Trump Voters Harbor Mixed Feelings Ahead of Inauguration

Voters like Deborah Forster, an independent in Michigan, are part of a pivotal group who harbored reservations about Donald Trump but helped put him in the Oval Office. PHOTO: FABRIZIO COSTANTINI FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

By
JANET HOOK
Wall Street Journal



President-elect Donald Trump owes his election in 2016 in part to voters like Deborah Forster, an independent in Michigan who had deeply mixed feelings about the Republican nominee.

Ms. Forster, a 52-year-old attorney, voted for Mr. Trump mostly because she didn’t want Democrat Hillary Clinton to win. Now she is nervously watching as he prepares to enter the White House. She likes some of his cabinet picks, but isn’t pleased with his penchant for sending harsh tweets about everything from the U.S. intelligence community to actress Meryl Streep.

“I am hoping that Trump begins to speak and act like the intelligent businessman that I’m sure he is,” she said. “I’m hoping he stops tweeting like a 13-year-old boy and starts acting like an adult.”


Ms. Forster is one of a pivotal bloc of voters who harbored reservations about Mr. Trump but helped put him in the Oval Office. According to exit polls, 18% of voters had a negative view of both major party candidates, and nearly half of them voted for Mr. Trump.

Their evolving view of Mr. Trump—whether their qualms are relieved or exacerbated by his performance—could tip the balance of public opinion, affecting how much leverage Mr. Trump will have with Congress and his prospects for uniting the country.

The Wall Street Journal identified a pool of these voters, people who said last fall in Journal/NBC News surveys that they preferred Mr. Trump but with some reservations and concerns about his temperament. They will be interviewed periodically through the Trump presidency as a window into whether he is winning converts or losing support.

Despite complaints from supporters, Mr. Trump shows no sign of giving up his use of Twitter. In a weekend interview with the Times of London, Mr. Trump said, “the tweeting, I thought I’d do less of it, but I’m covered so dishonestly by the press, so dishonestly, that I can put out [on] Twitter” a fast response that is viewed by millions.

Daniel Gallegos II, of Colorado, objects to Donald Trump criticizing corporations for moving jobs out of the U.S. PHOTO: THEO STROOMER FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

A Trump transition team spokeswoman said Mr. Trump “is always going to be clear about his principles, honest with the American people and committed to fighting for American jobs.”

As of now, voters generally are giving him the benefit of the doubt. Many are pleased with his cabinet picks, but are uneasy with his attacks on people and broad, often confusing, statements of policy that he circulates on Twitter.

“So far I think he’s doing a decent job,” said Matt Triplett, 47, a Republican salesman in Dublin, Ohio. “But I sure wish he’d get off Twitter. The guy is a loose cannon. I’m going to sit back and be entertained by what’s going to be transpiring. But it’s a little unnerving.”

Mr. Trump’s high-profile moves to pressure companies such as Carrier Corp., an air conditioning manufacturer, to keep jobs in the U.S. is speaking to people like Cathy Coats, a former Barack Obama voter in Raleigh, N.C., who has been out of work for three years.

“I am cautiously optimistic,” she said. “If he does what we want him to do—on immigration, jobs—then he will be an excellent president.”

She worries that he is already easing off his demand that Mexico pay for building a wall on the southern U.S. border and softening his tone on immigration policy.

“I may be jumping the gun a little myself, but I am wondering why we haven’t heard anything about deportation of illegal aliens,” said Ms. Coats, 59, an Army veteran who had worked in marketing.

John Brickner, 78, a Republican former school superintendent in Wilbur, Neb., is eager to see the new administration roll back regulations of the Obama era, but was uneasy about Mr. Trump’s postelection rallies. “When he comes on with those damn rallies, I turn the TV off,” Mr. Brickner said.

Mr. Trump’s decision to nominate Rex Tillerson, former CEO of Exxon Mobil Corp., to be secretary of state and Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama to be attorney general eases his concerns. “The more I read about his choices the better I feel about it,” Mr. Brickner said. “These are people who will do what needs to be done. I like it that they are not all career politicians.”

Mr. Trump hit it out of the park for Carol Jansson, 54, a former home-school teacher in Acworth, Ga., when he picked as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, a noted advocate for school choice.

Like many social conservatives, Ms. Jansson supported Mr. Trump because of his abortion policies. And one of her highest hopes for Mr. Trump is that he cut off federal funding for Planned Parenthood, an issue that the president-elect has sent mixed signals about.

Polls indicate that Mr. Trump on Election Day benefited from some 11th-hour switches from people who had been backing third-party candidates like libertarian Gary Johnson.

One of them is Daniel Gallegos II, 53, of Commerce City, Colo., a post office worker and libertarian who now objects to Mr. Trump’s calling out of corporations over moving jobs out of the U.S. and his threatening to impose tariffs.

“Donald Trump appears to be economically ignorant,” he said. “I really don’t like the strong arm tactics on business.”

Mr. Trump’s success as president may also hinge on winning over voters like Beckie Toney, 49, of London, Ohio, an independent who was so turned off that she ended up voting for neither Mrs. Clinton nor Mr. Trump. Still, she is willing to keep her mind open to the new president.

“He is the winner and we have to give him a chance,” she said. “You are the president and I will respect it. We need someone who will bring us together. We needed to get an outsider.”

—Peter Nicholas contributed to this article.

How Republican's Can Pass Immigration Reform Now, Here's How

By Stephen A. Nuno

NBC




As President-elect Trump prepares for his term in office, Republicans in Congress have stumbled out of the gate with an ill-advised attempt to gut an independent ethics office that investigates House lawmakers and staff accused of misconduct. But if the GOP is looking for an easy victory that could put the Democrats on their heels, they may look no further than a compromise on immigration reform.

Immigration reform has been difficult, mainly because of one important disagreement between the GOP and the Democrats; what to do with the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants. Democrats desire a pathway to citizenship for this population; they have touted the economic and social benefits and it doesn't hurt that new citizens also means new potential voters.

However, Republicans have been opposed to a pathway to citizenship, saying this would reward illegal immigration and sidestepped the legal system, despite the many incentives businesses provide to undocumented labor. Some in the party have also used thinly veiled racially charged arguments against a pathway to citizenship because these immigrants would dilute the social fabric of the country, ie. they may be less likely to assimilate into American culture. And frankly, given the GOP's performance with minority voters, the party knows they have a demographic disadvantage with new Latino and Asian voters that would only be made worse by extending this population with the right to vote.

Immigrants without documentation are faced with daily struggles. It is difficult to work without proper identification. They are susceptible to human and labor rights violations because of their status. Their status is also a source of extreme stress for their families, many of whom are citizens. An undocumented immigrant may be pulled over for a traffic infraction and be taken to a detention facility without any notice to their family which can last weeks or months.

Moreover, many undocumented immigrants were young when they migrated to the United States and had no idea that they were not processed properly until later in their lives. Recall that Senator Ted Cruz, who is married to a corporate banking executive and who has a law degree from Harvard University, did not discover that he was a Canadian citizen until he announced his candidacy for President. Cruz was also the longest serving Solicitor General of Texas who argued nine cases before the Supreme Court.

However, a key compromise exists between the two parties that is both acceptable to the majority of voters in the country and would humanely solve the immigration issue. Perhaps as important, immigration reform would be beneficial to the economy and to Donald Trump's investment portfolio.

Marco Rubio floated an immigration reform plan that addressed the most important issues outlined above in 2012; a plan that granted undocumented immigrants a pathway to legalization without a special pathway to citizenship. His proposal became the basis for a compromise under the "Gang of Eight" proposal the following year, which died when an upswell of dissent rose from the Republican grassroots. But while Rubio's plan was also cast as unacceptable to Democrats because it did not provide an explicit path to citizenship, President Obama was praised for implementing a temporary reprieve program for Dreamers, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which was essentially the same as legalization without a special path to citizenship.

For undocumented immigrants, the economy, and Donald Trump, the benefits are immediate.

"Increasing immigration is a guaranteed way to boost economic growth. Immigrants boost the supply and the demand side of the economy," says economist Alex Nowrasteh with the conservative Cato Institute. Even for immigrants already here without status, formally integrating them is a boost to economy, says Nowrasteh.

Legalization brings undocumented immigrants out of the shadows so that they may work, take their kids to school, go to church or participate in society without fear of being torn from their families.

Research from the social sciences shows that greater social integration increases immigrants' assimilation into American culture, like speaking English and gaining the education they need to maximize their contribution to the economy. And as Pew Research has shown, many immigrants do not desire to be citizens even if offered.

Legalizing undocumented immigrants who can then freely participate in the economy brings them formally into the community. For Donald Trump, a real estate mogul, the benefits are obvious. Nowrasteh of Cato says, "The smallest estimated effect of immigration on rental prices is that a 1 percent increase in population from immigration increases rents by 1 percent. A huge impact."

The case for immigration reform that includes a path to legalization without an explicit path to citizenship is obvious for all except those who either see immigrants as a threat to cultural purity in the Republican party or those in the Democratic party who see their value only in what they can provide in votes.

But a great majority of voters in the 2016 wanted undocumented immigrants to be offered legal status. Exit polls during the election showed that 70 percent favored legal status, and these data have been consistent for years. Voters are not resistant to legal status, except that the real point of disagreement is over what "legal status" actually means.

Politically, a Republican solution to immigration reform would put Democrats in a difficult spot. Obama enjoyed a majority in Congress in his first term in office and could not get immigration reform through, largely because the GOP was united against it and a few Democrats in red districts defected against the party. Obama had also largely expended all of his political capital on health care reform. But the inability to get immigration reform passed was one of the biggest failures of the Obama administration. The GOP can start by settling an issue that is long overdue.

Black Friday Special - 25% Off My Book!

President Obama Speaks on Criminal Justice Reform at NAACP

"In too many places, black boys and black men, Latino boys and Latino men, experience being treated differently under the law." 

—President Obama making the case for criminal justice reform

Click here to see President Obama's speech addressing the issue of the need to reform America's criminal justice system!

A quick look at the numbers:

• 2.2 million: The number of prisoners in the U.S. -- which has quadrupled from only 500,000 in 1980.
• 25 percent: The share of the world's prisoners that are in the U.S., even though we're only home to 5 percent of the world's population.
• 60 percent: The share of U.S. prisoners that are either African American or Latino. "About one in every 35 African American men, one in every 88 Latino men is serving time right now," the President said. "Among white men, that number is one in 214."
• $80 billion: The amount we spend each year to keep people incarcerated in America. For $80 billion, we could:
  • Provide universal preschool for every 3-year-old and 4-year-old in America
  • Double the salary of every high school teacher in America
  • Finance new roads, bridges, and airports; job training programs; research and development
  • Eliminate tuition at every one of our public colleges and universities

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As the President noted, today's criminal justice system "remains particularly skewed by race and by wealth," and has adverse ripple effects on our country's families and communities:

"A growing body of research shows that people of color are more likely to be stopped, frisked, questioned, charged, detained. African Americans are more likely to be arrested. They are more likely to be sentenced to more time for the same crime. And one of the consequences of this is, around one million fathers are behind bars. Around one in nine African American kids has a parent in prison.

What is that doing to our communities? What’s that doing to those children? Our nation is being robbed of men and women who could be workers and taxpayers, could be more actively involved in their children’s lives, could be role models, could be community leaders, and right now they’re locked up for a non-violent offense."

The Wasted Gift of Donald Trump

The New York Times | OP­ED COLUMNIST


JULY 8, 2015
By Frank Bruni

I keep reading that Donald Trump is wrecking the Republican Party. I keep hearing that he’s a threat to the fortunes of every other Republican presidential candidate, because he sullies the brand and puts them in an impossible position. What bunk. The truth is that he’s an opportunity for them as golden as the namesake nameplates on his phallic towers, if only they would seize it. The brand was plenty sullied before he lent his huff and his hair to the task.

And by giving his Republican rivals a perfect foil, he also gives them a perfect chance to rehabilitate and redeem the party. As it stands now, he’s using them. If they had any guts, they could use him. They could piggyback on the outsize attention that he receives, answering his unhinged tweets and idiotic utterances with something sane and smart, knowing that it, too, would get prominent notice.

They could define themselves in the starkest possible contrast to him,calling him out as the bully and bigot that he is. Then he wouldn’t own the story, because the narrative would be about cooler heads and kinder hearts in the party staring down one of its most needlessly divisive ambassadors and saying: Enough. No more. We’re serious people at the limit of our patience for provocateurs.

There was a hint of this last weekend, when Jeb Bush, whose wife is Mexican­American, lashed out at Trump’s broad­brush comments about Mexican immigrants crossing into America with an agenda of drugs and rape. Bush labeled those remarks “extraordinarily ugly” and “way out of the mainstream” and said that there’s “no tolerance” for them.

But he didn’t exactly volunteer that assessment. It came in response to a reporter’s question, and it came more than two weeks after Trump’s offense. Neither he nor Marco Rubio exhibited any hurry in distancing themselves from Trump, though both of them trumpet their personal biographies as proof that they’re sensitive to Latino immigrants.

On Fox Business on Tuesday, Rubio gave a pathetic master class in cowardly evasion, stammering his way though an interview in which he was asked repeatedly for an opinion about Trump. You would have thought that he was being pressed for malicious gossip about the Easter bunny. He never did manage to upbraid Trump, though he was careful to mention the “legitimate issue” of border security that Trump had raised.

As in 2012, Republicans can’t summon the courage to take on the dark heroes of the party’s lunatic fringe. As in 2012, this could cost them dearly. The Charleston, S.C., church massacre and subsequent debate over the Confederate flag afforded them an ideal moment to talk with passion and poetry about racial healing.

But the leading contenders reacted in fashions either sluggish, terse, muffled or all three. They showed more interest in fleeing the subject than in grabbing profitable hold of it. Trump’s rant about immigrants, which he has since amplified, was another squandered moment. Chris Christie could have made good on his boasts about always telling it like it is and being unconstrained by politesse.

Instead he made clear that he liked Trump and considered him a friend. That soft crunching sound you heard was the supposedly hard­charging New Jersey governor walking on eggshells.

Rand Paul claims the desire and ability to expand the party’s reach to more minorities. So where’s his takedown of Trump? Bush has said that a politician must be willing to lose the party’s nomination in order to win the general election, but that philosophy can’t end with his allegiance to the Common Core. It has to include an unblinking acknowledgment of his party’s craziness whenever and wherever it flares. Trump’s hold on voters stems largely from his lack of any filter and from his directness, traits that they don’t see in establishment candidates.

So his fellow Republicans’ filtered, indirect approach to him just gives him more power. And while he should be irrelevant, he’s becoming ever more relevant, because he’s exposing their timidity and caution. They’re wrong to try to ignore him, because the media won’t do that and because he’s probably going to qualify for the debates. Looking ahead to the first of them, the conservative pundit George Will bought into the notion of Trump as an ineradicable pest who “says something hideously inflammatory, which is all he knows how to say, and then what do the other nine people onstage do?”

Oh, please. That’s hardly an existential crisis. It’s a prompt for an overdue smidgen of valor. Without any hesitation, they tell him that he’s a disgrace. Without any hedging, they tell him that he’s absurd. It’s the truth. And for the Republican Party, it might just be transformative. Thomas L. Friedman is off today.

I invite you to visit my blog, follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/frankbruni and join me on Facebook. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter. A version of this op­ed appears in print on July 8, 2015, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: The Wasted Gift of The Donald.

Frank Bruni

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RACE SCARES THE U.S. RIGHT!

The Shrinking White Base of the GOP Cannot Accept the Country In Which It Now Lives

 

 

 

 Written by Gary Younge

 

GUEST WORDS-In the early 1980s veteran pollster Stan Greenberg, conducted a focus group in Macomb County, a Detroit suburb, of former Democrats who had switched allegiance to the Republican Ronald Reagan. After he read a statement by Robert Kennedy about racial inequality, one participant interjected: "No wonder they killed him." 

"That stopped me and led to a whole new analysis of Reagan Democrats," wrote Greenberg in a recent report, Inside the GOP.  "I realized that in trying to reach this group of people race is everything," he told me.

While conducting a focus group with Republicans over the summer he had a similar revelation, although it came not from a sole outburst but almost throwaway comments, often left on cards after the session. As one man left his handout he half-joked: "It's probably digital, so you can check it on the NSA files."

Another asked: "Now you're going to guarantee that what we put down here, we won't be getting a call from the IRS about an audit or anything like that?" Alongside this sense of being spied upon was relief that, in these Republican-only groups, they had found kindred spirits. "I'm not alone in the way I view things for the most part," wrote one on a postcard. "Not by myself in thought process," confided another.

Those seeking to understand what drove the Republican party to shut down the government this month in a strategically disastrous move that laid bare its deep internal divisions – and ultimately led to humiliating defeat – could do worse than start here. The report reveals a sense of ideological, demographic and cultural siege, on the American right, from which there is no obvious escape.

Unable to comprehend or process last year's election defeat, they feel the nation has become unmoored from its founding principles and is on a full-scale, unrelenting descent into chaos. Obama has been victorious in implementing socialism and the party they identify with has proved incapable of halting the decline, leaving them alienated not only from the country at large but one another. If it appears as though they are howling at the moon, it's because they feel all earthly options have been exhausted.

Describing Ireland's economic and cultural transformation in his book The Deportees, Roddy Doyle wrote: "I went to bed in one country and woke up in a different one." Many Republicans have precisely the same feeling.

Central to this deep-seated sense of angst is race. In 2012, 92% of the Republican vote came from white people who, within 30 years, will no longer be in the majority. "They are acutely racially conscious," says Greenberg. "They are very aware that they are 'white' in a country that is becoming increasingly 'minority'."

Growing increasingly dependent on an ever-shrinking base, they see their electoral fortunes waning but are resistant to adapting their message to broaden their appeal beyond their narrow racial confines. Race is less the explicit target of their anxiety (issues such as affirmative action and civil rights no longer dominate) than the primary (if not exclusive) prism through which their political consciousness is being filtered. "Race," writes Greenberg, "is central to their worldview."

There are three main ways in which this has been a factor in the recent government shutdown and Republican schisms. First is gerrymandering. Since race is one of the best predictors of voting behavior, House congressional seats have been manipulated largely on racial grounds. Politicians at state level carve constituencies into odd and unlikely shapes, shuffling around various racial groups to protect incumbents.

Both parties do this when they have the chance but Republicans, who run more state houses, have had more chance and have undertaken the task with much zeal and guile.

As a result, in 2012 the Democrats won more votes nationally for Congress but still got fewer seats, giving the Republicans who shut down the government a fragile mandate. It also means incumbents need not fear losing their seats, leaving them able to act out.

Second is the perceived beneficiaries of government spending. Republicans are more likely to regard intervention as being to support minorities rather than to support the poor. This goes not only for food stamps and welfare but also for Obamacare – which was the issue that initially sparked the shutdown.

"Obamacare is a racial flashpoint for many evangelical and Tea Party voters," writes Greenberg.
Their despair is largely rooted in the assumption that by championing programs that disproportionately help minorities, Obama is effectively buying votes and securing a growing tranche of the electorate who will for evermore be dependent on government.

One participant, echoing the views of many, said: "Every minority group wants to say they have the right to something, and they don't. It's life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It doesn't say happiness. You get to be alive and you get to be free. The rest of it's just a pursuit … you're not guaranteed happiness. You have to work for it."

Finally, there is Obama – the black son of an African immigrant and white mother – who stands as an emblem for all this unease, personifying, in their minds, not only their political impotence today but their demographic irrelevance tomorrow. The word they're most likely to use to describe him is "liar". But their hostility goes beyond his policies and pronouncements to a deeply rooted suspicion of his authenticity.

"[There] is a sense of him being foreign, non-Christian, Muslim – and they wonder what really are his motives for the changes he is advancing." As he moves into his second term, there is now an elision in the Republican mind between what they think he is (an immigrant, a fraudster, a non-American) and what they think he does (assist immigrants and fraudsters in contravention of American ideals).

Their inability to craft a credible strategic response to these insecurities only serves to reinforce them.
"You don't like a particular policy or a particular president?" taunted Obama last week. "Go out there and win an election." The trouble is Republicans can't because their racially charged rhetoric alienates minorities, leaving them more electorally isolated, prompting defeat – which leaves them ever more divided.

Meanwhile, their reckless obstruction in Congress, which nearly triggered a default, makes the nation's descent into chaos more likely. Unable to come to terms with the country in which they live, they are complicit in creating the very future they most fear.

(Gary Younge is a Guardian columnist and feature writer based in the US. This column was posted first by The Guardian/UK and most recently by the excellent CommonDreams.org)

Reporting on government shutdown has failed democracy

by Dan Froomkin

@froomkin

Aljazeera America

October 1, 2013  

 

Commentary: We need journalists to hold politicians accountable for extremist actions, not to enable them.

A man reads morning newspapers from around the U.S. at the Newseum in Washington October 1, 2013.

Gary Cameron/Reuters

American news reports are largely blaming the government shutdown on the inability of both political parties to come to terms. It is supposedly the result of a "bitterly divided" Congress that "failed to reach agreement" (Washington Post) or "a bitter budget standoff" left unresolved by "rapid-fire back and forth legislative maneuvers" (New York Times). This sort of false equivalence is not just a failure of journalism. It is also a failure of democracy.

When the political leadership of this country is incapable of even keeping the government open, a political course-correction is in order. But how can democracy self-correct if the public does not understand where the problem lies? And where will the pressure for change come from if journalists do not hold the responsible parties accountable?

The truth of what happened Monday night, as almost all political reporters know full well, is that "Republicans staged a series of last-ditch efforts to use a once-routine budget procedure to force Democrats to abandon their efforts to extend US health insurance." (Thank you, Guardian.)

And holding the entire government hostage, while demanding the de facto repeal of a president's signature legislation and not even bothering to negotiate, is by any reasonable standard an extreme political act. It is an attempt to make an end run around the normal legislative process. There is no historical precedent for it. The last shutdowns, in 1995 and 1996, were not the product of unilateral demands to scrap existing law; they took place during a period of give-and-take budget negotiations.

But the political media's aversion to doing anything that might be seen as taking sides — combined with its obsession with process — led them to actively obscure the truth in their coverage of the votes. If you did not already know what this was all about, reading the news would not help you understand.
What makes all this more than a journalistic failure is that the press plays a crucial role in our democracy. We count on the press to help create an informed electorate. And perhaps even more importantly, we count on the press to hold the powerful accountable.

That requires calling out political leaders when they transgress or fail to meet commonly agreed-upon standards: When they are corrupt, when they deceive, when they break the rules and refuse to govern. Such exposure is the first consequence. When the transgressions are sufficiently grave, what follows should be continued scrutiny, marginalization, contempt and ridicule.
In the current political climate, journalistic false equivalence leads to an insufficiently informed electorate, because the public is not getting an accurate picture of what is going on.

---

Journalists have been suckered into embracing 'balance' and 'neutrality' at all costs.

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But the lack of accountability is arguably even worse, because it has the characteristics of a cascade failure. When the media coverage seeks down-the-middle neutrality despite one party's outlandish conduct, there are no political consequences for their actions. With no consequences for extremism, politicians who have succeeded using such conduct have an incentive to become even more extreme. The more extreme they get, the further the split-the-difference press has to veer from common sense in order to avoid taking sides. And so on.

The political press should be the public's first line of defense when it comes to assessing who is deviating from historic norms and practices; who is risking serious damage to the nation; whose positions are based in irrational phobias and ignorance rather than data and reason.

But instead, journalists have been suckered into embracing "balance" and "neutrality" at all costs, and the consequences of their choice in an era of political extremism will only get worse and worse.
One of the great ironies of the current dynamic is that political scientists Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, who for decades were conventional voices of pox-on-both-your-houses centrism, have now become among the foremost critics of a press corps that fails to report the obvious. They describe the modern Republican party, without any hesitation, as "a party beholden to ideological zealots."

But as Mann explained in an interview last year: "The mainstream press really has such a difficult time trying to cope with asymmetry between the two parties' agendas and connections to facts and truth."

Even with a story as straightforward as the government shutdown, splitting the difference remains the method of choice for the political reporters and editors in Washington's most influential news bureaus. Even when they surely know better. Even when many Republican elected officials have criticized their own leaders for being too beholden to the more radical right wing.

Media critics — and members of the public — have long decried this kind of "he-said-she-said" reporting. The Atlantic's James Fallows, one of the most consistent chroniclers and decriers of false equivalence, describes it as the "strong tendency to give equal time and credence to varying 'sides' of a story, even if one of the sides is objectively true and the other is just made up."

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen argues that truth-telling has been surpassed as a newsroom priority by a neither-nor impartiality he calls the "View from Nowhere."
Blaming everyone — "Congress," "both sides," "Washington" — is simply the path of least resistance for today's political reporters. It's a way of avoiding conflict rather than taking the risk that the public — or their editors — will accuse them of being unprofessionally partisan.

But making a political judgment through triangulation — trying to stake out a safe middle ground between the two political parties — is still making a political judgment. It is often just not a very good one. And in this case, as in many others, it is doing the country a grave disservice.

So no, the shutdown is not generalized dysfunction, or gridlock or stalemate. It is aberrational behavior by a political party that is willing to take extreme and potentially damaging action to get its way. And by not calling it what it is, the political press is enabling it.

We need a more fearless media.

Opinion: People are the problem, not guns

Community members in Newtown, Connecticut try to console themselves after the school massacre. (Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images

by Stephen A. Nuño

We’re told America is a violent society with a “fatally counterproductive national identity”, says the German magazine Spiegel Online.

We certainly do have a violent cultural undertow in this country, though it has been getting less violent over the years. Americans are also culturally apathetic. Many more kids die every year to gun violence than did at Sandy Hook Elementary, yet the political energy to address gun violence can’t get any wind at its back until something grotesquely tragic happens.

And when it does happen, the anti-gun folks can hardly contain themselves. The call for banning assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, and limiting ammunition sales came out rapidly, as if these folks have a template press release ready with blank spaces for the next Aurora, Colorado.

The Christian conservatives on the right were predictably moronic. Mike Huckabee claimed we shouldn’t be surprised by such events because we’ve systematically removed God from our schools.

Our government was born from violent revolution, and we’ve been perpetually at war with others and ourselves since then. We are a violent society because our glory and power was born from it and we require steady doses of it in peacetime. We revere Al Capone and Jesse James and the quickest pathway to fame in America involves beating up your girlfriend.

Guns are invariably part of American culture. They aren’t going anywhere. The Supreme Court rightfully declared that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right. In true American cultural fashion, gun ownership is a civil right in this country, like the right to free speech. Europe has no comparable acknowledgement of this right in their institutions.

Banning guns won’t work and we already have reams of laws on the books that regulates the sale of firearms at the federal level and the states. Like it or not, the right to keep and bear arms is indeed a civil right. The Supreme Court’s decision declaring the Second Amendment an individual right left some room for regulations, but they have already struck down laws from the strictest jurisdictions in the country, Washington D.C. and Chicago.

Yet, there are solutions. Aside from the sudden desire to address mental health in America by Republicans, it is true that this country has been appallingly deficient in our attention to mental health.

The last four mass killings were committed by people who had some mental illness; Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer, was seen as a troubled individual by a counselor. A psychiatrist who treated the Aurora, Colorado shooter, James Holmes, was so concerned about his state of mind that he contacted the police.

The shooter in Arizona, Jared Loughner, had an extended record of run-ins with police and his actions surprised nobody when his killing spree hit the news. And the killer at the Sikh temple, Wade Michael Page, was a known sociopath who spewed hatred across the country.

Its seems that rather than focusing on guns, we need to focus primarily on the informational barriers between identifying these people and the authorities charged with acting on that information.

Jared Loughner was kicked out of college and administrators would not allow him back in without a psychiatric evaluation. This decision to act on information by the school possibly saved lives at Pima College.

Yet once he left school, there was nobody to pick up the scent on him. If we are to prevent the next Sandy Hook, we should of course review the gun regulations on the books, but gun bans are not going to change the fundamental problem.

Just after the tragedy in Newtown, two potential killers were reported and arrested; one in Indiana and another in Oklahoma. Both made threats or made plans to kill multiple kids, but the difference was not gun regulations, gun bans or ammunition restrictions. The difference was vigilance by members of society who saw the signs and contacted authorities, and that information was acted upon by them.

We are indeed a violent nation, and we are also notoriously apathetic. Events like Sandy Hook Elementary have brought us together, and has chipped away at that apathy for now, but the answer to prevention lies less on a prolonged political fight over regulations that will get us nowhere and more on a greater appreciation for our responsibilities as a community. Yes, let’s look at gun regulations, but we’ll get nowhere without first looking at ourselves.


Stephen A. Nuño, Ph.D., NBC Latino contributor and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and International Affairs at Northern Arizona University. He is currently writing a book on Republican outreach into the Latino Community.

Obama: I Would Be Considered Moderate Republican in 1980s

By JORDAN FABIAN (@Jordanfabian)

Dec. 14, 2012

 

President Barack Obama believes that if he were president 25 years ago, his economic policies would make him a moderate Republican.

During an interview with Noticias Univision 23, the network's Miami affiliate newscast, Obama pushed back against the accusation made in some corners of south Florida's Cuban-American and Venezuelan communities that he wants to instill a socialist economic system in the U.S. The president said he believes few actually believe that.

"I don't know that there are a lot of Cubans or Venezuelans, Americans who believe that," Obama said. "The truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican."
 
See Also: Obama Talks Tax Hikes on Twitter

Obama's comments come amid the contentious debate over how to resolve the "fiscal cliff," in which the White House and Congress are trying to figure out whether to extend a series of tax cuts set to expire at the end of the year while staving off steep spending cuts to domestic and defense programs set to go into place at the beginning of 2013.

For years amid the brooder debate over taxes and the size of government, Obama has been characterized by some on the right as a socialist who wants to redistribute wealth. They cite Obama's healthcare law in particular as a massive increase in the size of government.

Obama is seeking to eradicate that image as he tries to sell his economic plan to the public amid the fiscal cliff debate, which includes eliminating the low Bush-era tax rates for those families making more than $250,000 per year.

"What I believe in is a tax system that is fair. I don't think government can solve every problem. I think that we should make sure that we're helping young people go to school. We should make sure that our government is building good roads and bridges and hospitals and airports so that we have a good infrastructure," he said.

"I do believe that it makes sense that everyone in America, as rich as this country is, shouldn't go bankrupt because someone gets sick."

Republican leaders have largely rejected tax-rate increases repeatedly and said that Obama is not serious about reducing the federal budget deficit and reforming the nation's entitlement programs.

"The president's plan to avert the fiscal cliff still does not meet the two standards that I laid out the day after the election," House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Wednesday.

"His plan does not fulfill his promise to bring a balanced approach to solving this problem. It's mainly tax hikes, and his plan does not begin to solve our debt crisis. It actually increases spending."

But Obama reiterated his belief that higher tax rates for upper-income earners should be part of a broader effort to reduce the deficit.

"We also need to reduce our deficit in a responsible way, that means revenue, asking the wealthiest to pay a little bit more taxes, protecting middle-class families. Then cutting out some programs that we don't need, passing responsible spending cuts. And I hope that we can get this resolved," he said. "We just need, you know, for Speaker Bohner and the House Republicans to step up and say they are ready to get going."
 
The Obama-as-a-socialist notion recently played out on the campaign trail. In an effort to energize anti-Obama sentiment among Cuban- and Venezuelan-American voters in south Florida, the Romney campaign ran a Spanish-language TV ad there one week before Election Day that tied Obama to Cuba's Castro brothers and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. The president's campaign took the unusual step of releasing its own ad in Spanish to counter the Romney ad.

Some on the left have long argued that the president's policy beliefs closely resemble moderate Republican views from the 1980s and 1990s. Ezra Klein made the argument in a 2011 column, citing his adoption of the individual health insurance mandate, an idea developed in conservative think tanks. Will Saletan of Slate made a similar argument this year.

Opinion: Toure flap and GOP's language to delegitimize minorities

Here is another great piece by my good friend and fellow Loyola Cub, Dr. Stephen Nuno:

CLICK HERE for Dr. Stephen Nuno's Blog post!

My latest post on NBC Latino, also posted on The Grio.

Was Touré correct to say that, by trying to access racial stereotypes about the “angry black man,” Mitt Romney was engaging in the niggerization of President Obama? In a word: yes.

However, Touré’s violation in such a charged accusation was not that he was being candid and accurate, but that he identified the wrong culprit. The GOP has for years massaged the superior notions of whites, largely in the context of advancing the notion of inferior qualities of blacks and lately signaling the “otherness” of Latinos.

But this has a long tradition in America, undergirded by institutions which have propped up this racial order. From a legal system that gave us separate but equal, and which began with a Constitution that declared blacks as three-fifths of a human, to the social reality which gave us the era of Jim Crow, the inferiority of blacks is a normality of American thinking. That’s just a fact.

Now, when measuring the validity of Touré’s charge, and the counter argument that Joe Biden’s comment to a crowd of black folks that Romney/Ryan was trying to put them back in chainswas equally racist, one must first keep in mind this normalcy of black inferiority in America.

Does Biden’s comment sustain this normalcy? No. It was lazy, crude, and patronizing, but it wasn’t racist. Now consider Romney’s campaign, and its focus on welfare and “taking back America.” Consider the white audiences. Consider the obsession with President Obama’s citizenship by the Tea Party. Consider the constant use of President Obama’s middle name by his detractors, Barack Hussein Obama, they say. Consider the push by the GOP to drug test welfare recipients despite there being no evidence that welfare recipients use drugs at greater rates than non-welfare recipients.

The only campaign which operates under the normalcy of black inferiority is the GOP campaign. When Rick Santorum spoke to a crowd of white folks in Iowa and told them that he doesn’t want to make black folks’ lives better by giving them someone else’s money, he was appealing to that normalcy. In Romney’s terms, Rick Santorum was making a cultural connection with his audience.

The normalcy of whiteness is a constant problem for blacks, of course, but it is also one that is complicated by the growing Latino population. While there is a long record of discrimination toward Hispanics in America, Latinos could also appeal for inclusion into white society with varied success.

Legally, Hispanics are white, so other methods of exclusion became necessary. But Latinos used their legal status as whites to tear down the mechanisms of separation. For instance,Westminster v. Mendez was a desegregation case in California that sued the city of Westminster to allow Hispanic children to attend the “white schools.” This case predated Brown v. Board of Education by almost ten years.

Despite the legal victories, our socialization to accept the normalcy of whiteness is being constantly reaffirmed by framing ethnic minorities as “others.” In the case of Latinos, this socialization is often supported by the use of terms that dehumanize them. The use of the term “anchor baby” is quite literally a dehumanizing term. The almost universal acceptance by the GOP of use of the term “illegal immigrant” is another mechanism of delegitimizing Latinos.

Quite similar to our immigration laws, Congress signed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, compelling law enforcement to arrest and detain anyone suspected of being a runaway slave. This law served to put any black person under an aura of suspicion, and it was constantly used against free blacks to detain them under suspicion of violating the law of being present in public when they had no legal right to be. Since black folks had no social standing, the inconvenience this presented to free blacks was not a concern, since without the status and privilege of whiteness, they had no claims to civility.

The immigration debate does much the same thing to Latinos in the US. When Jan Brewer issued her executive order reaffirming that undocumented immigrants had no right to access any state resources, she was reminding Latinos of their second-class status in the State of Arizona. Latinos are all under suspicion. And that’s the way the GOP likes it.

It’s the normalcy of whiteness that Touré should have criticized. It’s hard to say how intentional the GOP consultants are being in making these appeals and whether Romney is consciously participating in these cultural appeals. For now, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, its difficult to be conscious of the air we breathe.

S.O.S. - SAVE OUR STATE!

Last Friday, the national unemployment figures were released and California did not look great once again. The "golden" state came up short to having the worst unemployment rate in the nation at 12.1%, second only to Nevada at 13.4%.

Why is the state of California, home to silicon valley, Hollywood, and the largest ports in the nation, to name a few good assets, having difficulty creating jobs and maintaining businesses in the not so "golden" state? We have heard so called "experts" say America is out of the recession. But not we are told that we are still in it and it just might get worse before it gets any better!

President Obama spoke to the joint session of Congress and to the American people on national television. The President told us much about the same of what we already know....we are economically in trouble. He also unveiled his job plan for America. Both parties immediately took aim at shooting it down to some capacity. Not shocking to see democrats and republicans continuing their partisan politics and moving their personal agendas of "business as usual" tactics at the expense of the American people!

On Sunday's "Meet The Press", the ex-governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm, was an invited guest. The Governor spoke about her eight years at the helm of a state facing many of the same issues as California. Interestingly enough, Granholm is a California native who grew up and went to college in the San Francisco - Bay area. She is familiar with the issues and differences facing her home state of California.

The funny thing about her responses is that I agree with many of her answers. She seems to think like a fiscal conservative. California, like most states in the union, are starving for tax revenue. The recent housing melt down, for example, did nothing in bringing new or even maintaining property tax revenue to state coffers....on the contrary it has gone down to record lows. Previous voter approved and "anti-tax" philosophy behind the passing of Proposition 13 in 1978, not only limited property tax but also required a two-thirds majority vote to raise other taxes. In the Granholm's recent book, "A Governor's Story, the Fight for Jobs and America's Economic Future", she states, "These restrictions have crippled the efforts of lawmakers to bring fiscal stability to California and have driven the state to the brink of bankruptcy repeatedly."

Spending cuts are a must and tax breaks can help, but they are only part of the overall solution. Here are some necessities needed by the states' elected officials to pump economic life back to California:

1.) Pick & invest in winning industries
2.) Develop public-private partnerships
3.) Invest more money in educating our current workforce (i.e. via the community college system)
4.) Renegotiate on public salaries and pensions that are more realistic
Tax cuts for corporation has to be tied to job creation or it does not make any sense to offer them. If not, all we will see is job creation being taken overseas. In addition, tax rates play a small role in bringing back jobs, profits, and prosperity back to California. For example, Granholm states, "For teh kinds of advanced-manufacturing, high-tech businesses we were recruiting, (worker) talent is what matters, (along with) quality of life, culture, and sheer 'coolness' factor of host cities.

With all that the great state of California has to offer, the golden state (or not so golden) should be the fastest in the nation in job creation. But unfortunately, the state government has been awfully slow or even unresponsive in today's polarized politics to solve its problems....S.O.S.....please SAVE OUR STATE!!!

It's Labor Day...but where are all the American Jobs?

I will start today's blog with a quote from President Reagan back in 1981,"...government isn't the solution, government is the problem!"


As America waits for the President to give his long awaited jobs plan speech this Thursday, we got to think for a moment and say is this really America? The August employment report came out and the number of new jobs created: ZERO. The unemployment rate, as of today, remains at 9.1%. The number of fellow Americans who are unemployed today is officially 14 million people. A CNN poll that just came out last week, stated that 8 out 10 Americans think we are still in a recession. The situation is dire.

In a recent interview with Ken Rogoff, a professor at Harvard University said, "Well, clearly we're stagnating. I mean, the employment numbers have been getting weaker and weaker for a while. I think what it really underscores is that the recession never ended. We have not got back to where we started on output. We're not close on employment. We're still very much crawling our way out of the recession. And right now...nothing."

The editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal, Stephen Moore says, "There is a BIG difference between the two parties and it may lead to gridlock." I think that train has unfortunately already passed us. "But I don't think either party has anything that they've proposed that will get us out of this because I think they're missing the fundamental point. And that this economy does not appear to be capable anymore of creating enough jobs to put enough decent jobs on the table."

Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO and a member of the President's Council of Jobs and Competitiveness, also has some interesting things to say about America's current economic situation. Trumka states, "We have bad trade laws, we have tax laws that reward people for moving jobs overseas. If we'd focus on manufacturing here and all of us coming together, labor, government and business, and business and labor all working together, we can compete with anybody in the world. Because if you don't compete, if you don't manufacture things, you can't compete in the global economy!"

So where do we turn? Who has our best interest? What are some solutions?Here are some possible solutions being put on the table from both the business and labor sectors:

1) Eliminate the number of government regulations that are killing job creation.

2) Lower taxes on individuals and corporations (maybe even a possible flat tax?)

3) Target specific communities throughout America for job creation.

4) Regulate Wall Street.



We must remember economics 101....demand drives up business and hiring. From CNN's Your Money show, the host Ali Velshi says to the President:

"And finally, go big Mr. President. Americans are not spending money because they're frightened about their economic prospects....you have to tell America how it can be great again. Extract yourself from the embarrassing quagmire that Washington has become. America has reason to be proud and hopeful. This is a tall order, but lay out the road map on Thursday. Tell us how you think we'll get there. Maybe you will be right, maybe you won't be, but we'll have something to talk about other than politics as usual."