Tag: Americans

Anti-Trump protests in UK endanger Americans. Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation weighs in on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight'. FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour all-encompassing news service dedicated to delivering breaking news as well as political and business news.…

A key finding is that people traveling from places with very high levels of political advertisements experienced a more extreme holiday-shortening effect. Many Americans avoid talking politics at family gatherings. Among the people in these politically mismatched families, 6 in 10 said their families keep politics out of their conversations. The cellphone data merely reveal that, broadly speaking, people had less opportunity to talk about politics because of the shorter gatherings on average, and the tendency for some people to stay home rather than travel as they did in 2015. For example, the partisan beliefs of people who traveled or stayed home were assumed to track the partisan leanings of their home voting precincts. To protect privacy, the researchers tracked people only at the precinct or Zip code level, Chen said: “We do not try and identify where someone lives at the level of a street address.” The researchers also assumed that people exposed to political ads over the course of many months continue to feel the polarizing effects weeks after the election, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania. In an interview, Chen acknowledged that it is difficult to isolate the cause of the observed change in behavior captured by the cellphone data. A striking feature of this intensifying tribalism is that Americans have grown more negative in their views of people affiliated with the other major political party. Since 1994, there has been a near-tripling in the percentage of Democrats and Republicans who say they have a “very unfavorable” view of the other party, according to a report published last year by the Pew Research Center. And that’s new.” Larry Diamond, a political scientist at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, said of the study by Chen and Rohla, “It’s very intriguing, and sounds like a very innovative study, which is certainly telling us something of sobering importance about the way political polarization is affecting American life.” He added, “There's nothing happening in American politics now to suggest it will be better at Thanksgiving in 2020.”

Occasionally, though, a purely cynical understanding of how politicians conduct themselves can lead observers astray. It was the smaller community banks with $50 billion in assets and less that make up the vast majority of American financial institutions and once accounted for most small business loans. Ironically, the only institutions that could easily absorb the costs of regulations favored by progressives like Warren are the institutions that were once deemed “too big to fail.” As Gordon noted, the effect of Dodd-Frank was to direct more assets into fewer hands and make the financial institutions the reformers said were already too big bigger still. That is paranoia, not politics. It’s not just conservatives who are celebrating a hard-won victory today. Yesterday, the GOP-dominated House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill aimed at improving the conditions in prison by a staggering 360 to 59 votes. The bill may not survive in the Senate as it is, but not because it goes too far. Senate Judiciary Chairman and Republican Chuck Grassley told reporters that prison reform could not survive as is unless it includes broader sentencing reform. But the bipartisan consensus about the necessity of criminal justice reform is bearing fruit, and those seeds were planted years ago by libertarian and progressive reformers. The liberal and conservative activists who wallow hopelessly in the perception that the political process is irreparably broken should rejoice.

At the heart of Mr. West’s message is the idea that all of us—no matter our race, religion or background—have the right to be more than one thing. I grew up in poverty during the Great Depression, the son of blue-collar parents who passionately defended Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. I can be the son of working-class parents and also a pro-business Republican. I can be an ally to the transgender community and also a committed Christian. Identity politics is tribalism by another name. Under this cynical program, the identity of the group subsumes the identity of the individual, allowing little room for independence, self-realization or free thought. Identity politics turns the American idea on its head. Rather than looking beyond arbitrary differences in color, class and creed, identity politics separates us along these lines. In doing so, identity politics conditions us to define ourselves and each other by the groups to which we belong. Identity politics is cancer on our political culture.

Kim Hak-song, an agricultural professor at the same university, who hoped to ease North Korea’s chronic food shortages and malnutrition, was arrested two weeks later and was also accused of trying to topple the regime. Calling the freed captives “incredible people,” Trump said, “Frankly, we didn’t think this was going to happen, and it did.” After answering reporters’ questions, the President joked that the event had just broken “the all-time-in-history television rating for three o’clock in the morning.” Later that day, the White House released a press release with the heading, “WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE PRESIDENT’S VICTORY FOR THE WORLD BY FREEING THREE BRAVE AMERICANS.” Trump’s decision to journey to Andrews in the middle of the night to greet the three men was unusual; previous Presidents have welcomed returning captives and prisoners, but usually at the White House or in private meetings. Since Trump took office, White House officials have told me that the President is personally and passionately committed to freeing Americans held overseas. I asked former captives and the family members of former hostages this week for their reactions to Trump’s early-morning welcome of the prisoners from North Korea. “Hostage cases are usually more complicated than that.” Another former hostage told me, “I thought, What a show-off, but I understood. It was good politics, taking credit for bringing the hostages home. In April of 2017, Trump invited Aya Hijazi, a thirty-year-old American aid worker, to the Oval Office, after Administration officials had helped broker her release, along with that of her husband and four other aid workers, from Egypt. (The same Taliban faction held me captive for seven months, in 2008 and 2009.) In other cases, Trump has proved temperamental. Foley also said that she felt that the Trump Administration is more willing to take risks, or to bargain, for the return of hostages than the Obama Administration was: “I think they see the return of Americans detained abroad as a win.” What drives Trump to so publicly celebrate the return of captives is difficult to know.

It was not until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that leading European political thinkers began to question the rationale for monarchies. Hazony explains that “the modern age was born out of an intellectual matrix that was steeped in Hebraic texts.” Nelson, in The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought, discusses how political theorists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, influenced by “rabbinic Biblical exegesis,” began “to claim that monarchy per se is an illicit constitutional form and that all legitimate constitutions are republican.” Until the discovery of rabbinic exegesis, the consensus among Christian exegetes had been that ancient Israel had not erred in having kings. Rather, Israel had erred either in selecting tyrannical kings or in asking for a change in government, which was considered a sin of rebellion against God’s established order. If he is instructing them to have a king, then why, in 1 Samuel, did God apparently become angry when responding to Samuel about the people’s request for a king? Rabbi Nehorai dissents, arguing that Moses did not command the Jews to appoint a king. Rabbi Eliezer, in discussing 1 Samuel, stipulates that it was acceptable for the elders to call for a king to establish law and order, but not for the mob of people to do so to emulate the surrounding nations, who were idolatrous. Maimonides had endorsed the idea that Moses was using the imperative. Grotius claimed that “at another time [the Jews] could have erected a king for themselves without sin.” They were not wrong to ask for a king, but they were wrong to ask for one “during that time in which they had an interregnum established by God.” Still another rabbinic discussion—in Midrash Rabbah - Devarim—took an entirely different view of Biblical monarchy, with even greater import. Milton insisted that “God did not order the Israelites to ask for a king … but ‘God was angry not only because they wanted a king in imitation of the gentiles … but clearly because they desired a king at all.’” Milton’s views resonated with many of his contemporaries, including the English politician Algernon Sidney. Influenced by Milton, Paine argued against monarchy and for republican government.

But don’t bet this change will bring about a better functioning Congress. If the recent history of wave elections is any guide, the moderates in swing districts will be the first swept away, leaving mostly passionate partisans and hard-left or hard-right politicians from safely gerrymandered districts. Our broken political incentives are the crux of these problems. Even in a swing year, the general election is a forgone conclusion in these one-party districts, and the real contests are low-turnout primaries dominated by the most passionately partisan voters. A politician who wants to win these primaries must appeal to the voters on the extreme fringes to protect their flanks. The fractured media landscape and liberal and conservative media “echo chambers” have also contributed to the increased polarization of our politics. Meanwhile, the phenomenon of “fake news” has shaken the public’s faith even in a set of common facts, the bedrock of reasoned debate. We will focus on reforming the incentives in U.S. politics that currently drive our leaders to favor partisan point scoring, personal attacks, and all-or-nothing posturing over reasoned debate and finding real solutions to our nation’s daunting challenges. Many are proposing practical solutions. Like many past efforts, states are often serving as the critical laboratories of democracy.

Congratulations, Mick Mulvaney. You put in stark relief what most Americans know in their gut: There’s a broken, “pay to play’ system in Washington. But it would be wrong to say you are the problem and leave it at that. That’s not really the case. The right for a redress of grievances is enshrined in our Constitution, and it’s an important right to exercise. There’s no constitutional imperative that requires lobbyists to be at the center of the current system that is up to its eyeballs in transactional giving. Even the National Institute for Lobbying & Ethics, a trade group for lobbyists, bristled at Mulvaney’s candid admission, saying, “This should not be be the norm or how ‘business’ is done in Washington.” Mulvaney’s words, “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. Members of Congress, especially those who aspire to leadership positions, spend too much time soliciting campaign contributions, and they hate it. Sure, we can lay much of this at the feet of a Supreme Court that almost blesses this “pay to play” system, where ingratiation and buying access are not considered corruption. One of its five solutions is reducing “pay to play” politics, because in a democracy, making laws should be based on the power of ideas, not simply the size of the checkbook or moneyed interests behind them.

No, not Macron and Trump; rather, for the United States and France. But with the American president alienating many other world leaders, his working relationship with Macron, who is as willing as Trump to fête and be fêted, is signaling that no ally in Europe, or the world, perhaps matters as much to the White House than Paris. Just 15 years ago, Republican leaders in Washington snidely disparaged the French because they refused to follow Americans blindly into the Iraq War. The president invited no Democrats to the Tuesday dinner, making the point that like-minded foreigners are welcome but that Americans of the opposition party are not. Congressional Republicans long ago traded their political ideology for Trump. That’s literally trading country for party. In the world of militaries and national security politics, this all matters. The French flip-flop is yet another example of how Americans should know that the messaging and posturing of global political leaders often have little to do with, nor do they reflect the reality of, the military and intelligence relationships. Others are fighting and training forces in Africa, often alongside U.S. troops, in Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Niger. That’s the diplomatic work that we’ve already started but we have to finish.

A photo taken at the funeral showed George W. Bush with one arm around his wife Laura, and his other arm around Hillary Clinton. Michelle Obama stood next to Melania Trump, with a beaming Barack Obama next to his wife. [T]he funeral was a welcome respite from the current alley cat brawl.” Brokaw’s words about Mrs. Bush are welcome and empathetic. Donald Trump has championed a particularly toxic brand of bullying masquerading as politics, and most Republicans — especially those in elected office — have signed on for the ride. A 2017 Trump campaign ad used precisely that word to describe Democrats and others who don’t agree with the president. When Democrats didn’t stand and applaud Trump during his State of the Union address earlier this year, Trump denounced them as “un-American” and even “treasonous.” This is not part of the ordinary business of American politics. As Greg Sargent notes, “Republicans embroiled in tough primaries are increasingly emulating President Trump” — including by calling for “imprisoning [Trump’s] political opponents.” For example, Don Blankenship, a Republican senate hopeful in West Virginia and former CEO of Massey Energy, has a campaign ad declaring that “We don’t need to investigate our president. What if he stood with Obama, Colin Powell, Madeline Albright, and other prominent Republicans and Democrats to reject Trump’s bullying, authoritarian tactics? Americans may well be hungry for bipartisanship. Seeing Bush, Obama, and others jointly denounce the idea of calling for the jailing of political opponents could be a great way to respond.