Tag: Americans

Fresh off the grand opening of his first New Hampshire campaign office, presidential candidate John Delaney addressed students and business leaders at a "Politics & Eggs" event in Bedford. Delaney, making his fourteenth visit to the Granite State since launching his campaign in 2017, called for a restoration of American unity and a renewed sense of national purpose. “I think our current president is the divider-in-chief, but he’s only the punctuation mark on decades of failed politics,” Delaney said. >> Raw video: See Delaney's speech The former Maryland congressman said while he opposes President Donald Trump and seeks to defeat him in 2020, the president is not the central focus of his campaign. “My campaign is about solving problems, focusing on the future, and bringing people together – that makes me more of a moderate,” Delaney said. If he’s elected, Delaney lists education and addressing climate change as top priorities, with a carbon tax and publicly funded “K-14,” adding two years of no-cost community college beyond high school. He’d also spend his first hundred days working to pass legislation that already has broad bipartisan support in Congress. Delaney said he appreciates “the energy” behind the Green New Deal and ‘Medicare for All’ proposals. He said he supports measures he believes are more practical and compatible with the economy – another ‘third way’ solution that aims to find compromise between Washington’s partisan factions. “We can have a different politics,” Delaney said.

CNN's Chris Cuomo shares a letter from the late Congressman John Dingell encouraging Americans to put country and people before party. #CNN #News

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—A leak of Donald J. Trump’s official White House schedule has left millions of Americans deeply relieved that Trump spends approximately sixty per cent of each day not using his powers as President. In conversations across the country, Americans called the revelation that Trump devotes the majority of his day to “executive time,” a euphemism for watching TV and checking Twitter, the most reassuring news out of the White House in months. “Like most of the people I know, the idea of Donald Trump sitting behind his desk doing things that affect the country has me in a state of mortal terror,” Carol Foyler, a resident of Minneapolis, said. “Just knowing that he’s spending sixty per cent of his time doing basically nothing makes me feel somewhat better.” Harland Dorrinson, who lives in Detroit, agreed that it was “great news that Trump is only President forty per cent of the time” but called on the entertainment industry to create more diverting programming that might distract Trump for a larger portion of his day. “It would be fantastic if we could push the sixty per cent of his day that he does nothing up to seventy or even eighty per cent,” he said. “Maybe someone could come up with a podcast that he could get into.” But Tracy Klugian, a Baltimore resident, said that the leak of Trump’s schedule did little to allay her darkest fears. “Until I find out that he’s spending a hundred per cent of his time not being President, I won’t sleep at night,” she said.

Wang Zhao/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images WASHINGTON — The Justice Department unveiled sweeping charges on Monday against the Chinese telecom firm Huawei and its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, outlining a decade-long attempt by the company to steal trade secrets, obstruct a criminal investigation and evade economic sanctions on Iran. The pair of indictments, which were partly unsealed on Monday, come amid a broad and aggressive campaign by the United States to try to thwart China’s biggest telecom equipment maker. They also cite internal memos, obtained from Ms. Meng, that prosecutors said link her to an elaborate bank fraud that helped Huawei profit by evading Iran sanctions. Trump administration officials have insisted that Ms. Meng’s detention will not affect the trade talks, but the timing of the indictment coming so close to in-person discussions is likely to further strain relations between the two countries. The indictment now presents Canada with a politically charged decision: whether to extradite Ms. Meng to face the fraud charges, or make a legal or political determination to send her back to Beijing. No executives involved in the scheme were indicted, though six employees were fired. Mr. Whitaker fueled the speculation about an indictment of Mr. Ren when he told reporters on Monday that the criminal activity “goes all the way to the top of the company.” The Justice Department also accused Huawei of conspiring to steal trade secrets from a competitor, T-Mobile. The legal drama now shifts to Canada, where the government has warned that it will not extradite Ms. Meng if it appears that the request is being made for political reasons. The Trump administration is seeking significant changes to China’s trade practices, including what it says is a pattern of Beijing pressuring American companies to hand over valuable technology and outright theft of intellectual property. On Tuesday, American intelligence officials are expected to cite 5G investments by Chinese telecom companies, including Huawei, as a worldwide threat.

David Blight on Frederick Douglass: 'I call him beautifully human' Read more Harvard professor Jill Lepore chooses to begin her history of the United States with that quotation, and much of the worst of America, from lynching to brutality to Native Americans, is rightly here. Is it possible for the US – or any nation – to be ruled by reason and choice? This is, therefore, a history of political equality which necessarily becomes primarily a political history. The question nearly sundered the colonies from all government. Like so many Americans, Lepore asks that question and another: “By what right are we ruled?” Her aims are ambitious. Finally, “this book aims to be something else, too – an explanation of the nature of the past.” “History isn’t only a subject,” Lepore writes. Lepore offers an unabashedly liberal perspective, but seeks to be scrupulously fair to the modern conservative movement American politics has always been robust, but technology and better methods of analysis have magnified the impact. She offers an unabashedly liberal perspective, but seeks to be scrupulously fair to the modern conservative movement, devoting numerous pages to its intellectual origins as well as to its nativist and conspiratorial elements. This is a history for the 21st century, far more inclusive than the standard histories of the past. Lincoln did not say merely that we “can” save the country, but that we “shall”.

But last Thursday Mrs. Pelosi wrote the president, discouraging him from accepting her Jan. 3 invitation to address the nation from the House chamber next Tuesday. She cited “security concerns” and suggested the Secret Service could not protect the president if he trekked up to Capitol Hill. This kind of thing gives a bad name to pettiness. Then there are the Democrats who’ve jumped into their party’s presidential contest in the past four weeks. None did so with a traditional speech outlining an agenda and governing vision. On Jan. 15, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, 52, described herself as a “young mom” as she broke the news about her presidential exploratory committee on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” Not to be outdone, Sen. Kamala Harris joined the race last Monday with a segment on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” bookended by news of Prince Philip’s auto accident and a United airplane stuck on a remote Canadian runway in subzero temperatures. Warren, Harris and Gillibrand got instant coverage of their announcements. Ms. Harris appeared in a video dancing to Cardi B’s “I Like It.” Really? Unfortunately, social media’s propensity for shallow, rapid-fire and often error-riddled commentary could also turn politics into even more of a reality show than it already is. I will cheer them along when they do, regardless of party, and I’m guessing plenty of other Americans will do the same.

Who’s going to be our nominee in 2020 and how do we beat Trump is something every Democrat wants to talk about “I do think our election cycles are very long and I don’t think that’s great,” admits the affable Delaney. They don’t actually think they pick the president. Clinton entered the race a month later, followed in June by Trump’s now infamous descent on a Trump Tower escalator. “That would fundamentally change how the American people think about these issues and think about their leaders and think about common ground,” he says. Asked if Sanders or Warren can win the nomination, he replies carefully: “I think that someone who comes forth and wants to build a big tent party has a better chance of winning. Elizabeth Warren is running – here are 10 others who may seek the Democratic nomination Read more “If we as a Democratic party say we’re going to become the party the American people are looking for, which is a party that’s honest, civil, respectful, focusing on common ground, positive, optimistic and has big ideas about the future and welcomes progressives, centrists and disaffected Republicans, I think we’ll run the table in 2020. I tend to think that the American people in general and the Democratic party voters in particular make a deeper analysis of who they’re looking for. “You could have someone who’s an African American running for president who doesn’t stand for any of the things that the Democratic party stands for. I just don’t think the Democratic party is going to vote for someone because of the colour of their skin. They care about their vision for the future.”

The Pentagon says they are investigating reports that two men from the U.S. have been detained by Kurdish forces; Jennifer Griffin reports. FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour all-encompassing news service dedicated to delivering breaking news as well as…

J. Alfred Prufrock, the title character in T.S. Eliot’s poem about the existential doldrums of a life lived under crushing routine, moans that he has “known the evenings, mornings, afternoons / I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” Consider, perhaps, the possibility of revolution contained in that coffee spoon. The multi-tier ceramic tower had small platforms, usually in the shape of seashells. In the 18th century, porcelain was still largely an exotic, Asian material relatively new to the Western world. Difficult to manufacture on a large scale, colonists who wanted it in their homes had to have it imported. “It’s a mark of independence,” said Erickson. “To own it was showing your empathy for independence and for American being its own free state.” An original Bonnin and Morris pickle stand is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Around the turn of the 19th century, there was a lively social campaign, begun in England, to urge Abolitionists to match their money with their ideals. Similar to modern campaigns to buy free trade coffee, the sugar bowl urged the woman of the house to spend more money on sugar produced in a more humane way. “These things were communicated on the objects,” said Erickson.

Empirical researchers are studying this--Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion is one very important contribution--and as a way of organizing our thinking on rhetorical and political division I think Arnold Kling's short book The Three Languages of Politics: Talking Across the Political Divides is especially insightful. He considers three groups in American politics: liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. Liberals frame issues in terms of the struggle between oppressors and the oppressed. Conservatives frame issues in terms of the struggle between civilization and barbarism. Libertarians, meanwhile, frame issues in terms of the struggle between liberty and power (or coercion). These different framings lead us to different ways of thinking about policy issues. How, then, do we understand what is happening along the border, and how do we understand the political rhetoric and division regarding the migrant caravan? For conservatives, the struggle between barbarism and civilization is also obvious. The rights-emphasizing libertarian can point to the exercise of force along the border as illegitimate interference with voluntary interaction between migrants and those who wish to hire them, rent to them, care for them, or otherwise associate with them. Instead of jumping right to the assumptions of stupidity and ill will, Kling suggests that we first seek to really understand one another's ways of framing the issue, and not just superficially.