Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Bono Is Not Excited About Trump


Bono on Charlie Rose

Turn

In a four-way match up of likely voters, Clinton leads Trump by 5 points—45 percent to 40 percent. Libertarian Gary Johnson now has 10 percent support and Jill Stein maintains 4 percent.

Debates

There's No Debate 

Lauer seemed to think Clinton’s emails were worthy of more questions than, say, nuclear war, global warming or the fate of Syrian refugees.

have turned the campaign and the upcoming debates into profit centers that reap a huge return from political trivia and titillation. A game show, if you will — a farcical theater of make-believe rigged by the two parties and the networks to maintain their cartel of money and power.

“Debating,” Jill Lepore writes, “like voting, is a way for people to disagree without hitting one another or going to war: it’s the key to every institution that makes civic life possible, from courts to legislatures. Without debate, there can be no self-government.” But the media monoliths have taken the democratic purpose of a televised debate — to inform the public on the issues and the candidates’ positions on them — and reduced it to a mock duel between the journalists who serve as moderators — too often surrendering their allegedly inquiring minds — and candidates who know they can simply blow past the questions with lies that go unchallenged, evasions that fear no rebuke and demagoguery that fears no rebuttal.

Remember that it was CBS CEO Leslie Moonves who whooped about the cash to be made from the campaign, telling an investors conference in February, “The money’s rolling in and this is fun. I’ve never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us... Bring it on, Donald. Keep going. Donald’s place in this election is a good thing.” Oh, yes, good for Moonves’ annual bonus, but good for democracy? Don’t make us laugh. Elaine Quijano of CBS News will be moderating the vice presidential candidates’ debate on Oct. 4, with Moonves looking over her shoulder.

Remember, too, that both Lauer and Trump are NBCUniversal celebrities who have earned millions from and for the networks. (Vanity Fair magazine even reported that NBCUniversal boss Steve Burke had spoken hypothetically with Trump about continuing The Apprentice from the White House.) Moderating the first presidential debate on Sept. 26 is NBC anchorman Lester Holt, a nice and competent fellow, but facing the same pressure as his fellow teammate Matt Lauer to not offend their once-and-possibly-future NBC star Donald Trump.

And remember that Anderson Cooper of Time-Warner’s CNN, the all-Trump-all-the-time network, and Martha Raddatz of Disney’s ABC News will anchor the second presidential debate (to her credit, Raddatz did a good job during the 2012 vice presidential debate) — and that the final, crucial close encounter between Trump and Clinton will be moderated by Chris Wallace of Fox, the very “news organization” that joined with Donald Trump to gleefully spread the Big Lie of Birtherism that served Trump so well with free publicity (and Fox so well with ratings) and that Trump now conveniently and hypocritically repents.

Wallace has already admitted he is in no position to hold Trump accountable for the lies he tells in the “debate” — that “it’s not my job” to fact check either Trump or Clinton during the course of their appearance with him. That should be pleasing to Roger Ailes, who was fired as head of the Fox News empire for scandalous sexist behavior but who is now giving Trump debate tips. Wallace is on record saying how much he admired and loved Ailes, to whom he owes his stardom at Fox — “The best boss I’ve had in almost a half a century in journalism,” Wallace said.





A Tight Race

NPR Battleground Map: A Path To The Presidency Opens Up For Trump 

The debates are the last best chance for either candidate to change the trajectory of the race. And, right now, they could be key in determining who wins, because the election looks to be at an inflection point.

Grrl, Interrupted

Why Hillary Clinton Gets Interrupted More than Donald Trump 

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

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

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

Going Blue

Why so many red states are turning blue 

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

Monday, September 19, 2016

Disaster Candidate Trump

The Case Against Trump

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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