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Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley - TODAY.com - 0 views

  • Trump walks back sanctions against Russia, contradicting Nikki Haley
  • President Trump is walking back plans to impose new economic sanctions against Russia announced Sunday by U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. The planned sanctions were an attempt to punish Russia for its support of Syrian President Bashar Assad after a chemical weapons attack earlier this month. {"1222314563954":{"mpxId":"1222314563954","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Positive","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","description":"Daughter of former New York Gov. 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five years after her escape from the Cleveland home of Ariel Castro, who held her and two others captive for over a decade, Michelle Knight (now known as Lily Rose Lee) joins Megyn Kelly TODAY to talk about her ordeal and her new memoir, “Life After Darkness.” She talks about her recent marriage and her prospects for having a child.","title":"Cleveland kidnapping survivor Michelle Knight talks about new life, marriage","thumbnail":"https://media2.s-nbcnews.com/j/MSNBC/Components/Video/201804/tdy_mk_news_michelle_knight_180430.today-vid-rail.jpg","socialTitle":"Cleveland kidnapping survivor Michelle Knight talks about new life, marriage","seoHeadline":"Cleveland kidnapping survivor Michelle Knight talks about new life, 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  • Amid the historic developments formally ending the Korean War, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has promised to close down a nuclear test site in May. NBC’s Keir Simmons reports for TODAY from London. {"1222314563954":{"mpxId":"1222314563954","canonical_url":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","canonicalUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","legacy_url":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","playerUrl":"https://www.today.com/offsite/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","ampPlayerUrl":"https://player.today.com/offsite/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","relatedLink":"","sentiment":"Positive","shortUrl":"https://www.today.com/video/how-author-allison-pataki-s-life-was-changed-by-her-husband-s-stroke-1222314563954","description":"Daughter of former New York Gov. 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  • North Korea to close down nuclear test site in May
katherineharron

Biden admin started outreach to North Korea last month, but country is unresponsive - C... - 0 views

  • The Biden administration launched a behind-the-scenes push last month to reach out to North Korea through multiple channels, a senior administration official has told CNN, but thus far Pyongyang has been unresponsive.
  • "To reduce the risks of escalation, we reached out to the North Korean government through several channels starting in mid-February, including in New York,"
  • To date, we have not received any response from Pyongyang. This follows over a year without active dialogue with North Korea
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  • News of the outreach comes as lawmakers and key US allies are eagerly awaiting details about Biden's North Korea policy, which they expect will be announced publicly in the coming weeks when the administration has completed a policy review, according to multiple sources familiar with the internal discussions.
  • the administration has consulted with former government officials with experience in North Korea policy, including some officials from the Trump administration,
  • The official did not provide further details of what the outreach entailed but noted the administration has been conducting its interagency review of the United States' policy towards North Korea, "including evaluation of all available options to address the increasing threat posed by North Korea to its neighbors and the broader international community."
  • The Biden administration launched a behind-the-scenes push last month to reach out to North Korea through multiple channels, a senior administration official has told CNN, but thus far Pyongyang has been unresponsive.
edencottone

North Korea's Kim Yo Jong breaks silence to warn US against 'causing a stink' - CNNPoli... - 0 views

  • Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korea's leader, warned the Biden administration against "causing a stink at its first step" on Monday, hours after the White House said it had not received a response to its outreach to Pyongyang.
  • "If it wants to sleep in peace for (the) coming four years, it had better refrain from causing a stink at its first step," she said. The warning comes as the US and South Korea conduct scaled-down, simulated military exercises and US Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin have touched down in the region for meetings with their Japanese and South Korean counterparts.
  • North Koreans see several reasons why they should not denuclearize based on recent history, including situations in Iraq, Libya and more recently Iran. Leaders in Iraq and Libya were toppled after relinquishing their nuclear programs under US pressure, while Iran entered a deal with the US only to have the Trump administration withdraw, impose crippling economic sanctions and then assassinate the country's leading general and nuclear scientist.
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  • "Diplomacy is always our goal. Our goal is to reduce the risk of escalation. But, to date, we have not received any response," Psaki said, noting that the outreach "follows over a year without active dialogue with North Korea, despite multiple attempts by the US to engage."
  • However, experts told CNN prior to Kim Yo Jong's message that Pyongyang was likely to rebuff diplomatic efforts for the time-being for a number of reasons including the coronavirus pandemic, the Biden team's ongoing North Korea policy review, the meetings in the region and above all, the administration's rhetoric.
  • "That's just a non-starter for the North Koreans," said Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.
  • On Monday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that the administration had reached out to North Korea, noting they have "a number of channels, as we always have had, that we can reach out through."
  • "It has to be nuanced because you can't just say, you know, we want to have talks, and the talks are going to be about North Korea's complete denuclearization, because that sounds very one sided," he told CNN. "It would have to be long term and not the Libya model of complete denuclearization upfront before we give them anything they want."
  • But after the summit, Trump administration officials, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said the agreement pledged North Korea to the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of its nuclear program, despite the fact that it said nothing of the sort.
  • Former officials and experts also noted that Biden administration officials' commitments not to lift tariffs on North Korea during confirmation hearings did not go unnoticed, which could be one factor driving Pyongyang's decision not to engage directly with the US.
  • "What if the US and China come out of their meetings this week and make it clear that they are headed for escalating US-China tensions? If you are Kim Jong Un you would read that as meaning that it is less likely that China will put the squeeze on North Korea," said Anthony Ruggiero, a former National Security Council official. "If that happens, maybe Kim now knows he can go to China to buy more pieces for its nuclear programs, or to go to China and sell more coal. That would be a bad sign for the future of any US-North Korea diplomacy."
  • Aum said that he doesn't think they'd "want to do anything to provoke the US prior to some greater signal that the US is going to take a very hostile approach."
Javier E

The Bike Thieves of Burlington, Vermont - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In the effort to try to solve the crime of bike theft themselves, the group’s members have come close to a world of violence and despair that lurks barely below the surface of this beautiful place and, at times, bursts into the open
  • In some years, Burlington has gone without a single gunfire incident, according to the police. But in 2022 there have been 25 such incidents, including four murders — the most in at least 30 years, the police say.
  • The Progressives on the Council tend to be left leaning on many issues and often at odds with the city’s Democratic mayor. And in June 2020, the Progressive members of the Council successfully sponsored a measure that sought to reduce the size of the city’s police force by about 30 percent. The move, which the mayor opposed, came just weeks after the murder of George Floyd, and amid concerns about how the Burlington police had used force against Black people.
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  • The city’s population remains about 85 percent white — in a state that is among the whitest in the nation. But Burlington is a college town, drawing people from around the country. It’s also a refugee resettlement hub, where people from war-torn countries in Asia and Africa come to live.
  • The measure capped the number of officers at 74, down from a maximum of about 100. Most of the reduction was expected to happen over time through attrition.
  • Still, the Burlington Police say many kinds of crimes have increased in 2022. Larceny of all types is up 107 percent this year in Burlington compared with the five-year average from 2017 to 2021, and downtown businesses have begun to react.
  • “And 85 percent of the time that is probably true,” she said, “but there is the other 15 percent that has to be dealt with.”
  • “Street level crime, like bike thefts, they are not being dealt with before it escalates into something bigger,’’ said Joseph Corrow, a patrol officer and president of the local police union.
  • The police say making arrests for bike thefts could be challenging. They cite a memo from the local prosecutor which stipulates that, according to Vermont law, in order to effectively prosecute someone the police must prove the person “actually knew” the property was stolen.
  • Tammy Boudah, a street outreach worker in Burlington, said she supported the broad examination of race and class by the city government. But the notion of replacing the police with more social workers, she said, “is predicated on the idea that everyone just wants to get along.”
  • Mr. Weinberger readily admits, however, that the police cuts do not explain everything that’s going wrong in Burlington, particularly the increase in violence.Over the course of two weeks in September, a man in a wheelchair was hit in the face and robbed while withdrawing money from an A.T.M., another man suffered multiple skull fractures and nearly lost an eye after being beaten outside a Walgreens and a third man, a college student, was robbed at gunpoint and forced to strip naked.
  • “We are not used to this level of violence in Vermont,” Mr. Weinberger said at a news conference announcing a double murder in early October.
  • “I no longer feel safe going into City Hall Park at any time of the day,” said Ms. Toof, who has worked in street outreach for seven years.Those concerns are exacerbated because the outreach workers say they can no longer depend on the police to accompany them on certain calls because of staffing constraints.
  • Michael Hutchins, who moved to Florida last October to get away from the drug scene in Burlington, said some meth users he knew in Burlington stole bikes for transportation. “To get from Point A to Point B,” he said.
  • Others stole for the sheer thrill of taking something. Up for days without sleeping, some rode the bikes around with no real purpose. Mr. Davis said he had watched one bike change hands six times in the park
  • Last year, when the police dismantled a large encampment in an empty lot, they found the “severed limbs of hundreds of bikes” strewn about, Chief Murad said.
  • “Bikes were a quick easy grab that fulfilled the need to take something for an adrenaline rush,” Mr. Hutchins, 40, said in a phone interview from Florida.
  • Stealing and hoarding were common among the people Mr. Hutchins knew in Burlington struggling with addiction.
cjlee29

In the age of Trump, Latino Republicans are anguished over what to do - The Washington ... - 0 views

  • Hispanic Republicans and conservatives are increasingly anguished over whether they can remain involved in this year’s presidential election as Donald Trump continues to launch attacks on prominent Latinos and makes little effort to win their support.
  • Many Hispanics active in national GOP politics have been hoping for months that Trump would tone down his broadsides against immigrants
  • there is little evidence that such a change is coming — leading some to abandon the presidential race or the 2016 elections altogether.
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  • “If you’re a Hispanic holding your breath and hoping for Donald Trump to get better in his outreach to Latinos, you’re going to die of asphyxia,”
  • The unhappiness among many Latino GOP members only adds to the Republican Party’s broader problems in attracting Hispanics and other minorities
  • Trump has derided Mexican immigrants as rapists and killers and built his candidacy around vows to build a giant border wall, deport 11 million illegal immigrants and temporarily ban Muslims from entering the country.
  • Republican activists and contributors are in “a very difficult situation” because of Trump’s rhetoric and positions.
  • Just when someone thinks that they can begin to maybe start thinking about coming on board, Trump goes and attacks that judge for being Mexican
  • “are looking to see if the candidate is going to evolve,” adding that Guerra’s decision to go was “fair.”
  • “But if the candidate doesn’t reflect some of those principles and values, then waking up in the morning, meeting deadlines, being creative and standing in the gap for the candidate becomes difficult.”
  • said he’s less concerned with “personality or charisma” and more concerned with a candidate’s policy positions. The group will concentrate on Senate races in the fall.
  • Compared to similar points in previous election cycles, Trump trails previous GOP presidential candidates by wide margins.
  • Alfonso Aguilar, a Hispanic conservative activist who knows Guerra and Aguirre Ferre, said Wednesday night that it will continue to be a challenge for any Latino Republican to defend Trump.
  • You can have all the Helens you want, but if the candidate continues with his rhetoric and proposals, you’re not going to win Latinos
  • Trump had retweeted an offensive comment about Columba Bush, who was born in Mexico.
  • Three years ago, bruised by Romney’s loss to Obama, the RNC commissioned a study to determine how to improve its outreach to minority voters
  • 00-page report urged Republicans to support comprehensive immigration reform, to focus less on social issues and to build stronger relationships with minority communities.
  • everything issued in that report has been ignored
malonema1

Billy Graham, Dead at 99, Reshaped Evangelicalism - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Billy Graham, the famous preacher who reached millions of people around the world through his Christian ministry, died on Wednesday at 99. Over the course of more than six decades, he reshaped the landscape of evangelism, sharing the gospel from North Carolina to North Korea and developing innovative ways to communicate the message of the Bible. He influenced generations of pastors and developed friendships with presidents, prime ministers, and royalty around the world. His death marks the end of an era for evangelicalism, and poses a fundamental question: Will his legacy of bipartisan, ecumenical outreach be carried forward?
  • Although the term “evangelical” is now commonly used to refer to Christians who focus on personal salvation and outreach about the gospel, it wasn’t always so common. “Billy was sort of the original evangelical,” argued Jack Graham, the pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, who serves with Laurie on President Trump’s unofficial evangelical advisory council. (He’s not related to Billy Graham.) The North Carolina preacher was focused on evangelism, or sharing the good news of the gospel. As he grew more popular, he became the face of the movement to many around the United States and the world.
  • He was also firmly committed to remaining bipartisan, proudly claiming that he provided spiritual counsel to 12 sitting presidents and participated in events surrounding nine inauguration ceremonies. “Billy had great influence on people from every side of the aisle, politically,” said Jack Graham. “To me, he reminds us always that more important than partisan politics, more important than the political divisions that we have today, that Christ can unite us.” Even President Trump met Graham, before he won the White House: Laurie said the now-president sat with the preacher at Graham’s 95th birthday party.
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  • Still, Graham was far more sympathetic towards civil rights than many other white Christian pastors of his generation, and he pushed for non-segregated crusades early in the 1950s. That legacy left him beloved across different groups of American Christians. “Our generation owes this giant of the Christian faith a debt of gratitude for paving the way for sharing the Gospel with the world with humility, graciousness, and integrity,” wrote Gabriel Salguero, the president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, in a statement on Wednesday.
aidenborst

States skeptical of Biden's Covid-19 vaccine plan as they await the missing details - C... - 0 views

  • State officials are skeptical that President-elect Joe Biden can meet his goal of 100 million coronavirus shots in his first 100 days, with a week to go before his start date and a slew of unanswered questions still swirling around his plan.
  • Multiple state officials and sources familiar with the Biden transition team's outreach told CNN in recent interviews that they are unclear on major details of the Biden team's plans -- including those for mass vaccination sites, vaccine supply issues and funding for local governments.
  • But states have questions, too, starting with a critical one: Will there even be enough vaccines to pull off 100 million shots in the first 100 days?
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  • "It's definitely aggressive," Claire Hannan, the executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers, told CNN.
  • The lack of clarity has made it difficult for states to map out their vaccination campaigns -- and they're unsure whether the situation will improve under Biden. Sources familiar with planning in both Republican- and Democratic-led states spoke with CNN.
  • "What the states have been doing is fly the plane a bit as they build it" is how one source familiar with the Biden team's outreach to states described their Covid-19 relief work under the Trump administration's watch.
  • Biden has said he will look into tapping the CDC, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Guard and the military to launch vaccination sites in school gyms and football stadiums and to set up mobile units to reach disadvantaged communities. His transition team has discussed the potential use of the US military and the National Guard in Covid mitigation efforts with governors and the Department of Defense, a transition official said.
  • "Just giving us the vaccine doesn't necessarily help, because we still need more people to administer it," the official told CNN.
  • This official noted that under some state plans, medical providers are supposed to reach out to their patients to give the vaccine. But many smaller practices lack enough staff for this responsibility, and they don't have the resources to hire.
  • For his part, Biden has publicly stressed the need for Congress to make more funding available for Covid-19 relief.
rerobinson03

Can Biden Regain Lost Ground With Latinos? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • MIAMI — Despite a late push to court Latino voters over the last several weeks, Joseph R. Biden Jr. is ending his presidential bid on shaky and perhaps perilous ground with this diverse, essential segment of the electorate, according to interviews with Democratic officials, community activists and voters.
  • Did Mr. Biden do too little, too late to court Latino voters, committing a strategic error that could be the 2020 version of Hillary Clinton taking Wisconsin for granted in 2016?
  • Polling in battleground states this fall has generally shown Mr. Biden leading President Trump among Hispanic voters, but not in every case — and rarely by the same margin that Mrs. Clinton commanded in 2016, especially among Hispanic men.
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  • A New York Times/Siena College poll of Florida released on Sunday showed Mr. Biden with the support of 54 percent of the state’s Latino voters, compared with 62 percent for Mrs. Clinton four years ago. He and Mr. Trump were basically tied among Hispanic men in the state
  • Mr. Biden is competitive among Latino voters, and could still win Florida based on his strength with educated whites.
  • But he would be in better shape, campaign aides privately acknowledged, if the campaign had reached out earlier to recruit infrequent voters and soften Mr. Trump’s support among Hispanic men in the state.
  • “The Biden people have done a good job in playing catch-up, but it is always the same, every cycle,” said Chuck Rocha, who runs Nuestro PAC, a pro-Biden committee that has raised $9 million for Spanish-language advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts. “Everybody only does Latino outreach in the last couple of weeks of the campaign. That has to change.”
  • The coronavirus has also been an impediment, said Mr. Castro, the former secretary of housing and urban development under President Barack Obama and now an adviser to Mr. Biden. “Latino voters like in-person contact,” he said.
  • Thanks to those funds, the Biden campaign has been able to increase its Spanish-language media buys in the closing weeks, with six-figure expenditures booked in Florida, Arizona and Pennsylvania, a spokesman said.
  • Still, the party has seen some successes. The Democratic National Committee invested heavily in microtargeting Puerto Rican voters through the purchase of call lists in 2019, and Mr. Biden owes his surprising strength in Texas and Arizona to strong support from Latino voters.
  • Democratic officials say they expected that nine million Latino voters will have gone to the polls early by mail or in person, up from 3.7 million in 2016.
  • Democrats have also recently begun pouring money and resources into outreach efforts, with donors pumping $28 million into three independent expenditure groups aimed at increasing Latino turnout in the past two months.
  • The overall problem is rooted not only in the party’s inconsistent efforts to reach Latino voters, but also in the particulars of Mr. Biden’s primary campaign. It was a cash-poor operation that was focused on Black voters, a group long courted by the former vice president that turned out to be critical to his primary victory.
  • But much of the Democrats’ resources in the closing days is being devoted to providing basic voting information to registered Latino voters, rather than funding a deeper dive into the voter files to reach more voters, or a big effort to change the minds of wavering male voters, party officials said.
  • On Saturday, Veronica Escobar, the Democratic congresswoman from El Paso, spent 20 minutes on the phone with a young Mexican-American woman in Texas who was outraged at Mr. Trump’s response to the pandemic and frightened by his rhetoric — and had no intention, whatsoever, of voting.
  • Democrats are relying on many Latino voters to go to the polls on Election Day, as they have tended to do in the past.
Javier E

Republicans have heart disease. Democrats have a gushing head wound. - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • There is a serious prospect, however, that Democrats will choose No. 1. There would be many reverberations for our politics. But chiefly, the United States would cease to have a center-left party and a center-right party. Both radicalized institutions would exaggerate our national differences, becoming the political equivalent of the hard-left and hard-right media. And the cause of national unity would be damaged even further.
  • Democrats should not overlearn the lessons of a close election. Option No. 3 is the Democratic future on the presidential level.
  • But for the foreseeable future, Democrats will also need a dash of No. 2, including a more accommodating attitude toward religion and associational rights.
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  • What are the Democratic options moving forward? First, there is the Bernie Sanders option — the embrace of a leftist populism that amounts to democratic socialism. This might also be called the Jeremy Corbyn option, after the leftist leader of the British Labour Party who has ideologically purified his party into political irrelevance.
  • Second, there is the Joe Biden option — a liberalism that makes a sustained outreach to union members and other blue-collar workers while showing a Catholic religious sensibility on issues of social justice
  • Third, there is the option of doubling down on the proven Barack Obama option, which requires a candidate who can excite rather than sedate the Obama-era base.
  • the Democratic candidate for president can’t prevail — at least at the moment — when she receives less than 30 percent of the vote from the white, non-college-educated Americans who live in the spaces between the cities
  • Democrats have become symbolically estranged from white, working-class America.
  • here is the largest, long-term Democratic challenge: It has become a provincial party. It is highly concentrated in urban areas and clings to the coasts. But our constitutional system puts emphasis on holding geography, particularly in the House of Representatives and the electoral college
  • In 2012, President Obama won the presidency with fewer than 700 counties out of more than 3,000 in the United States — a historical low. Clinton carried a little under 500 — about 15 percent of the total.
  • But why was the election even close enough for bad strategy in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, or utter incompetence by the FBI director, to matter?
  • Donald Trump was riding a modest electoral wave in certain parts of the country, but it was not large enough to overwhelm a reasonably capable Democratic candidate with a decent political strategy. Trump’s vote did not burst the levees; it barely lapped over the top of them in the industrial Midwest. The “blue wall” was too low by just a foot or two.
  • The Democratic candidate and her team could not protect the United States from a serious risk to its ideals and institutions by an untested and unstable novice who flirted with authoritarianism and made enough gaffes on an average Tuesday to sink a normal presidential campaign.
  • Hillary Clinton proved incapable of defeating a reality-television host whom more than 60 percent of Americans viewed as unfit to be president. It is perhaps the most humiliating moment in the long history of Mr. Jefferson’s party.
draneka

America will soon be ruled by a minority - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Starting next month, the United States will have a minority government.
  • this is a problem that can no longer be politely ignored
  • Because the system currently benefits Republicans and hurts Democrats, any talk about its injustices will be dismissed as partisan pleading by those who benefit from it
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  • These circumstances call for compromise, consensus, statesmanship and outreach to those who have been left out in the cold. I fear that we will be seeing none of this.
draneka

Bernie Sanders backs unionization campaign in Mississippi as Democrats draft populist a... - 0 views

  • The onetime presidential candidate, now the Democratic caucus’s point man on political outreach, is coming to the “March on Mississippi” to send a message about how organizing can lift workers’ quality of life.
  • “What I’m going to be saying is that the facts are very clear, that workers in America who are members of unions earn substantially more, 27 percent more, than workers not in unions,” Sanders (I-Vt.) said in an interview. “They get pensions and better working conditions. I find it very remarkable that Nissan is allowing unions to form at its plants all over the world. Well, if they can be organized everywhere else, they can be organized in Mississippi.”
  • “These workers are incredibly courageous,” Sanders said. “One thing we already know is that workers who have stood up for their rights are being harassed, are being discriminated against and are being lectured about the so-called perils of trade unionism. There’s a massive anti-union effort going on, and these guys are standing out their own. They deserve our support.”
Javier E

Who Are We? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • “That’s not who we are.” So said President Obama, again and again throughout his administration, in speeches urging Americans to side with him against the various outrages perpetrated by Republicans.
  • If close to half of America voted for Republicans in the Obama years and support Trump today, then clearly something besides the pieties of cosmopolitan liberalism is very much a part of who we are.
  • This self-undermining flaw makes the trope a useful way to grasp the dilemmas facing Trump’s opponents. In seeking to reject Trump’s chauvinist vision, they end up excluding too much of what a unifying counternarrative would require.
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  • The exclusion happens by omission, in the course of telling a story about America that’s powerful but incomplete.
  • In this narrative, which has surged to the fore in response to Trump’s refugee and visa policies, we are a propositional nation bound together by ideas rather than any specific cultural traditions
  • Given this story’s premises, saying that’s not who we are is a way of saying that all more particularist understandings of Americanism, all non-universalist forms of patriotic memory, need to be transcended.
  • But the real American past was particularist as well as universalist. Our founders built their a new order atop specifically European intellectual traditions. Our immigrants joined a settler culture, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, that demanded assimilation to its norms.
  • Then for a variety of reasons — a necessary reckoning with white supremacism, a new and diverse wave of immigration, the pull of a more globalist ethos, the waning of institutional religion — that mid-century story stopped making as much sense.
  • As late as the 1960s, liberalism as well as conservatism identified with these particularisms, and with a national narrative that honored and included them. The exhortations of civil rights activists assumed a Christian moral consensus.
  • Our crisis of the house divided was a Christian civil war. Our great national drama was a westward expansion that conquered a native population rather than coexisting with it.
  • n its place emerged a left-wing narrative that stands in judgment on the racist-misogynist-robber baron past, and a mainstream liberal narrative that has room for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Alexander Hamilton (as opposed to the slightly more Trumpish genuine article) and Emma Lazarus, but feels unsure about the rest.
  • meanwhile for a great many Americans the older narrative still feels like the real history. They still see themselves more as settlers than as immigrants, identifying with the Pilgrims and the Founders, with Lewis and Clark and Davy Crockett and Laura Ingalls Wilder. They still embrace the Iliadic mythos that grew up around the Civil War, prefer the melting pot to multiculturalism, assume a Judeo-Christian civil religion rather the “spiritual but not religious” version.
  • Trump’s ascent is, in part, an attempt to restore their story to pre-eminence. It’s a restoration attempt that can’t succeed, because the country has changed too much, and because that national narrative required correction.
  • But so far we haven’t found a way to correct the story while honoring its full sweep — including all the white-male-Protestant-European protagonists to whom, for all their sins, we owe so much of our inheritance.
  • Instead liberalism, under pressure from the left, has become steadily more anxious about its political and cultural progenitors, with Woodrow Wilson joining Jackson and Jefferson in the dock
  • Meanwhile the right’s narrative has become steadily more exclusionary — religious-conservative outreach to Muslims has given way to Islamophobia, racial optimism has been replaced by white resentment.
  • Maybe no unifying story is really possible. Maybe the gap between a heroic founders-and-settlers narrative and the truth about what befell blacks and Indians and others cannot be adequately bridged.
  • But any leader who wants to bury Trumpism (as opposed to just beating Trump) would need to reach for one — for a story about who we are and were, not just what we’re not, that the people who still believe in yesterday’s American story can recognize as their own.
Javier E

Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War? - Magazine - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The belief that the Civil War wasn’t for us was the result of the country’s long search for a narrative that could reconcile white people with each other, one that avoided what professional historians now know to be true: that one group of Americans attempted to raise a country wholly premised on property in Negroes, and that another group of Americans, including many Negroes, stopped them. In the popular mind, that demonstrable truth has been evaded in favor of a more comforting story of tragedy, failed compromise, and individual gallantry. For that more ennobling narrative, as for so much of American history, the fact of black people is a problem.
  • Honor is salvageable from a military defeat; much less so from an ideological defeat, and especially one so duly earned in defense of slavery in a country premised on liberty.
  • The fallen Confederacy’s chroniclers grasped this historiographic challenge and, immediately after the war, began erasing all evidence of the crime—that is to say, they began erasing black people—from the written record.
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  • Having preserved the Union and saved white workers from competing with slave labor, the North could magnanimously acquiesce to such Confederate meretriciousness and the concomitant irrelevance of the country’s blacks. That interpretation served the North too, for it elided uncomfortable questions about the profits reaped by the North from Southern cotton, as well as the North’s long strategy of appeasement and compromise, stretching from the Fugitive Slave Act back to the Constitution itself.
  • for my community, the message has long been clear: the Civil War is a story for white people—acted out by white people, on white people’s terms—in which blacks feature strictly as stock characters and props. We are invited to listen, but never to truly join the narrative, for to speak as the slave would, to say that we are as happy for the Civil War as most Americans are for the Revolutionary War, is to rupture the narrative. Having been tendered such a conditional invitation, we have elected—as most sane people would—to decline.
  • With a firm foothold in the public memory and in the academic history, the comfortable narrative found its most influential expression in the popular media. Films like Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind revealed an establishment more interested in the alleged sins perpetrated upon Confederates than in the all-too-real sins perpetrated upon the enslaved people in their midst. That predilection continues. In 2010’s The Conspirator, the director Robert Redford’s Mary Surratt is the preferred victim of political persecution—never mind those whose very lives were persecution.
  • “It was because we failed to do the thing we really have a genius for, which is compromise,” said Foote, neglecting to mention the Missouri Compromise, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Kansas-­Nebraska Act, and the fact that any further such compromise would have meant the continued enslavement of black people.
  • Wilson executed a familiar act of theater—urging the country’s white citizens away from their history, while continuing to act in the spirit of its darkest chapters. Wilson’s ideas were not simply propaganda, but notions derived from some of the country’s most celebrated historians. James McPherson notes that titans of American history like Charles Beard, Avery Craven, and James G. Randall minimized the role of slavery in the war; some blamed the violence on irreconcilable economic differences between a romantic pastoral South and a capitalistic manufacturing North, or on the hot rhetoric of radical abolitionists.
  • The celebrated Civil War historian Bruce Catton best sums up this sense when he refers to the war as “a consuming tragedy so costly that generations would pass before people could begin to say whether what it had bought was worth the price.” All of those “people” are white. For African Americans, war commenced not in 1861, but in 1661, when the Virginia Colony began passing America’s first black codes, the charter documents of a slave society that rendered blacks a permanent servile class and whites a mass aristocracy. They were also a declaration of war.
  • African Americans understood they were at war, and reacted accordingly: run­ning away, rebelling violently, fleeing to the British, murdering slave-catchers, and—less spectacularly, though more significantly—refusing to work, breaking tools, bending a Christian God to their own interpretation, stealing back the fruits of their labor, and, in covert corners of their world, committing themselves to the illegal act of learning to read. Southern whites also understood they were in a state of war, and subsequently turned the ante­bellum South into a police state
  • In our present time, to express the view of the enslaved—to say that the Civil War was a significant battle in the long war against bondage and for government by the people—is to compromise the comfortable narrative. It is to remind us that some of our own forefathers once explicitly rejected the republic to which they’d pledged themselves, and dreamed up another country, with slavery not merely as a bug, but as its very premise. It is to point out that at this late hour, the totems of the empire of slavery—chief among them, its flag—still enjoy an honored place in the homes, and public spaces, of self-professed patriots and vulgar lovers of “freedom.” It is to understand what it means to live in a country that will never apologize for slavery, but will not stop apologizing for the Civil War.
  • For the portion of the country that still honors, or traces its ancestry to, the men who fired on Fort Sumter, and thus brought war, the truthful story of the Civil War tells of a defeat richly deserved, garnered in a pursuit now condemned. For the blameless North, it throws up the failed legacy of appeasement of slaveholders, the craven willingness to bargain on the backs of black people, and the unwillingness, in the Reconstruction years, to finish what the war started.
  • For realists, the true story of the Civil War illuminates the problem of ostensibly sober-minded compromise with powerful, and intractable, evil. For radicals, the wave of white terrorism that followed the war offers lessons on the price of revolutionary change. White Americans finding easy comfort in nonviolence and the radical love of the civil-rights movement must reckon with the unsettling fact that black people in this country achieved the rudi­ments of their freedom through the killing of whites.
  • Confronted with the realization that the Civil War is the genesis of modern America, in general, and of modern black America, in particular, we cannot just implore the Park Service and the custodians of history to do more outreach—we have to become custodians ourselves.
Javier E

When Even the Starting Line Is Out of Reach - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • One reason American antipoverty efforts over the last half-century haven’t been more effective is that they mostly treat symptoms, not causes. To put it another way, we don’t invest nearly enough in helping children in the first few years of life as their brains are developing. If we miss that window, then adult interventions like higher minimum wages can never be fully effective.
  • Almost one-fifth of children here in West Virginia are born with drugs or alcohol in their systems, one study found. Those kids may never reach their potential as a result.
  • What would make a difference? We need an integrated set of early interventions, starting with family planning to help women and girls avoid unwanted pregnancy (four out of five births to teenagers are unplanned or unwanted). We need outreach efforts to help pregnant women curb use of drugs, alcohol and tobacco, as well as free at-home help for new moms who want to breast-feed.
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  • Let’s push for home visitation programs that encourage parents to speak to children and read to them; many low-income homes don’t have a single kid’s book. We also need initiatives to reduce exposure to lead and other toxins. Finally, how about screenings for problems like hearing and visual impairment — all followed by a good prekindergarten.
  • all young children should have a primary care physician who screens them for eight barriers to learning: vision problems, hearing deficits, undertreated asthma, anemia, dental pain, hunger, lead exposure and behavioral problems.
  • Let’s broaden the conversation about opportunity, to build not just safety nets for those who stumble but also to help all American kids achieve lift-off.
Javier E

Op-Ed Columnist - How Fox Betrayed Petraeus - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York?
  • An America at war with Islam plays right into Al Qaeda’s recruitment spiel. This month’s incessant and indiscriminate orgy of Muslim-bashing is a national security disaster for that reason — Osama bin Laden’s “next video script has just written itself,” as the former F.B.I. terrorist interrogator Ali Soufan put it — but not just for that reason. America’s Muslim partners, those our troops are fighting and dying for, are collateral damage. If the cleric behind Park51 — a man who has participated in events with Condoleezza Rice and Karen Hughes, for heaven’s sake — is labeled a closet terrorist sympathizer and a Nazi by some of the loudest and most powerful conservative voices in America, which Muslims are not?
Javier E

Palo Alto train death opens fresh wound in a community searching for solutions - Contra... - 0 views

  • The boy's death happened at about 6:25 a.m. on the tracks just south of the city's Churchill Avenue, near the elegant century-old high school on an oak-studded Spanish Mission campus, directly across the street from Stanford University, in a ZIP code synonymous with success. Two student suicides earlier this school year at neighboring Gunn High School led to a flurry of community meetings and teen outreach, and the district has been working to overhaul its teen mental-health policies since a much-publicized cluster of student suicides in 2009.
  • the very life of the school district has been altered in ways large and small. Social studies classes start with meditation. Teachers and staff have been taught to help identify teens struggling with depression or in distress. The district is accelerating construction of a student wellness center at Gunn High School, where students can talk to counselors and mental health professionals and nutritionists to decompress.To reduce stress, the school district -- home to the progeny of top Stanford faculty and many of Silicon Valley's tech titans -- reformed its homework policy in 2012, but the plan was never fully implemented. Now it is back on the school board's agenda. The district also recently contracted with a data-analysis firm called Hanover Research Group to analyze homework, grading practices and curriculum.
  • Both Gunn and Paly have convened sessions to listen to students. A similar communitywide gathering was held last week, and another is scheduled. Teachers offer academic accommodations -- like not collecting homework, or delaying tests -- and Paly economics teacher Alexander Davis created a "Gratitude Wall" in his classroom for students to write what they are grateful for on sticky notes.Paly, many students say, is a place where teachers care about their well-being. But the causes of suicide are complex.The school offers an array of electives and resources. "There's journalism, glassblowing, theater -- there may be a little more pressure, but a lot more opportunity here," said senior Jack Brook. "People are happy when they find a passion, and there's a lot of opportunity to find a passion here."
aqconces

Rare Interviews With Hitler's Inner Circle Reveal What Truly Happened on "The Day Hitle... - 0 views

  • a 1948 film never before shown to the American public, former Nuremberg trials judge and Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice Michael Musmanno proclaimed: "I have brought a number of eye witnesses on the subject of Hitler's disappearance. In their own words, they will tell you what happened to the Führer of Germany."
  • For two years following World War II, Musmanno tracked down members of Hitler's staff, including his secretary and the leader of the Nazi Youth, among others, in an effort to prove the Führer’s death.
  • The interviewees describe Hitler in his last moments as the Soviet Army invaded Germany in 1945, detailing everything from the claustrophobic quarters of the Führer's underground bunker, to his marriage to Eva Braun, to his final meal and eventual suicide.
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  • While the Musmanno collection, comprising 1,000 linear feet of photographs, papers and artifacts, came to Duquesne University in Pittsburgh several years after the judge's death, the recordings remained inaccessible until the mid-2000s, around the time that Thomas White, Duquesne's archivist and curator of special collections, began working at the school. We spoke with White about the interviews.
  • The collection was given by the Musmanno family to Duquesne in 1980. Literally, they had everything that was his. We were aware that the films existed, but the canisters were unlabeled, and of course they’re on old reel film, so we had no way to play them.
qkirkpatrick

Donald Trump May Not Be a Fascist, But He Is Leading Us Merrily Down That Pat... - 0 views

  • People who have studied the extremist right as a historical and sociopolitical phenomenon in depth are acutely aware of a simple truth: America has been very, very lucky so far when it comes to fascistic political movements.
  • Fascistic elements and tendencies have always been part of America's DNA. Indeed, it can be said that some of the worst traits of fascism in Europe were borrowed from their American exemplars - particularly the eliminationist tendencies, manifested first in the form of racial and ethnic segregation, and ultimately in genocidal violence.
  • Hitler acknowledged at various times his admiration for the American genocide against Native Americans, as well as the segregationist policies of the Jim Crow regime in the South (on which the Nuremberg Race Laws were modeled) and the threat of the lynch mob embodied in the Ku Klux Klan. According to Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler was "passionately interested in the Ku Klux Klan. ... He seemed to think it was a political movement similar to his own." And indeed it was.
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  • Those of us who study fascism not just as a historical phenomenon, but as a living and breathing phenomenon that has always previously maintained a kind of half-life on the fringes of the American right, have come to understand that it is both a complex and a simple phenomenon
  • In many ways, Trump's fascistic-seeming presidential campaign fills in many of the components of that complex constellation of traits that comprises real fascism. Perhaps the most significant of these is the one component that has been utterl
  • There is little doubt that Trump is tapping into fascistic sentiments, which is why so many observers are now beginning to finally use the word in describing Trump's campaign.
  • Eliminationist rhetoric is the backbone of Trump's appeal. His opening salvo in the campaign - the one that first skyrocketed him to the forefront in the race, poll-wise, and proved wildly popular with Republican voters - was his vow (and subsequent proposed program) to deport all 12 million of the United States' undocumented immigrants
manhefnawi

How the Nazis Tried to Cover Up Their Crimes at Auschwitz - History in the Headlines - 0 views

  • the death march of Auschwitz—part of the Nazis’ mad scramble to escape Allied forces in January 1945
  • Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazis’ more than 400,000 camps and incarceration facilities
  • Beller saw Nazi guards murder prisoners who tried to escape
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  • Nazi guards led them through the forests and fields of southern Poland on their way to Germany. The Germans called the march an “evacuation”; prisoners immediately dubbed it the “death march.”
  • one of Nazi Germany’s most efficient tools in the quest to eradicate European Jews
  • ordinary Germans standing along the road, watching the prisoners go by
  • The Nazis’ goal wasn’t only to destroy evidence of the camp: They had plans to force the prisoners to serve as slave laborers for the Reich
  • Those officers who stayed burned documents in a last-ditch attempt to hide their crimes
  • Then, on January 27, 1945, the Red Army reached the camp. Inside, they found prisoners covered in excrement and starving to death, children who had been used for medical experiments, and other shocking evidence of the Nazis’ crimes.
  • the Red Army immediately began to help feed and care for them. Half of the surviving prisoners died of starvation, disease and exhaustion shortly after liberation
  • few people could even grasp the horror that was found in the camps
Javier E

The second-most dangerous American - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Because John Bolton is five things President Trump is not — intelligent, educated, principled, articulate and experienced — and because of Bolton’s West Wing proximity to a president responsive to the most recent thought he has heard emanating from cable television or an employee, Bolton will soon be the second-most dangerous American
  • he will be the first national security adviser who, upon taking up residence down the hall from the Oval Office, will be suggesting that the United States should seriously consider embarking on war crimes.
  • The first two charges against the major Nazi war criminals in the 1945-1946 Nuremberg trials concerned waging aggressive war
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  • Bolton, for whom a trade war with many friends and foes is insufficiently stimulating, favors real wars against North Korea and Iran. Both have odious regimes, but neither can credibly be said to be threatening an imminent attack against the United States. Nevertheless, Bolton thinks bombing both might make the world safer. What could go wrong?
  • to speak of, say, a sincere sofa is to commit what philosophers call a “category mistake” — sofas are incapable of sincerity — and to speak of this president’s convictions (or plans, or policies) about this or that is a category mistake.
  • It is frequently said that the decision to invade Iraq was the worst U.S. foreign policy decision since Vietnam. Actually, it was worse than Vietnam, and the worst in American history, for two reasons.
  • One is that so far we probably have paid no more that 20 percent of the eventual costs of that decision that enhanced Iran’s ascendancy.
  • The other reason is that America gradually waded waist deep into Vietnam without a crossing-the-Rubicon moment — a single clear, dispositive decision. In contrast, the protracted preparation for invading Iraq was deliberative and methodical.
  • Bolton’s belief in the U.S. power to make the world behave and eat its broccoli reflects what has been called “narcissistic policy disorder” — the belief that whatever happens in the world happens because of something the United States did or did not do. This is a recipe for diplomatic delusions and military overreaching
  • Speaking of delusions, one died last week — the belief that this president could be safely cocooned within layers of adult supervision
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