Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged shutdown

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
25More

Gavin Newsom Survives Recall Election and Will Remain Governor - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...overnor-california-recall.html
shared by woodlu on 15 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • No Republican has held statewide office in more than a decade.
  • reflected the state’s recent progress against the coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed more than 67,000 lives in California
  • The state has one of the nation’s highest vaccination rates and one of its lowest rates of new virus cases
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • “We said yes to science. We said yes to vaccines. We said yes to ending this pandemic. We said yes to people’s right to vote without fear of fake fraud and voter suppression
  • “As a health care worker, it was important to me to have a governor who follows science,” said Marc Martino, 26, who was dressed in blue scrubs as he dropped off his ballot in Irvine.
  • it was the politicization of the pandemic that propelled it onto the ballot as Californians became impatient with shutdowns of businesses and classrooms
  • Initially, Mr. Heatlie’s petition had difficulty gaining traction. But it gathered steam as the pandemic swept California and Mr. Newsom struggled to contain it
  • Though polls showed that the recall was consistently opposed by some 60 percent of Californians, surveys over the summer suggested that likely voters were unenthusiastic about Mr. Newsom.
  • President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota traveled to California to campaign for Mr. Newsom, while Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former President Barack Obama appeared in his commercials
  • The governor charged that far-right extremists and supporters of former President Donald J. Trump were attempting a hostile takeover in a state where they could never hope to attain majority support in a regular election.
  • Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one in California, and pandemic voting rules encouraged high turnout, allowing ballots to be mailed to each of the state’s 22 million registered, active voters with prepaid postage. More than 40 percent of those Californians voted early.
  • Recall attempts are common in California, where direct democracy has long been part of the political culture.
  • We said yes to women’s fundamental constitutional right to decide for herself what she does with her body, her fate, her future. We said yes to diversity.”
  • Californians who at first were supportive of the governor’s health orders wearied of shutdowns in businesses and classrooms, and public dissatisfaction boiled over in November when Mr. Newsom was spotted mask-free at the French Laundry, an exclusive wine country restaurant,
  • The recall campaign, the two men said, had expanded the small cadre that began the effort into a statewide coalition of 400,000 members who are already helping to push ballot proposals to fund school vouchers, forbid vaccine mandates in schools, and abolish public employee unions, which have been a longstanding Democratic force in California.
  • About one-quarter of the state’s registered voters are Republicans, and their numbers have been dwindling since the 1990s,
  • He took note of the voter fraud accusations that some in his party began to make well before the polls closed, echoing Mr. Trump, who claimed without evidence that Democrats had “rigged” the recall election.
  • Some Democratic observers were circumspect, warning that the disruption caused by the recall effort hinted at deeper problems.
  • And until the issues that created it get dealt with, people in power are in trouble. There’s a lot of anger and fear and frustration out there.
  • the governor moved aggressively to demonstrate that the state could both protect its economy and curb the virus. In recent months, he has rolled out vaccinations, cleaned up trash in neighborhoods neglected by pandemic-worn Californians, thrown motel rooms open to homeless Californians, announced stimulus checks and rent assistance for poor and middle-class Californians and stood repeatedly in front of a gold lamé curtain to host one of the nation’s largest vaccine lotteries.
  • Mr. Newsom and his team quickly cleared the field of potential Democratic alternatives.
  • Mr. Newsom painted the recall effort in national, partisan terms and rejected a defensive posture. His strategy galvanized major donors and his base.
  • Millions of voters chose not to answer the ballot’s second question, with Mr. Elder receiving about 44 percent of the vote from those who did. Kevin Paffrath, a Democrat, and Kevin Faulconer, a Republican and former mayor of San Diego, each had about 10 percent of the vote as of 10 p.m. Pacific time.
  • California has no limits on donations to committees for and against recalls, but the state caps contributions to candidates from individual donors.
  • Mr. Newsom capitalized on the rules, raising more than $50 million just in donations of more than $100,000 to oppose the recall.
24More

Ocean Currents in the Atlantic Could Slow by Century's End, Research Shows - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...antic-ocean-tipping-point.html atlantic ocean turning point environment crisis tipping point
shared by Javier E on 26 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • The last time there was a major slowdown in the mighty network of ocean currents that shapes the climate around the North Atlantic, it seems to have plunged Europe into a deep cold for over a millennium.
  • That was roughly 12,800 years ago, when not many people were around to experience it. But in recent decades, human-driven warming could be causing the currents to slow once more, and scientists have been working to determine whether and when they might undergo another great weakening, which would have ripple effects for weather patterns across a swath of the globe.
  • A pair of researchers in Denmark this week put forth a bold answer: A sharp weakening of the currents, or even a shutdown, could be upon us by century’s end.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Climate scientists generally agree that the Atlantic circulation will decline this century, but there’s no consensus on whether it will stall out before 2100.
  • the new findings were reason enough not to regard a shutdown as an abstract, far-off concern. “It’s now,” she said.
  • As humans warm the atmosphere, however, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet is adding large amounts of fresh water to the North Atlantic, which could be disrupting the balance of heat and salinity that keeps the overturning moving. A patch of the Atlantic south of Greenland has cooled conspicuously in recent years, creating a “cold blob” that some scientists see as a sign that the system is slowing.
  • Abrupt thawing of the Arctic permafrost. Loss of the Amazon rain forest. Collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Once the world warms past a certain point, these and other events could be set into swift motion, scientists warn, though the exact thresholds at which this would occur are still highly uncertain.
  • In the Atlantic, researchers have been searching for harbingers of tipping-point-like change in a tangle of ocean currents that goes by an unlovely name: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC (pronounced “AY-mock”).
  • These currents carry warm waters from the tropics through the Gulf Stream, past the southeastern United States, before bending toward northern Europe. When this water releases its heat into the air farther north, it becomes colder and denser, causing it to sink to the deep ocean and move back toward the Equator. This sinking effect, or “overturning,” allows the currents to transfer enormous amounts of heat around the planet, making them hugely influential for the climate around the Atlantic and beyond.
  • adds to a growing body of scientific work that describes how humankind’s continued emissions of heat-trapping gases could set off climate “tipping points,” or rapid and hard-to-reverse changes in the environment.
  • Much of the Northern Hemisphere could cool. The coastlines of North America and Europe could see faster sea-level rise. Northern Europe could experience stormier winters, while the Sahel in Africa and the monsoon regions of Asia would most likely get less rain.
  • Scientists’ uncertainty about the timing of an AMOC collapse shouldn’t be taken as an excuse for not reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to try to avoid it, said Hali Kilbourne, an associate research professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.
  • Were the circulation to tip into a much weaker state, the effects on the climate would be far-reaching, though scientists are still examining their potential magnitude.
  • Dr. Ditlevsen’s new analysis focused on a simple metric, based on sea-surface temperatures, that is similar to ones other scientists have used as proxies for the strength of the Atlantic circulation. She conducted the analysis with Peter Ditlevsen, her brother, who is a climate scientist at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute. They used data on their proxy measure from 1870 to 2020 to calculate statistical indicators that presage changes in the overturning.
  • “Not only do we see an increase in these indicators,” Peter Ditlevsen said, “but we see an increase which is consistent with this approaching a tipping point.”
  • They then used the mathematical properties of a tipping-point-like system to extrapolate from these trends. That led them to predict that the Atlantic circulation could collapse around midcentury, though it could potentially occur as soon as 2025 and as late as 2095.
  • Their analysis included no specific assumptions about how much greenhouse-gas emissions will rise in this century. It assumed only that the forces bringing about an AMOC collapse would continue at an unchanging pace — essentially, that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations would keep rising as they have since the Industrial Revolution.
  • they voiced reservations about some of its methods, and said more work was still needed to nail down the timing with greater certainty.
  • Susan Lozier, a physical oceanographer at Georgia Tech, said sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic near Greenland weren’t necessarily influenced by changes in the overturning alone, making them a questionable proxy for inferring those changes. She pointed to a study published last year showing that much of the cold blob’s development could be explained by shifts in wind and atmospheric patterns.
  • Scientists are now using sensors slung across the Atlantic to directly measure the overturning. Dr. Lozier is involved in one of these measurement efforts. The aim is to better understand what’s driving the changes beneath the waves, and to improve projections of future changes.
  • Still, the new study sent an urgent message about the need to keep collecting data on the changing ocean currents,
  • scientists’ most advanced computer models of the global climate have produced a wide range of predictions for how the currents might behave in the coming decades, in part because the mix of factors that shape them is so complex.
  • “It is very plausible that we’ve fallen off a cliff already and don’t know it,” Dr. Kilbourne said. “I fear, honestly, that by the time any of this is settled science, it’s way too late to act.”
  • the projects began collecting data in 2004 at the earliest, which isn’t enough time to draw firm long-term conclusions. “It is extremely difficult to look at a short record for the ocean overturning and say what it is going to do over 30, 40 or 50 years,”
8More

Venezuela halts effort to recall president - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html venezuela president history
shared by zachcutler on 24 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Venezuela halts effort to recall president
  • A drive to hold a recall referendum on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has been halted, Venezuela's National Electoral Council announced in a statement.
  • Opposition leader Henrique Capriles said Friday, "Yesterday in Venezuela there was a coup d'état. There is no other way to call it. What we feared so much was hatched."
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • "The time has come to defend Venezuela's constitution," he said at a news conference, adding that "next Wednesday, we're going to take Venezuela from end to end." He didn't specify what might happen beyond protests.
  • Maduro, heir to the late socialist leader Hugo Chavez, has vowed that efforts to remove him from office won't succeed.
  • Many people are fed up with the widespread shortages of basic goods and medical supplies, factory shutdowns and
  • blackouts.
  • Opposition groups collected signatures of 1% of the voting population during the first petition drive last summer. That was enough to trigger the second round.
1More

Trump's order encourages states to turn refugees away - 0 views

www.politico.com/...migration-states-reject-234346 politics US
shared by marleymorton on 30 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • marleymorton on 30 Jan 17
     
    States and cities will find it easier to turn away even those refugees the Trump administration admits to the U.S. under the executive order issued Friday. The order evolved from a proposal that candidate Donald Trump described as a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" - though President Trump says of the final version, "This is not a Muslim ban."
10More

Visualizing a Trump Presidency-and the Grim Reality of American Politics - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...474198 2016 election politics US crisis gop demagogue
shared by Javier E on 18 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • American politics have careened out of control, lurching from a role model of sensible policy making and civil discourse to gridlock over even modest proposals with bipartisan buy-in, and to a presidential campaign with the kind of angry populist bluster, coarse language and sectarian division formerly associated with Peron-style banana republics.
  • On the policy front, the Republican Congress has made the unprecedented decision to portray a president with almost a year left in his term as not simply a “lame duck” but utterly bereft of any legitimacy to carry out the responsibilities of his office
  • On the campaign front, the emergence of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz as the leaders of the Republican presidential pack—one a demagogic populist outsider who has never served in public office and had no role in the party, the other an extreme right-wing ideologue whose twin calling cards are engineering a government shutdown and going on the Senate floor and calling his own leader a liar—turned conventional presidential politics on its head, leaving a Republican political establishment reeling and a broader group of concerned Americans frightened about the future.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Trump’s monumental ego would be blown up even more by a presidential victory, and his modus operandi in business and the nominating process—telling his subordinates to act with no questions asked, using bluster and intimidation to force others to bend to his will—would be reinforced.
  • whatever the circumstances, if Trump does capture the Republican nomination and there is no significant third party or independent effort, he has a chance, however remote it looks now, to win. With America’s tribal politics, any nominee probably starts with a floor of 45 percent of the votes. What if there is serious economic turbulence or a Paris-style attack in the fall? Could enough voters in key states like Ohio and Michigan go to the strong man? It’s possible.
  • Donald Trump’s emergence as the GOP frontrunner and likely nominee creates an existential crisis for the Republican Party, as the angry populism exploited and incited by Republican leaders in Congress to regain majority control turns inward to consume its host. The potential outcomes are bad for the party and its adherents—but even worse for the rest of America.
  • Many mainstream Republicans have comforted themselves by noting that Trump has no strong or fixed ideology, and as a lifelong dealmaker, is used to some give-and-take. Maybe they are right. But given that he has no understanding of policy or how policy is made, no ties at all to veterans of politics and government, and disdain for all those who have been inside and made those terrible deals, it would be a long, long time before he would or could recognize the reality of governing in a democracy.
  • If Republicans in Congress can’t help themselves from giving a collective middle finger to the outgoing president, how will they treat a new Democratic president? If Hillary Clinton wins—after the vast majority of Republicans in Congress endorse their presidential candidate by demonizing the alternative, and given the long history of contentiousness between the Clintons and Republicans in Congress—is there any way it can be better?
  • The near-term future of politics and policy in America is a pretty grim one. Intimidated by the nihilist, nativist pressure from talk radio hosts and bloggers, Republican leaders in Congress are not all that likely to ignore their desires.
  • A Trump loss—which he would surely blame on the enemy within—would not mean the demise of a Trump movement or the angry populism behind it, and the driving need by Republicans to recapture their party’s mojo in the midterm would probably have them fall back on the populist approach that worked in 2010 and 2014. So brace yourselves for a rocky road ahead, not just in 2016 but in 2017 and beyond. 
4More

Right-wing groups hurt the GOP - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...right-wing-groups-hurt-the-gop republican tea party
shared by James Flanagan on 12 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Club for Growth is one of the right-wing groups prone to backing losing, extreme candidates and cheering on silly stunts like the shutdown
  • Opensecrets.org lists the CFG for 2013 as spending $16,584,207 in the 2012 election cycle. Over $9M was spent against Republicans.
  • By pushing unprepared, true-believer candidates in 2010 and 2012 it helped throw away potential pickups in Nevada, Colorado and Texas Alaska while helping Dems win Indiana. That is four seats Republicans don’t have (they need six now to win back the majority). I doubt there is a single Democratic group as effective in undermining GOP attempts to gain the Senate majority.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • This is only one example of the dysfunction on the right that winds up playing into the Dems hands. With CFG, Madison Project and Senate Conservatives Fund to do its work both in savaging good GOP candidates and boosting flaky ones, Democrats can focus their funds on hard-to-win swing states and even some long-shot races.
9More

Why This Is Not Just 'Washington Breakdown,' in 3 Graphs (and 1 Story) - James Fallows ... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...280099 partisan politics nullification crisis obama policy obamacare republicans
shared by Javier E on 30 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • In essence, the hard-line faction of the House GOP is demanding the following, as recent NYT, WSJ, and WaPo articles, apart from today's, have made clear:  EITHER the Administration must undo the main legislative accomplishment of the president's time in office, which he passed despite filibuster resistance four years ago and which the Supreme Court has since held constitutional;  OR ELSE all other business of the government will be halted, and the full faith and credit of the United States will be called into question, with unknown but likely bad world-financial consequences.
  • the closest parallels in our history were to the John C. Calhoun era before the Civil War. If you think that's unfair, please tell me another case in which a dissatisfied minority threatened to shut down the entire government, and if necessary renege on the national debt, unless a sitting President agrees to reverse his hardest-won policy accomplishment.
  • are there any other ways in which a democracy might assess the people's will? I can think of three
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • What's the basis for the GOP claim that the time has come to "defund Obamacare" and threaten default and shutdown to get their way? Their passion comes from their contention that the public has turned against this program. Thus, they are doing no more than reflecting popular will.
  • 1) Just last year, a presidential election was fought over this exact issue, along with economic policy more broadly. When the votes came in, Barack Obama scored a runaway Electoral College win -- and became the first person since Dwight Eisenhower to get more than 51% of the popular vote twice.
  • 2) In that year's elections for the Senate, the Democrats increased their majority by two seats and overall received 10 million+ more votes than all Republican candidates.
  • 3) And last year even in the elections for the House, Democrats -- who for better or worse were forced to run on Obamacare and the president's economic policies -- gained 8 seats and received 1.7 million more votes than did all Republican candidates combined. 
  • all evidence suggests that without post-2010 gerrymandering, the Democrats might well control the House right now, along with the Senate and White House.
  • In short, we have a faction making historically unprecedented demands -- give us everything, or we stop the government and potentially renege on the national debt. And it is doing so less than a year after its party lost the presidency, lost the Senate (and lost ground there), and held onto the House in part because of rotten-borough distortions. 
5More

Niall Ferguson: The Shutdown Is a Sideshow. Debt Is the Threat - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...4906704579113661593684356.html debt deficit us crisis
shared by Javier E on 05 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • True, the federal deficit has fallen to about 4% of GDP this year from its 10% peak in 2009. The bad news is that, even as discretionary expenditure has been slashed, spending on entitlements has continued to rise—and will rise inexorably in the coming years, driving the deficit back up above 6% by 2038
  • A very striking feature of the latest CBO report is how much worse it is than last year's. A year ago, the CBO's extended baseline series for the federal debt in public hands projected a figure of 52% of GDP by 2038. That figure has very nearly doubled to 100%.
  • Only a fantasist can seriously believe "this is not a crisis." The fiscal arithmetic of excessive federal borrowing is nasty even when relatively optimistic assumptions are made about growth and interest rates. Currently, net interest payments on the federal debt are around 8% of GDP. But under the CBO's extended baseline scenario, that share could rise to 20% by 2026
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The question is what on earth can be done to prevent the debt explosion. The CBO has a clear answer: "[B]ringing debt back down to 39 percent of GDP in 2038—as it was at the end of 2008—would require a combination of increases in revenues and cuts in noninterest spending (relative to current law) totaling 2 percent of GDP for the next 25 years. . . .
  • "If those changes came entirely from revenues, they would represent an increase of 11 percent relative to the amount of revenues projected for the 2014-2038 period; if the changes came entirely from spending, they would represent a cut of 10½ percent in noninterest spending from the amount projected for that period."
5More

An Afghan Interpreter Seeks a Visa That Is Unlikely to Come - NYTimes.com - 0 views

atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/...-visa-that-is-unlikely-to-come US mideast allies interpreter
shared by Javier E on 31 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • on the Facebook page for applicants to a special American visa program. In this case, however, the man in the photograph couldn’t be described that way because his head had been cut off and placed on the small of his back so that his lifeless eyes stared at the camera. He had been an interpreter for United States Marines advising the Afghan Border Police in 2010, which is presumably why insurgents made an example of him. I don’t know his story, but I can tell you Amin’s.
  • Amin didn’t simply assist my platoon; he was central to our effort. In a complex political environment that Marine battalions rotated through every six months, he was the constant — the face that local leaders remembered each time new Marines arrived, and the expert on a complicated web of interpersonal relationships among Afghan soldiers, police, politicians and elders.
  • Today, a year and four months after I sent the first e-mail, Amin is still waiting to schedule medical exams and a final security interview at the United States Embassy in Kabul. He continues to work in the relative safety of an American military base, but as the draw-down continues, he will eventually be left to fend for himself.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • On Sept. 30, Congress passed legislation extending a special visa program for Iraqis. That a Congress seemingly incapable of accomplishing anything unanimously passed this bill just before the government shutdown is encouraging, but legislation meant to improve the special visa system for Afghans remains up in the air.
  • Amin was probably as indispensable to those other Marines as he was to me. And if our leaders would apply the same sort of focus and industriousness to the special visa program that Amin applies every day to the war effort they oversee, perhaps they could prevent any more of our linguists from being dishonored on Facebook.
8More

The Boehner Bunglers - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gman-the-boehner-bunglers.html crisis governance partisan Republicans policy
shared by Javier E on 08 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The federal government is shut down, we’re about to hit the debt ceiling (with disastrous economic consequences), and no resolution is in sight. How did this happen?
  • The main answer, which only the most pathologically “balanced” reporting can deny, is the radicalization of the Republican Party.
  • the G.O.P. has become “an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Conservative leaders are indeed ideologically extreme, but they’re also deeply incompetent. So much so, in fact, that the Dunning-Kruger effect — the truly incompetent can’t even recognize their own incompetence — reigns supreme.
  • Even more remarkable, in its way, was the response of House Republican leaders, who didn’t tell the activists they were being foolish. All they did was urge that the extortion attempt be made over the debt ceiling rather than a government shutdown.
  • It has been obvious for years that the modern Republican Party is no longer capable of thinking seriously about policy. Whether the issue is climate change or inflation, party members believe what they want to believe, and any contrary evidence is dismissed as a hoax, the product of vast liberal conspiracies.
  • Sooner or later, the party’s attitude toward policy — we listen only to people who tell us what we want to hear, and attack the bearers of uncomfortable news — was bound to infect political strategy, too.
  • Everybody not inside the bubble realizes that Mr. Obama can’t and won’t negotiate under the threat that the House will blow up the economy if he doesn’t — any concession at all would legitimize extortion as a routine part of politics. Yet Republican leaders are just beginning to get a clue, and so far clearly have no idea how to back down. Meanwhile, the government is shut, and a debt crisis looms. Incompetence can be a terrible thing.
11More

Opinion: America's role in the world - Michael O'Hanlon and Jeremy Shapiro - POLITICO.com - 0 views

www.politico.com/...s-role-in-the-world-98351.html obama education economics policy culture economic crisis politics history us isolation
shared by julia rhodes on 16 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • President Barack Obama’s reluctance to intervene in Syria has occasioned yet another round of soul-searching on America’s role in the world.
  • “Nation-building at home” is the newest term of art, and even the dreaded I-word is making one of its periodic comebacks. Bill Keller of The New York Times sees a “new isolationism” creeping across the land
  • More than 50,000 U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan — more than when Obama took office in early 2009. T
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • it should be easy to see that Obama’s America is not retreating and will not retreat from the world
  • Obama’s record shows that he recognizes America’s capacity to project military power around the world is its unique strength and an underpinning to the global order.
  • The “rebalancing” to Asia has manifested itself in numerous military and nonmilitary measures that have certainly gotten China’s attention, among its other effects.
  • He has therefore used American military forces repeatedly in such diverse locales as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Uganda, among others
  • But Obama also sees an America that is weary of war, fiscally constrained and in the view of many sometimes reckless in its use of force. Whatever one’s views on the latter point, there is little doubt in the eyes of most Americans that the wars of the past dozen years have been very difficult and costly — and that they are not to be repeated.
  • This reflects a sense that American power is not enhanced by unnecessary wars that waste resources and erode American will. He also talks about ending the major wars in Iraq and Afghanistan even while continuing to prosecute military operations on several fronts.
  • Obama’s priorities are clear: maintaining great-power peace, preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and combating Al Qaeda and related groups — on these matters, very little retrenchment is visible in U.S. policy.
  • has Congress, especially in its willingness to tolerate sequestration and even a government shutdown and a debt default — blunders that could pose far greater threats to American internationalism than anything emanating from the White House.
14More

The Long March of the American Right - NYTimes.com - 0 views

economix.blogs.nytimes.com/...ng-march-of-the-american-right economics us government dysfunction legitimacy New Deal history fiscal crisis policy
shared by Javier E on 19 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • the last week has provided additional insight into how and why the current governmental arrangement known as the United States of America will end.
  • The mainstream narrative is that the problem is “dysfunctional government” or “paralysis in Washington.” That’s true, up to a point, but the real problem is the steady decline in legitimacy of the federal government – and the way this is related to what has happened on the right of the political spectrum.
  • In the 1940s, many people believed, with good reason, in the ability of the federal government to both organize activities at home and to have a positive impact around the world.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • In the 1930s, the private economy stumbled and private financial arrangements failed in many ways – but, on the whole, government was perceived as stepping in to help.
  • The politician whose career better matches the long march of the American right is Newt Gingrich. Mr. Gingrich, elected to Congress in 1978, astutely saw the possibility of building a coalition that would turn the South into a Republican stronghold. Mr. Gingrich voted against the fiscal compromises between George H.W. Bush and the Democrats and, as speaker of the House, crafted the confrontations that led to the government shutdowns in late 1995 and early 1996.
  • According to the latest C.B.O. numbers, debt relative to gross domestic product remains below 120 percent through the 2030s. I regard this as manageable, with the major wild cards being the extent of additional foreign war follies or big financial system blowups.
  • This backlash against government has been a long time coming, but – perhaps in the final irony – America’s fiscal affairs were in relatively good shape until quite recently.
  • these developments have been backed by people with deep pockets and a great deal of patience.
  • The economic recovery, although weak, has improved the nation’s fiscal picture – as have the large spending cuts and more modest revenue increases in the last few years
  • it only indicated what was to come – increasing willingness to further undermine the government and to question the validity of its debts. Every time the United States comes to a line, the most extreme voices in the Republican Party want to go even further – this time calling for an actual default on government obligations in some form as a potentially good thing.
  • I recommend that the revenue base be strengthened as the economy recovers further over the coming decade, while keeping a lid on spending increases. There is no case for precipitous fiscal adjustment, let alone a political confrontation that generates great uncertainty and therefore deters both investment and the purchase of consumer durables (including housing).
  • But it’s too late for good short-term fiscal news or to insist that the problem the country faces over coming decades is the rising cost of health care (not the government-paid part of health care, but all health care costs). Too many people are convinced strongly that they know better than what is in the numbers.
  • the decline in legitimacy of the United States government is real and lasting; it cannot regain the prestige it had in the 1940s and 1950s. Reinforcing and accelerating this trend is perhaps the greatest damage caused by the financial crisis of 2007-8 and the “rescue” measures that ensued.
  • Sooner or later, the American public may elect a group of politicians determined to end the belief that the federal government can be trusted. Their initial steps in that direction will strengthen their showing in opinion polls – and they will be encouraged to go further. At that time, the United States will default on its debts and the world’s financial and fiscal systems will be plunged into chaos.
6More

BBC News - US added 148,000 jobs in September - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...business-24626151 jobs us politics crisis
shared by grayton downing on 22 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The US economy added 148,000 jobs in September, official figures show, lower than analysts had predicted.
  • 7.2%, down from 7.3% in August, the US Department of Labor
  • Following the figures, stock markets turned higher, with the FTSE 100 up 0.5% at 6,688 and both the Dow futures and broader S&P index futures up 0.3%, as investors bet on the Fed continuing its stimulus programme at the same pace.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Economists had predicted 180,000 job gains for September, and the lower-than-expected figure could raise fears the US economy is losing momentum.
  • The dollar fell, under pressure
  • The Labor Department said the next US unemployment data would be released on 8 November, a week later than scheduled due to the partial shutdown of the US government.
5More

Rice Offers a More Modest Strategy for Mideast - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...dest-strategy-for-mideast.html mideast US politics obama strategy
shared by grayton downing on 27 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Critics say the retooled policy will not shield the United States from the hazards of the Middle East. By holding back, they say, the United States risks being buffeted by crisis after crisis, as the president’s fraught history with Syria illustrates.
  • “You can have your agenda, but you can’t control what happens,”
  • Egypt is still the test case of whether there can be a peaceful political transition in the Arab world
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Some priorities were clear. The election of Hassan Rouhani as president of Iran presents the West with perhaps its last good chance to curb its nuclear program.
  • lready, the government shutdown forced the president to cancel a trip to Southeast Asia — a decision that particularly irked Ms. Rice, who was planning to accompany Mr. Obama and plunge into a part of the world with which she did not have much experience.
6More

House GOP intensifies immigration standoff | MSNBC - 0 views

www.msnbc.com/...tensifies-immigration-standoff immigration msnbc US politics obama
shared by johnsonma23 on 16 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • House GOP intensifies immigration standoff
  • the task before Congress is quite simple: fund the Department of Homeland Security.
  • either President Obama accepts GOP demands to effectively dismantle his entire approach to immigration policy or Congress will gut Homeland Security funding when it expires at the end of February.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • the far-right plan isn’t going to work.
  • either fold and pass a clean bill before the deadline or force a partial DHS shutdown next month. The latter wouldn’t derail Obama’s policy, but it would undermine domestic border security, which the right claims to care deeply about.
  • johnsonma23 on 16 Jan 15
     
    Mass immigrations in the US 
7More

Turkey Threatens to Block Social Media Over Released Documents - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...a-over-released-documents.html turkey block social media
shared by Hannah Caspar-Johnson on 17 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Turkish officials threatened to shut down Twitter in the country unless the social-media company blocked the account of a left-wing newspaper that had circulated documents about a military police raid on Turkish Intelligence Agency trucks that were traveling to Syria last January.
  • issued an order barring coverage of the investigation
  • Networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus complied with the court order on Wednesday, removing content from accounts to avert a shutdown, Turkish news outlets reported.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The court argued that publication of the information violated national security and interfered with a continuing inquiry
  • But the BirGun newspaper, as well as other Twitter users, continued to challenge the ban by posting new messages
  • We continue to work diligently to protect the rights of our users and preserve access for millions of Twitter users in Turkey.”
  • Hannah Caspar-Johnson on 17 Jan 15
     
    Turkish government threatens to shut down Twitter if it doesn't comply with a ban on the newspaper that is spreading documents a controversy over possible weapons being carried to Al Qaeda.  
5More

The end of this GOP might be a blessing - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...5-8d98-4b3d9215ade1_story.html gop politics crisis demagogue
shared by Javier E on 05 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Even though few Republicans could ever vote Democratic, and certainly not for Clinton, it wouldn’t be the end of the world as we know it. But voting for Trump, whom other civilized nations find abhorrent, might be.
  • Any hope that Trump might not really mean what he says is either delusional or a gamble too far. Which would voters prefer: The man who promises a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” or one who’ll say anything to get elected? The lunatic or the liar?
  • It has finally dawned on Republicans that their die is cast and Trump is about to destroy the party he relatively recently rejoined. Like a bunch of Ebenezer Scrooges, GOP leaders have begun emerging from their sleep, blinking at the horror of past misdeeds, trying to prevent a future that their actions foretold.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Republicans may be forgiven for thinking the Trump carnival would have ended by now, but they don’t deserve much slack for allowing their party to devolve from an ideas-driven counterweight to liberalism to a ragtag consortium of discontents dissociated from anything like an intellectual trust.
  • it may be time for some creative destruction. Should Trump become the nominee, more reasoned minds in the GOP might do well to abandon it altogether. The death of this party — of know-nothing ugliness and outright fascist rhetoric — might be a blessing, a cleansing of the palate before a resurrection of the party of limited government and individual liberty.
6More

Muslims Around the World Have Overwhelmingly Negative Views of ISIS - NBC News - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...ly-negative-views-isis-n476081 muslims world negative views nbc news
shared by redavistinnell on 09 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Muslims Around the World Have Overwhelmingly Negative Views of ISIS
  • Donald Trump, the controversial 2016 Republican contender, on Monday called for a "complete" shutdown of Muslims entering the U.S. as a national security measure until our country's leaders "can figure out what is going on.
  • rump's ban would include tourists and Muslims hoping to enter the U.S. on visas, and comes as authorities uncover more details about the shooters in last week's rampage in San Bernardino, who they believe had been radicalized into following an extreme form of Islam.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The one exception was Pakistan, where a majority — 62 percent — had no opinion about ISIS. Still, 28 percent said they had an unfavorable view of ISIS, and just nine percent said they had a favorable view.
  • In addition to Paris, the terror group has taken responsibility for a string of other recent attacks, including ones in Beirut and Baghdad.
  • In Lebanon, which was attacked by ISIS days before the survey was conducted, 99 percent of people had a very unfavorable view of the group. Israelis (97 percent) and Jordanians (94 percent) were also opposed to ISIS.
4More

Muhammad Ali responds to Donald Trump's Muslim ban plan | Sport | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-donald-trumps-muslim-ban-plan donald trump muslim politics
shared by lenaurick on 10 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • “I am a Muslim and there is nothing Islamic about killing innocent people in Paris, San Bernardino, or anywhere else in the world,” Ali said in a statemen
  • True Muslims know or should know that it goes against our religion to try and force Islam on anybody.”
  • Trump’s sweeping call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • bring understanding about the religion of Islam and clarify that these misguided murderers have perverted people’s views on what Islam really is,”
4More

Mark Zuckerberg speaks in support of Muslims after week of 'hate' | Technology | The Gu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...g-support-muslims-donald-trump mark zuckerberg support muslims hate technology the guardian
shared by redavistinnell on 10 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Mark Zuckerberg speaks in support of Muslims after week of ‘hate’
  • “After the Paris attacks and hate this week, I can only imagine the fear Muslims feel that they will be persecuted for the actions of others,” he added.
  • The comments come after Trump was widely criticised for saying on Monday that Muslims should be banned from entering the US. He said in a speech following a mass shooting committed by a Muslim couple in San Bernardino, California, last weekend: “We need a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States while we figure out what the hell is going on. We are out of control.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In the face of mounting criticism, Trump has said he will never leave the 2016 presidential race.
« First ‹ Previous 41 - 60 of 167 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page