This Monday, we commemorate the 30th anniversary of the federal holiday in honor of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.It's a holiday that thankfully has been gaining in recognition since Congress passed a bill and President Ronald Reagan signed it in 1983, designating the third Monday in January, starting in 1986, to honor the civil rights leader. For years, some states declined to participate in the holiday, and Arizona lost the opportunity to host a Super Bowl over it. In 2000, South Carolina became the last state to recognize the holiday.
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MLK Day turns 30: Why we observe it - CNN.com - 0 views
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Had an assassin's bullet not taken his life at the age of 39, King would have turned 87 on Friday.Read MoreHad he lived, I believe King would have continued to inspire hope and would challenge us to fulfill his dream of a more inclusive society -- where everyone would have an equal opportunity for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
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Not only are we reopening old wounds with regard to confrontation with law enforcement, we are also relitigating everything from voting rights to affirmative action. And now we confront, for the second year in a row, Hollywood -- which somehow ignores the talent of people of color when it comes to the Oscars.
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It was his faith, determination and hope, as much as his words, that sustained and inspired a generation to be actively engaged in the political process as voters -- and thus working to transform our nation by electing men and women of valor who sought to remove barriers and open once-closed doors to all. That was part of King's vision -- as he stated back in 1957 when he called on the country to "give us the ballot."King once said, "If you can't run, then walk. If you can't walk, then crawl. But whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward."
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No one knew better than King of disappointment, yet he remained determined not to be discouraged. He saw in his own lifetime that racism was shifting from malicious, violent discrimination to softer means such as excluding people from voting, or from access to promotions in the workplace, or from access to certain careers, or from ever being able to rise above hand-to-mouth wages and salaries.
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Finally, King believed in diversity. Diversity, the chorus of different voices, should be a song of harmony. As Americans, we cannot deny our heritage, our individual cultures, but rather we must continue to bring all that is good and just to the civic enterprise. King's legacy is action in the service of others. For he believed that "not everybody can be famous, but everybody can be great, because greatness is determined by service.
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So, whether on the job or off, let's use this day to commit ourselves to service through acts of goodness and kindness. Let's continue his work in the vineyards of justice and equality for all. And let us begin to live in what King called "the fierce urgency of now."
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The Gospel According to Trump - The New York Times - 0 views
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IT is no secret that Donald J. Trump’s ruinous rise in the Republican presidential primaries has been powered, in large part, by a naked agenda of religious division and fear-mongering
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But while his anti-Muslim provocations have rightly drawn the largest share of public outrage, Mr. Trump has in fact been using his bully pulpit throughout this election season to attack religious minorities of all stripes.
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In the Gospel According to Trump, there is only one blessedly normal, all-American faith: mainline Protestant Christianity.
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Take Mr. Trump’s bizarre speech last month to the Republican Jewish Coalition, where he kept inexplicably returning to the same well-worn tropes that anti-Semites have been using for a century
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“I’m Presbyterian,” Mr. Trump said. “Boy, that’s down the middle of the road, folks, in all fairness. I mean, Seventh-day Adventist, I don’t know about. I just don’t know about.”
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More recently, he tried to blunt Ted Cruz’s surge in the Iowa polls by using the senator’s Cuban heritage to exoticize his Christian faith. “I do like Ted Cruz,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in Des Moines, “but not a lot of evangelicals come out of Cuba.”
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But Mr. Trump’s religious posturing is not about theology, it’s about branding — and if his religious worldview seems impossibly dated, that’s by design.
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Mr. Trump’s target demographic is not America’s most devout, but its most anxious and aggrieved, and what he’s selling isn’t salvation, but a bygone era of plentiful factory jobs
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By focusing his rhetorical firepower largely on minority faiths that have grown in size and influence in the United States over the past 60 years — displacing the old Protestant monopoly — Mr. Trump is stoking a tribal hostility toward those who worship differentl
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He promptly recalibrated, telling me about a Jewish friend (“great guy, rich guy”) who had moved to Utah and fallen in love with the local creedal breed. “You know,” he said, “people don’t understand the Mormon thing. I do. I get it. They are great people!
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'Vice' Review: Dick Cheney and the Negative Great Man Theory of History - The New York ... - 0 views
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McKay, staying close to the historical record (and drawing on books by the journalists Jane Mayer and Barton Gellman), propounds a negative great man theory of history, telling the story of an individual who was able, through a unique combination of discipline, guile and luck, to bend reality to his will
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The story of his rise, roller-coastering through four decades of American history, is a hectic blend of psychohistory, domestic drama and sketch-comedy satire bound together by McKay’s ingenuity and indignation. Like “The Big Short,” his rollicking explication of the financial crisis of 2008, this movie transforms gaudy pop-cultural toys into tools of polemic and explanation. The pace is jaunty, the scenes crackle with gleeful, giddy incredulity, and the dry business of statecraft attains the velocity of farce
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“What do we believe in?” Dick asks his Yoda at one point, provoking a gale of laughter in response. The more substantive answers are torture, deceit and the all-but-unchecked power of the American presidency
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To the question “How did he do it?” McKay offers a fairly coherent answer, one grounded in Bale’s canny and sensitive performance. As biography, in other words, the movie works pretty well. As history, though, it’s another story — at once tendentious and undercooked, proposing a reductive, essentially conspiratorial account of recent events.
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The motley pageantry of our politics — the endless arguments about race, class, religion, ideology, sex, region and heritage that have defined the republic since the beginning — boils down to a single personality. All you really need to know about the world today is that everything wrong with it is Dick Cheney’s fault.
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How did he get away with it, though? The answer McKay supplies is that he was smart and the rest of us were too dumb and too distracted to stop him
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Trump Unites Left and Right Against Troop Plans, but Puts Off Debate on War Aims - The ... - 0 views
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Mr. Trump, he said, wanted to end these military campaigns so he could focus on the economic and geopolitical contest with China, which he views as America’s biggest foreign threat. “This is not about a return to isolationism,” Mr. Bannon said. “It’s the pivot away from the humanitarian expeditionary mentality of the internationalists.”
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While Mr. Trump’s critics would shrink from that language, military analysts, former officials and diplomats acknowledge there is a case for withdrawing from both conflicts.Open-ended but limited troop deployments are not likely to alter the battlefield in either Afghanistan, where the Taliban now holds more ground than at any other time since 2001, or in Syria, where the Islamic State’s territorial grip has been broken and President Bashar al-Assad, with the help of Russia and Iran, has largely stymied the rebellion.
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The situation is even starker in Afghanistan. Last month, a year after Mr. Trump grudgingly authorized the deployment of nearly 4,000 troops, bringing the total number there to 14,000, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., admitted that the Taliban “are not losing.”“If someone has a better idea than we have right now, which is to support the Afghans and put pressure on the terrorist groups in the region, I’m certainly open to dialogue on that,” General Dunford said at a panel sponsored by The Washington Post earlier this month.
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“Despite holding most of eastern Syria for two years, including the oil-fields, the U.S. and its Syrian allies have extracted exactly zero political concessions from Assad,” said Mr. Ford, who now teaches at Yale and is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. “Assad will wait us out.”
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Announcing troop withdrawals will force the United States to rethink long-term military commitments that have little public support and are no longer effective. It could also force the Afghans and Syrians to confront their own deep-rooted problems, without the presence of foreign soldiers who often delay the day of reckoning.“I, for one, think the decision to withdraw is sound and wise,” said Robert S. Ford, the last American ambassador to Syria
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During a meeting in the Situation Room in July 2017, when Mr. Mattis and other advisers were pitching their plan to deploy more troops, an angry Mr. Trump lashed out. “We’re losing,” he declared, according to a person in the room.
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Those frustrations are widely held by NATO allies who have been America’s partners in Afghanistan.“It’s been getting increasingly harder to explain to European publics why we need to stay there,” said Tomas Valasek, a former NATO ambassador from Slovakia who is the director of Carnegie Europe. “Perhaps Trump’s tendency to disrupt things, including by withdrawing from Afghanistan, may not be such a bad idea after all.”
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.Afghanistan’s leaders, mired in political infighting and corruption, need to see the partial pullout as a sign that they don’t have much time, he said.But that is not without risk, Mr. Mir warned, because if the Taliban returned, it would haunt the Americans “that they were defeated by a ragtag force after 17 years of fighting them.”However precipitously Mr. Trump acted, he was channeling the same reservations that Mr. Obama had. Both presidents questioned the open-ended nature of these campaigns, pressed their advisers to define success, and faced the problem of “mission creep.” Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, John R. Bolton, recently vowed that the United States would not leave Syria as long as Iran, or its proxies, were active there.“Suggesting they stay until Iranian influence was gone was an unachievable goal and a recipe for potential escalation for a deployment that the Trump people have never been particularly transparent about,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser to Mr. Obama.Expanding the mission to resisting Iran, he pointed out, also “has no distinct congressional authorization.”
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Mr. Rhodes said he supported the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Syria. But like many former officials, from Democratic and Republican administrations, he harshly criticized how Mr. Trump made the decision, without consulting allies or Congress, or even warning his generals
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Even the president’s supporters did not defend him. James Jay Carafano, a national security expert at the Heritage Foundation who worked on Mr. Trump’s transition, said he gave the president credit for not just accepting the status quo.But he added, “It’s not really clear what the plan is in Syria. It’s not clear how we protect our interests after we leave, and it’s not clear how it fits into our regional strategy.”
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shared by Javier E on 19 Aug 18
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Stolen Elections, Voting Dogs And Other Fantastic Fables From The GOP Voter Fraud Mytho... - 0 views
talkingpointsmemo.com/...-the-gop-voter-fraud-mythology
voting elections gop voter fraud history Politics
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Numerous studies have found that voter fraud is far from a major issue in the U.S., and in-person fraud of the sort Trump and Kobach like to talk about — things like non-citizens showing up to vote or people returning to vote multiple times under different names — is vanishingly rare. A 2007 study by NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice memorably found that an individual American is more likely to get struck by lightning than to commit in-person voter fraud.
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as of last summer, 68 percent of Republicans thought millions of illegal immigrants had voted in 2016, and almost three quarters said voter fraud happens “somewhat” or “very often.” The same survey found that nearly half of Republicans believed Trump had won the popular vote.
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The idea that Nixon gracefully and expeditiously chose not to fight the outcome is a myth, the historian David Greenberg demonstrated back in 2000. Nixon did, however, eventually give in — but in the process, he turned the notion that the Democrats had stolen the election into an article of faith among Republicans, especially conservative ones.
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or decades, complaints about “voter fraud” have been a core component of Republican right-wing folklore — and one of their most useful election-year tools, particularly in places where winning the white vote isn’t enough to win elections.
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The effect was immediate. In 1961, the Republican National Committee launched a “ballot security program,” explained in a pamphlet published by its Women’s Division. Party workers were advised to place poll watchers outside the polls with cameras.
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Ultimately, that year Barr reported that his workers had “discouraged or successfully challenged 50,000 illegally registered voters.” This claim was baldly fantastical. Meanwhile, in Arizona, future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist ran Operation Eagle Eye in Phoenix’s Maricopa County. Federal judge Charles Hardy later recalled that Eagle Eye workers in Democratic-majority precincts challenged “every black or Mexican voter,” demanding that they read a passage from the Constitution
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Barr expanded Operation Eagle Eye to help Senator Barry Goldwater’s bid for the presidency in 1964. The RNC sent 1.8 million letters to registered voters nationwide — a practice called voter caging. If a letter couldn’t be delivered for any reason, it would represent a reason to challenge the voter as illegitimate.
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One document from state-level GOP operations obtained by the Democratic National Committee instructed workers to stall lines in Democratic precincts. In another document, a state ballot security office in Louisiana explained that “all sheriffs in the state of Louisiana, except one, are sympathetic with Senator Goldwater’s election. We should take full advantage of this situation.”
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Unsurprisingly, the effort did less to restore confidence than it did to stoke paranoia. In Houston, the Austin American newspaper looked for the more than a thousand “fictitious” or ineligible registrations claimed by the GOP county chairman. It found nothing but some simple clerical errors. In Long Beach, California, another newspaper investigation found that seven of eight people on a list of ineligible voters “were just as eligible as can be.” In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, annoyed voters called the police on the Eagle Eyes. In Miami, a circuit court judge enjoined Citizens for Goldwater for “illegal mass challenging without cause, conducted in such a manner as to obstruct the orderly conduct of the election.
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the extent to which blocking voting opportunities for Democratic constituencies had become baked into conservative Republican culture became evident when Jimmy Carter proposed a package of electoral reforms in March of 1977. These included national same-day registration.
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As historian Greg Downs recently wrote for TPM, the entire system of voter registration had been designed, back in the nineteenth century, to dampen democratic participation by immigrants and black Southerners that threatened native-born white dominance. A century later, conservatives went to the mat to preserve it.
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At first, legislators from both parties enthusiastically endorsed same-day registration. Then, conservatives convinced the Republican Party establishment that, as the conservative newspaper Human Events put it, it would represent “Euthenasia for the GOP,” because “the bulk of these extra votes would go to the Democratic Party.” It pointed to a political scientist who said national turnout would go up 10 percent under the plan, but made it clear that the wrong people would be voting: most of the increase would come from “blacks and other traditionally Democratic voter groups.” The Heritage Foundation argued the reforms would “allow eight million illegal aliens in the U.S.” to vote
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Weyrich made the dubious nature of the New Right’s definition of “free elections” more explicit. Speaking at an Evangelical gathering in 1980 alongside Reagan, he warned Christians against the “good government syndrome.
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“I don’t want everyone to vote,” he said. “Elections are not won by a majority of the people… As a matter of fact, our leverage in the election quite candidly goes up as the voting population goes down. We have no responsibility, moral or otherwise, to turn out our opposition. It’s important to turn out those who are with us.”
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The DNC and the New Jersey Democratic Party sued, and finally, as part of a settlement designed to stanch voter intimidation, the RNC entered a consent decree agreeing not to run any ballot-security efforts specifically targeting districts for their racial makeup.
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The state Republican Party sent 125,000 postcards to recipients in Democratic areas who turned out to be 97 percent black, falsely claiming that a voter who had moved within 30 days of the election couldn’t vote, and noting that giving false information to an election official was punishable by up to five years in jail.
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Both the 1986 and 1990 incidents led to new consent decrees. Neither dampened Republican enthusiasm to use fraud allegations as a political tool. In fact, by this time, it had become one of the conservative movement’s go-to responses to all kinds of perceived threats.
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So too were ongoing Republican efforts to fight the liberalization of voter registration. In 1988, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell — having been first elected to the Senate in a close vote in 1984 — argued in the American Bar Association Journal against a bill that would require mail-in registration systems nationwide. Liberal registration systems might be fine in places like North Dakota and Minnesota, he wrote, but “for other states like mine, and regions where one party dominates and people are poor, election fraud is a constant curse.”
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Taking a page from Reagan and Weyrich, McConnell wrote that “relatively low voter turnout is a sign of a content democracy,” an observation that was, he argued, “heresy to some, blasphemy to others, and worst of all, politically incorrect.” Motor Voter could “foster election fraud and thus debase the entire political process,” he wrote. And anyway, “We should ask ourselves: How easy should voting be? Is it too much to ask that people have a passing interest in the political process, 10, 20, or 30 days prior to an election and that they go down to the courthouse, or the library, to register?”
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Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama was more explicit, alleging that the Motor Voter bill would register “millions of welfare recipients, illegal aliens, and taxpayer funded entitlement recipients.”
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In 1992, George H.W. Bush vetoed Motor Voter, calling it an “open invitation to fraud and corruption.” But it passed the next year, essentially on a party line vote, and Bill Clinton signed it into law.
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Motor Voter was responsible for tens of millions of new voter registrations. But its roll-out wasn’t smooth. Many states resisted implementing parts of it, particularly the part about letting people sign up to vote at the offices where they received government benefits. In 1994, McConnell pushed to remove WIC offices from the list of places where voter registration must be offered. This had nothing to do with his original opposition to Motor Voter, he insisted. He was just concerned that “WIC workers will have to spend valuable time and money on an activity that is totally unrelated to the mission of the WIC program.”
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Between 1999 and 2000, the Jeb Bush administration carried out a voter purge with a sloppy vengeance. It contracted with a private company, DBT, to produce “scrub lists” of ineligible voters. In her recounting of this episode, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer notes that DBT received an award for “innovative excellence” in 1999 by a conservative group called the Voting Integrity Project, which had been pushing states to purge their rolls. DBT’s lists ended up including almost 1 percent of Florida’s electorate and nearly 3 percent of its black voters. But they were enormously messy.
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voters were identified as candidates for the purge just because “their name, gender, birthdate and race matched — or nearly matched — one of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States.” DBT proposed refining its lists using address histories or financial records, but the state declined to take it up on the offer.
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Similar purges went down across the country. A report drawn up by the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic staff after the 2000 election found that “voters in the majority of states reported being improperly excluded or purged from voting rolls.”
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As Joshua A. Douglas, a University of Kentucky law professor, tells the story, Bond took the stage at an Election Night rally, pounding the podium and screaming “this is an outrage!” He blamed Ashcroft’s loss on votes cast by dead people and dogs. Specifically, Bond spoke frequently of a Springer Spaniel named Ritzy Mekler. As it turned out, someone had indeed registered Ritzy, but the dog never cast a vote. Later investigations found only six definitively illegitimate votes out of the more than 2 million cast in all of Missouri that year.
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But the post-election chaos in Florida that year was, of course, of a whole different order, and would refocus the GOP for more than a decade on the potency of a handful of votes
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Given the astoundingly slim final official margin of 537 votes, it was easy for observers to rightfully attribute the outcome to any number of efforts to skew the vote or accidents of history: If Republicans hadn’t convinced state officials to count overseas absentee ballots that didn’t comply with state laws, or if the state hadn’t disenfranchised thousands of people falsely judged to be felons, or if Ralph Nader hadn’t run, or if Palm Beach County hadn’t used weirdly designed ballots, everything might have been different.
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for Republicans, one clear lesson from 2000 was that any move to keep potential Democratic voters away from the polls might win them an election.
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Ultimately, the federal ID requirement wasn’t terribly onerous, but Minnite writes that it was significant; it “embedded a party tactic into federal law and signaled approval for a new partisan movement in the states to encumber voters with unnecessary identification requirements.”
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In the next presidential election year, 2004, talk of voter fraud was everywhere. Conservative activists targeted the community group ACORN in multiple states where it was registering voters. (In several cases, the organization’s employees turned out to have forged the registration forms — but not in the hope of casting illegitimate votes. Instead, they were trying to hit a quota set by the organization that required volunteers to collect a certain number of registrations.) In Washington State, after a super-close gubernatorial election, Republican Dino Rossi refused to concede until nearly six months after his opponent was sworn in, claiming there was illegal voting. And back in Florida, the Bush campaign got caught with caging lists made up of mostly African-American voters that it planned to use to challenge people at the polls.
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Rove was convinced that some U.S. attorneys weren’t doing enough to make hay over voter fraud charges. Between 2005 and 2006, the administration fired nine U.S. attorneys. It would become one of the major scandals of the Bush presidency.
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One of the fired attorneys, David C. Iglesias of New Mexico, later explained that he’d been asked to resign after declining to file corruption charges against local Democrats. Another, John McKay of Washington, said he suspected his firing had to do with his decision not to call a grand jury to investigate voter fraud in the governor’s race in 2004, which Rossi lost by just a few hundred votes. The Washington Post reported that five of the 12 U.S. attorneys the administration dismissed or considered for dismissal in 2006 oversaw districts that Rove and his deputies saw as “trouble spots for voter fraud,” including New Mexico, Nevada, Washington State, Kansas City and Milwaukee
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Gonzales and the Justice Department later acknowledged that they had fired U.S. Attorney Bud Cummings in Arkansas to make way for Tim Griffin, a former Rove aid who had been involved with the caging in Florida in 2004. Griffin ended up stepping down from the post in 2007 after the scandal broke, and Gonzales lost his own job later that summer.
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Today, though, Griffin is happily serving as lieutenant governor of Arkansas. Gonzales avoided criminal charges and now serves as dean of Belmont University in Tennessee. Hans von Spakovsky and one of the conservative activists Bradley Schlozman had hired as a DOJ attorney, J. Christian Adams, reprised their Bush-era roles by becoming members of Trump’s voter fraud commission last year. Few of the other people responsible for spreading the voter fraud myth faced any consequences at all.
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This past January, a judge allowed the 1982 consent decree that banned the RNC from racially motivated voter security operations to expire. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that Ohio could purge occasional voters from its voter rolls if they don’t return a mailed address-confirmation form.
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BBC - Travel - The people descended from Spartans - 0 views
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From the steep hilltops, stone houses resembling small castles stand with their backs to the colossal Taygetos mountains and look out over the stoic Ionian Sea.
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This is the land of the Maniots, a clannish community said to be descended from Spartans, the legendary warriors of Ancient Greece.
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He had the build of a warrior – sturdy and broad-shouldered – but his wrinkled face was warm and relaxed.
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Oikonomeas grew up in the village of Neochori on the Mani Peninsula’s north-west coast and never left.
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Oikonomeas explained that I was savouring a snack that was likely eaten thousands of years ago by Greece’s infamous soldiers.
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n 371BC, the Spartans were defeated by soldiers from the city-state of Thebes, sparking the downfall of Sparta.
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But the Spartans living on the Mani peninsula, sheltered from the rest of the Peloponnese by the Taygetos mountains, held strong, defending their territory for centuries from the Thebans, and later Ottoman, Egyptian and Franc forces, among others
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The region remained self-governing until the mid- to late 19th Century, when the Greek government reduced the peninsula’s autonomy.
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until the 1970s, when construction of new roads opened the peninsula to the rest of the Peloponnese, that the Maniots began to embrace newcomers.
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During its time as an autonomous region, the peninsula was governed by different families, or clans;
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Such was the Maniot sense of pride.” He noted that until recently Maniots would refer to their sons as ‘guns’ and their daughters as ‘barrels with gunpowder at the foundations of their house’.
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That’s not the only reminder. Almost anyone who was born and raised on the Mani peninsula will tell you they have Spartan blood in their veins.
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Oikonomeas still remembers his mother spooning hardboiled eggs into his mouth to make him stronger, insisting that as the only boy it was up to him to continue the family legacy.
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Any trace of authentic Spartan DNA long ago disappeared; all that’s left of the warriors are their legends. Some historians and anthropologists say similarities between ancient and modern rituals – like the mourning songs – are strong indicators of a relationship between Ancient Spartans and modern Maniots,
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shared by Javier E on 12 Oct 17
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Trump's Media Bashing Has Deep Roots in the GOP - The Atlantic - 0 views
www.theatlantic.com/...542670
trump media free press' subversion free speech politics history culture
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As I wrote in a new essay for the fall issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, the history of modern Republican politics is rife with examples of conservatives—from Barry Goldwater to Sarah Palin—working to discredit journalism.
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But for most of the past half-century, conservatives have at least claimed their press criticism was aimed at spurring reform. “
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In the Trump era, that pretense has been dropped. With the rapid growth and rising influence of the conservative-media complex, most on the right seem to have given up on trying to “fix” the mainstream press. And many of the powerful figures in that world now openly declare that they are working to bring about the demise of the nonpartisan journalistic establishment in America.
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Matt Boyle, the Washington editor for Breitbart News, told young conservatives in a speech at the Heritage Foundation in July that his goal was “the full destruction and elimination of the entire mainstream media.”
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This sentiment can be found at almost every level of the conservative media today. From my CJR essay: “Nothing is grander, nothing is more glorious, nothing is more satisfying, nothing is sweeter, nothing is more validating, nothing is better for America than the death of the mainstream media’s political power,” John Nolte crowed in The Daily Wire the day after the election.
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some in the conservative media have begun providing their audiences with how-to guides for finishing off the journalistic establishment. [Radio host Rush] Limbaugh told his listeners they should stop consuming news from the mainstream press altogether. “I’ll let you know what they’re up to,” he assured them. “And as a bonus, I’ll nuke it!” [Fox News’s Sean] Hannity urged his viewers to start targeting individual journalists—and their bosses—on social media. And the alt-right blogger Roosh Valizadeh has called for a coordinated campaign of bullying aimed at reporters. “Make them appear as ‘uncool’ salarymen in the eyes of the public,” he wrote. “Mock their appearance, their mannerisms, and their weaknesses.”
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the widespread destructionist attitude toward American journalism on display in the conservative media today means that Trump would have a loud and enthusiastic cheering section if he ever decided to actually follow through on his threat to the networks. And given the immense political power these figures have demonstrated over the past two years—culminating in the election of a conservative media darling to the presidency—it would be a mistake to take their agenda lightly.
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shared by anonymous on 13 Mar 18
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'Never Again': Fighting Hate in a Changing Germany With Tours of Nazi Camps - The New Y... - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...germany-anti-semitism.html
germany nazi tours camps new york times history culture
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Teaching history is a pillar of national identity in postwar Germany. That is why Sawsan Chebli, a Berlin state legislator with Palestinian heritage, recently came up with an idea that is radical even by the standards of a country that has dissected the horrors of its past like no other: make visits to Nazi concentration camps mandatory — for everyone.
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“This is about who we are as a country,” she said in a recent conversation in Berlin. “We need to make our history relevant for everyone: Germans who no longer feel a connection to the past and immigrants who feel excluded from the present.”
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Neo-Nazis have been emboldened by the arrival of Alternative for Germany, the first far-right party to break into Parliament since World War II. And there are concerns that the recent absorption of more than a million immigrants, many from the Middle East and many Muslim, has inadvertently created incubators of a different kind of anti-Semitism — one hiding behind the injustices of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but often reverting to hateful old stereotypes, too.
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“Our most powerful tool,” she said, “is identification.”Recently, a young Syrian had asked a fellow guide, “Why do you turn your torture chambers into a museum?”To make sure we will never have torture chambers again, he had replied.The boy had thought this over for a while. “We have torture chambers in Syria,” he eventually said. “Maybe, when the war is over, we should turn them into a museum, too.”
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shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 18
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This madness will pass. Conservatives can't give up. - The Washington Post - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...8-8bdd-cdb33a5eef83_story.html
conservatism gop compromise trump culture values
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Olsen sees this as an important but normal political moment, in which the policy views of populists and conservative intellectuals need to be reconciled on issues such as trade and immigration. An intellectual dialectic within the Republican coalition is straining to produce a new, more pro-worker synthesis — which Olsen himself has long advocated
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If Trump were merely proposing a border wall and the more aggressive employment of tariffs, we would be engaged in a debate, not facing a schism.
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Trump’s policy proposals — the details of which Trump himself seems unconcerned and uninformed about — are symbolic expressions of a certain approach to politics.
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The stated purpose of Trump’s border wall is to keep out a contagion of Mexican rapists and murderers. His argument is not taken from Heritage Foundation policy papers. He makes it by quoting the racist poem “The Snake,” which compares migrants to dangerous vermin. Trump proposes to ban migration from some Muslim-majority countries because Muslim refugees, as he sees it, are a Trojan-horse threat of terrorism. Trump’s policy ideas are incidental to his message of dehumanization.
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So how do we split the political difference on this one? Shall we talk about Mexican migrants as rapists on every other day? Shall we provide rhetorical cover for alt-right bigots only on special occasions, such as after a racist rally and murder?
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We have seen similar damage in the realm of values and norms. In the cultivation of anger and tribalism. In the use of language to inflame and demean. In the destruction of a common factual basis for politics, making policy compromise of the kind Olsen favors impossible.
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What would fusion with this type of politics look like? Trump defines loyalty to conservatism as contempt for many of our neighbors
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One might as well have proposed a fusion between popular sovereignty and Abraham Lincoln’s conception of inherent human rights. They were not a dialectic requiring a synthesis. They were alternatives demanding a choice.
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Russian Influence Campaign Extracted Americans' Personal Data - WSJ - 1 views
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That was in early 2017. It wasn’t until recently, after being contacted by The Wall Street Journal, that Ms. Hales would learn that Black4Black and “partner” groups, including BlackMattersUS, were among hundreds of Facebook and Instagram accounts set up by a pro-Kremlin propaganda agency to meddle in American politics, Facebook records show.
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The fake directory is one example of the elaborate schemes that Russian “trolls” have pursued to try to collect personal and business information from Americans, the Journal has found. Leveraging social media, Russians have collected data by peddling niche business directories, convincing activists to sign petitions and bankrolling self-defense training classes in return for student information.
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which also owns Instagram, said the company allows users to find out whether they have “liked” or “followed” any Russia-backed accounts through an online tool..
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It isn’t clear for what purpose the data were collected, but intelligence and cybersecurity experts say it could be used for identity theft or leveraged as part of a wider political-influence effort that didn’t end with the 2016 election
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Russian operators used stolen American identities to open bank and PayPal accounts, create fake driver’s licenses, post messages online and buy political advertisements before the 2016 election, according to the indictment.
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Another Russian group, “Don’t Shoot,” identified as Russia-linked in congressional hearings last fall, appeared to collect information by asking followers to sign petitions and report police misconduct on its website, DoNotShoot.us.
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The operators allegedly kept a list of more than 100 Americans and their political views to “monitor recruitment efforts,
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Their targets included niche groups ranging from Texas secessionists and “Southern heritage” proponents to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community and the Black Lives Matter movement.
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Black4Black and its partner account BlackMattersUS, which had hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, asked the American entrepreneurs to answer detailed questions so it could write articles promoting their companies. More than a dozen entrepreneurs contacted by the Journal said they turned over data to participate in the directory, yet none reported gaining any new customers.
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However, the tool doesn’t notify users who exchanged messages with or turned over information to the accounts.
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“We’re all just trying to make an honest living here,” said Ms. Hales, the business owner from Cleveland. “I would feel comfortable knowing that whoever’s behind this and whatever information they were pursuing has been shut down.”
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Conservative Obsession - The Atlantic - 0 views
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More than simply a leftist to be opposed, Ocasio-Cortez has joined Barack Obama as a focus of the very same fear and anger that elected Trump in the first place. She represents the prospect of a more progressive, diverse America where those who were once deprived of power and influence can shape the course of the nation and its politics. The story of her family’s working-class roots in the Bronx is both specific enough to be compelling and universal enough for anyone, including many voters in Trump’s base, to relate to. And that’s precisely why her story, like Obama’s, must be discredited.
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The idea that undeserving people of color are stealing money or recognition from the deserving predates Trump, of course. It has been a feature of American politics since the country’s founding. The poetry of the young enslaved woman Phillis Wheatley was assumed to be fraudulent because her intelligence undermined the basic assumption of chattel slavery, that black people were not truly human. After Frederick Douglass wrote his first autobiography, a critic who knew one of Douglass’s owners insisted that the famed orator was “not capable of writing the Narrative” and that “there are no such barbarities committed on their plantations.”
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More recently, the election of Barack Obama provoked a fierce backlash on the right, one that manifested in one conspiracy theory after another meant to prove Obama was a fraud. Conservatives became fixated on proving that the first black president did not write his autobiography, that he was functionally illiterate absent a teleprompter, and that his admission to elite universities was the unearned result of affirmative action, despite his graduating magna cum laude from Harvard Law.
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The entirety of the Republican Party’s response to this situation during its two years of unified control of the federal government was a failed effort to slash health-care coverage for millions and a successful effort to cut taxes on the wealthy. The GOP needs a different story to tell about what’s wrong with the country, and the one about people of color living lavishly at the expense of white people who work hard and play by the rules is an old classic.
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What this narrative is meant to obscure is the reality that American policy making has not created some nightmare inversion of power between white people and ethnic minorities, but a landscape of harrowing inequality where people are forced to beg strangers for money on the internet to pay their medical bills. Upward mobility is stagnant; those who are born rich, die rich, and those who are born poor, die poor. Real wages have risen painfully slowly for decades; housing, particularly in urban centers, is unaffordable; and young people are saddled with skyrocketing student debt for educations that did not provide the opportunities they were supposed to.
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Even after Obama was elected, conservative pundits argued that Obama wasn’t “really popular” because he maintained sky-high support among black voters—who, they implied, should count less. The underlying argument behind the claim, no matter how mundane or outlandish, was that being black confers unearned benefits rather than systemic obstacles to be overcome. Obama became the living, breathing symbol of the narrative that undeserving people of color were being elevated even as hardworking white people were being left behind
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In America, when people of color succeed despite the limits placed on them, and use their newfound status to indict the system for holding others back, they are held up as proof that the limits do not exist, they are denounced as ingrates, or they are pilloried as frauds incapable of the successes attributed to them.
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The exception is if they present their success as evidence that the structural barriers are not as great as they seem, and that in truth the only thing that holds back marginalized communities is their own lack of ability or motivation. If they affirm the righteousness of the class and caste system that they defied to succeed, they are hailed as heroes by the same people who would otherwise have denounced them as frauds.
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When people of color enter elite spaces, they make those with unearned advantages conscious of how they’ve been favored by the system.
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During the 2016 campaign, for every problem America faced, Trump found an enemy, an outsider to blame: Latino immigrants stealing jobs and lowering wages, Muslims engaging in terrorism, black men committing crimes. Then there were the white liberals, such as Elizabeth Warren, whose claim to American Indian heritage was touted as proof that the system is rigged to the advantage of undeserving people of color—so much so that even white liberals seek to get in on the scam
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The unworthy, in this case, are not the legislators and their wealthy benefactors who have worked tirelessly for decades to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few, at the expense of American welfare and democracy. Rather, they are marginalized communities and their white liberal allies, who maintain a corrupt spoils system for black and brown people at the expense of hardworking white Americans.
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The Roots of Muslim Rage - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Islam is one of the world's great religions. Let me be explicit about what I, as a historian of Islam who is not a Muslim, mean by that
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Islam has brought comfort and peace of mind to countless millions of men and women. It has given dignity and meaning to drab and impoverished lives. It has taught people of different races to live in brotherhood and people of different creeds to live side by side in reasonable tolerance
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It inspired a great civilization in which others besides Muslims lived creative and useful lives and which, by its achievement, enriched the whole world
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But Islam, like other religions, has also known periods when it inspired in some of its followers a mood of hatred and violence. It is our misfortune that part, though by no means all or even most, of the Muslim world is now going through such a period
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At times this hatred goes beyond hostility to specific interests or actions or policies or even countries and becomes a rejection of Western civilization as such, not only what it does but what it is, and the principles and values that it practices and professes. These are indeed seen as innately evil, and those who promote or accept them as the "enemies of God.
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sophy, even more anti-American, took its place—the Soviet version of Marxism, with a denunciation of Western capitalism
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In the classical Islamic view, to which many Muslims are beginning to return, the world and all mankind are divided into two: the House of Islam, where the Muslim law and faith prevail, and the rest, known as the House of Unbelief or the House of War, which it is the duty of Muslims ultimately to bring to Islam
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But the greater part of the world is still outside Islam, and even inside the Islamic lands, according to the view of the Muslim radicals, the faith of Islam has been undermined and the law of Islam has been abrogated. The obligation of holy war therefore begins at home and continues abroad, against the same infidel enemy.
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Like every other civilization known to human history, the Muslim world in its heyday saw itself as the center of truth and enlightenment, surrounded by infidel barbarians whom it would in due course enlighten and civilize.
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Among the components in the mood of anti-Westernism, and more especially of anti-Americanism, were certain intellectual influences coming from Europe
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One of these was from Germany, where a negative view of America formed part of a school of thought by no means limited to the Nazis but including writers as diverse as Rainer Maria Rilke, Ernst Junger, and Martin Heidegger. In this perception, America was the ultimate example of civilization without culture
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German philosophy, and particularly the philosophy of education, enjoyed a considerable vogue among Arab and some other Muslim intellectuals in the thirties and early forties, and this philosophic anti-Americanism was part of the message.
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It must surely be clear that what won support for such totally diverse doctrines was not Nazi race theory, which can have had little appeal for Arabs, or Soviet atheistic communism, which can have had little appeal for Muslims, but rather their common anti-Westernism
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Not all the ideas imported from the West by Western intruders or native Westernizers have been rejected. Some have been accepted by even the most radical Islamic fundamentalists, usually without acknowledgment of source, and suffering a sea change into something rarely rich but often strange
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The cause most frequently adduced for anti-American feeling among Muslims today is American support for Israel. This support is certainly a factor of importance
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Another explanation, more often heard from Muslim dissidents, attributes anti-American feeling to American support for hated regimes, seen as reactionary by radicals, as impious by conservatives, as corrupt and tyrannical by both. This accusation has some plausibility
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More than ever before it is Western capitalism and democracy that provide an authentic and attractive alternative to traditional ways of thought and life. Fundamentalist leaders are not mistaken in seeing in Western civilization the greatest challenge to the way of life that they wish to retain or restore for their people.
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Ultimately, the struggle of the fundamentalists is against two enemies, secularism and modernism. The war against secularism is conscious and explicit, and there is by now a whole literature denouncing secularism as an evil neo-pagan force in the modern world and attributing it variously to the Jews, the West, and the United States.
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The war against modernity is for the most part neither conscious nor explicit, and is directed against the whole process of change that has taken place in the Islamic world in the past century or more and has transformed the political, economic, social, and even cultural structures of Muslim countries.
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Islamic fundamentalism has given an aim and a form to the otherwise aimless and formless resentment and anger of the Muslim masses at the forces that have devalued their traditional values and loyalties and, in the final analysis, robbed them of their beliefs, their aspirations, their dignity, and to an increasing extent even their livelihood.
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The instinct of the masses is not false in locating the ultimate source of these cataclysmic changes in the West and in attributing the disruption of their old way of life to the impact of Western domination, Western influence, or Western precept and example.
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And since the United States is the legitimate heir of European civilization and the recognized and unchallenged leader of the West, the United States has inherited the resulting grievances and become the focus for the pent-up hate and anger.
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It should by now be clear that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them.
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This is no less than a clash of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both
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It is crucially important that we on our side should not be provoked into an equally historic but also equally irrational reaction against that rival.
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Despite this monotheism, Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, was at various stages influenced, especially in Iran, by the dualist idea of a cosmic clash of good and evil, light and darkness, order and chaos, truth and falsehood, God and the Adversary, variously known as devil, Iblis, Satan, and by other names.
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One such was political freedom, with the associated notions and practices of representation, election, and constitutional government. Even the Islamic Republic of Iran has a written constitution and an elected assembly
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Muslim states have also retained many of the cultural and social customs of the West and the symbols that express them, such as the form and style of male (and to a much lesser extent female) clothing, notably in the military.
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The movement nowadays called fundamentalism is not the only Islamic tradition. There are others, more tolerant, more open, that helped to inspire the great achievements of Islamic civilization in the past, and we may hope that these other traditions will in time prevail
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But before this issue is decided there will be a hard struggle, in which we of the West can do little or nothing
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To this end we must strive to achieve a better appreciation of other religious and political cultures, through the study of their history, their literature, and their achievements
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In the Blood - The Secret History of the Habsburgs | History Today - 0 views
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18th-century succession crisis unlocks a tale of dynastic obsession and myth-history in Austria's first family
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Charles had devoted his whole adult life to maintaining the Habsburg claim to the Spanish throne. From 1705 when he first arrived in Barcelona he saw himself as the only rightful king of Spain. He never accepted the accession of the Bourbon claimant, Philip V, under the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, and thereafter anything that smacked of a French influence was guaranteed to rouse him to fury
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So, even if the last Habsburg's death had no sinister implications, it was potentially a catastrophe for the dynasty. Charles had no male heir, and his daughters could not succeed him to the Imperial throne. The laws of the Empire permitted only a male to sit on the throne of Charlemagne
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among the Habsburgs, as opposed, to say, the Valois or the Bourbons, the reality of female power and authority was accepted. Thus Charles' daughters could succeed to his titles and lands but they could not become Holy Roman Emperor
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Since Frederick III had been crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome in 1452, the Imperial title had become almost synonymous with the Habsburgs. They had been elected since 1438 in an unbroken succession to the most dignified and honourable office in Christian Europe. Sometimes there had been other challengers and, on occasion, it had seemed likely that the title would pass to another claimant. But the Habsburgs had always succeeded in persuading sufficient electors to favour their candidate
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While the power and effectiveness of the Reich was undoubtedly waning, especially after the peace settlement at Westphalia in 1648, it was, paradoxically, becoming a more effective instrument of Habsburg power
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The Emperor Leopold I, in 1687 and 1705, had moved away from the notion of the equal claim towards establishing the precedence of the senior line, with males inheriting first and then females.
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deprived the daughters of Joseph I, and established that the new primogeniture would begin with his own children. When Charles presented this edict he was initiating a constitutional revolution
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It is worthwhile noting that Charles' concerns were for the future. In 1715, despite ten years of marriage, he had no heir
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the lands ruled by the Habsburgs should never be divided, and he was mindful of the wrangles over the Spanish inheritance of his cousin Carlos II, which ultimately deprived him (he believed) of the throne of Spain
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However, there was a strong body of legal opinion that suggested that so powerful were these claims ‘of blood' that no prior agreement could abrogate them, and certainly nothing could prevent their rights being transmitted to the future children of a female Habsburg
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The Pragmatic Sanction assumed that males would come before females in order of inheritance, but if there were no male heirs, then a female could inherit all the powers and rights due to the head of the house of Habsburg
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it was accepted that a female Habsburg could wear the Crown of St Stephen. Constitutional lawyers would insist that, technically speaking, Maria Theresa should become ‘King of Hungary’, although she was always referred to as Queen of Hungary
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The sudden death of Charles produced a crisis for the Habsburgs, firstly in the political domain, but secondly, in the area of dynastic ideology
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The Habsburgs had made so much of their long ancestry, of the male descent through the generations, since the time of the first Rudolf
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To describe Charles VI as the ‘last of the Habsburgs’ plays to a widely-held legend of the enfeeblement of the Habsburg line
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This grotesque appearance lay behind the assumption that the Habsburgs had died out in the male line for genetic reasons, as a consequence of their deliberate policy of marrying within the family which they had followed since the middle of the sixteenth century
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In fact the failure of the Habsburg line had much more to do with epidemic disease and poor standards of infant care in the Habsburg palaces than with any genetic taint
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The lack of a male heir may have had a hereditary element, because there were many more female than male births in the House of Habsburg, but the disappearance of the male line was more an accident than a sign of waning procreative powers.
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or this reason he never accepted that it was his elder daughter Maria Theresa who would succeed him, and had done nothing to introduce her to the complexities of government
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The rules and taboos which constrained other ruling houses were transmuted by the Habsburgs' notion of their own unique collective identity
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The Habsburgs, from the founder of the family's fortune, Emperor Rudolf I in the thirteenth century, had sedulously constructed a myth of their origins which set them apart from ordinary humanity
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And most Habsburg rulers year by year, right up until the death of the Emperor Franz Joseph in 1916, played a solemn part in the annual Corpus Christi procession through the streets of Vienna
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It was for this reason that the Darks of Habsburg identity, like the jutting jaw, were a mark of honour not a disfigurement
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It had been the grimly practical Wallenstein and not the Virgin Mary who had rescued the Habsburg cause in the 1630s. In the 1740s Maria Theresa saved her inheritance with a steely will and an unswerving determination to succeed
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Her response, conditioned both by her character and the exigencies of the circumstances, was very different from her fussy and pedantic father, obsessed with the lost throne of Spain
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A young woman inherited the crowns and possessions of her father, but also an empty treasury and an army commanded by dotards. The process by which she stiffened the resolve of her generals, won the nobility and gentry of Hungary to her cause, and organised the resistance to the Prussian, Bavarian and French armies has itself achieved the quality of myth
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Maria Theresa was as involved with the identity of the house of Habsburgs as he had been. She followed her father in his obsessive concern for the safe keeping of the bones of their ancestors
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Maria Theresa's son Joseph II has been nicknamed ‘The Revolutionary Emperor' by one of his biographers
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The transformation which she inspired and then enforced on her territories was less dramatic (and less publicised) than Joseph’s: it was also a lot more successful and longer lasting. The crisis of Maria Theresa's first years and the subsequent revival of Habsburg power is most often looked upon in external terms, both political and economic
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However, even then, she refused to be crowned as Empress, preferring the titles she held in her own right to the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia
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who ruled briefly as Leopold II, knew better than either of them how to play the twin chords of coercion and free expression
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But the Habsburgs, from Maria Theresa onwards, turned their backs on the tradition of grandeur and portrayed themselves as the first servants of the nation
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Historians have come to regard Maria Theresa as one of the most significant and innovative of the long line of Habsburg rulers
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The potential catastrophe of the 1740s was that the Habsburg lands, like Poland a generation later, might have been dismembered or at best much reduced in scale and power
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Russian Culture Facts for Heritage and Traditions - 0 views
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Russia Economy: Population, GDP, Inflation, Business, Trade, FDI, Corruption - 0 views
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History of Hindu Temples Through the Ages - 0 views
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The Cave Temples of Badami, the Virupaksha temple at Pattadakal, the Durga Temple at Aihole and the Kailasanatha temple
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Southeast Asian countries, many of which were ruled by Indian monarchs saw the construction of many marvelous temples in the region between 7th and 14th century AD that are popular tourist attractions till his day, the most famous amongst them being the Angkor Vat temples built by King Surya Varman II in the 12th century.
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Today, Hindu temples across the globe form the cynosure of India's cultural tradition and spiritual succor. There are Hindu temples in all almost countries of the world, and contemporary India is bristling with beautiful temples, which hugely contribute to her cultural heritage.
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These Influencers Aren't Flesh and Blood, Yet Millions Follow Them - The New York Times - 0 views
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Everything about Ms. Sousa, better known as Lil Miquela, is manufactured: the straight-cut bangs, the Brazilian-Spanish heritage, the bevy of beautiful friends
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Lil Miquela, who has 1.6 million Instagram followers, is a computer-generated character. Introduced in 2016 by a Los Angeles company backed by Silicon Valley money, she belongs to a growing cadre of social media marketers known as virtual influencers
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Each month, more than 80,000 people stream Lil Miquela’s songs on Spotify. She has worked with the Italian fashion label Prada, given interviews from Coachella and flaunted a tattoo designed by an artist who inked Miley Cyrus.
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Until last year, when her creators orchestrated a publicity stunt to reveal her provenance, many of her fans assumed she was a flesh-and-blood 19-year-old. But Lil Miquela is made of pixels, and she was designed to attract follows and likes.
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Why hire a celebrity, a supermodel or even a social media influencer to market your product when you can create the ideal brand ambassador from scratch
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Xinhua, the Chinese government’s media outlet, introduced a virtual news anchor last year, saying it “can work 24 hours a day.
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Soul Machines, a company founded by the Oscar-winning digital animator Mark Sagar, produced computer-generated teachers that respond to human students.
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“Social media, to date, has largely been the domain of real humans being fake,” Mr. Ohanian added. “But avatars are a future of storytelling.
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Edward Saatchi, who started Fable, predicted that virtual beings would someday supplant digital home assistants and computer operating systems from companies like Amazon and Google.
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YouPorn got in on the trend with Jedy Vales, an avatar who promotes the site and interacts with its users.
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when a brand ambassador’s very existence is questionable — especially in an environment studded with deceptive deepfakes, bots and fraud — what happens to the old virtue of truth in advertising?
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the concerns faced by human influencers — maintaining a camera-ready appearance and dealing with online trolls while keeping sponsors happy — do not apply to beings who never have an off day.
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Many of the characters advance stereotypes and impossible body-image standards. Shudu, a “digital fabrication” that Mr. Wilson modeled on the Princess of South Africa Barbie, was called “a white man’s digital projection of real-life black womanhood
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“It’s an interesting and dangerous time, seeing the potency of A.I. and its ability to fake anything,
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Last summer, Lil Miquela’s Instagram account appeared to be hacked by a woman named Bermuda, a Trump supporter who accused Lil Miquela of “running from the truth.” A wild narrative emerged on social media: Lil Miquela was a robot built to serve a “literal genius” named Daniel Cain before Brud reprogrammed her. “My identity was a choice Brud made in order to sell me to brands, to appear ‘woke,’” she wrote in one post. The character vowed never to forgive Brud. A few months later, she forgave.
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While virtual influencers are becoming more common, fans have engaged less with them than with the average fashion tastemaker online
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“An avatar is basically a mannequin in a shop window,” said Nick Cooke, a co-founder of the Goat Agency, a marketing firm. “A genuine influencer can offer peer-to-peer recommendations.”
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How Trump Is Reshaping American Opinion - The Atlantic - 0 views
www.theatlantic.com/...596335
american opinion nativism free trade' immigration discrimination culture politics trump
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The Reuters analysis also found that Americans were less likely to express feelings of racial anxiety this year, and they were more likely to empathize with African Americans. This was also true for white Americans and whites without a college degree, who largely backed Trump in 2016.”
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the number of whites who say “America must protect and preserve its White European heritage” has sunk nine points since last August
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The percentages of whites, and white Republicans, who strongly agree that “white people are currently under attack in this country” have each dropped by roughly 25 points from the same time two years ago
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A record-high number of Americans—75 percent—said in 2018 that immigration is good for the United States. Although the Trump administration took steps last week to limit even legal immigration, the Trump presidency has seen an increase in the number of Americans who support more legal immigration—not just among Democrats, but even slightly among Republicans.
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white Americans are 19 percent more supportive of a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants than they were four years ago, and slightly less supportive of increased deportations
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more Democrats say blacks are treated unfairly at work and by the police than in 2016—remarkable given how coverage of police violence toward African Americans has dropped in the past few years—while Republican attitudes have remained unchanged.
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voters have now gotten a chance to see him implement ideas that seemed novel or at least worth a shot during the campaign, and they don’t like what they’re seeing in practice
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64 percent of Americans think free trade is good, up from 57 in 2017, 55 in 2016, and 51 in 2015. Meanwhile, the percentage who say free trade is bad has dropped 10 points since 2017.
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The poll found that “people who rejected racial stereotypes were more interested in voting in the 2020 general election than those who expressed stronger levels of anti-black or anti-Hispanic biases.” That wasn’t the case in 2016, when Americans who held strong antiblack views were more politically engaged.
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Trump says Republicans would 'never' be elected again if it was easier to vote | US new... - 0 views
www.theguardian.com/...arty-voting-reform-coronavirus
gop democracy elections 2020 trump crisis pandemic
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Donald Trump admitted on Monday that making it easier to vote in America would hurt the Republican party.
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The president made the comments as he dismissed a Democratic-led push for reforms such as vote-by-mail, same-day registration and early voting as states seek to safely run elections amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Democrats had proposed the measures as part of the coronavirus stimulus. They ultimately were not included in the $2.2tn final package, which included only $400m to states to help them run elections.
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“The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again,”
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Democrats often accuse Republicans of deliberately making it hard to vote in order to keep minorities, immigrants, young people and other groups from the polls. And Republicans often say they oppose voting reforms because of concerns of voter fraud – which is extremely rare – or concerns over having the federal government run elections.
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But Trump’s remarks reveal how at least some Republicans have long understood voting barriers to be a necessary part of their political self-preservation.
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“I don’t want everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich, an influential conservative activist, said in 1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
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Trump’s Monday comments showed he saw voter suppression as part of his re-election strategy, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) said in a statement Monday. “Ensuring that Americans can vote during the Covid-19 crisis is fundamental to maintaining our democracy. It is shocking that Trump is essentially admitting that when the American people vote, Republican lose,” said Xochitl Hinojosa, a DNC spokeswoman. “Trump knows that suppressing the vote is the only way he and Republicans win in November.”
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The $400m that Congress allocated so far is just a small fraction of what the Brennan Center for Justice estimated election officials need to run elections in November if coronavirus still lingers. Officials need that money to pay for postage, personnel and equipment to process an influx of mail-in ballots.
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“What cannot be lost in all the back and forth among politicians is that election administrators at the state and local level need substantial resources now to ensure that the elections in November go off smoothly and safely,” she said.