Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

America is different now, more so with every election cycle. Ronald Reagan won his mandate in an America in which 89 percent of the voters were white. That number is down to 72 percent and falling. Fifty thousand new Latino citizens achieve the voting age every month. America will soon belong to the men and women — white and black and Latino and Asian, Christian and Jew and Muslim and atheist, gay and straight — who can comfortably walk into a room and accept with real comfort the sensation that they are in a world of certain difference, that there are no real majorities, only pluralities and coalitions. The America in which it was otherwise is dying, thank god, and those who relied on entitlement and division to command power will either be obliged to accept the changes, or retreat to the gated communities from which they wish to wax nostalgic and brood on political irrelevance.

Eighty years ago, the Democratic party became a national utilitarian enterprise, molding the immigrant waves of Irish and Italian and Jew into a voting bloc that stunned the political opposition and transformed American society, creating the world’s greatest economic engine in the form of a consumer class with vast discretionary income. The New Deal asserted for American progress — shaping and influencing administrations both Democratic and Republican — for three decades before running aground on the shoals of the civil rights movement, resulting racial fears and resentments, and, of course, the Southern strategy of political cynics

right now, the conservative movement in America is fleeing from dramatic change that is certain and immutable. A man of color is president for the second time, and this happened despite a struggling economic climate and a national spirit of general discontent. He has been returned to office over the specific objections of the mass of white men. He has instead been re-elected by women, by people of color, by homosexuals, by people of varying religions or no religion whatsoever. Behold the New Jerusalem. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a white man, of course. There’s nothing wrong with being anything. That’s the point.

Congress may flip -- but dysfunction is here to stay

The Republican majority in the Senate -- and maybe even the House -- could be gone after this year's election.

With Donald Trump trailing in the polls, Hillary Clinton is increasingly turning her attention to down-ballot races -- particularly for the Senate, where Democrats are hoping to pick up at least the four seats they'd need to claim the majority if Clinton wins the White House.

The prospects for James N. Mattis to serve as secretary of defense in the Trump administration received a boost on Tuesday when two experts in military policy recommended that an exception be made so Mr. Mattis, a retired four-star general, can assume the top Pentagon post.

Military officers are barred by law from serving as defense secretary unless they have been retired for seven years.

John McCain, the Arizona Republican who leads the Senate Armed Services Committee and has strongly supported General Mattis’s nomination

Is the Christopher Steele dossier fake news?

Donald Trump has called the Christopher Steele dossier "fake news" and "phony stuff," but is it? The Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, sent a trusted staff member to London to obtain a copy and deliver it to the FBI for investigation, according to the UK newspaper The Independent.

Donald Trump has begun carrying out his campaign pledges to undo America's trade ties -- starting Monday with executive action to pull the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

"Great thing for the American worker, what we just did," Trump told reporters

Trans-Pacific Partnership -- a 12-nation deal that had been negotiated under former President Barack Obama.

Mississippi to join states’ suit against Obama’s transgender bathroom policy

Mississippi plans to back the 11 other states that filed a lawsuit Wednesday to block the Obama administration’s transgender bathroom policy at public schools

Texas is leading the lawsuit, and governors from Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Maine, Oklahoma, Tennessee, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Utah are also on board.

In the Face of Weighty Problems, Trump Focuses on Squabbles

The morning after North Korea launched a ballistic missile into the sea, apparently to test President Trump’s resolve in his first days in office, the new commander in chief wanted to make one thing very clear to the world: Mark Cuban, the billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner, was not smart enough to have his job.

“He backed me big-time but I wasn’t interested in taking all of his calls. He’s not smart enough to run for president!”

The European Union is an attempt to build an economic and legal superstructure without a linguistic, cultural, historic and civic base. It was the final of the post-World War II efforts — the United Nations was among the first — to build governments that were transnational, passionless and safe.

At this moment of crisis, it is obvious how little moral solidarity undergirds the European pseudostate. Americans in Oregon are barely aware when their tax dollars go to Americans in Arizona. We are one people with one shared destiny. West Germans were willing to pay enormous subsidies to build the former East Germany. They, too, are one people.

But that shared identity doesn’t exist between Germans and Greeks, or even between French and Germans. It was easy to be European when it didn’t cost anything. When sacrifices are necessary, the European identity dissolves away.

Some others, including astronomers and geologists, have another view of biological inevitability. Life is a natural consequence of geology, said Everett Shock, a geophysicist at Arizona State. “Most of what life is doing is using chemical energy,” Dr. Shock said, and that energy is available in places like undersea volcanic vents where life, he calculated, acts as a catalyst to dissipate heat from the Earth. In what he called “a sweet deal,” life releases energy rather than consuming it, making it easy from a thermodynamic standpoint.

President Obama is a Christian (despite the fact that most Republicans apparently still believe that his “deep down” beliefs are Muslim, according to one poll conducted last year.)

In fact, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, there have only been four “religiously unaffiliated heads of state in American history,” the last being Rutherford B. Hayes, who left office in 1881. This, however, does not mean that they did not believe in God.

Now it is almost unconscionable to think of a president who didn’t believe in God. In fact, a poll last year by the Pew Research Center found that not believing in God was the most negative trait a presidential candidate could have among a variety of options, even more negative than having an extramarital affair.

lynchers targeted many other racial and ethnic minorities in the United States, including Native Americans, Italians, Chinese and, especially, Mexicans.

From 1848 to 1928, mobs murdered thousands of Mexicans, though surviving records allowed us to clearly document only about 547 cases.

These lynchings occurred not only in the southwestern states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas, but also in states far from the border, like Nebraska and Wyoming.

After the terror attacks in Paris that killed at least 129 people, the placement of refugees fleeing Syria has come under scrutiny as at least two dozen governors — mostly Republicans — have raised concerns about Syrian refugees relocating to their state.

"The first and foremost responsibility of government is to keep its people safe," Texas Governor Greg Abbott said Monday. "We are working on measures to ensure ... that Texans will be kept safe from those refugees."

Nearly 2,000 refugees from Syria have relocated to the United States since 2012, the New York Times reports and President Barack Obama has said that the U.S. will accept 10,000.

WASHINGTON — As tears streamed down his face, President Obama on Tuesday condemned the gun violence that has reached across the United States and vowed to curb the bloodshed with or without Congress.

“In this room right here, there are a lot of stories. There’s a lot of heartache,” Mr. Obama said in the White House East Room, flanked by relatives of those struck down in mass shootings, including former Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona. “There’s a lot of resilience, there’s a lot of strength, but there’s also a lot of pain.”For all the emotion he showed, Mr. Obama nonetheless faces legal, political and logistical hurdles that are likely to blunt the effect of the plan he laid out.

A number of the executive actions he plans are only suggested “guidance” for federal agencies, not binding regulations. They were framed mostly as clarifying and enforcing existing law, not expanding it. And many of those measures rely on hefty funding increases that a Republican-led Congress is almost certain to reject.

President Obama sent Congress a plan on Tuesday to close the United States military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, his latest attempt to deliver on an unfulfilled promise of his presidency, which faces near-certain rejection by Congress.

The prison has come to symbolize the darker side of the nation’s antiterrorism efforts, but the series of steps that Mr. Obama outlined at the White House were as much an acknowledgment of the constraints binding him during his final year in office as they were a practical blueprint for transferring prisoners.

n presenting them, the president made little secret of his frustration that his quest to close Guantánamo, once regarded as a bipartisan moral imperative, had become a divisive political issue.

Gun Deaths May Not Eclipse Traffic Fatalities Just Yet

New data shows traffic deaths jumped by more than 9 percent during the first nine months of 2015, the most recent period for which information is available.

The NHSTA says it’s too soon to speculate on factors contributing to the “significantly higher” traffic fatality rates last year.

Welcome to the GOP civil war

“The party will not fracture but will likely splinter,” says former Minnesota Rep. Vin Weber, a senior party strategist. “The question is: How big will the piece that splinters off actually be?”

He tried to make that pivot this week, releasing his health care plan and defending Planned Parenthood, but was forced to battle a growing insurrection in his own ranks – led by the party’s 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, who labeled him “a fraud” and “a phony” who represented “a brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss.”

Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes was livid. On February 19, 1942, 74 days after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, his boss, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized the internment of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, 62% of whom were American born.

To drive his dissent home, Ickes soon had four Japanese-American men and three women transferred from a relocation camp in Arizona to his home in Olney, Maryland.

Donald Trump has defended his call to stop all Muslims from entering America, approvingly invoking FDR's mistaken action of 1942 as his benchmark. FDR, in my opinion, was the greatest president in U.S. history. But EO 9066 was his biggest mistake.

Is Donald Trump another Barry Goldwater?

Some Democrats are giddy about the possibility of Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination.

But other Democrats, including former President Bill Clinton, fear Trump could prove a formidable general election opponent.