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FOCUS: Why Are Donald Trump's Poll Numbers Still So High? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6853"><span class="small">Frank Rich, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Thursday, 13 August 2015 10:59 |
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Rich writes: "The mystery of Trump's hold on Republican voters is no mystery. As many, including me, have said, his xenophobia and misogyny have long been orthodoxy among the party's base."
Donald Trump. (photo: Reuters)
Why Are Donald Trump's Poll Numbers Still So High?
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
13 August 15
Most weeks,New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: Chuck Schumer's opposition to the Iran deal, Trump's continued strong poll numbers after the GOP debate, and Caitlyn Jenner's future as a public figure.
 huck Schumer stirred up sharp criticism from the left by announcing his opposition to President Obama's Iran deal, though it doesn't look like his vote will ultimately prevent the deal's approval. Schumer aspires to lead the Senate Democrats after 2017. Should this turn cost him his colleagues' support down the line?
If Schumer’s "no" vote causes the Iran deal to go down, that would set up a furious and possibly successful challenge to his status as Harry Reid’s heir apparent in the Senate. But everyone assumes that Schumer is opposing the deal precisely because he knows his vote is not needed to put it over. So his ascent to the top of the Senate Democrats is not in jeopardy. Schumer knows how to count votes, God knows.
His wisdom about foreign policy is another matter. “I think we will have no choice but to engage in a large-scale military action in Iraq,” he said in January 2002. Actually, we did have a choice, and he made the wrong one, voting for the war resolution with even less hesitation than his fellow New York senator Hillary Clinton. Much of Schumer’s argument against the Iran deal, released as an online manifesto, is similarly lacking in gravitas. He comes across “a bit like your crazy uncle who gets his opinions from talk radio and wants to set you straight at Thanksgiving,” in the words of Jeffrey Lewis, writing in Foreign Policy. Read Lewis to appreciate just how much Schumer, for all his ostentatious deliberation, garbled the actual terms of the deal when announcing his opposition to it. Like other opponents, he cannot explain away the fact that there is no better alternative to curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Nor can he satisfactorily explain how scuttling this deal will make Israel safer. Quite the contrary. If we walk away from the deal, the current sanctions regime will collapse, and Iran will be completely liberated to pursue a bomb on as fast a timetable as it can. And then what? The most likely outcome will be apocalyptic “large-scale military action” of the kind Schumer voted to unleash in Iraq.
Schumer is smart enough to know this. But on this one he is playing to the neocon claque and the donors who love them (and support him). The whole exercise has been both disingenuous and cynical. But I can’t find a single person who expected anything else from Schumer. As a friend of mine said a few years ago, “Schumer says everything a liberal Democratic senator from New York should say while believing none of it.” That’s harsh, but really, what does he believe in? Well, in power, for sure. You can bet he would have come out for the deal in a second if he had calculated that voting "no" threatened his own political ambitions.
The controversy following Donald Trump's comments about Megyn Kelly may have hurt him among some GOP insiders, but, according to post-debate polling, it hasn't cut into his popular appeal with Republican voters. Why not?
The mystery of Trump’s hold on Republican voters is no mystery. As many, including me, have said, his xenophobia and misogyny have long been orthodoxy among the party’s base. Just look at the Fox News debate itself. Though Kelly called Trump out on his history of misogynistic insults, none of his nine opponents onstage took exception to his crude attack on Rosie O’Donnell or to the laughter and cheers it aroused from the audience. (The incident was an echo of that 2012 GOP debate where no one onstage dared chastise the audience for booing Stephen Hill, a gay serviceman in Iraq who asked the candidates a question about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell via video.) Nor did anyone onstage dissent when Scott Walker and Marco Rubio declared that women should be outlawed from seeking abortions even if their own lives are at stake. How glibly and eagerly they decreed capital punishment for women who have the ill fortune to end up in tragic, potentially fatal pregnancies.
The difference between Trump and his cohort is that he shouts his party’s ugliest views at the top of his lungs and without apology rather than sugarcoating them in Frank Luntz–tested euphemisms and code words. What the GOP Establishment wants is Trumpism — and Trump supporters — without the embarrassing spectacle of Trump himself. Now he has called their bluff and is holding the entire Republican Party hostage. The Establishment would like to blow him up so that he’ll stop giving up the game by calling attention to the extremist views and constituents in the GOP base, but every attempt to sideline him has backfired. Trump, meanwhile, retains the power to blow up the party’s 2016 hopes by coaxing his followers either to stay home on Election Day or to join him in some quixotic third-party sideshow. As my colleague Gabriel Sherman has reported, even Roger Ailes has had to retreat and seek peace with Trump once Trump threatened to boycott Fox News and deprive it of ratings oxygen in the wake of his battle with Kelly. By bringing Ailes to heel, Trump has made himself the most powerful figure in the conservative firmament right now — more powerful than Ailes’s own boss, Rupert Murdoch.
Every day brings another op-ed or quote from a Republican functionary trying to find the bright side. Somehow Trump, in the end, will be good for the other candidates because he makes them look more presidential. Or he will fade when the calendar hits Labor Day, or will somehow self-destruct. These premature obituaries appeared after Trump mocked John McCain’s war service, after Trump supposedly did poorly in the debate, and after he literally attacked Kelly below the belt. Yet Trump’s numbers kept going up. Now William Kristol’s Weekly Standard is reduced to hawking a poll from Rasmussen Reports showing a falloff in Trump’s Republican support. That’s true desperation. Rasmussen is the notorious polling outfit that last gave Republicans false hopes in 2012, when it presaged a Romney victory by calling six of nine battleground states wrong.
From the Diane Sawyer interview through the Vanity Fair cover to the premiere of her reality show I Am Cait, Caitlyn Jenner's introduction has been something of a public-relations masterpiece. But half of the show's audience didn't come back after the first episode, and ratings continue to drop. What's Cait's future as a public figure?
Jenner’s future as a public figure could be very bright, not to mention important, for all the reasons we know and she knows. If the ratings continue to plummet for her E! series — episode two was down to 2.1 million viewers — that may be an indication that the time has come to separate her role as an advocate from her role as an entertainer in a cheesy celebrity enterprise tied to the Kardashians. Imagine, for instance, if Jenner, a self-proclaimed Republican, makes good on her declaration to Sawyer that she would speak to Mitch McConnell and John Boehner about trans rights. Even better, imagine if she did so on television, so the world could see her take her stand. And why not invite Trump for good measure — and good ratings? Sawyer’s Jenner interview may have drawn 17 million viewers to ABC, but Trump induced 24 million to watch a show otherwise filled with boring Republicans on Fox News last week.
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Scott Walker Cut $250 Million From Wisconsin Colleges. Now He's Blowing $250 Million on a Basketball Arena. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35987"><span class="small">Jordan Weissmann, Slate</span></a>
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Thursday, 13 August 2015 08:38 |
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Weissmann writes: "In July, Wisconsin governor and presidential candidate Scott Walker signed a budget that slashed $250 million from his state's higher education system. Wednesday, he signed a bill that would spend $250 million of taxpayer funds on a new stadium for the NBA's Milwaukee Bucks."
Scott Walker. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty)
Scott Walker Cut $250 Million From Wisconsin Colleges. Now He's Blowing $250 Million on a Basketball Arena.
By Jordan Weissmann, Slate
13 August 15
 n July, Wisconsin governor and presidential candidate Scott Walker signed a budget that slashed $250 million from his state's higher education system. Wednesday, he signed a bill that would spend $250 million of taxpayer funds on a new stadium for the NBA's Milwaukee Bucks.
It is difficult to think of a clearer illustration of a politician’s comically misplaced priorities.
I should say upfront that, if you want to get nit-picky about it, the two figures aren’t exactly comparable. For starters, the stadium spending will be spread out over 20 years. And once you include bond interest, the cost to Wisconsin residents is expected to hit $400 million. Meanwhile, only about $80 million will be coming exclusively from the state government—the rest will basically be financed by the city and county of Milwaukee, and by a $2 surcharge on tickets to events at the Bucks' current stadium. You could also argue that, if they become permanent, the university system cuts could save far more than $250 million over the long term.
But, really, there's no need to get stuck in the weeds here. Because what Wisconsin has is a governor who is willing to excise a massive chunk of his state's education budget in the name of fiscal prudence while flushing hundreds of millions of dollars down the drain in order to subsidize a fancy arena.
Walker has tried to frame the Bucks affair as a matter of pragmatism, of course. He claims that, if the team leaves Wisconsin, which it well might without a new home, the state will miss out on $299 million of tax revenues from NBA player salaries over the next two decades. That’s why Walker has been saying it will be "cheaper to keep them."
This is silly. The $299 million figure is still less than the $400 million tab Wisconsin residents will end up on the hook for. Moreover, Walker's projection makes big assumptions about the rate at which NBA salaries will increase, which is basically unknowable. As renowned sports economist Andrew Zimbalist notes, it likely overstates how much the state would lose in the event of a Bucks departure, since player salaries are paid in part with the revenue from ticket sales to locals. Without a team, former fans would probably spend those dollars elsewhere, and the government would get a chance to tax them as they cycled through the economy.
The bigger issue here, of course, is that sports arenas and stadiums tend to be a waste of public money, because they do little to spur economic development. This is simply not a controversial point these days. And yet Walker is willing to rationalize burning public dollars to fund one, while slashing funding for a higher education system that can and does act as an engine of growth. It may be that, like so many state politicians and mayors, he's simply cowed by the idea that a professional sports team will pick up and leave. Or maybe he really believes his own excuses—which, frankly, would be even scarier.
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Stop the #BlackLivesMatter Surveillance |
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Thursday, 13 August 2015 08:36 |
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Choudhury writes: "Despite the heroic efforts of many activists, it was recently uncovered that the U.S. government is surveilling the #BlackLivesMatter movement - tracking its activity online."
Black Lives Matter protest. (photo: Getty)
Stop the #BlackLivesMatter Surveillance
By Nusrat Choudhury/ACLU, Reader Supported News
13 August 15
 ne year after Michael Brown’s death at the hands of law enforcement in Ferguson, many #BlackLivesMatter organizers continue to drive the movement for justice – standing up for the lives of Black men, women, and children wherever and whenever injustices occur.
Despite the heroic efforts of many activists, it was recently uncovered that the U.S. government is surveilling the #BlackLivesMatter movement – tracking its activity online.
Government monitoring of #BlackLivesMatter activists’ Facebook pages and Twitter accounts without any evidence of wrongdoing is just plain wrong. These actions threaten to scare activists off from speaking, organizing, and expressing themselves – as is their right under the First Amendment – and throws open the door to racial profiling.
DeRay McKesson, #BlackLivesMatter organizer, says “truth-telling has always been considered a radical act in America.” Throughout our country’s history, the federal government has used the fear of a threat – real or perceived – to conduct surveillance on domestic groups and people who look or act different. From the communists during the McCarthy era to Dr. Martin Luther King and other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s to Muslim civil rights leaders and academics after 9/11, our government has used this tactic time and again.
Government surveillance of civil rights activists is still as wrong today as it was in the past. We do not need to wait another 50 years to understand that.
Modern protest movements speak, empower, and organize through social media. Their tweets, blogs, protests, marches, and die-ins are the trumpets they use to call for reform and social justice. If we let government surveillance of activists on social media chill them from expressing themselves freely online, we take away their voice.
Join the thousands of supporters who have already signed our petition asking the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice to stop their unnecessary and unfair surveillance of the Black Lives Matter movement:
Add your name to ask the government to end the unjust surveillance of #BlackLivesMatter activists.
Nusrat Choudhury is a Staff Attorney, for the ACLU's Racial Justice Program
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Democrats Continue to Delude Themselves About Obama's Failed Guantanamo Vow |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29455"><span class="small">Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept</span></a>
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Wednesday, 12 August 2015 14:03 |
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Greenwald writes: "As everyone knows, 'closing Guantánamo' was a centerpiece of the 2008 Obama campaign. In the Senate and then in the presidential campaign, Obama repeatedly and eloquently railed against the core, defining evil of Guantánamo: indefinite detention."
President Barack Obama. (photo: AFP/Getty)
Democrats Continue to Delude Themselves About Obama's Failed Guantanamo Vow
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
12 August 15
 s everyone knows, “closing Guantánamo” was a centerpiece of the 2008 Obama campaign. In the Senate and then in the presidential campaign, Obama repeatedly and eloquently railed against the core, defining evil of Guantánamo: indefinite detention.
On the Senate floor, Obama passionately intoned in 2006: “As a parent, I can also imagine the terror I would feel if one of my family members were rounded up in the middle of the night and sent to Guantánamo without even getting one chance to ask why they were being held and being able to prove their innocence.” During the 2008 campaign, he repeatedly denounced “the Bush Administration’s attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantánamo.”
In the seventh year of Obama’s presidency, Guantánamo notoriously remains open, leaving one of his central vows unfulfilled. That, in turn, means that Democratic partisans have to scrounge around for excuses to justify this failure, to cast blame on someone other than the president, lest his legacy be besmirched. They long ago settled on the claim that blame (as always) lies not with Obama but with Congressional Republicans, who imposed a series of legal restrictions that impeded the camp’s closing.
As I’ve documented many times over the last several years, that excuse, while true as far as it goes, does not remotely prove that Obama sought to fulfill his pledge. That’s because Obama’s plans never included an end to what he himself constantly described as the camp’s defining evil: indefinite detention. To the contrary, he explicitly demanded the right to continue to imprison Guantánamo detainees without charges or trial –– exactly what made Guantánamo so evil in the first place — based on the hideous new phrase “cannot be tried but too dangerous to release.” Obama simply wanted to indefinitely imprison them somewhere else.
In other words, Obama never sought to close Guantánamo in any meaningful sense but rather wanted to relocate it to a less symbolically upsetting location, with its defining injustice fully intact and, worse, institutionalized domestically. In that regard, his Guantánamo shell game was vintage Obama: He wanted to make a pretty, self-flattering symbolic gesture to get credit for “change” (I have closed Guantánamo) while not merely continuing but actually strengthening the abusive power that made it so odious in the first place.
All of this is worth emphasizing because the close-Guantánamo controversy is back in the news as the result of what the Washington Post today, citing anonymous U.S. officials, describes as “an internal disagreement over its most controversial provision — where to house detainees who will be brought to the United States for trial or indefinite detention.” The Post said that “as part of the plan, the administration had considered sending some of the 116 detainees remaining at the prison to either a top-security prison in Illinois or a naval facility in Charleston, S.C.” Most members of Congress who love to parade around as super-tough warriors claim to be petrified about imprisoning Terrorist super-villains in their states, even though one of the few things at which the U.S. still excels is building oppressive penal institutions.
But even Obama’s current Guantánamo plan — like all his previous ones — does not seek to end indefinite detention. It does the opposite: It insists on the right to continue to indefinitely imprison detainees, most of whom have already been kept in a cage for more than a decade with no charges or trial. In that regard, Obama — as has been true since the first day of his presidency — is not seeking to “close Guantánamo” but rather relocate it, as Human Rights Watch’s Ken Roth noted today:
The ACLU also made this point from the moment Obama first unveiled his “move Guantánamo” plan and Democratic partisans pretended it was a “close Guantánamo” plan.
Headline covering Gitmo North. (photo: The Intercept)
As the ACLU’s Ben Wizner told me in an interview back in 2009, Obama’s Guantánamo plan — long before Congress took any action — was more likely to strengthen the camp’s scheme of indefinite detention than end it, just as Obama did with so many other once-controversial Bush/Cheney War on Terror policies:
It may to serve to enshrine into law the very departures from the law that the Bush administration led us on, and that we all criticized so much. And I’ll elaborate on that. But that’s really my initial reaction to it; that what President Obama was talking about yesterday is making permanent some of the worst features of the Guantanámo regime. He may be shutting down the prison on that camp, but what’s worse is he may be importing some of those legal principles into our own legal system, where they’ll do great harm for a long time.
Obama-excusing Democrats also love to point out that even Democratic Senators such as Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders voted for legislation blocking Obama’s Guantánamo plan, implying that even the Senate’s most liberal members wanted Gitmo to remain open. But these Obama advocates never mention that those votes were based on their concerns about Obama’s desire to simply relocate the camp to U.S. soil and thus strengthen its core injustice. And all of that is to say nothing of all the limits on closing Guantánamo, which Obama himself (not the Republicans) imposed.
In sum, it’s true that Congress impeded Obama’s Guantánamo plan. But it’s misleading in the extreme to pretend that Obama’s plan was ever about ending the core injustice of that camp. If anything, Obama’s plan would have, and if it succeeds still will, institutionalize and strengthen the Bush/Cheney scheme of indefinite detention: the very same beyond-the-law framework that made them want to open the camp, and made it a symbol of injustice around the world, in the first place.
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