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rachelramirez

A-List's Trump Snub Hits Him Where It Hurts - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...b-hits-him-where-it-hurts.html

trump politics US history

shared by rachelramirez on 03 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • NOT NORMALA-List’s Trump Snub Hits Him Where It Hurts
  • Rockettes and now even a member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, who are refusing to raise their microphones, kick up their bare-legged heels or otherwise perform for Donald Trump at his inaugural
  • America is, in many ways, as much an idea as it is a country. And Americans have long marketed that idea around the world through our popular culture
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Our love of Hollywood-style glamour helped elect two presidents: JFK and Reagan, who fulfilled the prophecy that a country so enamored of actors would eventually make one their president. “All in the Family” chronicled the racial and cultural upheavals of the Nixon era. Bill Clinton captured the zeitgeist of young voters in the early 1990s by playing his saxophone on the “Arsenio Hall” show
  • owes his election in large part to the sense of familiarity that being a reality TV star afforded him. That status allowed many of his voters to put aside his misogyny and vulgarity
  • onservatives rail at Hollywood movies that make them feel alienated by presenting capitalists, corporations and moral traditionalists as the villains, and sexual libertines, iconoclasts and the godless (or godlike, in the form of superheroes, witches and warlocks) as the heroes.
  • the 80 percent of white self-professed evangelicals who voted for Trump purportedly did so to lay claim to the courts, where they believe they can yet win out on banning abortion and birth control, forcing women back into traditional roles, and undoing gay marriage
  • Obama, though, has taken celebrity association to another level. He has been a darling of Hollywood, the music industry and popular culture from the time he declared for president in 2007
  • which dined out on vows to discriminate against Mexicans and Muslims while unleashing a resurgence of racist hate groups and just plain haters is reaping the cultural opprobrium it sowed. And it’s making The Donald miserable.
Javier E

Trump's China Policy: 'This Is How You Stumble Into a Crisis' | Foreign Policy - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...-how-you-stumble-into-a-crisis

trump china policy foreign policy

shared by Javier E on 30 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Rex Tillerson, Trump’s pick for secretary of state, stunned lawmakers and foreign governments at his Jan. 11 Senate confirmation hearing when he said that the United States would be ready to block China’s access to artificial islands it is building in the South China Sea. Seemingly just a gaffe, the White House later appeared to double down on Tillerson’s stance, which taken at face value would be tantamount to an act of war.
  • The comments suggest President Donald Trump’s White House is eager to take an aggressive tone with Beijing, but lacks a coherent strategy to deal with China or a basic grasp of the legal and security issues at stake in the South China Sea, said former officials, diplomats, Asia experts and congressional aides.
  • Tillerson’s threat that America would bar China’s access to disputed reefs and islands in the South China Sea would mark a radical break with long established U.S. policies dating back to the 1990s
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Taken literally, Tillerson’s proposed approach would violate international law and require a naval blockade, which would be an act of war, experts said.
  • After the hearing, lawmakers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee gave Tillerson a chance to clarify what they assumed was an ill-informed gaffe, but neither he nor the White House took up the offer, aides told Foreign Policy.
  • The bellicose words on the South China Sea follow a host of other provocative statements and actions by Trump since his election. H
  • The idea behind Trump’s approach seems to be that the United States has been weak in its dealings with Beijing, and that a strong hand is needed. Experts said the Trump administration is testing the hypothesis that if the Washington simply gets tougher with China, Beijing will back down.
  • Washington and Beijing could be headed on a collision course, as both countries could be overestimating their own power and misjudging how the other side will respond, former officials and policy analysts said.
  • “They have been signaling subtly but clearly that they have cards to play as well and that they’re not going to back down,” one congressional aide said.
  • military leaders are not keen on provoking tensions with China or threatening a naval blockade that Washington won’t be ready to enforce.
  • Even as it seeks to squeeze China, the Trump administration has lost crucial economic and diplomatic leverage in the region by abandoning the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed 12-nation trade pact with strong support among Asian allies and partners. It offered a counterbalance to Beijing’s economic heft, particularly among countries with rival claims in the South China Sea.
  • China is trying to fill the void, eagerly expanding its own trade grouping to attract countries like Japan and Malaysia. For Asian states gauging U.S. power, “their measuring stick isn’t just one or two aircraft carriers, it’s trade flows,” the congressional staffer said.
  • Allies are dismayed by the administration’s embrace of protectionism, its aggressive and improvised rhetoric toward China, and the wide gap between the president’s views and those of his Cabinet, said diplomats and former official
  • long-established allies are looking at exploring other trade and diplomatic options if the U.S. loses its status as a reliable partner.
  • While Tokyo and other foreign capitals have been reassured somewhat by officials named or expected to serve in the Trump administration on Asia policy, the president’s unpredictable tweets and impulsive policy making are a source of anxiety.
abbykleman

Travelers Stranded and Protests Swell Over Trump Order - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rd-holders-wont-be-barred.html

shared by abbykleman on 30 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • abbykleman on 30 Jan 17
     
    The White House was left to defend what seemed to many government veterans like a slapdash process. Aides to Mr. Trump insisted they had consulted for weeks with relevant officials, but the head of the customs and border service in the Obama administration, who resigned on inauguration day, said the incoming president's team never talked with him about it.
abbykleman

The Alt-Majority: How Social Networks Empowered Mass Protests Against Trump - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-social-networks-protests.html

shared by abbykleman on 30 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • abbykleman on 30 Jan 17
     
    A similar story unfolded the weekend before. In his inaugural address Mr. Trump claimed the mantle of popular will. The next day, a far larger illustration of popular will was on display at marches across the country. The people who gathered for the women's march hijacked the media narrative.
Javier E

Review: 'Bush,' a Biography as Scathing Indictment - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hy-as-scathing-indictment.html

History politics US bush 43

shared by Javier E on 04 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • The first sentence of his book: “Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush.”
  • The last: “Whether George W. Bush was the worst president in American history will be long debated, but his decision to invade Iraq is easily the worst foreign policy decision ever made by an American president.”
  • “Believing he was the agent of God’s will, and acting with divine guidance, George W. Bush would lead the nation into two disastrous wars of aggression,” Mr. Smith writes. “Bush’s personalization of the war on terror combined with his macho assertiveness as the nation’s commander in chief,” he adds later, “were a recipe for disaster.”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Mr. Smith is more approving of his main subject in moments where Mr. Bush follows his original campaign doctrine of compassionate conservatism. The former president gets high marks for his No Child Left Behind program — intended to improve education, especially for minority students — as well as for expanding Medicare to cover prescription drugs and for leading an ambitious fight against AIDS in Africa. Mr. Smith credits Mr. Bush for saving the economy through his bold and counterintuitive intervention after the financial crash of 2008.
  • He presents a president who, for all his flaws, was usually gracious and warmhearted, who disdained the sort of divisive bashing that Mr. Trump favors and who went out of his way to make Barack Obama’s transition successful. He rejects the caricature of a president who simply did what his vice president told him to.
  • Mr. Smith’s fundamental critique is his belief that Mr. Bush overreacted to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “The events of 9/11 were tragic, but scarcely catastrophic,” he writes. That led Mr. Bush, in his view, to advance policies that were not justified by the actual danger. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • The Patriot Act, he writes, “may be the most ill-conceived piece of domestic legislation since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.”
  • In labeling Iran, Iraq and North Korea an “axis of evil,” Mr. Bush “had spoken without weighing the consequences.”
  • Mr. Bush’s refusal to face up to the fact that Iraq had no unconventional weapons “suggests a willfulness that borders on psychosis.” His second-term Inaugural Address making democracy promotion his major goal “must rank as one of the most ill-considered of all time.”
ecfruchtman

Trump supporters see a successful president - and are frustrated with critics who don't - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-9845-576c69081518_story.html

shared by ecfruchtman on 20 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • ecfruchtman on 20 Feb 17
     
    MELBOURNE, Fla. - Many of President Trump's most dedicated supporters - the sort who waited for hours in the Florida sun this weekend for his first post-inauguration campaign rally - say their lives changed on election night. Suddenly they felt like their views were actually respected and in the majority.
Javier E

Donald Trump's Media Attacks Should Be Viewed as Brilliant | Time.com - 0 views

time.com/...donald-trump-fake-news-attacks

trump journalism culture crisis truth post-truth corruption deviance liar

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • the central idea of journalism — the conviction, as my old boss Peter Kann once said, “that facts are facts; that they are ascertainable through honest, open-minded and diligent reporting; that truth is attainable by laying fact upon fact, much like the construction of a cathedral; and that truth is not merely in the eye of the beholder.”
  • the executive branch of government is engaged in a systematic effort to create a climate of opinion against the news business.
  • the question of what Mr. Trump might yet do by political methods against the media matters a great deal less than what he is attempting to do by ideological and philosophical methods.
  • ...38 more annotations...
  • Ideologically, the president is trying to depose so-called mainstream media in favor of the media he likes — Breitbart News and the rest.
  • he’s trying to substitute news for propaganda, information for boosterism.
  • His objection is to objectivity itself. He’s perfectly happy for the media to be disgusting and corrupt — so long as it’s on his side.
  • that’s not all the president is doing.
  • Today, just 17% of adults aged 18-24 read a newspaper daily, down from 42% at the turn of the century. Today there are fewer than 33,000 full-time newsroom employees, a drop from 55,000 just 20 years ago.
  • “Many people say” is what’s known as an argumentum ad populum. If we were a nation of logicians, we would dismiss the argument as dumb.
  • The president is responding to a claim of fact not by denying the fact, but by denying the claim that facts are supposed to have on an argument.
  • He isn’t telling O’Reilly that he’s got his facts wrong. He’s saying that, as far as he is concerned, facts, as most people understand the term, don’t matter: That they are indistinguishable from, and interchangeable with, opinion; and that statements of fact needn’t have any purchase against a man who is either sufficiently powerful to ignore them or sufficiently shameless to deny them — or, in his case, both.
  • If I had to sum it up in a single sentence, it would be this: Truth is what you can get away with.
  • Today we have “dis-intermediating” technologies such as Twitter, which have cut out the media as the middleman between politicians and the public
  • Consider this recent exchange he had with Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly asks:Is there any validity to the criticism of you that you say things that you can’t back up factually, and as the President you say there are three million illegal aliens who voted and you don’t have the data to back that up, some people are going to say that it’s irresponsible for the President to say that.To which the president replies:Many people have come out and said I’m right.
  • I personally think we crossed a rubicon in the Clinton years, when three things happened: we decided that some types of presidential lies didn’t matter; we concluded that “character” was an over-rated consideration when it came to judging a president; and we allowed the lines between political culture and celebrity culture to become hopelessly blurred.
  • “We have been re-defining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the ‘normal’ level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard,” Moynihan wrote.
  • If a public figure tells a whopping lie once in his life, it’ll haunt him into his grave. If he lies morning, noon and night, it will become almost impossible to remember any one particular lie. Outrage will fall victim to its own ubiquity.
  • It has been stunning to watch a movement that once believed in the benefits of free trade and free enterprise merrily give itself over to a champion of protectionism whose economic instincts recall the corporatism of 1930s Italy or 1950s Argentina.
  • One of the most interesting phenomena during the presidential campaign was waiting for Trump to say that one thing that would surely break the back of his candidacy.
  • Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, called on Americans to summon “the better angels of our nature.” Donald Trump’s candidacy, and so far his presidency, has been Lincoln’s exhortation in reverse.
  • Here’s a simple truth about a politics of dishonesty, insult and scandal: It’s entertaining.
  • Whichever way, it’s exhilarating. Haven’t all of us noticed that everything feels speeded up, more vivid, more intense and consequential? One of the benefits of an alternative-facts administration is that fiction can take you anywhere.
  • At some point, it becomes increasingly easy for people to mistake the reality of the performance for reality itself. If Trump can get through a press conference like that without showing a hint of embarrassment, remorse or misgiving—well, then, that becomes a new basis on which the president can now be judged.
  • I’ve offered you three ideas about how it is that we have come to accept the president’s behavior.
  • The first is that we normalize it, simply by becoming inured to constant repetition of the same bad behavior.
  • The second is that at some level it excites and entertains us.
  • And the third is that we adopt new metrics of judgment, in which politics becomes more about perceptions than performance—of how a given action is perceived as being perceived.
  • Let me add a fourth point here: our tendency to rationalize.
  • Overall, the process is one in which explanation becomes rationalization, which in turn becomes justification. Trump says X. What he really means is Y. And while you might not like it, he’s giving voice to the angers and anxieties of Z. Who, by the way, you’re not allowed to question or criticize, because anxiety and anger are their own justifications these days.
  • The most painful aspect of this has been to watch people I previously considered thoughtful and principled conservatives give themselves over to a species of illiberal politics from which I once thought they were immune.
  • In his 1953 masterpiece, “The Captive Mind,” the Polish poet and dissident Czeslaw Milosz analyzed the psychological and intellectual pathways through which some of his former colleagues in Poland’s post-war Communist regime allowed themselves to be converted into ardent Stalinists
  • They wanted to believe. They were willing to adapt. They thought they could do more good from the inside. They convinced themselves that their former principles didn’t fit with the march of history, or that to hold fast to one’s beliefs was a sign of priggishness and pig-headedness. They felt that to reject the new order of things was to relegate themselves to irrelevance and oblivion. They mocked their former friends who refused to join the new order as morally vain reactionaries. They convinced themselves that, brutal and capricious as Stalinism might be, it couldn’t possibly be worse than the exploitative capitalism of the West.
  • I fear we are witnessing a similar process unfold among many conservative intellectuals on the right.
  • The interesting conversation concerns how we come to accept those lies.
  • It is no less stunning to watch people once mocked Obama for being too soft on Russia suddenly discover the virtues of Trump’s “pragmatism” on the subject.
  • And it is nothing short of amazing to watch the party of onetime moral majoritarians, who spent a decade fulminating about Bill Clinton’s sexual habits, suddenly find complete comfort with the idea that character and temperament are irrelevant qualifications for high office.
  • There’s the same desperate desire for political influence; the same belief that Trump represents a historical force to which they ought to belong; the same willingness to bend or discard principles they once considered sacred; the same fear of seeming out-of-touch with the mood of the public; the same tendency to look the other way at comments or actions that they cannot possibly justify; the same belief that you do more good by joining than by opposing; the same Manichean belief that, if Hillary Clinton had been elected, the United States would have all-but ended as a country.
  • This is supposed to be the road of pragmatism, of turning lemons into lemonade. I would counter that it’s the road of ignominy, of hitching a ride with a drunk driver.
  • We each have our obligations to see what’s in front of one’s nose, whether we’re reporters, columnists, or anything else. This is the essence of intellectual integrity.
  • Not to look around, or beyond, or away from the facts, but to look straight at them, to recognize and call them for what they are, nothing more or less. To see things as they are before we re-interpret them into what we’d like them to be. To believe in an epistemology that can distinguish between truth and falsity, facts and opinions, evidence and wishes. To defend habits of mind and institutions of society, above all a free press, which preserve that epistemology. To hold fast to a set of intellectual standards and moral convictions that won’t waver amid changes of political fashion or tides of unfavorable opinion. To speak the truth irrespective of what it means for our popularity or influence.
  • The legacy of Danny Pearl is that he died for this. We are being asked to do much less. We have no excuse not to do it.
marleymorton

US-China relations: Trump meets senior official Yang Jiechi - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-china-39110020

politics us world

shared by marleymorton on 01 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • marleymorton on 01 Mar 17
     
    A senior Chinese diplomat had a brief meeting with President Donald Trump while at the White House for talks with the president's advisers. State Councillor Yang Jiechi is the first senior Chinese official to meet Mr Trump since his inauguration.
abbykleman

US tourism experiences a 'Trump slump' - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rism-experiences-a-trump-slump

shared by abbykleman on 01 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • abbykleman on 01 Mar 17
     
    Interest in travel to the US has "fallen off a cliff" since Donald Trump's election, according to travel companies who have reported a significant drop in flight searches and bookings since his inauguration and controversial travel ban.
Javier E

Trump's honeymoon with the stock market will soon be over | Nouriel Roubini | Business | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...neymoon-stock-market-dow-jones

trump honeymoon stock market business

shared by Javier E on 03 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • It is little wonder that corporations and investors have been happy. This traditional Republican embrace of trickle-down supply-side economics will mostly favour corporations and wealthy individuals, while doing almost nothing to create jobs or raise blue-collar workers’ incomes.
  • According to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, almost half of the benefits from Trump’s proposed tax cuts would go to the top 1% of income earners.
  • Trump’s honeymoon with investors might be coming to an end. There are several reasons for this.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • the strengthening dollar will destroy more of the jobs typically held by Trump’s blue-collar base. The president may have “saved” 1,000 jobs in Indiana by bullying and cajoling the air-conditioner manufacturer Carrier; but the US dollar’s appreciation since the election could destroy almost 400,000 manufacturing jobs over time.
  • Republicans can rarely resist the temptation to cut corporate, income and other taxes, even when they have no way to make up for the lost revenue and no desire to cut spending. If this happens again under Trump, fiscal deficits will push up interest rates and the dollar even further, and hurt the economy in the long term
  • The Nobel laureate economist Edmund S Phelps has described Trump’s direct interference in the corporate sector as reminiscent of corporatist Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Indeed, if Barack Obama had treated the corporate sector in the way that Trump has, he would have been smeared as a communist; but for some reason when Trump does it, corporate America puts its tail between its legs.
  • Fifth, Trump is questioning US alliances, cosying up to American rivals such as Russia, and antagonizing important global powers such as China. His erratic foreign policies are spooking world leaders, multinational corporations and global markets generally.
  • To be sure, expectations of stimulus, lower taxes and deregulation could still boost the economy and the market’s performance in the short term. But, as the vacillation in financial markets since Trump’s inauguration indicates, the president’s inconsistent, erratic, and destructive policies will take their toll on domestic and global economic growth in the long run.
Javier E

Why Nobody Cares the President Is Lying - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...es-the-president-is-lying.html

post-factual trump politics Orwell truth partisan

shared by Javier E on 05 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Mr. Trump understands that attacking the media is the reddest of meat for his base, which has been conditioned to reject reporting from news sites outside of the conservative media ecosystem.
  • For years, as a conservative radio talk show host, I played a role in that conditioning by hammering the mainstream media for its bias and double standards. But the price turned out to be far higher than I imagined.
  • The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information. We thought we were creating a savvier, more skeptical audience. Instead, we opened the door for President Trump, who found an audience that could be easily misled.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • During his first week in office, Mr. Trump reiterated the unfounded charge that millions of people had voted illegally. When challenged on the evident falsehood, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, seemed to argue that Mr. Trump’s belief that something was true qualified as evidence. The press secretary also declined to answer a straightforward question about the unemployment rate, suggesting that the number will henceforth be whatever the Trump administration wants it to be.
  • Unfortunately, that also means that the more the fact-based media tries to debunk the president’s falsehoods, the further it will entrench the battle lines.
  • The news media’s spectacular failure to get the election right has made it only easier for many conservatives to ignore anything that happens outside the right’s bubble and for the Trump White House to fabricate facts with little fear of alienating its base.
  • He can do this because members of the Trump administration feel confident that the alternative-reality media will provide air cover, even if they are caught fabricating facts or twisting words (like claiming that the “ban” on Muslim immigrants wasn’t really a “ban”). Indeed, they believe they have shifted the paradigm of media coverage, replacing the traditional media with their own.
  • In a stunning demonstration of the power and resiliency of our new post-factual political culture, Mr. Trump and his allies in the right media have already turned the term “fake news” against its critics, essentially draining it of any meaning
  • now any news deemed to be biased, annoying or negative can be labeled “fake news.”
  • Even as he continues to attack the “dishonest media,” Mr. Trump and his allies are empowering this alt-reality media, providing White House access to Breitbart and other post-factual outlets that are already morphing into fierce defenders of the administration.
  • The relationship appears to be symbiotic, as Mr. Trump often seems to pick up on talking points from Fox News and has tweeted out links from websites notorious for their casual relationship to the truth, including sites like Gateway Pundit, a hoax-peddling site that announced, shortly after the inauguration, that it would have a White House correspondent.
  • All administrations lie, but what we are seeing here is an attack on credibility itself.
  • The Russian dissident and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov drew upon long familiarity with that process when he tweeted: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
  • the real threat is not merely that a large number of Americans have become accustomed to rejecting factual information, or even that they have become habituated to believing hoaxes. The real danger is that, inundated with “alternative facts,” many voters will simply shrug, asking, “What is truth?” — and not wait for an answer.
  • In that world, the leader becomes the only reliable source of truth; a familiar phenomenon in an authoritarian state, but a radical departure from the norms of a democratic society. The battle over truth is now central to our politics.
  • as George Orwell said: “The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.”
  • Trump and company seem to be betting that much of the electorate will not care if the president tells demonstrable lies, and will pick and choose whatever “alternative facts” confirm their views.
  • If we want to restore respect for facts and break through the intellectual ghettos on both the right and left, the mainstream media will have to be aggressive without being hysterical and adversarial without being unduly oppositional.
  • it will be incumbent on conservative media outlets to push back as well. Conservatism should be a reality-based philosophy, and the movement will be better off if it recognizes that facts really do matter.
  • The conservative media ecosystem — like the rest of us — has to recognize how critical, but also how fragile, credibility is in the Orwellian age of Donald Trump.
Javier E

US-China war would be a disaster for the world, says Communist party | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...the-world-says-communist-party

war china trump crisis

shared by Javier E on 06 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • “Were the United States and China to wage war on one another, the whole world would divide itself,” the People’s Daily newspaper argued in a commentary, paraphrasing Henry Kissinger
  • Fears of a potentially calamitous trade war, or even a military clash between the two nuclear powers, have been building since Trump’s shock election win last November.
  • Steve Bannon, Trump’s influential chief strategist, was last week reported to have warned last year that war between the US and China in the resource-rich waterway was inevitable.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Meanwhile, in a likely indication of the frictions between Washington and Beijing, Trump has yet to speak to his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, despite having held conversations with at least 18 world leaders since his inauguration.
  • Last month, the China’s foreign ministry urged the US president’s team to “speak and act cautiously” after the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, vowed the US would foil Chinese efforts to “take over” the South China Sea.
  • In a diplomatically worded editorial published on page three of the People’s Daily domestic edition on Monday, the voice of the Communist party said both countries should strive to avoid confrontation, conflict, misunderstandings and miscalculations.
  • Differences of opinion were inevitable due to the historical, cultural, economic and social differences between the US and China, the article said, “but wise men should seek common ground”. The article was printed under the byline “Zhong Sheng”, a homonym for “Voice of China”.
  • “The Chinese have not let themselves be bated … They understand that they are dealing with a different American leader who operates in different ways. They want to manage it carefully so it doesn’t needlessly escalate,” said Medeiros, who is now the managing director for Asia at the political risk consultancy Eurasia Group.
  • However, attitudes had shifted from nervousness about the US president’s erratic tweeting to resignation that the two countries were entering a “difficult period”. “The possibilities for an escalation of tensions are growing because distrust is high,” the article said.
  • Susan Shirk, the head of the 21st Century China Centre at the University of California, San Diego, said China specialists were “flummoxed” at Trump’s apparent determination to take on Beijing and said such moves came at an unfortunate time.
  • “As a person who sees a very strong connection between Chinese domestic politics and its foreign policy, I see the Trump statements as resonating through Chinese foreign policy in a way that could really be dangerous,” said Shirk, the author of China: Fragile Superpower
redavistinnell

Why Nobody Cares the President Is Lying - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...es-the-president-is-lying.html

nobody president lying new york times

shared by redavistinnell on 07 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Why Nobody Cares the President Is Lying
  • On his first full day in office Mr. Trump insisted that his inaugural crowd was the largest ever, a baseless boast that will likely set a pattern for his relationship both to the media and to the truth.
  • For years, as a conservative radio talk show host, I played a role in that conditioning by hammering the mainstream media for its bias and double standards. But the price turned out to be far higher than I imagined. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information. We thought we were creating a savvier, more skeptical audience. Instead, we opened the door for President Trump, who found an audience that could be easily misled.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Unfortunately, that also means that the more the fact-based media tries to debunk the president’s falsehoods, the further it will entrench the battle lines.
  • The press secretary also declined to answer a straightforward question about the unemployment rate, suggesting that the number will henceforth be whatever the Trump administration wants it to be.
  • In a stunning demonstration of the power and resiliency of our new post-factual political culture, Mr. Trump and his allies in the right media have already turned the term “fake news” against its critics, essentially draining it of any meaning. During the campaign, actual “fake news” — deliberate hoaxes — polluted political discourse and clogged social media timelines.
  • For years, the widely read Drudge Report has linked to the bizarre conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who believes that both the attacks of Sept. 11 and the Sandy Hook shootings were government-inspired “false flag” operations.
  • But now any news deemed to be biased, annoying or negative can be labeled “fake news.” Erroneous reports that the bust of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office or misleading reports that sanctions against Russia had been lifted will be seized on by Mr. Trump’s White House to reinforce his indictment.
  • Mr. Trump and his allies are empowering this alt-reality media, providing White House access to Breitbart and other post-factual outlets that are already morphing into fierce defenders of the administration.
  • By now, it ought to be evident that enemies are important to this administration, whether they are foreigners, refugees, international bankers or the press.
  • But discrediting independent sources of information also has two major advantages for Mr. Trump: It helps insulate him from criticism and it allows him to create his own narratives, metrics and “alternative facts.”
  • The Russian dissident and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov drew upon long familiarity with that process when he tweeted: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
  • In that world, the leader becomes the only reliable source of truth; a familiar phenomenon in an authoritarian state, but a radical departure from the norms of a democratic society. The battle over truth is now central to our politics.
  • Scottie Nell Hughes, was asked to defend the clearly false statement by Mr. Trump that millions of votes had been cast illegally. She answered by explaining that everybody now had their own way of interpreting whether a fact was true or not.
  • Or as George Orwell said: “The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.”
  • In the meantime, we must recognize the magnitude of the challenge. If we want to restore respect for facts and break through the intellectual ghettos on both the right and left, the mainstream media will have to be aggressive without being hysterical and adversarial without being unduly oppositional.
  • There may be short-term advantages to running headlines about millions of illegal immigrants voting or secret United Nations plots to steal your guns, but the longer the right enables such fabrications, the weaker it will be in the long run. As uncomfortable as it may be, it will fall to the conservative media to police its worst actors.
malonema1

Trump's Alpha Male Foreign Policy - POLITICO Magazine - 0 views

www.politico.com/...pha-male-foreign-policy-214830

trump politics us girlpower

shared by malonema1 on 27 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Trump's Alpha Male Foreign Policy
  • “Our foreign policy has been a disaster,” Gorka told Fox’s Sean Hannity before the inauguration. “We’ve neglected and abandoned our allies. We’ve emboldened our enemies. The message I have—it’s a very simple one. It’s a bumper sticker, Sean: The era of the Pajama Boy is over January 20th, and the alpha males are back.”
  • Is Trump really an anti-free trader who wants to end globalization—or an international businessman-turned-politician who simply wants a “better deal”? Does he seek more aggressive military measures and a tougher approach in the Middle East—or to give up and go home altogether? Will he get the United States into new confrontations with China, Iran, North Korea and others?
Javier E

How to Beat Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...515736

politics Trump protest engagement crisis

shared by Javier E on 08 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • I was one of the many who admired the orderly commitment and resolution of the women’s march on Washington the day after President Trump’s inauguration.
  • Yet my admiration is mixed with worry. As I step through the police lines, I bring a message with me: Your demonstrations are engineered to fail. They didn’t stop the Iraq war. They won’t stop Donald Trump.
  • With the rarest exceptions—and perhaps the January 21 demonstration will prove to be one—left-liberal demonstrations are exercises in catharsis, the release of emotions. Their operating principle is self-expression, not persuasion. They lack the means, and often the desire, to police their radical fringes, with the result that it’s the most obnoxious and even violent behavior that produces the most widely shared and memorable images of the event.
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  • Again and again, their most lasting effect has been to polarize opinion against them—and to empower the targets of their outrage. And this time, that target is a president hungering for any excuse to repress his opponents
  • Protesters may be up against something never before seen in American life: a president and an administration determined to seize on unrest to legitimate repression.
  • here’s what I have to offer from the right, amid the storms of the Trump era.
  • The more conservative protests are, the more radical they are.You want to scare Trump? Be orderly, polite, and visibly patriotic.
  • It’s beyond audacious that a candidate who publicly requested help from Russian espionage services against his opponent would claim the flag as his own. But Trump is trying. Don’t let him get away with it. Carry the flag. Open with the Pledge of Allegiance. Close by singing the Star Spangled Banner
  • Trump’s presidency is itself one long flag-burning, an attack on the principles and institutions of the American republic. That republic’s symbols are your symbols. You should cherish them and brandish them.
  • Don’t get sucked into the futile squabbling cul-de-sac of intersectionality and grievance politics. Look at this roster of speakers from the January 21 march. What is Angela Davis doing there? Where are the military women, the women police officers, the officeholders? If Planned Parenthood is on the stage, pro-life women should stand there, too. If you want somebody to speak for immigrants, invite somebody who’s in the country lawfully.
  • Here are a few useful tests:a) Could this demand be achieved by a law passed through Congress?b) Can I imagine my Rush Limbaugh listening brother-in-law agreeing with it?c) Can I tweet it?If so … good.
  • “Tone policing” has entered the left-of-center vocabulary as one of the worst possible things you can do or think. In fact, all effective political communication must carefully consider both tone and content
  • The classic military formula for success: concentrate superior force at a single point
  • Successful movements are built upon concrete single demands that can readily be translated into practical action: “Votes for women.” “End the draft.” “Overturn Roe v. Wade.” “Tougher punishments for drunk driving.
  • People can say “yes” to such specific demands for many different reasons.
  • So it should be for critics of President Trump. “Pass a law requiring the Treasury to release the President’s tax returns.” “An independent commission to investigate Russian meddling in the US election.” “Divest from the companies.” These are limited asks with broad appeal.
  • On the other hand, if you build a movement that lists those specific and limited goals along a vast and endlessly unfolding roster of others from “preserve Dodd Frank” to “save the oceans”—if you indulge the puckish anti-politics of “not usually a sign guy, but geez”—you will collapse into factionalism and futility.
  • if you are building a movement to protect American democracy from the authoritarianism of the Trump administration, you should remember that the goal is to gain allies among people who would not normally agree with you
  • the core demand of your movement should likewise be easy to explain and plausibly acceptable to that mainstream, stretching from Bernie voters to Romney donors.
  • Donald Trump has made clear that he wants to wage a Nixon-style culture war: cops against criminals, soldiers against pacifists, hard hats against hippies. Don’t be complicit. If you want to beat him, you have to reject his categories.
  • bodies in the street represent only potential power, not actual power. Even the largest rally must sooner or later disassemble and return home. What happens after that? The difference between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party was that only the second movement translated the energy and excitement of its early mass meetings into steady organizational work aimed at winning elections.
  • it is the steady and often tedious work of organization that sustains democracy—and can change the world. Protests are useful mostly to the extent that they mobilize people to participate in the follow-up meetings to realize the protest’s goals. Collect names and addresses. Form Facebook groups. Keep in touch. Don’t argue: recruit. Meet in real space as well as online. Serve cake. Make your presence felt on your local elected officials not just once, but day after day, week in, week out.
  • to succeed, you should be equally focused and persistent. And that requires above all: be motivated by hope, not outrage.
  • The outrage may get you started, but only hope keeps you going. Hope, as Vaclav Havel insisted, is an expression of the state of our minds, not a description of the state of the world. It powers you to undertake the daunting but essential mission: unlimited efforts for limited goals.
  • ou’re not trying to save the world. Just to pass one law. It doesn’t sound like much. It could be everything.
malonema1

It's not just lead that's poisoning the water. It's also politics. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ng-the-water-its-also-politics

us politics environment

shared by malonema1 on 02 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • It’s not just lead that’s poisoning the water. It’s also politics.
  • Lead poisoning, low water pressure and contamination of water sources are widespread problems in Mexican cities. Aging, decaying infrastructure is the problem — in some cities, water infrastructure is more than 70 years old.
  • 1) Maintaining water infrastructure = high financial cost and high political cost.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Spending millions of dollars repairing infrastructure that a prior politician inaugurated is rarely politically appealing
  • 2) Poor water systems = opportunities for direct political control of services
  • In political science, this is called clientelism, which is the exchange of a material good or resource — food, cash, public services — for the vote.
  • Politicians can exchange services for votes in water systems that are not digitized or updated; low-level workers are able to respond to political bosses quickly, moving water services, by pressing manual levers, to one community and taking it from another.
  • 3) Higher water prices = political suicide.
  • Industries that relied on stable water supplies also engaged in political lobbying.
  • These new political coalitions used print and radio ads to brand “infrastructure maintenance” as a sign of their governing success
  • U.S. cities and neighborhoods can learn something from Mexico’s experience building broad-based political coalitions in the face of decaying infrastructure. Politics can interfere with reliable water access, but when infrastructure is part of a good-governance platform, politics can also be part of the solution.
malonema1

UN human rights chief takes swipe at Trump, speaks of 'political profiteers' | Fox News - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...eaks-political-profiteers.html

us politics trump UN

shared by malonema1 on 02 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • UN human rights chief takes swipe at Trump, speaks of 'political profiteers'
  • After praising the anti-Trump marches that took place the day after Trump’s inauguration, and adding that he was “proud members of my staff took part,” the career Jordanian diplomat warned about political actors who would withdraw from parts of the “mulitilateral system.”
  • One of the main criticisms concerns the makeup of the 47-member council – which includes countries with extremely poor human rights records, such as China, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela
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  • “The proposition of recovering a supposedly perfect past is fiction; its merchants are cheats. Clever cheats,” he said, before saying the tactics that populists use are similar to those of ISIS.
  • Former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren welcomed the reports that the U.S. is considering withdrawing, saying it would send a “moral message” to the world.
  • “I will not go to New York and abstain when the U.N. seeks to create an international environment that encourages boycotts of Israel,” she said, referring to the Obama administration’s controversial decision in December to abstain on a Security Council vote condemning Israeli settlements.
malonema1

Trump's baptism into America's political religion Trump's baptism into America's political religion - The Boston Globe - 0 views

www.bostonglobe.com/...story.html

us politics trump Religion

shared by malonema1 on 02 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Trump’s
  • baptism
  • into
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • religion
  • political
  • America’s
  • When it comes to American political speeches, I’m a fan of brevity. Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address registered a bare 703 words. That was as the bloody Civil War was nearing its end.President Trump is not Abraham Lincoln. His hour-long State of the Union speech Tuesday was as lengthy as those of his predecessors. There was nothing particularly remarkable about it. No words he said will end up etched on a marble monument in Washington.
  • Trump did not provide concrete details on how to pay for his plans to cut taxes and stimulate the American economy. Nor did he offer specifics on the replacement for Obamacare, outside of some general principles for Congress to follow
  • A post-speech CNN poll had eight of 10 viewers reacting positively to Trump’s speech. It seems likely that Trump’s first, nominal, State of the Union address will mark the start of his ascent into positive territory. The question is, will the good feelings last?
Javier E

Bacevich: After Iraq, War is U.S. - Global Public Square - CNN.com Blogs - 0 views

globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/...bacevich-after-iraq-war-is-u-s

war legacy US foreign policy violence

shared by Javier E on 23 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • The disastrous legacy of the Iraq War extends beyond treasure squandered and lives lost or shattered. Central to that legacy has been Washington's decisive and seemingly irrevocable abandonment of any semblance of self-restraint regarding the use of violence as an instrument of statecraft. With all remaining prudential, normative, and constitutional barriers to the use of force having now been set aside, war has become a normal condition, something that the great majority of Americans accept without complaint. War is U.S.
  • By leaving intact and even enlarging the policies that his predecessor had inaugurated, President Barack Obama has handed these militarists an unearned victory. As they drag themselves from one "overseas contingency operation" to the next, American soldiers must reckon with the consequences. So too will the somnolent American people be obliged to do, perhaps sooner than they think.
Brian Zittlau

Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy: civil rights' wary allies - CSMonitor.com - 0 views

www.csmonitor.com/...nnedy-civil-rights-wary-allies

shared by Brian Zittlau on 21 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Candidate Kennedy’s purpose was simply to express sympathy to Coretta Scott King over her husband’s plight. Many of his aides opposed the call as likely to lose votes in the South. But King was released from jail shortly afterwards, and reports of Kennedy’s concern energized African-Americans. Many historians feel it shifted crucial votes in Northern states away from Richard Nixon to give JFK his razor-thin victory.
  • They admired each other’s best qualities but were suspicious of the other’s flaws. On civil rights, they marched to different cadences.Early in his administration, President Kennedy did not want to be seen as too eager to press for such moves as equal housing and voting protection for minorities, even though he saw such changes as inevitable. King was not invited to his inauguration or to an initial meeting of civil rights figures in the Oval Office
  • In June 1963, Kennedy unveiled sweeping civil rights legislation. Among other things, it promised the right to vote to all citizens with a grade-school education, and eliminated legal discrimination in public accommodations such as hotels and restaurants.Kennedy remained hesitant to embrace the nation’s most prominent civil rights figure, however. In part this was due to allegations that a key King aide had communist ties, as well as the FBI’s notorious surveillance of King, which produced evidence of womanizing.The FBI’s file on King’s sex life was dauntingly thick, Berl L. Bernhard, staff director of the US Commission on Civil Rights from 1958 to 1963, said in an oral history at the Kennedy Library.“I do think the president was aware of it, and I know [darn] well some people in the administration were aware of it,” Mr. Bernhard said.Kennedy himself had numerous affairs, of course. It’s unknown how he felt about the juxtaposition of his own recklessness with the King allegations.In the summer of 1963 the administration was worried about the upcoming March on Washington to highlight civil rights. Unable to stop the planning, the White House recruited white union and labor groups to participate, to counter criticism that whites were not interested in sweeping civil rights changes.
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  • In the end the bill did pass. It is an enduring legacy of the Kennedy era. But it was muscled through those Southern-dominated committees by President Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy’s assassination.In part it was LBJ’s legislative craftsmanship that carried the day. In part it was enabled by emotional appeals to the spirit of JFK.“By this and other efforts of mourning, Kennedy acquired the Lincolnesque mantle of a unifying crusader who had bled against the thorn of race,” wrote historian Taylor Branch in “Parting the Waters,” his Pulitzer-winning chronicle of the civil rights movement. “Honest biographers later found it impossible to trace an engaged personality in proportion to the honor.”
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