Seven Years Late, Media Elites Finally Acknowledge GOP’s Radical Ways

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Source: NationalMemo

Author: Eric Boehlhert

Emphasis Mine

This article originally appeared on Media Matters. 

Now they tell us the Republican Party is to blame? That the Obama years haven’t been gummed up by Both Sides Are To Blame obstruction?

The truth is, anyone with clear vision recognized a long time ago that the GOP has transformed itself since 2009 into an increasingly radical political party, one built on complete and total obstruction. It’s a party designed to make governing difficult, if not impossible, and one that plotted seven years ago to shred decades of Beltway protocol and oppose every inch of Obama’s two terms. (“If he was for it, we had to be against it,” former Republican Ohio Sen. George Voinovich once explained.)

And for some of us, it didn’t take Donald Trump’s careening campaign to confirm the destructive state of the GOP. But if it’s the Trump circus that finally opens some pundits’ eyes, so be it.

Recently, Dan Balz, the senior political writer for the Washington Post, seemed to do just that while surveying the unfolding GOP wreckage as the party splinters over Trump’s rise. Balz specifically noted that four years ago political scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein examined the breakdown in American politics and zeroed in their blame squarely on Republicans.

“They were ahead of others in describing the underlying causes of polarization as asymmetrical, with the Republican Party — in particular its most hard-line faction — as deserving of far more of the blame for the breakdown in governing,” Balz acknowledged.

“We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional,” Mann and Ornstein wrote in The Washington Post in 2012. “In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.”

They continued: The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

Tough stuff.

And what was the Beltway media’s response when Ornstein and Mann squarely blamed Republicans during an election year for purposefully making governing impossible? Media elites suddenly lost Mann and Ornstein’s number, as the duo’s television appearances and calls for quotes quickly dried up. So did much of the media’s interest in Mann and Ornstein’s prescient book.

“This was far too much for the mainstream press,” noted New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen. “They couldn’t assimilate what Mann and Ornstein said AND maintain routines and assumptions that posited a rough symmetry between the two parties. (‘Both sides do it.’) It was too much dissonance. Too much wreckage. So they pushed it away.”

For anyone who still harbors the naïve notion that the political debates staged by the Beltway press represent free wheeling discussions where anything goes, the Mann/Ornstein episode helped shed some light on the fact that certain topics and analysis remain off limits for public debate for years — even topics that are accurate, fair and essential to understanding our government’s current dysfunction.

See:http://www.nationalmemo.com/seven-years-late-media-elites-finally-acknowledge-gops-radical-ways/

Why the Conditions Were Perfect for Bernie’s Socialist Crusade

Behind Bernie’s unlikely appeal is a generation marred by precarious employment and economic disruption.

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Source: AlterNet

Author: Robert Kuttner

Emphasis Mine

Once again, Bernie Sanders has demonstrated, with a trifecta of big wins in Hawaii, Alaska, and Washington State, that he has broad and enthusiastic support, especially among the young. Equally astonishing is the large percentage of voters who say they are attracted rather than repelled by Sanders’s embrace of socialism.

But if you’d bother to conduct your own focus group among Americans under 40, neither phenomenon should be surprising. Except for those graduating from elite universities, with either full scholarships or wealthy tuition-paying parents, this is the stunted generation—young adults venturing into a world of work, loaded with student debt, unable to find stable jobs or decent careers.

This is also the post-Cold War generation, for whom Soviet communism is a distant memory (along with reliable jobs). For this generation of Americans, capitalism is not exactly a good word, nor is socialism a bad one.

And this is the generation that finds employer-paid health insurance hard to find; often the “Bronze” version of the Affordable Care Act, with its high out-of-pocket payments, is all they can afford; a generation paying too much of unreliable incomes in rent, and putting off the dream of homeownership and having children.

So, when a candidate comes along calling for free college education and free universal health care, and far higher minimum wages, it sounds pretty fine. And if capitalism means the 1 percent making off with everything that isn’t nailed down, then maybe Sanders-style socialism is worth a try. So say the young.

Private frustrations and longings have at last become politicized. And well they should be. Because the reality of the rules of the game turning brutally against the young has nothing to do with technology or the immutable realities of the digital economy—and everything to do with who gets to write the rules.

The policy wonk types like to point out that the Sanders program would require a huge tax increase.

And indeed it would. But as long as the tax hike is on the upper brackets, that only adds to the appeal of the program. During and after World War II, the top marginal tax rate was north of 90 percent, and this was the era of a record economic boom.

At the heart of this generational revolution is the vanishing good job. Until recently, the claims of a new, on-demand economy, made up of short-term gigs, was challenged by economists, even liberal ones.

It was kind of a new category that didn’t show up in the data. You could debate whether Uber and Task Rabbit and kindred companies were good or evil, but they just didn’t affect that many workers.

Now, belatedly, this shift is being confirmed. The economists are right—most of the unreliable jobs are not on-demand gigs. Rather, they are other forms of lousy “contingent” work. That category includes temping, contract work, on-call workers, workers hired by staffing agencies, workers with no job security, and inferior forms of conventional employment like adjunct college professors who can make less than minimum wage, Ph.D.’s and all. (So much for the education cure.)

Jobs that used to pay decently are being turned into inferior jobs, whether in the manufacturing economy or the service economy. Yes there is an uptick in entrepreneurship, but for every young person who creates a company like Amazon, there are tens of thousands working in its warehouses.

The Labor Department, denied adequate funding to update its numbers, had not revised its count of contingent workers. So two eminently mainstream economists, Lawrence Katz of Harvard and Alan Krueger of Princeton (one of the very people carping about the cost of Sanders’ program) hired the Rand Corporation to do what the Labor Department should be doing—surveying actual current workers.

Katz and Krueger analyzed the results. And guess what? They confirmed in rich detail what your local 28-year-old could tell you: Real jobs are getting harder and harder to find. No wonder the uptick in GDP growth is not impressing voters, especially younger ones.

So Sanders is likely to continue making off with the youth vote. Even if he falls short of the nomination, this is bad news for Hillary Clinton. Whatever her other virtues, most young Americans don’t see her speaking to the realities of their condition.

The Wall Street Journal, of all places, reports a 60 percent increase since 2005 in the proportion of U.S. workers who have these inferior forms of employment.

This also presents a real conundrum for mainstream, moderate liberal economists like Katz and Krueger. Altering these trends will require radical reforms, not adjustments at the margins.

Sanders’s program may cost a lot of money. It may be socialistic. And it may require congressional majorities that will be a long time coming. But Sanders has the loyalty of the kids because he is speaking truth.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a visiting professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. His latest book is Debtors’ Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility.

See: http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/why-conditions-were-perfect-bernies-socialist-crusade?akid=14126.123424.Dqrt5R&rd=1&src=newsletter1053651&t=10

Learning From Obama

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Source: NY Times

Author: Paul Krugman

Emphasis Mine

Like many political junkies, I’ve been spending far too much time looking at polls and trying to understand their implications. Can Donald Trump really win his party’s nomination? (Yes.) Can Bernie Sanders? (No.) But the primaries aren’t the only things being polled; we’re still getting updates on President Obama’s overall approval. And something striking has happened on that front.

At the end of 2015 Mr. Obama was still underwater, with significantly more Americans disapproving than approving. Since then, however, his approval has risen sharply while disapproval has plunged. He’s still only in modestly positive territory, but the net movement in polling averages has been about 11 percentage points, which is a lot.

What’s going on?

Well, one answer is that voters have lately been given a taste of what really bad leaders look like. But I’d like to think that the public is also starting to realize just how successful the Obama administration has been in addressing America’s problems. And there are lessons from that success for those willing to learn.

I know that it’s hard for many people on both sides to wrap their minds around the notion of Obama-as-success. On the left, those caught up in the enthusiasms of 2008 feel let down by the prosaic reality of governing in a deeply polarized political system. Meanwhile, conservative ideology predicts disaster from any attempt to tax the rich, help the less fortunate and rein in the excesses of the market; and what are you going to believe, the ideology or your own lying eyes?

But the successes are there for all to see.

Start with the economy. You might argue that presidents don’t have as much effect on economic performance as voters seem to imagine — especially presidents facing scorched-earth opposition from Congress for most of their time in office. But that misses the point: Republicans have spent the past seven years claiming incessantly that Mr. Obama’s policies are a “job killing” disaster, destroying business incentives, so it’s important news if the economy has performed well.

And it has: We’ve gained 10 million private-sector jobs since Mr. Obama took office, and unemployment is below 5 percent. True, there are still some areas of disappointment — low labor force participation, weak wage growth. But just imagine the boasting we’d be hearing if Mitt Romney occupied the White House.

Then there’s health reform, which has (don’t tell anyone) been meeting its goals.

Back in 2012, just after the Supreme Court made it possible for states to reject the Medicaid expansion, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that by now 89 percent of the nonelderly population would be covered; the actual number is 90 percent.

The details have been something of a surprise: fewer people than expected signing up on the exchanges, but fewer employers than expected dropping coverage, and more people signing up for Medicaid — which means, incidentally, that Obamacare is looking much more like a single-payer system than anyone seems to realize. But the point is that reform has indeed delivered the big improvements in coverage it promised, and has done so at lower cost than expected.

Then there’s financial reform, which the left considers toothless and the right considers destructive. In fact, while the big banks haven’t been broken up, excessive leverage — the real threat to financial stability — has been greatly reduced. And as for the economic effects, have I mentioned how well we’ve done on job creation?

Last but one hopes not least, the Obama administration has used executive authority to take steps on the environment that, if not canceled by a Republican president and upheld by future Supreme Courts, will amount to very significant action on climate change.

All in all, it’s quite a record. Assuming Democrats hold the presidency, Mr. Obama will emerge as a hugely consequential president — more than Reagan. And I’m sure Republicans will learn a lot from his achievements.

April fools!

Seriously, there is essentially no chance that conservatives, whose ideas haven’t changed in decades, will reconsider their dogma. But maybe progressives will be more open-minded.

The 2008 election didn’t bring the political transformation Obama enthusiasts expected, nor did it destroy the power of the vested interests: Wall Street, the medical-industrial complex and the fossil fuel lobby are all still out there, using their money to buy influence. But they have been pushed back in ways that have made American lives better and more secure. The lesson of the Obama years, in other words, is that success doesn’t have to be complete to be very real. You say you want a revolution? Well, you can’t always get what you want — but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.

See:http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/01/opinion/learning-from-obama.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fpaul-krugman&action=click&contentCollection=opinion&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection&_r=1

A Psychotherapist’s Take on Donald Trump’s Outrageously Unfiltered Rhetoric

In Trump’s presence, it’s not only OK to be racist; it’s patriotic and even an act of belonging and self-esteem.

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Source: AlterNet

Author:Richard Brouillette / Salon

See: http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/psychotherapists-take-donald-trumps-outrageously-unfiltered-rhetoric?akid=14126.123424.Dqrt5R&rd=1&src=newsletter1053651&t=8

 Ted Cruz Embodies the Degeneration of Foreign-Policy Conservatism

 Think nothing could be worse than a Trump presidency? Think again.

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Source: Huff Post

Author: Andrew J. Bacevich

Emphasis Mine

W hen it comes to US foreign policy, what exactly does it mean to be a conservative?

Before the Vietnam War, conservatism in foreign policy had less to do with principles than with temperament. As president, Dwight Eisenhower represented the very embodiment of that temperament. From his days as a soldier, Ike knew war well enough to treat it warily. Raised in the heartland, he was something of a prairie nationalist, with an aversion to crusades and a limited appetite for risk. This did not imply passivity, and Eisenhower made his fair share of lamentable mistakes—instigating coups in Guatemala and Iran, initiating the US commitment to South Vietnam, and overreacting to the Cuban Revolution, among them. Yet his overall approach to the business of statecraft emphasized prudence and even circumspection. Say what you will about US foreign policy in the 1950s, it could have been much worse. Indeed, Ike’s immediate successors, disdaining his stewardship, wasted little time in demonstrating this point, most disastrously in Vietnam.

In the wake of the war in Vietnam and as a direct consequence of the defeat the United States suffered there, conservative thinking about foreign policy acquired a pronounced ideological edge. By denouncing the Evil Empire and scrubbing the American past clean of ambiguity, Ronald Reagan made himself a favorite on the right. Among those succumbing to the allure of the Great Communicator, Reagan’s willingness to condemn adversaries as unabashedly wicked seemed to restore to US policy the moral clarity it had lost during the 1960s. Even so, Reagan’s rhetoric did not necessarily translate into action. While he might demand that Mikhail Gorbachev “tear down this wall,” nowhere in that demand was there any implication that if the Soviet leader refused to comply, Reagan himself would do the bulldozing.

Only after 9/11 did Manichaeism become the explicit basis for action. When it came to rhetorical flourishes, George W. Bush outdid Reagan, setting his sights on destroying a 21st-century Axis of Evil en route to forcing large chunks of the Islamic world into compliance with his Freedom Agenda. Unlike Ike—no longer in the pantheon of conservative heroes—Bush knew next to nothing about war. Perhaps for that very reason, he evinced supreme confidence in his ability to put America’s matchless military to work.

The defining features of American conservatism now became hubris and vainglory. Prudence? That was for wusses. Circumspection? A euphemism for cowardice.

Not everyone on the right climbed aboard the Bush bandwagon. But the great majority did, led by the most fervent crusaders—commonly known as neoconservatives—who promptly set out to expel dissenters. Writing in National Review in March 2003, with the US invasion of Iraq just under way, David Frum announced the purge, declaring that conservatives daring to oppose the Iraq War were treasonous. “They deny and excuse terror,” Frum charged. “They publicize wild conspiracy theories.” Some even “yearn for the victory of their nation’s enemies.” No alternative existed but to banish them from the conservative movement altogether. “In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.”

Frum’s “we” promptly led the United States into a debacle of monumental proportions, its mournful consequences continuing to mount even today. As a direct consequence of Operation Iraqi Freedom, a name chosen without a trace of irony, the right’s claim to foresight and wisdom in the management of national security affairs took a major hit. Names such as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith now became bywords for arrogant incompetence.

Few readers of this magazine will view with regret the blow to their reputations sustained by the architects of the Iraq War. Yet the disaster over which they presided has produced a further perversion in what passes for an ostensibly conservative approach to foreign policy. Rather than inspiring a return to prudence and circumspection, the failures and frustrations endured in Iraq and other post-9/11 military campaigns now find expression in compulsive truculence.

As the embodiment of this truculence, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, today finding favor among Republicans desperate to derail Donald Trump’s bid for the GOP nomination, stands alone. From the very outset of his candidacy, Cruz has depicted himself as the one genuinely principled conservative in the race. And in comparison to Trump, who is ideologically sui generis, Cruz does qualify as something of a conservative. When it comes to foreign policy, however, Cruz offers not principles but—like Trump himself—raw pugnacity.

Cruz has gone out of his way to deride the pretensions of democracy promoters, mocking “crazy neocon invade-every-country-on-earth” types wanting to “send our kids to die in the Middle East.” On the stump, Cruz advertises himself as Reagan’s one-and-only true heir. As such, he endorses “the clarity of Reagan’s four most important words: ‘We win, they lose.’” Upon closer examination, Cruz is actually advocating something quite different: “We win, they lose, then we walk away.” The key to “winning” is to unleash American military might. “If I am elected president, we will utterly destroy ISIS,” Cruz vows. “We won’t weaken them. We won’t degrade them. We will utterly destroy them. We will carpet-bomb them into oblivion…. We will do everything necessary so that every militant on the face of the earth will know…if you wage jihad and declare war on America, you are signing your death warrant.”

Yet rather than Reaganesque, Cruz’s prescription for dealing with Islamist radicalism represents a throwback to bomb-them-back-to-the-Stone-Age precepts pioneered by Gen. Curtis LeMay and endorsed by the likes of Barry Goldwater back when obliteration was in fashion. The embryonic Cruz Doctrine offers an approximation of total war. “I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out!” he promises with evident enthusiasm.

Nowhere, however, does his outlook take into account costs, whether human, fiscal, or moral. Nor does it weigh the second-order consequences of, say, rendering large parts of Iraq and Syria a smoking ruin or of killing large numbers of noncombatants through campaigns of indiscriminate bombing. In essence, Cruz sees force as a way to circumvent history—a prospect that resonates with Americans annoyed by history’s stubborn complexities.

A similar logic—if we can call it that—is at play in Cruz’s promise on “day one” of his presidency to “rip to shreds” the Iran nuclear agreement. He has compared the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) to the “Munich Deal of 1938, allowing homicidal maniacs to acquire weapons of mass murder.” Apart from causing consternation among the several other signatories to the agreement—the other permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany—US withdrawal would accomplish nothing of substance. Even so, Cruz’s insistence that he will do so—begging the question then what?—assures his supporters that he, like they, inhabits a world in which good guys are pitted against bad guys. In such a world, diplomacy simply plays into the hands of the enemy. “We stop the bad guys by using our guns,” Cruz insists, not by talking to them. His implied willingness to use guns to stop the bad guys in Tehran is unmistakable.

Not least among Cruz’s objections to the JCPOA is that it represents a “fundamental betrayal” of Israel, a country to which he professes great devotion. Cruz’s antagonism toward evildoers finds its counterpart in his deference toward Israel. More specifically, Cruz expresses unabashed admiration for the current head of the Israeli government, conferring on Benjamin Netanyahu the supreme conservative accolade of being “Churchillian.”

In reality, the comparison is an odd one. As a statesman, the quality setting Churchill apart was imagination, which he possessed in abundance—as prime minister, he was perpetually hatching wild schemes. Netanyahu’s defining characteristic is his absolute dearth of imagination; he is a willing prisoner of the status quo. Still, by paying homage to the Israeli leader—more broadly aligning himself with the eye-for-a-tooth Israeli approach to security policy—Cruz affirms his own bellicosity. Not surprisingly, Cruz promises to invite Netanyahu to attend his first State of the Union address. Going a step further, he has already previewed the greetings he will employ on the occasion: “Mr. Prime Minister, let me say, I enjoyed seeing you just recently at the grand opening of the new American Embassy in Jerusalem, the once and eternal capital of Israel.” Again, the question left hanging is unanswered: Then what? Whether Cruz possesses the capacity even to recognize the existence of such questions appears doubtful. All that matters is to project an attitude of toughness.

So too with his recently announced team of foreign-policy advisers, consisting in large part of certifiable loonies, Islamophobes, and zealots keen to wage the Christian equivalent of global jihad. Members of the team broadly share the candidate’s own assessment of “Islamic supremacism,” whose adherents are intent on forcing the world to “submit to their form of Islam or die.”

Representative of this crew as a whole is Michael Ledeen, unrepentant proponent of preventive war. Preliminary efforts to destroy the Axis of Evil have not fared well. Ledeen’s prescription? Broaden the problem set and double down. “We now face a more potent Axis of Evil,” he writes, one that incorporates “Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and other countries, and terrorist groups including al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and the Islamic State.” This new axis “includes Sunni and Shi’ite radical Muslims, Communists and other radical leftists, and nationalistic secular tyrants.” Together, they have “succeeded in wrecking hopes for a peaceful world.” The only way to eliminate this all-encompassing threat is through relentless and implacable war, from which, Ledeen concludes, there is “no escape.”

Under no plausible definition of the term does Ledeen qualify as even remotely conservative. That the leading “conservative” candidate for the GOP nomination has recruited such a wacko to advise him is itself evidence of how unhinged the American political right has become.

Think nothing could be worse than a Trump presidency? Think again.

Andrew J. Bacevich Andrew J. Bacevich is professor emeritus of history and international relations at Boston University.

See:http://www.thenation.com/article/ted-cruz-embodies-the-degeneration-of-foreign-policy-conservatism/

A Melting Antarctica Could Sink The World’s Coastlines Faster Than Predicted

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Source: HuffPost

Author: Nick Visser

Emphasis Mine

A new report nearly doubles previous predictions for sea level rise if global emissions continue unabated, portending a doomsday scenario for many of the world’s coastal cities.

The study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, looks toward the ice sheets of Antarctica, which by themselves may contribute more than three feet to sea level rise by 2100. Taken with other melting regions, including Greenland, seas could rise more than six feet, or two meters, by the end of the century.

David Pollard of Penn State University and co-author Rob DeConto said the “dire” predictions are nearly double those recently used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a worst-case scenario if humanity fails to curb emissions.

Dozens of low-lying metropolises, including Hong Kong, New York and Sydney, would be vulnerable to these rising seas. The authors warn that places like Boston could be faced with a sea level rise of more than five feet in the next century alone. Pollard said other potential effects, similar to the damaging storm surge caused by Hurricane Sandy, could contribute to the ballooning estimates for future flood losses.

A study published last month found sea levels were rising at the fastest rate since the founding of ancient Rome 2,800 years ago, spurred by the burning of fossil fuels. The authors of that report noted without the impact of humans, seas would be rising less rapidly, or possibly falling.

In an interview with The Guardian, DeConto said global warming could force “retreat” from cities, rather than the “engineering of defenses” to avoid the worst effects of sea level rise.

But the new models cited in Pollard and DeConto’s study, which use historical data from 130,000 years ago and 3 million years ago, when temperatures were warmer and seas were higher, could make a fight against the tides all for naught. The authors expanded the sea level rise estimates to the year 2500, and found that Antarctica could cause more than 50 feet of sea level rise alone.

Despite the doomsday-esque prediction, the planet still holds some hope to address the growing concerns. DeConto noted in a statement that if humans are able to slash emissions, most of the Antarctic would remain frozen.

Last year’s landmark climate accord forged in Paris could provide the groundwork toward limiting greenhouse gas emissions. World leaders have pledged to keep global warming below a threshold of 2 degrees Celsius. But the world isn’t there yet, and global temperature records — including the one set in February, the warmest such month on record — continue to be broken.

See:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sea-level-rise_us_56fc60c0e4b0a06d5804ba11?

Trump’s Tragic Flaw May Finally Send Him Down In Flames

Donald Trump is being brought down to earth by his most powerful enemy.

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Source: HuffPost

Author: Howard Fineman

Emphasis Mine

Donald Trump has defied the laws of political physics from the moment he rode down that gold-toned elevator in his own Manhattan tower to announce his candidacy last spring.

Time and again he’s proved every pundit and all of his fellow Republican candidates wrong, and he remains the only GOP contender with a plausible chance to collect a majority of delegates before the Cleveland convention in July.

But after a year of hovering above the skyline like a giant dirigible, Trump is being brought down to earth by his most powerful enemy: his own need to demonstrate his masculine “strength” by disparaging others, particularly women.

It has taken a year for relevant, campaign-related examples to accumulate, but they reached critical mass just in time for a pivotal primary in Wisconsin next week that could see the start of a slow, steady decline in his chances.

He is simply so unpopular with female voters — who make up at least 54 percent of the turnout in presidential general elections — that a victory by him this fall seems all but impossible. In a new NBC News poll, Trump is viewed favorably by only 1 in 5 female voters.

To be sure, his ratings among men aren’t dramatically better, and his main GOP rival, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, is almost as poorly regarded by women. Still, 1 in 5 doesn’t work.

“He can’t win, and women are a main reason why,” said Charlie Black, a Republican consultant advising Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

Trump critics also note that, despite his vow to ferociously attack Hillary Clinton in a general election, his salvos could be countered by Democrats as just another example of his corrosive attitude toward women.

There are plenty of examples already: his long-running firefight with Fox anchor Megyn Kelly, which included a veiled reference to menstruation; his high-school-level disparagement of Carly Fiorina’s looks; his vow to “spill the beans” on Cruz’s wife, Heidi; and Trump’s full-throated defense of his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who was arrested this week in Florida and charged with using unwanted physical force to yank a female reporter away from his boss.

Trump’s own family and close advisers have been worried about Lewandowski’s short fuse and aggressive behavior for months, but Trump is sticking by him in the din.

Then, on Tuesday, Trump struck a match to the whole pile, telling MSNBC host Chris Matthews that women who get “illegal” abortions (and Trump wants to make them all illegal) should face “some form of punishment” — details unspecified.

In the hourlong face-to-face interview — no phone-ins this time — Matthews pressed Trump on whether he thought abortion should be illegal. The answer was “yes.” So if it is, should women be punished in some way? After hesitating several times, Trump answered “yes.”

After meandering around on the issue for years, Trump in the campaign has run as somewhat of a hard-liner: in favor of repealing Roe v. Wade and of banning so-called partial-birth abortions, but not endorsing a human life amendment or a ban on abortions even in cases of rape or incest.

But the comments to Matthews took him much further to the right, and away from the mainstream of female voters, 55 percent of whom think abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

Minutes after the taping of the show, and the airing of that key excerpt, the Trump campaign tried to walk the comments back, but it was too late. Democrats, liberals and leaders of women’s rights groups attacked with gusto.

So did Cruz, though his complaint came from the opposite political direction: that Trump was masquerading as a totalitarian foe of abortion, a role that rightly belongs to the Texan.

We’ll know soon enough whether Trump is on trouble, let alone going up in flames, when Wisconsin primary voters go to the polls on Tuesday.

The most recent poll, out on Wednesday and taken during the days that the Lewandowski story dominated the political news, showed Trump falling behind Cruz by 10 points.

Look out below.

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.

 

See:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-women-flames_us_56fc47efe4b0a06d5804b0b4?

Donald Trump Is Dangerous to Women

His vision of America is one in which women have no rights—and it’s not far from becoming a reality.

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donnie
donnie

Source:AlterNet

Author: Kali Halloway

Emphasis Mine

There is perhaps no one in recent American political history who has outdone expectations as drastically as Donald Trump.

I do not mean this as a compliment. What I mean is that even as we have come to expect Donald Trump to say and be the absolute worst—to burrow beneath what previously seemed to be the garbage-strewn bottom—he continues to unashamedly dive to once unthinkable depths, outdistancing even the scavengers and bottom-feeders who preceded him.

An example of this occurred on Wednesday, when Trump stated that as president he would seek not only to ban abortions, but also to ensure that women who illegally obtained them would have to face “some kind of punishment.” Perhaps because the notion of criminalizing abortion and then exacting some kind of twisted revenge on women goes beyond even the rhetoric of the far-right anti-choice crowd, interviewer Chris Matthews gave Trump a chance to clarify his remarks.

“For the woman?” Matthews asked, being nothing if not specific.

“Yeah. There has to be some form [of punishment],” Trump replied.

This is a man who has built his political—and if we go back even further, his public—brand on sexualizing, degrading, insulting and vocally and enthusiastically hating women. He makes jokes about newswomen being on their periods, about a fellow candidate’s wife being ugly. He has said countless terrible things about many, many prominent women. And in kind, his supporters dedicate time at rallies to violently shoving teenage girls; to allegedly groping and macing them in the face. Even his campaign manager allegedly physically attacked a woman reporter for doing her job.

And yet, Trump still finds a way to be worse, to keep digging beyond this.

A few days ago, one of Trump’s key advisers—a woman named Stephanie Cegielski—resigned. On her way out, she penned an open letter that essentially accused Trump of being a know-nothing, power-hungry blowhard (I’m paraphrasing), whose entire persona may be contrived. Maybe that means that Trump is not the misogynist (racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, nativist, transphobe) he plays on TV—or on the campaign trail. Maybe it’s all just talk to win hardened, bitter hearts and minds, which he only wants because his lust for power can never be quenched.

Yeah, maybe. I honestly don’t know if Trump hates women, and frankly, at this point, I don’t care. None of us, at this point, should give a shit about Trump’s personal psychology. That’s a problem for his shrink, who can never be paid enough.

What’s more important is the fact that Trump either believes or plays to the most misogynist elements of this country, the consequences of which are very real. When asked about issues of importance—from women’s reproductive rights to whether he’s down with the KKK—he says yes and later sort of says no, a way of cynically and calculatedly playing both sides of the fence to be sure he doesn’t alienate those who see themselves in the mirror of his terribleness. (Case in point: His backpedalling on Wednesday’s remarks.) He stokes anger and hatred toward women and then stands back and watches as his crowd—who were pretty hateful to being with—has their worst ideas of women confirmed and even applauded. He revels in their bile and ignorance, offering a safe space to be a woman-hating asshole whose every problem would be solved if only feminism and Black Lives Matter would go away.

With these latest remarks, Trump is advocating for an America where women have no agency around their bodies, dangerous back alley abortions are the norm, and the health of women—especially those who have had the gall to have sex—is inconsequential. A United States where women are mostly seen—maybe, if they are pretty—but only heard when they’re saying what men want to hear. Poor women, women of color, LGBT women—these women in particular would be even more disenfranchised and invisible. Trump is helping guide us toward being a country where violence against women is okay, in both word and deed. It’s disgusting and frightening. And it’s not that far from being a reality.

Donald Trump stopped being funny a long time ago, but the Woman Hater’s Club he’s built will, I’m certain, find all new ways to be horrible. Be outraged, be angry, make fun of Trump’s supporters, but know that won’t stop him. We’re long past that point. Don’t just stand on the sidelines and ridicule him. Trump’s medieval America is too dangerous and backwards to just watch happen.

 

Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.

 

See:http://www.alternet.org/gender/donald-trump-dangerous-women?akid=14123.123424.HUBpbD&rd=1&src=newsletter1053591&t=2

‘Labor for Bernie’ Activists Take the Political Revolution Into Their Unions

The all-volunteer Labor for Bernie operation has come a long way, growing to include tens of thousands of union members.

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Source: AlterNet

Author:Rand Wilson/Labor Notes

Emphasis Mine

Last June a small group of volunteers kicked off a network called “Labor for Bernie.” Their goal was to build support inside their unions for Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign.

Since then, Sanders has come a long way—racking up primary wins in nine states, including a major upset in Michigan. The all-volunteer Labor for Bernie operation has come a long way too, growing to include tens of thousands of union members.

So far they’ve helped Sanders win the endorsements of more than 80 local unions and four national or international unions, including the Postal Workers (APWU), Communications Workers (CWA), and National Nurses United.

CWA made its endorsement after polling its members online—and after Sanders rallied with Verizon workers who are battling for a contract. The candidate is a longtime advocate for postal services, which impressed the Postal Workers. He’s also a lifelong proponent of single-payer health care, NNU’s signature issue. Nurses have crisscrossed the country on their union’s “Bernie Bus,” talking to voters.

The latest big union to endorse Sanders was the Amalgamated Transit Union. In a March 14 press release, President Larry Hanley cited the senator’s “longstanding fidelity to the issues that are so important to working people.”

One of Labor for Bernie’s top achievements has been to block an AFL-CIO endorsement, once presumed to be in the bag for Hillary Clinton. President Richard Trumka announced in February that there would be no endorsement at the federation’s winter executive council meeting.

Labor for Bernie had submitted 5,000 signatures last summer urging the executive council not to make an early endorsement. While many international unions have endorsed Clinton since then, Labor for Bernie has helped publicize opposition in the ranks and push local endorsements for Sanders.

The lack of a primary endorsement “means that union members and other working Americans are not going to be facing a coordinated campaign from the AFL-CIO for the other candidate,” said former CWA President Larry Cohen, who has campaigned for Sanders across the country. “It’s a green light for people to do what moves them, and that’s what democracy looks like.”

LOCAL ENDORSEMENTS

Labor for Bernie has been a central clearinghouse for members campaigning for their local unions to endorse Sanders. Its website offers a model endorsement resolution, workplace leaflet, and sign-up sheets for supporters. It’s also using social media to promote the Sanders campaign with union members, garnering 25,000 “likes.”

Ariana Eakle, a third-year apprentice with Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 124 in Kansas City, tailored a version of the resolution for her local. She estimates she’s had members of 15 IBEW locals around the country contact her to get a copy.

After hundreds of IBEW members signed a Labor for Bernie petition last year, new President Lonnie Stephenson announced the International would not make an early endorsement. More than 30 IBEW locals have since endorsed Bernie, thanks to grassroots organizing by members like Eakle.

In every case, said Local 153 member Carl Shaffer, “it’s been a part of a democratic process. None of these endorsements represent a top-down action by a couple of leaders on their own.”

Shaffer has helped coordinate the campaign within the IBEW. He said in past elections it was unusual for locals to endorse. “You didn’t dare do anything like endorsing on your own,” he said. “There would have been a phone call, there would have been an international rep coming to see you, there would have been a lot of pressure to rescind.”

BUCKING THE INTERNATIONAL

Some Sanders supporters whose national unions endorsed Clinton have taken to social media and the press to challenge top-down, undemocratic decisions.

The Food and Commercial Workers came out for Clinton in January. But a month later, Northern California UFCW Local 5, whose 28,000 members work in grocery and food processing, endorsed Sanders.

The executive board vote was 30 to 2, according to Mike Henneberry, the local’s director of communications and politics. He said the local hasn’t gotten any pushback from the International. “For us, it was not a very difficult decision,” he said. “Compare an individual who’s been supporting workers since he was mayor of Burlington with someone who’s been on the board of Walmart.”

Some Service Employees members too have struggled to reconcile their union’s strong support for a $15-an-hour minimum wage with their International’s endorsement of Clinton, who only backs $12.

SEIU Local 1984, New Hampshire’s largest public sector union, bucked the International and came out for Sanders in November.

“I never thought I would see involvement like there was when Obama ran,” said Vice President Ken Roos, who works as a Medicaid administrator for the state. “But people were stopping me in the hall at work, or even in the street—they would say, ‘Bernie’s the man, we gotta go for Bernie.”

LUNCH BREAK TALKS

The campaign has collected tens of thousands of email addresses and other contact info for union members who pledge to support Sanders. A recently created workplace flyer includes a tearoff pledge card. Info from the cards is entered into a database so that supporters can be reminded to go out and vote.

Local “Labor for Bernie” groups have sprung up in dozens of states and cities, bringing together members of various unions to strategize about how to expand support for Sanders in their local labor movements.

In Seattle, hundreds of union members—including Machinists, teachers, and public employees—turned out to a February kickoff where they heard reports from Cohen and local union leaders about the campaign.

Metro Detroit Labor for Bernie formed a speakers bureau that sends members to local union meetings to talk about the campaign.

“We understood that, in order to have conversations with people, we had to talk about more than Bernie,” said Asar Amen-Ra, a member of Auto Workers Local 1248 who got involved with the group last fall. “We had to talk about the principles he represented—a living wage, universal education, universal health care.”

Amen-Ra’s local represents workers at Chrysler’s Mopar facility in Centerline, Michigan. He and his co-workers built on the organizing they had done for a “no” vote on the recent Chrysler contract. A core group of six original organizers grew to 20.

“We just said, ‘Hey, we’re going to have a conversation at lunchtime about politics, about this presidential campaign,’” he said. “And we would get anywhere from two to 10 people at a time.”

There’s nothing wrong with traditional canvassing and phonebanking, Amen-Ra argues, but unions should go further. He’s taking the time to have detailed one-on-one conversations with co-workers about politics “because we want to organize beyond these elections,” he said.

“We want to build a political transformation, and that means building a community—and you can have that community in the workplace.”

Another place to find community is where you live. Kevin Mack, who’s active in IBEW Local 58’s Minority Caucus, helped get a dozen members from his local to knock on doors in their own Detroit neighborhoods.

“When you stick at home, people can relate to you,” he said. “They see you at the grocery store, or with your kids. You can say, ‘Hey, I live right down the street. That’s my mom’s house over there.’”

Mack is 28. Pundits are largely crediting young voters’ high turnout and pro-Bernie enthusiasm for the surprise win in Michigan. Sanders won 81 percent of the 18-to-29 vote there.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Labor for Bernie’s focus now is on the Democratic primaries. The network is trying to mobilize support among union members in the remaining primary states. Supporters in states that already voted are phonebanking to get out the vote.

Meanwhile, Labor for Bernie organizers are also trying to chart their next steps. This is the first time in decades that a national movement of this scale has come together around a candidate with an unapologetic allegiance to working class concerns and aspirations.

It’s evident that there’s broad support in unions for Bernie’s platform—and that many members, fed up with their unions’ legacy of “blank check” support for corporate Democrats, want a more inclusive, democratic process for deciding endorsements.

Can the unions backing Bernie agree on an ongoing strategy to build working-class political power? Once the presidential nomination is wrapped up, will they opt to carry this “political revolution” into contests for elected office in thousands of municipal and state-level races?

Those questions will be on activists’ minds at a national meeting of Labor for Bernie activists, part of the upcoming Labor Notes Conference.

“Our endorsement for Sanders is the best that we’ve ever made,” said Myles Calvey, business manager of IBEW Local 2222 in Boston, “and most certainly the most enthusiastic one for our membership.”

A version of this article appeared in Labor Notes #445. Don’t miss an issue, subscribe today.

Rand Wilson is a staff member at SEIU Local 888 in Boston and a volunteer with Labor for Bernie 2016, a volunteer effort that’s neither funded nor directed by the Sanders campaign. Dan DiMaggio is the assistant editor of Labor Notes. Learn more at laborforbernie.org.

See: http://www.alternet.org/labor/labor-bernie-activists-take-political-revolution-their-unions?akid=14113.123424.5Q82yN&rd=1&src=newsletter1053402&t=14

The Truth About Donald Trump’s Angry White Men

Members of the establishment press wonder how they got Trump so wrong. Here’s one big way.

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Source: AlterNet

Author: Heather Digby Parton/Salon

Emphasis Mine

(N.B.: it might be noted that Trump has not yet achieved a majority in any of his parties primaries…)

The press is doing a whole lot of navel gazing at the moment, wondering how they went so wrong about Donald Trump’s appeal. Apparently, they all thought it was joke until this weekend or something. And the big takeaway is best exemplified by this observation by Nicholos Kristof in the New York Times:

Media elites rightly talk about our insufficient racial, ethnic and gender diversity, but we also lack economic diversity. We inhabit a middle-class world and don’t adequately cover the part of America that is struggling and seething. We spend too much time talking to Senators, not enough to the jobless.

It mystifying why Kristof thinks media elites inhabit a “middle class” world, but that’s beside the point. It’s the rest that’s truly laughable.

Evidently, Kristof believes that if you’re talking about racial, ethnic and gender diversity you aren’t talking about the jobless or the part of America that is struggling. Basically, he’s saying the media’s ignoring white men. Again.

This conversation has been going on since the 1960s. Here’s the Kristof of his day, Joseph Kraft, wringing his hands over the media elite failing to properly take into consideration the needs and concerns of “average Americans” back in 1968 after the violence at the Democratic convention:

“Are we merely neutral observers, seekers after truth in the public interest? Or do we, as the supporters of Mayor Daley and his Chicago police have charged, have a prejudice of our own?

The answer, I think, is that Mayor Daley and his supporters have a point. Most of us in what is called the communications field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans–in Middle America. And the results show up not merely in occasional episodes such as the Chicago violence but more importantly in the systematic bias toward young people, minority groups, and the of presidential candidates who appeal to them.

To get a feel of this bias it is first necessary to understand the antagonism that divides the middle class of this country. On the one hand there are highly educated upper-income whites sure of and brimming with ideas for doing things differently. On the other hand, there is Middle America, the large majority of low-income whites, traditional in their values and on the defensive against innovation.

The most important organs of and television are, beyond much doubt, dominated by the outlook of the upper-income whites.

In these circumstances, it seems to me that those of us in the media need to make a special effort to understand Middle America. Equally it seems wise to exercise a certain caution, a prudent restraint, in pressing a claim for a plenary indulgence to be in all places at all times the agent of the sovereign public.”

This began the decades-long self-flagellation by the media (and the cynical exploitation of it by the Republicans) wherein it was assumed that the most misunderstood and underserved people in the whole country were salt-of-the-earth white folks nobody ever thinks about. Except that it’s anything but the truth. Every single election cycle since 1968 the press has been obsessed with this mythical Real American who is always angry, always frustrated, always railing against the so-called elites because they allegedly only care about the racial minorities or the women or somebody other than them. Then we end up with a mass soul search in which we all come to understand that the key to the election is to address these people’s grievances.

(N.B.: a primary factor in this demographic during this period was the relative prosperity and job security in manufacturing, which caused working class whites to move their political focus from economics to social issues…)

In those early days it was referred to as “The Silent Majority” of Richard Nixon, which Donald Trump has unoriginally revived. Since then, pollsters have come up with slogans to target certain demographics (NASCAR Dads and Waitress Moms are two examples), which the press then uses as symbols of this Real America, representing the breathing heart and soul of the country. 1976 featured media obsessing over the everyman outsider Jimmy Carter, a born-again Christian from the South who spoke to Real Americans who just wanted a president who wouldn’t lie to them. It wasn’t long before they discovered that he didn’t really fit the bill. The Real Americans, it turned out, were more conservative than Carter and really wanted the Gipper to Make America Great Again. And thus the most Real Americans in the whole country were discovered: the Reagan Democrat: The work of Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg is a classic study of Reagan Democrats. Greenberg analyzed white ethnic voters (largely unionized auto workers) in Macomb County, Michigan, just north of Detroit. The county voted 63 percent for John F. Kennedy in 1960, but 66 percent for Reagan in 1980. He concluded that “Reagan Democrats” no longer saw the Democratic party as champions of their working class aspirations, but instead saw them as working primarily for the benefit of others: the very poor, feminists, the unemployed, African Americans, Latinos, and other groups. In addition, Reagan Democrats enjoyed gains during the period of economic prosperity that coincided with the Reagan administration following the “malaise” of the Carter administration. They also supported Reagan’s strong stance on national security and opposed the 1980s Democratic Party on such issues as pornography,crime, and high taxes.

These are people we now refer to as “Republicans” but the myth of these alleged swing voters has persisted even to this day, as reporters commonly wonder if Trump is going to be able to nab those Reagan Democrats, who no longer exist. (Even pollster Stan Greenberg, who followed Macomb County in Michigan for decades, gave up the ghost on that project after 2008, when Barack Obama won there. It turns out that all the Real Americans there had either moved or stopped being Real.)

During the ’80s, the ecstatic canonization of these voters was overwhelming with political reporters rushing to their enclaves in various parts of the heartland like anthropologists in search of lost tribes of the Amazon. They would sit down in diners and cafes and listen raptly to white men in cat hats talk about how the country is going to hell in a handbasket because we can’t afford to keep giving handouts to foreigners and people who won’t work. Sound familiar?

About the same time, the Democratic Party began their quest to once more bag their great white whale—the Southern white male; they recruited their presidential candidates among the ranks of the white Southerners of the New South and crafted their message to appeal to him. And once again, the press “discovered” that this demographic was deeply in need of more coverage so the country could understand their plight.

In 1994, the term “Angry White men” was found to have been used more than 1,500 times in the run-up to Newt Gingrich’s mid-term sweep of the House. On the day after the election, USA Today ran a famous story by Patricia Edmonds and Richard Benedetto called “Angry White Men; Their Votes Turn the Tide for GOP; ‘Men Want to Torch’ Washington.” Sound familiar?

By 2004 the press once again donned the proverbial hair shirt and castigated itself for failing to properly cover the Real Americans. The New York Times even began a “conservative beat,” presumably so they could understand the message underlying songs like “The Angry American” which had been the perfect expression of angry white men who wanted revenge after 9/11.

Now we are witnessing yet another iteration of the phenomenon with the Trump voter of 2016, a very, very angry white guy everyone supposedly ignored for years. But the truth is that whether they are Reagan Democrats or Reagan Republicans or Heartland voters or Southern white males, these citizens’ needs and desires are always at the forefront of media attention in virtually every election. And their concerns are always the same: They believe they are personally getting screwed because immigrants and welfare queens and gays and feminists and foreigners are all taking what they aren’t entitled to and America is weaker and less significant because of it.

This has been going on for almost 50 years. It’s been the backbone of conservative resentment and the Republican Party has exploited it every step of the way. The press has been covering it for that long as well, over and over again putting these same people at the center of our elections as if they are the most important voters in the country, who have suffered a tremendous indignity by having to put up with the likes of immigrants and African Americans and women getting any attention at all. That’s certainly how these so-called Real Americans feel about it. But there’s no reason for the press to keep buying into it.

Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

See:http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/truth-about-donald-trumps-angry-white-men-inside-media-narrative-media-doesnt?akid=14116.123424.GEb575&rd=1&src=newsletter1053473&t=8