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monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

 
 
blatham
 
Fri 25 Nov, 2016 10:41 am
I've opened up this topic to keep track of what's going on post-election. Feel free to drop in passages/links from good analyses you bump into and any commentary you'd like to add.
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Type: Discussion • Score: 192 • Views: 3,652,241 • Replies: 105,847
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blatham
 
  -2  
Fri 25 Nov, 2016 10:42 am
Quote:
As a #NeverTrumper, I had hoped that the election would prompt a moment of reckoning and introspection, not merely about conservative values but also the role of the conservative media. As someone who has spent much of his career promoting conservative values on my radio show, I was depending on it.

Clearly, that is not going to happen now. In fact, it’s going to get a lot worse.

Trump’s victory means that the most extreme and recklessly irresponsible voices on the right now feel emboldened and empowered. And more worrisome than that, they have an ally in the White House. For years, Rush Limbaugh has gibed about what he calls the “state-controlled media”—the fawning liberal news outlets that Limbaugh has long decried for their lack of critical coverage of President Obama—but we may be about to see what one actually looks like—an alt-reality news outlet operating from within 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The new media will not only provide propaganda cover for the administration, but also direct the fire of a loose confederation of conservative outlets against critics and dissenters. Already, Fox’s Sean Hannity has urged Trump to freeze out the mainstream media and talk directly to the nation.

The “fake news” that we are now obsessing over is only the latest leading indicator of the perils of our new post-truth media/political world. Indeed, what we learned this year was that the walls are down, the gatekeepers dismissed, the norms and standards of journalism and fact-based discourse trashed.

All of this was a long time coming...
http://politi.co/2gpkbrf
giujohn
 
  -3  
Fri 25 Nov, 2016 04:02 pm
🚾
cicerone imposter
 
  2  
Fri 25 Nov, 2016 04:06 pm
@giujohn,
Yup. Your head is in it.
0 Replies
 
georgeob1
 
  0  
Fri 25 Nov, 2016 04:24 pm
@blatham,
Mr Sykes appears to be in a state of denial. Both the country and the nedia have been unusually polarized on political matters for a fairly lonmg time now. We have seen the widespread failure of our mostly left-leaning media to detect or report the underlying disenchasntment of the public with the policies of the current admininstration. What caused it? I believe it is fairly obvious that it was they, not their opponents as Sykes suggests who "were in a bubble" of their own making. Now when that self-deception is clearly revealed by the elkection result, he decries the legitamacy of what he calls the right wing media establishment. There is an amussing intellectual dysfunction implicit in that stance, which gives the lie to his self-aggrandizing pretensions.
cicerone imposter
 
  2  
Fri 25 Nov, 2016 06:04 pm
@georgeob1,
The country may be polarized on political matters, but Obama's approval rating in the mid-fifties range ranks pretty well with past presidents.
I'm not so sure how Obama could have increased wages which seems to be one of the major complaints.
Our economy compared to all other developed countries seems to be doing fairly well. Our GDP seems to continue to grow, and that's a pretty tough road when most developed countries are struggling - including the European Union.

Image result for us gdp growth 2016
Real gross domestic product increased at an annual rate of 2.9 percent in the third quarter of 2016 (table 1), according to the "advance" estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the second quarter, real GDP increased 1.4 percent.
News Release: Gross Domestic Product - Bureau of Economic Analysis

www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/gdpnewsrelease.htm

Commission forecasts euro area growth of 1.6% and EU growth of 1.8% in 2016
Economic growth in Europe is expected to remain modest as key trading partners' performance has slowed and some of the so far supportive factors start to wane. As a result, GDP in the euro area is forecast to continue growing at modest rates over the 2015-2017 period.
RABEL222
 
  -1  
Fri 25 Nov, 2016 06:04 pm
Every time I protest that tRump has the same personal character as hitler I am told by the more intelligent on this site this couldent happen because we are a constitutional representative democracy. As I thought it through I seemed to remember that so was Germany before Hitler took over. I thought about a congress that has sat on its thumbs for 8 years and wondered if we could count on a republican congress and Supreme Court to protect us. I dont believe they have the ethics to depose a republican president no matter what he does. So I googled some sites and found this fact, opinion piece. I have bought that gun I referenced earlier, for self protection. I am only a second generation citizen and am afraid that when tRump startes his crap I may be one of the first to go.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/opinion/03kershaw.html
wmwcjr
 
  5  
Fri 25 Nov, 2016 07:15 pm
@blatham,
Thank you very much, blatham, for posting a link to Mr. Sykes' article.

You might be interested in this article by David French -- which, sadly, is still relevant.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441319/donald-trump-alt-right-internet-abuse-never-trump-movement

During the presidential election campaign, Good Men Project featured another article of interest to which I've posted a link below:

https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/shocker-5-anti-gay-right-wingers-who-actually-dumped-trump-wat/

I agree with the writer's assessment of the five so-called "right-wingers": "With the exception of Steve Schmidt, who has been supportive of gay causes, none of the dissenters are remotely allies. But they are people of principle." I agree completely. Considering the author's political and social position, I'm quite touched by his statement.

For the record, I have never supported Hillary Clinton. Instead of not voting in this election, I voted for Evan McMullin -- a "Never Trump" conservative -- as did my wife, our two daughters, and their husbands. Of course, I was only casting a protest vote. I knew Trump would win.

I'm not playing the politics game. I gave up on politics decades ago. I just wanted to express my appreciation to blatham for calling attention to Mr. Sykes' article.
blatham
 
  0  
Fri 25 Nov, 2016 10:35 pm
Jane Mayer on the DeVos appointment. http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/betsy-devos-trumps-big-donor-education-secretary

Quote:
After choosing for his cabinet a series of political outsiders who are loyal to him personally, Donald Trump has broken with this pattern to name Betsy DeVos his Secretary of Education. DeVos, whose father-in-law is a co-founder of Amway, the multi-level marketing empire, comes from the very heart of the small circle of conservative billionaires who have long funded the Republican Party.

Trump’s choice of DeVos delivers on his campaign promise to increase the role of charter schools, which she has long championed. But it also flies in the face of his fiery anti-establishment campaign rhetoric. Steve Bannon, who was named Trump’s senior counsellor and chief strategist, has mocked what he called “the donor class,” arguing that it and the politicians it bankrolls have little understanding of the needs of working-class and middle-class voters. Such populist rhetoric fuelled Trump’s campaign, in which he presented himself as an outsider who would govern independently of the corrupt and out-of-touch private interests that he said had “rigged” American politics.

But it would be hard to find a better representative of the “donor class” than DeVos, whose family has been allied with Charles and David Koch for years...
reasoning logic
 
  0  
Fri 25 Nov, 2016 10:45 pm
Donald trump has been diagnosed by many in the field of psychology!

blatham
 
  2  
Fri 25 Nov, 2016 10:48 pm
@wmwcjr,
From the French article you linked...
Quote:
Trump’s alt-right trolls have subjected me and my family to an unending torrent of abuse that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I distinctly remember the first time I saw a picture of my then-seven-year-old daughter’s face in a gas chamber. It was the evening of September 17, 2015. I had just posted a short item to the Corner calling out notorious Trump ally Ann Coulter for aping the white-nationalist language and rhetoric of the so-called alt-right. Within minutes, the tweets came flooding in. My youngest daughter is African American, adopted from Ethiopia, and in alt-right circles that’s an unforgivable sin. It’s called “race-cucking” or “raising the enemy.” I saw images of my daughter’s face in gas chambers, with a smiling Trump in a Nazi uniform preparing to press a button and kill her. I saw her face photo-shopped into images of slaves. She was called a “niglet” and a “dindu.” The alt-right unleashed on my wife, Nancy, claiming that she had slept with black men while I was deployed to Iraq, and that I loved to watch while she had sex with “black bucks.”

It's a crowd of really special Americans supporting Bannon and Trump.

blatham
 
  0  
Fri 25 Nov, 2016 10:57 pm
@georgeob1,
Quote:
I believe it is fairly obvious that it was they, not their opponents as Sykes suggests who "were in a bubble" of their own making. Now when that self-deception is clearly revealed by the elkection result,

The election result where 2 million more American citizens voted for Clinton rather than Trump? And we'll note (along with CI) that Obama's approval rating among US citizens is now greater than that of Reagan at the same point.
roger
 
  2  
Fri 25 Nov, 2016 11:01 pm
@blatham,
Probably because we're now comparing Obama to Trump. Kind of an unfair advantage, don't you think?
roger
 
  2  
Fri 25 Nov, 2016 11:02 pm
@roger,
Come to think of it, I bet Obama would compare well to Clinton, if she had won.
0 Replies
 
layman
 
  0  
Fri 25 Nov, 2016 11:26 pm
@reasoning logic,
Quote:
...when it comes to politics, one of the great love affairs of all time may have been between Lyndon Johnson and… himself.

Johnson leads the list of 42 presidents on measures of “grandiose narcissism,” according to a new study by a team of psychologists published online by the journal Psychological Science.

Also near the top of presidents grandly infatuated with themselves were Teddy Roosevelt, Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.


http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/11/14/the-most-narcissistic-u-s-presidents/

Kinda strange. Teddy, of the Bull Moose party aside, all Democrats, aint they?
layman
 
  0  
Sat 26 Nov, 2016 12:17 am
@layman,
On the topic of narcissism, the same guy in the video RL posted says Obama is a narcissist:

http://bigthink.com/articles/barack-obama-narcissist-or-merely-narcissistic

In another video he says Hillary Clinton is also.

In the study I posted, right behind the 5 I mentioned, Nixon was next (6th), then Billy Clinton (7th).

You begin to wonder--what president isn't claimed to be a narcissist? Since the 60's: Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Clinton, Obama, and now Trump, they claim.
blatham
 
  0  
Sat 26 Nov, 2016 04:58 am
@roger,
Quote:
Probably because we're now comparing Obama to Trump. Kind of an unfair advantage, don't you think?

You following note is closer. Obama's popularity numbers were very high even before Trump triumphed in the primaries. But I'd wager that, given Trump in place now, the sort of contrast you suggest will push Obama's numbers very high in the near future.
0 Replies
 
giujohn
 
  -2  
Sat 26 Nov, 2016 06:11 am
@cicerone imposter,
Obama like other Democrats put a Stranglehold on business with unnecessary regulation. The only reason Obama was elected was because he was black. And of course the media is afraid to criticize him for fear of being called racist. He was a junior Senator and a community organizer never held down a real job in his life certainly had no knowledge of how to run a successful business.

What you will see with Republicans at the helm is deregulation and economic growth as evidenced by within days of Trumps election the stock market hits an all-time high. You will see elimination of some unnecessary segments of the government and reduced spending which will also reduce the deficit. You'll see reduction in taxes especially for business where we are the highest taxed in the world. That will increase the GDP. And you'll see wages go up in keeping with inflation.

But even after all that, you bleeding heart liberals will still be pissing and moaning about Trump.
giujohn
 
  0  
Sat 26 Nov, 2016 06:18 am
@RABEL222,
The New York Times? Lol hahahaha hahahaha... you bought a gun? That's rich a bleeding heart liberal with a gun ... you'll probably shoot yourself in the foot.
0 Replies
 
blatham
 
  0  
Sat 26 Nov, 2016 06:34 am
More on DeVos
Quote:
But you don’t have to be in the educational establishment to be worried about where this is going. The DeVos nomination is a triumph of ideology over evidence that should worry anyone who wants to improve results for children.
http://nyti.ms/2gs0rn0
 

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