To listen to your broadcasts, we are on the precipice of a national mental health plague, something Americans only survive with the aid of therapy, drinking or an endless slathering on of (wry, fashionable-understated) cynicism. A time of year where all ceremony is onerous, all family members are insane or intolerable, all travel is wearing, all human interaction is a layer of plastic fakery over a rotten, frothing core of anxiety and desperation.Yes. Public radio became irrelevant to me a quarter-century ago. On occasion, if I'm on a road trip and the car radio is on scan, I'll lock on to a public radio station, and it's the nasal droning and the obscure topics.
That’s right – the Holiday season.
Public radio programming will be clogged with with newscasters droning on about seasonal mental health afflictions; with “entertainers” jabbering about the only kind of get-togethers any of them seem to have – ugly, dysfunctional ones; with obscure writers and artists elevated (?) to radio commentators, testifying to the ordeal we’re all about to go through.
Point taken, Public Radio – the upper-middle-class, over-miseducated, secular (wildly-disproportionally secular-jewish) crowd is exquisitely bored with the whole thing.
Some years ago I mildly remarked to a gathering of my beloved Department of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago that the speaker who had just concluded his presentation, a fashionable Marxian imported from New York, just might not have got the economic history exactly right. The speaker responded in a sentence, "Oh, I see that you are a neoliberal"and sat down. That was it, and none of my colleagues, mostly themselves Marxians or Marxoids or cautious fellow travelers, would speak up to insist that he respond more fully to someone who after all had some claim to knowing a little about economics and history. I was startled by his exhibition of proud ignorance and saddened by the implicit agreement in the room that one is not to "listen, really listen, to one's friends' questions and objections"and certainly not to those of one's party enemies. The result of a century of name-calling-as-argument, from "Bernsteinian revisionism"and "economism"to "bourgeois"and "neoliberal,"and not listening, really listening, has had the scientific result one might expect.Oh, plus she gets price theory, as a careful reading will reveal. A sample:
In truth, after all, "surplus value"is "extracted"every time you exchange anything for something else—or else you wouldn't do it, would you, now? You are a "capitalist"when you buy a cup of coffee served by an "exploited"owner of a coffee shop. She gets the profit of a price higher than the lowest she would accept, and you get a cup of coffee for lower than the highest price you would accept—which is why exchange happens, earning a profit for both sides.Strictly speaking, "profit" refers here to "consumer and producer surplus," but that's rivet-counting.
Rep. Tim Ryan, an Ohio Democrat, is mounting a challenge against House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and argues that Democrats are hurt by a paint-by-numbers view of politics. “We try to slice the electorate up,” Ryan said on Meet the Press over the weekend. “And we try to say, ‘You’re black, you’re brown, you’re gay, you’re straight, you’re a woman, you’re a man.’”Mr Lowry suggests that paying attention to what we used to understand as mainstream Americans might help.
Ryan might have pointed to a critique of his own leadership bid by a writer at the website ThinkProgress, who opined that his run against Pelosi “is how sexism works.” How so? Ryan is a male; Pelosi is a woman. Q.E.D.
Outside of its political effects, this style of argument is childish and intellectually deadening, yet is too ingrained and widespread on the left to be extricated easily.
What Democrats won’t want to grapple with is that their problem with Middle America goes deeper than an insufficiently socialistic economic agenda, and deeper than their hard-to-control instinct to call people who disagree with them names. To have broader appeal, Democrats will actually have to meet working-class voters partway on a few cultural issues, whether it is abortion or guns or immigration, even if their concessions are symbolical or rhetorical.Yes, and Thirty-something Wendy Caldwell elaborates. "Attention Liberals: We Are Part of the Problem." First: stop the condescension.
This is what Bill Clinton did in the 1990s when he made inroads into what would come to be known as Red America. This will be a truly painful step, and surely anyone advocating it will be accused of every -ism and -phobia in the book.
Nobody wants to be told that their beliefs and opinions are invalid because they don't know any better. If we want to make changes in this country, we need to win elections. We cannot do that if we treat everyone as though we are more enlightened than they are. Think back to your high school days. Was the class president the smartest person in your grade? Probably not. It was probably someone who was popular - someone who knew how to make and keep friends. It was probably someone who was good at getting people to like him/her.This is going to be difficult, as there is a long tradition of activism as pedantry. "Have you read The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon?" But in the just-ended presidential, the frat boy beat teacher's pet. Just saying. " What we do not do - what we cannot do - is belittle others by putting on airs of intellectual superiority. This has not worked, and it will not work. Nobody likes a know-it-all, even if they are right." Yes, and too often the self-styled progressives get it wrong. But that's Mr Lowry's forum.
We've gotten so caught up in our enlightened crusades that we've forgotten that not everyone fits into one of these demographics that we are so apt to try and rescue. In an ideal society, every citizen votes. Everyone. And that means that if we expect to win elections, we certainly cannot neglect half of the voters just because they have a certain kind of privilege, skin color, or social class. Ironically, we are often striving for equality among people of all levels of privilege, of all skin colors, and of all social classes.Plus call a halt to the Oppression Olympics.
I realize this stance may be a bit unpopular, but we have to live in reality. I've spent a lot of time reflecting over the last few days, and I've heard this subject come up more than once, and it was done so by the latest liberal villain: the privileged white man. Donald Trump overwhelming won the white vote (men and women). Of course, the natural response is to say he won the racist vote. That is probably true, as several known racist groups endorsed him. However, not everyone who voted for him is racist (I'll get to that later). If this is the case, why did white Americans come out in such large numbers in support of him?
There are many reasons, I am sure, but one of the main ones is probably that he validated their concerns instead of dismissing them. Yes, having white skin in this country affords one certain privileges. I, for instance, have been pulled over by police officers many times. Never once have I felt that my life was in danger. Never once have I been afraid of anything other than the cost of the ticket, which I usually do not even get. I recognize this is largely due to the way I look, and there is nothing I can do about that. However, that does not mean I do not have problems that should be taken seriously.
We have gotten into the unseemly habit of making a contest out of people's struggles. Sure, that middle-aged white man who has been unemployed for 8 months has it rough, but think of how much worse it would be for him if he were an Hispanic woman. Of course it would be more difficult. We usually learn growing up that someone always has it better than we do, and someone always has it worse. But how is saying that going to help that man get a job? It won't.Congratulations, you've just pointed out how empty intersectionality theory is. It's useful to have empathy or sympathy for someone in a worse state than you. It's also useful to be upset when people don't take advantage of the favorable circumstances they find themselves in. (That may be part of the appeal of Mr Trump's "We are being governed by stupid people.")
But to many professors, the idea of a watch list seemed newly chilling in a political climate in which some scholars have been the targets of racist and anti-Semitic abuse. Whether the list ends up having a chilling effect on speech depends on how seriously people take it, said Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a group that views itself as a defender of campus free speech.Catch that "views itself as a defender?" The Foundation (disclaimer: they get Christmas money from me. Universities don't) maintain a speech code watch list, which runs contrary to business as usual at many such institutions, including the one I retired from.
Professors on the list reacted with a mix of disbelief, confusion, and pride; one scholar even took to social media to wonder why he wasn’t named. Some scholars used the Twitter hashtag #trollprofwatchlist to mock the whole enterprise, submitting false tips about Indiana Jones and Professor Xavier, from the X-Men comic-book series, among others.
On routes where they still have adequate infrastructure, railroads have won back fantastic amounts of business from trucks, especially on long hauls such as Los Angeles to New York, where railroads now have a 72 percent market share in container traffic and could have more. Railroads have gone from having too much track to having not enough. Today, the nation’s rail network is just 94,942 miles, less than half of what it was in 1970, yet it is hauling 137 percent more freight, making for extreme congestion and longer shipping times.The overbuilt railroad network of the 1920 - 1970 period was phenomenally productive, and improvements in train and signalling technologies have made possible the greater volumes, even at the risk of a lot of Delayed Freight.
The half-conscious decision by Washington, Wall Street, and the last generation of rail management to abandon much of the rail system thus prevents railroads from getting more trucks off the road. For example, UPS desperately wants to use fast trains like the ones Erie Lackawanna once had to reduce the cost of moving parcels coast to coast in less than four days, a feat currently requiring a tag team of truck drivers at enormous cost in fuel and labor. For a brief time in 2004, UPS did persuade two railroads to run a train fast enough to handle this business. But due to insufficient track to allow slower trains to get out of its way, the UPS bullet train caused massive congestion, freezing up the Union Pacific system for months until the railroad at last canceled the service.
The Program Prioritization Administrative Task Force placed the program in the enhanced resources category, suggesting the program “has the potential to increase enrollment as well as improve the academic profile of the institution,” according to the task force report. The task force also acknowledged the inadequate funding allotted for the program.What was I saying, before I quit, about the deleterious effects of discouraging people of ability?
Daniel Kempton, who works as the vice president for Academic Affairs at Franciscan University of Steubenville, served as NIU’s honors director from 2009 to 2011 and said he felt he did not receive the resources he needed.
During Kempton’s time at NIU as honors director, he established new programs and administration saw a rise in the number of students participating in the program. Kempton said despite achieving this, he still felt it was a challenge being heard.
“I think [NIU] was in a period already at that time where the competition for resources was very intense, and I valued the honors program [so much] that I thought that it would receive resources more readily than it did,” Kempton said. “I did think we had a supportive administration at the time, [but] it was challenging.”
Today there's only one round-trip passenger train a day on the Pennsylvanian, the line that runs from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh. It passes through Lewistown going east at 11:20 a.m. and heading west at 3:45 p.m., stopping in Huntingdon, Tyrone, Altoona, Johnstown, Latrobe and Greensburg on the way to Pittsburgh.On the eve of Amtrak, the remnants of The Pennsylvania Railroad's Fleet of Modernism for and from Chicago, Cincinnati, and St. Louis crossed the Mountain overnight, plus there were two Pittsburgh day trains. But getting the trains back involves negotiations.
A lot of people would like to see more daily trains to make day trips and commuting possible.
After a series of bankruptcies and buy-outs, the once-great Pennsylvania Railroad was divided up among different rail companies. The line east of Harrisburg into Philadelphia went to Amtrak, the passenger rail company. West of Harrisburg became freight lines owned by Norfolk Southern Corporation.Yeah, we've seen what Norfolk Southern does about moving people on the revised Chicago to Harrisburg main line Conrail created out of Penn Central.
Amtrak and Norfolk Southern serve as each other's landlords, one renting track time for passenger trains, the other for freight trains. Norfolk Southern spokesman David Pidgeon says they are happy to help when they can, but the company's priority is moving stuff, not people.
"Roughly about 40 to 60 Norfolk Southern trains a day travel that corridor, so this is a critically important part of not just the Norfolk Southern network, but also, the nation's supply chain," said Pidgeon.
Norfolk Southern is planning for an increase in freight traffic over the next three decades, so the company is wary about renting more track time to Amtrak. Before they consider the proposal, they will require a feasibility study that addresses scheduling, safety and liability concerns.I have copies of Pennsylvania Railroad and Penn Central timetables showing the passenger train frequencies from the middle 1950s until 1971 to show what the passenger train frequencies used to be. In those days there was a lot more dead freight, particularly on the Mountain Division, with coal and ore into the mills and steel out. The improvements to the former Alton Route speed up passengers between Chicago and St. Louis, as well as intermodal traffic for and from the Sun Belt. Perhaps Norfolk Southern, Amtrak, and the government can strike a deal. It would certainly hearten Chris Matthews, who of late has been going on about building faster passenger trains into "flyover country." The Midwest would likely still be flyover country for Californians headed for or from the east coast, but a regional rail passenger service linking Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh to Cleveland and Cincinnati, Erie and Cleveland to Toledo, Detroit, and Chicago, Chicago to the Twin Cities and Fargo, and the Twin Cities to St. Louis would be nice.
And, of course, "Norfolk Southern is a private business, so we would certainly be looking for fair compensation for the use of our private network."
The railroad subcommittee in the Pennsylvania House has brought a resolution that requests funding for that feasibility study. After that, there will be a better sense of what the costs might be, whether it's worth it, and whether PennDOT, Amtrak and Norfolk Southern would be able to strike a deal.
Free speech advocates are right to be on the lookout. Historically, creating a list of disfavored viewpoints or of people who hold them has often been a first step towards official sanction. The American Association of University Professors also expressed concern about the Watchlist; in a 1985 statement regarding a similar effort, it said that such “[e]xternal monitoring of in-class statements” is “likely to have a chilling effect and result in self-censorship.” FIRE hopes neither of these results come to pass, but if any college or university takes action or attempts to restrict expression based on the Watchlist—or any similar list—we will employ all of the resources at our disposal in response.Once upon a time, there was something called good manners, and something called scholarly integrity, under which, inter alia, a professor would teach the New Deal in such a way that a student would not be sure whether Franklin Roosevelt is Savior or Destroyer. But that was so Fifties, and now we have people self-censoring because Student Affairs suggests they do so, or because they fear they will trigger people in a bad way.
Last week, at Northern Illinois University where I teach, there was a discussion aimed at addressing the issue of safety for our most vulnerable students: people of color, especially Black students and undocumented students (who, at NIU, mostly come from Mexico), as well as women and LGBTQI individuals.Apparently, there has been a Yobs With Confederate Battle Flag sighting. (On occasion, I have seen such a pickup truck around town. Some people come with warning labels.)
In an act of poor-decision making, I once made it to a meeting on time by climbing over a freight train that was temporarily stopped on the tracks and blocking my access to the station.Climbing over a stopped freight train, or crawling under one, is a hazardous practice considering that trains might move at any time, or be jolted by the coupling of cars.
I wasn’t the only pedestrian to make this dangerous decision either. Freight trains regularly sit on the tracks, blocking every North / South intersection that could be used to get to the station.
Commuters often arrive early, watch their train pull into the station, wait for 15 minutes, and watch their train pull away without them. All while blocked by the freight trains. Some have become frighteningly comfortable with climbing over the freight trains [video available at the link] in business attire, hoisting their bicycles over the non-moving trains, and even passing young children in between train cars.
If Dallas goes under, the state authorities aren’t going to be keen to bail out the city government. Some of the bloodiest fights over the next few years will be between blue cities and red state legislatures as pension liabilities force municipalities to ask for assistance. With Republicans dominant at the state level (and now at the federal level), cities aren’t going to have an easy time getting help.Republican-friendly suburbs are in little better shape, but in the absence of a growing economy, agglomeration economies aren't enough for the big cities either.
There’s a lot of talk these days about urban renewal, with greener waterfronts and hipster gentrification driving up real estate values and making previously-decrepit neighborhoods hot spots of culture. But today’s urban havens are built on a very unsteady foundation of blue city governance. At what point will the costs of maintaining today’s blue cities outweigh the appeal of what we might call “Brooklynization”? It’s not just rising housing prices that could drive people out; imagine the tax rates which could be necessary to pay off pension liabilities. Particularly for families looking to make an investment in real estate, cities may start to look much riskier.That's already happening in Chicago, and at what point will the city no longer be able to maintain what is effectively a gated community surrounded by increasing despair and increasing frustration with Democrats?
It was not just the failure of the Democrats' urban-centric political focus on minorities, women, and income inequality that deep-sixed Hillary Clinton's campaign. Walking it back, what has outraged so many grassroots conservatives was the phony conservatism under George W. Bush, culminating in the financial crisis of 2008. It pushed them overboard to no longer get fooled by the Republican establishment that had been basically a milder form of the big-government progressivism that had taken over the Democratic Party following the loss of Hubert Humphrey in 1968 to Richard Nixon. It was that crushing loss that sent Democrats on a far-left trajectory for decades to come.That squares with an hypothesis, popular among Pajamas Media writers, to the effect that the relatively polite Tea Party movement, upon being handled roughly by the Democrat-Academic-Entertainment-Media Complex, might emerge in a less refined form.
Bush did nothing to cut back the size and growth of government. Instead, he actually expanded it through his unfunded Medicare Part D prescription drug program and the "No Child Left Behind" federally mandated education program. There were no efforts at all to rein in spending and the size of the federal government. And the war with Iraq added untold billions to the ever expanding annual federal deficits.
Bush's "compassionate conservatism" was liberalism in disguise.
Recent attempt to subvert social institutions by problematizing concepts have produced a few very good books. They have also produced many thousands of books which represent scholastic philosophizing at its worst. The authors of these purportedly ‘subversive’ books honestly believe that they are serving human liberty. But it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy. Even though what these authors ‘theorize’ is often something very concrete and near at hand – a current TV show, a media celebrity, a recent scandal – they offer the most abstract and barren explanations imaginable.Well, that subversiveness corroded the mediating institutions, and converted bourgeois concepts such as integrity and morality into constructs reeking of privilege. Perhaps Mr Rorty is correct, the failings of the intellectual elite, and the epistemically closed bubbles into which their political brain-brothers retreated, and the people who had to live next door to the splintery, trashy culture that everybody else got stuck with sought a strongman. But politics is downstream from culture, and the deconstruction of the established ways of doing things made much of the opposition to Mr Trump's outrageous behavior as a campaigner simply a matter of preference, rather than insistence on a principle.
The Illinois Terminal’s days as a passenger carrier were coming to an end, as the railroad could not overcome larger social and economic changes sweeping the Corn Belt, mainly those involving the intertwined issues of depopulation, school consolidation and the rise of the automobile. Tolley knew this, as did the train crew and most passengers.The interurban is gone, the mail and the nursery stock no longer travel on the electric cars. Some tracks remain in the streets of Bloomington's warehouse district (itself a casualty of just-in-time logistics?) where truckers obstructed the passage of the cars.
There was a poll this week subsequent to the election that showed that the general public has a more favorable view of Democrats than Republicans. As I noted, my approval ratings are quite high yet what has been true during the course of my eight years is that does not always translate. In fact, too often it hasn't translated into working majorities at the state level or the federal level.Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Delaware also get the same number of senators as California, but those states are, for some reason, more likely to be the destination of Democrat-leaning voters than Wyoming or the Dakotas. Or perhaps it's a failure of Mr Obama and the rest of the Democrats to do anything constructive for swing voters away from the coasts. That's part of Michael Barone's most recent pass through the returns.
Now, some of that is the nature of our system. And geography. As long as Wyoming gets the same number of Senators as California there is going to be some tilt towards Republicans when it comes to Congressional races. The fact that a lot of Democratic voters are bunched up in big cities and a lot of Republican voters are spread out across geography gives them an advantage when it comes to Congressional races. Some of it is just political bad luck.
For example, I came in as the economy was in flow fall and although I took the right steps to save the economy, in my midterm election of 2010 people couldn't yet see the recovery and not surprisingly the president's party got punished. We lost control of a lot of not just Congressional seats but also governorships and state legislative seats and that happened to be the year that the census was done and you start doing redistricting. And so those Republicans took advantage of political gerrymandering to lock in majorities even though in a numerous subsequent elections Democrats have actually cast more votes or more votes have been cast for Democratic Congressional candidates than Republicans and yet you end up having large Republican majorities. So there are just structural problems we have to deal with.
But the Obama coalition turned out to be too heavily clustered to be easily replicated in an election decided by electoral votes, and much too heavily clustered to make the party competitive in congressional and legislative elections conducted in equal-population districts.That's been going on all through the Obama presidency.
People from all walks of life have performed their first protest of any kind, confronting the repressive “riot” police and not backing down. New groups are springing into existence as people spontaneously self-organize.Yes, time to head to the Finland Station, to the barricades, to the local campus of Trump University.
How powerful is the new movement? Time will tell. But it’s up to activists, organizers, and revolutionaries to prioritize throwing fresh logs on the movement flame, buying time to activate and educate new people while building and leveraging power.
The Left can achieve miracles in this moment if it strategically grows and broadens the infant social movement. What is possible depends on the strength of the movement. In math terms: if X grows larger (the social movement), then Y (anything) is possible, including preventing Trump from assuming power.Who is to provide the Tet Offensive for this insurgency?
The anti-Trump movement will either grow or shrink. But it’s up to activists to grow the movement by any means necessary. Historically speaking, the most obvious evidence of powerful social movements are massive, ongoing street demonstrations that grow in proportion to the momentum the movement produces. The anti-Vietnam war movement is just such an example.
Instead of each separate group organizing their own, smaller actions over their own particular issues, organizations must work together in democratically run coalitions to organize ongoing massive demonstrations around issues that include everyone under attack, so that they can be coordinated nationwide.Perhaps, although it is the very diversity that Mr Cooke invokes in assembling this supposed coalition that will lead to the fracturing of the coalition, or to vanguardists attempting to impose their own structure on the spontaneous order. All the same, a democratically run coalition of the virtue-signallers and the privilege-checkers will make for amusing television.
There is already a call for a massive demonstration on Trump’s inauguration day, but there is time to organize several nationwide massive mobilizations before then. Each one would embolden new layers of people to take to the streets, and will, hopefully, get the labor movement engaged in a big way, while invigorating the Black Lives Matter movement, Latinos, women, students, LGBTQ, Muslims, and everyone who fears a Trump presidency. All should be demonstrating together, striking blows collectively.
The movement can be easily squandered. Sectarian divisions that have plagued the left for years are re-asserting themselves. Some groups want to opportunistically use the moment to recruit to their own group while doing nothing to grow the movement. Groups and individual activists denounce the actions of others while doing nothing productive themselves. This ego-driven gossipy infighting has been a cancer on the left for years and needs to die now, lest it kill the movement.
All Left groups should be calling for local coalitions that organize ongoing street demonstrations that also make demands on local city and state governments. By making local demands — and winning them — the local movement will strengthen itself, and be better able to defend against a possible Trump presidency.
Local demands should be “united front” demands, meaning there are a few powerful demands that have broad support from the majority of the working class, mobilizing them into action. The existing energy must be funneled into something concrete locally to help grow the movement nationally.
Red America has no choice but to listen to Blue America all the time.Yes, but virtue-signalling trumps logic. Besides, logic is another bourgeois construction.
And, sorry, it’s Blue America that routinely screams “Shut up” to voices it doesn’t want to hear. That’s the essence of political correctness, and not just on campus: Recall, for example, the PC condemnation of the incredibly sensitive and nuanced “red” film “American Sniper.”
When you can’t understand how your fellow Americans could make “that man” our next president, maybe it’s time you stopped assuming it hasn’t heard you, and started listening yourselves.
In precisely the same way, when, somewhat later, academic leftists preached that race and gender were the determinative categories of social analysis, members of the future alt-right were slouching in the back rows of their classrooms, baseball caps pulled down over their eyes, making no external motions but in their dark little hearts twitching with fervent agreement.That's the same argument Andrew Sullivan made before the election, when (and he's likely to be stressing this rather than his reservations about Trig Palin's parentage, going forward) he, almost alone among the MSNBC Approved People, predicted a Trump win.
For a few years now, the term ‘white men’ has been used as shorthand for evil. Apparently white men are running, and ruining, society, the economy, the internet, and everything else. Now, following Trump’s rise, ‘white women’ are getting it in the neck, too. ‘How white women’s fear helped elect Donald Trump’, one headline sneers. Feminists tell us these white women suffer from internalised misogyny, the poor dears, where their brains have been fried by ‘the culture’ and they end up hating themselves.He's having none of it, and he ends with a reprimand to the social theorists of the left.
As if the white man who owns a bank is indistinguishable from the Rust Belt white guy who works on a production line. As if the white man who runs the European Commission is the same as the white men who must trek from the east of the EU to the west just to find some (hard) work. Radicals’ obsession with whiteness speaks to their utter abandonment of the idea of class, and of any attempt to analyse and rethink social relations.There's more in Mark Lilla's The End of Identity Liberalism. It runs in New York's Times, thus maybe a few of the appletini set will read it and understand it.
Hillary Clinton was at her best and most uplifting when she spoke about American interests in world affairs and how they relate to our understanding of democracy. But when it came to life at home, she tended on the campaign trail to lose that large vision and slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop. This was a strategic mistake. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class and those with strong religious convictions.Neglect part of the electorate at your peril, warns The American Interest. "Both left and right see the politics of group identity as useful to securing short term gains. But in the long run, it will not produce anything good—only tribalism, distrust, and, ultimately, violence."
The east sides of New York, London and Paris are noticeably and famously poorer than their western sides. And it turns out there’s a reason for that.Yes, research often confirms things people think staggeringly obvious, but it's in developing the tools to be unable to reject the staggeringly obvious that one obtains the ability to make sense of the truly mysterious.
Researchers have found that it’s due to the impact of air pollutants at the time of the Industrial Revolution, as prevailing winds in the U.S. and Europe typically blow from west to east. And it’s an impact that has lasted into today.
CHUCK TODD: Before the election, there were Democrats telling Hillary Clinton if she won, she needed to spend time in red America. Does Donald Trump need to spend some time in blue America and not just have rallies with his supporters but maybe have town halls with opponents?Chipmunk has to change the subject, because Mrs Conway has done her homework, and she's going to match him one "In September you said this ..." with a proper response.
KELLYANNE CONWAY: Sure. He's already shown his willingness to spend time in blue America. It's actually how he won the election. Busting the blue wall that people said we couldn't do.
CHUCK TODD: Now, but there's a difference. Talking to--
KELLYANNE CONWAY: But he also--
CHUCK TODD: It's-- There's one thing talking-- going to states where he finds voters who agree with him. But talking to voters who disagree with him.
KELLYANNE CONWAY: Well, he found a lot of voters who disagreed with the Republican Party all along, and they voted for him. Those were the undercover Trump voters we tried to talk about for months under a hail of ridicule.
CHUCK TODD: So what you're saying is he's not-- he wouldn't come in to say, "Let's burn Washington down proverbially"?She can't say it, but I will. Democrats were more effective at buying proxies when they had to do so with their own money, at three votes for the price of five slaves. I'm going to get into the contested Electoral College in the next few days, and the way the Democrats buying proxies with other people's money shaped the aftermath of 2012.
KELLYANNE CONWAY: I think that the president-elect is there to actually implement his first 100-day plan. And those around him know that and will appreciate that, whether it's within his inner circle or on Capitol Hill. I-- we are very grateful in Trump world to both Bannon and Priebus. And I think you'll see them wor-- continue to work together. We all work very closely together. This is a mandate. And those of us, those of us who are around him will support him--
CHUCK TODD: It's a mandate? But, the pop--
KELLYANNE CONWAY: --wanting to do stuff.
CHUCK TODD: All right. But you say it's a mandate. How do you explain losing the popular vote?
KELLYANNE CONWAY: Well, you've got big states in there like California, and Illinois, New York.
CHUCK TODD: All, all part of America.
KELLYANNE CONWAY:
All par-- Well, of course they're part of America--
CHUCK TODD: No, but that's my point. So that's half the country. I mean, it's one thing to claim a mandate. And I, I think governing-wise, I get what you're saying. But you do have a public opinion-wise or popularity-wise that's a different story. How do you--
KELLYANNE CONWAY: Popularity.
CHUCK TODD: --square the two? How do you square the two?
KELLYANNE CONWAY: You know, Chuck, for, you know, my colleagues across the aisle in Brooklyn and team Clinton are very smart people. I respect them very much. But they misread America. They, they did not have her in red states. They, they were pretending that they were going to turn red blue. They were pretending. It was literally said. And all of you covered it like it was gospel.
Literally said, "We will know this election result before election day because of the early vote." False but written about. We, well-- She had good election-- She had good early voting but horrible election day turnout. We-- Then it was, quote, "We will have historic turnout." False. But it was written about and covered as if it were true because it came from them.
We are dedicated to promoting a campus environment where all people feel valued and respected. To that end, the university expects community members to engage in discussion, especially over controversial issues, in ways that are respectful of others’ viewpoints and that promote greater understanding. We are disappointed that some attendees at the event chose not to do so.Well, no, creating protected classes of people, and treating some viewpoints as problematic or triggering or microaggressive, is going to enable the people who enjoy the protections to Otherize or marginalize those viewpoints.
As a taxpayer funded university, Madison should make efforts to have more events open to the public. It is important student organizations have the ability to – without cumbersome red tape – host events to include the public. Every time university officials lobby my office for more taxpayer resources, they argue how important the school is to the state. Student organizations should have the freedom – without fear of complaints – to create a larger discussion with the broader public community. The CfLI should dismiss this grievance as baseless. Complaints are not to be used as a weapon against organizations with different viewpoints.Right Wisconsin, the intellectual home of #NeverTrump #NeverHillary in Wisconsin, has additional coverage, including video of the speech, the protest, (flip to page 2, it's two hours!) and the aftermath.
[S]uccess for Trump would be a disaster for America. If his campaign promises are to be taken at face value, his success would mean that tens of millions of Americans may lose health care insurance. It would mean a step back on fighting climate change that could have a catastrophic, even apocalyptic effect on the planet. It would mean a shredded social safety net and little federal attention to voting restrictions and structural racism in America’s criminal justice system. It would mean global instability and a weakening of American’s leadership role in the world. It would mean acquiescence to an assertive Russia and a weakening of the international institutions that help to maintain global order. It would mean disastrous trade wars and a domestic agenda that would do more to harm the people who voted for Trump than help them. It would mean mass deportation — and a humanitarian catastrophe — for millions of undocumented immigrants.That's why we have separation of powers. When Republicans in Congress resisted Mr Obama's policy proposals, that's not obstruction, that's attempting to mitigate a disaster. Should Democrats in Congress resist Mt Trump's policy proposals, that's not obstruction, either. It will help, though, if Democrats have something more substantive than "mean-spirited" or something ending in "-ist" or "-phobic" to their objections.
Newspapers exist to process and assess the rival claims of experts – politicians, governments, corporations, the professoriate, pollsters, authors, whistleblowers, filmmakers, and denizens of the blogosphere. When its own claims to authority are misplaced – a spectacular example having been the Monday before the election, when newspapers were still expecting a Clinton victory – the print press and its kith and kin correct themselves (the next day) and investigate the prior beliefs that led them to error. A free and competitive press resembles the other great self-correcting systems that have evolved over centuries – democracy, markets, and science.Yes, the mugging by reality going on in the palace-guard media is refreshing. But emergence is messy, and the downsizing going on in the free and competitive press is going to turn out the same way the downsizing in transportation and higher education and manufacturing has gone.
That’s why the WSJ decision to cut back to from four to two daily sections is significant: it acknowledges the reduced but still very powerful claim of print on consumers’ ever-more stretched budget of time.Or maybe the USA Today folks had the right idea thirty years ago: pithy and superficial sells.
For many years, newspaperfolk considered that their businesses were mostly exempt from the laws of supply and demand. Price cuts play a big part in the lore of its past. Today, the future of the industry depends on the recognition that price/performance is everything.Exempt from the laws of supply and demand? Or was Milwaukee mayor Henry Maier also forty years ahead of his time, when he called the old Journal Company (morning Sentinel, afternoon Journal, WTMJ on AM 620 and Channel Four) a monopoly?
