tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57522152024-02-08T11:58:38.606-08:00Not In Kansas Anymore, Dot<em><strong><a href="http://notinkansasanymoredot.blogspot.com/">Certa, Toto, sentio nos in Kansate non iam adesse. (aka The Curmudgeon Chronicles) </a></strong></em>Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.comBlogger551125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5752215.post-34392152658134602902019-05-04T06:54:00.002-07:002019-05-04T06:54:48.514-07:00It's a fucked world after allIt's a world of assholes<br />A world of tears<br />It's a world of pain<br />And a world of fears<br />There's so much shit that we share<br />That it's time we're aware<br /><b>It's a fucked world after all</b><br /><br />Chorus:<br />It's a fucked world after all (x3)<br />It's a fucked up world!<br /><br />There is just one moon<br />And one golden sun<br />And a finger means<br />The same thing to every one<br />Not just mountains divide<br />Not just oceans are wide<br />It's a fucked world after all<br /><br />(Repeat Chorus)<br /><br />Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5752215.post-12111335289299664222016-09-07T13:23:00.000-07:002016-09-07T13:23:11.773-07:00Dallas Morning News breaks for Clinton<br />
<br />
<i>There aren't many people who remember the last time the Morning News went for a Democrat.</i><br />
<br />
Dallas Morning News <br />
07 September 2016 <br />
<br />
There is only one serious candidate on the presidential ballot in November. We recommend Hillary Clinton.<br />
<br />
We don't come to this decision easily. This newspaper has not recommended a Democrat for the nation's highest office since before World War II — if you're counting, that's more than 75 years and nearly 20 elections. The party's over-reliance on government and regulation to remedy the country's ills is at odds with our belief in private-sector ingenuity and innovation. Our values are more about individual liberty, free markets and a strong national defense.<br />
<br />
We've been critical of Clinton's handling of certain issues in the past. But unlike Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton has experience in actual governance, a record of service and a willingness to delve into real policy.<br />
<br />
PART ONE<br />
Donald Trump is no Republican<br />
<br />
His name may be at the top of the GOP ticket, but Trump doesn’t reflect Republican ideals of the past; we are certain he shouldn’t reflect the GOP of the future.<br />
<br />
Resume vs. resume, judgment vs. judgment, this election is no contest. <br />
<br />
In Clinton's eight years in the U.S. Senate, she displayed reach and influence in foreign affairs. Though conservatives like to paint her as nakedly partisan, on Capitol Hill she gained respect from Republicans for working across the aisle: Two-thirds of her bills had GOP co-sponsors and included common ground with some of Congress' most conservative lawmakers.<br />
<br />
As President Barack Obama's first secretary of state, she helped make tough calls on the Middle East and the complex struggle against radical Islamic terrorism. It's no accident that hundreds of Republican foreign policy hands back Clinton. She also has the support of dozens of top advisers from previous Republican administrations, including Henry Paulson, John Negroponte, Richard Armitage and Brent Scowcroft. Also on this list is Jim Glassman, the founding executive director of the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas.<br />
<br />
Clinton has remained dogged by questions about her honesty, her willingness to shade the truth. Her use of a private email server while secretary of state is a clear example of poor judgment. She should take additional steps to divorce allegations of influence peddling from the Clinton Foundation. And she must be more forthright with the public by holding news conferences, as opposed to relying on a shield of carefully scripted appearances and speeches.<br />
<br />
Those are real shortcomings. But they pale in comparison to the litany of evils some opponents accuse her of. Treason? Murder? Her being cleared of crimes by investigation after investigation has no effect on these political hyenas; they refuse to see anything but conspiracies and cover-ups.<br />
<br />
We reject the politics of personal destruction. Clinton has made mistakes and displayed bad judgment, but her errors are plainly in a different universe than her opponent's.<br />
<br />
Trump's values are hostile to conservatism. He plays on fear — exploiting base instincts of xenophobia, racism and misogyny — to bring out the worst in all of us, rather than the best. His serial shifts on fundamental issues reveal an astounding absence of preparedness. And his improvisational insults and midnight tweets exhibit a dangerous lack of judgment and impulse control.<br />
<br />
After nearly four decades in the public spotlight, 25 of them on the national stage, Clinton is a known quantity. For all her warts, she is the candidate more likely to keep our nation safe, to protect American ideals and to work across the aisle to uphold the vital domestic institutions that rely on a competent, experienced president.<br />
<br />
Hillary Clinton has spent years in the trenches doing the hard work needed to prepare herself to lead our nation. In this race, at this time, she deserves your vote. <br />
<br />
...
<b>"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences." </b> - Winston Churchill, <u>The Gathering Storm</u><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
PS: Breaking with decades of historical precedent, the editorial board of The <a href="http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/editorials/20160906-donald-trump-is-no-republican.ece" target="_blank">Dallas Morning News </a>on
Tuesday had ripped into Trump for his “admiration” of Russian President
Vladimir Putin and disavowal of trade deals like the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, as well as national security ideas that it says “put sound
bites over sound policy.” <br />
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“We have no interest in a Republican nominee for whom all principles
are negotiable, nor in a Republican Party that is willing to trade away
principle for pursuit of electoral victory,” the editorial concluded.
“Trump doesn’t reflect Republican ideals of the past; we are certain he
shouldn’t reflect the GOP of the future. Donald Trump is not qualified
to serve as president and does not deserve your vote.” <br />
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<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/1600/US%20of%20Canada.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/320/US%20of%20Canada.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; margin: 0 10px 10px 0;" /></a>Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5752215.post-59880006404030069992016-07-29T15:15:00.001-07:002016-07-29T15:15:22.467-07:00The Sour Fruits of Hate<br />
<br />You cannot hate people without reason, without at some point turning
into someone filled with unreasoning hate. You cannot care only for
yourself, without at some point turning into someone who fears someone,
somewhere is getting something you think only you deserve, and therefore
being filled with greed to get what you think is yours. At some point,
normal human beings will recognize these people are pathological, that
something is seriously wrong with them, and begin to wonder to
themselves how they ever listened to them, much less respected them.
This is what is happening all over the US today. <br />
<br />
Hopefully, out of the wreckage of the Trumpist Party, a party of loyal
opposition will arise again, but first they have the truly Herculean
task of cleaning out the mountain ranges of excrement that have built up
ever since Nixon and Reagan took them down the dark path of
dog-whistling racists. That task is hard and long, however, and cannot
be underestimated. Consider how long it has been since Johnson signed
the Civil Rights acts that lost Democrats the “solid south” for two
generations (not the one generation he expected). <br />
<br />
But that signature on that act is what really launched the
transformation of the Democratic Party into the party of inclusion and
optimism it is today. What kind of party would we have without Barak and
Michelle Obama, and without the transformed southerner Bill Clinton and
his once-Goldwater girl wife Hillary Clinton. They show us the real
value of inclusion and transformation. They show us we can hope for
change, and change ourselves and our party and our country. The real
America is the one that believes in new beginnings, in transformation,
in hope and in working together. <br />
<br />
That is why Newt's former press secretary weeps, because he knows in his
heart what his head has long denied, that the Republican Party has gone
far off the rails, far away from the American tradition, and has veered
deeply into a dead-end tunnel filled with danger and darkness."<br />
<br />
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/7/29/1554084/-Newt-s-ex-press-secretary-I-am-standing-at-my-kitchen-counter-sobbing-at-Hillary-s-speech<br />
<br />
http://www.dailykos.com/user/monkeybrainpolitics <br />
<br />
...
<b>"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences." </b> - Winston Churchill, <u>The Gathering Storm</u>
<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/1600/US%20of%20Canada.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/320/US%20of%20Canada.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; margin: 0 10px 10px 0;" /></a>Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5752215.post-67935316284548254782016-07-22T19:04:00.001-07:002016-07-22T19:04:33.309-07:00Washington Post's Unprecedented Anti-Trump EditorialThe <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trump-is-a-unique-threat-to-american-democracy/2016/07/22/a6d823cc-4f4f-11e6-aa14-e0c1087f7583_story.html" target="_blank">Washington Post</a>
ran a full-page ad today, one day after Donald Trump accepted the
Republican nomination for president of the United States, spelling out
in prolific and profound prose the dangers of a Trump presidency. It was
an amazing piece of writing. The piece hit on many topics: Trump’s playing on the racist and
xenophobic undercurrent in GOP voter stances, his debilitating lack of
experience or willingness to listen and learn, his wildly dangerous
and improbable solutions to all the wrong problems, and his complete
ignorance about the constitution. The article cannot be printed here in its entirety, but here are some of the highlights.<br />
<div class="code-block code-block-7" style="margin: 8px 0px;">
</div>
<blockquote>
‘Donald J. Trump, until now a Republican problem, this
week became a challenge the nation must confront and overcome. The real
estate tycoon is uniquely unqualified to serve as president, in
experience and temperament. He is mounting a campaign of snarl and
sneer, not substance. To the extent he has views, they are wrong in
their diagnosis of America’s problems and dangerous in their proposed
solutions. Mr. Trump’s politics of denigration and division could strain
the bonds that have held a diverse nation together. His contempt for
constitutional norms might reveal the nation’s two-century-old
experiment in checks and balances to be more fragile than we knew […]<br />
‘There is nothing on Mr. Trump’s résumé to suggest he could function
successfully in Washington. He was staked in the family business by a
well-to-do father and has pursued a career marked by some real estate
successes, some failures and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/as-its-stock-collapsed-trumps-firm-gave-him-huge-bonuses-and-paid-for-his-jet/2016/06/12/58458918-2766-11e6-b989-4e5479715b54_story.html" target="_blank">Repeated episodes</a> of saving his own hide while harming people who trusted him. Given his continuing refusal to release his <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/voters-are-still-waiting-on-your-tax-returns-mr-trump/2016/07/19/c87c4054-4de1-11e6-a7d8-13d06b37f256_story.html" target="_blank">tax returns</a>,
breaking with a long bipartisan tradition, it is only reasonable to
assume there are aspects of his record even more discreditable than what
we know.<br />
<div id="U1100744773779NQD">
‘Given his ignorance, it is perhaps not
surprising that Mr. Trump offers no coherence when it comes to policy.
In years past, he supported <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/adriancarrasquillo/that-time-donald-trump-had-a-meeting-with-dreamers-and-said" target="_blank">immigration reform</a>, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/07/09/ths-many-ways-in-which-donald-trump-was-once-a-liberals-liberal/">gun control</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/03/donald-trumps-ever-shifting-positions-on-abortion/" target="_blank">Legal abortion</a>; as candidate, he became a <a href="https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions">hard-line opponent</a> of all three. Even in the course of the campaign, he has flip-flopped on issues such as whether <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-back-pedals-on-banning-muslims-from-u-s-1467058774" target="_blank">Muslims should be banned</a> from entering the United States and whether women who have abortions <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/03/30/donald-trump-there-has-to-be-some-form-of-punishment-for-women-who-get-abortions/" target="_blank">should be punished</a>. Worse than the flip-flops is the absence of any substance in his agenda. Existing <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/defying-republican-orthodoxy-trump-trashes-trade-deals-and-advocates-tariffs/2016/06/28/3b47617e-3d5a-11e6-84e8-1580c7db5275_story.html" target="_blank">Trade deals</a> are “<a href="http://www.ontheissues.org/2016/Donald_Trump_Free_Trade.htm" shape="rect" target="_blank" title="www.ontheissues.org">stupid</a>,” but Mr. Trump does not say how they could be improved. The Islamic State <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/27/the-gauzy-generalities-of-donald-trumps-foreign-policy-vision/">must be destroyed</a>, but the candidate offers no strategy for doing so. Eleven million undocumented immigrants <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/20/us/politics/donald-trump-immigration.html?_r=0" target="_blank">must be deported</a>, but Mr. Trump does not tell us how he would accomplish this legally or practically.</div>
<div id="U1100744773779YGD">
‘What the candidate does offer is a series of prejudices and gut feelings, most of them erroneous. Allies are <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/03/30/donald-trump-says-u-s-is-bankrolling-asian-allies-defense-thats-not-really-true/">taking advantage</a> of the United States. Immigrants are <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/08/donald-trumps-false-comments-connecting-mexican-immigrants-and-crime/" target="_blank">committing crimes</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2014/03/06/trump-warns-gop-on-immigration-theyre-taking-your-jobs/" target="_blank">stealing jobs</a>. Muslims <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/09/politics/donald-trump-islam-hates-us/" target="_blank">hate America</a>.
In fact, Japan and South Korea are major contributors to an alliance
that has preserved a peace of enormous benefit to Americans. Immigrants
commit <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/07/02/surprise-donald-trump-is-wrong-about-immigrants-and-crime/">fewer crimes</a>than native-born Americans and take jobs that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/08/06/mexican-immigrants-will-move-for-low-skill-jobs-no-one-else-will/" target="_blank">no one else will</a>. Muslims are the <a href="http://fas.org/irp/threat/nctc2011.pdf" target="_blank">primary victims</a> of
Islamist terrorism, and Muslim Americans, including thousands who have
served in the military, are as patriotic as anyone else […]</div>
<div id="U1100744773779NHE">
‘Mr. Trump campaigns by insult and denigration, insinuation and wild accusation: Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/05/03/donald-trump-associates-ted-cruzs-father-with-jfks-assassin/" target="_blank">assassination</a> of President John F. Kennedy; Hillary Clinton may be <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-escalates-attack-on-bill-clinton/2016/05/23/ed109acc-2100-11e6-8690-f14ca9de2972_story.html" target="_blank">guilty of murder</a>; Mr. Obama is a traitor who <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/06/13/donald-trump-suggests-president-obama-was-involved-with-orlando-shooting/" target="_blank">wants Muslims to attack</a>.
The Republican Party has moved the lunatic fringe onto center stage,
with discourse that renders impossible the kind of substantive debate
upon which any civil democracy depends […]</div>
<div id="U11007447737796UF">
‘The party’s failure of judgment leaves the
nation’s future where it belongs, in the hands of voters. Many Americans
do not like either candidate this year . We have <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/clintons-inexcusable-willful-disregard-for-the-rules/2016/05/25/0089e942-22ae-11e6-9e7f-57890b612299_story.html" shape="rect" target="_blank" title="www.washingtonpost.com">criticized</a> the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/its-time-for-hillary-clinton-to-hold-more-news-conferences/2016/06/06/bae05018-2c29-11e6-9de3-6e6e7a14000c_story.html" shape="rect" title="www.washingtonpost.com">in</a> the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-voters-need-answers-about-the-clinton-emails/2016/02/07/ef5f02c0-cab9-11e5-88ff-e2d1b4289c2f_story.html?tid=a_inl" shape="rect" target="_blank" title="www.washingtonpost.com">past</a> and
will do so again when warranted. But we do not believe that she (or the
Libertarian and Green party candidates, for that matter) represents a
threat to the Constitution. Mr. Trump is a unique and present danger.’</div>
</blockquote>
It is stunning to think what one must be willing to overlook in order to vote for this man.<br />
The only way to stop this danger from becoming a reality is to vote
in November. Vote for whichever candidate most aligns with your values,
but vote. The future of our country depends on it.<br />
<br />
<br />
...
<b>"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences." </b> - Winston Churchill, <u>The Gathering Storm</u>
<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/1600/US%20of%20Canada.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/320/US%20of%20Canada.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; margin: 0 10px 10px 0;" /></a>Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5752215.post-78127684462819267002016-07-18T15:18:00.001-07:002016-07-18T16:23:09.529-07:00Trump's “stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance” --ghostwriter<h1 class="title" itemprop="headline">
Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All</h1>
<h2 class="dek" itemprop="alternativeHeadline">
“The
Art of the Deal” made America see Trump as a charmer with an unfailing
knack for business. Tony Schwartz helped create that myth—and regrets
it.</h2>
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<figcaption class="caption" itemprop="description"><span class="caption-text">“I put lipstick on a pig,” Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter, says. He feels “deep remorse.” </span><span class="credit" itemprop="copyrightHolder" title="Illustration by Javier Jaén"></span> </figcaption>
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Last
June, as dusk fell outside Tony Schwartz’s sprawling house, on a leafy
back road in Riverdale, New York, he pulled out his laptop and caught up
with the day’s big news: Donald J. Trump had declared his candidacy for
President. As Schwartz watched a video of the speech, he began to feel
personally implicated.</div>
<div data-wc="72">
Trump, facing
a crowd that had gathered in the lobby of Trump Tower, on Fifth Avenue,
laid out his qualifications, saying, “We need a leader that wrote ‘The
Art of the Deal.’ ” If that was so, Schwartz thought, then he, not
Trump, should be running. Schwartz dashed off a tweet: “Many thanks
Donald Trump for suggesting I run for President, based on the fact that I
wrote ‘The Art of the Deal.’ ”</div>
<div data-wc="105">
Schwartz
had ghostwritten Trump’s 1987 breakthrough memoir, earning a joint
byline on the cover, half of the book’s five-hundred-thousand-dollar
advance, and half of the royalties. The book was a phenomenal success,
spending forty-eight weeks on the <i>Times</i> best-seller list,
thirteen of them at No. 1. More than a million copies have been bought,
generating several million dollars in royalties. The book expanded
Trump’s renown far beyond New York City, making him an emblem of the
successful tycoon. Edward Kosner, the former editor and publisher of <i>New York</i>, where Schwartz worked as a writer at the time, says, “Tony created Trump. He’s Dr. Frankenstein.”</div>
<div data-wc="148">
Starting
in late 1985, Schwartz spent eighteen months with Trump—camping out in
his office, joining him on his helicopter, tagging along at meetings,
and spending weekends with him at his Manhattan apartment and his
Florida estate. During that period, Schwartz felt, he had got to know
him better than almost anyone else outside the Trump family. Until
Schwartz posted the tweet, though, he had not spoken publicly about
Trump for decades. It had never been his ambition to be a ghostwriter,
and he had been glad to move on. But, as he watched a replay of the new
candidate holding forth for forty-five minutes, he noticed something
strange: over the decades, Trump appeared to have convinced himself that
he <i>had</i> written the book. Schwartz recalls thinking, “If he
could lie about that on Day One—when it was so easily refuted—he is
likely to lie about anything.”</div>
<div data-wc="124">
<br />
It
seemed improbable that Trump’s campaign would succeed, so Schwartz told
himself that he needn’t worry much. But, as Trump denounced Mexican
immigrants as “rapists,” near the end of the speech, Schwartz felt
anxious. He had spent hundreds of hours observing Trump firsthand, and
felt that he had an unusually deep understanding of what he regarded as
Trump’s beguiling strengths and disqualifying weaknesses. Many
Americans, however, saw Trump as a charmingly brash entrepreneur with an
unfailing knack for business—a mythical image that Schwartz had helped
create. “It pays to trust your instincts,” Trump says in the book,
adding that he was set to make hundreds of millions of dollars after
buying a hotel that he hadn’t even walked through.</div>
<div data-wc="114">
<br />
In
the subsequent months, as Trump defied predictions by establishing
himself as the front-runner for the Republican nomination, Schwartz’s
desire to set the record straight grew. He had long since left
journalism to launch the Energy Project, a consulting firm that promises
to improve employees’ productivity by helping them boost their
“physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual” morale. It was a successful
company, with clients such as Facebook, and Schwartz’s colleagues urged
him to avoid the political fray. But the prospect of President Trump
terrified him. It wasn’t because of Trump’s ideology—Schwartz doubted
that he had one. The problem was Trump’s personality, which he
considered pathologically impulsive and self-centered.</div>
<div data-wc="86">
<br />
Schwartz
thought about publishing an article describing his reservations about
Trump, but he hesitated, knowing that, since he’d cashed in on the
flattering “Art of the Deal,” his credibility and his motives would be
seen as suspect. Yet watching the campaign was excruciating. Schwartz
decided that if he kept mum and Trump was elected he’d never forgive
himself. In June, he agreed to break his silence and give his first
candid interview about the Trump he got to know while acting as his
Boswell.</div>
<div data-wc="65">
<br />
“I put lipstick on a pig,”
he said. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to
presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him
more appealing than he is.” He went on, “I genuinely believe that if
Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility
it will lead to the end of civilization.”</div>
<div data-wc="34">
If
he were writing “The Art of the Deal” today, Schwartz said, it would be
a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would
call it, he answered, “The Sociopath.”</div>
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<div class="descender" data-wc="86">
<br />
The
idea of Trump writing an autobiography didn’t originate with either
Trump or Schwartz. It began with Si Newhouse, the media magnate whose
company, Advance Publications, owned Random House at the time, and
continues to own Condé Nast, the parent company of this magazine. “It
was very definitely, and almost uniquely, Si Newhouse’s idea,” Peter
Osnos, who edited the book, recalls. <i>GQ</i>, which Condé Nast also owns, had published a cover story on Trump, and Newhouse noticed that newsstand sales had been <span id="correct">unusually</span> strong.</div>
<div data-wc="92">
Newhouse
called Trump about the project, then visited him to discuss it. Random
House continued the pursuit with a series of meetings. At one point,
Howard Kaminsky, who ran Random House then, wrapped a thick Russian
novel in a dummy cover that featured a photograph of Trump looking like a
conquering hero; at the top was Trump’s name, in large gold block
lettering. Kaminsky recalls that Trump was pleased by the mockup, but
had one suggestion: “Please make my name much bigger.” After securing
the half-million-dollar advance, Trump signed a contract.</div>
<div data-wc="175">
Around
this time, Schwartz, who was one of the leading young magazine writers
of the day, stopped by Trump’s office, in Trump Tower. Schwartz had
written about Trump before. I<b>n 1985, he’d published a piece in <i>New York</i>
called “A Different Kind of Donald Trump Story,” which portrayed him
not as a brilliant mogul but as a ham-fisted thug who had unsuccessfully
tried to evict rent-controlled and rent-stabilized tenants from a
building that he had bought on Central Park South. Trump’s efforts—which
included a plan to house homeless people in the building in order to
harass the tenants—became what Schwartz described as a “fugue of
failure, a farce of fumbling and bumbling.”</b> An accompanying cover
portrait depicted Trump as unshaven, unpleasant-looking, and shiny with
sweat. Yet, to Schwartz’s amazement, Trump loved the article. He hung
the cover on a wall of his office, and sent a fan note to Schwartz, on
his gold-embossed personal stationery. “Everybody seems to have read
it,” Trump enthused in the note, which Schwartz has kept.</div>
<div data-wc="95">
“I
was shocked,” Schwartz told me. “Trump didn’t fit any model of human
being I’d ever met. He was obsessed with publicity, and he didn’t care
what you wrote.” He went on, “Trump only takes two positions. Either
you’re a scummy loser, liar, whatever, or you’re the greatest. I became
the greatest. He wanted to be seen as a tough guy, and he loved being on
the cover.” Schwartz wrote him back, saying, “Of all the people I’ve
written about over the years, you are certainly the best sport.”</div>
<div data-wc="67">
And so Schwartz had returned for more, this time to conduct an interview for <i>Playboy</i>.
But to his frustration Trump kept making cryptic, monosyllabic
statements. “He mysteriously wouldn’t answer my questions,” Schwartz
said. After twenty minutes, he said, Trump explained that he didn’t want
to reveal anything new about himself—he had just signed a lucrative
book deal and needed to save his best material.</div>
<div data-wc="6">
“What kind of book?” Schwartz said.</div>
<div data-wc="4">
“My autobiography,” Trump replied.</div>
<div data-wc="12">
“You’re only thirty-eight—you don’t have one yet!” Schwartz joked.</div>
<div data-wc="5">
“Yeah, I know,” Trump said.</div>
<div data-wc="27">
“If I were you,” Schwartz recalls telling him, “I’d write a book called ‘The Art of the Deal.’ <i>That’s</i> something people would be interested in.”</div>
<div data-wc="11">
“You’re right,” Trump agreed. “Do you want to write it?”</div>
<div data-wc="249">
Schwartz
thought it over for several weeks. He knew that he would be making a
Faustian bargain. A lifelong liberal, he was hardly an admirer of
Trump’s ruthless and single-minded pursuit of profit. “It was one of a
number of times in my life when I was divided between the Devil and the
higher side,” he told me. He had grown up in a bourgeois, intellectual
family in Manhattan, and had attended élite private schools, but he was
not as wealthy as some of his classmates—and, unlike many of them, he
had no trust fund. “I grew up privileged,” he said. “But my parents made
it clear: ‘You’re on your own.’ ” Around the time Trump made his offer,
Schwartz’s wife, Deborah Pines, became pregnant with their second
daughter, and he worried that the family wouldn’t fit into their
Manhattan apartment, whose mortgage was already too high. “I was overly
worried about money,” Schwartz said. “I thought money would keep me safe
and secure—or that was my rationalization.” At the same time, he knew
that if he took Trump’s money and adopted Trump’s voice his journalism
career would be badly damaged. His heroes were such literary nonfiction
writers as Tom Wolfe, John McPhee, and David Halberstam. Being a
ghostwriter was hackwork. In the end, though, Schwartz had his price. He
told Trump that if he would give him half the advance and half the
book’s royalties he’d take the job.</div>
<div data-wc="54">
Such
terms are unusually generous for a ghostwriter. Trump, despite having a
reputation as a tough negotiator, agreed on the spot. “It was a huge
windfall,” Schwartz recalls. “But I knew I was selling out. Literally,
the term was invented to describe what I did.” Soon <i>Spy</i> was calling him “former journalist Tony Schwartz.”</div>
<div class="descender" data-wc="123">
Schwartz
thought that “The Art of the Deal” would be an easy project. The book’s
structure would be simple: he’d chronicle half a dozen or so of Trump’s
biggest real-estate deals, dispense some bromides about how to succeed
in business, and fill in Trump’s life story. For research, he planned to
interview Trump on a series of Saturday mornings. The first session
didn’t go as planned, however. After Trump gave him a tour of his
marble-and-gilt apartment atop Trump Tower—which, to Schwartz, looked
unlived-in, like the lobby of a hotel—they began to talk. But the
discussion was soon hobbled by what Schwartz regards as one of Trump’s
most essential characteristics: “He has no attention span.”</div>
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<div data-wc="127">
In
those days, Schwartz recalls, Trump was generally affable with
reporters, offering short, amusingly immodest quotes on demand. Trump
had been forthcoming with him during the <i>New York</i> interview,
but it hadn’t required much time or deep reflection. For the book,
though, Trump needed to provide him with sustained, thoughtful
recollections. He asked Trump to describe his childhood in detail. After
sitting for only a few minutes in his suit and tie, Trump became
impatient and irritable. He looked fidgety, Schwartz recalls, “like a
kindergartner who can’t sit still in a classroom.” Even when Schwartz
pressed him, Trump seemed to remember almost nothing of his youth, and
made it clear that he was bored. Far more quickly than Schwartz had
expected, Trump ended the meeting.</div>
<div data-wc="27">
Week
after week, the pattern repeated itself. Schwartz tried to limit the
sessions to smaller increments of time, but Trump’s contributions
remained oddly truncated and superficial.</div>
<div data-wc="129">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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“Trump
has been written about a thousand ways from Sunday, but this
fundamental aspect of who he is doesn’t seem to be fully understood,”
Schwartz told me. “It’s implicit in a lot of what people write, but it’s
never explicit—or, at least, I haven’t seen it. And that is that<b> it’s
impossible to keep him focused on any topic, other than his own
self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then . . . ”
</b>Schwartz trailed off, shaking his head in amazement. He regards Trump’s
inability to concentrate as alarming in a Presidential candidate. <b>“If he
had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to
imagine him paying attention over a long period of time,” he said.</b></div>
<div data-wc="86">
In
a recent phone interview, Trump told me that, to the contrary, he has
the skill that matters most in a crisis: the ability to forge
compromises. The reason he touted “The Art of the Deal” in his
announcement, he explained, was that he believes that recent Presidents
have lacked his toughness and finesse: “Look at the trade deficit with
China. Look at the Iran deal. I’ve made a fortune by making deals. I do
that. I do that well. That’s what I do.”</div>
<div data-wc="89">
But
Schwartz believes that Trump’s short attention span has left him with<b>
“a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance.” He
said, “That’s why he so prefers TV as his first news source—information
comes in easily digestible sound bites.” He added, “I seriously doubt
that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.” </b>
During the eighteen months that he observed Trump, Schwartz said, he
never saw a book on Trump’s desk, or elsewhere in his office, or in his
apartment.</div>
<div data-wc="133">
Other journalists have
noticed Trump’s apparent lack of interest in reading. In May, Megyn
Kelly, of Fox News, asked him to name his favorite book, other than the
Bible or “The Art of the Deal.” Trump picked the 1929 novel “All Quiet
on the Western Front.” Evidently suspecting that many years had elapsed
since he’d read it, Kelly asked Trump to talk about the most recent book
he’d read. “I read passages, I read areas, I’ll read chapters—I don’t
have the time,” Trump said. As <i>The New Republic</i> noted recently,
this attitude is not shared by most U.S. Presidents, including Barack
Obama, a habitual consumer of current books, and George W. Bush, who
reportedly engaged in a fiercely competitive book-reading contest with
his political adviser Karl Rove.</div>
<div data-wc="119">
Trump’s
first wife, Ivana, famously claimed that Trump kept a copy of Adolf
Hitler’s collected speeches, “My New Order,” in a cabinet beside his
bed. In 1990, Trump’s friend Marty Davis, who was then an executive at
Paramount, added credence to this story, telling Marie Brenner, of <i>Vanity Fair</i>,
that he had given Trump the book. “I thought he would find it
interesting,” Davis told her. When Brenner asked Trump about it,
however, he mistakenly identified the volume as a different work by
Hitler: “Mein Kampf.” Apparently, he had not so much as read the title. “<i>If</i> I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them,” Trump told Brenner.</div>
<div class="descender" data-wc="87">
Growing
desperate, Schwartz devised a strategy for trapping Trump into giving
more material. He made plans to spend the weekend with Trump at
Mar-a-Lago, his mansion in Palm Beach, where there would be fewer
distractions. As they chatted in the garden, Ivana icily walked by,
clearly annoyed that Schwartz was competing for her husband’s limited
free time. Trump again grew impatient. Long before lunch on Saturday,
Schwartz recalls, Trump “essentially threw a fit.” He stood up and
announced that he couldn’t stand any more questions.</div>
<div data-wc="169">
Schwartz
went to his room, called his literary agent, Kathy Robbins, and told
her that he couldn’t do the book. (Robbins confirms this.) As Schwartz
headed back to New York, though, he came up with another plan. He would
propose eavesdropping on Trump’s life by following him around on the job
and, more important, by listening in on his office phone calls. That
way, extracting extended reflections from Trump would not be required.
When Schwartz presented the idea to Trump, he loved it. Almost every day
from then on, Schwartz sat about eight feet away from him in the Trump
Tower office, listening on an extension of Trump’s phone line. Schwartz
says that none of the bankers, lawyers, brokers, and reporters who
called Trump realized that they were being monitored. The calls usually
didn’t last long, and Trump’s assistant facilitated the
conversation-hopping. While he was talking with someone, she often came
in with a Post-it note informing him of the next caller on hold.</div>
<div data-wc="98">
“He
was playing people,” Schwartz recalls. On the phone with business
associates, Trump would flatter, bully, and occasionally get mad, but
always in a calculated way. Before the discussion ended, Trump would
“share the news of his latest success,” Schwartz says. Instead of saying
goodbye at the end of a call, Trump customarily signed off with “You’re
the greatest!” There was not a single call that Trump deemed too
private for Schwartz to hear. “He loved the attention,” Schwartz
recalls. “If he could have had three hundred thousand people listening
in, he would have been even happier.”</div>
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<div data-wc="146">
This
year, Schwartz has heard some argue that there must be a more
thoughtful and nuanced version of Donald Trump that he is keeping in
reserve for after the campaign. “There isn’t,” Schwartz insists. “There
is no private Trump.” This is not a matter of hindsight. While working
on “The Art of the Deal,” Schwartz kept a journal in which he expressed
his amazement at Trump’s personality, writing that Trump seemed driven
entirely by a need for public attention. “All he is is ‘stomp, stomp,
stomp’—recognition from outside, bigger, more, a whole series of things
that go nowhere in particular,” he observed, on October 21, 1986. But,
as he noted in the journal a few days later, “the book will be far more
successful if Trump is a sympathetic character—even weirdly
sympathetic—than if he is just hateful or, worse yet, a one-dimensional
blowhard.”</div>
<div class="descender" data-wc="276">
Eavesdropping
solved the interview problem, but it presented a new one. After hearing
Trump’s discussions about business on the phone, Schwartz asked him
brief follow-up questions. He then tried to amplify the material he got
from Trump by calling others involved in the deals. But their accounts
often directly conflicted with Trump’s. <b>“Lying is second nature to him,”
Schwartz said. “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the
ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given
moment is true, or sort of true, or at least <i>ought</i> to be true.”
</b>Often, Schwartz said, the lies that Trump told him were about
money—“how much he had paid for something, or what a building he owned
was worth, or how much one of his casinos was earning when it was
actually on its way to bankruptcy.” Trump bragged that he paid only
eight million dollars for Mar-a-Lago, but omitted that he bought a
nearby strip of beach for a record sum. After gossip columns reported,
erroneously, that Prince Charles was considering buying several
apartments in Trump Tower, Trump implied that he had no idea where the
rumor had started. (“It certainly didn’t hurt us,” he says, in “The Art
of the Deal.”) Wayne Barrett, a reporter for the <i>Village Voice</i>,
later revealed that Trump himself had planted the story with
journalists. Schwartz also suspected that Trump engaged in such media
tricks, and asked him about a story making the rounds—that Trump often
called up news outlets using a pseudonym. Trump didn’t deny it. As
Schwartz recalls, he smirked and said, “You like that, do you?”</div>
<div data-wc="34">
Schwartz
says of Trump<b>, “He lied strategically. He had a complete lack of
conscience about it.” Since most people are “constrained by the truth,”
Trump’s indifference to it “gave him a strange advantage.”</b></div>
<div data-wc="89">
When
challenged about the facts, Schwartz says, Trump would often double
down, repeat himself, and grow belligerent. This quality was recently on
display after Trump posted on Twitter a derogatory image of Hillary
Clinton that contained a six-pointed star lifted from a
white-supremacist Web site. Campaign staffers took the image down, but
two days later Trump angrily defended it, insisting that there was no
anti-Semitic implication. <b>Whenever “the thin veneer of Trump’s vanity is
challenged,” Schwartz says, he overreacts—not an ideal quality in a
head of state.</b></div>
<br />
<br />
<div data-wc="126">
<br />
When
Schwartz began writing “The Art of the Deal,” he realized that he
needed to put an acceptable face on Trump’s loose relationship with the
truth. So he concocted an artful euphemism. Writing in Trump’s voice, he
explained to the reader, “I play to people’s fantasies. . . . People
want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the
most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of
exaggeration—and it’s a very effective form of promotion.” Schwartz now
disavows the passage. “Deceit,” he told me, is never “innocent.” He
added, “ ‘Truthful hyperbole’ is a contradiction in terms. It’s a way of
saying, ‘It’s a lie, but who cares?’ ” Trump, he said, loved the
phrase.</div>
<div data-wc="81">
In his journal, Schwartz
describes the process of trying to make Trump’s voice palatable in the
book. It was kind of “a trick,” he writes, to mimic Trump’s blunt,
staccato, no-apologies delivery while making him seem almost boyishly
appealing. One strategy was to make it appear that Trump was just having
fun at the office. “I try not to take any of what’s happened too
seriously,” Trump says in the book. “The real excitement is playing the
game.”</div>
<div data-wc="252">
In his journal, Schwartz
wrote,<b> “Trump stands for many of the things I abhor: his willingness to
run over people, the gaudy, tacky, gigantic obsessions, the absolute
lack of interest in anything beyond power and money.”</b> Looking back at
the text now, Schwartz says, “I created a character far more winning
than Trump actually is.” The first line of the book is an example. “I
don’t do it for the money,” Trump declares. “I’ve got enough, much more
than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other
people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like
making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.” Schwartz
now laughs at this depiction of Trump as a devoted artisan. “<i>Of course</i>
he’s in it for the money,” he said. “One of the most deep and basic
needs he has is to prove that ‘I’m richer than you.’ ” As for the idea
that making deals is a form of poetry, Schwartz says, “He was incapable
of saying something like that—it wouldn’t even be in his vocabulary.” He
saw Trump as driven not by a pure love of dealmaking but by an
insatiable hunger for “money, praise, and celebrity.” Often, after
spending the day with Trump, and watching him pile one hugely expensive
project atop the next, like a circus performer spinning plates, Schwartz
would go home and tell his wife, “He’s a living black hole!”</div>
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<div data-wc="110">
Schwartz
reminded himself that he was being paid to tell Trump’s story, not his
own, but the more he worked on the project the more disturbing he found
it. In his journal, he describes the hours he spent with Trump as
“draining” and “deadening.” Schwartz told me that Trump’s need for
attention is “completely compulsive,” and that his bid for the
Presidency is part of a continuum. “He’s managed to keep increasing the
dose for forty years,” Schwartz said. After he’d spent decades as a
tabloid titan, “the only thing left was running for President. If he
could run for emperor of the world, he would.”</div>
<div data-wc="65">
Rhetorically,
Schwartz’s aim in “The Art of the Deal” was to present Trump as the
hero of every chapter, but, after looking into some of his supposedly
brilliant deals, Schwartz concluded that there were cases in which there
was no way to make Trump look good. So he sidestepped unflattering
incidents and details. “I didn’t consider it my job to investigate,” he
says.</div>
<div data-wc="284">
Schwartz also tried to avoid
the strong whiff of cronyism that hovered over some deals. In his 1986
journal, he describes what a challenge it was to “put his best foot
forward” in writing about one of Trump’s first triumphs: his
development, starting in 1975, of the Grand Hyatt Hotel, on the site of
the former Commodore Hotel, next to Grand Central Terminal. In order to
afford the hotel, Trump required an extremely large tax abatement.
Richard Ravitch, who was then in charge of the agency that had the
authority to grant such tax breaks to developers, recalls that he
declined to grant the abatement, and Trump got “so unpleasant I had to
tell him to get out.” Trump got it anyway, largely because key city
officials had received years of donations from his father, Fred Trump,
who was a major real-estate developer in Queens. Wayne Barrett, whose
reporting for the <i>Voice</i> informed his definitive 1991 book,
“Trump: The Deals and the Downfall,” says, “It was all Fred’s political
connections that created the abatement.” In addition, Trump snookered
rivals into believing that he had an exclusive option from the city on
the project, when he didn’t. Trump also deceived his partner in the
deal, Jay Pritzker, the head of the Hyatt Hotel chain. Pritzker had
rejected an unfavorable term proposed by Trump, but at the closing Trump
forced it through, knowing that Pritzker was on a mountain in Nepal and
could not be reached. Schwartz wrote in his journal that “almost
everything” about the hotel deal had “an immoral cast.” But as the
ghostwriter he was “trying hard to find my way around” behavior that he
considered “if not reprehensible, at least morally questionable.”</div>
<div data-wc="187">
Many
tall tales that Trump told Schwartz contained a kernel of truth but
made him out to be cleverer than he was. One of Trump’s favorite stories
was about how he had tricked the company that owned Holiday Inn into
becoming his partner in an Atlantic City casino. Trump claimed that he
had quieted executives’ fears of construction delays by ordering his
construction supervisor to make a vacant lot that he owned look like
“the most active construction site in the history of the world.” As
Trump tells it in “The Art of the Deal,” there were so many dump trucks
and bulldozers pushing around dirt and filling holes that had just been
dug that when Holiday Inn executives visited the site it “looked as if
we were in the midst of building the Grand Coulee Dam.” The stunt, Trump
claimed, pushed the deal through. After the book came out, though, a
consultant for Trump’s casinos, Al Glasgow, who is now deceased, told
Schwartz, “It never happened.” There may have been one or two trucks,
but not the fleet that made it a great story.</div>
<div data-wc="56">
Schwartz
tamped down some of Trump’s swagger, but plenty of it remained. The
manuscript that Random House published was, depending on your
perspective, either entertainingly insightful or shamelessly
self-aggrandizing. To borrow a title from Norman Mailer, who frequently
attended prizefights at Trump’s Atlantic City hotels, the book could
have been called “Advertisements for Myself.”</div>
<div data-wc="118">
In
2005, Timothy L. O’Brien, an award-winning journalist who is currently
the executive editor of Bloomberg View, published “Trump Nation,” a
meticulous investigative biography. (Trump unsuccessfully sued him for
libel.) O’Brien has taken a close look at “The Art of the Deal,” and he
told me that it might be best characterized as a “nonfiction work of
fiction.” Trump’s life story, as told by Schwartz, honestly chronicled a
few setbacks, such as Trump’s disastrous 1983 purchase of the New
Jersey Generals, a football team in the flailing United States Football
League. But O’Brien believes that Trump used the book to turn almost
every step of his life, both personal and professional, into a
“glittering fable.”</div>
<div data-wc="87">
Some of the falsehoods in “The Art of the Deal” are minor. <i>Spy</i>
upended Trump’s claims that Ivana had been a “top model” and an
alternate on the Czech Olympic ski team. Barrett notes that in “The Art
of the Deal” Trump describes his father as having been born in New
Jersey to Swedish parents; in fact, he was born in the Bronx to German
parents. (Decades later, Trump spread falsehoods about Obama’s origins,
claiming it was possible that the President was born in Africa.)</div>
<div data-wc="210">
In
“The Art of the Deal,” Trump portrays himself as a warm family man with
endless admirers. He praises Ivana’s taste and business skill—“I said
you can’t bet against Ivana, and she proved me right.” But Schwartz
noticed little warmth or communication between Trump and Ivana, and he
later learned that while “The Art of the Deal” was being written Trump
began an affair with Marla Maples, who became his second wife. (He
divorced Ivana in 1992.) As far as Schwartz could tell, Trump spent very
little time with his family and had no close friends. In “The Art of
the Deal,” Trump describes Roy Cohn, his personal lawyer, in the warmest
terms, calling him “the sort of guy who’d be there at your hospital
bed . . . literally standing by you to the death.” Cohn, who in the
fifties assisted Senator Joseph McCarthy in his vicious crusade against
Communism, was closeted. He felt abandoned by Trump when he became
fatally ill from <small>AIDS</small>, and said, “Donald pisses ice
water.” Schwartz says of Trump, <b>“He’d like people when they were
helpful, and turn on them when they weren’t. It wasn’t personal. He’s a
transactional man—it was all about what you could do for him.”</b></div>
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<div class="descender" data-wc="77">
According
to Barrett, among the most misleading aspects of “The Art of the Deal”
was the idea that Trump made it largely on his own, with only minimal
help from his father, Fred. Barrett, in his book, notes that Trump once
declared, “The working man likes me because he knows I didn’t inherit
what I’ve built,” and that in “The Art of the Deal” he derides wealthy
heirs as members of “the Lucky Sperm Club.”</div>
<div data-wc="291">
Trump’s
self-portrayal as a Horatio Alger figure has buttressed his populist
appeal in 2016. But his origins were hardly humble. Fred’s fortune,
based on his ownership of middle-income properties, wasn’t glamorous,
but it was sizable: in 2003, a few years after Fred died, Trump and his
siblings reportedly sold some of their father’s real-estate holdings for
half a billion dollars. In “The Art of the Deal,” Trump cites his
father as “the most important influence on me,” but in his telling his
father’s main legacy was teaching him the importance of “toughness.”
Beyond that, Schwartz says, Trump “barely talked about his father—he
didn’t want his success to be seen as having anything to do with him.”
But when Barrett investigated he found that Trump’s father was
instrumental in his son’s rise, financially and politically. In the
book, Trump says that “my energy and my enthusiasm” explain how, as a
twenty-nine-year-old with few accomplishments, he acquired the Grand
Hyatt Hotel. Barrett reports, however, that Trump’s father had to
co-sign the many contracts that the deal required. He also lent Trump
seven and a half million dollars to get started as a casino owner in
Atlantic City; at one point, when Trump couldn’t meet payments on other
loans, his father tried to tide him over by sending a lawyer to buy some
three million dollars’ worth of gambling chips. Barrett told me,
“Donald did make some smart moves himself, particularly in assembling
the site for the Trump Tower. That was a stroke of genius.” Nonetheless,
he said, “The notion that he’s a self-made man is a joke. But I guess
they couldn’t call the book ‘The Art of My Father’s Deals.’ ”</div>
<div data-wc="271">
The
other key myth perpetuated by “The Art of the Deal” was that Trump’s
intuitions about business were almost flawless. “The book helped fuel
the notion that he couldn’t fail,” Barrett said. But, unbeknown to
Schwartz and the public, by late 1987, when the book came out, Trump was
heading toward what Barrett calls “simultaneous personal and
professional self-destruction.” O’Brien agrees that during the next
several years Trump’s life unravelled. The divorce from Ivana reportedly
cost him twenty-five million dollars. Meanwhile, he was in the midst of
what O’Brien calls “a crazy shopping spree that resulted in
unmanageable debt.” He was buying the Plaza Hotel and also planning to
erect “the tallest building in the world,” on the former rail yards that
he had bought on the West Side. In 1987, the city denied him permission
to construct such a tall skyscraper, but in “The Art of the Deal” he
brushed off this failure with a one-liner: “I can afford to wait.”
O’Brien says, “The reality is that he <i>couldn’t</i> afford to wait.
He was telling the media that the carrying costs were three million
dollars, when in fact they were more like twenty million.” Trump was
also building a third casino in Atlantic City, the Taj, which he
promised would be “the biggest casino in history.” He bought the Eastern
Air Lines shuttle that operated out of New York, Boston, and
Washington, rechristening it the Trump Shuttle, and acquired a giant
yacht, the Trump Princess. “He was on a total run of complete and utter
self-absorption,” Barrett says, adding, “It’s kind of like now.”</div>
<div data-wc="75">
Schwartz
said that when he was writing the book “the greatest percentage of
Trump’s assets was in casinos, and he made it sound like each casino was
more successful than the last. But every one of them was failing.” He
went on, “I think he was just spinning. I don’t think he could have
believed it at the time. He was losing millions of dollars a day. He had
to have been terrified.”</div>
<div data-wc="65">
In 1992,
the journalist David Cay Johnston published a book about casinos,
“Temples of Chance,” and cited a net-worth statement from 1990 that
assessed Trump’s personal wealth. It showed that Trump owed nearly three
hundred million dollars more to his creditors than his assets were
worth. The next year, his company was forced into bankruptcy—the first
of six such instances. The Trump meteor had crashed.</div>
<div data-wc="168">
But
in “The Art of the Deal,” O’Brien told me, “Trump shrewdly and
unabashedly promoted an image of himself as a dealmaker nonpareil who
could always get the best out of every situation—and who can now deliver
America from its malaise.” This idealized version was presented to an
exponentially larger audience, O’Brien noted, when Mark Burnett, the
reality-television producer, read “The Art of the Deal” and decided to
base a new show on it, “The Apprentice,” with Trump as the star. The
first season of the show, which premièred in 2004, opens with Trump in
the back of a limousine, boasting, “I’ve mastered the art of the deal,
and I’ve turned the name Trump into the highest-quality brand.” An image
of the book’s cover flashes onscreen as Trump explains that, as the
“master,” he is now seeking an apprentice. O’Brien said, “ ‘The
Apprentice’ is mythmaking on steroids. There’s a straight line from the
book to the show to the 2016 campaign.”</div>
<a class="tny-page" data-total-words="5943" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="/7"></a><br />
<div data-wc="74">
It
took Schwartz a little more than a year to write “The Art of the Deal.”
In the spring of 1987, he sent the manuscript to Trump, who returned it
to him shortly afterward. There were a few red marks made with a
fat-tipped Magic Marker, most of which deleted criticisms that Trump had
made of powerful individuals he no longer wanted to offend, such as Lee
Iacocca. Otherwise, Schwartz says, Trump changed almost nothing.</div>
<div data-wc="96">
In
my phone interview with Trump, he initially said of Schwartz, “Tony was
very good. He was the co-author.” But he dismissed Schwartz’s account
of the writing process. “He didn’t write the book,” Trump told me. “<i>I</i>
wrote the book. I wrote the book. It was my book. And it was a No. 1
best-seller, and one of the best-selling business books of all time.
Some say it was the best-selling business book ever.” (It is not.)
Howard Kaminsky, the former Random House head, laughed and said, “Trump
didn’t write a postcard for us!”</div>
<div data-wc="58">
Trump
was far more involved in the book’s promotion. He wooed booksellers and
made one television appearance after another. He publicly promised to
donate his cut of the book’s royalties to charity. He even made a
surprise trip to New Hampshire, where he stirred additional publicity by
floating the possibility that he might run for President.</div>
<div data-wc="116">
In
December of 1987, a month after the book was published, Trump hosted an
extravagant book party in the pink marble atrium of Trump Tower. Klieg
lights lit a red carpet outside the building. Inside, nearly a thousand
guests, in black tie, were served champagne and fed slices of a giant
cake replica of Trump Tower, which was wheeled in by a parade of women
waving red sparklers. The boxing promoter Don King greeted the crowd in a
floor-length mink coat, and the comedian Jackie Mason introduced Donald
and Ivana with the words “Here comes the king and queen!” Trump toasted
Schwartz, saying teasingly that he had at least tried to teach him how
to make money.</div>
<div data-wc="174">
Schwartz got more
of an education the next day, when he and Trump spoke on the phone.
After chatting briefly about the party, Trump informed Schwartz that, as
his ghostwriter, he owed him for half the event’s cost, which was in
the six figures. Schwartz was dumbfounded. “He wanted me to split the
cost of entertaining his list of nine hundred second-rate celebrities?”
Schwartz had, in fact, learned a few things from watching Trump. He
drastically negotiated down the amount that he agreed to pay, to a few
thousand dollars, and then wrote Trump a letter promising to write a
check not to Trump but to a charity of Schwartz’s choosing. It was a
page out of Trump’s playbook. In the past seven years, Trump has
promised to give millions of dollars to charity, but reporters for the
Washington <i>Post</i> found that they could document only ten
thousand dollars in donations—and they uncovered no direct evidence that
Trump made charitable contributions from money earned by “The Art of
the Deal.”</div>
<div class="descender" data-wc="101">
Not
long after the discussion of the party bills, Trump approached Schwartz
about writing a sequel, for which Trump had been offered a seven-figure
advance. This time, however, he offered Schwartz only a third of the
profits. He pointed out that, because the advance was much bigger, the
payout would be, too. But Schwartz said no. Feeling deeply alienated, he
instead wrote a book called “What Really Matters,” about the search for
meaning in life. After working with Trump, Schwartz writes, he felt a
“gnawing emptiness” and became a “seeker,” longing to “be connected to
something timeless and essential, more real.”</div>
<div data-wc="105">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5752215" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a>Schwartz
told me that he has decided to pledge all royalties from sales of “The
Art of the Deal” in 2016 to pointedly chosen charities: the National
Immigration Law Center, Human Rights Watch, the Center for the Victims
of Torture, the National Immigration Forum, and the Tahirih Justice
Center. He doesn’t feel that the gesture absolves him. “I’ll carry this
until the end of my life,” he said. “There’s no righting it. But I like
the idea that, the more copies that ‘The Art of the Deal’ sells, the
more money I can donate to the people whose rights Trump seeks to
abridge.”</div>
<div data-wc="96">
Schwartz expected Trump to
attack him for speaking out, and he was correct. Informed that Schwartz
had made critical remarks about him, and wouldn’t be voting for him,
Trump said, “He’s probably just doing it for the publicity.” He also
said, “Wow. That’s great disloyalty, because I made Tony rich. He owes a
lot to me. I helped him when he didn’t have two cents in his pocket.
It’s great disloyalty. I guess he thinks it’s good for him—but he’ll
find out it’s not good for him.”</div>
<div data-wc="51">
Minutes
after Trump got off the phone with me, Schwartz’s cell phone rang. “I
hear you’re not voting for me,” Trump said. “I just talked to <i>The New Yorker</i>—which, by the way, is a failing magazine that no one reads—and I heard you were critical of me.”</div>
<a class="tny-page" data-total-words="6814" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="/8"></a><br />
<div data-wc="17">
“You’re running for President,” Schwartz said. “I disagree with a lot of what you’re saying.”</div>
<div data-wc="85">
“That’s
your right, but then you should have just remained silent. I just want
to tell you that I think you’re very disloyal. Without me, you wouldn’t
be where you are now. I had a lot of choice of who to have write the
book, and I chose you, and I was very generous with you. I know that you
gave a lot of speeches and lectures using ‘The Art of the Deal.’ I
could have sued you, but I didn’t.”</div>
<div data-wc="12">
“My business has nothing to do with ‘The Art of the Deal.’ ”</div>
<div data-wc="8">
“That’s not what I’ve been told.”</div>
<div data-wc="14">
“You’re running for President of the United States. The stakes here are high.”</div>
<div data-wc="12">
“Yeah, they are,” he said. “Have a nice life.” Trump hung up.</div>
<div data-wc="96">
Schwartz
can understand why Trump feels stung, but he felt that he had to speak
up before it was too late. As for Trump’s anger toward him, he said, “I
don’t take it personally, because the truth is he didn’t mean it
personally. People are dispensable and disposable in Trump’s world.” If
Trump is elected President, he warned, “the millions of people who voted
for him and believe that he represents their interests will learn what
anyone who deals closely with him already knows—that he couldn’t care
less about them.”<br />
<br /></div>
</div>
</div>
Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5752215.post-8762708781406362472016-07-10T08:05:00.000-07:002016-07-10T08:05:06.433-07:00The Chilcot Report: Blair's classic case of cognitive dissonance<br />
We filter new information when it challenges our strongly-held
beliefs or judgements. We use a series of post hoc manoeuvres to reframe
anything inconvenient to our original position. We question the probity
of the evidence, or the credentials of the people who discovered it, or
their motives, or whatever. The more information that emerges to
challenge our perspective, the more creatively we search for new
justifications, and the more entrenched we become in our prior view.<br />
<br />
This tendency is called "cognitive dissonance". <br />
<figure class="media-landscape has-caption full-width">
<span class="image-and-copyright-container">
</span></figure> You can see the hallmarks of cognitive dissonance in
the build-up to and aftermath of the Iraq War. The Chilcot report made
pointed criticisms over the legal advice, lack of cabinet oversight and
post-war planning and policy. But let us focus on the way the primary
evidence used to justify war - namely, the existence of WMD - was
serially reframed. <br />
On 24 September 2002, before Tony's Big Iraq Adventure,
Tony Blair made a speech where he emphatically stated: "His [Saddam
Hussein's] WMD programme is active, detailed and growing… he has
existing plans for the use of weapons, which could be activated in 45
minutes…"<br />
<br />
The problem with this claim became apparent when Saddam's troops
didn't use such weapons to repel Western forces, and the initial search
for WMD drew a conspicuous blank. And yet, as the social psychologists
Jeff Stone and Nicholas Fernandez have pointed out in an essay on the
Iraq conflict, Blair didn't amend his view - he reframed the evidence.
In a speech to the House of Commons, he said: "There are literally
thousands of sites... but it is only now that the Iraq Survey Group has
been put together that a dedicated team of people… will be able to do
the job properly… I have no doubt that they will find the clearest
possible evidence of WMD."<br />
<br />
So,
to Blair, the lack of WMD didn't show that they were not actually
there. Rather, it showed that inspectors hadn't been looking hard
enough. Moreover, he had become more convinced of the existence of WMD,
not less so. <br />
Twelve months later, when the Iraq Survey Group
couldn't find the weapons either, Blair still couldn't accept that WMD
were not there. Instead, he changed tack again arguing in a speech that
"they could have been removed, they could have been hidden, they could
have been destroyed".<br />
<br />
So now, the lack of evidence for WMD in
Iraq was no longer because troops hadn't had enough time to find them,
or because of the inadequacy of the inspectors, but because Iraqi troops
had spirited them out of existence.<br />
<br />
But this stance soon became untenable, too. As the search continued in a
state of desperation, it became clear that not only were there no WMD,
but there were no remnants of them, either. Iraqi troops could not have
spirited them away. <br />
<br />
Blair now reached for a new justification for the decision to go to war.
"The problem is that I can apologise for the information that turned
out to be wrong, but I can't, sincerely at least, apologise for removing
Saddam," he said in a speech. "The world is a better place with Saddam
in prison."<br />
<br />
Classic case. <br />
<br />
<br />http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36744911<br />
<br />
<br />
(Afterthot: Let's not judge Tony too harshly--if your biggest blunder killed
thousands of your citizens and hundreds of thousands of human beings,
you'd grasp at anything that would help you sleep at night too. )Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5752215.post-50856907115942301592016-07-08T06:57:00.002-07:002016-07-08T06:57:30.140-07:00<div class="outer-wrap">
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<article class="article"><header class="article__header"><br /><h1 itemprop="name headline">
Study disguises climate change in different terms for scrutiny by economists
</h1>
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<a class="signature__img-wrap" href="http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/by/Amy-Mitchell-Whittington-gmdila" tabindex="-1">
<img alt="Amy Mitchell-Whittington" class="signature__img" itemprop="image" src="http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/m/e/k/9/3/image.imgtype.columnistThumbnail.60x60.png/1453801020376.jpg" title="" /></a>
<div class="signature__info">
<time class="signature__datetime" datetime="2016-07-08T06:25:29+1000" itemprop="datePublished">July 8 2016 - 6:25PM</time>
<ul>
<li class="signature__name" itemprop="author creator" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
<a href="http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/by/Amy-Mitchell-Whittington-gmdila" itemprop="url">
<h5 itemprop="name" rel="author">
Amy Mitchell-Whittington</h5>
</a>
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A climate-change study disguised with economic terms such as
profits and trade surplus has had analysts agreeing that statements from
climate-change deniers were "overwhelmingly" misleading.<br />
Data
from six climate change trends such as rising sea levels
was relabelled with terms relating to trade surplus, business profits or
population trends.<br />
<figure class="media media--photo is_fm-analytics-component-tracking is_fm-toggle" data-event-tracking-enabled="false" data-track-data="{"name_component":"Inline_Image"}" id="fm-id-6">
<figcaption class="media__caption">The study was taken up to show the facts of each climate change trend, without the politics. <cite> </cite>
</figcaption>
</figure>
Graphs were then presented to 22 economists and 30 statisticians to
review the data and determine if a statement that was related to each
graph was accurate.<br />
The study was conducted in England in 2014 and has been published in the journal <em>Global Environmental Change</em>.<br />
University
of Queensland School of Psychology researcher Timothy Ballard said each
statement was either from those who agreed with climate change or those
who didn't.<br />
<br />
"We found that those in the survey who were exposed
to these denier statements, even when translated into another context,
people overwhelmingly rated them as misleading," he said.<br />
<br />
"The other thing we did, half the time above the graph they were
exposed to these translated denier statements, the other half the time
they were translated into statements that accurately reflected the
scientific consensus.<br />
"When exposed to those statements, they rated the statements as accurate."<br />
<br />
Data
was sourced relating to the reduction in arctic ice, glacier mass,
rising sea levels and rising global temperatures and was put into
various economic contexts, Dr Ballard said.<br />
<br />
"For example, we have a
graph that shows the arctic ice decrease over the last 30 years and we
basically just changed the labels on the graphs so that instead of the
viewer thinking it was arctic ice, they think it is profits for this
fictitious company," he said.<br />
<br />
"The actual data and the trends they are seeing is exactly the same. The
individual glacier mass was translated into a population for
individuals or villages, sea level was translated into a daily currency
trade volume. There was nothing particularly special about these
new contexts, they just had trends that resembled the overall trends or,
in this case, sea level."<br />
<br />
Dr Ballard said the study was taken up to show the facts of each climate change trend, without the politics.<br />
"The
background is that climate change has gotten so politicised and
particularly those who are not believing in climate change, the deniers
or whatever you want to call them, their arguments were that you can't
take anything that climate scientists are saying because they are trying
to push their political agenda," he said.<br />
<br />
"If you can separate
the data from the political context then it might help to get a clearer
picture of the merits of each of the arguments.<br />
<br />
"We used
economists and statisticians in our sample, the logic was that these
people are very well trained in evaluating data and they should be well
equipped to whether these particular claims about the data are
accurate."<br />
Dr Ballard said inaccessibility to climate science left a lot of people unaware of the facts.<br />
"You
see a lot of climate deniers painting the picture of uncertainty and
using it is as a reason to cast out on the climate-change people," he
said.<br />
"They don't know either way and so they are potentially susceptible to weak arguments. The
arguments that have led scientists to conclude that climate change is
existing and is going to get worse, they are very complex ... these
arguments are not easily accessible. The whole idea of
decontextualisation, of not only understanding the merits but as a way of
presenting it, is certainly an interesting idea."<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>A species that evolved to prioritize short-term threats is pretty much doomed to ignore a long-term threat until it is too late. <br /><br />Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.</b><br />
<b></b><br /><i>"...and I'm just gettin warmed up!" </i>-- Mother Nature<br /> <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/1600/US%20of%20Canada.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/320/US%20of%20Canada.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; margin: 0 10px 10px 0;" /></a></div>
</article></div>
</div>
Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5752215.post-84953518088904684822016-04-27T11:17:00.000-07:002016-07-08T06:58:37.522-07:00<br />
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<b>Authoritarianism is not a new, untested concept</b>
< <a class="handle" href="https://forums.craigslist.org/?act=su&handle=faanta_stat" target="R"><span class="handle hnd">faanta_stat</span></a> >
<time>2016-04-24 13:37</time>
<br />
<br /></div>
<span class="quote">
<br />
Authoritarianism is not a new, untested concept in the American
electorate. Since the rise of Nazi Germany, it has been one of the most
widely studied ideas in social science. While its causes are still
debated, the political behavior of authoritarians is not. Authoritarians
obey. They rally to and follow strong leaders. And they respond
aggressively to outsiders, especially when they feel threatened. From
pledging to “make America great again” by building a wall on the border
to promising to close mosques and ban Muslims from visiting the United
States, Trump is playing directly to authoritarian inclinations.
<br />
<br />
Not all authoritarians are Republicans by any means; in national surveys
since 1992, many authoritarians have also self-identified as
independents and Democrats. And in the 2008 Democratic primary, the
political scientist Marc Hetherington found that authoritarianism
mattered more than income, ideology, gender, age and education in
predicting whether voters preferred Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama.
But Hetherington has also found, based on 14 years of polling, that
authoritarians have steadily moved from the Democratic to the Republican
Party over time. He hypothesizes that the trend began decades ago, as
Democrats embraced civil rights, gay rights, employment protections and
other political positions valuing freedom and equality. In my poll
results, authoritarianism was not a statistically significant factor in
the Democratic primary race, at least not so far, but it does appear to
be playing an important role on the Republican side. Indeed, 49 percent
of likely Republican primary voters I surveyed score in the top quarter
of the authoritarian scale—more than twice as many as Democratic voters.
<br />
<br />
Political pollsters have missed this key component of Trump’s support
because they simply don’t include questions about authoritarianism in
their polls. In addition to the typical battery of demographic, horse
race, thermometer-scale and policy questions, my poll asked a set of
four simple survey questions that political scientists have employed
since 1992 to measure inclination toward authoritarianism. These
questions pertain to child-rearing: whether it is more important for the
voter to have a child who is respectful or independent; obedient or
self-reliant; well-behaved or considerate; and well-mannered or curious.
Respondents who pick the first option in each of these questions are
strongly authoritarian.
<br />
<br />
Based on these questions, Trump was the only candidate—Republican or
Democrat—whose support among authoritarians was statistically
significant.
<br />
<br />
So what does this mean for the election? It doesn’t just help us
understand what motivates Trump’s backers—it suggests that his support
isn’t capped. In a statistical analysis of the polling results, I found
that Trump has already captured 43 percent of Republican primary voters
who are strong authoritarians, and 37 percent of Republican
authoritarians overall. A majority of Republican authoritarians in my
poll also strongly supported Trump’s proposals to deport 11 million
illegal immigrants, prohibit Muslims from entering the United States,
shutter mosques and establish a nationwide database that track Muslims.</span>
<br />
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<a class="contextlink" href="https://forums.craigslist.org/?ID=270701187" target="_top"> </a></div>
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<br />
...
<b>"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences." </b> - Winston Churchill, <u>The Gathering Storm</u>
<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/1600/US%20of%20Canada.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/320/US%20of%20Canada.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; margin: 0 10px 10px 0;" /></a>Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5752215.post-64078234009547410482016-04-24T13:10:00.003-07:002016-04-24T13:10:41.226-07:00Mussolini 2.0
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<br />
The Country Sees ‘Fascist Undertones’ In Donald Trump’s Campaign: New Survey
<br />
And just about as many say he encourages violence at his rallies.
<br />
<br />
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump waves as he speaks to
supporters at his primary election night event this week in Florida.
<br />
<br />
Half of America believes Donald Trump’s campaign exhibits fascist
undertones, with only 30 percent disagreeing, according to a new
HuffPost/YouGov poll. The sentiment isn’t contained to Democrats, who
unsurprisingly are willing to agree with a negative statement about
their political rivals. Forty-five percent of independents also say
Trump’s campaign has echoes of fascism, as do a full 28 percent of
Republicans.
<br />
<br />
About half the country believes Trump encourages violence at his
campaign events, with just 34 percent saying he doesn’t. The rest aren’t
sure. Meanwhile, 27 percent of Republicans say it’s acceptable to
“rough up” protesters at political events.
<br />
<br />
The survey comes in the wake of dozens of arrests and physical
altercations tied to Trump’s campaign rallies, including clashes after
an event was canceled in Chicago.
<br />
<br />
Trump, who once offered to pay his supporters’ legal fees if they “knock
the crap out of” potential tomato-throwers, has since sought to
downplay the frequency of such problems.
<br />
<br />
“The press is now going, they’re saying, ‘Oh, but there’s such
violence.’ No violence. You know how many people have been hurt at our
rallies? I think, like, basically none except maybe somebody got hit
once,” the businessman said last week in North Carolina.
<br />
<br />
Most Americans, though, have a very different impression. Two-thirds say
there’s more violence at Trump’s events than at those for other
candidates, with 62 percent saying the clashes are part of a broader
pattern rather than isolated incidents.
<br />
<br />
<br />
That level of agreement on such a politically charged question is itself
unusual. It far outstrips, for example, the fraction of the public that
sees a broad pattern of police violence against black men.
<br />
<br />
It even extends somewhat to the GOP: A 55 percent majority of
Republicans consider Trump’s events unusually violent, and 61 percent
believe the violent clashes are part of a bigger pattern.
<br />
<br />
Who’s To Blame?
<br />
<br />
The data indicates that people generally consider protesters and the
media to be most responsible for the uptick in violence, even if they
also agree that Trump fans the flames. Fifty-four percent say protesters
shoulder “a lot” of the blame, 41 percent say Trump’s supporters do and
47 percent say Trump himself does.
<br />
<br />
Only 23 percent of Republicans, though, say Trump is largely
responsible, with barely one-quarter believing that he encourages
violence.
<br />
<br />
Republicans place even less blame on Trump’s supporters, as just 18
percent say they bear a lot of responsibility. In contrast, half place
that level of blame on “the mainstream media,” and 78 percent put that
degree of fault on protesters.
<br />
<br />
While some of the GOP response is likely due to rallying around the
party’s front-runner, Republicans are also less amenable toward
protesting in general. They’re 20 points less likely than Democrats to
say it’s acceptable for protesters to turn up at candidates’ rallies,
and nearly twice as likely to say it’s all right for those protesters to
be thrown out.
<br />
<br />
The fact that such violence is continuing to happen — and that it seems
to be at least condoned by the Trump campaign — is enough to give pause
to much of the public regarding the nature of Trump’s candidacy, the
survey finds.
<br />
<br />
A lot of the talk about Trump’s post-primary prospects revolves around
his ability to reverse the overwhelmingly negative impression he’s so
far made on most of the country.
<br />
<br />
In recent speeches, he has previewed some arguments he would make in the
general election. Many, like focusing on people left behind by the
economy, are relatively moderate, and have the potential to resonate
across party lines. Convincing voters that he has the temperament to
take office — or, at the very minimum, that he’s not a would-be fascist —
may be the tougher sell.
<br />
<br />
The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews
conducted March 14-16 among U.S. adults, using a sample selected from
YouGov’s opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other
characteristics of the adult U.S. population.
<br />
</span><a class="contextlink" href="https://forums.craigslist.org/?ID=270700589" target="_top"></a><br />
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<br />
...
<b>"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences." </b> - Winston Churchill, <u>The Gathering Storm</u>
<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/1600/US%20of%20Canada.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/320/US%20of%20Canada.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; margin: 0 10px 10px 0;" /></a>Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5752215.post-79117207053846338942016-03-31T06:45:00.001-07:002016-03-31T06:45:36.370-07:00Krugman on the Modern GOP"What is the modern
GOP? A simple model that accounts for just about everything you see is
that it’s an engine designed to harness white resentment on behalf of
higher incomes for the donor class.
<br />
<div class="story-body-text" itemprop="articleBody">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text" itemprop="articleBody">
What we call the
Republican establishment is really a network of organizations that
represent donor interests because they’re supported by donor money.
These organizations impose ideological purity with a combination of
carrots and sticks: assured support for politicians and pundits who toe
the line, sanctions against anyone who veers from orthodoxy —
excommunication if you’re an independent thinking pundit, a primary
challenge from the Club for Growth if you’re an imperfectly reliable
politician.</div>
<div class="story-body-text" itemprop="articleBody">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text" itemprop="articleBody">
To a very casual
observer, it may look as if this movement infrastructure engages in
actual policy analysis and discussion, but that’s only a show put on for
the media. Can you even imagine being unsure how a Heritage Foundation
study on any significant issue will come out? The truth is that the
right’s policy ideas haven’t changed in decades. Paul Ryan’s innovative
idea on Medicare — let’s replace it with vouchers! — is the same
proposal <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/05/16/166474/newt-gingrich-voucher-medicare/">Newt Gingrich offered in 1995</a>. </div>
<div class="story-body-text" itemprop="articleBody">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text" itemprop="articleBody">
So why are we seeing a
crackup of this system now? It’s not because events have called the
orthodoxy into question; that has never mattered in the past. On the
contrary, failed predictions have never caused even the slightest change
in claims: the same people who <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2010/08/10/173450/1993-quotes/">predicted that Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax hike</a>
would kill jobs and that Obamacare would be an economic disaster are
making confident predictions about the salutary effects of tax cuts now.</div>
<div class="story-body-text" itemprop="articleBody">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text" itemprop="articleBody">
The problem, instead,
seems to be demography — an increasingly diverse population means that
the party needs to go beyond white resentment, but the resentful whites
are having none of it. Oh, and the base never cared about the ideology.</div>
<div class="story-body-text" itemprop="articleBody">
<br /></div>
...
<b>"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences." </b> - Winston Churchill, <u>The Gathering Storm</u>
<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/1600/US%20of%20Canada.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/320/US%20of%20Canada.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; margin: 0 10px 10px 0;" /></a>Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5752215.post-59779537588554995292016-02-23T08:46:00.001-08:002016-02-23T08:46:20.271-08:00Sea levels are rising, faster than last 2800 yrs <blockquote>
Sea levels on Earth are rising several times faster than they have in the past 2,800 years and are <b><span style="font-size: large;">accelerating</span>.</b>
<a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/health/20160223_Rutgers__sea-level_rise_is_fastest_in_2_800_years.html" target="_blank"><br /></a></blockquote>
<a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/health/20160223_Rutgers__sea-level_rise_is_fastest_in_2_800_years.html" target="_blank">20160223_Rutgers__sea-level_rise_is_fastest_in_2_800_years </a><br />
<br />
<blockquote>
Couple this with two facts:
<br />
1. ACCELERATING PHENOMENA ARE INHERENTLY UNPREDICTABLE. <br />
2. A species that evolved to prioritize short-term threats is pretty
much doomed to ignore a long-term threat until it is too late. <br />
<br />
</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
"...<i>and I'm just gettin warmed up!" </i>-- Mother Nature
<br />
<blockquote>
</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
...
<b>"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences." </b> - Winston Churchill, <u>The Gathering Storm</u>
<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/1600/US%20of%20Canada.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/320/US%20of%20Canada.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; margin: 0 10px 10px 0;" /></a>Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5752215.post-87857567837889074372016-02-08T07:03:00.003-08:002016-02-08T07:03:37.588-08:00CEO Guide to Fraud for Fun & Profit"Fun" being a euphemism for avoiding jail...<br />
<br />
<h2 id="post-1592">
<a href="http://www.macroresilience.com/2013/12/04/how-to-commit-fraud-and-get-away-with-it-a-guide-for-ceos/" rel="bookmark">How to commit fraud and get away with it: A Guide for CEOs</a></h2>
Shorter Version
A strategy to maximise bonuses and avoid personal culpability:<br />
<ul>
<li>Don’t commit the fraud yourself.</li>
<li>Minimise information received about the actions of your employees.</li>
<li>Control employees through automated, algorithmic systems based on plausible metrics like Value at Risk.</li>
<li>Pay high bonuses to employees linked to “stretch” revenue/profit targets.</li>
<li>Fire employees when targets are not met.</li>
<li>…..Wait.</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="longerversion">
Longer Version</h3>
CEOs and senior managers of modern corporations possess the ability
to engineer fraud on an organisational scale and capture the upside
without running the risk of doing any jail time. In other words, they
can reliably commit fraud and get away with it.<br />
Imagine that you are the newly hired CEO of a large bank and by some
improbable miracle your bank is squeaky clean and free of fraudulent
practises. But you are unhappy about this. Your competitors are making
more profits than you are by embracing fraud and coming out ahead of you
even after paying tens of billions of dollars in fines to the
regulators. And you want a piece of the action. But you’re a risk-averse
person and don’t want to risk spending any time in jail for committing
fraud. So how can you achieve this outcome?<br />
Obviously you should not commit any fraudulent acts yourself. You
want your junior managers to commit fraud in the pursuit of higher
profits. One way to incentivise this behaviour is to adopt what are
known as ‘high-powered incentives’. Pay your employees high bonuses tied
to revenue/profits and maintain hard-to-meet ‘stretch’ targets. Fire
ruthlessly if these targets are not met. And finally, ensure that you
minimise the flow of information up to you about how exactly how your
employees meet these targets.<br />
There is one problem with this approach. As a CEO, this allows you to
use the “I knew nothing!” defense and claim ignorance about all the
“deplorable” fraud taking place lower down the organisational food
chain. But it may fall foul of another legal principle that has been
tailored for such situations – the principle of <a href="http://www.leftfootforward.org/2012/05/rupert-murdoch-wilful-blindness-corporate-law/">‘wilful blindness’</a> – <em>“if
there is information that you could have know, and should have known,
but somehow managed not to know, the law treats you as though you did
know it”</em>. In a recent <a href="http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/%7Ejrvarma/blog/index.cgi/Y2013/rakoff-prosecution.html">essay</a>,
Judge Rakoff uses exactly this principle to criticise the failure of
regulators in the United States in prosecuting senior bankers.<br />
But wait – all hope is not lost yet. There is one way by which you as
a CEO can not only argue that adequate controls and supervision were in
place and at the same time make it easier for your employees to commit
fraud. Simply perform the monitoring and control function through an
automated system and restrict your role to signing off on the risk
metrics that are the output of this automated system.<br />
It is hard to explain how this can be done in the abstract so let me
take a hypothetical example from the mortgage origination and
securitisation industry. As a CEO of a mortgage originator in 2005, you
are under a lot of pressure from your shareholders to increase subprime
originations. You realise that the task would be a lot easier if your
salespeople originated fraudulent loans where ineligible borrowers are
given loans they can’t afford. You’ve followed all the steps laid out
above but as discussed this is not enough. You may be accused of not
having any controls in the organisation. Even if you try hard to ensure
that no information regarding fraud filters through to you, you can
never be certain. At the first sign of something unusual, a mortgage
approval officer may raise an exception to his supervisor. Given that
every person in the management hierarchy wants to cover his own back,
how can you ensure that nothing filters up to you whilst at the same
time providing a plausible argument that you aren’t wilfully blind?<br />
The answer is somewhat counterintuitive – you should codify and
automate the mortgage approval process. Have your salespeople input
potential borrower details into a system that approves or rejects the
loan application based on an algorithm without any human intervention.
The algorithm does not have to be naive. In fact it would ideally be a
complex algorithm, maybe even ‘learned from data’. Why so? Because the
more complex the algorithm, the more opportunities it provides to the
salespeople to ‘game’ and arbitrage the system in order to commit fraud.
And the more complex the algorithm, the easier it is for you, the CEO,
to argue that your control systems were adequate and that you cannot be
accused of wilful blindness or even the <a href="http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303444204577460810759748848.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTWhatsNewsCollection&mg=reno-wsj">‘failure to supervise’</a>.<br />
In complex domains, this argument is impossible to refute. No
regulator/prosecutor is going to argue that you should have installed a
more manual control system. And no regulator can argue that you, the
CEO, should have micro-managed the mortgage approval process.<br />
Let me take another example – the use of Value at Risk (VaR) as a
risk measure for control purposes in banks. VaR is not ubiquitous
because traders and CEOs are unaware of its flaws. It is ubiquitous
because it allows senior managers to project the facade of effective
supervision without taking on the trouble or the legal risks of actually
monitoring what their traders are up to. It is sophisticated enough to
protect against the charge of wilful blindness and it allows ample room
for traders to load up on the tail risks that fund the senior managers’
bonuses during the good times. When the risk blows up, the senior
manager can simply claim that he was deceived and fire the trader.<br />
What makes this strategy so easy to implement today compared to even a
decade ago is the ubiquitousness of fully algorithmic control systems.
When the control function is performed by genuine human domain experts,
then obvious gaming of the control mechanism is a lot harder to achieve.
Let me take another example to illustrate this. One of the positions
that lost UBS billions of dollars during the 2008 financial crisis was
called <a href="http://www.macroresilience.com/2009/11/06/a-rational-explanation-of-the-financial-crisis/">‘AMPS’</a>
where billions of dollars in super-senior tranche bonds were hedged
with a tiny sliver of equity tranche bonds so that the portfolio showed a
zero VaR and delta-neutral risk position. Even the most novice of
controllers could have identified the catastrophic tail risk embedded in
hedging a position where one can lose billions, with another position
where one could only gain millions.<br />
There is nothing new in what I have laid out in this essay – for example, Kenneth Bamberger has <a href="http://www.law.upenn.edu/fac/thbaker/fall2009workshop/papers/Bamberger_TechnologiesOfCompliance.pdf">made</a> much the same point on the interaction between technology and regulatory compliance:<br />
<blockquote>
automated systems—systems that governed loan
originations, measured institutional risk, prompted investment
decisions, and calculated capital reserve levels—shielded irresponsible
decisions, unreasonably risky speculation, and intentional manipulation,
with a façade of regularity….<br />
Invisibility by design, allows engineering of fraudulent outcomes
without being held responsible for them – the “I knew nothing!” defense.
of course, they are also self-deceived so this is really true.</blockquote>
But although the automation that enables this risk-free fraud is a
recent phenomenon, the principle behind this strategy is one that is
familiar to managers throughout the modern era – “How do I get things
done the way I want to without being held responsible for them?”.<br />
Just as the algorithmic revolution is simply a continuation of the <a href="http://www.macroresilience.com/2012/02/21/the-control-revolution-and-its-discontents-the-uncanny-valley/">control revolution</a>,
the ‘accountability gap’ due to automation is simply an acceleration of
trends that have been with us throughout the modern era. Theodore
Porter has <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691029083/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0691029083&linkCode=as2&tag=httpwwwmacror-20">shown</a>
how the rise of objectivity and bureaucracy were as much driven by the
desire to avoid responsibility as they were driven by the desire for
superior results. Many features of the modern corporate world only make
sense when we understand that one of their primary aims is the avoidance
of responsibility and culpability. Why are external consulting firms so
popular even when the CEO knows exactly what he wants to do? So that
the CEO can avoid responsibility if the ‘strategic restructuring’ goes
badly. Why do so many firms delegate their critical control processes to
a hotpotch of outsourced software contractors? So that they can blame
any failures on external counter-parties who have explicitly been
granted exemption from any liability<a class="footnote" href="http://www.macroresilience.com/#fn:nissenbaum" id="fnref:nissenbaum" title="see footnote">,</a><br />
<br />
http://www.macroresilience.com/ <br />
<br />
...
<b>"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences." </b> - Winston Churchill, <u>The Gathering Storm</u>
<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/1600/US%20of%20Canada.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/320/US%20of%20Canada.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; margin: 0 10px 10px 0;" /></a>Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5752215.post-9852903430954099002016-01-30T08:18:00.001-08:002016-01-30T08:18:22.342-08:00Trump phenomenon explained:"bitch-slap politics" <span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"> </span></span><span><span style="font-size: xx-small;"></span></span><br />
<br />It's about dominance displays, about showing, rather than arguing,
that one's opponent is weak. It's done not through critique but through
attack — personal attack — demonstrating that the target will not or can
not defend him or herself. The attack doesn't make the point, it
***is*** the point. It's "bitch-slap politics." <br />
<br />
This kind of dominance symbolism is pervasive in GOP politics. It's not
new with Trump at all. Most successful Republican politicians speak this
language. And yet somehow for most it is nonetheless a second language.
But it's Trump's native language. ... Wherever it comes from, he seems
to intuitively get that for this constituency and at this moment just
demonstrating that he gets his way, always, is all that really matters.
Policy details, protecting the candidate through careful press releases
and structured media opportunities ... none of that matters.
<br />
<br />
Though it makes pundits somewhat uncomfortable to admit it, most voters —
especially the politically disengaged working-class whites Trump is
attracting — don't know much about "issues" and don't have well-defined
political philosophies.
<br />
<br />
When they witness political debate, they aren't really analyzing and
assessing arguments. They are reading the subtext, attuned to who's
aggressive and who's defensive, who's strong and who's weak, who seems
like a leader and who doesn't.
<br />
<br />
Trump instinctively gets this. His innovation, if you can call it that,
is to abandon the text altogether, bringing the subtext to the surface.
"Toughness" is no longer a side dish, it's the main dish, the only dish.
Trump will win because Trump wins.<br />
<br />
http://www.vox.com/2016/1/30/10873476/donald-trump-never-president<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
...
<b>"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences." </b> - Winston Churchill, <u>The Gathering Storm</u>
<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/1600/US%20of%20Canada.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/320/US%20of%20Canada.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; margin: 0 10px 10px 0;" /></a>Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5752215.post-3418479894819923462015-07-15T08:22:00.003-07:002015-07-15T08:22:59.269-07:00Greek 101
there’s a broader lesson from Greece that is relevant to all of us — and
it’s not the usual one about mending our free-spending ways lest we
become Greece, Greece I tell you. What we learn, instead, is that fiscal
austerity plus hard money is a deeply toxic mix. The fiscal austerity
depresses the economy, and pushes it toward deflation; if it’s
accompanied by hard money (in Greece’s case the euro, but a fixed
exchange rate, a gold standard, or any kind of obsessive fear of
inflation would do the trick), the result is not just a depression and
deflation, but quite likely a failure even to reduce the debt ratio.<br />
For comparison, look at everyone’s favorite example of successful
austerity, Canada in the 1990s. Canada came in with gross debt of
roughly 100 percent of GDP, roughly comparable to Greece on the eve of
the financial crisis. It then proceeded to do a pretty big fiscal
adjustment — 6 percent of GDP according to the International Monetary
Fund’s measure of the structural balance, which is about a third of what
Greece has done but comparable to other European debtors. But
unemployment fell steadily. What was Canada’s secret?<br />
The answer was, easy money and a large currency depreciation. These
offset the drag from austerity, allowing growth to continue. <br />
<br />
<i>http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/</i> <br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">So why Tsipras is caving in to the austerians now is just plain baffling. <span class="echo-streamserver-controls-stream-item-text">Everyone with
half a should understand by now: Austerity Does Not Work (OK, maybe when
offset by massive monetary easing and currency devaluation but those
are NA here).<br /><br />In the pantheon of legacy-destroying and utterly baffling moves, Tsipras has joined Blair at the top of the pile. </span></span><br />
<br />
...
<b>"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences." </b> - Winston Churchill, <u>The Gathering Storm</u>
<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/1600/US%20of%20Canada.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/320/US%20of%20Canada.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; margin: 0 10px 10px 0;" /></a>Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5752215.post-28184828861907322932015-03-14T12:27:00.000-07:002015-03-14T12:27:08.796-07:00America as Failed State"leaders in both war parties are now looking at ways to get around the
Pentagon spending limits in order to satisfy the insatiable appetite of
the military industrial complex and their agents in Congress who want
to bring home the weapons production bacon - the only real job creation
program in the nation anymore.<br /><br />
One likely mechanism to get around sequestration is to use the Overseas
Contingency Operations funds, or OCO, which isn't subject to the
sequester. This process allows Congress to appropriate more money for
war spending - outside of the traditional Pentagon annual appropriations
which are impacted by sequestration. <br /><br />
All of this means that further vicious attacks will be made on social
programs like food stamps, education, health care, infrastructure repair
and more. We'll see more calls for local privatization of water and
sewer systems, schools, roads and bridges and the like. Basically the
continued hollowing out of the public sector. The standard of living
will continue to plummet and practically the only jobs for young people
will increasingly be in the military sector.<br /><br />
This is what is happening today in many other western client states
where this formula of austerity cuts and militarization go
hand-in-hand. The Democrats, the so-called party of the 'little guy',
are meekly agreeing to this as they have become full partners in this
decimation of the nation."<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
...
<b>"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences." </b> - Winston Churchill, <u>The Gathering Storm</u>
<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/1600/US%20of%20Canada.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/320/US%20of%20Canada.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; margin: 0 10px 10px 0;" /></a>Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5752215.post-75069550678971418882015-03-10T12:14:00.003-07:002015-03-10T12:14:51.373-07:00Warming could hit rates unseen in 1,000 years <br />
<div class="annotatable" data-annotation-count="0" data-article-id="359620" data-thread-id="169513">
<span class="anno-span">We are standing on the edge of a new world where warming is poised to accelerate at rates unseen for at least 1,000 years.</span></div>
<div class="annotatable" data-annotation-count="0" data-article-id="359620" data-thread-id="169513">
<br /></div>
<div class="annotatable" data-annotation-count="0" data-article-id="359620" data-thread-id="169516">
<span class="anno-span">That’s the main finding of a paper published March 9 in <a href="http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2552.html">Nature Climate Change</a>,
which looked at the rate of temperature change over 40-year periods.
The new research also shows that the Arctic, North America, and Europe
will be the first regions to transition to a new climate, underscoring
the urgent need for adaptation planning. Historical
records show temperatures have typically fluctuated up or down by about
0.2 °F per decade over the past 1,000 years. But trends over the past
40 years have been decidedly up, with warming approaching 0.4 °F per
decade. That’s still within historical bounds of the past—but just
barely.</span></div>
<div class="annotatable" data-annotation-count="0" data-article-id="359620" data-thread-id="169516">
<br /></div>
<span class="anno-span">By 2020, warming rates should eclipse historical bounds of the past 1,000 years—and likely at least 2,000 years—and keep rising.</span><br />
Faster and faster. That's called "acceleration".
<br />
<br />
Prediction by extrapolation is chancy; extrapolating accelerating phenomena is just a fool's game.
<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://qz.com/359620/global-warming-could-hit-rates-unseen-in-1000-years/" target="_top">http://qz.com/359620/global-warming-could-hit-rates-unseen-in-1000-years/</a>
<br />
<br />
...<i>"and I'm just gettin warmed up!" </i>-- Mother Nature
<br /> <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
...
<b>"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences." </b> - Winston Churchill, <u>The Gathering Storm</u>
<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/1600/US%20of%20Canada.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/320/US%20of%20Canada.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; margin: 0 10px 10px 0;" /></a>Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5752215.post-31918594565335873152015-02-13T08:50:00.000-08:002015-02-13T08:50:15.529-08:00Boehner's achievements to date<br />
<br />
Over fiveYears Ago, John Boehner promised to be "Laser Focused on Jobs and the Economy" 'jobs will be our top priority"<br />
So what has the GOP House been up to?<br />
House Bills passed:<br />
46 Bills on Abortion<br />
113 Bills on Religion ( anti gay)<br />
73 Bills on Family Relationships ( anti gay)<br />
36 Bills on Marriage ( anti gay)<br />
72 Bills on Firearms<br />
604 Bills on Taxation ( more obscene tax cuts for the rich)<br />
437 Bills on Govt Investigations ( cost $14 million for nothing).<br />
Bills attempted and failed to be passed even by the GOP:<br />
33 attempts to Defund Obamacare.....Failed ( cost to the American tax payer $50 million)<br />
15 attempts to Cut Funding for Planned Parenthood......Failed<br />
3 Attempts to Cut Funding for VA Hospitals.......Failed.<br />
GOP blocked bills:<br />
Blocked bill to aid Small Business<br />
Blocked Unemployment extension ( a loss of 250,000 peripherally related jobs)<br />
Blocked Bank Reform Bills<br />
Blocked Campaign Finance Reform and open Contributions Law<br />
Blocked MULTIPLE Jobs Bills<br />
Blocked Infrastructure Bill ( the nations crumbling infrastructure has a failing "D" rating)<br />
Blocked Ending Tax Breaks for companies that Outsource Jobs ( blocked the "Bring the jobs back home measure)<br />
Blocked Wall Street Reform<br />
Blocked Energy Legislation<br />
Blocked Mine Safety Bill<br />
Blocked Oil Spill Liability Cap increase<br />
Blocked Bill to lower Oil Company Tax Breaks ( 4 billion a year in tax payer subsidies )<br />
Blocked Bill to impose charging American Oil Companies on Oil achieved in the Gulf<br />
Held government hostage, economy lost $24 billion<br />
Blocked Veterans jobs bills<br />
Blocked Veterans benefits<br />
Blocked Veterans health bills<br />
Succeeded in cutting food stamps to 90,000 vets<br />
Filibustered VA hospital funding<br />
Filibustered 3 million unemployment extensions costing 250,000 peripherily related jobs, throwing families out of homes.<br />
Number of TRUE Jobs Bills even allowed to come to a vote in the House....NONE.<br />
<a href="http://thegavel.democraticleader.house.gov/?p=6171" rel="nofollow">http://thegavel.democraticlead...</a><br />
<a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/news/other/do-nothing-congress-track-one-least-productive-years-ever-f2D11656939" rel="nofollow">http://www.nbcnews.com/news/ot...</a><br />
<a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2013/dec/22/nation/la-na-congress-inaction-20131223" rel="nofollow">http://articles.latimes.com/20...</a><br />
<a href="http://thomas.loc.gov/home/LegislativeData.php?&n=Browse&c=112" rel="nofollow">http://thomas.loc.gov/home/Leg...</a><br />
<a href="http://www.politicususa.com/2013/05/19/republican-obstructionism-real-scandal-plaguing-washington.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.politicususa.com/20...</a><br />
<br />
...
<b>"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences." </b> - Winston Churchill, <u>The Gathering Storm</u>
<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/1600/US%20of%20Canada.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/320/US%20of%20Canada.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; margin: 0 10px 10px 0;" /></a>Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5752215.post-84289530798444431582014-12-22T05:47:00.003-08:002014-12-22T05:47:57.914-08:00Pope issues blistering critique of Vatican<blockquote>
<br /><br />
Pope Francis issued a blistering critique Monday
of the Vatican bureaucracy that serves him, denouncing how some people
lust for power at all costs, live hypocritical double lives and suffer
from “spiritual Alzheimer’s” that has made them forget they’re supposed
to be joyful men of God.
<br />
<br />
Francis’ Christmas greeting to the cardinals, bishops and priests who
run the Holy See was no joyful exchange of holiday good wishes. Rather,
it was a sobering catalogue of 15 sins of the Curia that Francis said he
hoped would be atoned for and cured in the New Year.
<br />
<br />
He had some zingers: How the “terrorism of gossip” can “kill the
reputation of our colleagues and brothers in cold blood.” How cliques
can “enslave their members and become a cancer that threatens the
harmony of the body” and eventually kill it by “friendly fire.” About
how some suffer from a “pathology of power” that makes them seek power
at all costs, even if it means defaming or discrediting others publicly.
<br />
<br />
<i>...Dead pope walking!
</i></blockquote>
<u> </u> <a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/1600/US%20of%20Canada.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/320/US%20of%20Canada.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; margin: 0 10px 10px 0;" /></a>Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5752215.post-29883638113886847412014-12-03T17:22:00.001-08:002014-12-03T17:22:13.260-08:00TJ on patience in the face of setbacksThomas Jefferson, from a letter he sent in 1798 after passage of the Sedition Act:<br /><br />"A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt......If the game runs sometimes against us at home<b> we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake</b>."<br /><br />
<br />
<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/1600/US%20of%20Canada.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/320/US%20of%20Canada.jpg" style="float: left; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;" /></a>Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5752215.post-83272568830511012812014-07-19T22:30:00.000-07:002014-07-19T22:30:01.246-07:00Santelli vs Liesman per Krugman<h1 class="story-heading" itemprop="headline">
Addicted to Inflation</h1>
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<div class="byline-dateline">
<time class="dateline" datetime="2014-07-17">Paul Krugman JULY 17, 2014</time>
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The
first step toward recovery is admitting that you have a problem. That
goes for political movements as well as individuals. So I have some
advice for so-called reform conservatives trying to rebuild the
intellectual vitality of the right: You need to start by facing up to
the fact that your movement is in the grip of some uncontrollable urges.
In particular, it’s addicted to inflation — not the thing itself, but
the claim that runaway inflation is either happening or about to happen.<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="88" data-total-count="583" itemprop="articleBody">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="88" data-total-count="583" itemprop="articleBody">
To see what I’m talking about, consider <a href="http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/rick-santelli-wrong-steve-liesman" title="Watch a video here">a scene that played out the other day on CNBC</a>.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="633" data-total-count="1216" id="story-continues-2" itemprop="articleBody">
Rick
Santelli, one of the network’s stars, is best known for a rant against
debt relief that arguably gave birth to the Tea Party. On this occasion,
however, he was ranting about another of his favorite subjects, the
allegedly inflationary policies of the Federal Reserve. And his
colleague Steve Liesman had had enough. “It’s impossible for you to have
been more wrong,” Mr. Liesman declared, and he went on to detail the
wrong predictions: “The higher interest rates never came, the inability
of the U.S. to sell bonds never happened, the dollar never crashed,
Rick. There isn’t a single one that’s worked for you.”</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="381" data-total-count="1597" itemprop="articleBody">
You
could say the same thing about many people. I’ve had conversations with
investors bemused by the failure of the dollar to crash and inflation
to soar, because “all the experts” said that was going to happen. And
that is indeed what you might have imagined if your notion of expertise
was what you saw on CNBC, on The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page,
or in Forbes. </div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="378" data-total-count="1975" itemprop="articleBody">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="378" data-total-count="1975" itemprop="articleBody">
And
this has been going on for a long time — at least since early 2009. Yet
despite being consistently wrong for more than five years, these
“experts” never consider the possibility that there might be something
amiss with their economic framework, let alone that Ben Bernanke, Janet
Yellen or, for that matter, yours truly might have been right to dismiss
their warnings.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="413" data-total-count="2388" itemprop="articleBody">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="413" data-total-count="2388" itemprop="articleBody">
At
best, the inflation-is-coming crowd admits that it hasn’t happened yet,
but attributes the delay to unforeseeable circumstances. Thus, in
recent Congressional testimony, <a href="http://www.jec.senate.gov/republicans/public/?a=Files.Serve&File_id=02987d87-417d-4f42-b58c-db06f4e9946b">Lawrence Kudlow, also of CNBC, warned</a>
about “excess money and a devalued dollar.” However, “Miraculously,
both actual and expected inflation indicators have stayed low.” It’s not
something wrong with my model. It’s a miracle! </div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="574" data-total-count="2962" id="story-continues-3" itemprop="articleBody">
At
worst, inflationistas resort to conspiracy theories: Inflation is
already high, but the government is covering it up. The sources
purporting to document this cover-up <a href="http://azizonomics.com/2013/06/01/the-trouble-with-shadowstats/">were thoroughly debunked years ago</a>; among other things, private indicators of inflation like <a href="http://bpp.mit.edu/usa/">the Billion Prices Index</a> (derived from Internet prices) basically confirm the official numbers. Furthermore, inflation conspiracy theorists <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/266583/niall-ferguson-cries-inflation-ramesh-ponnuru">have faced well-deserved ridicule</a> even from fellow conservatives. Yet the conspiracy theory keeps resurfacing. It has, predictably, <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/382859/inflation-vacation-amity-shlaes">been rolled out to defend Mr. Santelli</a>.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="257" data-total-count="3219" itemprop="articleBody">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="257" data-total-count="3219" itemprop="articleBody">
All
of this is very frustrating to those reform conservatives. If you ask
what new ideas they have to offer, they often mention “market
monetarism,” which translates under current circumstances to the notion
that the Fed should be doing more, not less.One member of the group, Josh Barro — who is now at The Times — has gone so far as to call market monetarism “<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-reformists-and-me-2013-6">the shining success of the conservative reform movement.</a>”
But this idea has achieved no traction at all with the rest of American
conservatism, which is still obsessed with the phantom menace of
runaway inflation. </div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="257" data-total-count="3219" itemprop="articleBody">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="564" data-total-count="4114" id="story-continues-5" itemprop="articleBody">
And
the roots of inflation addiction run deep. Reformers like to minimize
the influence of libertarian fantasies — fantasies that invariably
involve the notion that inflationary disaster looms unless we return to
gold — on today’s conservative leaders. But to do that, you have to
dismiss what these leaders have actually said. If, for example, people
accuse Representative Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee,
of believing that he’s living in an Ayn Rand novel, that’s because in
2009 he said that we are “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmW19uoyuO8" title="A YouTube video">living in an Ayn Rand novel.</a>”</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="320" data-total-count="4434" itemprop="articleBody">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="320" data-total-count="4434" itemprop="articleBody">
More
generally, modern American conservatism is deeply opposed to any form
of government activism, and while monetary policy is sometimes treated
as a technocratic affair, the truth is that printing dollars to fight a
slump, or even to stabilize some broader definition of the money supply,
is indeed an activist policy.</div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="433" data-total-count="4867" itemprop="articleBody">
<br /></div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="433" data-total-count="4867" itemprop="articleBody">
The
point, then, is that inflation addiction is telling us something about
the intellectual state of one side of our great national divide. The
right’s obsessive focus on a problem we don’t have, its refusal to
reconsider its premises despite overwhelming practical failure, tells
you that we aren’t actually having any kind of rational debate. And
that, in turn, bodes ill not just for would-be reformers, but for the
nation. </div>
<div class="story-body-text story-content" data-para-count="433" data-total-count="4867" itemprop="articleBody">
<br /></div>
<i>
A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 18, 2014, on page A23 of the <span itemprop="printEdition">New York edition</span> with the headline: Addicted to Inflation</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
...
<b>"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences." </b> - Winston Churchill, <u>The Gathering Storm</u>
<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/1600/US%20of%20Canada.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/320/US%20of%20Canada.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; margin: 0 10px 10px 0;" /></a>Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5752215.post-70452824215272331082014-02-18T05:34:00.001-08:002014-02-18T05:34:15.051-08:00History Channel show to give Greensburg UFO believer new platform<b>It's come to this: "the Dec. 7, 1941, invasion of Pearl Harbor <br />
that launched World War II" in an article about a History Channel show. How sad. </b><br /><br />
<br /><br />
<br /><br />
<b><a href="http://trib.me/1jzbHpW">History Channel show to give Greensburg UFO believer new platform</a><br />
<br />
... </b><br /><br />
<br /><br />
<b><br /> </b><b>"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences." - Winston Churchill, <u>The Gathering Storm</u><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/1600/US%20of%20Canada.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/320/US%20of%20Canada.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; margin: 0 10px 10px 0;" /></a></b>Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5752215.post-6033328774678737032013-12-31T09:41:00.002-08:002013-12-31T09:41:39.654-08:00Hottest November Ever <br />
<br />
The globally averaged temperature for November 2013 was the warmest for
November since record keeping began in the late 19th century, and was
the 345th consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20th
century average.
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>..."I'm just gettin warmed up!" -- Mother Nature</i><br />
<br />
Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5752215.post-33809845761203462552013-12-31T07:25:00.001-08:002013-12-31T07:25:22.409-08:00 BOHICA, Jersey shoreAccording to a new study, the New Jersey shore will likely see a<b> sea level rise of about 1.5 feet by 2050</b>, and about 3.5 feet by 2100, at least a foot higher than the average global sea level rise over the rest of the century. Using a middle-range scenario for future sea level rise, the study found that by 2050, flooding caused by a 10-year storm, which has a 10 percent probability of occurring each year, would <b>exceed all historic storms in Atlantic City.</b><br />
<br />
<span class="fbod quote"><strong></strong> <br /> </span>
<br />
<span class="fbod quote"><br />http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013EF000135/full</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
..<i>."I'm just gettin warmed up!" -- Mother Nature</i><br />
<br />
<i> </i><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/1600/US%20of%20Canada.jpg"><br /></a>Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5752215.post-23223606212231742162013-07-27T14:31:00.000-07:002013-07-27T14:39:14.435-07:00Gerrymandering and extremism
The House is supposedly the chamber with proportional representation yet the GOP holds a very large majority despite having polled over a million votes less than the loyal opposition. This is a very obvious symptom of the gerrymandering elephant in the room. The less obvious symptom is the extremism that safe-seat gerrymandering promotes: Only 64 of the 435 House races were decided within a 10 percentage-point margin. Of all incumbents vying to retain their seats in the general election, just 21 were defeated. (By comparison, 79 House races had margins of victory less than 10 percent in 2010 and 54 incumbents lost.) Meaning most races were decided in the primaries. And we've what happens to moderates in primaries, especially in the Tea Party era GOP. Until you rip redistricting from the grasp of politicians, gerrymandered extremist politics will be the rule, not the exception.
http://www.governing.com/blogs/by-the-numbers/redistricting-gerrymandering-effect-2012-congressional-elections.html
...
<b>"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences." </b> - Winston Churchill, <u>The Gathering Storm</u>
<a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/1600/US%20of%20Canada.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/7179/227/320/US%20of%20Canada.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5752215.post-79313100779973359162013-03-15T08:35:00.001-07:002013-03-15T08:35:49.835-07:00Fiscal Impasse 101<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><a href='http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/03/15/the-morning-plum-the-gops-self-defeating-strategy-in-fiscal-fight/'>The Morning Plum: The GOP’s self-defeating strategy in fiscal fight</a><br/><blockquote>The real reason for the fiscal impasse is hiding right there in plain sight, and it can be summed up in two sentences:<br/><br/>1) Obama can’t sell entitlement cuts to his base, or indeed Democrats in general, without Republicans agreeing to new revenues, and has offered them a straightforward compromise — one that would anger the base on both sides — based on the premise that total victory for the GOP is not an acceptable or realistic outcome.<br/><br/>2) Republican leaders can’t even begin to acknowledge that Obama has offered them a real compromise, because they can’t sell their base on the idea that the President is being flexible, let alone get them to seriously entertain accepting any compromise with him, because the base sees total victory over Obama as the <i>only </i>acceptable outcome.<br/><br/>In essence, a variety of political constraints prevent Republican leaders from acknowledging the reality of the situation. That makes any reality-based dialog impossible. The press has largely failed to reckon with this basic disconnect, which is why the discussion continues to spin its wheels around irrelevant questions, such as whether the president’s outreach is “sincere” enough, as if hurt feelings have anything at all to do with the stalemate, or whether Democrats have gone quite far enough with their offer to Republicans, when the latter won’t even say whether there’s any compromise they could accept.<br/><br/>...rinse, repeat<br/></blockquote></div>Tinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17469298813605483869noreply@blogger.com0