November 28, 2016

Trump has already defeated the news media. And its unclear what we can do about it.

By Paul Waldman November 28 at 1:17 PM

Donald Trump is either a mad genius who has cracked the media code in a way no politician before him was able to do, or he’s a kind of political Mr. Magoo, stumbling randomly about yet achieving one success after another. We may never know which it is. But if we’re going to maintain our democracy, we have to figure out how to deal with the way Trump successfully manipulates the media.

Perhaps, as some have suggested, Trump tweeted his ridiculous lie about millions of fraudulent votes on Sunday in order to distract people from this lengthy investigation in the New York Times of the overseas partnerships that present unprecedented conflict of interest problems for his foreign policy. But even if that wasn’t his intent, it’s what happened — and he accomplished some other things as well.

The first thing it does when Trump kicks off a frenzy like this one is thrill his supporters (and I’ll admit that I was among those who said that just playing to his base wouldn’t be enough to win him the election). Here’s how the cycle works. First, Trump says something outrageously false, but which his supporters either believe already or would like to believe. Then Trump gets criticized in the media for it, and his supporters say, “There they go again, the liberal anti-Trump media.” Instead of convincing everyone that the claim was false, the criticism only reinforces for Trump’s fans the idea that nothing the media says can be believed, which further undermines their ability to act as neutral arbiters in any debate.

The more outrageous his claim, the more coverage it gets. At first, a disturbing amount of that coverage just passes along what Trump is saying, particularly in headlines and brief mentions on television, which often take the form of “Trump says world is flat.” Then the news media find their footing a bit and begin explicitly calling him out for the falsehood. But the more it ends up looking like an argument between Trump and the media, the more that even Republicans who are skeptical of Trump will get pulled to his side, because they’ve long been invested in the idea that the media are hopelessly infected with liberal bias.

more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/11/28/trump-has-already-defeated-the-news-media-and-its-unclear-what-we-can-do-about-it/?utm_term=.b3468ad9ccd6&wpisrc=nl_popns&wpmm=1

November 28, 2016

Fewer people attend NC furniture market down since LGBT law

Source: Associated Press

HIGH POINT, N.C. (AP) — Fewer people are attending a world-renowned furniture market in North Carolina, where state law defines which bathrooms people can use and limits legal protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

Attendance at the High Point Market’s fall event dropped 2.4 percent compared to October 2015. The spring event also drew about 1,000 fewer registered attendees than in April 2015. High Point Market Authority CEO Tom Conley didn’t respond Monday when asked how much calls to boycott events in North Carolina over House Bill 2 are to blame.

The taxpayer-supported authority was one of the first North Carolina business groups to warn the law could hurt commerce. The twice-a-year markets together generate about $5 billion in statewide economic activity. The 2015 fall market for wholesale furniture buyers and sellers had been the best in five years, so October’s registered attendance of 77,036 is still strong, Conley said in a news release last week. It’s nearly 1 percent higher than in 2014, he said.

The spring market held in April was marked by a social-media campaign urging a boycott after North Carolina lawmakers in March voided a Charlotte anti-discrimination ordinance and imposed the new rules statewide. Some of the roughly 20,000 retail and interior-design companies that usually attend the five-day event stayed away.

-snip-

Read more: http://www.salon.com/2016/11/28/fewer-people-attend-nc-furniture-market-down-since-lgbt-law/

November 28, 2016

Trump Threatens To 'Terminate' Normalized Relations With Cuba

Source: Talking Points Memo

Donald Trump on Monday threatened to undo President Barack Obamas attempts to normalize U.S. relations with Cuba unless the island nation makes reforms that are to his liking. If Cuba is unwilling to make a better deal for the Cuban people, the Cuban/American people and the U.S. as a whole, I will terminate deal, the President-elect [link:https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/803237535178772481wrote on Twitter].

Trump offered no further explanation of the kind of reforms he would like to see, or what would prompt him to rescind Obamas 2014 executive actions re-establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba and lifting key economic sanctions against the country.

His recently-named chief of staff, Reince Priebus, offered some specifics in a Sunday interview on Fox News. Priebus [link:http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/27/priebus-trump-will-void-cuba-deal-unless-castro-regime-moves-to-concessions.htmlnamed] repression, open markets, freedom of religion, political prisoners as some of the key factors that need to change if the United States and Cuba are to have a relationship.

Trump transition communications director Jason Miller told reporters in a Monday conference call that the President-elect understands that Cuba is a very complex topic. In addition to the priorities Priebus stated, Miller said that Trump would focus on the return of fugitives from American law.

-snip-

Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/trump-threaten-terminate-normalized-relations-cuba

November 28, 2016

Fidel Castro's Horrific Record on Gay Rights

Concentration camps for gays. Political prisons where they were treated like ‘beasts.’ Listen up, liberals: Before you go celebrating the life of Castro, remember his victims.

JAMES KIRCHICK

11.27.16 2:23 PM ET

Fidel Castro was many things: a revolutionary, a communist, a garrulous orator. Amid the fawning encomia released upon his long-overdue death at the age of 90, it should never be forgotten that he was also an oppressor, torturer, and murderer of gay people.

“We would never come to believe that a homosexual could embody the conditions and requirements of conduct that would enable us to consider him a true revolutionary, a true communist militant,” Castro told an interviewer in 1965. “A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant communist should be.”

In the eyes of Castro and his revolutionary comrade Che Guevara—who frequently referred to gay men as maricones, “faggots”—homosexuality was inherently counterrevolutionary, a bourgeois decadence. To a traditional Latin American machismo that viewed gayness pejoratively, they married an ideological fixation treating it as politically undesirable.

It wasn’t long after Castro came to power that police began rounding up gay men. In 1965, the regime established prison work camps known as Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP), into which it deposited homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other “undesirable” elements. Alert to this news, the Mattachine Society—one of the earliest gay rights organizations in the United States—held demonstrations outside the United Nations and the White House successively over two days. Four years before the world-famous Stonewall riots, these were two of the first gay rights protests held in the United States. That same year, Allen Ginsberg was expelled from Cuba for spreading rumors that Raul Castro—Fidel’s brother and successor as president—was gay and claiming that Guevara was “cute.”

Putting gays into concentration camps is not the only practice Castro borrowed from the Nazis. During the Cuban missile crisis, according to recently released German intelligence files, this so-called anti-fascist attempted to hire former SS officers to instruct his army. Though the Cuban regime closed down the UMAPs in the late 1960s, it continued to repress gay men as ideologically subversive elements. Openly homosexual people were prevented from joining the Communist Party and fired from their jobs. One of the country’s most distinguished writers, Reinaldo Arenas, recounted the prison experience he and countless other gay men endured in his memoir Before Night Falls. “It was a sweltering place without a bathroom,” he wrote. “Gays were not treated like human beings, they were treated like beasts. They were the last ones to come out for meals, so we saw them walk by, and the most insignificant incident was an excuse to beat them mercilessly.”

-snip-

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/27/don-t-forget-fidel-castro-s-brutal-oppression-of-gay-people.html

November 28, 2016

DNC Chair Candidate Keith Ellison Once Called For Separate Country for Black Americans

Here we go, the right wing smear against Ellison begins. Eventually, they'll tie all this together into an anti-Muslim tirade against him...and the Democratic Party if he becomes chair. -- DonViejo

by Alex Griswold | 11:53 am, November 28th, 2016

Democratic Minnesota Representative and Democratic National Committee chairman candidate Keith Ellison once called for slavery reparations and a separate country for black Americans in a university newspaper column.

Ellison’s writings while a student at the University of Minnesota law school– under the name “Keith Hakim”– raised eyebrows when he announced his first congressional run in 2006. The Weekly Standard noted that “Ellison refers to ‘Minister Louis Farrakhan,’ defends Nation of Islam spokesman Khalid Abdul Muhammad, and speaks in the voice of a Nation of Islam advocate… ‘Hakim’ demands reparations for slavery and throws in a demand for an optional separate homeland for American blacks.”

After Ellison announced he was seeking the chairman position, The Daily Caller News Foundation went back and dug up the columns in question, including two the Standard missed. In particular, they confirmed Ellison’s past support for a separate country for African-Americans:

Blacks would have the option of choosing their own land base or remaining in the United States. Since black people toiled most diligently in the southeastern section of the United States, this land, quite naturally, would be most suitable. That means Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi. Blacks, of course, would not be compelled to move to the black state, and, of course, peaceful whites would not be compelled to move away.

-snip-

http://www.mediaite.com/online/dnc-chair-candidate-keith-ellison-once-called-for-separate-country-for-black-americans/

November 28, 2016

It turns out we should have taken Trump literally as well as seriously

He’s really doing what he said.

Updated by Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesiasmatt@vox.com Nov 28, 2016, 8:10am EST

In one of the better stories written about Donald Trump’s core base of supporters during the 2016 campaign, the Atlantic’s Salena Zito observed that while the national media had a tendency to take Trump literally without taking his presidential ambitions seriously, his fans did just the reverse: They took him seriously but not literally.

As a point about the state of mind of Trump supporters, Zito is absolutely correct. But one of Trump’s most prominent supporters, the media-savvy billionaire Peter Thiel, took Zito’s turn of phrase and inverted its meaning. He said that the media misunderstands Donald Trump by taking him literally rather than seriously.

What we’ve seen thus far of Trump’s transition, however, shows just the opposite. The national press’s Trump coverage did to an extent err by not taking him seriously enough. But it also failed in exactly the same way many Trump supporters failed. The celebrity candidate seemed so much more emotionally invested in his rallies than his policy proposals that not nearly enough attention was paid to the literal commitments he was making and what they literally said.

But throughout history and across various countries, the best guide to how politicians will govern is to pay attention to their policy promises. And Trump’s transition so far suggests that this is an area where he will be typical. Like any president, he won’t accomplish 100 percent of what he promised to do. But he’ll make a good faith effort at the vast majority of it, and probably succeed in many cases.

-snip-

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/28/13728086/trump-literally-and-seriously

November 28, 2016

Delta Bans Trump Supporter Who Ranted At 'Hillary Bitches' On Flight

Source: Talking Points Memo

The CEO of Delta Airlines responded Monday to a video of a man berating “Hillary bitches” on a flight last week, defending the flight crew’s decision not to kick the man off the plane but saying that he would not be allowed on a Delta flight again.

“After questioning the customer, our team members made the best decision they could given the information they had and allowed him to remain on the flight,” CEO Ed Bastian’s memo to staff reads in part. “However, if our colleagues had witnessed firsthand what was shown in the video, there is no question they would have removed him from the aircraft.”

The memo states that passengers on the Tuesday morning flight from Atlanta to Allentown, Pennsylvania would be refunded the cost of their tickets and that the man in the video “will never again be allowed on a Delta plane.”

In a video posted to Facebook by Emma Baum, one of the passengers on the flight is seen standing up from his seat and yelling about Donald Trump to the rest of the plane.

-snip-

Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/delta-bans-trump-supporter-viral-video-rant

November 28, 2016

Texas Elector Resigns: Trump Is Not Qualified And I Cannot Vote For Him

A member of the Electoral College representing Texas, Art Sisneros, wrote on Saturday that he will resign as an elector because he refuses to cast a vote for Donald Trump. Sisneros had previously spoken out against Trump, telling Politico in August that he was considering voting against Trump even if he won the electoral college. But in a blog post on Saturday, Sisneros wrote that he does not want to be a "faithless" elector and cannot bring himself to vote for Trump, so he decided to resign from his role as an elector.

"I do not see how Donald Trump is biblically qualified to serve in the office of the Presidency. Of the hundreds of angry messages that I have received, not one has made a convincing case from scripture otherwise," he wrote on his blog "The Blessed Path." "If Trump is not qualified and my role, both morally and historically, as an elected official is to vote my conscience, then I can not and will not vote for Donald Trump for President. I believe voting for Trump would bring dishonor to God."

"Since I can’t in good conscience vote for Donald Trump, and yet have sinfully made a pledge that I would, the best option I see at this time is to resign my position as an Elector," Sisneros continued. "This will allow the remaining body of Electors to fill my vacancy when they convene on Dec 19 with someone that can vote for Trump. The people will get their vote. They will get their Skittles for dinner. I will sleep well at night knowing I neither gave in to their demands nor caved to my convictions. I will also mourn the loss of our republic."

###

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/art-sisneros-elector-resigns-over-trump

November 28, 2016

Unprecedented Corruption at the Top

Paul Krugman: “Remember all the news reports suggesting, without evidence, that the Clinton Foundation’s fund-raising created conflicts of interest? Well, now the man who benefited from all that innuendo is on his way to the White House. And he’s already giving us an object lesson in what real conflicts of interest look like, as authoritarian governments around the world shower favors on his business empire.”

“Of course, Donald Trump could be rejecting these favors and separating himself and his family from his hotels and so on. But he isn’t. In fact, he’s openly using his position to drum up business. And his early appointments suggest that he won’t be the only player using political power to build personal wealth. Self-dealing will be the norm throughout this administration. America has just entered an era of unprecedented corruption at the top.”

###

https://politicalwire.com/2016/11/28/unprecedented-corruption-top/

November 28, 2016

Gingrich Says Transition Turning Into Reality TV Show

Newt Gingrich, who backs Rudy Giuliani for secretary of state, told the Wall Street Journal that the search for the nation’s top diplomat is playing out a bit like Donald Trump’s longtime reality show, The Apprentice, as he publicly mulls the candidates’ skill sets and invites “audience participation.”

Said Gingrich: “It’s the only place so far that we have seen him trying to do an open apprenticeship, if you will.”

###

https://politicalwire.com/2016/11/28/gingrich-says-transition-turning-reality-tv-show/