harder To Act Like Whiteness Doesn't Shape Our Politics : Code Switch : NPR
One of the Most Racially Divided States in the Country Just Passed a New Voter-ID Bill | The Nation
"Missouri Republicans have been trying for a decade to enact a strict voter-ID law, and 2016 could finally be their year.
On Thursday, the GOP-controlled legislature passed a new voter-ID bill and a companion ballot initiative changing the state Constitution that must be approved by voters, most likely in November. (Governor Jay Nixon can still veto the bill, but the legislature has a super-majority to override him.)
“It has been a priority for us in the past, but not to the level it has been a priority this year,” said the bill’s sponsor, State Senator Will Kraus.
Voter ID has long been an obsession for Missouri Republicans. They have been blocked on three different occasions from enacting such a law, which is why they are now asking voters to weaken protections for voting rights in the state Constitution to allow it. Writes David Graham of The Atlantic:
A 2006 attempt was passed and signed into law, but the state supreme court struck it down as an unconstitutional infringement on the right to vote, in part because it forced citizens to assume the cost of obtaining ID.
In 2011, Governor Nixon vetoed another attempt. There were not enough votes to override him. The following year, state Republicans tried again, this time using a constitutional amendment to sidestep the supreme court ruling. But a judge ruled that attempt unconstitutional, too, and it was excluded from the ballot.
One of the Most Racially Divided States in the Country Just Passed a New Voter-ID Bill | The Nation
On Thursday, the GOP-controlled legislature passed a new voter-ID bill and a companion ballot initiative changing the state Constitution that must be approved by voters, most likely in November. (Governor Jay Nixon can still veto the bill, but the legislature has a super-majority to override him.)
“It has been a priority for us in the past, but not to the level it has been a priority this year,” said the bill’s sponsor, State Senator Will Kraus.
Voter ID has long been an obsession for Missouri Republicans. They have been blocked on three different occasions from enacting such a law, which is why they are now asking voters to weaken protections for voting rights in the state Constitution to allow it. Writes David Graham of The Atlantic:
A 2006 attempt was passed and signed into law, but the state supreme court struck it down as an unconstitutional infringement on the right to vote, in part because it forced citizens to assume the cost of obtaining ID.
In 2011, Governor Nixon vetoed another attempt. There were not enough votes to override him. The following year, state Republicans tried again, this time using a constitutional amendment to sidestep the supreme court ruling. But a judge ruled that attempt unconstitutional, too, and it was excluded from the ballot.
One of the Most Racially Divided States in the Country Just Passed a New Voter-ID Bill | The Nation
Trump Supporters Support Him Because Of Caste Concerns, Not Economic Class
It is more about the intersection of caste and class. Liberals make the mistake of thinking that working class whites are voting against their economic interest when they vote for a Reagan or Trump. . These liberals and others on the left are stuck in an outdated Marxist based analysis. Though useful this type of analysis does not take other motivations besides economic into consideration. These workers are choosing class status over economic class. They are more concerned with having Black and Brown people to look down upon than they are concerned about the wealthy taking the bulk of the economic wealth they help produce. In America caste has always trumped economic class and I see no reason to believe it will change after nearly 400 years. This system was class/caste manipulation of poor whites began after Bacon's Rebellion in the 1670s and continues with Trump's racist anti Hispanic, Muslim and Black attacks today. His misogyny is a living, breathing walking and talking example of "Mad Men" a perfect description of Trump.
John H Armwood
John H Armwood
Thursday, May 12, 2016
In 1927, Donald Trump’s father was arrested after a Klan riot in Queens - Does an apple usually fall far from the tree that it fell from? The Washington Post
During appearances on network television Feb. 28, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump repeatedly declined to refuse the endorsement of David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. While Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz both took aim at Trump. (The Washington Post)
"I don’t know anything about David Duke, okay," Trump said. "I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists. I don't know, did he endorse me? Or what's going on. Because I know nothing about David Duke. I know nothing about white supremacists."
In 2000, Trump declined to run for president as a member of the Reform Party because the "Reform Party now includes a Klansman, Mr. Duke, a neo-Nazi, Mr. Buchanan, and a communist, Ms. Fulani. This is not company I wish to keep." As Trump himself noted on Twitter, he also disavowed Duke in a news conference earlier this week.
In 1927, Donald Trump’s father was arrested after a Klan riot in Queens - The Washington Post
If you support Donald Trump your are supporting an avowed racist and misogynist
If you support Donald Trump your are supporting an avowed racist and misogynist. His views are morally repugnant. Your support of him means you are comfortable with racism and misogyny. Your support for Trump identifies you as someone who is tolerant of racism and misogyny. What does that say about you as a person? Please ask yourself that question.
John H Armwood
John H Armwood
Wednesday, May 11, 2016
China’s Newest Challenge Is Adapting to Its Aging Population - The Atlantic
Mark L. Haas, a Duquesne University political scientist, has for some time warned of a looming contest between guns and canes—a variant on the old idea of guns versus butter—as the world’s major countries grapple with demographic change. “China’s political leaders beginning in roughly 2020 will be faced with a difficult choice: allow growing levels of poverty within an exploding elderly population, or provide the resources necessary to avoid this situation,” Haas writes in Political Demography. If China’s government decides in favor of the latter option, Haas argues, American power will benefit. More broadly, he foresees a coming “geriatric peace,” as nations around the world find themselves too burdened to challenge America’s military preeminence.
Recent events may well provide a preview of this reality. When Xi Jinping announced last year that he was slashing China’s armed forces by 300,000 troops, Beijing spun the news as proof of China’s peaceful intentions.
Hillary Clinton aims high on child care | MSNBC
The most concrete part of the agenda, first reported by The Huffington Post, is a pair of narrow but potentially important proposals. One would bolster a highly regarded “home visiting” program designed to help low-income children at risk of emotional, intellectual, and physical harm. If Clinton has her way, the program, known as the Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting Initiative, would reach twice as many children as it does today.
The other initiative would seek to boost pay for child-care workers, as a way to improve retention and attract educators with stronger qualifications. Clinton will call this the RAISE initiative, for “Respect And Increased Salaries for Early Childhood Educators,” and it will be based on successful pilot programs now operating in several states.
As Cohn added, Clinton also intends to cap family expenses for child care at 10% of annual income. When costs exceed this limit, Clinton “would use a combination of subsidized child care and tax credits.”
Hillary Clinton aims high on child care | MSNBC
What Young Men Of Color Can Teach Us About The Achievement Gap : NPR Ed : NPR
Public schools in the U.S. now have a majority of nonwhite students.
That's been the case since 2014, and yet children of color — especially boys — still lag behind their white peers.
This story has been all over the media. It's topic No. 1 at education conferences on university campuses. Even the White House is all over it.
But what Ron Ferguson wants to know is why. And he says there's a big group of experts out there who never get asked about it: boys and young men of color.
What Young Men Of Color Can Teach Us About The Achievement Gap : NPR Ed : NPR
Trump refuses to release tax returns before November
Despite pressure, the billionaire businessman also doesn't expect to release his tax returns before November, citing an ongoing audit of his finances. He said he will release them after the audit ends.
"There's nothing to learn from them," Trump told The Associated Press in an interview Tuesday. He also has said he doesn't believe voters are interested.
There’s nothing to learn from the tax returns of this yugely wealthy man campaigning for president on a platform of his own wealth and success? People aren’t interested to know how much money he has—is it as much as he claims, or a fraction of that as many observers suggest—or what tax rate he pays, or how much he gives to charity? But hey, The Donald has read the minds of the voters and found that their views are happily in line with what’s convenient for him, and who am I to question?
It’s such a perfectly Trump thing to just be like “nope” when asked to do something that’s standard for a presidential nominee, though. It’s almost enjoyable—but not as enjoyable as months of pressure on him to change his mind will be.
Trump refuses to release tax returns before November
"There's nothing to learn from them," Trump told The Associated Press in an interview Tuesday. He also has said he doesn't believe voters are interested.
There’s nothing to learn from the tax returns of this yugely wealthy man campaigning for president on a platform of his own wealth and success? People aren’t interested to know how much money he has—is it as much as he claims, or a fraction of that as many observers suggest—or what tax rate he pays, or how much he gives to charity? But hey, The Donald has read the minds of the voters and found that their views are happily in line with what’s convenient for him, and who am I to question?
It’s such a perfectly Trump thing to just be like “nope” when asked to do something that’s standard for a presidential nominee, though. It’s almost enjoyable—but not as enjoyable as months of pressure on him to change his mind will be.
Trump refuses to release tax returns before November
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Judge Orders Feds to Release List of Bridgegate Conspirators - NBC News
A federal judge ordered New Jersey prosecutors Tuesday to release their list of suspected Bridgegate conspirators.
The ruling was a victory for a consortium of media outfits that had been pushing the feds to publicly identify the "unindicted co-conspirators" who allegedly conspired to snarl traffic on the George Washington Bridge three years ago to punish a New Jersey mayor for not endorsing the re-election of Gov. Chris Christie.
Judge Orders Feds to Release List of Bridgegate Conspirators - NBC News
NYTimes: Putting Grit in Its Place, An excellent critique of American 3eucation.
"We all know why it exists, but the grade-point average is one of the more destructive elements in American education.
Success is about being passionately good at one or two things, but students who want to get close to that 4.0 have to be prudentially balanced about every subject. In life we want independent thinking and risk-taking, but the G.P.A. system encourages students to be deferential and risk averse, giving their teachers what they want.
Creative people are good at asking new questions, but the G.P.A. rewards those who can answer other people’s questions. The modern economy rewards those who can think in ways computers can’t, but the G.P.A. rewards people who can grind away at mental tasks they find boring. People are happiest when motivated intrinsically, but the G.P.A. is the mother of all extrinsic motivations.
The G.P.A. ethos takes spirited children and pushes them to be hard working but complaisant. The G.P.A. mentality means tremendous emphasis has now been placed on grit, the ability to trudge through long stretches of difficulty. Influenced by this culture, schools across America are busy teaching their students to be gritty and to have “character” — by which they mean skills like self-discipline and resilience that contribute to career success."
NYTimes: Is This the End of the Religious Right?
"Deliberately or not, Mr. Trump may be the perfect candidate for an evangelical subculture that has increasingly become enamored with the prosperity, or health and wealth, gospel. In trying to build a singular religious faction that agreed on some core issues (like abortion), the Republican Party has courted that subculture, even though many evangelicals consider prosperity theology to be heretical. Mr. Trump acts more like a televangelist than an evangelical.
Although Ted Cruz used the traditional religious right playbook to win in Iowa, Mr. Trump’s subsequent successes in beating Mr. Cruz among evangelicals — including across wide sections of the Bible Belt — demonstrated that many Republican voters, and even many evangelical Republicans, were more swept up in Trump-style nativist culture wars than battles over abortion, marriage or, especially, bathrooms. Mr. Trump understood he could unite nativists and culture warriors using his diatribes against political correctness as an all-purpose code to stoke conservative resentments.
Mr. Trump has some big-name evangelical endorsements, notably from Jerry Falwell Jr., but he has vocal opponents within the religious right as well. Many historically Republican evangelicals may stay home, or vote for the Democrat or a third party.
It doesn’t mean that the union of America’s evangelicals and the party is over forever. But at least in 2016, many influential voices within the religious right are not interested in entering into a suicide pact with the Republican Party.
NYTimes: 70 Years After Nagasaki Bombing, Atomic Debate Yields Little Consensus
"Did the United States have to drop the bomb?
Seventy years after the United States launched the atomic age with attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hastening the end of the war in the Pacific, The New York Times asked readers how they viewed the decision by President Harry S. Truman.
On Aug. 9, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, the second such attack on Japan in three days.
At the time, Truman defended his decision to drop the bombs as the only way to avoid a full-scale invasion of Japan. That, arguably, would have cost more lives, American and Japanese, than the approximately 200,000 who died in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
NYTimes: 70 Years After Nagasaki Bombing, Atomic Debate Yields Little Consensus
Monday, May 09, 2016
NYTimes: Louisiana’s Color-Coded Death Penalty
"The last time a white person in Louisiana was executed for a crime against a black person was in 1752, when a soldier named Pierre Antoine Dochenet was hanged after attempting to stab two enslaved black women to death with his bayonet.
This is just one of many grim facts in a new report describing the history of capital punishment in Louisiana and analyzing the outcome of every death sentence imposed in that state since 1976, when the Supreme Court reversed its brief moratorium on executions and allowed them to resume.
Racism has always been at the heart of the American death penalty. But the report, in the current issue of The Journal of Race, Gender, and Poverty, drives home the extent to which capital punishment, supposedly reserved for the “worst of the worst,” is governed by skin color.
In Louisiana, a black man is 30 times as likely to be sentenced to death for killing a white woman as for killing a black man. Regardless of the offender’s race, death sentences are six times as likely — and executions 14 times as likely — when the victim is white rather than black."
Sunday, May 08, 2016
Saturday, May 07, 2016
Surviving Cancer Without the Positive Thinking - The Atlantic
"Mary Elizabeth Williams was just 44, a staff writer at Salon and a mother of two who was freshly reunited with her husband (from whom she had separated two years earlier), when she noticed a bump about the size of a pencil eraser on her scalp. It didn’t hurt. It didn’t itch. “I’m sorry to tell you this,” her dermatologist said, “but you have malignant melanoma,” a cancer that kills some 10,000 people annually.
Surviving Cancer Without the Positive Thinking - The Atlantic
Back then, in 2010, her tumor was only Stage 2. But a year after it was removed—along with a chunk of her scalp—the disease came back. This time it was Stage 4; there is no Stage 5. Her long-term prognosis? She could have as little as six months to live.
Then she got lucky: She qualified for a clinical trial at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, testing drugs that were supposed to harness a patient’s immune system against the disease. As the first line of her new memoir reveals, “Spoiler: I lived.”
Surviving Cancer Without the Positive Thinking - The Atlantic
#ThanksObama: president's greatest legacy may be Trumping of the GOP | US news | The Guardian
"Yet one thing Trump supporters and Democrats agree on is the extent to which the party of Lincoln has been twisted out of recognition by its loathing for the current occupant of the White House.
Amid bitter recriminations over Trump’s successful exploitation of this mood, many are wondering if the president’s greatest legacy may be the desolation of the Republican party, which did so much to frustrate his own time in office but may take decades to recover once he leaves."
#ThanksObama: president's greatest legacy may be Trumping of the GOP | US news | The Guardian
Amid bitter recriminations over Trump’s successful exploitation of this mood, many are wondering if the president’s greatest legacy may be the desolation of the Republican party, which did so much to frustrate his own time in office but may take decades to recover once he leaves."
#ThanksObama: president's greatest legacy may be Trumping of the GOP | US news | The Guardian
Donald Trump represents the party base. Leaders must finally admit it
"The beauty and the horror of Trump is that he tells people what he thinks they want to hear, and his genius is knowing precisely what that is. He’s done a better job of reading the GOP base than anyone in the party and, ever the salesman, he’s selling himself in the image of his electorate’s values.
Trump’s populist message on the economy, trade deals and national security (he was against the Iraq war and appears to be largely non-interventionist) coupled with a generous dose of racism, sexism and xenophobia is the most accurate portrait we have of what Republican voters actually think, feel and want to see represented. And many in the Republican leadership, perhaps sensing that this is a losing general election strategy, are by turns discouraged and embarrassed."
Donald Trump represents the party base. Leaders must finally admit it
NYTimes: Daniel Berrigan’s Clarity
"To the Editor:
Re “He Traveled Light: Just a Backpack and Beliefs,” by Jim Dwyer (About New York column, front page, May 6):
Though he would have rejected the phrase, the Rev. Daniel J. Berrigan, a Jesuit, was among the great spiritual leaders of his generation. This was at least in part because of the way he rejected the public trappings of moral authority that such leaders often acquire, and clung as tenaciously as he did to his own and his church’s moral judgments, their shared concern for life and for the lives of others, and his own felt love of humankind.
He was a priest and a poet before he was a protester, and reading him, or hearing him speak, one was always aware that his interest looked beyond the particular issue in which he was invested to those whom it would affect, and in whose interest he lived and worked.
Even when the issue was war and peace, as it often was, he had a kind of clarity of purpose shared with Dorothy Day, the other great Catholic activist of his day, that was both deeply and personally felt, and rooted in a sure understanding of Catholic social teaching.
JOHN C. HIRSH
Washington
The writer teaches medieval literature at Georgetown University."
What Black Republicans Care About - The New York Times
"IT is easy to laugh at the proverbial “black friend” invoked to neutralize charges of racism. However, the humor sours when you realize that this comical ploy is also a strategy the Republican Party uses in its outreach to black and moderate white voters.
Despite the whiteness of the G.O.P. in general — about 90 percent of voters in the Republican primaries this year have been white — a number of black Republicans hold prominent positions in the party, and are often held up as evidence of its commitment to diversity. Last year, for example, when the presidential candidate Ben Carson was doing well in the polls, his presence on the campaign trail helped prompt the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, to claim that the G.O.P. was “likely to have the most diverse presidential primary field in history — of either party.”
Promoting black Republicans in this fashion may or may not succeed in convincing white voters that the party is not as racially divisive as it can seem. But less appreciated is the effect that this approach has on black voters. As recent research of mine suggests, the image of black Republicans that the G.O.P. disseminates may actually dampen enthusiasm for the party — not only among the black electorate in general, but also among black Republicans themselves.
A common thread that links high-profile black Republicans like Mr. Carson is their commitment to “colorblind” politics. You can also see this with recently elected politicians like Representative Mia Love of Utah and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina. They acknowledge that being black is part of their life experience but reject the idea that racial identity should orient their political decision making. They often decry efforts, like affirmative action, to address racial inequality explicitly, claiming that such policies undermine black success.
Though colorblind black Republicans get a lot of attention, they fail to represent an important, if overlooked, type of black Republican, which I call “race conscious.”
I began studying the experiences of black activists in the Republican Party in 2006. In addition to monitoring their online presence, I attended political rallies, organizational meetings, conferences and panel discussions. I also spent time interviewing about 50 black Republicans involved in state and local politics across the nation who were often trying to persuade black voters to consider voting Republican.
What I found was at odds with the message of most black Republicans in the public eye. These race-conscious Republicans saw themselves as closely linked to a broader black community, and most experienced this connection as empowering. They were committed to conservative politics as a tool for the uplift of the black community. While they supported most Republican policy positions, their motivations were grounded in their black identity.
For instance, in their view, the virtue of school vouchers was not the free-market approach to education but rather the empowerment of black parents. They championed smaller government as a way of stemming the influence of white bureaucrats in black communities. One activist described his support of Republican politics as a way to achieve “Black Power through conservative principles.”
These Republicans expressed skepticism about G.O.P. outreach efforts and said they rarely felt their opinions were supported within the party. They sensed that while party leaders might want more black faces, the party was less interested in tailoring conservative messages to address the racial identity of black voters. One activist explained to me that “the party is not willing to get out there and advertise what they are doing today that greatly, positively impacts the lives of black folks.” As a result, despite their activism, these Republicans found themselves sitting on the sidelines while their colorblind counterparts were given all the playing time.
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