Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

U.K. Set to Choose Sharp Break From European Union

Prime Minister Theresa May is likely to choose to exit Europe’s single market and its customs union — a so-called hard Brexit.

Mrs. May calling for British unity “to make a success of Brexit and build a truly global Britain.”

President-elect Donald Trump vowed over the weekend to quickly work out a trade deal with Britain in a bid to help smooth the country's path out of the European Union -- further strengthening ties with the Brexit movement he lauded during his campaign. 

Trump also riled European leaders by dismissing the E.U. as a “vehicle for Germany.”

Trump ripped German Chancellor Angela Merkel over her decision to welcome more than a million Syrian refugees into her country.

n a series of interviews in March of 2014, Donald Trump singled out Russia as the United States' "biggest problem" and greatest geopolitical foe. Trump's comments more than two years ago, which came in the wake of Russian incursions into Crimea, offer a sharp contrast to the Russia-friendly rhetoric he has employed since launching his presidential campaign. In the interviews reviewed by CNN's KFile from March 2014, which occurred on NBC News and Fox News, Trump goes as far as to suggest imposing sanctions to hurt Russia economically and then later says he supports such sanctions

a radical shift with the arrival of Donald Trump in Washington; the businessman, now president-elect, has often spoken about government as a bumbling failure and an impediment to success.

“Government can be a tremendous force for good,” King said in an interview at his office recently.

“Government really sucks,” ­DeVos, Trump’s nominee for education secretary, said last year at the South by Southwest educational technology conference in Austin. “And it doesn’t matter which party is in power.”

Weber, Taylor and Brimelow – all classified as “extremists” by the Southern Poverty Law Center – said Trump’s victory energised the far-right and that the movement can grow with or without White House help.

The young crowd that roared “Hail Trump” at last month’s gathering in Washington will fight for its beliefs no matter what, Brimelow said. “None of them were looking for jobs in the Trump administration. These are not party loyalists. They know they’re entirely outside the establishment consensus. And they’re used to guerrilla warfare.”

Asked about that weekend and his impact on the white supremacist movement, Trump told the New York Times: “I don’t want to energize the group, and I disavow the group ... But it’s not a group I want to energize, and if they are energized I want to look into it and find out why.”

The content of the Russian-hacked emails was actually remarkably unexplosive. Probably the biggest news was that Hillary Clinton had expressed herself in favor of a hemispheric common market in speeches to Wall Street executives. Otherwise, we learned from them that some people at the Democratic National Committee favored a lifelong Democrat for their party’s nomination over a socialist interloper who had joined the party for his own convenience. We learned that many Democrats, including Chelsea Clinton, disapproved of the ethical shortcomings of some of the people in Bill Clinton’s inner circle. We learned that Hillary Clinton acknowledged differences between her “public and private” positions on some issues. None of this even remotely corroborated Donald Trump’s wild characterizations of the Russian-hacked, Wikileaks-published material.

Without Trump’s own willingness to make false claims and misuse Russian-provided information, the Wikileaks material would have deflated of its own boringness. The Russian-hacked material did damage because, and only because, Russia found a willing accomplice in the person of Donald J. Trump.

there were four trends that led the country to reject its post-World War I constitutional, parliamentary democracy, known as the Weimar Republic: economic depression, loss of trust in institutions, social humiliation and political blunder.

To a certain degree, these trends can be found across the West today

All this happened as traditional ways of life and values were being shaken by the modernization of the 1920s. Women suddenly went to work, to vote, to party and to sleep with whomever they wanted. This produced a widening cultural gap between the tradition-oriented working and middle classes and the cosmopolitan avant-garde — in politics, business and the arts — that reached a peak just when economic disaster struck. The elites were blamed for the resulting chaos, and the masses were ripe for a strongman to return order to society.

There are mainstream Republicans who are opting out, more than people may realize. The Stop Trump Movement boasts some major players in the GOP scene, people like Mitt Romney, George Will, Erick Erickson, David Brooks and Glenn Beck to name just a few. 

The more valiant among them take the threat of Trump seriously and are willing to admit the truth, such as Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal who told Fareed Zakaria over the weekend:

It’s important that Donald Trump and what he represents, this “ethnic conservatism or populism” be so decisively rebuked that the Republican party and Republican voters will forever learn their lesson that they cannot nominate a man so manifestly unqualified to be president in any way shape or form.

The people have spoken. What to do?

First, dare to say that the people aren’t always right. Surely Republicans admit the possibility. Or do they believe the people chose rightly in electing Obama? Twice. Historical examples of other countries choosing even more wrongly are numerous and tragic. The people’s will deserves respect, not necessarily affirmation.

In the end, Ryan called an armistice. What was he to do? Oppose and resign? And then what? What would remain of conservative leadership in the GOP? And if he created a permanent split in the party, he’d be setting up the GOP’s entire conservative wing as scapegoat if Trump lost in November.

“People now feel that it is O.K. to say things that they might not have said a year ago,” she said. “Trump played a big role.”

Among any nation’s most precious possessions is its social fabric, and that is what Donald Trump is rending with incendiary talk about roughing up protesters and about gun owners solving the problem of Hillary Clinton making judicial nominations.

We need not be apocalyptic about it. This is not Kristallnacht. But Trump’s harsh rhetoric tears away the veneer of civility and betrays our national motto of “e pluribus unum.” He has unleashed a beast and fed its hunger, and long after this campaign is over we will be struggling to corral it again.

US election 2016: New York primaries crucial for Clinton and Trump

New York is holding presidential primaries seen as key for both Republican and Democratic front-runners after their recent defeats.

Wins will put Mrs Clinton and Mr Trump closer to securing their nominations.

German political campaigns ramp up during beer-fueled Ash Wednesday rallies

The typical rhetorical restraint used by German politicians is thrown out of the window during the annual, beer-fueled rallies held by Germany's political parties. Instead, prominent German politicians rail against their opponents in cutting speeches rife with colorful insults.

beer-drinking crowd of 4,000 people.

From his leftist or "statist" perch, Bo has been challenging the "opening and reform" side of the political consensus that Deng Xiaoping secured three decades ago. Wen Jiabao, meanwhile, who plays the role of a learned, emphatic, and upright Confucian prime minister, has been challenging the other half of Deng consensus -- absolute political control -- from the liberal right. He has continuously articulated the need to limit government power through rule of law, justice, and democratization. To do this, he has drawn on the symbolic legacies of the purged reformist leaders he served in the 1980s, particularly Hu Yaobang, whose name he recently helped to "rehabilitate" in official discourse. As every Communist Party leader knows, those who want a stake in the country's future must first fight for control of its past.

change is still the issue, and the focus of his solid but not extraordinary speech was incremental improvement. The next president has to do three big things, which are in tension with one another: increase growth, reduce debt and increase social equity. President Obama has the intelligence, the dexterity and the sense of balance to navigate these crosscutting challenges. But he apparently lacks the creativity to break out of the partisan categories, the trench warfare gridlock. Thursday night's speech showed the character and his potential. It didn't show audacity and the fulfillment of that potential.

When people invoke culture in the Romney manner, what they are really invoking is a scale by which humanity may be ranked from totally dysfunctional to totally awesome. The idea is that culture is a set of irrefutable best practices, when in fact it is more like a toolbox whose efficacy depends upon the job.

If you want to create a nation with a dominant entertainment media, perhaps American culture is the way to go. If you’re uninterested in presiding over a nation with 25 percent of the world’s prisoners but only 5 percent of its population, perhaps not.

What stands out about Romney’s culture comments is how much he relies on bromides and banalities. It is almost as if he doesn’t know anything about the workings of culture at all. But here we should be understanding. Romney hails from the party of birthers and creationists. He is the appointed representative of those who would see the strictures against same-sex marriage rendered constitutional. Ignorance is no stranger there. It is part of the culture.