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Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Grrl, Interrupted

Why Hillary Clinton Gets Interrupted More than Donald Trump 

Lauer behaved toward the presidential candidates in a way that was consistent with much of the research about gender stereotypes and discrimination. Specifically, he interrupted Clinton more often than Trump, asked her more challenging questions, and questioned her statements more often.

Harvard MBA students evaluated the same case study of a successful entrepreneur. Half the class read a version in which the entrepreneur was male; the other half read a version in which the entrepreneur was female. The students who read about the male entrepreneur identified him as having positive traits, such as leadership and direction, while students who read about the female entrepreneur characterized her as being bossy and overly direct. The responses reflected the students’ hidden biases about how male and female leaders should act.

the more convinced we are of our own objectivity, the more likely bias is to creep in and influence our judgment and decisions.

Going Blue

Why so many red states are turning blue 

TheWashington Post just polled all 50 states. Trump is getting an absolute majority of the vote in six states: Alabama, Kentucky, North Dakota, Tennessee, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Monday, September 19, 2016

Disaster Candidate Trump

The Case Against Trump

Donald Trump would be an absolute disaster of a president — so bad it's almost impossible to grasp.

Trump's real estate development record is mixed at best, and several forays outside property ownership and management — be it education, food, or gambling — all ignominiously collapsed. At bottom, the Trump business formula is simple: Borrow a ton of money, invest in real estate during a boom, cash out the equity to a protected location, then declare bankruptcy after the market turns. This is an effective strategy when conditions are right, but it is purely taking advantage of external conditions. No business is really happening. It's pure parasitism. (It's unclear whether Trump even understands this is his strategy.)

Third, domestic policy. Trump does not have a remotely comprehensive policy platform. He clearly has no interest in building one. He clearly is unable to build one.

Trump constantly (and inadvertently) reveals his staggering ignorance of the most basic facts of government and recent history. Trump didn't know that Russia had annexed Crimea. He didn't know what Brexit was. He didn't know that the Trans-Pacific Partnership does not include China. He is very obviously a guy who gets his news from half-watching cable TV and the racists in his Twitter mentions.

When NBC News attempted to compile a list of every Trump flip-flop, they came up with 117 major changes in positions — and that's likely an underestimate, since it was published a few days ago. Even on his signature issues — the border wall that Mexico is supposedly going to pay for, and banning all Muslim entry into the United States — Trump is all over the place. One day it's round up and deport all 11 million unauthorized immigrants and ban Muslim immigration, the next it's a path to citizenship, and only partial Muslim restrictions, then back to mass deportation.

Insofar as one can discern any sort of domestic agenda through his blizzard of nonsense and rapidly shifting positions, Trump's favorite things are discriminating against Latinos and Muslims. The political forces behind him include a sizable fraction of straight-up white nationalists.

Over and above his threats against a free press, Trump's campaign has been the most overtly violent in living memory. His rallies have seen a steady stream of violence since early in the primary — most recently, a Trumpist socked a 69-year-old woman on oxygen right in the face. Trump has incited and encouraged this violence, telling his rallies that violence is acceptable, refusing to condemn such behavior when journalists ask, and even saying he might pay the legal bills for a man arrested for allegedly assaulting someone at a rally (though Trump, as usual, later insisted he had done no such thing).

Trump's campaign has accomplished the greatest legitimization of political violence since white supremacist "Redeemers" violently overthrew democratically elected Reconstruction governments in the 1870s. He represents a movement of proto-fascism that will probably endure long after he is gone.

Trump's foreign policy might well be corrupt. As Kurt Eichenwald details in Newsweek, Trump is involved in dozens of shady business and real estate deals overseas through the Trump Organization — in South Korea, India, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, Russia, Ukraine, and elsewhere. It would be almost impossible for Trump to conduct foreign policy without hitting conflicts of interest. Not that he would care about such things; instead, he would almost certainly attempt to leverage the power of the presidency to secure more lucrative deals for himself. Profit and self-promotion are the only consistent notes in the life story of Donald Trump.

Scholars argue that democracies are more stable than monarchies in part because they can survive a bad leader or two. But the flexibility is not endless. Donald Trump might well bend the rickety American constitutional system past the breaking point. Don't let him.

A Trump Scare

President Trump’s First Term - The New Yorker

Nothing in the campaign has presented Trump with a broader range of new information than the realm of foreign affairs. Asked about the Quds Force, an Iranian paramilitary unit, he has expressed his view of “the Kurds,” an ethnic group. During a debate in December, 2015, a moderator requested his view of the “nuclear triad,” the cornerstone of American nuclear strategy—bombers, land-based missiles, and submarine-launched missiles—and it became clear that Trump had no idea what the term meant. Trump replied, “I think, to me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me.”

Trump is not uniformly isolationist; he has affirmative ideas, some of which have produced effects outside his control. When he labelled Obama “the founder of isis,” the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah rejoiced. Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who is allied with President Bashar al-Assad, of Syria, against isis, has claimed that the U.S. created extremist groups in order to sow chaos in the Middle East. Now, it seemed, Trump was confirming it. “This is an American Presidential candidate,” Nasrallah said on television. “This was spoken on behalf of the American Republican Party. He has data and documents.”

Other militant organizations, includingisis, featured Trump’s words and image in recruiting materials. A recruitment video released in January by Al Shabaab, the East African militant group allied with Al Qaeda, showed Trump calling for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S.; the video warned, “Tomorrow, it will be a land of religious discrimination and concentration camps.”

In July, Trump made his most dramatic foray into foreign policy, declaring that if Baltic members ofnato are attacked he would decide whether to defend them on the basis of whether they had “fulfilled their obligations to us.” I asked the President of Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, what he made of that. Ilves rejected the suggestion that his country has not done its part for nato. “Estonia has not sat back and waited for allies to take care of its security,” he said. “Indeed, proportionally to our size, we were one of the greatest contributors to the mission in Afghanistan.” Without mentioning Trump’s name, he warned against improvising on matters of foreign policy involving President Vladimir Putin, of Russia: “Russia’s aggression against Ukraine—and the impact that Russian policies and actions toward neighboring countries have had on European security as a whole—marks a paradigm shift, the end of trust in the post-Cold War order.”

Shlapak said that in the spring of 2014, after Russia seized Crimea, “the question surfaced: What could Russia do to nato, if it was inclined to?” To test the proposition, rand organized a series of war games, sponsored by the Pentagon, involving military officers, strategists, and others, to examine what would happen if Russia attacked the three most vulnerable nato nations—the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia.

To his surprise, the simulated Russian forces reached the outskirts of the Estonian and Latvian capitals in as little as thirty-six hours. The larger shock was the depth of destruction. American forces, which would deploy from Germany, Italy, and elsewhere, are not heavily armored. “In twelve hours, more Americans die than in Iraq and Afghanistan, combined, in sixteen years,” Shlapak said. “In twelve hours, the U.S. Air Force loses more airplanes than it’s lost in every engagement since Vietnam, combined.” He went on, “In our base case, the Russians bring about four hundred and fifty tanks to the fight, and nato brings none. So it turns into a fight of steel against flesh.” (Based on the games, randrecommended that nato assign three heavily armored brigades to the Baltic states.)

“We’ve had seventy years of great-power peace, which is the longest period in post-Westphalian history,” Shlapak said. “I think one of the reasons we don’t think about that, or don’t understand the value of that, is that it’s been so long since we’ve been face to face with the prospect of that kind of conflict.”

the surge of hostility from American politicians will weaken Mexico’s commitment to help the United States with counter-terrorism

raids on farms, restaurants, factories, and construction sites would require more than ninety thousand “apprehension personnel”—six times the number of special agents in the F.B.I. Beds for captured men, women, and children would reach 348,831, nearly triple the detention space required for the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. Thousands of chartered buses (fifty-four seats on average) and planes (which can accommodate a hundred and thirty-five) would carry deportees to the border or to their home countries. The report estimated the total cost at six hundred billion dollars

Gingrich called for re-creating the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was established in 1938 to investigate accusations of subversion and disloyalty. “We’re going to presently have to go take the similar steps here,” he said, on Fox News. “We’re going to ultimately declare a war on Islamic supremacists, and we’re going to say, If you pledge allegiance toisis, you are a traitor and you have lost your citizenship.” The committee is not often praised; before it was abolished, in 1975, it had laid the groundwork for the internment of Japanese-Americans, and led investigations into alleged Communist sympathizers. In 1959, former President Harry S. Truman called it the “most un-American thing in the country today.”

Paul Krugman, the left-leaning Nobel laureate, argued that the supply-side argument was refuted by a basic fact: job growth has been higher under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama than under George W. Bush. 

To deal with China, he says, the United States should act like an aggressive patient at a dentist’s office: “Here’s how the patient deals with the dentist: sits down in the chair, grabs the dentist by the nuts, and says, ‘You don’t hurt me, I won’t hurt you.’ ”

The Economist Intelligence Unit, an economic-and-geopolitical-analysis firm, has ranked the prospect of a Trump victory on its top-ten risks to the global economy. Larry Summers, the Harvard professor and former Treasury Secretary, predicts that, taken together, Trump’s economic and trade policies would help trigger a protracted recession within eighteen months.

Trump’s trade plan could trigger a trade war that would put roughly four million Americans out of work, and cost the economy three million jobs that would have been created in Trump’s absence.

Trump, whose businesses have declared bankruptcy four times, said, “I’ve borrowed knowing that you can pay back with discounts,” and “if the economy crashed you could make a deal.” The notion that he might try to make creditors accept less than full payment on U.S. government debt caused an outcry. 

“If he ever even alludes to renegotiating the debt, we will have a downgrade of U.S. debt, and that event will cause a massive exodus of foreign investors from the U.S. Treasury market.” In 2011, when feuding in Congress delayed raising the debt limit, the stock market fell seventeen per cent. This would be a far larger event

Listening To The People

A small d democrat listens to the people even when they don't vote for them. This is no time to write off the working class.

Sin has to be confronted. Evil has to be confronted. Racism, misogyny, xenophobia are all evil, to be confronted.

But there are genuine concerns. The number one reason behind the meltdown of 2008 is not because bankers are evil people but because finance globalized but the politicians did not create a world government to go with it. They still have not done that.

Primarily due to the fast changing world of technological innovation we are about to enter the era of hypercapitalism. So far it has been liquid water physics. Soon it will be steam physics. But political and economic theorists lag far behind. Academics have been behind the curve.

In hypercapitalism you take one world government, one global economy for granted and you put human capital on equal pedestal with financial capital and technological capital. Later on a universal basic income is introduced.

None of this is part of the political conversation. And people feel like they are running blind.

Years ago there were random fires across Greece because it had become unusually dry. The culprit was global warming. But the local police started rounding up the known arsonists.

Jobs are disappearing in China also. Most jobs that are being lost in America are being lost to automation. Not to Mexicans or the Chinese. But Trump is laying the blame on the Mexicans. That is scapegoating. That is flagrant demagoguery. That is racist and offensive.

Sin leads to collapse and unhappiness. Racism, sexism, xenophobia are sin. Trump is a Pied Piper, leading people to ruin.

Humanity is at the cusp of potentially the most exciting era in human history. There are choices to make and decisions to take. It will not automatically happen.

The Trump pessimism is highly misguided.

Racism is its own fact. Hatred is its own fact. And Trump is peddling it.

Sunday, September 18, 2016

Trump Who?

Biologically speaking Donald Trump is a chimpanzee. I did not say that although I have been feeling it. A leading primatologist said that.

His psychological profile is that he is a bully, a narcissist.

His political ideology is he is a fascist.

His business profile is he is a fraudster.

His spiritual profile is he is Satanic.

His media profile is he is a demagogue.

His social media profile is he is Alt Right. That is the new name the white supremacists call themselves.

On trade and immigration he is an isolationist.

On nuclear weapons, he is strike first ask later.

On NATO he is a dismantlist.

On tax cuts he is super rich.

His canine profile is he is cute.

On the budget he is anti arithmetic.

On climate change he is "I believe there is weather."

On the wall, he is Brooklyn Bridge. "There is a bridge on the East River I would like to sell you."

On campaign finance he is pay yourself.

On fast food he is quick.

On comedy shows he is all hair and no cattle.




The Very Real Dangers Of A Donald Trump

“History tells us what may happen next with Brexit & Trump”

we need to avoid getting lost in arguing through facts and logic, and counter the populist messages of passion and anger with our own similar messages. We need to understand and use social media. We need to harness a different fear. Fear of another World War nearly stopped World War 2, but didn’t.We need to avoid our own echo chambers. Trump and Putin supporters don’t read the Guardian, so writing there is just reassuring our friends. We need to find a way to bridge from our closed groups to other closed groups, try to cross the ever widening social divides

A Chimp For Prez

Donald Trump is male chimpanzee.

Trump’s Shock And Awe Campaign

Trump’s psychological profile is that he is a third rate bully. During his business career he not only stiffed his many small vendors, he also stiffed big bankers. He would perform lousy on his bank loans, then go to the big bankers and say, guess what, unless you lend me more money you just lost the money you already gave me, and they would give him more money. He bullied his way through the Republican primary. "Little Marco," and calling Jeb Bush "a disgrace to his family." His Republican opponents lost by thinking he will take Poland and then stop there. I guess we can let him have Poland.

What Trump does is very well though out and he has honed it over a lifetime. He is really really good at it. And he thinks it works. Look at the Trump towers. Look at how many votes he collected in the primaries.

And now he is unleashing shock and awe on Hillary. Going after a Gold Star family can feel irrational to everyone else, but not to Trump. That is what he does. His rape comment during the Commander In Chief forum was more of the same. And now he is asking Hillary to ditch her bodyguards "and let's see what happens."

Japan has the most strict gun laws, there is no right to bear arms in Japan, but the Japanese prime minister moves around with a thick circle of armed bodyguards.

But then there is absolutely no logic to his wall either. It is not about logic. This is psychological. To his diehard supporters that Trump feeds their hate is a full course meal. They just need to watch him do obscene things. It is like a Horaldo Riviera Show, only in the form of someone running for president. You are not expecting college tuition, or health insurance, or a job from Riviera. This is narcissism feeding on narcissism. This is a piranha feast of racial hatred, misogyny and xenophobia.

This is more like FDR confronting Hitler and less like Barack Obama confronting Mitt Romney. Romney's "takers" comment was classist, but I never thought he was a fascist, a danger to the very republic. It is the genius of the Founding Fathers that they actually saw Trump coming, and now he is here. Americans did not fear a fascist takeover even in the 1930s, although anti-semitism was pretty rampant.

This is the first time in American history fascism is so close to becoming possible. Trump has rallied a crowd that seeks allegiance to no one and nothing but the person of Trump. "I alone can fix it."

In this 2016 election the very republic is at stake. And that argument has to be made to the thinking public.



Saturday, September 17, 2016

Trump Does Not Understand Government Structure

Trump's political dig on Yellen more dictatorial than presidential | TheHill

Attacking federal judges, Supreme Court justices and now the Chair of the independent Federal Reserve: every time this guy speaks he is capable of hitting a new low.

Beyond The Pale, A New Low

This tops the rape comment he made at the Commander In Chief forum.

Trump: Clinton's Bodyguards Should Disarm And See What Happens To Her

the insinuation of gun-related violence against a rival is unprecedented in modern presidential politics.

Trump: Never wrong, never sorry, never responsible - The Washington Post

What makes Donald Trump such a singular figure — in modern politics and, perhaps, ever — is his refusal to take ownership of the outrageous things he has said and done.

It is the essence of his leadership style, the defiance that exasperates his foes and makes his supporters love him all the more. The one thing that is consistent about him is inconsistency.

Not only does Trump refuse to apologize, he blames others for his own actions. His campaign staff may claim to speak for him, but he will leave even his aides twisting when it suits his purposes.

“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it,” Trump said, falsely, in an appearance at his newly opened luxury hotel, which is just a few blocks from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue NW. “President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period.”

“I fully think apologizing is a great thing, but you have to be wrong,” Trump told “Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon a year ago. “I will absolutely apologize sometime in the distant future if I’m ever wrong.”

“Don’t believe the biased and phony media quoting people who work for my campaign. The only quote that matters is a quote from me!” he tweeted in May.

To Trump and his supporters, his refusal to apologize is yet another measure of his strength as a leader. He wears the scorn of a legion of media fact-checkers as a badge of authenticity.

“One of the things that we all are used to in this business is dog whistles, but the thing that we’re not used to, and I’m finding it very difficult to getting used to , are the howls of wolves,” Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), the dean of the caucus, said at a news conference.

‘Mr. Trump Is Beyond Repair’ : Political Wire

At least on national security, I believe Mr. Trump is beyond repair. He is stubbornly uninformed about the world and how to lead our country and government, and temperamentally unsuited to lead our men and women in uniform. He is unqualified and unfit to be commander-in-chief.

Race tightens in projected U.S. Electoral College vote: Reuters/Ipsos

Polling aggregators, which calculate averages of major polls, have shown that Clinton’s lead over Trump has been shrinking this month. The most recent individual polls put Clinton’s advantage at 1 or 2 percentage points.

Trump stumbles after surge in polls | TheHill

Trump has seemed to slip back into his primary-election style, stirring up controversy and lashing out at critics as he rode a wave of quickly improving poll numbers.

“Take their guns away,” he said. “She doesn’t want guns … let’s see what happens to her. Take their guns away, OK? It’d be very dangerous.”

Democrats erupted in anger. Clinton's campaign called on GOP leaders to denounce the comments, and SenChris Murphy (D-Conn.) tweeted to Trump that "blood will be on your hands" if a supporter killed Clinton.

“When Trump is not on message and stirring controversy, he seems bored,” GOP strategist Nino Saviano said. “The media, for its part, doesn’t feel that much different.”

“He got the new management team in and they pinned him down for a few weeks, but it was inevitable he’d go rogue again.

“He just doesn’t have the discipline to stay within the game plan. It was inevitable he’d go back to bad Trump.”

Black Dems rip Trump as 'racial arsonist' over 'birther' controversy | TheHill






Gore, Sanders, Warren: Vote Clinton, not third-party | TheHill

Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's bad week has ended and her resurgence began Friday. 

Clinton's September slump may turn out to be a blessing in disguise for Democrats because the Clinton campaign had fallen victim to overconfidence, but that has ended.

Gore, whom I predict will campaign in Florida, among other states, is the most ideal person in the world to warn those who deplore Trump but are tempted to vote for Stein or Johnson that a vote for these two candidates could elect Trump, as votes for Green nominee Ralph Nader in 2000 almost certainly elected President George W. Bush, leading to all of the problems that followed.

I have long argued that there is a progressive populist majority in America waiting to be born. That is why Sanders topped Donald Trump by large double-digit margins in virtually every poll taken when Sanders was running for president. That is why Elizabeth Warren is such a beloved figure in progressive circles, along with Sanders, which is demonstrated again in her current battle with Well Fargo after more than 5,000 employees apparently ripped off bank customers.

The Clinton slump has ended and the Clinton resurgence has begun.