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Mike Pence's key role in building Team Trump - 0 views

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    Trump's decision to tap Seema Verma -- Pence's own Medicaid policy consultant in the Indiana governor's office -- to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services provided the clearest evidence yet of the prominence Pence and his conservative allies will have in Trump's Washington.
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Army, local police probe recent mystery deaths of 11 Fort Hood soldiers | Fox News - 0 views

  • Army, local police probe recent mystery deaths of 11 Fort Hood soldiers | Fox News
  • The Army and local police are investigating the deaths of 11 Fort Hood soldiers who have died on and off the large Texas base in the past three months under mysterious circumstances, according to reports.
  • “At this point in the investigative process we do not suspect foul play, but have not completely ruled it out while we conduct a complete and thorough death investigation,” Criminal Investigations spokesman Christopher Grey told the paper.
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  • Taylor is at least the 11th Fort Hood soldier to have died in the U.S. since Oct. 12.
  • Three other soldiers died from gunshot wounds. One of them, Pvt. Kevin Paulino, 24, died from a gunshot while he was in Indiana, Stars and Stripes reported. The Army said the soldiers' deaths were under investigation.
  • Three soldiers from Fort Hood died November 12 in a suicide bomb attack at Bagram air base in Afghanistan: Staff Sgt. John Perry, 30; Private First Class Tyler Iubelt, 20; and Sgt. 1st Class Allan Brown, 46. Brown died of injuries suffered in the attack at Walter Reade National Medical Center in Bethesda Dec. 6, the Houston Chronicle reported Friday.
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Ben Sasse's words of wisdom - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • “We aren’t a nation rooted in blood. We aren’t a nation based in ethnicity . . .  America was an idea that was about something much bigger than what tribe you come from.”
  • That message was entirely absent — and remains absent — in the xenophobic, nativist ramblings of Trump and his followers. Trump’s supporters rallied to his cry of white resentment and anti-immigrant blame-mongering. His authoritarianism and contempt for the First Amendment were of no concern.
  • the right, for all its Constitutional veneration, has become proudly ignorant about our founding principles and instead has adopted the worst aspects of the left: race obsession and class resentment. In the hands of misogynistic and xenophobic opportunists, the right now seems to be all about getting even, getting what some Americans imagine was taken from them.
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  • That, too, seems to be a proposition — sensible internationalism — that center-right and left can agree upon.
  • a sense of shared responsibility for the fate of our neighbors, especially those facing economic or other hardship, should be the basis of our public policy discussion
  • It is here, perhaps, that the conscientious center-right and center-left can join forces. Both should reject the steady diet of xenophobia on the right and identity politics on the left. Both should insist on a revival of civic education.
  • “We can talk about a specific factory moving from Ohio or Indiana to Mexico and the jobs that might be saved or lost in a move like that, but the long-term factor is that each of those factories have so many fewer workers. We are talking about 7 percent of the U.S. workforce now working in industrial jobs.”
  • Neither party, he said, is focusing on the real challenges — creating lifetime learners who can navigate through economic shifts we cannot now anticipate.
  • Sasse is unusual because, sadly, so few pols talk to voters like adults, addressing rather than denying complexity and appealing to American ideals rather than base fears and tribal prejudices
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Never-Trump conservatives search for alternative - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

  • Bill Kristol and other Never-Trump Republicans have done extensive polling and talked to potential candidates and financial backers about how to stop Donald Trump, according to sources familiar with those efforts.
  • They have searched feverishly in recent weeks for a candidate of stature to make an independent conservative White House bid. But like Kinzinger, no potential candidate has yet bitten.
  • Kinzinger, previously a prominent surrogate for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, would have undertaken a third party run "literally to save the union," according to a source familiar with his thinking, because both Clinton and Trump scare him.
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  • The efforts to recruit an independent conservative candidate come as Republican establishment figures increasingly coalesce around Trump's bid. Since effectively securing the nomination on May 3 with his Indiana primary win, more members of Congress have voiced support for Trump, as have former Republican rivals like Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.
  • But logistical hurdles to an independent bid are increasing. Ballot deadlines for independent candidates have either passed or soon will.
  • Sources familiar with efforts by Kristol and other Never-Trump Republicans say they have done extensive polling and gathered other private data, and talked to potential candidates and financial backers.
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Donald Trump: Hispanic judge in Trump University lawsuit is 'a hater' | MSNBC - 0 views

  • Donald Trump: Hispanic judge in Trump University lawsuit is ‘a hater’
  • Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump railed against the judge in the legal battle over Trump University, telling a large crowd Friday in San Diego, “There should be no trial.”
  • “We’re in front of a very hostile judge. The judge was appointed by Barack Obama,” Trump told a campaign rally
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  • U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel “happens to be, we believe Mexican, which is great. I think that’s fine,” Trump added of the judge, who was born in East Chicago, Indiana.
  • “I have a judge who is a hater of Donald Trump, a hater, he’s a hater,” he continued. “I’m getting railroaded by a legal system that frankly they should be ashamed.”
  • “I think Judge Curiel should be ashamed of himself. I think it’s a disgrace that he’s doing this and I look forward to going before a jury not this judge, a jury, and we will win that trial.”
  • “Because of the wall and because of everything that’s going on with Mexico … this is a judge who I believe has treated me very, very unfairly,” Trump said. 
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The GOP Delegate Race After Tonight | The Weekly Standard - 0 views

  • The GOP Delegate Race After Tonight
  • But the real race to watch is Pennsylvania, where an additional 54 unbound delegates are up for grabs. These delegates are elected directly on the ballot, but the ballot does not say which presidential candidates they support
  • Some percentage of Trump voters will take the time to figure out which delegates publicly back Trump. But there's really no way to know right now whether Trump ends up with half the unbound delegates or close to all of them.
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  • Almost all of the unbound delegates from North Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Minnesota, and Louisiana seem unlikely to back Trump
  • But as Scott Rasmussen points out in this video, Indiana and California still appear to be the two most important states still left to vote in the GOP race.
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Donald Trump and the Death of the Republican Party - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The Day the Republican Party Died
  • Where were you the night Donald Trump killed the Republican Party as we knew it? Trump was right where he belonged: in the gilt-draped skyscraper with his name on it, Trump Tower in Manhattan, basking in the glory of his final, definitive victory.
  • To his left, stopped for the night, was the golden escalator he’d ridden down when he announced his campaign last June with a rambling, unscripted address that invoked the “rapists” he said were pouring over the Mexican border, beginning what would be an uninterrupted series of shocks to the political system.
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  • “We want to bring unity to the Republican Party,” Trump said. “We have to bring unity—it’s so much easier.”
  • David Brooks had proclaimed “a Joe McCarthy moment,” adding, “People will be judged by where they stood at this time.” They had stood athwart Trump’s nomination, yelling, “Stop!”—but the Republican voters had ignored them, and now they feared their party was lost.
  • The New York Daily News’s cover showed a red, white, and blue elephant in a casket.
  • He would “go after” Hillary Clinton. He would attack trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement. He would build up the military and take care of veterans and “bring back jobs” for everyone, including the Hispanics and African Americans. “Our theme is very simple: It’s Make America Great Again,” he said. “We will start winning again, and you will be so proud of this country.”
  • After Trump exited, the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” came on the speakers—a fitting message from the newly minted Republican nominee to his party’s old elites.
  • It was followed by the Puccini aria “Nessun Dorma,”
  • At campaign stops, Cruz was taunted by Trump supporters: “Indiana doesn’t want you!” one shouted. Trump, Cruz told the man plaintively, “is playing you for a chump.”
  • ut the party was broken before Trump came along, and Cruz helped to break it.
  • “Ted Cruz helped create an environment where populist demagoguery would flourish on the right. Of course, he, no doubt, assumed he would be the beneficiary of this,” the conservative commentator Matt Lewis wrote. In the end, he added, “the revolution had turned on Ted Cruz, too.” And Trump, sensing the party’s weakness, steered into the breach.
  • There were no Kasich supporters moved to vote strategically, no former loyalists of Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. Cruz, it was clear, had not managed to broaden his appeal. It was the establishment’s revenge on the man some regarded as “Lucifer in the flesh.
  • ?A couple of weeks ago, he managed not to say anything bizarre for several days in a row, and even read from a sheet of notes at a few of his rallies. His ragtag, disorganized campaign, of which he has always been the undisputed chief strategist, finally hired a real-deal consultant. He gave a well-mannered victory speech that referred to “Senator Cruz” instead of his habitual “Lyin’ Ted.”
  • Trump’s approval rating among Republicans, he noted, is now positive by a 20-point margin, a sharp reversal from a couple of months ago, and a recent general-election poll had him narrowly beating Clinton.
  • Some of his supporters see him as a new kind of Republican reformer, one whose lack of loyalty to the party frees him to adopt more popular positions that can attract nontraditional GOP voters.
  • Jill McMillan, a 57-year-old environmental-health worker from Elkhart, told me Trump was the only candidate who made her feel safe, protected from the dangers of the world.
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John Kasich, last Republican Trump rival, quits race - BBC News - 0 views

  • John Kasich, last Republican Trump rival, quits race
  • Ohio Governor John Kasich has dropped out of the presidential race after struggling to gain traction against Republican front-runner Donald Trump.
  • "As I suspend my campaign today I have renewed faith, deeper faith that the Lord will show me the way forward,"
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  • Mr Trump holds a commanding lead and is closing in on the nomination
  • Several senior Republicans said on Wednesday they would not back him, with some saying they would prefer to vote for Mrs Clinton.
  • Ted Cruz's withdrawal from the race on Tuesday night meant John Kasich's long-shot path to the nomination - deadlocked delegates in a contested convention turning to him as a compromise candidate - was definitively closed.
  • Texas Senator Ted Cruz dropped out of the race on Tuesday after losing heavily to Mr Trump in the Indiana primary.
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Trump's honeymoon with the stock market will soon be over | Nouriel Roubini | Business ... - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • 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.
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Mike Pence accused of hypocrisy for hacked private emails - BBC News - 0 views

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    US Vice-President Mike Pence has been accused of hypocrisy after it emerged he used a private email as Indiana governor to conduct state business. He contacted advisers on terrorism and homeland security via an AOL account during his four years as governor, though he did nothing illegal.
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Right-wing groups hurt the GOP - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • 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.
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Pence: 'Not going to change' religious freedom law - 0 views

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    Indiana Gov. Mike Pence defended his state's new religious freedom law Sunday while refusing to say if it would allow discrimination against gays and lesbians. Facing a rising tide of criticism and business boycotts against his state, Pence said he would consider a second law that "amplifies and clarifies" the first one but added, "We're not going to change the law."
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More Governors Seek to Ban Syrian Refugees After Paris Massacre - NBC News - 0 views

  • 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."
  • Abbott is joined by Indiana Gov. Mike Pence and Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner who also announced their states would "suspend" the resettlement of Syrian refugees. The governors of Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee and Wisconsin made similar vows following the attacks, which killed at least 129 people.
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  • 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.
  • North Carolina and Idaho governors said they oppose the admittance of Syrian refugees but have not said they wouldn't accept them. Massachusetts' governor said he wants to know more before accepting them and Nevada's governor has not said either way but said he is requesting a review from the federal government.
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They Are Us - The New York Times - 0 views

  • et in January 1939, Americans polled said by a two-to-one majority that the United States should not accept 10,000 mostly Jewish refugee children from Germany.
  • If the Islamic State wanted to dispatch a terrorist to America, it wouldn’t ask a mole to apply for refugee status, but rather to apply for a student visa to study at, say, Indiana University. Hey, governors, are you going to keep out foreign university students?
  • Or the Islamic State could simply send fighters who are French or Belgian citizens (like some of those behind the Paris attacks) to the U.S. as tourists, no visa required. Governors, are you planning to ban foreign tourists, too?
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  • Refugee vetting has an excellent record. Of 785,000 refugees admitted to the United States since 9/11, just three have been arrested for terrorism-related charges, according to the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.
  • If Republican governors are concerned about security risks, maybe they should vet who can buy guns. People on terrorism watch lists are legally allowed to buy guns in the United States, and more than 2,000 have done so since 2004. The National Rifle Association has opposed legislation to rectify this.
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Republicans to President Barack Obama: Keep Syrian refugees out - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

  • GOP governors and lawmakers were quick to announce they wouldn't allow Syrian refugees into their states and are appealing for stronger control of U.S. borders.
  • people who are fleeing Syria are the most harmed by terrorism," Obama said in Antalya, Turkey, at a meeting of the G20. "It is very important ... that we do not close our hearts to these victims of such violence and somehow start equating the issue of refugees with the issue of terrorism."
  • Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee similarly heaped pressure on Ryan, saying in a statement: "Speaker Ryan
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  • eeds to make it clear that if the President won't stand to protect America from wholesale open borders, then Republicans will."
  • In a radio interview with Bill Bennett, Ryan also said he has tasked all committees of jurisdiction to come up with recommendations about how to ensure the thousands of Syrian refugees the President wants to settle in the United States won't be involved in terrorism
  • "When I hear folks say that maybe we should just admit the Christians and not the Muslims (refugees), when I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which person who's fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted -- when some of those folks themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political persecution -- that's shameful. That's not American," Obama said
  • The refugees have been admitted to 138 cities and towns in a total of 36 states -- with California, Texas, Michigan, Arizona and Illinois taking the most, according to wrapsnet.org, where the U.S. government keeps its official numbers
  • "Scapegoating an entire religious community and rejecting those fleeing ISIL's terrorism and persecution is what the terrorists want," O'Malley said in a statement.
  • House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican, took a more direct shot at Obama in previewing a Thursday subcommittee hearing on the Syrian refugee crisis.
  • "When will President Obama take ISIS threats seriously, as well as the warnings of national security officials within his own administration, and cease his plan to bring thousands of Syrian refugees into the United States?" Goodlatte said in a statement. "His disconnectedness to reality is needlessly jeopardizing national security and Americans' lives."
  • Indiana Gov. Mike Pence similarly ordered his state to suspend the resettlement of Syrian refugees, "pending assurances from the federal government that proper security measures have been achieved."
  • New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan is the only Democrat to oppose Syrian refugees' resettlement in the United States -- a stance that's particularly notable since she is challenging Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte in 2016. A spokesman said Hassan "believes that the federal government should halt acceptance of refugees from Syria.
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Trump and the Harsh Truth Exposed by the Midterms - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • In the Trump era, Republicans counter economic security with cultural security. Trump promised to protect Americans from Latino murderers and women who destroy men’s lives by alleging sexual assault. And, to a significant extent, it worked. By mobilizing his white, rural base, Trump matched Democratic enthusiasm in purple states such as Florida and Ohio and overwhelmed Democratic incumbents in red states such as North Dakota, Indiana, and Missouri. It’s an old game: W. E. B. Du Bois famously called it the “psychological wage.” Instead of protecting white people from economic hardship, you protect them from the racial demons you’ve stirred up in their minds.
  • The harsh truth is this: Racism often works. Cross-racial coalitions for economic justice are the exception in American history. Mobilizing white people to protect their racial dominance is the norm.
  • The lesson of 2018 is that American politics is not reverting to “normal.” In many ways, Trumpism is normal. It’s not Trump who is running uphill against American tradition, it’s the people who are trying—bravely but with mixed success—to stop him
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The GOP Has Become the Party of Rural White VotersIt's the first time in history they'v... - 0 views

  • As the suburbs have turned against the Republican Party of President Donald Trump, rural whites have embraced the Party’s new message of economic protectionism, immigration restrictions, and an “America First” foreign policy. In this month’s midterm elections, rural whites sent new Republicans to Congress from Pennsylvania’s southwestern coalmining region and the farming regions of southern and northeastern Minnesota. Rural whites were also the key to the Republican Party’s Senate victories in Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota. And in Tennessee, rural whites replaced a centrist conservative senator with a self-described “hard-core” conservative
  • The Republican Party’s campaign messages targeting the rural South suggest that rural whites are once again being mobilized by fear. This time, the enemies include “liberal” politicians who allegedly want to take their guns, along with “illegal” immigrants who are allegedly invading the nation. It is perhaps no accident that the full conversion of rural white southerners to the Republican Party occurred in 1994, immediately after President Bill Clinton signed into law the last gun control bill passed at the federal level and after an emerging conservative talk radio network, with Rush Limbaugh in the vanguard, succeeded in branding Clinton and his party as incompatible with white rural values
  • But today the problem that the Democratic Party has with white rural voters goes far beyond specific policy differences. After decades of denunciations of “liberal” Democrats from conservative media and evangelical churches, many rural whites in both North and South have equated loyalty to the Republican Party with their own values and self-identity. In nearly every region of the country – even northern California and the northeastern corner of Vermont – rural whites are voting Republican,
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  • Because a national culture of rural white Republican voting has already emerged, Democrats will not be able to make inroads into the rural white vote merely through policy proposals or appeals to economic self-interest. Instead, they will need to connect their party to the values, self-identity, and anxieties of rural whites. If they fail to do this – as seems likely – the country will probably experience an unprecedented political polarization between rural areas and metropolitan counties
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Andrew Sullivan: Portrait of the President As a Con Man - 0 views

  • One of the talking points for some who support continued mass immigration is the notion that the places where immigration is least popular are the places with the fewest number of immigrants. That’s how irrational xenophobia is, they suggest
  • the Migration Policy Institute complicates the picture a bit. While it finds that the number of immigrants increased by 9 percent between 2010 and 2016, it also notes that it had risen by 15 percent or more in 15 states. And among those states, most are red ones: North Dakota, West Virginia, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Alaska, Indiana, and Iowa among them.
  • , the total numbers are nowhere near where they are in, say, California, but the pace of change really has increased in those states where opposition — especially to immigrants who entered the country illegally — is high. I don’t find this surprising.
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  • One other small thing to note: More than a fifth of Americans, according to this survey, now speak a language other than English at home. In Nevada and Florida, nearly a third of residents don’t speak English at home.
  • very few previous waves of immigrants have been so homogeneous for as long as the Spanish-speaking immigrants from Mexico and Central America currently are; their numbers are higher than any other previous wave; and few have been so thoroughly dispersed.
  • the sheer scale of the cultural transformation of the last couple of decades — the CDC predicts that close to a quarter of Americans will be Hispanic by 2035 — is undeniable.
  • If you ignore that, or insist that worrying about too fast a pace of cultural change is inherently racist, it’s relatively easy to insist that there is no immigration crisis
  • if you believe that nations require some continuity and cultural unity to cohere and endure, then the picture is somewhat different. There is a reason this issue has become so prominent in this country. And it isn’t entirely bigotry.
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At Carrier, the Factory Trump Saved, Morale Is Through the Floor - The New York Times - 0 views

  • From afar, one might assume the picture is rosy: Indiana has an unemployment rate of just 3.3 percent, and for people without a college degree, few employers offer the kind of salary and benefits that Carrier does. But when I got to Indianapolis in July, I found that the factory Mr. Trump is often credited with saving is plagued by rising absenteeism and low morale.
  • What’s ailing Carrier isn’t weak demand. Furnace sales are strong, and managers have increased overtime and even recalled 150 previously laid-off workers. Instead, employees share a looming sense that a factory shutdown is inevitable — that Carrier has merely postponed the closing until a more politically opportune moment.
  • In some ways, the situation is a metaphor for blue-collar work and life in the United States today. Paychecks are a tad fatter and the economic picture has brightened slightly, but no one feels particularly secure or hopeful
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  • Several times in late July and early August, so many workers were missing that the furnace line had to shut down in midday — even more disruptive than an early-morning halt. That hadn’t happened in years, employees said. Some workers cite illness, while others claim days under the Family and Medical Leave Act, saying they are taking care of sick relatives
  • On the worst days, according to one group leader, up to one in five workers are out. It’s true that the company has been running the factory hard — up to 60 hours a week with mandatory overtime, six days in a row — and some absenteeism could be due to sheer exhaustion, Mr. Roell allowed. But “bad blood,” as he put it, is at least as much to blame. “Workers feel like Carrier is going to leave,” he said, “whether we come to work or not.”
  • A week after the election, the president-elect called the chief executive of Carrier’s parent, United Technologies. They worked out terms: Carrier would lay off 632 of its roughly 1,350 blue-collar employees in Indianapolis, but in exchange for $7 million in tax breaks, it would keep the plant open and invest $16 million in new equipment. A little more than half of the workers would keep their jobs.
  • “There have been a few days when three people don’t show up and I’ve had to work on the line all day,” Mr. Maynard said. “The attitude, the demeanor — they’re not grateful that they have a job. The absenteeism is real bad. A lot of us need our jobs. Others look at it and they don’t really care anymore.”
  • The bad vibes can be catching. “It makes it so depressing you don’t feel like going in,” he added. “I need the job, but some days you just want it to be over with.”
  • Yes, Mr. Hayes said, the company would invest in the Carrier facility, as it had promised Mr. Trump. But those funds were earmarked for automation, and would ultimately mean fewer jobs in Indianapolis, not more. Assembly-line positions there were not ones “that people really find all that attractive over the long term,” Mr. Hayes said. There were “great, great people” there, he added, “but the skill set to do those jobs is very different than what it takes to assemble a jet engine.” The Carrier faithful didn’t appreciate the slights
  • Even before the closure announcement, he said, supervisors gathered people from the lines and pointed out, ominously, that their counterparts in Mexico missed fewer days. “I’m worried they will use the absenteeism as an excuse to shut the factory,” Mr. Roell said. “They aren’t doing anything to improve morale.”
  • Mr. Roell doesn’t want his son, 10, or his daughter, 15, to follow him into factory work. “We tell them all the time to go to college or trade school,” he said. “It’s just not stable working in manufacturing. One day, the factory is going to go to another state or country.
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Can Anyone Hear What Caitlin Fink Is Saying? - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Feminists have wrestled with their relationship to pornography ever since the early ’70s, when the Rimbaud-loving Jersey girl Andrea Dworkin joined forces with America’s most lighthearted legal scholar, Catharine MacKinnon, and created sex-negative feminism. Their arguments about the nexus between violence against women and hard-core pornography were powerful, but the whole enterprise was a hard sell in the midst of the sexual revolution.
  • “No woman needs intercourse; few women escape it,” Dworkin said—what happened to Rimbaud?—from deep within her overalls, and she lost the crowd. MacKinnon’s legal argument depended on pornography’s potential violation of the equal-protection clause, a delicate proposition, and one she was advancing at a time when free speech was at the very center of the youth movement
  • The women were raising important questions, but in 1988 the World Wide Web arrived, blotting out the sun and giving us porn without end
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  • Children learn about the mechanics of sex—or rather, that mechanics is the whole of sex—by watching women who may have been blood-tested and “verified” professionals, or who may have been so impoverished and desperate that they would have done literally anything for cash or drugs
  • although the party line is that consumers bring their own desires to it and simply find the porn that suits them, the influence runs in the other direction.“If you’re with somebody for the first time,” a sex researcher at Indiana University helpfully tells her students, “don’t choke them, don’t ejaculate on their face, don’t try to have anal sex with them. These are all things that are just unlikely to go over well.”
  • we can’t pretend that the things people expect to do in bed, or expect partners to do in bed, have not been hugely—almost entirely, by this point—influenced by online porn
  • Culture is progressive and cumulative, and so is porn, restlessly seeking and crossing the next boundary, and thereby making whatever came before it seem tame and ordinary.
  • The right understands porn as a thing for sale, and so has a grudging respect for it. “It’s Trump,
  • It’s natural that this would become the venue for these troubled girls; porn is the main determinant of high-school kids’ sexual imaginings. Girls who feel uncomfortable or shamed about their body are deeply drawn to it. “I liked the attention I got,” Caitlin says of her first foray into selling pictures online; she liked “being called beautiful. I enjoyed it because it made me feel good about myself.”
  • it seems to me that a troubled teenager, desperate to be called beautiful, will have her sense of self deeply affected by work in that industry, which will quickly seek to put her in ever more extreme forms of on-camera behavior
  • What has happened is that within a few years of porn’s arrival, the country quickly learned what it was dealing with—something it had no power to control, something it couldn’t even keep small children from encountering—and so modern life simply adjusted itself around the new, imperial leader.
  • The left decided to champion porn in a variety of ways, beginning with reconceiving the women who work in it as fully liberated, empowered feminists
  • Do you know what percent of the vast, global porn industry these self-actualized porn workers represent? Not a large one.
  • The problem is that there are some very old human impulses that must now contend with porn. One of them is the tendency of deeply troubled teenage girls to act out sexually as a kind of distress signal, an attempt to get the attention of adults who may not be getting the message that they’re in a crisis.
  • The right destroyed the one force capable of challenging porn’s ubiquity: social conservatism. It gleefully elected a sleazeball whose personal history is that of a man with contempt for the ideas of personal responsibility and duty to others that were once central to social conservatism.
  • there isn’t anything left of the social conservatism of yesteryear but money, and selling any valuable commodity we have remaining, from our natural resources to our international reputation to our young girls.
  • The only person questioning any of these notions seems to be Caitlin herself, who labors under the delusion that she’s not living on a darkling plain. “The only hard thing so far is making sure I have enough money,
  • Maybe she had gained—from Napoleon Dynamite and Ellen—the impression that the she lives in a society where the center holds, and where promising girls are not left to drift so far beyond the shoreline that no one feels impelled to consider a rescue.
  • “Other than that”—here she is, the daughter that you and I made together, letting us know how she’s doing—“I’ve honestly been doing really good with myself.”
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