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<p><a href="" type="internal">&lt;img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-7295" style="margin: 5px;" title="ahmadinejad" src="https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/ahmadinejad-300x216.jpg" alt="Mahmoud Ahmadinejad" width="210" height="151" srcset="https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/ahmadinejad-300x216.jpg 300w, https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/ahmadinejad-150x108.jpg 150w, https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/ahmadinejad.jpg 605w" sizes="(max-width: 210px) 100vw, 210px" /&gt;</a>While it is all very easy for the news media, sundry interest groups, and government functionaries throughout the world to dismiss Dr Ahmadinejad as a Mad Mullah beyond the ken of rational debate, perhaps that is because Iran’s president poses questions that are too near the mark to allow a sensible hearing.</p>
<p>As if it weren’t enough being the leader of a large Islamic nation that does not kowtow to the USA and to Israel, Dr Ahmadinejad put himself beyond redemption for eternity by suggesting that “holocaust revisionism” should be subjected to the same standards of scholarly scrutiny as any other historical matter,[1] and like the Left-wing Jewish academic Prof. Norman G Finkelstein, suggested that the holocaust was being exploited for political and economic motives.[2] Being Jewish, Left-wing and the son of parents who had survived both the Warsaw Ghetto and Nazi concentration camps,[3] didn’t save Finkelstein from the Zionist smear-brigade, so Dr Ahmadinejad is not about to be cut any slack.</p>
<p>When Dr Ahmadinejad reached the UN podium on September 24, it is certain that Israel, the USA and sundry lackeys to both states, waited with baited breath to see what the president would do this time to try and expose their corrupt system before what remains of states that have any sense of national sovereignty and dignity. The reaction of the delegates from the USA, Australia, New Zealand, all 27 delegates from the EU states, Canada, and Costa Rica was to walk out en mass — the response of those who have nothing thoughtful or honest to offer. In New Zealand’s case, our state relies of moral posturing at world forums to compensate for national impotence.</p>
<p>Dr Ahmadinejad suggested before the General Assembly in regard to 9/11 that scenarios might include:</p>
<p>1. That a “powerful and complex terrorist group” which is “advocated by American statesmen,” penetrated US intelligence and defences.</p>
<p>2. “That some segments within the US Government orchestrated the attack to reverse the declining American economy and its grip on the Middle East in order to save the Zionist regime. The majority of the American people as well as other nations and politicians agree with this view.”</p>
<p>3. That the attack was the work of “a terrorist group but the American government supported and took advantage of the situation.”[4]</p>
<p>According to media reports, “Ahmadinejad said the US used the September 11 attacks as a pretext to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands of people.”[5]</p>
<p>Media reports incredulously claim that Dr Ahmadinejad did not explain the logic behind blaming the US for the terror attacks but state there were three theories (as listed above). Well surely the three theories are three explanations for the “logic behind blaming the US”?</p>
<p>While it might be questionable for Dr Ahmadinejad to have stated that “the majority” of Americans support the view that 9/11 was a Zionist jack up somewhere along the line, as well as the view of other nations and politicians, the view – of course dismissed by orthodox academia, media and government functionaries as “conspiracy theory” – is certainly a one that is at least very widespread, including among many professionals in the relevant sentences for investigating such matters. There are also many oddities about events before and after 9/11, such as the large number of Israelis who were acting suspiciously and were rounded up and deported from the USA, albeit quietly, and the antics of five Israeli “moving company” employees[6] dancing atop a warehouse roof in New Jersey at the time of the Twin Towers collapse, arrested and questioned for several months by the FBI, at least two of whom were found to be Mossad operatives.[7]</p>
<p>These matters will not concern us here however, as the internet has abundant details.</p>
<p>What we will consider here is:</p>
<p>1. Have such methods, as suggested by Dr Ahmadinejad been used before to justify wars?</p>
<p>2. Was there a long-range plan to use conflict scenarios as justification for the invasion of states in order to secure “regime change” in the interests of Israel?</p>
<p>False Flag Operations</p>
<p>The 9/11 attacks have been called “False Flag operations.” Media and others bleat about this “conspiracy theory” as though the concept has just been conceived by paranoid mentalities. The False Flag operation has been frequently used to instigate conflicts, and many such incidences are recognized by orthodox academe and media. Therefore, what makes 9/11 so inconceivable as a False Flag operation?</p>
<p>Examples of False Flag operations accepted as such by orthodox academe include:</p>
<p>1. The Manchurian Incident, 1931, when Japanese officers contrived a pretext for invading Manchuria by blowing up part of the Japanese owned railway.[8]</p>
<p>2. Gleiwitz, Poland, 1939. German soldiers dressed in Polish uniforms attacked and occupied a German radio station near the Polish border. Several German prisoners dressed as Polish soldiers were left dead at the scene. The incident was used to justify the invasion of Poland. Other incidences under “Operation Himmler” occurred simultaneously along the border.[9]</p>
<p>3. Mainila, Russia, 1939. The Soviets shelled this Russian town near the Finnish border, claiming that it had been bombed by the Finns, using this as a pretext for invasion.[10]</p>
<p>4. Cairo and Alexandria, 1954, The Lavon Affair. Israeli agents bombed American and British properties in Egypt for the purpose of blaming the Egyptians. The nine Egyptian Jews involved were honoured in 2005 by the Israeli Government, despite the operation supposedly being of a “rogue” nature.[11]</p>
<p>5. USA-Cuba, 1962. Operation Northwoods, conceived by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and signed off by Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer. The plan included the sinking of a US ship near Cuba, airplane hijackings, and bombings throughout the USA, which would be made to appear to be of Cuban origin. The plan was scotched by Kennedy, but was later exposed by James Bamford via the Freedom of Information Act. The purpose of this plan is instructive in the context of 9/11:</p>
<p>The desired result from the execution of this plan would be to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba and to develop an international image of a Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere.[12]</p>
<p>While not a “False Flag” operation, Pearl Harbor is worth mentioning in this context. It has long been contended by many well placed individuals, including ex-military commanders on Hawaii, that the Roosevelt Administration was forewarned of the Japanese attack due to having broken the Japanese naval codes, but failed to warn the Pearl Harbor command of the attack so that maximum propaganda could be obtained. Col. Curtis Dall, President Roosevelt’s son-in-law, was on the inside of what went on in Washington at that time, as well as interviewing in 1967 retired Admiral Husband A Kimmel, Commanding Officer at Pearl Harbor.[13] In a scenario familiar to those who consider 9/11 to be a False Flag operation, Dall cites the November 25, 1941 entry from US Secretary of War Henry L Stimson’s diary:</p>
<p>The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into firing the first shot, without allowing too much damage to ourselves. It was a difficult proposition.[14]</p>
<p>The Stimson comment follows the strategy recommended by Lt. Commander Arthur H McCollum, director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, Fear East Asia section, who had on October 7, 1940, over a year prior to Pearl Harbor, drafted a memorandum, suggesting methods of goading Japan into attacking the USA to justify America’s entry into the war, and move public opinion which was overwhelmingly isolationist. McCollum outlined eight points of policy that might provoke Japan into an action against the USA, the problem as McCollum stated it being that, “It is not believed that in the present state of political opinion the United States government is capable of declaring war against Japan without more ado…”[15] McCollum concludes by unequivocally stating: “If by these means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better. At all events we must be fully prepared to accept the threat of war.”[16]</p>
<p />
<p /> | false | 1 | ltimg classalignleft sizemedium wpimage7295 stylemargin 5px titleahmadinejad srchttpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads201009ahmadinejad300x216jpg altmahmoud ahmadinejad width210 height151 srcsethttpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads201009ahmadinejad300x216jpg 300w httpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads201009ahmadinejad150x108jpg 150w httpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads201009ahmadinejadjpg 605w sizesmaxwidth 210px 100vw 210px gtwhile easy news media sundry interest groups government functionaries throughout world dismiss dr ahmadinejad mad mullah beyond ken rational debate perhaps irans president poses questions near mark allow sensible hearing werent enough leader large islamic nation kowtow usa israel dr ahmadinejad put beyond redemption eternity suggesting holocaust revisionism subjected standards scholarly scrutiny historical matter1 like leftwing jewish academic prof norman g finkelstein suggested holocaust exploited political economic motives2 jewish leftwing son parents survived warsaw ghetto nazi concentration camps3 didnt save finkelstein zionist smearbrigade dr ahmadinejad cut slack dr ahmadinejad reached un podium september 24 certain israel usa sundry lackeys states waited baited breath see president would time try expose corrupt system remains states sense national sovereignty dignity reaction delegates usa australia new zealand 27 delegates eu states canada costa rica walk en mass response nothing thoughtful honest offer new zealands case state relies moral posturing world forums compensate national impotence dr ahmadinejad suggested general assembly regard 911 scenarios might include 1 powerful complex terrorist group advocated american statesmen penetrated us intelligence defences 2 segments within us government orchestrated attack reverse declining american economy grip middle east order save zionist regime majority american people well nations politicians agree view 3 attack work terrorist group american government supported took advantage situation4 according media reports ahmadinejad said us used september 11 attacks pretext invade afghanistan iraq killing hundreds thousands people5 media reports incredulously claim dr ahmadinejad explain logic behind blaming us terror attacks state three theories listed well surely three theories three explanations logic behind blaming us might questionable dr ahmadinejad stated majority americans support view 911 zionist jack somewhere along line well view nations politicians view course dismissed orthodox academia media government functionaries conspiracy theory certainly one least widespread including among many professionals relevant sentences investigating matters also many oddities events 911 large number israelis acting suspiciously rounded deported usa albeit quietly antics five israeli moving company employees6 dancing atop warehouse roof new jersey time twin towers collapse arrested questioned several months fbi least two found mossad operatives7 matters concern us however internet abundant details consider 1 methods suggested dr ahmadinejad used justify wars 2 longrange plan use conflict scenarios justification invasion states order secure regime change interests israel false flag operations 911 attacks called false flag operations media others bleat conspiracy theory though concept conceived paranoid mentalities false flag operation frequently used instigate conflicts many incidences recognized orthodox academe media therefore makes 911 inconceivable false flag operation examples false flag operations accepted orthodox academe include 1 manchurian incident 1931 japanese officers contrived pretext invading manchuria blowing part japanese owned railway8 2 gleiwitz poland 1939 german soldiers dressed polish uniforms attacked occupied german radio station near polish border several german prisoners dressed polish soldiers left dead scene incident used justify invasion poland incidences operation himmler occurred simultaneously along border9 3 mainila russia 1939 soviets shelled russian town near finnish border claiming bombed finns using pretext invasion10 4 cairo alexandria 1954 lavon affair israeli agents bombed american british properties egypt purpose blaming egyptians nine egyptian jews involved honoured 2005 israeli government despite operation supposedly rogue nature11 5 usacuba 1962 operation northwoods conceived joint chiefs staff signed gen lyman lemnitzer plan included sinking us ship near cuba airplane hijackings bombings throughout usa would made appear cuban origin plan scotched kennedy later exposed james bamford via freedom information act purpose plan instructive context 911 desired result execution plan would place united states apparent position suffering defensible grievances rash irresponsible government cuba develop international image cuban threat peace western hemisphere12 false flag operation pearl harbor worth mentioning context long contended many well placed individuals including exmilitary commanders hawaii roosevelt administration forewarned japanese attack due broken japanese naval codes failed warn pearl harbor command attack maximum propaganda could obtained col curtis dall president roosevelts soninlaw inside went washington time well interviewing 1967 retired admiral husband kimmel commanding officer pearl harbor13 scenario familiar consider 911 false flag operation dall cites november 25 1941 entry us secretary war henry l stimsons diary question maneuver japanese firing first shot without allowing much damage difficult proposition14 stimson comment follows strategy recommended lt commander arthur h mccollum director office naval intelligence fear east asia section october 7 1940 year prior pearl harbor drafted memorandum suggesting methods goading japan attacking usa justify americas entry war move public opinion overwhelmingly isolationist mccollum outlined eight points policy might provoke japan action usa problem mccollum stated believed present state political opinion united states government capable declaring war japan without ado15 mccollum concludes unequivocally stating means japan could led commit overt act war much better events must fully prepared accept threat war16 | 787 |
<p>WASHINGTON — A debate over bump stocks — devices that allowed semi-automatic rifles to fire at rapid speed during the Las Vegas shooting — will continue this week on Capitol Hill as lawmakers grapple with the politically stinging issue of gun control.</p>
<p>The week began Monday with a moment of silence for the victims of the Las Vegas tragedy at an annual conference here for progressive state legislators from across the country.</p>
<p>That moment of silence at the Omni Shoreham Hotel was led by members of the Nevada Legislature, in town for the 4th annual State Innovation Exchange Legislator Conference.</p>
<p>“It’s hard to talk about with this knot in my stomach,” said state Sen. Pat Spearman, D-North Las Vegas, who said the Nevada legislative delegation was brought onto the stage to lead the prayer for victims of tragedy.</p>
<p>Lawmakers from other states expressed their support for the Nevada delegation, “letting us know they were with us,” said Nevada Assemblyman William McCurdy II, D-Las Vegas.</p>
<p>“We decided to go up in unison and call for a moment of silence,” said McCurdy, adding, “We are stronger when we all stand together.”</p>
<p>As state lawmakers met, Congress was out for a federal holiday. The House returns this week.</p>
<p>Focus on bump stocks</p>
<p>The debate in Congress on gun control has focused mainly on bump stocks, which were used by the shooter, Stephen Paddock. He equipped some semi-automatic rifles with the devices before opening fire from his room at <a href="http://www.hotels.vegas/Las-Vegas-Hotels/Mandalay-Bay-Resort-And-Casino" type="external">Mandalay Bay</a> into a crowd attending a country music concert on Oct. 1.</p>
<p>There were 58 people killed and hundreds of others injured.</p>
<p>The bump stock accessory allows semi-automatic rifles to fire bursts of bullets near the speed of a fully automatic weapon.</p>
<p>Although the National Rifle Association has called for tighter controls on bump stocks, the gun lobby and Republican leaders are urging President Donald Trump to issue regulations through the Bureau of Alcohol,Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.</p>
<p>The NRA opposes an outright ban on the devices.</p>
<p>Democrats want a ban on bump stocks through legislation that would do just that. A bill filed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is co-sponsored by many Democrats in the Senate, including Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev.</p>
<p>Cortez Masto, a former Nevada attorney general, said she plans to be “very vocal” in Washington about gun safety legislation to make sure “the terror that came to our community never visits another one in America.”</p>
<p>The Feinstein bill would ban not only bump stocks, but other accessories to increase the rate of fire of semi-automatic weapons.</p>
<p>Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he plans to call a hearing on the gun control measures after several Republicans said they were open to legislative language to curb availability of the accessories.</p>
<p>Political consequences</p>
<p>But a vote on gun control legislation could have political consequences for vulnerable Republicans and Democrats up for reelection in 2018.</p>
<p>A bill to ban assault weapons in 1993 resulted in an NRA-orchestrated attack on Rep. Jack Brooks, D-Texas, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and other moderate Democrats, who lost reelection and saw a Republican takeover of the House.</p>
<p>The NRA funded unknown candidate Steve Stockman, who defeated Brooks. The gun lobby also funded an effort to defeat Speaker Tom Foley, D-Wash.</p>
<p>In Nevada, a divide over gun control in the congressional delegation falls along party lines, with the two Republicans, Sen. Dean Heller and Rep. Mark Amodei, favoring Trump administration action on regulations on bump stocks.</p>
<p>Cortez Masto and Democrat Reps. Dina Titus, Jacky Rosen and Ruben Kihuen favor legislation.</p>
<p>Heller joined other GOP senators last week in urging the administration to review and tighten regulations on bump stocks — a position that Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s executive vice president, underscored in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”</p>
<p>LaPierre said it is up to ATF to review and interpret current laws and regulations.</p>
<p>Feinstein, on another Sunday show, “Face the Nation,” argued against administrative actions that can be changed from president to president. “We need a law,” she said.</p>
<p>History shows any gun control legislation would face hurdles in the Senate, where lawmakers rejected bills to tighten background check requirements in 2015 following the San Bernardino, California, mass shooting, and in 2013 following the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.</p>
<p>Last year, groups and organizations on both sides of the issue spent money to lobby Congress.</p>
<p>Gun rights groups spent $10.6 million, and gun control organizations spent $1.7 million, on lobbyists alone. More was doled out in contributions, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan watchdog group that tracks money in politics.</p>
<p>Spearman, the Nevada state senator, said she has heard from Democrats and Republicans alike that something needs to be done, and that “throwing money” into the gun control debate “is not a winning strategy.”</p>
<p>She said people are looking for solutions.</p>
<p>“People are fed up,” Spearman said.</p>
<p>Contact Gary Martin at 202-662-7390 or <a href="" type="internal">[email protected].</a> Follow <a href="https://twitter.com/garymartindc" type="external">@garymartindc</a> on Twitter.</p>
<p>Representing Nevada</p>
<p>Nevada legislators attending the 4th annual State Innovation Exchange Legislator Conference:</p>
<p>—Sen. Pat Spearman, D-North Las Vegas</p>
<p>—Assemblywoman Daniele Monroe-Moreno, D-North Las Vegas</p>
<p>—Assemblywoman Maggie Carlton, D-Las Vegas</p>
<p>—Assemblyman William McCurdy II, D-Las Vegas</p>
<p>—Assemblyman Tyrone Thompson, D-North Las Vegas</p>
<p /> | false | 1 | washington debate bump stocks devices allowed semiautomatic rifles fire rapid speed las vegas shooting continue week capitol hill lawmakers grapple politically stinging issue gun control week began monday moment silence victims las vegas tragedy annual conference progressive state legislators across country moment silence omni shoreham hotel led members nevada legislature town 4th annual state innovation exchange legislator conference hard talk knot stomach said state sen pat spearman dnorth las vegas said nevada legislative delegation brought onto stage lead prayer victims tragedy lawmakers states expressed support nevada delegation letting us know us said nevada assemblyman william mccurdy ii dlas vegas decided go unison call moment silence said mccurdy adding stronger stand together state lawmakers met congress federal holiday house returns week focus bump stocks debate congress gun control focused mainly bump stocks used shooter stephen paddock equipped semiautomatic rifles devices opening fire room mandalay bay crowd attending country music concert oct 1 58 people killed hundreds others injured bump stock accessory allows semiautomatic rifles fire bursts bullets near speed fully automatic weapon although national rifle association called tighter controls bump stocks gun lobby republican leaders urging president donald trump issue regulations bureau alcoholtobacco firearms explosives nra opposes outright ban devices democrats want ban bump stocks legislation would bill filed sen dianne feinstein dcalif cosponsored many democrats senate including sen catherine cortez masto dnev cortez masto former nevada attorney general said plans vocal washington gun safety legislation make sure terror came community never visits another one america feinstein bill would ban bump stocks accessories increase rate fire semiautomatic weapons sen chuck grassley riowa chairman senate judiciary committee said plans call hearing gun control measures several republicans said open legislative language curb availability accessories political consequences vote gun control legislation could political consequences vulnerable republicans democrats reelection 2018 bill ban assault weapons 1993 resulted nraorchestrated attack rep jack brooks dtexas chairman house judiciary committee moderate democrats lost reelection saw republican takeover house nra funded unknown candidate steve stockman defeated brooks gun lobby also funded effort defeat speaker tom foley dwash nevada divide gun control congressional delegation falls along party lines two republicans sen dean heller rep mark amodei favoring trump administration action regulations bump stocks cortez masto democrat reps dina titus jacky rosen ruben kihuen favor legislation heller joined gop senators last week urging administration review tighten regulations bump stocks position wayne lapierre nras executive vice president underscored interview cbss face nation lapierre said atf review interpret current laws regulations feinstein another sunday show face nation argued administrative actions changed president president need law said history shows gun control legislation would face hurdles senate lawmakers rejected bills tighten background check requirements 2015 following san bernardino california mass shooting 2013 following tragedy sandy hook elementary school newtown connecticut last year groups organizations sides issue spent money lobby congress gun rights groups spent 106 million gun control organizations spent 17 million lobbyists alone doled contributions according center responsive politics nonpartisan watchdog group tracks money politics spearman nevada state senator said heard democrats republicans alike something needs done throwing money gun control debate winning strategy said people looking solutions people fed spearman said contact gary martin 2026627390 gmartinreviewjournalcom follow garymartindc twitter representing nevada nevada legislators attending 4th annual state innovation exchange legislator conference sen pat spearman dnorth las vegas assemblywoman daniele monroemoreno dnorth las vegas assemblywoman maggie carlton dlas vegas assemblyman william mccurdy ii dlas vegas assemblyman tyrone thompson dnorth las vegas | 566 |
<p>Every now and then, we read about how the collective intelligence of the American public is not particularly good. It’s usually mentioned in a political context. But no one, not even politicians, can take advantage of it like our favorite sports league.</p>
<p>Yes, I’m looking at you, NFL.</p>
<p>Why in the world a league that has a license to print money seemingly is in a constant state of internal war with its players is beyond comprehension. Yet, that’s the case with recent pronouncements that commissioner <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Roger_Goodell/" type="external">Roger Goodell</a> is close to a contract extension “similar” to his current inflated salary, and that players union head DeMaurice Smith says a player strike or a lockout is “almost a virtual certainty” when the current collective bargaining agreement expires in 2021.</p>
<p>Goodell’s obsession with the almighty dollar was already beyond the pale and, this week, we have union president Eric Winston saying he doesn’t care about the future of the league because “in 20 years … none of us are going to be playing.”</p>
<p>Is this for real? Seriously? We’re talking about just four years from now, not 20, when perhaps 90 percent of the current NFL players will be out of the league. Is this kind of talk really necessary? Are these people trying to make people sick of pro football? Trying to turn fans away from the game?</p>
<p>The NFL manages to succeed in spite of itself. The game is just that popular. Forget about whether you think Goodell is doing a good job or a lousy job. Four years is a long time. Where else is he going to make that kind of money? What is the big rush to extend the contract now? He’s not going to jump to the NBA or MLB.</p>
<p>And why is Smith, the union’s executive director, so intent on fanning the flames of discord so early? Most of those players he is saying are “almost a virtual certainty” to strike in four years are still in college. Some are still in high school. Are these people really this crazy?</p>
<p>With each passing month, the lovey-dovey relationship between <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Paul_Tagliabue/" type="external">Paul Tagliabue</a>, the former commissioner, and the late <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Gene_Upshaw/" type="external">Gene Upshaw</a>, the former head of the NFL Players Association, makes more and more sense. There were no strikes or lockouts on Tagliabue’s watch. And despite critics who used to say he was keeping labor peace in the league by giving away the store to the players, there is no history of teams that went out of business because of a generous deal with the players association.</p>
<p>Yet, today, we hear repeated references to Goodell’s aim of $25 billion revenue for the NFL within a decade, which would require an increase of about $1 billion a year. Look, we know pro football is a business, no matter how much the fans would like to think of it as sport, a game. But must those fans constantly be hit over the head with a reminder? Aren’t all the commercials on the telecasts enough?</p>
<p>What’s strange about the discord between the league and its players is that, on most issues, the players and the owners are on the same side. Maybe the players do not want the season extended to 18 games because they don’t want more wear-and-tear on their bodies, but that’s not really a hot-button issue at the moment. And much as there is talk about what’s wrong with following a Sunday game with another on Thursday, about the travel, about training camps, about too many exhibition games, the only really serious sticking point between the sides involves disciplinary matters.</p>
<p>This, of course, is back at the forefront now as we await a hearing on the appeal of Dallas running back <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Ezekiel-Elliott/" type="external">Ezekiel Elliott</a>, who is facing a six-game suspension. Yet, the number of players who get caught up in disciplinary issues, whether for drinking or drug abuses or for other off-field incidents, is a ridiculously small percentage in a league where there are nearly 1,700 players on active rosters during the season.</p>
<p>Which, of course, brings us back to the question of why Goodell and Smith can’t just get along in the interest of doing what’s best for virtually everybody. Just guessing now, but turning disciplinary issues over to a truly independent arbitrator would eliminate about 99.9999 percent of the matters on which the players and owners can’t agree.</p>
<p>That is such a simple solution.</p>
<p>It’s almost inconceivable to think Smith is right and that there will be a work stoppage in four years. The owners don’t want one because they’re rolling in cash and are smart enough to realize that disunity is bad for business. Plus, they’re happy with the current labor agreement. The players don’t want a stoppage because they’re making a lot of money, even if it isn’t as much as, say, the owners or <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/LeBron_James/" type="external">LeBron James</a> or <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Stephen_Curry/" type="external">Stephen Curry</a> make. And most of them are savvy enough to realize their years of big income have an expiration date.</p>
<p>If the players really wanted to change things, there is a simple solution. Enough of them have to stay away from the “voluntary” phase of offseason workouts. The reason for the quote marks is that we all know these workouts aren’t really voluntary. But the players don’t get paid much for them, and if they all stayed away, it would send a strong message – without disrupting the league’s real cash cow, the games themselves.</p>
<p>But therein lies the problem. There really isn’t much the players want to change. There really is enough money for everybody. Can’t we all just get along?</p>
<p>Ira Miller is an award-winning sportswriter who has covered the National Football League for more than five decades and is a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame Selection Committee. He is a national columnist for The Sports Xchange.</p> | false | 1 | every read collective intelligence american public particularly good usually mentioned political context one even politicians take advantage like favorite sports league yes im looking nfl world league license print money seemingly constant state internal war players beyond comprehension yet thats case recent pronouncements commissioner roger goodell close contract extension similar current inflated salary players union head demaurice smith says player strike lockout almost virtual certainty current collective bargaining agreement expires 2021 goodells obsession almighty dollar already beyond pale week union president eric winston saying doesnt care future league 20 years none us going playing real seriously talking four years 20 perhaps 90 percent current nfl players league kind talk really necessary people trying make people sick pro football trying turn fans away game nfl manages succeed spite game popular forget whether think goodell good job lousy job four years long time else going make kind money big rush extend contract hes going jump nba mlb smith unions executive director intent fanning flames discord early players saying almost virtual certainty strike four years still college still high school people really crazy passing month loveydovey relationship paul tagliabue former commissioner late gene upshaw former head nfl players association makes sense strikes lockouts tagliabues watch despite critics used say keeping labor peace league giving away store players history teams went business generous deal players association yet today hear repeated references goodells aim 25 billion revenue nfl within decade would require increase 1 billion year look know pro football business matter much fans would like think sport game must fans constantly hit head reminder arent commercials telecasts enough whats strange discord league players issues players owners side maybe players want season extended 18 games dont want wearandtear bodies thats really hotbutton issue moment much talk whats wrong following sunday game another thursday travel training camps many exhibition games really serious sticking point sides involves disciplinary matters course back forefront await hearing appeal dallas running back ezekiel elliott facing sixgame suspension yet number players get caught disciplinary issues whether drinking drug abuses offfield incidents ridiculously small percentage league nearly 1700 players active rosters season course brings us back question goodell smith cant get along interest whats best virtually everybody guessing turning disciplinary issues truly independent arbitrator would eliminate 999999 percent matters players owners cant agree simple solution almost inconceivable think smith right work stoppage four years owners dont want one theyre rolling cash smart enough realize disunity bad business plus theyre happy current labor agreement players dont want stoppage theyre making lot money even isnt much say owners lebron james stephen curry make savvy enough realize years big income expiration date players really wanted change things simple solution enough stay away voluntary phase offseason workouts reason quote marks know workouts arent really voluntary players dont get paid much stayed away would send strong message without disrupting leagues real cash cow games therein lies problem really isnt much players want change really enough money everybody cant get along ira miller awardwinning sportswriter covered national football league five decades member pro football hall fame selection committee national columnist sports xchange | 513 |
<p>U.S. Senator Robert Menendez, in trying to help a campaign donor who was accused of overbilling the government, enlisted then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to “amplify the pressure” on the Obama administration, the Justice Department said.</p>
<p>Reid contacted a White House staffer, who declined to help, prosecutors disclosed Wednesday in a court filing.</p>
<p>Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, faces a corruption trial next week with Salomon Melgen, a Florida eye doctor and close friend accused of bribing him with hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions and lavish trips in exchange for his help on government disputes.</p>
<p>Menendez “enlisted” Reid in November 2011 to help pressure the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, known as CMS, to reverse its ruling that Melgen owed $8.9 million for overbilling Medicare. Reid contacted a White House deputy chief of staff, prosecutors said.</p>
<p>“At that time, the Majority Leader reached out to the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, informing her that Menendez was upset about how a Florida ophthalmologist was being treated by CMS and asking that she call the agency,” according to the 30-page filing.</p>
<p>But the staffer, who wasn’t identified, “demurred” after “recognizing the matter involved a dispute between a single doctor and an administrative agency,” according to prosecutors. The filing doesn’t offer further details about what Menendez allegedly asked Reid to do. Reid isn’t accused of wrongdoing in the case.</p>
<p>‘Lurid Narrative’</p>
<p>Defense lawyers for Menendez and Melgen responded Wednesday with a letter complaining that prosecutors filed a “lengthy, lurid and one-sided narrative of the case’’ that includes “new, irrelevant and inflammatory ‘facts.’’’</p>
<p>The Justice Department filing, called a “Trial Brief,’’ wasn’t solicited by the judge and came after a juror chosen last week to hear the case has been excused for financial hardship, the lawyers said. A new juror must be chosen and may be exposed to the fresh pretrial publicity, they said.</p>
<p>“With its unnecessary presentation, irrelevant to the actual legal issues in the ‘brief,’ the gratuitous filing will make it harder to fill the remaining jury spot,’’ wrote the lawyers, adding that they won’t offer a further response to the allegation until the trial.</p>
<p>Efforts to contact Reid at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he’s affiliated with the law school, were unsuccessful, and his representatives didn’t immediately return calls and emails seeking comment on the filing.</p>
<p>Separate Relationship</p>
<p>Melgen and Reid had their own relationship. Prosecutors say Melgen gave $600,000 in 2012 to Majority PAC, a political action committee intended to expand the Democratic majority in the Senate. The money was earmarked for Menendez’s electoral race in 2012, prosecutors say. In June 2012, Melgen flew Reid on his company’s private plane from Washington to Boston and back for a Senate Majority PAC event, Politico has reported.</p>
<p>Though the alleged White House contact by Reid isn’t part of the charges against Menendez, prosecutors seek to tell jurors about it as proof that the lawmaker intended to pressure another official to perform an “official act.”</p>
<p>The U.S. Supreme Court narrowed the definition of official acts last year in setting aside the conviction of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell. The high court said prosecutors must prove an official act involved a formal exercise of power and be “something specific and focused” pending before a public official.</p>
<p>The U.S. indictment against Menendez and Melgen details how Menendez and Reid met with Kathleen Sebelius, then-secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to discuss policies that affected Melgen. That meeting on Aug. 2, 2012, took place in Reid’s Capitol office, according to Wednesday’s filing.</p>
<p>Close Friends</p>
<p>Both Menendez and Melgen have pleaded not guilty and deny wrongdoing. They say they have been close friends for two decades, and that the $771,500 in contributions that Melgen gave to the senator’s defense fund and various campaign committees, as well as trips on private jets, were not part of a corrupt scheme.</p>
<p>The filing also offered an overview of the government’s case against Menendez and Melgen, who was convicted earlier this year in a separate trial over health-care fraud. The doctor sought the senator’s help in getting visas for three of his girlfriends and pushing the Dominican Republic to honor a contract he held to provide security in that nation’s ports, prosecutors said.</p>
<p>The filing includes some fresh flourishes about the luxury trips that Menendez is accused of taking on Melgen’s tab. The Dominican resort where Melgen had a villa is a “tranquil Caribbean enclave, venerated for its seclusion” that attracted “luminaries in sports, entertainment and business, including Beyonce, Jay-Z, Jennifer Lopez, Richard Branson and Bill Gates,” prosecutors said.</p>
<p>Prosecutors attacked the heart of the defense argument that the two men had a longtime friendship that never became a corrupt pact.</p>
<p>“It is not uncommon for defendants to establish some evidence of friendship in bribery cases but still be found guilty,” according to the filing. “Just as genuine friendship may underlie a business arrangement, it should come as no surprise that friendship may very well form the foundation of a corrupt endeavor.”</p> | false | 1 | us senator robert menendez trying help campaign donor accused overbilling government enlisted thensenate majority leader harry reid amplify pressure obama administration justice department said reid contacted white house staffer declined help prosecutors disclosed wednesday court filing menendez new jersey democrat faces corruption trial next week salomon melgen florida eye doctor close friend accused bribing hundreds thousands dollars campaign contributions lavish trips exchange help government disputes menendez enlisted reid november 2011 help pressure centers medicare medicaid services known cms reverse ruling melgen owed 89 million overbilling medicare reid contacted white house deputy chief staff prosecutors said time majority leader reached white house deputy chief staff informing menendez upset florida ophthalmologist treated cms asking call agency according 30page filing staffer wasnt identified demurred recognizing matter involved dispute single doctor administrative agency according prosecutors filing doesnt offer details menendez allegedly asked reid reid isnt accused wrongdoing case lurid narrative defense lawyers menendez melgen responded wednesday letter complaining prosecutors filed lengthy lurid onesided narrative case includes new irrelevant inflammatory facts justice department filing called trial brief wasnt solicited judge came juror chosen last week hear case excused financial hardship lawyers said new juror must chosen may exposed fresh pretrial publicity said unnecessary presentation irrelevant actual legal issues brief gratuitous filing make harder fill remaining jury spot wrote lawyers adding wont offer response allegation trial efforts contact reid university nevada las vegas hes affiliated law school unsuccessful representatives didnt immediately return calls emails seeking comment filing separate relationship melgen reid relationship prosecutors say melgen gave 600000 2012 majority pac political action committee intended expand democratic majority senate money earmarked menendezs electoral race 2012 prosecutors say june 2012 melgen flew reid companys private plane washington boston back senate majority pac event politico reported though alleged white house contact reid isnt part charges menendez prosecutors seek tell jurors proof lawmaker intended pressure another official perform official act us supreme court narrowed definition official acts last year setting aside conviction former virginia governor bob mcdonnell high court said prosecutors must prove official act involved formal exercise power something specific focused pending public official us indictment menendez melgen details menendez reid met kathleen sebelius thensecretary us department health human services discuss policies affected melgen meeting aug 2 2012 took place reids capitol office according wednesdays filing close friends menendez melgen pleaded guilty deny wrongdoing say close friends two decades 771500 contributions melgen gave senators defense fund various campaign committees well trips private jets part corrupt scheme filing also offered overview governments case menendez melgen convicted earlier year separate trial healthcare fraud doctor sought senators help getting visas three girlfriends pushing dominican republic honor contract held provide security nations ports prosecutors said filing includes fresh flourishes luxury trips menendez accused taking melgens tab dominican resort melgen villa tranquil caribbean enclave venerated seclusion attracted luminaries sports entertainment business including beyonce jayz jennifer lopez richard branson bill gates prosecutors said prosecutors attacked heart defense argument two men longtime friendship never became corrupt pact uncommon defendants establish evidence friendship bribery cases still found guilty according filing genuine friendship may underlie business arrangement come surprise friendship may well form foundation corrupt endeavor | 518 |
<p>Bad Advice from a Friend……</p>
<p>Dahiyeh, SOUTH BEIRUT — This observer admits that politically speaking, things might appear a bit tough for Hezbollah these days, but will spare the dear reader the tedium of a laundry list of what the Party has experienced over the past 20 months in terms of domestic and foreign attacks, condemnations, calumny, obliquey, sundry plots, and legislative and political wounds, some a result of the Party of God lumbering under the weight of some tawdry political ‘allies’ who it must work with in Parliament. Some of the more commonly known and intensifying targeting of the Resistance by its internal and foreign foes who have pledged at all costs to dismantle it but sowing Sunni-Shia discords, include exploiting the chaos in Syria, manipulating the frustrations of the Lebanese public given widespread lack of public services, and attacking Hezbollah’s success in linking its military power with its growing political power but periodically insisting that it gives up its weapons.</p>
<p>Concerned friends of Hezbollah sometimes overreact out of sincere solidarity and friendship and a desire to protect the Resistance from surrounding events that are swirling out of control around them. Perhaps it is in this context that Ibrahim al Amin, the editor in chief of the pro-Hezbollah Beirut newspaper, Al Akbar, is demanding that Hezbollah throw in the towel and withdraw from Lebanese politics.</p>
<p>On July 18, the 6th anniversary of Lebanon’s July 2006 victory over Israel during the latter’s fifth war against Lebanon which included its brutal 1978, 1982,1993, 1996 aggressions, it was quite normal to discuss and evaluate &#160;where the Resistance is today in terms of its work and goals, not least of which is Hezbollah’s moral, religious, political, and humanitarian duties to support the Palestinians growing international campaigns to retrieve their country which is still occupied by &#160;a Zionist colonial regime after more than six decades, and their obligation to enact in Parliament right to work and home ownership legislation for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.</p>
<p>One interesting proposal—even provocative, but wrong-headed, in this observer’s opinion—was put forward in a July 18 editorial by Ibrahim al-Amin, reputed to be close to some Hezbollah officials.</p>
<p>Editor al-Amin did not mince his words, declaring thus:</p>
<p>“There’s no longer any point in the resistance (Hezbollah) remaining in government. The government is no longer good for anything. No good will come from the current (Hezbollah led) government surviving.</p>
<p>“There’s no longer any point in the resistance remaining in any branch of Lebanon’s government, not even in parliament. It’s impossible for it to play a legislative role given the weird and wondrous partnership between the executive and legislative establishments.</p>
<p>“There’s no longer any point in the resistance remaining involved in domestic political quarrels or discussions…There’s no longer any point in the resistance getting mixed up in political games that tarnish its reputation, undermine its standing, and make it resemble the gangsters who make up most of the political class in this land of the deranged.”</p>
<p>Al-Amin editorializes that</p>
<p>“The system sees the resistance as an alien body which must be ejected by any means: through isolation if possible, sectarian strife if necessary, and treason and the summoning of foreign invaders when desperate.”</p>
<p>Al Amin additionally concluded:</p>
<p>“There’s no longer any point in the resistance continuing to be involved in government crises which it never had anything to do with, and when there is no real partnership in decision-making. This reduces it to the role of mute witness to daily acts of robbery, waste, sabotage and the destruction of what remains of the hybrid state.</p>
<p>“There’s no longer any point in the resistance remaining around the table with people who are above the law, however lofty or lowly their ranks. This has become akin to providing cover for the debasement of every family and individual in the country.</p>
<p>“There’s no longer any point in the resistance remaining a player in a game of appointments and patronage that does nothing to protect the resistance fighters or maintain the dignity of their families. Instead it isolates those who are willing to sacrifice all they hold dear for their people and beliefs but still cannot cross a road un-harassed or provide for their children.</p>
<p>“What use is there in Hezbollah staying in a government, parliament or other state bodies that it cannot trust?</p>
<p>“What is the use of remaining in a government that provides misleading, fabricated or skewed information to sustain an international body which seeks to damage the resistance in the name of justice – helping Israel achieve what it failed to do by force of arms? It grinds its people to the bone, and will not spend a penny on developing public utility.</p>
<p>“What is the use of remaining in a government that provides misleading, fabricated or skewed information to sustain an international body which seeks to damage the resistance in the name of justice – helping Israel achieve what it failed to do by force of arms? It grinds its people to the bone, and will not spend a penny on developing public utility.”</p>
<p>Editor in Chief Amin’s &#160;sunshine-patriot weak-kneed laments and his apparent eagerness to throw in the Resistance towel plus his expressed fears sound at times like they were written by a speech writer last July for Libya’s &#160;Gadhafi&#160; or Yemen’s Salah, and he errs with virtually every syllable he pens.</p>
<p>Defending its political mantle and participation in government is key for the future of the Hezbollah led Resistance. The Resistance is bigger than Hezbollah and has now become truly international as has its project of supporting the Palestinian cause.&#160; Daily, the Resistance gains strength and support as Israel weakens and US and Western regional implantations and hegemony fades into the pages of history books.</p>
<p>Setbacks are surely in store for the Party of God, as with this country, region, movement, era, and culture of Resistance, inspired as it is by the 7th century sacrifices for the commonweal by Hussein bin Ali and the martyrs at Karbala and the 1st century C.E.&#160;Martyred Prophet from Nazareth at Calvary.</p>
<p>Were the logic of the no doubt well-meaning Al Akbar editor to prevail, and were Hezbollah to become ostrich-like politically, the predictable result would be nothing less and quite likely rather more than the following consequences.</p>
<p>Withdrawing from the political battles in Lebanon’s government would be an egregious capitulation to the designs of Elliot Abrams and the Bush administration when Abrams requested in 2004 of the Saudi Regime, $50 million in funding to set up the March 14th coalition. Abdicating its legislative duties would be for the Resistance to cave to the likes of Israel’s Netanyahu, the Zionist controlled US Congress, reactionary despotic Arab regimes and other defenders of the Zionist occupation of Palestine &#160;at the expense of people of goodwill everywhere and supporters of the Hezbollah led Resistance throughout&#160; Lebanon as well as internationally.</p>
<p>The suggestion that Hezbollah cannot remain cutting edge in its military preparedness simultaneous with the high quality of its Parliamentary delegation including Mohammad Raad, Nawaf Musawi, Ali Fayad, Hassan Fadallah, and Mohammed Fneish, to name just a few, is faulty.&#160; This stellar Loyalty to the Resistance team is more than capable of continuing to advance the Hezbollah campaign pledges and party platforms in Parliament and get results while Hezbollah remains vigilant and prepared to defeat the coming Israeli aggression.</p>
<p>The decision of Hezbollah to participate in Lebanese politics and government was the right decision when it was debated and decided in 1992 and it remains even more so today.</p>
<p>Hezbollah is known for its culture of dialogue, analysis, elements of democratic centralism and patience in decision making. &#160;Many supporters of the Resistance, including this observer, believe that proposals for Hezbollah to disengage from Lebanese politics err at best, and at worst they are patently absurd, counter-Resistance, and undermine prospects for a prosperous future for Lebanon and the people of all 18 confessions who Hezbollah seek to serve.&#160; Participating in Lebanon’s government, and not least in the mundane work of trying to ameliorate scores of local government problems after decades of neglect, is a noble cause.</p>
<p>Whether in Palestine or here in Lebanon, the Resistance takes nearly countless forms, paths, protests, operations, from military to academic and social.&#160; Continuing to engage every day, every hour with Lebanon’s government of which Hezbollah is an essential component and is vital.</p>
<p>Now is not the time to throw in the towel just because times are tough, but it would be well for the tough to get a move on and to redouble efforts to serve the people by concrete results from Parliament and through government agencies.</p> | false | 1 | bad advice friend dahiyeh south beirut observer admits politically speaking things might appear bit tough hezbollah days spare dear reader tedium laundry list party experienced past 20 months terms domestic foreign attacks condemnations calumny obliquey sundry plots legislative political wounds result party god lumbering weight tawdry political allies must work parliament commonly known intensifying targeting resistance internal foreign foes pledged costs dismantle sowing sunnishia discords include exploiting chaos syria manipulating frustrations lebanese public given widespread lack public services attacking hezbollahs success linking military power growing political power periodically insisting gives weapons concerned friends hezbollah sometimes overreact sincere solidarity friendship desire protect resistance surrounding events swirling control around perhaps context ibrahim al amin editor chief prohezbollah beirut newspaper al akbar demanding hezbollah throw towel withdraw lebanese politics july 18 6th anniversary lebanons july 2006 victory israel latters fifth war lebanon included brutal 1978 19821993 1996 aggressions quite normal discuss evaluate 160where resistance today terms work goals least hezbollahs moral religious political humanitarian duties support palestinians growing international campaigns retrieve country still occupied 160a zionist colonial regime six decades obligation enact parliament right work home ownership legislation palestinian refugees lebanon one interesting proposaleven provocative wrongheaded observers opinionwas put forward july 18 editorial ibrahim alamin reputed close hezbollah officials editor alamin mince words declaring thus theres longer point resistance hezbollah remaining government government longer good anything good come current hezbollah led government surviving theres longer point resistance remaining branch lebanons government even parliament impossible play legislative role given weird wondrous partnership executive legislative establishments theres longer point resistance remaining involved domestic political quarrels discussionstheres longer point resistance getting mixed political games tarnish reputation undermine standing make resemble gangsters make political class land deranged alamin editorializes system sees resistance alien body must ejected means isolation possible sectarian strife necessary treason summoning foreign invaders desperate al amin additionally concluded theres longer point resistance continuing involved government crises never anything real partnership decisionmaking reduces role mute witness daily acts robbery waste sabotage destruction remains hybrid state theres longer point resistance remaining around table people law however lofty lowly ranks become akin providing cover debasement every family individual country theres longer point resistance remaining player game appointments patronage nothing protect resistance fighters maintain dignity families instead isolates willing sacrifice hold dear people beliefs still cross road unharassed provide children use hezbollah staying government parliament state bodies trust use remaining government provides misleading fabricated skewed information sustain international body seeks damage resistance name justice helping israel achieve failed force arms grinds people bone spend penny developing public utility use remaining government provides misleading fabricated skewed information sustain international body seeks damage resistance name justice helping israel achieve failed force arms grinds people bone spend penny developing public utility editor chief amins 160sunshinepatriot weakkneed laments apparent eagerness throw resistance towel plus expressed fears sound times like written speech writer last july libyas 160gadhafi160 yemens salah errs virtually every syllable pens defending political mantle participation government key future hezbollah led resistance resistance bigger hezbollah become truly international project supporting palestinian cause160 daily resistance gains strength support israel weakens us western regional implantations hegemony fades pages history books setbacks surely store party god country region movement era culture resistance inspired 7th century sacrifices commonweal hussein bin ali martyrs karbala 1st century ce160martyred prophet nazareth calvary logic doubt wellmeaning al akbar editor prevail hezbollah become ostrichlike politically predictable result would nothing less quite likely rather following consequences withdrawing political battles lebanons government would egregious capitulation designs elliot abrams bush administration abrams requested 2004 saudi regime 50 million funding set march 14th coalition abdicating legislative duties would resistance cave likes israels netanyahu zionist controlled us congress reactionary despotic arab regimes defenders zionist occupation palestine 160at expense people goodwill everywhere supporters hezbollah led resistance throughout160 lebanon well internationally suggestion hezbollah remain cutting edge military preparedness simultaneous high quality parliamentary delegation including mohammad raad nawaf musawi ali fayad hassan fadallah mohammed fneish name faulty160 stellar loyalty resistance team capable continuing advance hezbollah campaign pledges party platforms parliament get results hezbollah remains vigilant prepared defeat coming israeli aggression decision hezbollah participate lebanese politics government right decision debated decided 1992 remains even today hezbollah known culture dialogue analysis elements democratic centralism patience decision making 160many supporters resistance including observer believe proposals hezbollah disengage lebanese politics err best worst patently absurd counterresistance undermine prospects prosperous future lebanon people 18 confessions hezbollah seek serve160 participating lebanons government least mundane work trying ameliorate scores local government problems decades neglect noble cause whether palestine lebanon resistance takes nearly countless forms paths protests operations military academic social160 continuing engage every day every hour lebanons government hezbollah essential component vital time throw towel times tough would well tough get move redouble efforts serve people concrete results parliament government agencies | 786 |
<p>It is tempting to dismiss the Republicans’ recent loss in New York’s 26th congressional district. A “tea-party” candidate siphoned off conservative votes, and the Republican did not respond to the Democrat’s Medicare ads until they had already sealed her fate.</p>
<p>Doing so would be a mistake: Republican Jane Corwin’s defeat in New York is to Republicans what the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts was to Democrats: a warning of impending disaster if the party maintains its course. Democrats in 2010 refused to see this, blaming their loss on poor turnout and a bad candidate. Republicans cannot make the same mistake. And that means the GOP must enroll in a class on the hopes and dreams– and fears and insecurities– of blue-collar white voters.</p>
<p>Political analysts on both sides of the aisle overlook blue-collar whites. But they are a large share of the electorate, about 40 percent. When they coalesce around one party, their preferences shape the election. That’s what happened in 2010. A record 63 percent of blue-collar whites voted Republican in House races in 2010, up from 54 percent in 2008.</p>
<p>But it isn’t 2010 anymore. NY-26 is a solidly Republican district, and was carried handily by both John McCain and George W. Bush. Corwin’s performance, in comparison, was worst in the working-class areas of the district. But blue-collar voters did not turn out for Democrat Kathy Hochul; instead, they backed faux tea partier Jack Davis, who spent millions of dollars on ads attacking the Republicans for supporting free trade.</p>
<p>It’s not just New York. Blue-collar whites abandoned the GOP or GOP-backed candidate in two recent Wisconsin elections, without third-party spoilers. Blue-collar areas that swung heavily toward Republican Scott Walker in 2010 swung heavily in favor of Democratic or Democratic-backed candidates in the April supreme-court election. This poses a great challenge for Republicans. Non-whites’ increased share of the electorate has left the GOP heavily dependent on substantial majorities among blue-collar whites for even a shot at victory. To win, Republicans have to learn what makes Joe Six-Pack tick.</p>
<p>Some of the answers can be found in a recent Pew poll in which researchers divided voters into eight typologies, each sharing an underlying belief pattern. One of these groups, dubbed the “Disaffecteds,” was 77 percent white and 89 percent without a college degree. Since nearly two-thirds of them are political independents, this group is a distilled example of the blue-collar white swing vote.</p>
<p>Disaffecteds share base Republicans’ dislike of Obama and negative views about the country’s direction. Obama’s job-approval rating among them is only 28 percent, and only 22 percent say they would reelect him. They view the Republican party favorably and the Democratic party unfavorably by wide margins. Only 14 percent are content with the federal government, and only 19 percent trust the government to do what is right always or most of the time. These assessments suggest that blue-collar whites are clearly opposed to today’s Left.</p>
<p>But being against the Left does not mean that one is for the Right. Comparing Disaffecteds with Staunch Conservatives, the Pew designation for the Republican base, reveals striking differences on fiscal and budgetary issues. Disaffecteds are much more likely to prefer a bigger government with more services and are significantly less likely to cite the deficit as either a top priority or the biggest economic worry.</p>
<p>“If conservatives want to break this cycle and finally reverse the seemingly perpetual growth of government, they must understand how blue-collar voters are different from them.”– Henry Olsen</p>
<p>Their solution to balancing the deficit is also at odds with that of the Staunch Conservatives. Fifty-nine percent of Staunch Conservatives want to focus on cutting major programs to reduce the deficit; only 17 percent of Disaffecteds do. Only 34 percent of Staunch Conservatives want a combination of tax hikes and spending cuts, compared with 65 percent of Disaffecteds. Most crucially, only 15 percent of Disaffecteds want to cut Social Security or Medicare to reduce the budget deficit, the smallest percentage for any of the Pew typologies– and 11 points lower than Solid Liberals. Given these results, it’s not surprising that blue-collar whites deserted Jane Corwin in droves.</p>
<p>It’s also no surprise that Davis did so well with the trade issue. Disaffecteds were the group most strongly against free trade, saying by a 57-29 margin that free-trade agreements are bad for America. Disaffecteds also have a much more favorable view of labor unions than do Staunch Conservatives, partially explaining the Wisconsin results.</p>
<p>Republicans who argue that these voters are natural tea partiers are mistaken. The Pew poll finds that while 72 percent of Staunch Conservatives support the Tea Party, only 19 percent of Disaffecteds do. Sixty-seven percent of them have no opinion at all about the Tea Party, the highest of any Pew group.</p>
<p>Those who want to shift focus to foreign affairs, social issues, or Obamacare also find little support in the poll. By wide margins, Disaffecteds join hardline Democrats in believing that the United States should focus more on domestic problems than on taking a leading role in world affairs (73 percent agree with this statement) and believe Obama won’t remove troops from Afghanistan quickly enough (44 percent). They have mixed opinions on gay marriage and abortion, and only 33 percent say Obamacare has had a mostly bad effect on health care.</p>
<p>It’s said that where you stand depends on where you sit, and that is certainly true of blue-collar whites. Their chair in the American social and economic hierarchy is low and wobbly. A majority of Disaffecteds earn less than $30,000 a year, while 44 percent are parents. The recession has hit these people hard; 63 percent say it had a major impact from which they have not yet recovered, and 71 percent had a household member unemployed in the last year. All four sets of responses are the highest among any of the Pew groups.</p>
<p>The Pew poll suggests that Republicans, in the short term, should concentrate their fire on jobs and the economy. Blue-collar whites agree with Republicans on low taxes and opposition to liberalism, and they already hold Obama and Democrats in low esteem. The president and his party will largely be held responsible for the prevailing economic conditions in 2012: Why not simply focus on the attack and worry about the policy aftermath later?</p>
<p>The trouble with this approach is that it has been tried before and has failed. The 2010 contest was the fourth GOP wave election in the last 60 years. In each case, the voters who swung to the GOP were blue-collar whites; in each case, attempts to roll back the welfare state quickly eroded GOP support. GOP establishmentarians who focused only on short-term wins also found that blue-collar loyalties quickly faded away.</p>
<p>If conservatives want to break this cycle and finally reverse the seemingly perpetual growth of government, they must understand how blue-collar voters are different from them. Research shows that blue-collar whites take the political positions they do because of their self-perception. They know they are less skilled than others; this makes them friendlier to protection from competition, whether the competition comes from trade abroad or immigrant workers at home. They depend more on public services to provide public order (which is why they support police so much) and economic stability (which is what middle-class entitlements support). Above all, they are risk-averse and proud. They fear the future as much as or more than they welcome it; one misstep and their whole world can collapse. This means they are wary of sudden change, whether it comes from the left or the right. And their dignity and pride mean they resist attempts to tell them what to do or treat them like pawns in someone else’s game, whether those attempts come from big business, big government, or big anything.</p>
<p>Republicans can begin to garner consistent loyalty from blue-collar whites only if they demonstrate genuine sympathy with them. Republicans cannot reform entitlements if they are seen as motivated by money or as imposing their abstract vision on hard-pressed Americans’ reality. Blue-collar whites need Medicare in their retirement; the Medicare-reform effort must be presented as what it truly is, the way to guarantee that those who need it will have it when they need it.</p>
<p>Republicans must also compare their plan with the president’s non-plan. By failing present any means of saving the program, the president’s budget guarantees that Medicare as we know it cannot continue without crushing tax hikes on the middle class. In short, today it’s the Republicans who can best fulfill Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s vision of a thriving, self-reliant, and economically secure middle class.</p>
<p>Ronald Reagan understood all of this decades ago. Even after the Goldwater debacle of 1964, he knew that Americans had voted against Goldwater because he had been cast as a radical. Reagan told the readers of National Review that “human nature resists change and goes over backward to avoid radical change,” and advised: “Time now for the soft sell to prove that our radicalism was an optical illusion.” He spent his entire political career showing how American conservative principles were not scary, but rather the simple, proven ideas that make Americans unique.</p>
<p>Reagan’s rhetoric always made the typical American feel valued and special. It did not emphasize the great entrepreneurs and captains of industry, although Reagan understood how setting them free would benefit America. Instead, he focused in speech after speech on ordinary people who did extraordinary things– the “boys of Pointe-du-Hoc,” the Lenny Skutnicks. It’s a rhetorical approach built on genuine sympathy for the average person.</p>
<p>His vision of a new Republican party included the educated and the uneducated, the working class as well as the upper class. He explained how working-class Democrats and independents could make common cause with traditional Republican supporters to forge a new majority founded on conservative principles, a strategy that carried him to a landslide.</p>
<p>That majority can be reconstructed. Blue-collar whites believe the president and the Democrats do not have their best interests at heart. They want to make common cause with conservatives to save our country. They just need to know that they will be safe on the Republican ship if they come aboard.</p>
<p>Henry Olsen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.</p> | false | 1 | tempting dismiss republicans recent loss new yorks 26th congressional district teaparty candidate siphoned conservative votes republican respond democrats medicare ads already sealed fate would mistake republican jane corwins defeat new york republicans election scott brown massachusetts democrats warning impending disaster party maintains course democrats 2010 refused see blaming loss poor turnout bad candidate republicans make mistake means gop must enroll class hopes dreams fears insecurities bluecollar white voters political analysts sides aisle overlook bluecollar whites large share electorate 40 percent coalesce around one party preferences shape election thats happened 2010 record 63 percent bluecollar whites voted republican house races 2010 54 percent 2008 isnt 2010 anymore ny26 solidly republican district carried handily john mccain george w bush corwins performance comparison worst workingclass areas district bluecollar voters turn democrat kathy hochul instead backed faux tea partier jack davis spent millions dollars ads attacking republicans supporting free trade new york bluecollar whites abandoned gop gopbacked candidate two recent wisconsin elections without thirdparty spoilers bluecollar areas swung heavily toward republican scott walker 2010 swung heavily favor democratic democraticbacked candidates april supremecourt election poses great challenge republicans nonwhites increased share electorate left gop heavily dependent substantial majorities among bluecollar whites even shot victory win republicans learn makes joe sixpack tick answers found recent pew poll researchers divided voters eight typologies sharing underlying belief pattern one groups dubbed disaffecteds 77 percent white 89 percent without college degree since nearly twothirds political independents group distilled example bluecollar white swing vote disaffecteds share base republicans dislike obama negative views countrys direction obamas jobapproval rating among 28 percent 22 percent say would reelect view republican party favorably democratic party unfavorably wide margins 14 percent content federal government 19 percent trust government right always time assessments suggest bluecollar whites clearly opposed todays left left mean one right comparing disaffecteds staunch conservatives pew designation republican base reveals striking differences fiscal budgetary issues disaffecteds much likely prefer bigger government services significantly less likely cite deficit either top priority biggest economic worry conservatives want break cycle finally reverse seemingly perpetual growth government must understand bluecollar voters different henry olsen solution balancing deficit also odds staunch conservatives fiftynine percent staunch conservatives want focus cutting major programs reduce deficit 17 percent disaffecteds 34 percent staunch conservatives want combination tax hikes spending cuts compared 65 percent disaffecteds crucially 15 percent disaffecteds want cut social security medicare reduce budget deficit smallest percentage pew typologies 11 points lower solid liberals given results surprising bluecollar whites deserted jane corwin droves also surprise davis well trade issue disaffecteds group strongly free trade saying 5729 margin freetrade agreements bad america disaffecteds also much favorable view labor unions staunch conservatives partially explaining wisconsin results republicans argue voters natural tea partiers mistaken pew poll finds 72 percent staunch conservatives support tea party 19 percent disaffecteds sixtyseven percent opinion tea party highest pew group want shift focus foreign affairs social issues obamacare also find little support poll wide margins disaffecteds join hardline democrats believing united states focus domestic problems taking leading role world affairs 73 percent agree statement believe obama wont remove troops afghanistan quickly enough 44 percent mixed opinions gay marriage abortion 33 percent say obamacare mostly bad effect health care said stand depends sit certainly true bluecollar whites chair american social economic hierarchy low wobbly majority disaffecteds earn less 30000 year 44 percent parents recession hit people hard 63 percent say major impact yet recovered 71 percent household member unemployed last year four sets responses highest among pew groups pew poll suggests republicans short term concentrate fire jobs economy bluecollar whites agree republicans low taxes opposition liberalism already hold obama democrats low esteem president party largely held responsible prevailing economic conditions 2012 simply focus attack worry policy aftermath later trouble approach tried failed 2010 contest fourth gop wave election last 60 years case voters swung gop bluecollar whites case attempts roll back welfare state quickly eroded gop support gop establishmentarians focused shortterm wins also found bluecollar loyalties quickly faded away conservatives want break cycle finally reverse seemingly perpetual growth government must understand bluecollar voters different research shows bluecollar whites take political positions selfperception know less skilled others makes friendlier protection competition whether competition comes trade abroad immigrant workers home depend public services provide public order support police much economic stability middleclass entitlements support riskaverse proud fear future much welcome one misstep whole world collapse means wary sudden change whether comes left right dignity pride mean resist attempts tell treat like pawns someone elses game whether attempts come big business big government big anything republicans begin garner consistent loyalty bluecollar whites demonstrate genuine sympathy republicans reform entitlements seen motivated money imposing abstract vision hardpressed americans reality bluecollar whites need medicare retirement medicarereform effort must presented truly way guarantee need need republicans must also compare plan presidents nonplan failing present means saving program presidents budget guarantees medicare know continue without crushing tax hikes middle class short today republicans best fulfill franklin delano roosevelts vision thriving selfreliant economically secure middle class ronald reagan understood decades ago even goldwater debacle 1964 knew americans voted goldwater cast radical reagan told readers national review human nature resists change goes backward avoid radical change advised time soft sell prove radicalism optical illusion spent entire political career showing american conservative principles scary rather simple proven ideas make americans unique reagans rhetoric always made typical american feel valued special emphasize great entrepreneurs captains industry although reagan understood setting free would benefit america instead focused speech speech ordinary people extraordinary things boys pointeduhoc lenny skutnicks rhetorical approach built genuine sympathy average person vision new republican party included educated uneducated working class well upper class explained workingclass democrats independents could make common cause traditional republican supporters forge new majority founded conservative principles strategy carried landslide majority reconstructed bluecollar whites believe president democrats best interests heart want make common cause conservatives save country need know safe republican ship come aboard henry olsen senior fellow ethics public policy center | 985 |
<p>By James Pearson (LON:) and Hyonhee Shin</p>
<p>SEOUL (Reuters) – The man who called Donald Trump “President Evil” last week at the U.N. General Assembly is actually a genteel intellectual who studies the memoirs of former U.S. presidents and has taste for fine whiskey, according to ten people who know him.</p>
<p>North Korea’s Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho made headlines in the Sept. 23 speech to the 193-member General Assembly, saying North Korea’s next move might be to detonate a hydrogen bomb above the Pacific Ocean, in response to U.S. President Trump’s threat to “totally destroy” his country of 26 million people.</p>
<p>While bellicose rhetoric often spouts from militaristic North Korea, it did seem out of character coming from what friends and colleagues described as a polite and softly-spoken career diplomat with a self-deprecating sense of humor and sharp debating skills.</p>
<p>“As a negotiation partner, Ri was a good one, whose status seemed quite secure and who had relatively greater leeway to exercise during the talks,” said Wi Sung-lac, South Korea’s former envoy at the now suspended six-party talks aimed at dismantling Pyongyang’s nuclear program.</p>
<p>“He was flexible and fundamentally rational,” said Wi, who met with Ri twice in 2011 in an effort to re-start the talks hosted by China, after they collapsed in 2008.</p>
<p>Ri has a reputation for translating North Korean propaganda into measured diplomatic language when interacting with Western diplomats, and has studied the works of former U.S. presidents in his spare time.</p>
<p>“He’s not just (North Korean leader) Kim Jong Un’s mouthpiece,” said one source who knows Ri personally.</p>
<p>“He likes to read the memoirs of former U.S. presidents like Nixon and Bush. He also reads Kissinger. He tries to understand American thinking,” the source, who requested anonymity, told Reuters.</p>
<p>“If there are any debates about U.S. policy in North Korea, he’s usually the one who puts forwards new ideas and new tactics,” the source said. “He’s a strategist.”</p>
<p>The North Korean government does not provide foreign media with a contact point in Pyongyang for comment by email, fax or phone. Ri declined Reuters request for an interview while he was in New York for the annual gathering of world leaders at the United Nations.</p>
<p>CLUBS &amp; DEBATES</p>
<p>Born in 1956, Ri is the son of Ri Myong Je, former deputy director of the Organisation and Guidance Department (OGD), a shadowy body within the ruling Workers’ Party that oversees the appointment of key management positions within the state, according to South Korea’s unification ministry.</p>
<p>His father was also an editor at the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the state media body that publishes Pyongyang’s bombastic propaganda statements.</p>
<p>A fluent English speaker who studied at Pyongyang’s prestigious University of Foreign Languages, Ri has for years held a number of high-level posts dealing with the West.</p>
<p>From 2003 to 2007, he was North Korea’s ambassador in London, where he lived with his wife and daughter while his son stayed at home in Pyongyang.</p>
<p>“He had a good command of English and always struck me as pretty polished,” said James Hoare, the U.K.’s former charges des affaires in Pyongyang, who met Ri frequently during his time in London and hosted him for dinner at his house. “He was willing to appear publicly and could cope with questions.”</p>
<p>“I last saw him in Pyongyang in 2011, when he gave a lunch for (my wife) and me,” Hoare said. By then, Ri had become vice foreign minister. “Although much grander, he was still the same polite and friendly person.”</p>
<p>A keen debater, Ri spent time engaging with British intellectuals during his time in London. At the private members Reform Club on London’s glitzy Pall Mall street, he charmed British academics over wine and lunch.</p>
<p>“He clearly had a good sense of humor and was never belligerent or combative when it came to articulating his government’s perspective,” said John Nilsson-Wright, a professor at the University of Cambridge and senior fellow at the Chatham House international affairs think tank.</p>
<p>Journalists caught a sample of that humor in Ri’s most recent off-the-cuff marks, when they asked the foreign minister in New York what he thought of the nickname “Rocket Man” that Trump’s has dubbed the North’s leader.</p>
<p>“I feel sorry for his aides,” Ri quipped.</p>
<p>In his U.N. speech he described Trump as “a mentally deranged person … who is chastised even by American people as ‘Commander in Grief’, ‘Lyin King’, ‘President Evil’…”</p>
<p>Evans Revere, a former senior diplomat who dealt with North Korea under President George W. Bush and met Ri on a few occasions, recalled that he exuded self-confidence and was at ease in any setting, likely reflecting his pedigree as the offspring of one of Pyongyang’s elite families.</p>
<p>While affable and approachable, Ri could be also “tough as nails”, and in meetings with Americans, he leaves no doubt that North Korea is determined to remain a nuclear-weapons state, Revere said.</p>
<p>“Behind the smile and the humor is a man who seems to believe strongly in the regime’s line.”</p>
<p>DIPLOMATIC ISOLATION</p>
<p>But the gregarious diplomat with an impressive rolodex of contacts has also faced increasing isolation, with the international community seeking to punish North Korea for its rapidly advancing missile and nuclear weapons programs.</p>
<p>He was spotted dining alone at a gala dinner during a gathering of foreign ministers at the annual Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) security forum in Laos in July 2016, while other ministers greeted one another and clinked wine glasses.</p>
<p>The delegate of one participating Western country switched seats to avoid sitting next to Ri, saying he “can’t be seen in photos having dinner side by side with him,” a South Korean diplomat said, declining to identify the nation.</p>
<p>This year’s ASEAN forum in Manila in August came after the U.N. Security Council imposed fresh sanctions on North Korea for conducting two intercontinental ballistic missile tests in July. Ri was often observed silent and stone-faced, as he held meetings with only four of the 27 foreign ministers attending the forum.</p>
<p>Not talking to Ri at the U.N. General Assembly was a “missed opportunity” for Washington, given his close ties to the Kim family, said Joel Wit, director of the 38 North website and a former State Department official who first met Ri more than 20 years ago.</p>
<p>Following a rare ruling Workers Party congress in May 2016, Ri was appointed foreign minister and given a position in the party’s powerful State Affairs Commission, a central decision-making body headed by Kim Jong Un.</p>
<p>It was the first time a career diplomat had been promoted to the politburo since 1998, said Cheong Seong-chang, a research fellow at the Sejong Institute south of Seoul.</p>
<p>In 2011, South Korea’s former nuclear negotiator Wi met Ri in Beijing and took the North Korean delegation out to a Chinese dinner. Hearing that Ri had grown fond of whisky during his time in London, Wi’s staff brought some Scotch for him — which was then leaked to the press.</p>
<p>“So he came in and said ‘Why do you have to tell every detail of our event to the media?’,” said Wi, who told Ri “not to pay attention” and have “just one drink” with him.</p>
<p>“We ended up drinking quite a lot.”</p> | false | 1 | james pearson lon hyonhee shin seoul reuters man called donald trump president evil last week un general assembly actually genteel intellectual studies memoirs former us presidents taste fine whiskey according ten people know north koreas foreign minister ri yong ho made headlines sept 23 speech 193member general assembly saying north koreas next move might detonate hydrogen bomb pacific ocean response us president trumps threat totally destroy country 26 million people bellicose rhetoric often spouts militaristic north korea seem character coming friends colleagues described polite softlyspoken career diplomat selfdeprecating sense humor sharp debating skills negotiation partner ri good one whose status seemed quite secure relatively greater leeway exercise talks said wi sunglac south koreas former envoy suspended sixparty talks aimed dismantling pyongyangs nuclear program flexible fundamentally rational said wi met ri twice 2011 effort restart talks hosted china collapsed 2008 ri reputation translating north korean propaganda measured diplomatic language interacting western diplomats studied works former us presidents spare time hes north korean leader kim jong uns mouthpiece said one source knows ri personally likes read memoirs former us presidents like nixon bush also reads kissinger tries understand american thinking source requested anonymity told reuters debates us policy north korea hes usually one puts forwards new ideas new tactics source said hes strategist north korean government provide foreign media contact point pyongyang comment email fax phone ri declined reuters request interview new york annual gathering world leaders united nations clubs amp debates born 1956 ri son ri myong je former deputy director organisation guidance department ogd shadowy body within ruling workers party oversees appointment key management positions within state according south koreas unification ministry father also editor korean central news agency kcna state media body publishes pyongyangs bombastic propaganda statements fluent english speaker studied pyongyangs prestigious university foreign languages ri years held number highlevel posts dealing west 2003 2007 north koreas ambassador london lived wife daughter son stayed home pyongyang good command english always struck pretty polished said james hoare uks former charges des affaires pyongyang met ri frequently time london hosted dinner house willing appear publicly could cope questions last saw pyongyang 2011 gave lunch wife hoare said ri become vice foreign minister although much grander still polite friendly person keen debater ri spent time engaging british intellectuals time london private members reform club londons glitzy pall mall street charmed british academics wine lunch clearly good sense humor never belligerent combative came articulating governments perspective said john nilssonwright professor university cambridge senior fellow chatham house international affairs think tank journalists caught sample humor ris recent offthecuff marks asked foreign minister new york thought nickname rocket man trumps dubbed norths leader feel sorry aides ri quipped un speech described trump mentally deranged person chastised even american people commander grief lyin king president evil evans revere former senior diplomat dealt north korea president george w bush met ri occasions recalled exuded selfconfidence ease setting likely reflecting pedigree offspring one pyongyangs elite families affable approachable ri could also tough nails meetings americans leaves doubt north korea determined remain nuclearweapons state revere said behind smile humor man seems believe strongly regimes line diplomatic isolation gregarious diplomat impressive rolodex contacts also faced increasing isolation international community seeking punish north korea rapidly advancing missile nuclear weapons programs spotted dining alone gala dinner gathering foreign ministers annual association southeast asian nations asean security forum laos july 2016 ministers greeted one another clinked wine glasses delegate one participating western country switched seats avoid sitting next ri saying cant seen photos dinner side side south korean diplomat said declining identify nation years asean forum manila august came un security council imposed fresh sanctions north korea conducting two intercontinental ballistic missile tests july ri often observed silent stonefaced held meetings four 27 foreign ministers attending forum talking ri un general assembly missed opportunity washington given close ties kim family said joel wit director 38 north website former state department official first met ri 20 years ago following rare ruling workers party congress may 2016 ri appointed foreign minister given position partys powerful state affairs commission central decisionmaking body headed kim jong un first time career diplomat promoted politburo since 1998 said cheong seongchang research fellow sejong institute south seoul 2011 south koreas former nuclear negotiator wi met ri beijing took north korean delegation chinese dinner hearing ri grown fond whisky time london wis staff brought scotch leaked press came said tell every detail event media said wi told ri pay attention one drink ended drinking quite lot | 746 |
<p />
<p>Have you seen the economic recovery?&#160; I haven't either.&#160; But it is bound to be around here somewhere, because the National Bureau of Economic Research spotted it in June 2009, four and one-half years ago. &#160;</p>
<p>It is a shy and reclusive recovery, like the "New Economy" and all those promised new economy jobs.&#160; I haven't seen them either, but we know they are here, somewhere, because the economists said so.</p>
<p>&lt;img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-14896" style="margin: 5px;" src="https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Paul-Craig-Roberts.jpg" alt="Paul Craig Roberts" width="256" height="180" srcset="https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Paul-Craig-Roberts.jpg 256w, https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Paul-Craig-Roberts-150x105.jpg 150w" sizes="(max-width: 256px) 100vw, 256px" /&gt; Congress must have seen all those jobs before they went home for Christmas, because our representatives let extended unemployment benefits expire for 1.3 million unemployed Americans who have not yet met up with those new economy jobs, or even with an old economy job, for that matter.</p>
<p>By letting extended unemployment benefits expire, Congress figures that they saved 1.3 million Americans from becoming lifelong bums of the nanny state and living off the public purse.&#160; After all, who do those unemployed Americans think they are?&#160; A bank too big to fail?&#160; The military-security complex?&#160; Israel?</p>
<p>What the unemployed need to do is to form a lobby organization and make campaign contributions.</p>
<p>Just as economists don't recognize facts that are inconsistent with corporate grants, career ambitions, and being on the speaking circuit, our representatives don't recognize facts inconsistent with campaign contributions.</p>
<p>For example, our representative in the White House tells us that Obamacare is a worthy program even though those who are supposed to be helped by it aren't because of large deductibles, copays, and Medicaid estate recovery. The cost of this non-help is a doubling of the policy premiums on those insured Americans who did not need Obamacare and the reclassification by employers of workers' jobs from full-time to part-time in order to avoid medical insurance costs. All it took was campaign contributions from the insurance industry to turn a policy that hurts most and helps none into a worthy program.&#160; Worthy, of course, for the insurance companies.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that it is the people who could not afford medical insurance who have to come up with their part of the premium or pay a penalty.&#160; How do people who have no discretionary income come up with what are to them large sums of money?&#160; Are they going to eat less, drive less, dress less?&#160; If so, what happens to people employed in those industries when demand falls?&#160; Apparently, this was too big a thought for the White House occupant, his economists, and our representatives in Congress.</p>
<p>According to the official <a href="https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2012" type="external">wage statistics for 2012</a>, forty percent of the US work force earned less than $20,000, fifty-three percent earned less than $30,000, and seventy-three percent earned less than $50,000. The median wage or salary was $27,519. The amounts are in current dollars and they are compensation amounts subject to state and federal income taxes and to Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes. In other words, the take home pay is less.</p>
<p>To put these incomes into some perspective, the poverty threshold for a family of four in 2013 was $23,550.</p>
<p>In recent years, the only incomes that have been growing in real terms are those few at the top of the income distribution.&#160; Those at the top have benefitted from "performance bonuses," often acquired by laying off workers or by replacing US workers with cheaper foreign labor, and from the rise in stock and bond prices caused by the Federal Reserve's policy of quantitative easing. Everyone else has experienced a decline in real income and wealth.</p>
<p>As only slightly more than one percent of Americans make more than $200,000 annually and less than four-tenths of one percent make $1,000,000 or more annually, there are not enough people with discretionary income to drive the economy with consumer spending. When real median family income and real per capita income ceased to grow and began falling, Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan substituted a credit expansion to take the place of the missing growth in income.&#160; However, as consumers became loaded with debt, it was no longer possible to expand consumer spending with credit expansion.</p>
<p>World War II left the US economy the only undamaged industrial and manufacturing center. Prosperity ensued. But by the 1970s the Keynesian demand management economic policy had produced stagflation. Reagan's supply-side policy was able to give the US economy another 20 years.&#160; But the collapse of the Soviet Union brought an era of jobs offshoring to large Asian economies that formerly were closed to Western capital. Once corporate executives realized that they could earn multi-million dollar performance bonuses by moving US jobs abroad and once they were threatened by Wall Street and shareholder advocates with takeovers if they did not, American capitalism began giving the US economy to other countries, mainly located in Asia. As high productivity manufacturing and professional service jobs (such as software engineering) moved offshore, US incomes stagnated and fell.</p>
<p>As real income growth stagnated, wives entered the work force to compensate. Children were educated by refinancing the home mortgage and using the equity in the family home or with student loans that they do not earn enough to repay.&#160; Since the December 2007 downturn, Americans have used up their coping mechanisms.&#160; Homes have been refinanced. IRAs raided. Savings drawn down. Grown children, now adults, are back home with parents. The falling labor force participation rate signals that the economy can no longer provide jobs for the workforce. In such a situation, economic recovery is impossible.</p>
<p>What the Treasury and Federal Reserve have done, with the complicity of the White House, Congress, economists, and the media, is to focus on rescuing a half dozen banks "too big to fail." The consequence of focusing economic policy on saving the banks is rigged financial markets and massive stock and bond market bubbles.&#160; To protect the dollar's exchange value from quantitative easing, the price of gold has been forced down in the paper futures market, with the consequence that physical gold is shipped to Asia where it is unavailable as a refuge for Americans faced with currency depreciation.</p>
<p>At a time when most Americans are running out of coping mechanisms, the US faces a possible financial collapse and a high rate of inflation from dollar depreciation as the Fed pours out newly created money in an effort to support the rigged financial markets.</p>
<p>It remains to be seen whether the chickens can be kept from coming home to roost for another year.</p> | false | 1 | seen economic recovery160 havent either160 bound around somewhere national bureau economic research spotted june 2009 four onehalf years ago 160 shy reclusive recovery like new economy promised new economy jobs160 havent seen either know somewhere economists said ltimg classalignleft sizefull wpimage14896 stylemargin 5px srchttpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads201204paulcraigrobertsjpg altpaul craig roberts width256 height180 srcsethttpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads201204paulcraigrobertsjpg 256w httpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads201204paulcraigroberts150x105jpg 150w sizesmaxwidth 256px 100vw 256px gt congress must seen jobs went home christmas representatives let extended unemployment benefits expire 13 million unemployed americans yet met new economy jobs even old economy job matter letting extended unemployment benefits expire congress figures saved 13 million americans becoming lifelong bums nanny state living public purse160 unemployed americans think are160 bank big fail160 militarysecurity complex160 israel unemployed need form lobby organization make campaign contributions economists dont recognize facts inconsistent corporate grants career ambitions speaking circuit representatives dont recognize facts inconsistent campaign contributions example representative white house tells us obamacare worthy program even though supposed helped arent large deductibles copays medicaid estate recovery cost nonhelp doubling policy premiums insured americans need obamacare reclassification employers workers jobs fulltime parttime order avoid medical insurance costs took campaign contributions insurance industry turn policy hurts helps none worthy program160 worthy course insurance companies keep mind people could afford medical insurance come part premium pay penalty160 people discretionary income come large sums money160 going eat less drive less dress less160 happens people employed industries demand falls160 apparently big thought white house occupant economists representatives congress according official wage statistics 2012 forty percent us work force earned less 20000 fiftythree percent earned less 30000 seventythree percent earned less 50000 median wage salary 27519 amounts current dollars compensation amounts subject state federal income taxes social security medicare payroll taxes words take home pay less put incomes perspective poverty threshold family four 2013 23550 recent years incomes growing real terms top income distribution160 top benefitted performance bonuses often acquired laying workers replacing us workers cheaper foreign labor rise stock bond prices caused federal reserves policy quantitative easing everyone else experienced decline real income wealth slightly one percent americans make 200000 annually less fourtenths one percent make 1000000 annually enough people discretionary income drive economy consumer spending real median family income real per capita income ceased grow began falling federal reserve chairman alan greenspan substituted credit expansion take place missing growth income160 however consumers became loaded debt longer possible expand consumer spending credit expansion world war ii left us economy undamaged industrial manufacturing center prosperity ensued 1970s keynesian demand management economic policy produced stagflation reagans supplyside policy able give us economy another 20 years160 collapse soviet union brought era jobs offshoring large asian economies formerly closed western capital corporate executives realized could earn multimillion dollar performance bonuses moving us jobs abroad threatened wall street shareholder advocates takeovers american capitalism began giving us economy countries mainly located asia high productivity manufacturing professional service jobs software engineering moved offshore us incomes stagnated fell real income growth stagnated wives entered work force compensate children educated refinancing home mortgage using equity family home student loans earn enough repay160 since december 2007 downturn americans used coping mechanisms160 homes refinanced iras raided savings drawn grown children adults back home parents falling labor force participation rate signals economy longer provide jobs workforce situation economic recovery impossible treasury federal reserve done complicity white house congress economists media focus rescuing half dozen banks big fail consequence focusing economic policy saving banks rigged financial markets massive stock bond market bubbles160 protect dollars exchange value quantitative easing price gold forced paper futures market consequence physical gold shipped asia unavailable refuge americans faced currency depreciation time americans running coping mechanisms us faces possible financial collapse high rate inflation dollar depreciation fed pours newly created money effort support rigged financial markets remains seen whether chickens kept coming home roost another year | 626 |
<p>Want to know what it’s like to be an East Coast commuter? Come along on my daily drive and you’ll be quickly welcomed to my own personal hell. Clogged highways between major cities, with thousands of cars joining the journey through traffic on every variation of 95 between Baltimore and Washington: 695, 295, 495, and 395.</p>
<p>My commute is about 70 miles each way and although it may sound crazy, it’s actually not that unusual for people who work in and around D.C. And it turns out, all of us could benefit from something that’s in the works not just along the eastern seaboard but also on the West Coast: high-speed rail.</p>
<p>We went to Baltimore to talk with Wayne Rogers as part of a joint project with our partner, " <a href="http://fullmeasure.news/news/politics/high-speed-spending" type="external">Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson."</a> He’s the CEO of <a href="http://northeastmaglev.com/" type="external">TNEM, the Northeast Maglev Project</a>, the mid-Atlantic’s attempt at high-speed rail.</p>
<p>“One of the things I think is important is not just looking at it like a fast train,” Rogers explained. “What we’re really doing is shrinking geography.”</p>
<p>To frustrated commuters, Rogers would be a dream-maker if he could bring a Maglev train to the congested areas between New York and Washington. Aside from having a weird name, the Japanese SCmaglev technology makes an amazing promise: shortening the trip from the Big Apple to Capitol Hill to just one hour.</p>
<p>“This train is 311 miles an hour, 50 percent faster than anything that’s even dreamed of here, and three-and-a-half to four times as what Amtrak is getting done,” Rogers said. “It’s going to change where you live. It changes where you work.”</p>
<p>It’s easy to get caught up in the idea. But don’t get too excited. High-speed rail on the East Coast won’t happen overnight or even in this decade. Just thinking about it is expensive. The Federal Railroad Administration handed out $28 million just to study the impact of a train like this.</p>
<p>But that sum of money is nothing compared to the funding that’s already been spent on a similar project in California. We took a trip to Fresno, where a high-speed train isn’t just a dream. Construction is already happening there.</p>
<p>It is painstaking work as these crews lay down the foundation of where the tracks will eventually go. It took seven years to get construction started after California voters gave the thumbs up in 2008. And it could still be another decade before there’s a train in operation.</p>
<p>"I know people think it’s the Christmas morning scenario where after we voted for this, we’re going to wake up and it’s done. But these things take time,” explained Lisa Marie Alley, the spokeswoman for the <a href="http://www.hsr.ca.gov/" type="external">California High Speed Rail Authority</a>.</p>
<p>The agency’s plan is ambitious. They’ve begun a 520-mile rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles. It’s designed to cut what is currently a six-hour trip by more than half. There are a lot of pros to the project, including the creation of hundreds of job and the use of businesses from 35 states, as well as environmental benefits.</p>
<p>Alley also has to defend the cons. Chief among them are the delays associated with the project and its cost. Alley automatically refutes reports that the effort is behind schedule and over budget, saying, “We anticipate right now our system will cost $64 billion. But if a city wants a different type of viaduct or a community wants something differently, we’re going to work with them to make sure that we’re giving them what works for them.”</p>
<p>The authority is being accommodating, but there are questions, mostly because the project involves federal money. So far, $3 billion in taxpayer funds has been invested in the project. And not everyone launching high-speed rail believes that’s how these projects have to work.</p>
<p>In Texas, another bullet train is also in the works under leadership from <a href="http://www.texascentral.com/" type="external">Texas Central</a>. That version will run from Houston to Dallas in 90 minutes. So what makes it different? Organizers of the project say they will not seek any public funds. Private dollars only.</p>
<p>D.C. and California will also need private investment if they want to finish their projects. But it’s not easy money to find. Rogers told us TNEM has some funding secured, but Alley said the California authority isn’t there yet.</p>
<p>“We need to get our system up and running. That’s what attracts the private sector and that’s when we believe that they’ll come to the table and see the benefit of the project,” Alley said.</p>
<p>That kind of talk makes lawmakers nervous, including Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who has famously called the California project in his home state a “boondoggle” and recently said it’s time to bail on the effort altogether. That seems unlikely given that hundreds of millions of additional federal money was awarded this year to state rail project that will still benefit the high-speed rail effort.</p>
<p>Other critics bring up Hyperloop, the project that’s made headlines under the leadership of Elon Musk. Those critics wonder why the federal government is spending any public money when Hyperloop could bring private funders and newer technology that goes faster than high-speed rail.</p>
<p>We asked Rogers whether high-speed rail was forward thinking enough. “At this point Hyperloop is an idea, it’s a concept,” he told us. “It’s not really even technology yet. When we look at SCmaglev, it’s gone through 15 years of testing in Japan. It’s received all of its safety approval. It’s been tested over millions of miles going back and forth. So, we know we can bring this technology today.”</p>
<p>But the time frame for the East Cast effort still isn’t concrete. We asked directly when the train will be up and running. We didn’t get a firm answer. So, when should I expect a bullet train to ease my commute? Who knows? In the meantime, I’ll be in my car.</p> | false | 1 | want know like east coast commuter come along daily drive youll quickly welcomed personal hell clogged highways major cities thousands cars joining journey traffic every variation 95 baltimore washington 695 295 495 395 commute 70 miles way although may sound crazy actually unusual people work around dc turns us could benefit something thats works along eastern seaboard also west coast highspeed rail went baltimore talk wayne rogers part joint project partner full measure sharyl attkisson hes ceo tnem northeast maglev project midatlantics attempt highspeed rail one things think important looking like fast train rogers explained really shrinking geography frustrated commuters rogers would dreammaker could bring maglev train congested areas new york washington aside weird name japanese scmaglev technology makes amazing promise shortening trip big apple capitol hill one hour train 311 miles hour 50 percent faster anything thats even dreamed threeandahalf four times amtrak getting done rogers said going change live changes work easy get caught idea dont get excited highspeed rail east coast wont happen overnight even decade thinking expensive federal railroad administration handed 28 million study impact train like sum money nothing compared funding thats already spent similar project california took trip fresno highspeed train isnt dream construction already happening painstaking work crews lay foundation tracks eventually go took seven years get construction started california voters gave thumbs 2008 could still another decade theres train operation know people think christmas morning scenario voted going wake done things take time explained lisa marie alley spokeswoman california high speed rail authority agencys plan ambitious theyve begun 520mile rail line san francisco los angeles designed cut currently sixhour trip half lot pros project including creation hundreds job use businesses 35 states well environmental benefits alley also defend cons chief among delays associated project cost alley automatically refutes reports effort behind schedule budget saying anticipate right system cost 64 billion city wants different type viaduct community wants something differently going work make sure giving works authority accommodating questions mostly project involves federal money far 3 billion taxpayer funds invested project everyone launching highspeed rail believes thats projects work texas another bullet train also works leadership texas central version run houston dallas 90 minutes makes different organizers project say seek public funds private dollars dc california also need private investment want finish projects easy money find rogers told us tnem funding secured alley said california authority isnt yet need get system running thats attracts private sector thats believe theyll come table see benefit project alley said kind talk makes lawmakers nervous including republican house majority leader kevin mccarthy famously called california project home state boondoggle recently said time bail effort altogether seems unlikely given hundreds millions additional federal money awarded year state rail project still benefit highspeed rail effort critics bring hyperloop project thats made headlines leadership elon musk critics wonder federal government spending public money hyperloop could bring private funders newer technology goes faster highspeed rail asked rogers whether highspeed rail forward thinking enough point hyperloop idea concept told us really even technology yet look scmaglev gone 15 years testing japan received safety approval tested millions miles going back forth know bring technology today time frame east cast effort still isnt concrete asked directly train running didnt get firm answer expect bullet train ease commute knows meantime ill car | 547 |
<p>Exactly fifty years ago in the face of a huge budget surplus, a Republican Congress prevailed over the veto of a Democratic president to enact the most family-friendly tax cut in history. Congress raised the personal exemption to $600—the equivalent of $7,000 today—and introduced “income splitting” between husband and wife, resolving the marriage penalty that would reappear in later years. The legislation not only provided financial incentives for marriage and penalties for divorce, but effectively kept most middle-class families in the lowest tax bracket or shielded them from the income tax altogether. Coupled with the family-oriented structure of the Social Security system—low payroll taxes and family-based benefits—the dramatic tax measures of the late 1940s helped usher in a golden family age known as the Fifties. For the first time in more than a century, the first-marriage rate rose, the divorce rate dropped, and the within-wedlock birth rate climbed, according to social policy expert Allan Carlson.1</p>
<p>Although history rarely repeats itself, Congress found itself in a similar situation this year. The federal government ran a $71 billion surplus, the first one since President Nixon’s inaugural year and the largest budget surplus in American history. Republican congressional leaders, however, did little to advance the kind of family-friendly tax reform plan that would have honored their 1948 forefathers. Even worse, every time the Congressional Budget Office raised its forecast—its most recent report projecting a $1.6 trillion cumulative surplus through fiscal year 2008—the Republicans scaled back whatever tax-cut plans they had proposed.2 In the end, the Party of Lincoln was forced to kowtow to a disgraced president, signing on to a budget deal that calls for $21 billion in new spending in 1999, consuming more than one-fourth of next year’s projected $80 billion surplus.</p>
<p>Even when they are not spending, some Republicans are preparing to hoard tax revenue. Senators Phil Gramm and Pete Domenici, for example, have called for the creation of a prodigious federal “reserve” fund, investing the projected surplus in private securities to “protect” Social Security, a proposal the Wall Street Journal describes as “a heap of conceptual baloney.”3 Like the weather that descends on the capital every summer, this typical Washington hot air clouds the fundamental issue on the horizon: the need for substantial relief for the American taxpaying family. That is unfortunate since what Robert J. Samuelson calls “the ‘surplus’ surplus”4 has removed the main obstacles that had put a damper on tax cuts during the deficit years, setting the stage for an unprecedented window of opportunity for serious tax reform.</p>
<p>In light of Republican timidity, social conservatives ought to join forces with economic conservatives in a full court press to demand comprehensive budget and tax reforms to keep federal spending from rising; already, federal taxes are the highest since World War Two, representing 20.6 percent of the Gross Domestic Product. In doing so, social conservatives must not forget their unique agenda: to push for tax reform that is, in the spirit of 1948, just as good for families—especially those with children—as it is for business. They will need to highlight the anti-family bias in the existing tax code as well as in the well-intended Republican tax alternatives, shaping the legislative debate into targeting specific relief toward working families who are investing in the most important capital of the country—the children of the next generation.</p>
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<p>Human Capital and the Home Economy</p>
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<p>For starters, keeping faith with 1948 requires the appreciation of the special role of what Allan Carlson calls the home economy vis-a-vis the market economy. As Carlson observes, American tax policy grossly undervalues economic activity that takes place in the home—the sharing of goods and services among family members with little regard to cash calculations. To the extent that the home economy thrives, so does the market economy, where transactions occur through money and where competition and efficiency drive decisions.5 Carlson writes:</p>
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<p>Every marriage creates a new home economy. These little economies are largely undetected in our measurement of the gross national product, just as they are usually beyond the reach of tax collectors. But they are vitally important. If they thrive, the well-being of children and of society as a whole improves.6</p>
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<p>Carlson is not the first scholar to call attention to the home economy. Nearly forty years ago, the economist Thomas W. Schultz, who later won a Nobel Prize for highlighting the critical role that “human capital” played in the growth of the United States and the dramatic postwar recoveries of Germany and Japan, expressed a related concern. To Schultz, even the family-friendly tax code of the 1950s needed improvement because it largely ignored the reality of “human capital” as a critical factor in national well-being:</p>
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<p>Our tax laws everywhere discriminate against human capital. Although the stock of such capital has become large, and even though it is obvious that human capital, like other forms of reproducible capital, depreciates, becomes obsolete, and entails maintenance, our tax laws are all but blind in these matters.7</p>
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<p>Schultz thought it was odd that the tax code, in granting far more incentives and credits for property than for working families, treats real estate, machines, and equipment far better than it does men, women, and children. If that were true in his day, it is even more so today, despite the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, which introduced a long-overdue $500 per child tax credit. As the feminist legislator Patricia Schroeder used to say, Congress has given bigger tax breaks for breeding racehorses than raising children.8</p>
<p>A character played by Cary Grant in the 1951 film, People Will Talk, lucidly explained the problem Schultz described. In one scene, “Dr. Praetorius” finds himself discussing the income tax with a farmer named Higgins and the farmer’s brother, Arthur.</p>
<p>“Got more deductions than I thought,” Higgins explains.</p>
<p>“Most of my equipment don’t cost me a thing, writing it off year by year—what’s it called, Arthur?”</p>
<p>“Depletion and depreciation,” Arthur says.</p>
<p>“Yeah, that’s it. Means it’s running down—don’t work as good as it did.”</p>
<p>“One thing about teachers and writers and such,” observes Dr. Praetorius, “they have less bother with their income tax than farmers and oil-well owners.”</p>
<p>“Is that so? Why?” Higgins demands.</p>
<p>“Because their equipment is talent, and a highly developed mind. And when they run down and don’t work so good as they did their depletion and depreciation can’t be written off their income tax.”</p>
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<p>The Middle-Class Squeeze</p>
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<p>Dr. Praetorius could have gone on to explain that all income in the economy comes from two sources: human and nonhuman capital. Workers generate about two-thirds of gross national income, while property generates about one-third of gross national income.9 But for tax purposes, labor and property income are measured quite differently. Property income (such as interest, dividends, and retained profits) is taxed after deducting costs for maintenance, obsolescence, and depreciation; workers’ incomes are taxed without any deduction for the equally real costs of maintenance, obsolescence, and depreciation of their “human capital.”</p>
<p>Some supply-side critics, like Jude Wanniski of Polyconomics Inc., claim the distinction between human and nonhuman capital is an abstraction. Tax breaks and incentives for business, he says, are indirect incentives for families; the more a business can write off expenses for taxes, the more it can pay in salary and benefits to workers.10 While Wanniski’s insight has some merit, the reverse is equally true: the more families invest in rearing and educating children, the greater the long-term economic benefits to business and the economy as a whole. Nor does Wanniski answer the question dear to families: if businesses can write off the cost of machines, why cannot working parents write off the cost of keeping body and soul together?</p>
<p>The federal income tax falls more heavily on employment income because a much smaller share of gross property income is subject to federal tax. As a result, middle-class families end up carrying a disproportionate share of the federal tax burden since their income is heavily dependent on employment. This long-standing discrepancy of taxing human capital more than nonhuman capital has intensified since Schultz’s time. The federal tax burden has shifted from the income tax—which falls mostly on workers—toward the payroll tax, which falls exclusively on workers and is assessed at a dramatically higher rate than in the 1950s, when it was less than 2 percent. Today, more than 60 percent of American workers pay more in payroll tax than federal income tax.</p>
<p>Granted, the federal tax burden as a portion of the Gross Domestic Product has remained relatively constant since World War Two (about 19 percent; although it stands today at 20.6 percent). But when broken down between employment and business income shares of national income, the tax burden on the former has risen from about 17 percent to 22.4 percent, while the tax burden on the latter has fallen from about 30 percent to about 14 percent. In effect, while workers earn about two-thirds of gross national income, they now pay nearly four-fifths of all federal taxes.</p>
<p>Though the shift has been gradual, most families started experiencing what has been called the middle-class squeeze by the 1980s. On the one hand they hear news of economic growth (a roaring stock market, low inflation, and low-unemployment); on the other hand they experience the reality of trying to stretch paychecks to meet living and child-rearing expenses. Even as gross family income has increased to keep pace with economic growth, actual take-home pay of many workers has dropped. If economic trends continue and gross family income continues to rise (lifting more middle-class families into the 28 percent income tax bracket and higher), the squeeze will only tighten. If payroll taxes rise to 24 percent by the year 2030 as recommended by the trustees of the Social Security system, many families will face a marginal federal tax rate of more than 50 percent.</p>
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<p>Bringing Property Income into the Tax Base</p>
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<p>How can federal policy resolve this dilemma so that middle-class families who are raising and educating their children keep more of the money they earn? How can Congress reform the tax code so that families enjoy the same kind of tax incentives—whether generous write-offs, depletion allowances, or depreciation—that businesses have enjoyed for years? One way is to expand the tax code with pages and pages of incentives for families. This has been tried with ‘ limited success over the years through narrowly targeted credits, special exemptions and tax-deferred accounts for education, housing, and retirement. To avoid further complicating an already mammoth tax code, a far better approach is to start from scratch with a simple, flat tax that treats labor and property income alike.</p>
<p>Treating labor and property income alike means scrapping the host of write offs and credits that businesses now enjoy, such as deductions for depreciation of capital. Only deductions for maintenance costs for both workers and business assets would be permitted. Maintenance costs for the worker involve the costs of keeping body and soul together. At a bare minimum, deducting “worker maintenance” means exempting a poverty-level income from taxes, including both Social Security and income taxes.</p>
<p>The tax code currently does this haphazardly and insufficiently. Standard deductions and personal exemptions can shield below-poverty working families from the income tax, but not from the regressive payroll tax. The Earned Income Tax Credit, introduced in 1975, was basically intended to offset the burden of the payroll tax for low-income working families. But human maintenance costs vary with family size, which the EITC mostly ignores; the credit is the same whether a family has one or two adults, or has two or six children. As a result, some families are exempt from taxes on human maintenance, but most working families are not. Like the widow’s mite in the New Testament, working families are taxed, not on their surplus, but on their sustenance.</p>
<p>The failure to even acknowledge, let alone address, the discrepancy in the present tax laws between property and employment income is the Achilles’ heel of all the Republican tax proposals, including those recommended by Dick Armey, Bill Archer, and Steve Forbes. While these initiatives admirably seek to simplify the tax code, they do not and will not solve the middle-class squeeze (see “The Republicans’ Grand Old Problem”). In the name of “economic growth,” the Republicans attempt to shift the tax base away from income to consumption, which squeezes the middle class even more.</p>
<p>On the surface, the shift to a consumption tax base sounds appealing, even virtuous. Who can object to taxing people on what they take out of society (consumption) and not on what they contribute (income)? Actually, the issue is not that simple. The current proposals define consumption inconsistently and archaically so that the maintenance of, and investment in, human capital–like raising and educating children–is taxed as consumption, as “taking out of society”. On the other hand, a business that purchases a company car is considered to be “contributing to society.”</p>
<p>A consumption-based tax has other weaknesses of which the middle class ought to be aware. Not only does it continue to shift the federal tax burden away from property to employment income; it also places the tax burden smack in the middle of the income scale, as families at either end of the income scale are largely unaffected. Families at the bottom receive a disproportionate share of their income from government transfer payments, which are generally exempt from taxation; families at the top of the income scale receive more than half of their income from property. But families in the middle earn their income mostly from employment. So while the existing federal tax burden is progressive, the burden of a consumption-based tax is dome-shaped when fully phased in—low at the bottom of the income scale, low at the top, and high in the middle. Fiddling with tax rates or personal exemptions provides only a partial solution because the problem stems from removing property income from the tax base.</p>
<p>Republican strategists would be wise, politically and economically, to avoid the rhetoric of the consumption tax and to seek a completely new paradigm: broadening the existing income tax base by including a greater share of property income. A broader tax base would be more progressive than the current tax code with its multiple layers of taxation (offsetting the exclusion of more than one-half of all property income from taxation), justifying the adoption of a flat tax to those who fear it would be regressive. Treating property and employment income equally would be most effective with a Social Security tax cut. This approach would be a win-win for the Republicans. IT would achieve their desire for serious tax reform which simultaneously correcting the very real public perception that they are the party of big business and do not care about the typical American family.</p>
<p>The Family Flat Tax</p>
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<p>A family-oriented tax plan would involve the replacement of the existing personal and corporate income tax with a simple flat tax of about 16 percent assessed on the Gross Domestic Product. This would differ from a tax on consumption spending because it disallows deductions for spending on investment property. Therefore, all consumption and investment spending in the Gross Domestic Product would be taxed.</p>
<p>Ideally, the tax would be collected only through business (similar in structure to proposals that call for a national sales tax) on gross business receipts, minus purchases from other businesses. Most households would not have to prepare or file tax returns. But because the Gross Domestic Product includes family spending on human capital maintenance, families would be entitled to an Earned Personal Tax Credit, based upon number of family members, for a portion of the federal and Social Security taxes assessed on their employment income. If the credit was not fully applied to their paychecks, families would need to file a return for a refund. Families realizing capital gains would also be required to file a return.</p>
<p>If the public is not ready for such a wholesale break from the current system, a more conservative approach would resemble the current tax system: requiring individuals to pay the tax on their wages and pensions, minus the Earned Personal Tax Credit, while exempting wages and pensions from the business tax. This more complicated approach would require the filing of annual returns by most families. But it deals with transitional issues better, retaining, for example, the mortgage interest deduction as long as the lender is taxed on the interest. Because most economists believe interest rates would drop under tax reform, such an option would ensure that outstanding mortgage holders benefit from the decline in interest rates. This plan also could retain deductions for charitable contributions—which, unlike most existing tax deductions, have a quasi-public purpose and encourage private sector solutions to social problems.</p>
<p>Either way, the Family Flat Tax would set the amount of the Earned Personal Tax Credit from the aggregate earnings of American families up to the poverty line, estimated to be just under $5,000 per person. A credit against the flat income tax (16 percent) and the reduced payroll tax (12.2 percent) on this amount would be worth about $1,400 per person. For a man supporting his wife and three children with a 1997 median income of $28,808, the credit would be worth $7,000, enough to offset almost all federal taxes on his employment. That worker would have no Social Security or federal income taxes deducted from the first $25,000 of his paycheck; he would also receive a refund (that could be added to his paycheck) of $634 to recover part of the employer’s share of the payroll tax the worker has never seen. Under the current tax system, that same family pays $4,155 in federal income and Social Security taxes, a whopping $4,789 difference.11 For those earning more, the credit remains irrevocable no matter how high the income.</p>
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<p>Prudent Social Security Reform</p>
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<p>Critical to the Family Flat Tax is a long-overdue 20 percent cut in the payroll tax. Ever since President Lyndon Johnson placed Social Security in the budget in the 1960s, the program’s excess revenues have been used to disguise the federal deficit. Helped along with hefty tax increases over the years, the program generates nearly $120 billion per year more than it pays out in benefits, counting around $70 billion from tax revenue and nearly $50 billion in interest from its one-to-two year reserve.12 While the public believes that the money goes into a trust fund for future retirees, no such trust fund actually exists—the money is simply plundered by Congress and the president to fund other government projects and programs. In the not-too-distant future, payroll tax revenue is expected to fall far short of promised benefits, mostly because baby boomers have been raising fewer children than their parents, resulting in a relatively smaller work force than a generation ago. Unless the trend is reversed, payroll tax rates will rise sharply even under optimistic economic assumptions.</p>
<p>To address both problems, the Family Flat Tax calls for cutting the payroll tax immediately by 20 percent and reducing future benefits according to the number of years a worker paid the lower tax rate. For example, if an eighteen-year-old paid a 20 percent lower rate for fifty years, retirement benefits would be reduced 20 percent from current estimates. If a fifty-five-year-old worker paid the 20 percent lower tax for ten years, promised benefits would be reduced by 4 percent. Current workers could use the tax cut to invest in human or nonhuman capital.</p>
<p>These changes would reduce the long-term liabilities of the Social Security system and prevent future tax increases. Instead of doubling in real terms over the next several decades as currently projected, the level of retirement benefits would rise about 60 percent faster than inflation. Instead of replacing 42 percent of covered wages, Social Security benefits would stabilize at about one-third of covered wages. Finally, instead of doubling to 30 percent of taxable payroll, as a much smaller generation supports retired baby boomers, payroll taxes would never have to be raised beyond current levels. Social Security would therefore continue to provide a floor for retirement security without crowding out investments in child-rearing and education, family saving, and private insurance.</p>
<p>These Social Security reforms enable the Family Flat Tax to deliver the lowest marginal rates on working families of any tax reform plan. It also provides the most generous tax allowances for families, while providing them with a net tax cut on their employment taxes, precisely because it taxes a larger portion of property income than under current law.</p>
<p>The exact income tax rate, the criteria of the Earned Personal Tax Credit, and the size of the payroll tax cut can be fine-tuned somewhat. However, if the Grand Old Party wants to advance tax reform that provides substantial relief for middle-class families, its plan must contain two elements: first, it must treat property income and employment income the same way, particularly regarding maintenance and depreciation costs; and second. Social Security problems must be addressed to relieve the tax burden on workers and prevent a massive future rise in tax rates. By addressing these weaknesses in the current tax system, the Republicans could help usher in, like they did in 1948, another golden era of family growth and economic prosperity.</p>
<p>NOTES</p>
<p>1. Allan Carlson, “Toward a Family-Centered Theory of Taxation,” The Family in America (January 1998), pp.” 1-2.</p>
<p>2. Congressional Budget Office, “The Economic and Budget Outlook: An Update” (August 1998).</p>
<p>3. “Domenici-Gramm Socialism,” The Wall Street Journal, July 31, 1998, Sec. A editorial.</p>
<p>4. Robert J. Samuelson, “The ‘Surplus’ Surplus,” The Washington Post, May 20, 1998.</p>
<p>5. Allan Carlson and David Blankenhorn, “Marriage and Taxes: The Case for Family-friendly Taxation,” The Weekly Standard (February 9, 1998), pp. 24-27.</p>
<p>6. Carlson and Blankenhorn, p. 25. 7. Theodore W. Schultz, “Investment in Human Capital,” American Economic Review 51 (March 1961): 1-17.</p>
<p>8. Pat Schroeder, Champion of the Great American Family (New York: Random House, 1989), p. 142.</p>
<p>9. John W. Kendrick, “Total Capital and Economic Growth,” Atlantic Economic Journal 22 (March 1994): 1-18.</p>
<p>10. Jude Wanniski, “Humans vs. Machines vs. Taxes,” The Wall Street Journal, letter to the editor, November 16, 1995.</p>
<p>11. For median family income data and tax burdens, see Tax Foundation, Special Report #74 (November 1997), p. 3.</p>
<p>12. Congressional Budget Office, “The Economic and Budget Outlook for Fiscal Years 1999-2008.”</p> | false | 1 | exactly fifty years ago face huge budget surplus republican congress prevailed veto democratic president enact familyfriendly tax cut history congress raised personal exemption 600the equivalent 7000 todayand introduced income splitting husband wife resolving marriage penalty would reappear later years legislation provided financial incentives marriage penalties divorce effectively kept middleclass families lowest tax bracket shielded income tax altogether coupled familyoriented structure social security systemlow payroll taxes familybased benefitsthe dramatic tax measures late 1940s helped usher golden family age known fifties first time century firstmarriage rate rose divorce rate dropped withinwedlock birth rate climbed according social policy expert allan carlson1 although history rarely repeats congress found similar situation year federal government ran 71 billion surplus first one since president nixons inaugural year largest budget surplus american history republican congressional leaders however little advance kind familyfriendly tax reform plan would honored 1948 forefathers even worse every time congressional budget office raised forecastits recent report projecting 16 trillion cumulative surplus fiscal year 2008the republicans scaled back whatever taxcut plans proposed2 end party lincoln forced kowtow disgraced president signing budget deal calls 21 billion new spending 1999 consuming onefourth next years projected 80 billion surplus even spending republicans preparing hoard tax revenue senators phil gramm pete domenici example called creation prodigious federal reserve fund investing projected surplus private securities protect social security proposal wall street journal describes heap conceptual baloney3 like weather descends capital every summer typical washington hot air clouds fundamental issue horizon need substantial relief american taxpaying family unfortunate since robert j samuelson calls surplus surplus4 removed main obstacles put damper tax cuts deficit years setting stage unprecedented window opportunity serious tax reform light republican timidity social conservatives ought join forces economic conservatives full court press demand comprehensive budget tax reforms keep federal spending rising already federal taxes highest since world war two representing 206 percent gross domestic product social conservatives must forget unique agenda push tax reform spirit 1948 good familiesespecially childrenas business need highlight antifamily bias existing tax code well wellintended republican tax alternatives shaping legislative debate targeting specific relief toward working families investing important capital countrythe children next generation 160 human capital home economy 160 starters keeping faith 1948 requires appreciation special role allan carlson calls home economy visavis market economy carlson observes american tax policy grossly undervalues economic activity takes place homethe sharing goods services among family members little regard cash calculations extent home economy thrives market economy transactions occur money competition efficiency drive decisions5 carlson writes 160 every marriage creates new home economy little economies largely undetected measurement gross national product usually beyond reach tax collectors vitally important thrive wellbeing children society whole improves6 160 carlson first scholar call attention home economy nearly forty years ago economist thomas w schultz later nobel prize highlighting critical role human capital played growth united states dramatic postwar recoveries germany japan expressed related concern schultz even familyfriendly tax code 1950s needed improvement largely ignored reality human capital critical factor national wellbeing 160 tax laws everywhere discriminate human capital although stock capital become large even though obvious human capital like forms reproducible capital depreciates becomes obsolete entails maintenance tax laws blind matters7 160 schultz thought odd tax code granting far incentives credits property working families treats real estate machines equipment far better men women children true day even today despite taxpayer relief act 1997 introduced longoverdue 500 per child tax credit feminist legislator patricia schroeder used say congress given bigger tax breaks breeding racehorses raising children8 character played cary grant 1951 film people talk lucidly explained problem schultz described one scene dr praetorius finds discussing income tax farmer named higgins farmers brother arthur got deductions thought higgins explains equipment dont cost thing writing year yearwhats called arthur depletion depreciation arthur says yeah thats means running downdont work good one thing teachers writers observes dr praetorius less bother income tax farmers oilwell owners higgins demands equipment talent highly developed mind run dont work good depletion depreciation cant written income tax 160 middleclass squeeze 160 dr praetorius could gone explain income economy comes two sources human nonhuman capital workers generate twothirds gross national income property generates onethird gross national income9 tax purposes labor property income measured quite differently property income interest dividends retained profits taxed deducting costs maintenance obsolescence depreciation workers incomes taxed without deduction equally real costs maintenance obsolescence depreciation human capital supplyside critics like jude wanniski polyconomics inc claim distinction human nonhuman capital abstraction tax breaks incentives business says indirect incentives families business write expenses taxes pay salary benefits workers10 wanniskis insight merit reverse equally true families invest rearing educating children greater longterm economic benefits business economy whole wanniski answer question dear families businesses write cost machines working parents write cost keeping body soul together federal income tax falls heavily employment income much smaller share gross property income subject federal tax result middleclass families end carrying disproportionate share federal tax burden since income heavily dependent employment longstanding discrepancy taxing human capital nonhuman capital intensified since schultzs time federal tax burden shifted income taxwhich falls mostly workerstoward payroll tax falls exclusively workers assessed dramatically higher rate 1950s less 2 percent today 60 percent american workers pay payroll tax federal income tax granted federal tax burden portion gross domestic product remained relatively constant since world war two 19 percent although stands today 206 percent broken employment business income shares national income tax burden former risen 17 percent 224 percent tax burden latter fallen 30 percent 14 percent effect workers earn twothirds gross national income pay nearly fourfifths federal taxes though shift gradual families started experiencing called middleclass squeeze 1980s one hand hear news economic growth roaring stock market low inflation lowunemployment hand experience reality trying stretch paychecks meet living childrearing expenses even gross family income increased keep pace economic growth actual takehome pay many workers dropped economic trends continue gross family income continues rise lifting middleclass families 28 percent income tax bracket higher squeeze tighten payroll taxes rise 24 percent year 2030 recommended trustees social security system many families face marginal federal tax rate 50 percent 160 bringing property income tax base 160 federal policy resolve dilemma middleclass families raising educating children keep money earn congress reform tax code families enjoy kind tax incentiveswhether generous writeoffs depletion allowances depreciationthat businesses enjoyed years one way expand tax code pages pages incentives families tried limited success years narrowly targeted credits special exemptions taxdeferred accounts education housing retirement avoid complicating already mammoth tax code far better approach start scratch simple flat tax treats labor property income alike treating labor property income alike means scrapping host write offs credits businesses enjoy deductions depreciation capital deductions maintenance costs workers business assets would permitted maintenance costs worker involve costs keeping body soul together bare minimum deducting worker maintenance means exempting povertylevel income taxes including social security income taxes tax code currently haphazardly insufficiently standard deductions personal exemptions shield belowpoverty working families income tax regressive payroll tax earned income tax credit introduced 1975 basically intended offset burden payroll tax lowincome working families human maintenance costs vary family size eitc mostly ignores credit whether family one two adults two six children result families exempt taxes human maintenance working families like widows mite new testament working families taxed surplus sustenance failure even acknowledge let alone address discrepancy present tax laws property employment income achilles heel republican tax proposals including recommended dick armey bill archer steve forbes initiatives admirably seek simplify tax code solve middleclass squeeze see republicans grand old problem name economic growth republicans attempt shift tax base away income consumption squeezes middle class even surface shift consumption tax base sounds appealing even virtuous object taxing people take society consumption contribute income actually issue simple current proposals define consumption inconsistently archaically maintenance investment human capitallike raising educating childrenis taxed consumption taking society hand business purchases company car considered contributing society consumptionbased tax weaknesses middle class ought aware continue shift federal tax burden away property employment income also places tax burden smack middle income scale families either end income scale largely unaffected families bottom receive disproportionate share income government transfer payments generally exempt taxation families top income scale receive half income property families middle earn income mostly employment existing federal tax burden progressive burden consumptionbased tax domeshaped fully phased inlow bottom income scale low top high middle fiddling tax rates personal exemptions provides partial solution problem stems removing property income tax base republican strategists would wise politically economically avoid rhetoric consumption tax seek completely new paradigm broadening existing income tax base including greater share property income broader tax base would progressive current tax code multiple layers taxation offsetting exclusion onehalf property income taxation justifying adoption flat tax fear would regressive treating property employment income equally would effective social security tax cut approach would winwin republicans would achieve desire serious tax reform simultaneously correcting real public perception party big business care typical american family family flat tax 160 familyoriented tax plan would involve replacement existing personal corporate income tax simple flat tax 16 percent assessed gross domestic product would differ tax consumption spending disallows deductions spending investment property therefore consumption investment spending gross domestic product would taxed ideally tax would collected business similar structure proposals call national sales tax gross business receipts minus purchases businesses households would prepare file tax returns gross domestic product includes family spending human capital maintenance families would entitled earned personal tax credit based upon number family members portion federal social security taxes assessed employment income credit fully applied paychecks families would need file return refund families realizing capital gains would also required file return public ready wholesale break current system conservative approach would resemble current tax system requiring individuals pay tax wages pensions minus earned personal tax credit exempting wages pensions business tax complicated approach would require filing annual returns families deals transitional issues better retaining example mortgage interest deduction long lender taxed interest economists believe interest rates would drop tax reform option would ensure outstanding mortgage holders benefit decline interest rates plan also could retain deductions charitable contributionswhich unlike existing tax deductions quasipublic purpose encourage private sector solutions social problems either way family flat tax would set amount earned personal tax credit aggregate earnings american families poverty line estimated 5000 per person credit flat income tax 16 percent reduced payroll tax 122 percent amount would worth 1400 per person man supporting wife three children 1997 median income 28808 credit would worth 7000 enough offset almost federal taxes employment worker would social security federal income taxes deducted first 25000 paycheck would also receive refund could added paycheck 634 recover part employers share payroll tax worker never seen current tax system family pays 4155 federal income social security taxes whopping 4789 difference11 earning credit remains irrevocable matter high income 160 prudent social security reform 160 critical family flat tax longoverdue 20 percent cut payroll tax ever since president lyndon johnson placed social security budget 1960s programs excess revenues used disguise federal deficit helped along hefty tax increases years program generates nearly 120 billion per year pays benefits counting around 70 billion tax revenue nearly 50 billion interest onetotwo year reserve12 public believes money goes trust fund future retirees trust fund actually existsthe money simply plundered congress president fund government projects programs nottoodistant future payroll tax revenue expected fall far short promised benefits mostly baby boomers raising fewer children parents resulting relatively smaller work force generation ago unless trend reversed payroll tax rates rise sharply even optimistic economic assumptions address problems family flat tax calls cutting payroll tax immediately 20 percent reducing future benefits according number years worker paid lower tax rate example eighteenyearold paid 20 percent lower rate fifty years retirement benefits would reduced 20 percent current estimates fiftyfiveyearold worker paid 20 percent lower tax ten years promised benefits would reduced 4 percent current workers could use tax cut invest human nonhuman capital changes would reduce longterm liabilities social security system prevent future tax increases instead doubling real terms next several decades currently projected level retirement benefits would rise 60 percent faster inflation instead replacing 42 percent covered wages social security benefits would stabilize onethird covered wages finally instead doubling 30 percent taxable payroll much smaller generation supports retired baby boomers payroll taxes would never raised beyond current levels social security would therefore continue provide floor retirement security without crowding investments childrearing education family saving private insurance social security reforms enable family flat tax deliver lowest marginal rates working families tax reform plan also provides generous tax allowances families providing net tax cut employment taxes precisely taxes larger portion property income current law exact income tax rate criteria earned personal tax credit size payroll tax cut finetuned somewhat however grand old party wants advance tax reform provides substantial relief middleclass families plan must contain two elements first must treat property income employment income way particularly regarding maintenance depreciation costs second social security problems must addressed relieve tax burden workers prevent massive future rise tax rates addressing weaknesses current tax system republicans could help usher like 1948 another golden era family growth economic prosperity notes 1 allan carlson toward familycentered theory taxation family america january 1998 pp 12 2 congressional budget office economic budget outlook update august 1998 3 domenicigramm socialism wall street journal july 31 1998 sec editorial 4 robert j samuelson surplus surplus washington post may 20 1998 5 allan carlson david blankenhorn marriage taxes case familyfriendly taxation weekly standard february 9 1998 pp 2427 6 carlson blankenhorn p 25 7 theodore w schultz investment human capital american economic review 51 march 1961 117 8 pat schroeder champion great american family new york random house 1989 p 142 9 john w kendrick total capital economic growth atlantic economic journal 22 march 1994 118 10 jude wanniski humans vs machines vs taxes wall street journal letter editor november 16 1995 11 median family income data tax burdens see tax foundation special report 74 november 1997 p 3 12 congressional budget office economic budget outlook fiscal years 19992008 | 2,315 |
<p />
<p>In Part One of Friederich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, there is a particularly provocative section entitled ‘Of the New Idol.’ Remembering that this pivotal writing of the great German thinker/philosopher, so often misinterpreted, was written in 1881, it is surprising how relevant and invigorating its strong language remains in 2011. In his Introduction to the Penguin edition of Zarathustra, R.J. Hollingdale, the distinguished Nietzsche scholar and translator writes, “[t]he book’s worst fault is excess.” But excess can also be constructive, making us think harder. The cultural historian, Norman O. Brown, once remarked during a lecture that “[i]n psychoanalysis only the exaggerations are valuable.” Why? It makes us consider even awkward realities beneath the surface that are usually outside the box of what is treated as ‘responsible debate’ according to establishment pundits who set themselves up to be the arbiters of convention at a given society, at a given time. The dynamics of denial, so well known to psychologists, are a particularly virulent mechanism by which we protect our comfort zone from intrusion by inconvenient truths.</p>
<p>It should be understood that Zarathustra as a character in the treatise is presented as the prophetic voice of Nietzsche, the person who stands outside and in solitude so as to understand better what is taking place inside; a voice that is shrill with anger, impassioned by conviction, and dedicated to truth-telling, however heretical. It should be remembered that Nietzsche was experiencing a young German state that was seeking unity by promoting an intense cult of nationalism that would eventuate in self-destructive major wars twice in the 20th century. Also, Nietzsche’s pre-existentialist outlook emphasized the absence of metaphysical guidance in our life experience. We are on our own, and cannot validly rely on church or state to shape our own future. We cannot, without false conscience, escape the burdens of freedom and responsibility. Our lives unfold as if on a pathless journey unassisted by reliable signposts. In other words, it takes courage and strength to live life authentically. In this regard, subjection to the will of the state was, and remains, a prevalent and unacceptable form of escape from these burdens.</p>
<p>Such an escape is often glorified as ‘patriotism,’ underscoring the stark difference between the obedient subject and the conscience-stricken citizen. Most individuals in sovereign states are willing or unwilling subjects, few are willing to risk the travails of citizenship so conceived. The risings in Tunisia and Egypt, regardless of what will happens during the long morning after, can be understood as spontaneous, unexpected, and brace embrace of citizenship under most difficult conditions, risking a life-threatening punitive response by challenging the authority of the repressive regime in power.</p>
<p>In “Of the New Idol”, Nietzsche exclaims: “The state? What is that? Well then! Now open your ears, for now I shall speak to you of the death of peoples.” The passage goes on, “[t]he state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.'” In this theatrical language, Nietzsche is reminding us that for many the state becomes an idol to be unconditionally obeyed as if an infallible god, a forfeiture of freedom, a renunciation of citizenship in a humane political community, and a voluntary acceptance of subjugation of the spirit. Such a ‘patriotic’ process has drastically diminished the quality of democratic life almost everywhere, and has given the state a green light to wage wars of choice, regardless of their bloody consequences.</p>
<p>The coldness of the state, so far as human solidarity is concerned, is often most vividly revealed by extreme behavior: the Nazi death camps, the atomic bombs dropped on Japanese cities, the genocidal dispossession of indigenous peoples throughout the world, the cruelties of colonial rule, the long siege imposed on the people of Gaza, and on and on. The United States, claiming the mantle of leader of ‘the free world,’ remains ready to incinerate tens of millions of innocent civilians for the sake of regime survival for itself and allied governments. What could be colder? What could be more anti-human?</p>
<p>Yet this kind of violence is always rationalized by reference to the evil of the other, which is supposed to contrast with the good of the state. Yet we find that the protected national population (composed of patriots) is not treated much better. The person of conscience who speaks in public against a war of aggression being waged by his own government can be charged with treason if the message is viewed as giving aid and comfort to ‘the enemy,’ and sentenced to death in many countries. The crime of treason is another symbolic expression of the coldness of the state, as are the tactics often exhibited in a civil war or in violent responses to insurgent challenges. Current events also manifest this icy coldness of the state: shooting unarmed demonstrators in the towns and cities of Syria and Libya, or along the borders of Israel.&#160; This coldness that Nietzsche so resented is acutely present when those who press their grievances peacefully against the state are met with violence.</p>
<p>And yet we must be careful. Nietzsche’s excess, however eye-opening, is still excel. History vindicates the case for limited government. We need protection to live moderate and satisfying lives, to avoid crippling feuds. Nietzsche, shouting to be heard, exaggerated in some ways that are not instructive. We must not deify the state, or renounce our responsibilities as citizens to speak truthfully, or free the government from its obligations at home and abroad to act within the law, but even most of those among us who try to be citizens in the proper sense would still not opt for the chaos of an ungoverned social order if given a free choice. Our task is to build a just and ethically accountable state, not to abandon the enterprise as futile.&#160; It is not a middle ground that we seek that is content with more moderate forms of secular forms of idolatry. The struggle I support is what the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, called for, I believe, when speaking of ‘the democracy to come.’</p>
<p>We need to listen carefully to the words of Nietzsche, but not be seduced by them to indulge idolatry in its negative form. To remove the blindfold, and see the state as the coldest of monsters is a necessary wakeup call for which we should thank Nietzsche, even now, 140 years after Zarathustra was published.&#160; And yet we also need to resist the temptation to fall into a deeper sleep by adopting a posture of unrealizable and unacceptable negation of this strange political creature called the state. In the end, the state is not a monster, but a work in progress.</p> | false | 1 | part one friederich nietzsches thus spake zarathustra particularly provocative section entitled new idol remembering pivotal writing great german thinkerphilosopher often misinterpreted written 1881 surprising relevant invigorating strong language remains 2011 introduction penguin edition zarathustra rj hollingdale distinguished nietzsche scholar translator writes books worst fault excess excess also constructive making us think harder cultural historian norman brown remarked lecture psychoanalysis exaggerations valuable makes us consider even awkward realities beneath surface usually outside box treated responsible debate according establishment pundits set arbiters convention given society given time dynamics denial well known psychologists particularly virulent mechanism protect comfort zone intrusion inconvenient truths understood zarathustra character treatise presented prophetic voice nietzsche person stands outside solitude understand better taking place inside voice shrill anger impassioned conviction dedicated truthtelling however heretical remembered nietzsche experiencing young german state seeking unity promoting intense cult nationalism would eventuate selfdestructive major wars twice 20th century also nietzsches preexistentialist outlook emphasized absence metaphysical guidance life experience validly rely church state shape future without false conscience escape burdens freedom responsibility lives unfold pathless journey unassisted reliable signposts words takes courage strength live life authentically regard subjection state remains prevalent unacceptable form escape burdens escape often glorified patriotism underscoring stark difference obedient subject consciencestricken citizen individuals sovereign states willing unwilling subjects willing risk travails citizenship conceived risings tunisia egypt regardless happens long morning understood spontaneous unexpected brace embrace citizenship difficult conditions risking lifethreatening punitive response challenging authority repressive regime power new idol nietzsche exclaims state well open ears shall speak death peoples passage goes state coldest cold monsters coldly lies lie creeps mouth state people theatrical language nietzsche reminding us many state becomes idol unconditionally obeyed infallible god forfeiture freedom renunciation citizenship humane political community voluntary acceptance subjugation spirit patriotic process drastically diminished quality democratic life almost everywhere given state green light wage wars choice regardless bloody consequences coldness state far human solidarity concerned often vividly revealed extreme behavior nazi death camps atomic bombs dropped japanese cities genocidal dispossession indigenous peoples throughout world cruelties colonial rule long siege imposed people gaza united states claiming mantle leader free world remains ready incinerate tens millions innocent civilians sake regime survival allied governments could colder could antihuman yet kind violence always rationalized reference evil supposed contrast good state yet find protected national population composed patriots treated much better person conscience speaks public war aggression waged government charged treason message viewed giving aid comfort enemy sentenced death many countries crime treason another symbolic expression coldness state tactics often exhibited civil war violent responses insurgent challenges current events also manifest icy coldness state shooting unarmed demonstrators towns cities syria libya along borders israel160 coldness nietzsche resented acutely present press grievances peacefully state met violence yet must careful nietzsches excess however eyeopening still excel history vindicates case limited government need protection live moderate satisfying lives avoid crippling feuds nietzsche shouting heard exaggerated ways instructive must deify state renounce responsibilities citizens speak truthfully free government obligations home abroad act within law even among us try citizens proper sense would still opt chaos ungoverned social order given free choice task build ethically accountable state abandon enterprise futile160 middle ground seek content moderate forms secular forms idolatry struggle support french philosopher jacques derrida called believe speaking democracy come need listen carefully words nietzsche seduced indulge idolatry negative form remove blindfold see state coldest monsters necessary wakeup call thank nietzsche even 140 years zarathustra published160 yet also need resist temptation fall deeper sleep adopting posture unrealizable unacceptable negation strange political creature called state end state monster work progress | 585 |
<p>A big federal investment in infrastructure is one of the few things that Donald Trump has specifically said he wants to pursue early in his presidency. It is not as high a priority for most congressional Republicans, to put it mildly.</p>
<p>In fact, their work so far on the coming legislative year suggests that House and Senate leaders hope they might push infrastructure off the agenda by getting started early on health care and tax reform. Two major initiatives, both pursued through reconciliation bills (the failure to pass a budget resolution in 2016 allows for two reconciliation measures in 2017), would already make for an unusually intense legislative year. A third major initiative, even though it would involve different committees and coalitions, would not be easy to squeeze in—particularly as a new president without experience in pressing his priorities in Congress gets his sea legs.</p>
<p>And yet, precisely because the congressional Republicans’ two key priorities are both set to be pursued through essentially partisan reconciliation bills, it may be hard to avoid an infrastructure bill. The new administration will want to do something with the Democrats, and infrastructure offers the prospect of a bipartisan measure that could furnish ribbon-cutting photo opportunities for years to come. It will also be the foremost priority of Gary Cohn, whom Trump has appointed to lead his National Economic Council. That means an important portion of the White House staff will press the issue.</p>
<p>In both respects, infrastructure could be for the Trump team what No Child Left Behind was for George W. Bush in his first year: The Bush team prioritized the bill’s bipartisan potential above any policy particulars, and Bush’s domestic policy adviser, Margaret Spellings, was especially committed to it.</p>
<p>The analogy should worry congressional Republicans. So to avoid getting stuck with a choice between voting for a sopping legislative mess or opposing one of the foremost priorities of a new president of their own party, those Republicans need to be thinking about what a reasonable infrastructure measure might look like. At the very least, they need an approach of their own to reinforce the case for opposing a bad bill.</p>
<p>And they must do that in full recognition of two particular dangers to be avoided. The first is simply the danger of wasting lots of money on pork and on projects unlikely to contribute much to the state of America’s infrastructure. Many conservatives in Congress are well aware of that danger. It’s why they are not excited about a big infrastructure bill. But the second distinct risk of infrastructure legislation is less obvious. Simply put, moving carelessly toward an infrastructure package could cost conservatives the earmark ban they worked so hard for a few years ago.</p>
<p>The ban is already in a precarious state. House Republicans were set to vote on whether to renew it in late November, and their leadership had to step in and “delay” the vote into this year—because it seemed suddenly like there might be a majority in the conference in favor of bringing back earmarks. The party’s leaders aren’t all opposed to ending the ban themselves, but they knew that the conference wasn’t ready for the political shock that an unexpected vote to do so would have involved. Putting a large pot of infrastructure money on the floor would surely strengthen the desire to bring back earmarks and could well render it irresistible.</p>
<p>Conservatives therefore will need an alternative, not just resistance. What would that look like? A plausible approach could involve three elements, each geared to economic growth and the efficient use of public resources: reforming permitting rules, alleviating key bottlenecks in the transportation system, and otherwise devolving decisions about project spending to states and localities.</p>
<p>The first is a form of deregulation, and one that has garnered a fair bit of bipartisan backing in recent years. Significant infrastructure projects are now routinely held up for years in the federal permitting process, rendering both public and private infrastructure spending less effective and contributing enormously to the backlog of essential projects.</p>
<p>Congress has tried to address the problem, most recently through the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (or FAST) Act enacted at the end of 2015. And the Obama administration actually tried a series of administrative measures to take on the problem too. All of these, however, have tended to focus on consolidating the review process to enable better oversight. That’s a good idea, to be sure, and there are further steps along those lines that would make sense: Alaska senator Dan Sullivan has proposed requiring the permitting agencies to provide approvals or denials within a set period of time, for instance, so that if the time limit were exceeded the project would be deemed approved.</p>
<p>But beyond finding ways to accelerate all the permitting that’s now required, Congress should also cut down on the requirements—for instance, reducing the range of environmental concerns that require review under the National Environmental Policy Act and allowing such reviews to build on those conducted for similar projects in the past, rather than beginning from scratch with every application. Aggressively reducing federal permitting requirements would act as a multiplier of whatever else was done in an infrastructure bill, far better enabling federal, state, and local infrastructure spending to actually make a difference and thereby also encouraging more investment.</p>
<p>Second, in thinking about projects to be funded, congressional Republicans should prioritize the easing of bottlenecks in America’s transportation infrastructure. And they should focus on bottlenecks in the movement of goods before those in the movement of people.</p>
<p>This is not how politicians naturally incline to think about throwing money at construction projects, of course. But precisely because of how the political system tends to approach infrastructure, there is some relatively low-hanging fruit to be picked when it comes to major bottlenecks in the movement of cargo. Antiquated rail tunnels around Baltimore, for instance, create major choke points with huge implications for how goods move up and down the East Coast—and they also add to the number of trucks on highways, slowing the movement of people. The rail networks that converge in Chicago confront similar bottlenecks that create huge costs and delays.</p>
<p>America’s inland waterways, which are essential to our freight-transportation system, feature similar choke points begging to be addressed. And as with rail bottlenecks, an unusual number of them are in the Midwest, which Republicans with their eyes on electoral dynamics naturally find themselves much interested in after this election. The country’s major seaports could also benefit from some upgrades that have enormous potential to spur growth.</p>
<p>Those kinds of projects are what public (and particularly national) investments in infrastructure ought to emphasize. Their purpose should be, like the government’s role in a market system more generally, to help our economy function more effectively, enabling competitive markets in ways those markets are unlikely to take up themselves.</p>
<p>The movement of cargo isn’t more important than passenger transportation, but it’s less likely to already have a political constituency behind it, particularly at the state and local level. And it is also often (though not always) less likely to involve infrastructure upgrades that could readily be paid for by user fees, tolls, or other sources of profits for builders and investors, and so might require some public funding to spur action. These kinds of needs can be harder to see, and the ways in which people involved in politics tend to personally experience the transportation system can badly distort how government funds infrastructure. Someone who describes a new passenger-rail tunnel into Manhattan as a high national priority is likely to be someone who frequently travels to and from Manhattan and needs a broader definition of “national.” To the extent that infrastructure spending is determined at the national level, it should focus on genuinely national needs with the potential to spur the growth of the national economy.</p>
<p>But of course, most infrastructure spending shouldn’t be determined at the national level, because needs and priorities differ in different parts of our vast country. Therefore, if conservatives are going to offer support for new infrastructure legislation, the third element of any proposal they offer should involve setting the country on a course toward devolving more infrastructure policy toward the state and local level, where most of it belongs.</p>
<p>For instance, as a number of conservatives in Congress have proposed in recent years, such legislation could significantly reduce the federal gas tax and allow states and localities to hike it back up to the degree they desire, raising revenue (while their residents only pay as much in taxes at the pump as they do now) for transit, roads, pipes, and other infrastructure projects better prioritized by policymakers closer to the ground.</p>
<p>States should also be allowed to establish new tolls on the Interstate Highway System, which they can do today only by building specialized new lanes or by begging the Transportation Department for hard-to-get exemptions. More generally, a new infrastructure bill should try to define in some bounded way the federal role in infrastructure policy. The lack of clear boundaries on this front, as in so many areas of contemporary federalism, is an enormous obstacle to effective public policy at all levels.</p>
<p>A bill with these three elements would stand some chance of advancing conservative priorities while meeting Donald Trump’s stated objectives. It would still be likely to waste a fair bit of public money. And it wouldn’t guarantee the survival of the earmark ban, which faces real peril in the new Congress. But on net, it could trade some temporary spending for more enduring structural changes in our infrastructure policy, while trying to focus that spending as well as possible.</p>
<p>That is the kind of approach that conservatives should look to more generally in contending with Trump administration initiatives that aren’t up their alley. There will surely be many opportunities to advance conservative proposals in the coming years. But there will also be many instances when conservatives need to resist and restrain and to approach the new president transactionally. That will mean prioritizing structural reforms and the reinforcement of constitutional boundaries over more ephemeral policy questions where necessary. Infrastructure offers a good place to start.</p>
<p>Yuval Levin is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, Hertog fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and editor of National Affairs.</p> | false | 1 | big federal investment infrastructure one things donald trump specifically said wants pursue early presidency high priority congressional republicans put mildly fact work far coming legislative year suggests house senate leaders hope might push infrastructure agenda getting started early health care tax reform two major initiatives pursued reconciliation bills failure pass budget resolution 2016 allows two reconciliation measures 2017 would already make unusually intense legislative year third major initiative even though would involve different committees coalitions would easy squeeze inparticularly new president without experience pressing priorities congress gets sea legs yet precisely congressional republicans two key priorities set pursued essentially partisan reconciliation bills may hard avoid infrastructure bill new administration want something democrats infrastructure offers prospect bipartisan measure could furnish ribboncutting photo opportunities years come also foremost priority gary cohn trump appointed lead national economic council means important portion white house staff press issue respects infrastructure could trump team child left behind george w bush first year bush team prioritized bills bipartisan potential policy particulars bushs domestic policy adviser margaret spellings especially committed analogy worry congressional republicans avoid getting stuck choice voting sopping legislative mess opposing one foremost priorities new president party republicans need thinking reasonable infrastructure measure might look like least need approach reinforce case opposing bad bill must full recognition two particular dangers avoided first simply danger wasting lots money pork projects unlikely contribute much state americas infrastructure many conservatives congress well aware danger excited big infrastructure bill second distinct risk infrastructure legislation less obvious simply put moving carelessly toward infrastructure package could cost conservatives earmark ban worked hard years ago ban already precarious state house republicans set vote whether renew late november leadership step delay vote yearbecause seemed suddenly like might majority conference favor bringing back earmarks partys leaders arent opposed ending ban knew conference wasnt ready political shock unexpected vote would involved putting large pot infrastructure money floor would surely strengthen desire bring back earmarks could well render irresistible conservatives therefore need alternative resistance would look like plausible approach could involve three elements geared economic growth efficient use public resources reforming permitting rules alleviating key bottlenecks transportation system otherwise devolving decisions project spending states localities first form deregulation one garnered fair bit bipartisan backing recent years significant infrastructure projects routinely held years federal permitting process rendering public private infrastructure spending less effective contributing enormously backlog essential projects congress tried address problem recently fixing americas surface transportation fast act enacted end 2015 obama administration actually tried series administrative measures take problem however tended focus consolidating review process enable better oversight thats good idea sure steps along lines would make sense alaska senator dan sullivan proposed requiring permitting agencies provide approvals denials within set period time instance time limit exceeded project would deemed approved beyond finding ways accelerate permitting thats required congress also cut requirementsfor instance reducing range environmental concerns require review national environmental policy act allowing reviews build conducted similar projects past rather beginning scratch every application aggressively reducing federal permitting requirements would act multiplier whatever else done infrastructure bill far better enabling federal state local infrastructure spending actually make difference thereby also encouraging investment second thinking projects funded congressional republicans prioritize easing bottlenecks americas transportation infrastructure focus bottlenecks movement goods movement people politicians naturally incline think throwing money construction projects course precisely political system tends approach infrastructure relatively lowhanging fruit picked comes major bottlenecks movement cargo antiquated rail tunnels around baltimore instance create major choke points huge implications goods move east coastand also add number trucks highways slowing movement people rail networks converge chicago confront similar bottlenecks create huge costs delays americas inland waterways essential freighttransportation system feature similar choke points begging addressed rail bottlenecks unusual number midwest republicans eyes electoral dynamics naturally find much interested election countrys major seaports could also benefit upgrades enormous potential spur growth kinds projects public particularly national investments infrastructure ought emphasize purpose like governments role market system generally help economy function effectively enabling competitive markets ways markets unlikely take movement cargo isnt important passenger transportation less likely already political constituency behind particularly state local level also often though always less likely involve infrastructure upgrades could readily paid user fees tolls sources profits builders investors might require public funding spur action kinds needs harder see ways people involved politics tend personally experience transportation system badly distort government funds infrastructure someone describes new passengerrail tunnel manhattan high national priority likely someone frequently travels manhattan needs broader definition national extent infrastructure spending determined national level focus genuinely national needs potential spur growth national economy course infrastructure spending shouldnt determined national level needs priorities differ different parts vast country therefore conservatives going offer support new infrastructure legislation third element proposal offer involve setting country course toward devolving infrastructure policy toward state local level belongs instance number conservatives congress proposed recent years legislation could significantly reduce federal gas tax allow states localities hike back degree desire raising revenue residents pay much taxes pump transit roads pipes infrastructure projects better prioritized policymakers closer ground states also allowed establish new tolls interstate highway system today building specialized new lanes begging transportation department hardtoget exemptions generally new infrastructure bill try define bounded way federal role infrastructure policy lack clear boundaries front many areas contemporary federalism enormous obstacle effective public policy levels bill three elements would stand chance advancing conservative priorities meeting donald trumps stated objectives would still likely waste fair bit public money wouldnt guarantee survival earmark ban faces real peril new congress net could trade temporary spending enduring structural changes infrastructure policy trying focus spending well possible kind approach conservatives look generally contending trump administration initiatives arent alley surely many opportunities advance conservative proposals coming years also many instances conservatives need resist restrain approach new president transactionally mean prioritizing structural reforms reinforcement constitutional boundaries ephemeral policy questions necessary infrastructure offers good place start yuval levin contributing editor weekly standard hertog fellow ethics public policy center editor national affairs | 980 |
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<p>GW: Let’s talk about the Bush presidency. Bush quite rightly insisted on both the reunification of Germany and the incorporation of a reunified Germany within NATO; and he hung in there when the pressure got intense to abandon that position. He saw that Saddam Hussein’s conquest of Kuwait couldn’t be allowed to stand, and he did something about it, even if we’d both have grave questions about the endgame of the Gulf War. Those are things on the credit side of the ledger.</p>
<p>On the debit side, though, and even more clearly in retrospect, there is this striking pattern of incomprehension about the revolutionary dynamics of the late eighties and early nineties. I’m thinking of Secretary of State Baker in Belgrade in 1991, saying that our interest in Yugoslavia was “order and stability,” thus putting our bet on Milosevic as a kind of new Tito who would hold things together. I’m thinking about what William Safire dubbed President Bush’s “Chicken Kiev speech,” which amounted to an endorsement of Gorbachev’s efforts to hold the Soviet Union together. I’m thinking about the reaction (a month after the Kiev fiasco) to the August 1991 coup in Moscow. And then there was the lack of V-C Day, or at least some statement of what this all meant.</p>
<p>As you look back on the Bush years, set against the previous eight years in which you yourself were so intensely involved, do you think that the Bush team self-consciously pulled back from the ideological component of the Reagan foreign policy, in exchange for a more classic, moderate Republican, Realpolitik-driven perspective? And, if so, was that a fundamental error? Did that create interpretive filters that simply didn’t permit the Bush team to see what in fact was going on?</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>EA: Yes, I think that’s basically it. I’d also stress that Bush foreign policy was a team foreign policy: it was the team of Bush, Baker, and [Brent] Scowcroft throughout those four years. And I’m tempted to say that they just didn’t get it.</p>
<p>But the interesting question is: Why didn’t they get it? It was partly a reaction against Reagan. The Reagan people had insisted on stressing ideological issues; the Bush people wanted to distinguish themselves from the Reagan people on a number of fronts; and so there you were—the temptation was overwhelming to distinguish themselves in foreign policy by being “more pragmatic.” In the end, of course, they were less pragmatic. But that frequently hap pens to those who seek “pragmatism” by ignoring the role of ideas.</p>
<p>The Bush team also believed that the Reagan approach was stylistically, even morally, offensive. Talk about “evil empires” and America as a “city on a hill”—I think President Bush found those to be offensive formulations. And the stylistic question is not entirely trivial. President Bush thought that personal behavior and national behavior ought to be judged by similar standards of what was “offensive”…</p>
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<p>GW: … good form, bad form, that sort of thing …</p>
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<p>EA: That’s right, good form, bad form, and the latter understood as overly nationalistic, even chauvinistic. I think some of Reagan’s formulations just grated on Bush. And that, combined with the Bush team’s desire to distinguish themselves from Reagan, led to an overreaction. Of course, President Bush himself said that he had never been very comfortable with the “vision thing” and with the “moralizing” of issues (in the best sense of that term); I think he saw world politics in a relatively old-fashioned way.</p>
<p>Now that served him well in a few cases. But one of the critical errors the Bush team made was to misunderstand the substitution of other actors for the nation-state as key players on the world stage. The Bush people tended to react as if, well, the nation-state has always been the main actor, so it must have some sort of right to be the main actor; what were these other actors—regions, peoples, nationality groups—doing on stage? This was playing the King Canute role, trying to restrain a tide that simply couldn’t be held back.</p>
<p>Now, you can understand how Bush and his people came to think of nation-states as the principal actors in the drama. But what was really somewhat odd about their view was the notion that there was something morally right about the then-extant state borders. So you got these very strange messages about Eastern Europe and the old Soviet Union. Remember the “Captive Nations Days”? No doubt there was a lot of rhetoric propounded on those occasions; and no doubt I was one of the rhetoricians on occasion. But the point is that this rhetoric, the rhetoric of freedom versus tyranny, made President Reagan glow. And it made President Bush shrink. What we saw as the liberation of the captive nations, Reagan exulted in, as it drew near; to him it was, quite simply, a great moral event. President Bush saw it as a potentially great moral event that brought with it enormous dangers. That was true, of course. But I think Bush focused too intently on the inviolability of “the system.”</p>
<p>Remember what I said before about people who think they’re being pragmatic and prudent but end up being impractical and imprudent? One of the problems of the Bush Administration is that it didn’t think through very carefully what would happen when you substituted “defending the system,” now packaged as “the new world order,” for the moral imperatives of the Cold War years. What would this do to U.S. foreign policy? What would it do to the American people? For over forty years, the bottom line on the Cold War had been that, in the face of immoral communism linked to Soviet power, we were, in fact, the revolutionary party: the party of freedom, of change, of getting the world beyond tyranny. Then, suddenly, we were told that the goal of American foreign policy was “defending the system.” It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the Congress and the American people suddenly lost a lot of their enthusiasm for overseas involvements. Who wants to risk his son’s or daughter’s life “defending the international system”? I have the distinct impression that the Bush people didn’t quite think that one through.</p>
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<p>GW: Yet in the case of a major cross-border aggression—Iraq invading and subjugating Kuwait—they could make the case powerfully, and against a lot of opposition and skepticism.</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>EA: But it was a very odd business: a mismatch, it seems to me, of Old Think and New Think. Remember that the Bush Administration made several bizarre efforts to justify its actions in the Gulf, the most bizarre being James Baker’s claim that this was about “jobs, jobs, jobs.” And then there was the President’s curious rhetoric about defending democracy in a country, Kuwait, that had never experienced democracy and still hasn’t.</p>
<p>The American people, on the other hand, had a somewhat clearer, if old-fashioned, view: this was aggression, and it was wrong. Here was this familiar kind of burn, Saddam Hussein; we weren’t going to let him get away with aggression in a place that really mattered. And it really mattered because of the oil, and what that meant for the world economy and for international security. Americans understood that very, very well, I think.</p>
<p>One good “lesson of Vietnam” was that you had to get the whole nation involved in what would have to be a national effort: Bush managed that very well, and the American people responded. But it was a reflexive response, a traditional response, familiar to anyone who knew the American response to World Wars I and II. It was a response grounded in the belief that, at this particular moment, the Americans knew what they were up to. And that belief did more to sustain the American people’s support for the ef fort in the Gulf than many of the “interpretations” that the Bush Administration was offering us.</p>
<p>George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. and holds EPPC’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.</p> | false | 1 | 160 gw lets talk bush presidency bush quite rightly insisted reunification germany incorporation reunified germany within nato hung pressure got intense abandon position saw saddam husseins conquest kuwait couldnt allowed stand something even wed grave questions endgame gulf war things credit side ledger debit side though even clearly retrospect striking pattern incomprehension revolutionary dynamics late eighties early nineties im thinking secretary state baker belgrade 1991 saying interest yugoslavia order stability thus putting bet milosevic kind new tito would hold things together im thinking william safire dubbed president bushs chicken kiev speech amounted endorsement gorbachevs efforts hold soviet union together im thinking reaction month kiev fiasco august 1991 coup moscow lack vc day least statement meant look back bush years set previous eight years intensely involved think bush team selfconsciously pulled back ideological component reagan foreign policy exchange classic moderate republican realpolitikdriven perspective fundamental error create interpretive filters simply didnt permit bush team see fact going 160 ea yes think thats basically id also stress bush foreign policy team foreign policy team bush baker brent scowcroft throughout four years im tempted say didnt get interesting question didnt get partly reaction reagan reagan people insisted stressing ideological issues bush people wanted distinguish reagan people number fronts werethe temptation overwhelming distinguish foreign policy pragmatic end course less pragmatic frequently hap pens seek pragmatism ignoring role ideas bush team also believed reagan approach stylistically even morally offensive talk evil empires america city hilli think president bush found offensive formulations stylistic question entirely trivial president bush thought personal behavior national behavior ought judged similar standards offensive 160 gw good form bad form sort thing 160 ea thats right good form bad form latter understood overly nationalistic even chauvinistic think reagans formulations grated bush combined bush teams desire distinguish reagan led overreaction course president bush said never comfortable vision thing moralizing issues best sense term think saw world politics relatively oldfashioned way served well cases one critical errors bush team made misunderstand substitution actors nationstate key players world stage bush people tended react well nationstate always main actor must sort right main actor actorsregions peoples nationality groupsdoing stage playing king canute role trying restrain tide simply couldnt held back understand bush people came think nationstates principal actors drama really somewhat odd view notion something morally right thenextant state borders got strange messages eastern europe old soviet union remember captive nations days doubt lot rhetoric propounded occasions doubt one rhetoricians occasion point rhetoric rhetoric freedom versus tyranny made president reagan glow made president bush shrink saw liberation captive nations reagan exulted drew near quite simply great moral event president bush saw potentially great moral event brought enormous dangers true course think bush focused intently inviolability system remember said people think theyre pragmatic prudent end impractical imprudent one problems bush administration didnt think carefully would happen substituted defending system packaged new world order moral imperatives cold war years would us foreign policy would american people forty years bottom line cold war face immoral communism linked soviet power fact revolutionary party party freedom change getting world beyond tyranny suddenly told goal american foreign policy defending system shouldnt come surprise congress american people suddenly lost lot enthusiasm overseas involvements wants risk sons daughters life defending international system distinct impression bush people didnt quite think one 160 gw yet case major crossborder aggressioniraq invading subjugating kuwaitthey could make case powerfully lot opposition skepticism 160 ea odd business mismatch seems old think new think remember bush administration made several bizarre efforts justify actions gulf bizarre james bakers claim jobs jobs jobs presidents curious rhetoric defending democracy country kuwait never experienced democracy still hasnt american people hand somewhat clearer oldfashioned view aggression wrong familiar kind burn saddam hussein werent going let get away aggression place really mattered really mattered oil meant world economy international security americans understood well think one good lesson vietnam get whole nation involved would national effort bush managed well american people responded reflexive response traditional response familiar anyone knew american response world wars ii response grounded belief particular moment americans knew belief sustain american peoples support ef fort gulf many interpretations bush administration offering us george weigel distinguished senior fellow ethics public policy center washington dc holds eppcs william e simon chair catholic studies | 705 |
<p><a href="" type="internal">The Faith Angle Forum</a>&#160;is a semi-annual conference which brings together a select group of 20 nationally respected journalists with 3-5 distinguished scholars on areas of religion, politics &amp; public life.</p>
<p>“Faith, Film, &amp; Culture: The Challenges, the Prospects”</p>
<p>South Beach, Florida</p>
<p>Speaker:</p>
<p>Micheal Flaherty, President &amp; Co-Founder, Walden Media</p>
<p>Moderator:</p>
<p>Michael Cromartie, Vice-President, Ethics &amp; Public Policy Center</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>Michael Cromartie</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Ladies and gentlemen, Micheal’s bio, of course, is in your packet. He’s the President and Co-Founder of Walden Media. We did put a special request in a couple months ago that he figure out a way to see if Aslan could show up for our occasion but we weren’t able to work it out yet, couldn’t get through security, but as you know, they’re the producers behind the Narnia Chronicles, The Lion and the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and Prince Caspian, and those have been a great success.</p>
<p>One of the questions that I wanted to ask Micheal to address, of course, before he gets into the whole bulk of his talk is how long has he misspelled his name because this is the way he spells Micheal and I’ve had several people correct me, say you keep misspelling it. Oh, no, that’s the way he spells it.</p>
<p>So you can begin your comments to us, Micheal, by explaining, if you would, the origin of your first name.</p>
<p>Micheal Flaherty</p>
<p>MICHEAL FLAHERTY: I’ll begin with the cover story. My grandparents came from Ireland and it was one of the last dying requests that they had as they left that food-starved nation, that one day they would have a guy named Micheal and they would spell his name the way it’s spelt in Galway. Of course, it’s not spelled that way in Galway either.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: The reason why I spell my name that way is because in sixth grade I idolized a basketball player named Micheal Ray Richardson from the New Jersey Nets. He got kicked out of the league for drugs and then they brought him back in. He said, look, I’m off it, I’m never going to do drugs again. They brought him back into the league again. He got kicked out for doing drugs again and they said, listen, this is the third time. We need to see some real positive physical sign that you’re taking this seriously. We need to see you change something about your life.</p>
<p>So Micheal Ray brought in his birth certificate and he said, look, I’ve changed it. It’s now M-i-c-h-e-a-l. That’s the new Micheal and so on a dare, my big brother said I dare you to change the way you spell your name and it’s just one of the many lies I’ve kept going for decades and it’s too late now to change it back.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Okay. Well, good. Now we’re looking forward, Micheal, to hearing from you on Faith, Film and Culture, and then we have—we’ll get right into the discussion because we’re—for this session, we don’t have a respondent on purpose.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: So I just wanted to thank you so much, Michael, and a fantastic session this morning, really appreciate that, Jeffrey and Ambassador. That was great. It’s great to be here with a group of journalists because that was actually my dream when I was getting out of college. I always thought that I always wanted to be a writer and when I got out of college I went to work for William F. Buckley as his research assistant which meant that I got an X-Acto knife and a copy of the New York Times and I had to cut out every single article and put it in a file folder.</p>
<p>This was before the day and age of the Internet and then about a year after trying that, my father called me, a public defender in Massachusetts, and he said, “Little fellow, it’s about time you got a job with the government and got on with your life” and so I went home to Massachusetts. I worked for this great guy named Bill Bulger. He was the president of the Senate in Massachusetts. His brother was number one on the FBI’s Most Wanted List and learned quite a bit from him.</p>
<p>Education was always a real interest of mine. So was school choice and education reform. I was always interested in that and I would always tutor and on Saturday mornings, to break the ice, I would always ask kids what’d you do last night and they’d always either watched a film or watched a television show and about six months in, they said to me, you know what we did last night is we watched this movie Titanic and then the next week they said we watched Titanic again and then the next week they said to me you know what we did yesterday is we went to a museum.</p>
<p>They had an exhibit on the Titanic and we were able to put our hands into the same ice cold water that Leonardo DiCaprio drowned in and we were able to see all these things. Then the next week they went to the library. They got books out about the Titanic and that’s when I realized that stories could really have a profound influence on education. They could really change people’s outlook and they could start to see the application and so all these names, dates, and facts would actually start to mean something for them.</p>
<p>A year later, after all that, was April 20th, 1999. A lot of you probably remember Columbine, when two students walked into their school with shotguns and murdered, I think it was, 12 of their classmates and one of their teachers and, you know, the nation went into a depression. I didn’t know how to—what to do. I didn’t know how to react and I started reading these stories about these girls who had guns pointed in their face, you know, 16, 17-year-old girls, and were asked do you believe in God and they said yes.</p>
<p>I know that there are some journalists now saying otherwise but I’ve spoken to people who were in that library who swear that that’s what they heard and I realized that I’d been going to church my entire life and I didn’t have that same commitment and same faith as a 16-year-old girl and if I was looking down the barrel of a gun, I would say something I learned in some freshman philosophy class about there’s a presence and, you know, do anything I can, you know, to try to appease this guy and I didn’t really know what to do.</p>
<p>I was hoping that at Mass that Sunday they would make sense of it and this was before the scandal in Massachusetts broke out and the priest came out and he pressed play on an old Radio Shack recorder and it was an appeal from the Cardinal for that year’s Cardinal’s Appeal, not a word about what had happened just a few days before at Columbine.</p>
<p>The one thing that I was very lucky to have was a really powerful conversion experience where I really felt like the Holy Spirit, who I’ve heard about all my life, heard about at church, you know, really came into my life and told me that I needed to reset my priorities and make God first in my life and so if any of you have met, and I know the term is out of vogue now, but a born-again Christian, I became every caricature of that.</p>
<p>I put Scripture verse—the one Scripture verse I knew on my e-mail tag. I actually—the very next day, I went to a Christian bookstore and I bought a fish and I put it in the back of my car, so I felt like this is the equivalent of, you know, confirmation for an evangelical and because of that, I was just filled, you know, with—I was fearless.</p>
<p>I said, well, what do I really want to do with my life now? You know what I’d love to do is I’ve noticed that stories on my students had a real profound impact on their learning and I also know that stories could have a real profound impact on the way people think and feel.</p>
<p>Cassie Bernall, one of the girls who was murdered at Columbine, loved movies like Braveheart. The people who went in, the two murderers, a lot of people talked about did those films influence them or did they not, but that day was called Natural Born Killers Day in celebration of the movie about serial killers that they watched, you know, over 50 times. They wore black trench coats because they saw The Basketball Diaries with Leonardo DiCaprio where Leonardo DiCaprio wore a black trench coat and fantasized about going in and shooting his classmates.</p>
<p>And I know that there’s always that debate about, you know, can films influence people, you know, to do bad things and I think that if you look at it logically, if you buy the fact that great art and great music can inspire us and make us better people and want us to be better people, you know, you just have to buy that corollary, as well, that it can appeal to our darker natures and our darker angels and so I went out with a business plan.</p>
<p>The only problem was I had never made a film and I didn’t know how to write a business plan. So my wife bought me Business Plans for Dummies at Barnes and Noble. We wrote up a business plan with my old roommate from college, a great guy named Cary Granite, and Cary had made the educational classics Scream, Scary Movie, Children of the Corn VI, VII, VIII, IX, and X, and he was just the perfect guy to go in to make these new transformational, inspirational stories.</p>
<p>So we went around everywhere like the odd couple trying to raise money about films that would be based on great books and great people and literature and got laughed out of every venture capital private equity firm in the country and I still remember my first meeting with one VC in Massachusetts. The guy said to me, “Well, look, I understand your idea but where’s your P&amp;L?” and I said, “Well, what’s a P&amp;L?” He said, “It’s a profit and loss statement. It’s the cornerstone of every business. You don’t have one of those?” And so I bought a book on P&amp;Ls for dummies and then we were out of money and the last meeting that we could afford was a meeting with a gentleman in Denver, named Phil Anschutz and about 10 minutes into our pitch about making this new film company, Phil said, “Okay. I understand. I get it,” and I said, “Well, thank you for your time. Do you know where we can catch a cab?” and he said, “No. I’m interested in investing.” I said, “You’re kidding me!” And he said, “No. I just would like to get a better idea. I love books and I love history and I really think that film could have an impact and I’d love to get an idea of what kind of movies you guys are going to make.”</p>
<p>And he goes, “Why don’t we just break for lunch and you’ll come back?” and I’d never thought the plan out that far. So I called my wife. She was a fifth grade teacher at St. Peter’s and I said, “Look. I need some books. Give me some ideas for some books,” and so she went through her fifth grade reading list at St. Peter’s. She’s like, “Okay. Got a pen?” I said, “Yeah.” She goes, “Okay. Charlotte’s Web, Bridge to Terabithia, Holes, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” and I wrote them all down. I said, “Well, these are the movies, you know, the research and the focus groups are telling us that they’d really like to see” and so we went out and we optioned all of them and then, you know, we were able to go and make feature films out of all of them and that’s where it all began, was with my wife’s fifth grade reading list at St. Peter’s.</p>
<p>And so as we were starting up, we realized one of the things we wanted to do is really tie in the films to education because a lot of kids are in lousy schools and this is their one chance to really get them inspired and get them excited about things.</p>
<p>We’re always trying to tie things in, but as I was sort of growing in my faith and reading these books, I realized that these were a lot more than kids’ books and at that point, I had memorized another verse of Scripture, so I was up to two, and that one was Hebrews 11:1 which is “the substance of faith is the hope in the unseen,” and I think that’s one of the things for all of us who are believers.</p>
<p>Lisa, you talk about this in your book about Heaven which is fantastic, which is once you get down to these basics, well, tell me about Heaven. You know, once people are looking for the specifics, we get a little nervous that, you know, we’re going to look crazy, you know, because we pray, you know, to an unseen God and we believe in things that we can’t see and we can’t feel and we can’t touch and that is the major point of all of children’s literature.</p>
<p>It really is the common theme that runs through it. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Lucy says that she’s been to a place called Narnia, and her brothers say she’s crazy. They go and appeal to the professor. They want to hear some logic from him and, borrowing from Lewis’s trilemma, he says, “There’s only three options. Either your sister’s a liar, she’s a lunatic, or she’s telling you the truth.”</p>
<p>In Charlotte’s Web, Fern goes to her mother and tells her that she’s having these great conversations out in the barn with Wilbur the Pig and Charlotte the Spider. So the mother does what any good suburban mother would do and she goes to see a therapist and she says, “Listen, I think my daughter has lost her mind. She’s talking about talking animals,” and he says, “Well, what makes you think she’s lost her mind?” She goes, “Well, it can’t be true, can it?” The therapist goes, “I don’t know. Maybe we just haven’t been listening. Maybe animals have been talking to us and the sad news is there’s a word for what your daughter’s going through. It’s called childhood and one day it’s going to pass.”</p>
<p>And then another film that we made, Bridge to Terabithia, was about a young girl who was a non-believer and she was friends with a boy and the only book in his entire house was the Bible and so that was the only book that he ever drew upon and what ended up was they imagined this land called Terabithia because if you ever look at the Narnia books, there’s an outlying province there called Terabithia and so she introduced this boy to the wonderful world of literature and really opened up his mind and they would have all these great conversations.</p>
<p>One conversation they had was he was sort of embarrassed and he took her to his church one day and said, “Listen. It’s Easter. I’d like you to come,” and he was nervous that her parents were intellectuals. They had never been to church. She had never been to church, and he didn’t know how she was going to react and so afterwards, he sort of sheepishly said to her, “Well, what’d you think?” She goes, “What did I think? I think Jesus is the coolest person I ever heard of. He’s like Aslan or Abraham Lincoln. He just wanted people to love each other and then they killed him. What a great story.”</p>
<p>And it is a great story and it’s a story that we miss out so much on and I think we also a lot of times miss out on the way Jesus approached questions. Philip Yancey talks about how, in the New Testament, Jesus is asked 183 questions and he only gives direct answers to three of them and the rest of the time he would always respond with a story. One of those stories that we’ve heard so much is the story of the Prodigal Son and the more that I read that story and the more that I read great works by people like Pastor Tim Keller, the more I realized that this is the story of the Prodigal Sons, plural.</p>
<p>We all know what happened with the youngest son, but we don’t hear much about that elder son who was constantly asking about his rights and constantly appealing to justice. How can this be fair and that’s when I realized for a lot of times Hollywood’s representations of Christians represent the elder son.</p>
<p>They talk about the person who is always protesting the world shouldn’t be like this, the world shouldn’t operate like this. This is the way things should be. This is the way we have to do things and too often we miss out on the other Son. That’s in there and let’s face it. That Son is what great stories are made out of.</p>
<p>There’s no greater story than someone who has been redeemed, someone who’s reconciled, someone who has turned a leaf and gone on to have a completely new life. So many times—I remember one of the big movies when I was growing up on cable was Footloose and in that one, the Christian came into town to ban dancing. You probably all saw Cape Fear where Robert De Niro had Scripture tattooed on his back and so for a lot of times, these are the representations we have of people who believe.</p>
<p>Either if they have Scripture, it’s tattooed in permanent ink somewhere on their body or they hate dancing and there really wasn’t much else in there to talk about and so when—after we had made a lot of these books into films, we were looking to see what are some books we can make about great people. Phil always loved this idea of William Wilberforce, how one person armed with faith can change the world, and he called me one day and he said, “Do you know who William Wilberforce is?” and again growing up Catholic, I could give you the lives of the saints. I could tell you everyone. I don’t know any of these Protestant virtual saints and so I—oh, yeah, of course, Phil. William Wilberforce. Do you mean the classic British statesman and Reformer who—you know, just read him verbatim the Wikipedia entry. He’s like, “You have no idea who I’m talking about, do you?”</p>
<p>And so I had to quickly study up on Wilberforce and the only books that were out there were these really thick books out there, these huge biographies. So my wife went to the Christian Bookstore where I bought the fish and she found me this book, Heroes of the Christian Faith. It was 88 pages on William Wilberforce and that was perfect for me and we ended up getting about 10 lines from that book into the film.</p>
<p>But the really cool thing that happened during that film is the writer, Steven Knight, who’s a great writer, never had a conversation with him about faith, but he loved the story. He thought that it was an amazing story and we all particularly liked the idea of this character John Newton and a lot of you probably know the story of John Newton but it’s worthy of review.</p>
<p>John Newton was guilty of the worst crimes against humanity. John Newton was a slave trader, in his own words, a slave trader and an infidel, and one night as his ship was going down in the Atlantic after, you know, a successful passage of selling slaves, John Newton said a prayer to God and he said, listen, if you can spare this ship, I will turn my life around. I will put you first in my life and I will become a great Christian and so as the Sunday school lessons tell us, John Newton then went and wrote Amazing Grace and became an abolitionist.</p>
<p>What we realized when we were making the film is the real-life story was a lot more complicated. What happened when John Newton got into town is he said to himself, listen, I’m going to become a Christian, so no more swearing and no more dancing and these slaves are going to love me. I am going to be the most moral slave trader in all of England and at the time, there was no contradiction with that and how could there be?</p>
<p>You know, when the Crown, elements of the Church, and most of British polite society said, you know, slavery’s fine, we can reconcile that with Christianity, but it was over time that Newton’s heart started to soften and soon the things that broke God’s heart began to break Newton’s heart and over those course of years, he finally truly understood what it was like and he became a writer of hymns and he became a great abolitionist and so when you hear that word, “Amazing Grace, I once was blind but now can see,” that isn’t about someone going from non-belief to belief, that is about someone who thinks that they believe and thinks that they understand and until they really start to look at the world around them and really try to figure out what is this proper response, that they begin to behave differently.</p>
<p>We always are trying to do more and more of these kind of stories and these kind of films because we really believe that culture is upstream from politics. Earlier we were talking about a lot of the problems that we have. A lot of things are happening in the Middle East and we’re all looking for political solutions.</p>
<p>What Wilberforce understood was that you have to change hearts and minds before you can change any laws and that’s why one of the first people Wilberforce made an alliance with was Wedgwood and Wedgwood made a beautiful pendant that had a picture of a slave and it said, “Am I not a man and a brother?”</p>
<p>And then Thomas Clarkson would go and he would speak at all of the high schools and all the colleges, talking about this. These guys took a long view of social change. They didn’t expect things to change overnight. They knew that they were in for it, for a long haul and those stories are so powerful that once, Philip Yancey, again another great writer that I quoted earlier, someone was asking him—a Russian dissident was staying at his house and he was talking to him about the spread of Christianity in Russia and this is in the ‘80s and Yancey said to him, “I don’t buy it. How could this be happening in a country where, you know, idols are forbidden and where a lot of the most beautiful churches are being turned into cruel museums for Communist propaganda? How can people be hearing the stories of Jesus?” He goes, “It’s easy. You know, in all of their totalitarian rage, the dictators forgot one thing. They forgot to ban Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, the most perfect representations of the Gospel in modern times.”</p>
<p>And so the story of an all-loving, all-merciful, all-forgiving God came through in those pages to them and as we’re looking forward, one of the things we’re always looking for are new stories. We’re looking for great people in history and we’re looking for great books and they don’t always have to be right on the nose to tell the story of faith.</p>
<p>Dorothy Day, a great Catholic nun, used to say, “I think the Lord likes it when we read books that he didn’t write,” and I think that there’s a lot to the fact that these books might actually be inspired and he might even have a rather indirect hand in their creation and so we’re always looking for those kind of stories and right now there’s two stories that I really like that we’re working on.</p>
<p>The first story is a true story of a gentleman named Desmond Doss and Desmond Doss grew up poor in Tennessee in a tiny one-room house and his mother was a devout Christian and his father was a raging alcoholic and they had a tapestry of the 10 Commandants on their wall. Desmond used to look over at the picture of Thou Shalt Not Kill and there was a picture of Cain killing Abel and Desmond would say to his mother, “I don’t get that. How could a man kill his own brother?” And his mother said to him, “Desmond, you’ve got to understand the human heart is capable of every good and every evil and you always have to watch out for that.”</p>
<p>A week later after she told her son about this, his alcoholic father went into the house, having a fight with Desmond’s uncle, his own brother, and he went in to get the gun and went out to shoot his own brother, take his own brother’s life.</p>
<p>The mother got out, heroically intervened, handed the gun to Desmond and said, “You need to go bury this gun because if the police find it, your father could go to jail for a long time.”</p>
<p>Desmond went outside in his backyard, buried that gun, looked up into the heavens and said, “Okay, God. I now understand how a man could take his own brother’s life. Thank you for sparing them. I promise you I’ll never touch a gun as long as I live.” Ten years later, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. First person to show up in line to register for the draft is Desmond Doss and they said, “Is there anything else we need to know about you?” He said, “Yeah. I refuse to carry a gun.” They said, “Okay. You’re a conscientious objector. You get over there.” He goes, “I’m not a conscientious objector. I’m a conscientious cooperator. I just can’t carry a gun.” And they said, “What kind of religion is this that says that you can’t carry a gun?” He said, “I’m not talking about religion. I’m talking about a relationship. I made a promise to God that I wouldn’t carry a gun and I’m not going to break that promise.”</p>
<p>So Desmond goes through all of these different things, court martials and everything else. Everyone is trying to kick this guy out. He wants to be a medic because it’s his belief that in war you need people who will take life and people who will save life and he just wanted to be on the saving life side.</p>
<p>Finally, he’s able to win things as a medic and when everyone else is going through their maneuvers, practicing with guns, Desmond is going back to his Eagle Scout days and he’s practicing making different knots out of different ropes and once again he’s the object of scorn and derision because people are like, oh, look, Doss is going to save us all from the enemy with his ropes. You better watch out and so they get to Okinawa and they were set up.</p>
<p>Desmond’s unit was actually set up for an ambush. One hundred and twenty people were left to die at the top of this escarpment and they were treated. Desmond Doss, against the orders of his commander, climbed up the side of that rock and lowered 120 men down to safety and the way he was able to lower them down to safety was because he had this elaborate knot that he was doing when everyone else was practicing with the rifles and they were teasing him that that would never—it ended up saving nearly all of his men.</p>
<p>The next day, Doss went into battle. He was shot to ribbons and when he got to the Mercy Ship for the first time, his fellow men saw him collapse into tears and they said, listen, we have morphine, don’t worry, you’ll feel better. He said, “I’m not crying about the pain. I’m crying because I lost my Bible,” the Bible that had sustained him, that his fiancée gave him at the train station, the Bible that he was never without throughout the entire war. So this commander who was once a skeptic radios back and he’s like, “Guys, you’ve got to find Doss’s Bible.”</p>
<p>So now all these people that made his life really difficult are risking their lives looking everywhere, looking behind rocks, as they’re taking enemy fire, looking for the Word of God. Desmond Doss went on to become the first and only conscientious objector to ever win the Congressional Medal of Honor and after he got the Congressional Medal of Honor, he got a gift from his men which was the Bible that they made sure that they had found. The reason why I love that story is I don’t think that we really appreciate paradox anymore.</p>
<p>Paradox is a very key part of the New Testament and we’re always trying to reconcile things and the stories that I love are the stories about slave traders that become abolitionists, conscientious objectors that become war heroes, and that’s the kind of transformational thing I think that can happen when people have a deep abiding trust and love in our Creator.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Where did you hear the Desmond Doss story?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: There was a documentary, The Conscientious Objector, that was done that maybe only played like in one or two Christian film festivals and a producer found it and brought it to us and it’s an amazing story and about two years ago—I love talking about Desmond Doss and talking about his pacifism.</p>
<p>One of the things that’s interesting right now that’s happening is the growth of global Christianity. I think that not only is that a story that’s not being told, it’s certainly not a story that Hollywood is telling.</p>
<p>You think about people were talking about Egypt earlier but what’s going to happen to those 10 million or so Coptic Christians? This is the front lines. I mean, these are people risking their lives because of what they believe and in one place where this is really interesting, which I think could make a great film, and again we’re not making it, but some day I hope that someone could come in with a great idea, is what’s happening in China and there’s two interesting things that are happening.</p>
<p>Both of them have been brought to light by a good friend of mine who’s in Bible study, whose name is Chai Ling. Chai Ling was the Supreme Commander at Tiananmen Square and so she was the person that you see on top of the boxes with the megaphone, talking to everybody, trying to rally the troops, and after the tanks rolled in that night, Ling was rescued by a community of Buddhists who all risked their lives to get her over to Hong Kong and after that, she made her way to France and then she became one of these classic American stories.</p>
<p>She went to the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, got her Master’s there, then worked at Bane, then went to Harvard Business School, and then started a very successful business. Ten years before that, she was in a crate being smuggled around different provinces in China.</p>
<p>So it really is sort of the American dream, but she also felt an enormous emptiness and she said, “I can’t believe this. Here I am. I’ve had all the material things I thought that I ever wanted and I feel just as empty as I felt as when I was in Tiananmen,” and she realized that the reason why she felt so empty was because she hadn’t accepted God into her life and so Ling became a Christian and then asked God what is it that you expect me to do next?</p>
<p>Ling is always dying to get back into China. She still to this day, I think, is fourth on the Most Wanted List in China. So she can’t go back, but the one thing that she is really dedicating her life to now is abolishing China’s one-child policy which is, you know, a pretty pure unmistakable form of evil that not many people are doing anything about.</p>
<p>I mean, I think if you want to review the numbers very quickly, I think that there’s basically a hundred million girls missing in China right now because of selective abortion. The ancient preference for boys over girls that takes place in China that’s happening there and also the one-child policy, if you really think about it, how do you enforce a coercive policy like this if someone gets pregnant? Well, you kill the baby and so in a lot of these provinces in China where this is happening is when women are getting pregnant, they are being forced to have abortions. She’s brought back some pretty compelling pictures from China, official government slogans that say things like “10 Graves Are Better Than One Birth,” and what’s happening there is coupled with the fact that there’s now probably over 100 million Christians and these people are really believers in the Gospel and they’re doing everything they can to carry out and protect the innocent. So you have these two things that are really starting to come into opposition.</p>
<p>And then at the same time, you also have a population where I think right now there’s probably somewhere between 30 and 40 million men in China of marriage age that will never get married. So the disparity is continuing to grow and it’s out of control right now.</p>
<p>When you think about that, that’s sort of the equivalent of the entire American male population that’s eligible for marriage. So picture if not a single American was eligible for marriage right now, and knew that he would never get married. What would happen there?</p>
<p>So those are the kinds of things that we’re hoping to do in the future and from my perspective, there’s nothing that makes for a better story and nothing is more powerful in terms of that real transformational element than when somebody lets God into their life and really does their best to put God in charge. Again everything from children’s literature to historical biographies, there’s so many great examples of this, and I’d just love to take some questions now.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Great. Thank you, Micheal.</p>
<p>Well, I get the first question. Have you had some commercial success with these movies?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Yes. Well, as Phil likes to say, he’s got three different kinds of businesses. He has his for-profit businesses, his not-for-profit businesses, and his intended-for-profit businesses, and we fall into the intended-for-profit category, but it’s all rather up and down because, you know, we’re in a hits business.</p>
<p>So sometimes when a movie like Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe comes out, Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe made $750 million at the box office. It made probably another half a billion dollars in DVDs and everything else, but these films are really expensive to make. You know, they can cost over $200 million and the cost to advertise them also can be over a $100 million.</p>
<p>So it’s incredibly capital-intensive and I think one of the things that’s going to make a big difference is when people figure out not only how to make movies for less (people have proven that they can do that). The real challenge is how do you get the word out about a great movie and how do you advertise these movies for less because until you can get over—I think the average cost for advertising a movie is about $40 million and so that’s even if you make—I’m sure you guys saw Paranormal Activity or heard about that, the movie that was made for $15,000.</p>
<p>Well, it was $15,000 plus the $30 million that Paramount spent advertising it. So that’s the other part of the equation that really needs to get figured out and I think with social media, there is a real possibility for that, as well. More stories can be told.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: And before I move to our colleagues, what was your role in Waiting for Superman?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Well, we’ve always been interested in education as a civil rights issue and so we’re always out there looking for a project and we’re actually starting to shoot a film in May called Still I Rise,&#160;the title comes from the&#160;great Maya Angelou poem, about what happens when two mothers refuse to wait any more.</p>
<p>So many times, moms are told, yeah, the school’s going to get better, just give us another year, give us another two years, and then, you know, you’ve run out of time and so after that movie played at Sundance, I read a review of it and we called Participant, who were the producers, and we asked them, can we buy into this movie? And so we came alongside Participant as producers of that.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Okay. Paul Farhi.</p>
<p>Paul Farhi</p>
<p>PAUL FARHI, The Washington Post: Thanks very much, Micheal. I’m wondering what you see as the spiritual dimension of Waiting for Superman, if there is such a dimension to it, as opposed to plain old public policy.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Yeah. We don’t exclusively do spiritual films. So I don’t really see a spiritual dimension to Waiting for Superman. I do think, however, though, that the Church is now starting to get heavily involved in education reform and I really think that they could make a really positive mark if they got more involved.</p>
<p>You know, with Martin Luther King, I think in his letter from Birmingham jail, where he says, “too often people tell us to wait” because if you remember, Dr. King was criticized by people who were alongside him, saying take your time. Don’t upset the apple cart, we gotta go slowly at this, and it was Dr. King who said wait means never, justice delayed is justice denied, and that’s what’s happening right now, particularly in an issue like public education where poor minority communities are so adversely affected.</p>
<p>For me, I do see a strong spiritual dimension in that ed reform debate. We’d like to bring up more about it but this whole idea that we don’t worry about other people’s children and that we’re only fighting for our own kids and we have—if we really look at these people and consider them sons and daughters of God in the same way that our own children are, I think that’s what’s going to have to happen.</p>
<p>If it continues to be a public policy debate, I don’t think anything’s ever going to get done. If it becomes a true social justice civil rights issue, then there might be a chance.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Now, let me ask you—I have several people on the list but I want to jump in.</p>
<p>What about the movie—and maybe you can’t speak to this on the record but the movie—the Narnia movies. I understand that there’s been some argument about the content of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the various themes.</p>
<p>Have you all been able to navigate that debate about what can and cannot be done in a Hollywood movie?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: I tried and I gave up and I think this is something that Jim Daly goes through and a lot of people go through and, you know, Tolstoy wrote about this. He just says, I can’t believe this, that here I am with the Russian Orthodox people and they’re telling me, don’t listen to those Methodists and those Episcopalians. They don’t know anything and then I go and talk to the Methodists and it’s like, oh, those Russian Orthodox people are off their rocker, don’t listen to them.</p>
<p>When we’re developing these films, internally there will be a lot of discussion about what to include and what not to include and there’s a pivotal scene at the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe which is basically the Gospel which is when Aslan comes back from the dead, Lucy and Susan look at him and say, “Well, how’d you do it? I saw you die,” and Aslan says, “Well, there’s a deeper magic, and it was written that when an innocent person gives up his life for a traitor, that time will stop and death itself will be reversed.”</p>
<p>Beautiful line and right up until about a month before we locked the film, the line was, “There’s a deeper magic. It’s based on what’s right and what’s wrong. Always do right,” which is a totally different movie and he should have kept going with some hygiene tips from Jeffrey, comb your hair, brush your teeth, always do what’s right, and so there was an internal battle over that and then we did it right, but then even once that’s out there, you get criticized.</p>
<p>The same thing happened on Amazing Grace the day that that movie came out. A big thing in the Wall Street Journal about how Wilberforce’s life was whitewashed and this is a film where I fought to have lines put in there like “I’m a great sinner and Christ is a great savior,” you know, “Christianity leads to action as well as meditation,” and so there’s always going to be people out there saying you didn’t do enough and that’s the one that really sort of grates on me the most but you just have to start to accept it.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Okay. Mike Gerson, then Dan, and then Shelby and Tom and Fred.</p>
<p>MICHAEL GERSON, The Washington Post: You asked my question.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: The one I asked?</p>
<p>MR. GERSON: Mm-hmm.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Okay. Excellent.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: That also came up in Voyage of The Dawn Treader, too. At the very end of that film, you know, you have Reepicheep, a foot and a half of courage, you know, the brave mouse who’s always running around and Reepicheep’s great because he represents Lewis’s sort of faith based on reason because Lewis finally came around and he said, “Well, look, if I’m hungry, I can eat, if I’m thirsty, I can drink, if I’m horny, I can have sex, but what do I do about this sort of other hole that I can’t get any sort of satisfaction for? It must be that I wasn’t made for this world. I was made for another world and that’s the God-shaped hole,” and that’s what happens at the end of The Voyage of the Drawn Treader. They get to Aslan’s country, Heaven, in Narnia, and Reepicheep decides that he wants to go on and that we had a lot of discussions over that scene, as well, in terms of how that would be done and it was interesting and again I recommend Lisa Miller’s book on Heaven for people who haven’t read it yet.</p>
<p>We decided that we were going to just stick with what Lewis did because if the second you start to see Heaven, it’s always going to fall short. So all we wanted to do was sort of see the look on Reepicheep’s eyes that he had finally made it there and not represent that and then there’s also that line at the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treader in the book where Aslan says, you know, “In your world I have another name. You must learn to know me by it. That’s the whole reason why you came to Narnia by knowing me here a little you will know me better there.”</p>
<p>And so everyone had their eyes on that line. Would it be in? Would it be in? And not being there, again the battle went on right up until towards the end. The line got in there but then, you know, Liam Neeson and some other producers were asked about the meaning of that line and they were like, oh, no, no, I don’t really think of Aslan as Christ. He’s more kind of like Buddha and he’s more like Mohammad and he’s more—so I remember my wife reading me the article and she says there goes your day. And so, for the rest of the day, we’re doing damage control on that kind of stuff.</p>
<p>But, you know, these guys are actors and it’s always tough when they get drawn into really tricky theological questions and debates and, you know, as long as they’re delivering the line and doing it well, I mean, I really don’t care what they think behind it.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Dan Gilgoff. Dan, you’re up.</p>
<p>Dan Gilgoff</p>
<p>DAN GILGOFF, CNN: It seems like a lot of your films could be described as Christian films, at the same time they’re not kind of ostentatiously Christian, like—</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Correct.</p>
<p>MR. GILGOFF:—a film like The Passion of the Christ which I think provoked a lot of us to start paying much more attention to films that were overtly Christian, that were marketed to Christian audiences, and I’m wondering if your films appeal to a Christian audience but certainly to a much broader audience and so you don’t have to be one or the other to take in one of those films and to find meaning in it.</p>
<p>And I’m wondering how much of that is by design. Are you responding to a trend of Christian media from a previous generation that you felt tried too much to bang you over the head with its Christianity or to proselytize and how much stuff comes to you that you kind of reject for that reason, if that’s part of your MO?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Yes. Well, what was interesting was sort of for the first decade it was easy because we were just going by that reading list and what’s amazing is those books that kids read, they all have those great themes and the stories behind those stories are amazing.</p>
<p>Bridge to Terabithia is a story, as I told you earlier, about the little girl who dies at the end of that movie and the boy is left struggling with the reasons for trying to figure out why that all happened. The woman who wrote that book, Katherine Patterson, her son lost his best friend when she was only in the second grade. She got struck by lightening and died.</p>
<p>So his mom wrote that book as a way for her son to try to heal and for us, what we’re really interested in is the big questions and so religion answers a lot of those. Science, you know, answers a lot of those and so what is truth, what is justice, what is friendship, what is loyalty, that’s what we always go after, and if, in the basis of the story, there’s someone in there that represents the spiritual point of view, that’s great.</p>
<p>This is going to sound very Hollywood but my therapist wrote a book that we did a documentary on and—</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>—he’s a professor at Harvard, his name’s Armond Nicolai, and for 30 years Armond has been teaching a class at Harvard that says the way that the world looks at the big questions, why do bad things happen to good people, is there life after death, can basically be looked at one of two ways. Can be looked at through a spiritual lens, best articulated by C.S. Lewis, or it can be looked at through a secular lens, best articulated through Sigmund Freud. So I’ve always thought that was a really interesting way to approach things, and as long as the people are representing their point of views to the best degree possible, for me, someone that really believes in the Holy Spirit, as long as you can get people asking the questions…</p>
<p>I think too long we try to do the work of the Holy Spirit. If we can just get people’s minds on these big questions, they’ll eventually discover the truth.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Shelby Coffey.</p>
<p>Shelby Coffey</p>
<p>SHELBY COFFEY, Newseum: This is a question of beyond the fifth grade reading list. Where are you looking now for particular stories? Books? Documentaries? You’ve mentioned a couple in passing.</p>
<p>Secondly, in terms of the influences on your own work in writing the scripts and working with them, you obviously have to pay attention to the rest of the media landscape. So what movies are you seeing that you wouldn’t make that you have to think about being an influence on the viewing habits of the audiences you’re trying to reach and have to take into account in your own construction of the story?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: In terms of where we’re looking right now, we’re still looking at books but that’s sort of been picked clean. There aren’t that many books out there in the children’s literature space that have big followings. There’s one that we love called The Giver which is a fantastic book about, you know, this dystopia.</p>
<p>One of the things we’re seeing right now is the biggest thing out there right now for kids, it was wizards and then it was vampires and now it’s dystopias. It’s a pretty amazing thing to look at.</p>
<p>The best-selling series out there right now is a series called The Hunger Games and has anyone here read that one? It’s an unbelievable read. It’s one of the best page-turners I’ve read in the last few years. It’s again about this dystopia that has 13 different districts and each year there’s a lottery where one boy and one girl is chosen from each district to fight to the death on a reality show until only one person is left standing.</p>
<p>There’s so many of those kind of stories and a lot of people look at those and think they’re sort of bleak and what does this say about spirituality and I think it reflects a really sort of healthy response because what always happens is our hero in these things rejects materialism and because the woman that wins the hunger game, she can have a life of luxury and comfort the rest of her life and she rejects it to take on this totalitarian regime. The same thing happens in The Giver. These people are always taking those things on.</p>
<p>We’re publishing our own books now and so for us that’s one way around the really expensive route of developing—just seeing if it will work and investing a $100 million in a story and that’s been a big help. We got lucky and one of the first books we published won the Newberry Medal which is a prestigious thing for kids literature.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: What book was that?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: It’s called Savvy. It’s about a home-schooled Christian family that goes on a pink bus to save their father that’s in a coma. Home-schooled Christian families, I thought were going to be up there with vampires and zombies, but that genre hasn’t taken off but we’re hoping, and so we’re developing that into a movie.</p>
<p>We’re finding great screenwriters. Frank Cottrell Boyce, who wrote the book Millions, which was a great movie that Danny Boyle directed, he wrote a book for us called Cosmic which is a great book about parenting. That’s where we’re looking, and then in terms of films that we wouldn’t make, I can’t—I just love movies, so I can’t think of that many that we wouldn’t do.</p>
<p>MR. COFFEY: I meant, what were you seeing that was influencing where you see these are the films that younger people are looking at, they’re influenced by that then influence what you do, not necessarily—</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Oh, yeah.</p>
<p>MR. COFFEY:—what you would make.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: It’s amazing when you look at book sales and again this is something that no one in Hollywood really does and also just talking to librarians. Librarians can predict before a book comes out how it’s going to do. It is really amazing. They have a sixth sense and it makes sense because they’re pros. This is what they do and they really understand stories. They understand the components of a story, the elements of a great story.</p>
<p>We just talk to them in terms of children’s stories. They really know where it’s going and, for example, there was this book series Diary of a Wimpy Kid and we tried to do that and we decided not to. It wasn’t commercial. The sequel opened last weekend, a $25 million opening weekend, bigger than Narnia, and so, and it cost like, less than lunch, and so it’s amazing but if you look at Narnia, just as an example,—</p>
<p>MR. COFFEY: If it makes you feel any better, Irving Thalberg took a pass on Gone With The Wind on the grounds that no civil war movie ever made a nickel.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: You know, there’s a lot of those kind of things. People love to generalize like that but with Narnia, the thing that amazed me was Lion, Witch, came out and we thought, oh, this is easy. There’s six more of these things and it’s just—you know, we can just keep printing money and then Prince Caspian came out and it made half of what Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe made. Then I looked at the book sales and Prince Caspian only sold half of the books of Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe, and then Voyage of the Dawn Treader came out over Christmas and it sold 50 percent less tickets here in the U.S. than Prince Caspian sold and then perfect correlation, 50 percent less in terms of book sales.</p>
<p>And so it is pretty amazing and there are always—you know, there are exceptions to these things but these are stories that have been around for 60 years and readers have been able to make their choice about what they like and what they don’t like and so, I actually love The Magician’s Nephew. It’s my favorite book in Narnia and so I try to use that book to try and couch it in real business philosophy.</p>
<p>That’s how we got to do Magician’s Nephew next because Silver Chair, which is next in the sequence, that sold the fewest books out of all of them, and so that it’s good to look at those book sales, to look at those trends and then also just to talk to kids and teachers and librarians.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Tom is next, then Fred, and Sally. Tom?</p>
<p>Tom Krattenmaker</p>
<p>TOM KRATTENMAKER, USA Today: Dan asked the question I was going to ask, so compliments to you, but let me take it out to a broader context.</p>
<p>I’m interested in the whole notion of sort of Christian culture, Christian rock music, Christian magazines, Christian media. I know some edgy young evangelical musicians who hate the whole idea of doing Christian rock music and are breaking out of that.</p>
<p>Maybe you could comment on what you see happening in this regard, maybe on the wisdom, the whole idea of having this enclave Christian pop culture.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Yes. I forget what the exact Lewis quote is but we don’t need more Christian novelists, we need more novelists who are Christians. I like a lot of that music. I like a lot, but I think it’s self-defeating and this whole ghetto that’s been built up really marginalizes us and when I look at one of the most successful musicals in the history of Broadway theater, Les Miserables, I mean, it doesn’t get any more on the nose Christian than Les Miserables.</p>
<p>You know, “my soul belongs to God, I know I made that promise long ago, gave me hope and hope is gone, strength to carry on,” I mean, but no one calls that a Christian musical and then you, you know, read U2’s lyrics, you read interviews with Bono where he talks about grace. You go to a U2 concert and he puts a psalm to words but no one’s calling them a Christian band and so I think what people should do is not retreat one inch from what they love and what inspires them and what they like, but I do think that it would be helpful for them just to go out there and just be known as great artists because a lot of these folks that are Christian musicians, they can compete on any level and then there’s sort of the backlash where you have people who just go nuts.</p>
<p>“We’re not a Christian band, man, don’t call us that,” and so it’s just that whole problem with labels, you know. Are you a Christian band or aren’t you? And then there’s that great story of The Fray got rejected, I think, by every Christian music label because they didn’t have enough JPMs, Jesuses Per Minute, in their songs and so they—</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>—sent their disk on Sony and it goes on to be, you know, number one album on Billboard and so that was the best thing that ever happened to them, that they went out there in the mainstream.</p>
<p>And again, you listen to those lyrics, they’re about longing and suffering and redemption and reconciliation and, you know, one of their number one songs was about a conversation with God. “Where were you when everything was falling apart?” Very direct. So in terms of all that, there’s a lot of Christian music and Christian films and everything else I love but I just love them on their own because they’re great stories and great musicians who are contributing to all that.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Before we go to Fred, Fred Barnes is next, you’ve mentioned Lisa Miller’s book at least three times. Are you going to do a movie about Lisa’s book?</p>
<p>LISA MILLER, Newsweek/Daily Beast: How about optioning that?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Yeah. You know what I think? And it’s available on Kindle. So if people are looking for it, but, no, what’s great about that is, you know, there’s just not much in Scripture about that and I think that there are a lot of films, and the great thing about films is they deal with the supernatural. They deal with other worlds.</p>
<p>I mean, you mentioned Lovely Bones in your book and for Peter Jackson that was a big challenge for him cinematically. How do I represent Heaven because when people read the book, it’s a 14-year-old girl’s idea of what Heaven is going to be like and I think that’s one of the reasons that movie disappointed, is because it always is going to fall short.</p>
<p>The writer for Wired, I forget who—Kevin Kelly. This is where I see Lisa’s book going, is Kevin Kelly’s book was mandatory reading before people filmed The Matrix. The Matrix wasn’t based on his writing but in order to understand where society was heading, people read it and I really think that for anyone that has any component of other worlds and everything else, it’s all right there and the people in Hollywood would love it because you really don’t have to give you attribution because you can just read it and just say, oh, yeah, well, let me give you a little history on this because you’ve pulled it all into one place. It’s fantastic.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Okay. Fred Barnes.</p>
<p>Fred Barnes</p>
<p>FRED BARNES, The Weekly Standard: I wanted to follow up about Christian movies, I mean, really specifically Christian movies. I see a lot of ads in Christian magazines for movies that are not scheduled at my neighborhood theater anyway and I assume they’re just circulated among churches and at least distributed that way.</p>
<p>I have seen a couple of these Christian movies made by that church in Albany, Georgia. Facing the Giants was one about a football team and the other one, I can’t remember the name of the other one. They made about three or four of them, which—Fireproof, yeah. I have seen Fireproof.</p>
<p>They are professional but not as professional as movies you all make. So my question is this: Is there a serious movement among Christians to make movies and do you see this leading to movies that would be appealing to a secular audience?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: I think so, and it’s interesting when you watch Facing the Giants and then watch Fireproof. You see the improvements these guys are making.</p>
<p>MR. BARNES: Indeed.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: And I just love the fact that they’re in the ring and that’s the best way to learn, is just to get out there and start to make these films and they’re getting better at their craft. They’re getting better at story-telling and that’s what I love to see because film, it’s tough because there’s maybe only between a hundred and 150 major releases each year.</p>
<p>So to be one of those 150 is tough and there’s so many people just sitting there waiting tables and doing other things waiting to get their shot rather than just going out there and making the films.</p>
<p>So I have seen more of that and the problem is, and I’ve hit the lottery. I totally lucked out in terms of how I fell into this business, but it’s certainly not a scalable model, as the investors like to tell us, and I think too many—there’s no bench.</p>
<p>You know, there’s no bench strength in Hollywood for Christians and I think that everyone is getting out of film school and there’s this idea of let me become a director and it’s something kind of interesting that I’m noticing about some of these younger believers, is that really trying to explain to them the whole idea of paying your dues and at the same time explaining to them the idea of living your life. It’s probably not the best idea to move to Hollywood when you’re 21 and expect that you’re going to have some real great stories to share. Go live your life, travel, do some different experiences, do things.</p>
<p>So I think that there needs to be a bit of an attitude shift there, too, in terms of how it can all happen.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: But one part of Fred’s question was do you see more of this happening?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Oh, without a doubt, but the problem is people are divorcing production from distribution and there are a lot of great people who invest in these films. I mean, films aren’t cheap, no matter how you do it. So you see one of those movies and you know that someone has been separated from at least hundreds of thousands of dollars, probably millions, to get that film made but it was made without any idea of how to bring it to market, and there’s only, you know, maybe five studios that are out there and once your film is done, as you can imagine, you don’t have much negotiation strength when you only have five places to go and you were sitting on this million dollar asset that has a lot of interest against each month. So you’ll take anything to get it out into the theaters.</p>
<p>What would be great is if a lot of filmmakers would get together and figure out how to create a distribution pipeline.</p>
<p>SPEAKER: They call it United Artists.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Yeah. Exactly. I think the name’s for sale. Yeah. There’s something that could be done there.</p>
<p>So that’s the thing, Fred, yes, there’s more and more of those movies but still no real thought to how they’re going to distribute them and that’s been the biggest problem.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Okay. Sally Quinn, and then Lisa Miller.</p>
<p>Sally Quinn</p>
<p>SALLY QUINN, The Washington Post: Well, first, I would like to reiterate what you said about Lisa’s book which is absolutely fabulous. Everyone should read it, if they haven’t read it, go out and buy it immediately, because—</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: The title is again?</p>
<p>MS. QUINN: And it should be—Heaven it’s called and it should be a movie.</p>
<p>But you were—just following up on the Hollywood question, how are you viewed in Hollywood? It is a rather secular industry, and do people see you as a little weird or kind of a nut, you know, religious nut or do they take your success—excuse me for being blunt here. Or do they take your success well? Do they sort of look at what you’ve done, oh, my God, he really is making a difference here?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: One of the things I’m lucky about is I don’t live there, I live in Boston, and so I go there maybe twice a month and so I’m not there much, so I don’t know much in terms of what’s happening.</p>
<p>I do know that the proper perception is that I’m lucky because so many other people, the way that they get into Hollywood is they have to work their way up and they’re assistants for a few years and they’re treated awfully and then they’re junior development and, you know, I bypassed that. And then when I tell them I bypassed that through providence then you can imagine where the conversation goes.</p>
<p>So that does lead to, you know, the weirdness questions and—</p>
<p>MS. QUINN: Give us a little dialogue.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: What’s that?</p>
<p>SPEAKER: How do I meet this guy Providence?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Yeah.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Is he funding other companies? No. You know, what’s interesting is there probably is—any conversation that happens about faith quickly degenerates into questions about politics and it’s really hard to engage people with conversations.</p>
<p>The irony, the paradox of all this is when you talk about Jesus, you’re a lot better off. When you talk about Christianity, you’re kind of hosed, and so people think that the more general they are about things, the more that they can get away with it.</p>
<p>I’ve had a lot more luck, the more that I’m on the nose about it and the more that I talk about it, and then I think the other key thing to talk about is just story-wise is talking about redemption and rehabilitation and never presenting ourselves as cradle-to-grave saints and talking about the fact that so may heroes of our faith were murderers and prostitutes and liars and adulterers and—</p>
<p>MS. QUINN: They get that in Hollywood, right?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Exactly, yes. So there, there you go.</p>
<p>MS. QUINN: They can identify.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: They really can. Look, the biggest question Jesus ever got was what’s in it for me. So they definitely get that one in Hollywood.</p>
<p>But, yes, it’s good. I have just no idea if there even is a perception. I think there’s a perception of the company, that it’s a Christian company and there’s probably, out of 70 people, four Christians, and so, you are the movies that you make.</p>
<p>So, ultimately, any judgment that people have or any opinion that they’re going to render, they’ll base it on the films that you make and I think that people are trying to figure it out because for so long family films were defined by what’s not in them. You know, there’s no swearing, there’s no sex, there’s no fun, and when we came out there, ours were a little different. They had alcoholism and separation and death and all kinds of other things.</p>
<p>So we wanted to have our family movies be a little different.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Okay. The author of Heaven, Lisa Miller, is up.</p>
<p>MS. MILLER: I wrote a check for Micheal, it’s in your room.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: All right. Cool. Thanks. That was the arrangement.</p>
<p>Lisa Miller</p>
<p>MS. MILLER: Thank you so much. I wanted to ask you about Walmart. There’s this idea out there that Walmart is now the biggest distributor of Christian books in America and that the Christian bookstores have largely failed and that at Walmart they have a very sort of rigorous vetting process about what they will and won’t sell until the book actually starts selling so well that they have to carry it.</p>
<p>And I guess I wonder, is that true? Have you come up against it? Do you have to target your books and your films to pass the Walmart test?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Yes. We’ve never—we only make G and PG movies, so we’ve never had that problem, but their influence is unbelievable. It’s greater than half of all the DVDs. For family films, it can be over 60 percent and so if you’re not in Walmart, you’re out of business, and the interesting thing is going to be what are they going to do with that power. You know, are they going—they’ve just started to do some films on television, some network television movies, and the next day they’re available for sale in Walmart. That’s an unbelievable competitive advantage that those films will have and so the next question is, well, what kind of stories are they going to tell with that kind of platform and that influence, and ultimately, with Walmart, the bottom line always wins.</p>
<p>I mean, the stories of Sam Walton’s biography being shipped back to the publisher when they couldn’t sell it, those stories are legend. So they always will be driven by that but they have been really—I’m not just saying this because they control 60 percent of the business, but they have been great partners and they’re really interested in this idea.</p>
<p>They recognize the power. They recognize the influence that they have. For example, on Amazing Grace, we couldn’t get a distributor for that movie. We had a really hard time getting notice with it and Walmart was great because they treated it like it was a big release. The best thing about that was one of the things we did to try to make Amazing Grace relevant to today’s people is we tied it into modern day slavery and so every effort, every marketing piece we had came along with ideas about what’s happening with modern day slavery, talking about groups like International Justice Mission and Salvation Army, and all these groups that are combating modern day slavery and so that even people who didn’t see the movie thought we were doing some good. Walmart actually ran that PSA in their stores, drawing attention to modern day slavery and talking about the—</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: PSA means?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Public Service Announcements.</p>
<p>Yeah. They’ve been really good partners, but it’s amazing and it is sort of sad to see what’s happened with the Christian bookstores because they’ve almost surrendered. Because one day I remember they were looking for us to advertise in their magazine and they just said, look, even though people don’t shop here anymore, they still look in the magazine to find out what’s available before they go buy it at Walmart and so people will—they won’t buy it at our store but they’ll still see it if you advertise in our magazine. So how’s that for turning the other cheek?</p>
<p>MS. MILLER: Yeah.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: So, very powerful players.</p>
<p>MS. MILLER: But I guess I’m wondering is there an explicit or implicit Christian world view among the buyers there?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Again, I think it’s all bottom line. That’s what I get because it’s not as if any of the other stuff gets favored or disfavored and because we’re in such a safe middle, the question just never comes up.</p>
<p>MS. MILLER: Yeah, yeah.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Okay. Next is Jeffrey Goldberg, then Clare, then Tim.</p>
<p>Jeffrey Goldberg</p>
<p>JEFFREY GOLDBERG, The Atlantic: I have just sort of two related questions. I’m curious if you’ve been tempted to make a PG-13 or an R-rated movie, not because you’re looking for prurience but because if you’re telling stories of redemption, you have to tell stories of sin and sin can sometimes come in an R-rated fashion and Lisa Miller covers that in her next book.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>MS. MILLER: Hell.</p>
<p>MR. GOLDBERG: Hell. That’s right.</p>
<p>MS. MILLER: The sequel.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: If you loved Heaven, you’ll love Hell and Purgatory.</p>
<p>MR. GOLDBERG: And Purgatory. Right, right. That’s called publishing, actually.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: It’s been done. It’s called Dante.</p>
<p>MR. GOLDBERG: Could you do Dante is the question, actually? The sort of related question I have is what are your actual favorite movies, not Christian movies, but movies? And movies that have Christian themes but weren’t made to be sort of Christian movies?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Yeah. You know, our rule is G or PG but I see so many opportunities for PG-13 and R-rated movies, you know. Unbroken, the book that’s out now, that’s definitely going to be a PG-13 movie, but it’s going to be fantastic.</p>
<p>MR. GOLDBERG: I mean, do you have a firm policy—I mean, is it—</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Yeah. We only do G or PG. We did a PG-13 once, Ray, the movie about Ray Charles, and again to make an X-rated life, you know, PG-13 was a challenge.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: You all did Ray?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Yeah. That was one where—this is where we’re just so blessed to have an investor like Phil because he read the script and he loved it. He loved Ray Charles. He loved his music and we went to every distributor and they said, well, look, let me show you the numbers here. Bio pics don’t make much money and then African American bio pics, those don’t make any money. Will Smith’s the biggest star on the planet and he couldn’t go get people to see Mohammed Ali, so no one’s going to go see this In Living Color guy playing Ray Charles and Phil, in his great way, just said, “Well, that’s interesting but irrelevant. I’m making it,” and so he went and financed it with no distributor, $35 million. And it actually makes it a lot easier on us to stay focused on those G or PG because it’s—there’s plenty to do that’s there and there’s plenty of PG kind of problems.</p>
<p>The one time it really came up was when we wanted to invest in World Trade Center and I got a call from Oliver Stone just out of the blue. He goes like, “Look, you guys got a perception problem. Everyone thinks you’re really right wing and I got a problem, everyone thinks I’m really left wing and let’s get together and like really F with their minds,” and so—</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>In the way that only he can ask and that’s, you know, a fantastic story. I mean, those guys never should have survived and it was their faith that brought them through there.</p>
<p>So, yeah, I mean, there are—I loved Saving Private Ryan, one of the best movies ever made, R-rated film, and one of my favorites. It’s A Wonderful Life is my all-time, you favorite movie.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Then there was another question in there, though. Did you get them all?</p>
<p>MR. GOLDBERG: He covered it. He covered it. No, no, no. The reason I was thinking, it just crossed my mind that, you know, The Godfather was my favorite movie, always struck me as essentially the biography of Satan and it has obviously—you know, it’s shot through with, sometimes overt, religious imagery but I’m wondering, you know is it simply a moral reason you will not make PG-13—</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Oh, no. It’s just more—</p>
<p>MR. GOLDBERG: You don’t want to put any boobs on the screen or something like that?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: No. It’s a stick-to-your-knitting kind of thing. You know, if we just want to stay in that realm, but—and this was the problem that happened when we were developing The Screw Tape Letters. You know, to get real specific in terms of what you’re talking about,—</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Are you doing that movie?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: No, because there is no PG Screw Tape Letters, and so as we were trying to do it and as we—</p>
<p>MR. GOLDBERG: You just can’t do it?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: We couldn’t figure out a way to do it and we didn’t want to do it wrong.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Is it true possibly that Phil Anschutz will never do a movie that’s PG-13?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Oh, no, no. That’s not it at all. I just think that you gotta think about the business in terms of, you got guys who all day long it’s their job to go out and get stories and everyone wants theirs to get made and people can be all over the place.</p>
<p>You have to start to draw the line and again it’s got nothing really to do with morality and anything else like that. It’s got to do more with the fact that there’s a great business proposition out there, if you can make a G or PG movie.</p>
<p>So for us, it’s much easier just to take that policy of the G or PG because otherwise people just get away with everything that they can before they get in there and they’ll just be running wild and there’s enough Diary Of a Wimpy Kids that we’re missing that are really lucrative, that are great PG movies, that, you know, if we expanded it and people felt like they could look for anything that they could sort of define in their own terms, we’d never get any work done and it becomes a debating society.</p>
<p>Once you open it up from there, well, they said penis breath in E.T., so why can’t we say penis breath, and it just—people are kind of missing the point.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Claire Brinberg, and then Tim, and then Clare Duffy. Okay.</p>
<p>Claire Brinberg</p>
<p>CLAIRE BRINBERG, ABC News: I remember reading all the Narnia Chronicles, all the books when I was in school, and I went to a predominantly Jewish school. We had no clue that Aslan was anything more than like a really cool lion. Then obviously you grow up and you’re like, oh, wait a second, I wonder what this is about.</p>
<p>So you partnered with Disney on that movie, I think, and that must have been a little bit of a marketing push pull. I remember doing stories on it and Disney was not trying to have any of the Jesus discussion whatsoever. I remember being in a really huge church in I think it was Ft. Lauderdale where there was Narnia Day in anticipation of the movie’s release and there was all sorts of press materials from Walden and a big kind of session and games and the pastor was very clear at the beginning to tell kids before they saw the movie that Aslan is Jesus just in case you’re confused when you go and see it. It was like a preemptive strike on his part.</p>
<p>So I’m just wondering how, if you’re trying to have a movie with such huge and broad commercial success but still have such overt Christian themes, that you walk the line, saying this is a Christian movie but it doesn’t have to be a Christian movie. What’s the marketing push pull there and what was that struggle working with a company like Disney that wants to make money?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: People just really over thought it and they got petrified about it. Rather than just coming right out and just saying exactly what you said and saying, yeah, we have—and C.S. Lewis wrote so much about this. The problem is he added to the confusion and he was on the record saying, well, it’s actually not an allegory. It’s a supposal, and try explaining that, you know, to a journalist for their one line. Is it Christian or not? You know, I got a deadline and so don’t tell me about supposals, you know, like we all thought it was on the level.</p>
<p>And so that was the thing. The cuter we tried to get about it and the more that we tried to talk around it, the bigger the hole that we dug for ourselves and so, yes, it was just a tightrope walk that we didn’t do that well and that’s why with Voyage of the Dawn Treader, we were just a lot more out in front, like, yep, Lewis was a Christian. He was on the cover of Time Magazine as the greatest apologist and these are books that are really enjoyed by believers and non-believers alike and Lewis himself wrote about that.</p>
<p>He said, “Look, there’s three different ways to enjoy my books. One, you can just read them and like them as great stories. Two, you can read them and see all the Christian symbolism in them and reject them, and, three, you can read them, see the symbolism and embrace them. I don’t care how you see it. I just hope you enjoy it.”</p>
<p>But again, it was just people just getting so nervous about getting dragged into the culture wars and then just a lot of feet inserted into mouths during that.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Tim Dalrymple, you’re next.</p>
<p>Timothy Dalrymple</p>
<p>TIMOTHY DALRYMPLE, Patheos.com: There’s a book called The Hobbit, also written by Lisa Miller, I think. I’m curious if you tried to option that or if it was gone already. I’m also curious about animated films. It seems that you’ve steered clear of those. And finally, you talked about integrating your efforts with education and so how has Walden done that? I’m particularly interested in—I know you home school and so have you guys sought to partner with any kind of home school curriculum developers?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: We—with The Hobbit, it was great because when we first started, it was just total Wild West, you know. It was myself and Cary. He was my college roommate and so we were just going out there, taking meetings with people, and I remember Cary coming back and saying, “I got The Hobbit,” and I said, “That’s amazing,” and then he said, “Yeah,” he goes, “But there’s a stipulation.” I said, “What’s the stipulation?” He goes, “It has to be an animated rock musical of The Hobbit, but we got the rights.”</p>
<p>So, yes, we did try to do an animated rock musical of The Hobbit with Creed but they never returned our calls. So, thank God, that one never got off the ground and, sorry, Tim, what was the other question after The Hobbit?</p>
<p>MR. DALRYMPLE: Animated and then education.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Yes. Animated just we’ve never gotten around to that. I’d love to do it. We just—I tried to get Ferdinand, you know, one of my favorite books, more the passive history coming out here. You know, such a great story, and Fox actually got those rights because they have their own animation studio. So a lot of people that get those rights are people that have the studio to begin with.</p>
<p>And for home schooling, we’re always trying to do things. Lewis himself, you know, was home schooled and so the really fun—the thing that makes home schooling awesome is, it ranges from the home schoolers that we have in our neighborhood, who are the kids who just ride unicycles and their parents just want them to be themselves and it’s called unschooling, classic sort of Cambridge stuff that we have up there, and then to the other side of people that don’t want their kids ever having social security numbers, so it’s all over the place in terms of how wide the group is there.</p>
<p>But we are trying to do that and trying to figure out ways because it’s a huge exploding population, the number of people who are home schooling.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: And then education?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Oh, on education, we—it’s funny because that’s getting a little frayed, our relationship with the NEA and the other unions that we used to work with—</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Used to work with?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY:—in education. Yeah. We used to work very closely with the NEA, particularly on reading, and for us, when we first started, we tried to cover all the bases. So the first thing we did was we did 3-D documentaries with James Cameron. We did this one, Ghosts of the&#160;Abyss, and another one called Aliens of the Deep, and it was great.</p>
<p>What we didn’t realize at the time was that we were completely subsidizing James Cameron’s research in how to make 3-D movies and one of the guys that started the company with us, Josh Greer, I remember him coming into my office and saying, “Look, you know what, I think this is the future of story-telling, and I think what we need to do is really invest more in 3-D films and really even start to look into the business prospect of all this, of retrofitting some of these theaters.”</p>
<p>I remember saying to him, “Josh, that’s just a gimmick, just give it up. 3-D’s not going anywhere,” and Josh went out and started his own company called Real-D which went public in June. They’re the people that outfit all of the 3-D theaters and so that conversation was a $100 million ago in Josh’s world. So I was wrong in terms of anticipating where that went but instead of—so we do a lot of math and science around that but then we realized what we’re going to do is just focus on reading because nothing—the number one predictor of pretty much every socioeconomic problem we have in this country is the ability or the inability to read and so what we’re really trying to focus on is to get books to kids and also try to get some good reading instruction.</p>
<p>We work with the Harvard Ed School and the Jeanne Chall Reading Lab doing everything we can to try to get good models of teaching kids to read to parents and in Colorado, actually, one of the things that we did was working with the Harvard Ed School was every mother in 2011 that’s born is going to get this booklet on all the milestones to know that your kid’s on track to learn how to read and the idea is rather than looking for the instant solution, those third grade reading level scores are the most important, what we’re hoping to say is, out of the kids born in Colorado in 2011, the percentage of those kids who can read at grade level by third grade will increase substantially and so just really looking at the kids that are born this year and how do we get them better prepared.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Okay. Clare Duffy.</p>
<p>Clare Duffy</p>
<p>CLARE DUFFY, NBC Nightly News: This is a little bit like Jeff’s question about your favorite movies but not just your favorites but I’m wondering if you have any that you feel are just wonderful, perhaps probably unintentional depictions or dramatizations of great spiritual questions that stick out in your mind that you think like, I’d love to hit that same mark or something close to it in one of my own films. I’m just curious if you have any that you can think of.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Yeah. For me, Les Mis is, you know, it’s perfection. That’s really as good as it gets. Another thing that we tried to do that was a little experimental was I always loved Cat Stevens’ music growing up and so when we started the company, we tracked him down and he came into our office and we had a great meeting with him trying to figure out different projects.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Cat Stevens whose name is really?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Yusuf—</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Jeffrey knows it.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY:—Islam. What’s the story there? Can he be trusted or is there anything that you can say off the record?</p>
<p>MR. GOLDBERG: On the record, off the record. What do I care? Until he renounces his endorsement of the Fatwa calling for the execution of Salman Rushdie, I think we should put away our Tea for the Tillerman albums.</p>
<p>I used to like him. We used to listen to him in, you know, socialist Zionist camp in the ’70s and then one day he became Yusuf Islam and it’s like, oh, geez Louise.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: He never renounced that?</p>
<p>MR. GOLDBERG: No, no. He never renounced that.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Oh, that’s amazing.</p>
<p>MR. GOLDBERG: Yeah. And, actually, you know, Rushdie got incredibly pissed off at Jon Stewart for having Cat Stevens at his rally and Jon Stewart, in a low moment for Jon Stewart, said, “I don’t care.” Basically, he said—you know Rushdie wrote Stewart and said, you know, “This guy has called for my execution for writing a book,” and Stewart said, “Yeah. I’m sorry about that,” but he didn’t do anything about it. He kept him on. It’s a very strange story.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: And for me, I mentioned Saving Private Ryan earlier. I like anything that shows faith in those really difficult moments in terms of people trying to rally, but then there are the other ones, like Tender Mercies. I don’t know if you ever saw that.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: With Robert Duvall.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: With Robert Duvall. That’s a fantastic movie, as well, but there’s a lot of them. Any ones that deal with grace, you know, those are my favorite ones.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Okay. Barbara Bradley Hagerty.</p>
<p>Barbara Bradley Hagerty</p>
<p>BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY, NPR: This year, I think, a lot of the films at the Sundance Film Festival actually had religious themes, if not Christian themes. I’m wondering if you’re seeing these themes become more appealing to not just parents with eight-year-old kids but people like us, while some of us may have kids—okay. You know what I mean. People who are not looking for specific Christian themes or edifying themes but do you see a sophistication in religious films?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: A bit, but most of what I’m seeing is body-switching comedies and talking animal movies and so I haven’t had time to sort of see, you know, what the larger trends are there, but I’m very interested in this younger generation of kids that are growing up, when you look at their interests in spirituality, when you look at their interests in volunteering. When you look across the board, it’s a lot to be hopeful for, and these are kids who are into the big questions. They’re not scared of them and they’re really interested in dialogue and so hopefully that’s happening at Sundance. That’s just sort of a reflection of these younger kids that are coming into the system that are really thoughtful.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Okay. Paul, you’re up next.</p>
<p>MR. FARHI: I don’t quite know how to frame this question. Hollywood is perceived as Jewish and I wonder how that factors into the perception of someone who’s doing Christian themes. Is there some inherent resistance there because of the traditional Jewishness of Hollywood?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Well, it doesn’t—it really doesn’t come up that much and also, I mean, I think you’re hitting on something that has really been forgotten which is the fact that our faith is based on a 1st Century rabbi and—</p>
<p>SPEAKER: JC was a Jew.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: But no. Really, the biggest challenges with a lot of the faith-based stuff are lapsed Catholics and Protestants. They’re the ones that say let me tell you how this world works. I grew up in this world. Let me tell you how it goes.</p>
<p>That’s the biggest challenge, you know, to faith-based films, are sort of lapsed Christians.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: People who’ve abandoned their past faith, ex-fundamentalists, people like that.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Yeah.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE: Okay. Carl Cannon.</p>
<p>Carl Cannon</p>
<p>CARL CANNON, RealClearPolitics.com: Can you tell us, getting away from the faith part of it for one second, how it works? I was thinking of a movie. You did Winn-Dixie? That’s you?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Yeah.</p>
<p>MR. CANNON: Okay. So that’s, if memory serves, that’s a novel by Kate DeCamillo.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Kate DeCamillo, yes.</p>
<p>MR. CANNON: I see you get—so how does it work? I mean, tell us, just walk us through the process. You get a director, you get a writer, you get a novel, you get the property. Then you—how do you do that? How do you find the director? How do you get the screenplay written? How much input does Phil Anschutz have? Just walk us through how you make it.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: If you—if there’s a book that you like, you first find out if the rights are available and then you option the book and the option price is, to make the math easy, there’s a price just to take it off the market for a period of time.</p>
<p>MR. CANNON: Can you talk about the details for that movie I named?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: For Winn-Dixie?</p>
<p>MR. CANNON: Yeah.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Yeah. So, you know, Kate DeCamillo, this is before she won the Newbury for Tale of Despereaux, so it’s a new book, it hasn’t been out there that long, and then there’s an option price you take to take it off the market. Joan Singleton is the woman that wrote the screenplay. It was Joan’s daughters that read it at school and they loved it and so Joan got this idea and Joan, you know, she had produced Rambo, so she knew how to make a warm and cuddly movie about a dog, and she then optioned this and she wrote the screenplay and it was fantastic.</p>
<p>Then the thing is just to get the budget down to the—</p>
<p>MR. CANNON: She wrote the screenplay before coming to you?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: She wrote the screenplay with Fox and so then Fox had it and then they needed to bring on a director and the—</p>
<p>MR. CANNON: Who was the director?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Dan, you’ve been the one that’s good with the quick answers here.</p>
<p>MR. CANNON: Who was the director?</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Was it Wayne Wang?</p>
<p>MR. CANNON: Yes, it was.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Yeah. And so he came aboard and then they had to find the girl to play Opal and again an eight-year-old girl, she’s in every frame of that film. So the movie lives or dies on who you find for that and then the Fox casting people found this great actress, AnnaSophia Robb, who then went on to do Bridge to Teribithia for us, as well, a girl from Denver, great girl. She was home schooled at the time. She’d been in one McDonald’s ad or something. She hadn’t done much.</p>
<p>Then it was a movie about Florida. So we shot in Louisiana and when it came out, I think people were really surprised because it had a huge opening weekend.</p>
<p>MR. CANNON: But you didn’t even say when you got involved.</p>
<p>MR. FLAHERTY: Oh, okay. So we find out that Fox has the rights. We call Fox and we say would you guys, like a partner, with this film and at that point they have a script and they’re about to cast it and they say, yeah, we’d like one because we think this is risky and we don’t know how big the audience is for that one. Generally people will let you in if they’re nervous about the movie. They’re not going to let you in on Harry Potter and if you think you can have something to add to it.</p>
<p>So we come aboard in that situation which was a little anomalous at the script phase. Normally, it’s more common for us to find a book, call the author and the agent, negotiate book rights, hire the screenwriter ourselves, cast it ourselves, hire the director ourselves, and then there’s the ones where we’re along for the ride, like Winn-Dixie, and then Waiting for Superman is a particularly, you know, different example because that movie was done. We had absolutely no influence in that one, other than helping them market it and pay for it.</p>
<p>So it’s a real wide sort of gamut from, you know, Amazing Grace, you get one line, and those are the funnest ones obviously, and you get to go from this one single sentence idea about how to make a movie into seeing it on the screen. Then there are the other ones that you just love, you know, like Waiting for Superman and you’re just happy that you were able to help them financially and then there’s all kinds of different layers in between.</p>
<p>This transcript has been edited for clarity, accuracy, spelling, and grammar.</p> | false | 1 | faith angle forum160is semiannual conference brings together select group 20 nationally respected journalists 35 distinguished scholars areas religion politics amp public life faith film amp culture challenges prospects south beach florida speaker micheal flaherty president amp cofounder walden media moderator michael cromartie vicepresident ethics amp public policy center 160 michael cromartie michael cromartie ladies gentlemen micheals bio course packet hes president cofounder walden media put special request couple months ago figure way see aslan could show occasion werent able work yet couldnt get security know theyre producers behind narnia chronicles lion witch wardrobe prince caspian great success one questions wanted ask micheal address course gets whole bulk talk long misspelled name way spells micheal ive several people correct say keep misspelling oh thats way spells begin comments us micheal explaining would origin first name micheal flaherty micheal flaherty ill begin cover story grandparents came ireland one last dying requests left foodstarved nation one day would guy named micheal would spell name way spelt galway course spelled way galway either laughter mr flaherty reason spell name way sixth grade idolized basketball player named micheal ray richardson new jersey nets got kicked league drugs brought back said look im im never going drugs brought back league got kicked drugs said listen third time need see real positive physical sign youre taking seriously need see change something life micheal ray brought birth certificate said look ive changed micheal thats new micheal dare big brother said dare change way spell name one many lies ive kept going decades late change back mr cromartie okay well good looking forward micheal hearing faith film culture havewell get right discussion werefor session dont respondent purpose mr flaherty wanted thank much michael fantastic session morning really appreciate jeffrey ambassador great great group journalists actually dream getting college always thought always wanted writer got college went work william f buckley research assistant meant got xacto knife copy new york times cut every single article put file folder day age internet year trying father called public defender massachusetts said little fellow time got job government got life went home massachusetts worked great guy named bill bulger president senate massachusetts brother number one fbis wanted list learned quite bit education always real interest mine school choice education reform always interested would always tutor saturday mornings break ice would always ask kids whatd last night theyd always either watched film watched television show six months said know last night watched movie titanic next week said watched titanic next week said know yesterday went museum exhibit titanic able put hands ice cold water leonardo dicaprio drowned able see things next week went library got books titanic thats realized stories could really profound influence education could really change peoples outlook could start see application names dates facts would actually start mean something year later april 20th 1999 lot probably remember columbine two students walked school shotguns murdered think 12 classmates one teachers know nation went depression didnt know towhat didnt know react started reading stories girls guns pointed face know 16 17yearold girls asked believe god said yes know journalists saying otherwise ive spoken people library swear thats heard realized id going church entire life didnt commitment faith 16yearold girl looking barrel gun would say something learned freshman philosophy class theres presence know anything know try appease guy didnt really know hoping mass sunday would make sense scandal massachusetts broke priest came pressed play old radio shack recorder appeal cardinal years cardinals appeal word happened days columbine one thing lucky really powerful conversion experience really felt like holy spirit ive heard life heard church know really came life told needed reset priorities make god first life met know term vogue bornagain christian became every caricature put scripture versethe one scripture verse knew email tag actuallythe next day went christian bookstore bought fish put back car felt like equivalent know confirmation evangelical filled know withi fearless said well really want life know id love ive noticed stories students real profound impact learning also know stories could real profound impact way people think feel cassie bernall one girls murdered columbine loved movies like braveheart people went two murderers lot people talked films influence day called natural born killers day celebration movie serial killers watched know 50 times wore black trench coats saw basketball diaries leonardo dicaprio leonardo dicaprio wore black trench coat fantasized going shooting classmates know theres always debate know films influence people know bad things think look logically buy fact great art great music inspire us make us better people want us better people know buy corollary well appeal darker natures darker angels went business plan problem never made film didnt know write business plan wife bought business plans dummies barnes noble wrote business plan old roommate college great guy named cary granite cary made educational classics scream scary movie children corn vi vii viii ix x perfect guy go make new transformational inspirational stories went around everywhere like odd couple trying raise money films would based great books great people literature got laughed every venture capital private equity firm country still remember first meeting one vc massachusetts guy said well look understand idea wheres pampl said well whats pampl said profit loss statement cornerstone every business dont one bought book pampls dummies money last meeting could afford meeting gentleman denver named phil anschutz 10 minutes pitch making new film company phil said okay understand get said well thank time know catch cab said im interested investing said youre kidding said would like get better idea love books love history really think film could impact id love get idea kind movies guys going make goes dont break lunch youll come back id never thought plan far called wife fifth grade teacher st peters said look need books give ideas books went fifth grade reading list st peters shes like okay got pen said yeah goes okay charlottes web bridge terabithia holes lion witch wardrobe wrote said well movies know research focus groups telling us theyd really like see went optioned know able go make feature films thats began wifes fifth grade reading list st peters starting realized one things wanted really tie films education lot kids lousy schools one chance really get inspired get excited things always trying tie things sort growing faith reading books realized lot kids books point memorized another verse scripture two one hebrews 111 substance faith hope unseen think thats one things us believers lisa talk book heaven fantastic get basics well tell heaven know people looking specifics get little nervous know going look crazy know pray know unseen god believe things cant see cant feel cant touch major point childrens literature really common theme runs lion witch wardrobe lucy says shes place called narnia brothers say shes crazy go appeal professor want hear logic borrowing lewiss trilemma says theres three options either sisters liar shes lunatic shes telling truth charlottes web fern goes mother tells shes great conversations barn wilbur pig charlotte spider mother good suburban mother would goes see therapist says listen think daughter lost mind shes talking talking animals says well makes think shes lost mind goes well cant true therapist goes dont know maybe havent listening maybe animals talking us sad news theres word daughters going called childhood one day going pass another film made bridge terabithia young girl nonbeliever friends boy book entire house bible book ever drew upon ended imagined land called terabithia ever look narnia books theres outlying province called terabithia introduced boy wonderful world literature really opened mind would great conversations one conversation sort embarrassed took church one day said listen easter id like come nervous parents intellectuals never church never church didnt know going react afterwards sort sheepishly said well whatd think goes think think jesus coolest person ever heard hes like aslan abraham lincoln wanted people love killed great story great story story miss much think also lot times miss way jesus approached questions philip yancey talks new testament jesus asked 183 questions gives direct answers three rest time would always respond story one stories weve heard much story prodigal son read story read great works people like pastor tim keller realized story prodigal sons plural know happened youngest son dont hear much elder son constantly asking rights constantly appealing justice fair thats realized lot times hollywoods representations christians represent elder son talk person always protesting world shouldnt like world shouldnt operate like way things way things often miss son thats lets face son great stories made theres greater story someone redeemed someone whos reconciled someone turned leaf gone completely new life many timesi remember one big movies growing cable footloose one christian came town ban dancing probably saw cape fear robert de niro scripture tattooed back lot times representations people believe either scripture tattooed permanent ink somewhere body hate dancing really wasnt much else talk whenafter made lot books films looking see books make great people phil always loved idea william wilberforce one person armed faith change world called one day said know william wilberforce growing catholic could give lives saints could tell everyone dont know protestant virtual saints ioh yeah course phil william wilberforce mean classic british statesman reformer whoyou know read verbatim wikipedia entry hes like idea im talking quickly study wilberforce books really thick books huge biographies wife went christian bookstore bought fish found book heroes christian faith 88 pages william wilberforce perfect ended getting 10 lines book film really cool thing happened film writer steven knight whos great writer never conversation faith loved story thought amazing story particularly liked idea character john newton lot probably know story john newton worthy review john newton guilty worst crimes humanity john newton slave trader words slave trader infidel one night ship going atlantic know successful passage selling slaves john newton said prayer god said listen spare ship turn life around put first life become great christian sunday school lessons tell us john newton went wrote amazing grace became abolitionist realized making film reallife story lot complicated happened john newton got town said listen im going become christian swearing dancing slaves going love going moral slave trader england time contradiction could know crown elements church british polite society said know slaverys fine reconcile christianity time newtons heart started soften soon things broke gods heart began break newtons heart course years finally truly understood like became writer hymns became great abolitionist hear word amazing grace blind see isnt someone going nonbelief belief someone thinks believe thinks understand really start look world around really try figure proper response begin behave differently always trying kind stories kind films really believe culture upstream politics earlier talking lot problems lot things happening middle east looking political solutions wilberforce understood change hearts minds change laws thats one first people wilberforce made alliance wedgwood wedgwood made beautiful pendant picture slave said man brother thomas clarkson would go would speak high schools colleges talking guys took long view social change didnt expect things change overnight knew long haul stories powerful philip yancey another great writer quoted earlier someone asking hima russian dissident staying house talking spread christianity russia 80s yancey said dont buy could happening country know idols forbidden lot beautiful churches turned cruel museums communist propaganda people hearing stories jesus goes easy know totalitarian rage dictators forgot one thing forgot ban dostoevsky tolstoy perfect representations gospel modern times story allloving allmerciful allforgiving god came pages looking forward one things always looking new stories looking great people history looking great books dont always right nose tell story faith dorothy day great catholic nun used say think lord likes read books didnt write think theres lot fact books might actually inspired might even rather indirect hand creation always looking kind stories right theres two stories really like working first story true story gentleman named desmond doss desmond doss grew poor tennessee tiny oneroom house mother devout christian father raging alcoholic tapestry 10 commandants wall desmond used look picture thou shalt kill picture cain killing abel desmond would say mother dont get could man kill brother mother said desmond youve got understand human heart capable every good every evil always watch week later told son alcoholic father went house fight desmonds uncle brother went get gun went shoot brother take brothers life mother got heroically intervened handed gun desmond said need go bury gun police find father could go jail long time desmond went outside backyard buried gun looked heavens said okay god understand man could take brothers life thank sparing promise ill never touch gun long live ten years later japanese bombed pearl harbor first person show line register draft desmond doss said anything else need know said yeah refuse carry gun said okay youre conscientious objector get goes im conscientious objector im conscientious cooperator cant carry gun said kind religion says cant carry gun said im talking religion im talking relationship made promise god wouldnt carry gun im going break promise desmond goes different things court martials everything else everyone trying kick guy wants medic belief war need people take life people save life wanted saving life side finally hes able win things medic everyone else going maneuvers practicing guns desmond going back eagle scout days hes practicing making different knots different ropes hes object scorn derision people like oh look doss going save us enemy ropes better watch get okinawa set desmonds unit actually set ambush one hundred twenty people left die top escarpment treated desmond doss orders commander climbed side rock lowered 120 men safety way able lower safety elaborate knot everyone else practicing rifles teasing would neverit ended saving nearly men next day doss went battle shot ribbons got mercy ship first time fellow men saw collapse tears said listen morphine dont worry youll feel better said im crying pain im crying lost bible bible sustained fiancée gave train station bible never without throughout entire war commander skeptic radios back hes like guys youve got find dosss bible people made life really difficult risking lives looking everywhere looking behind rocks theyre taking enemy fire looking word god desmond doss went become first conscientious objector ever win congressional medal honor got congressional medal honor got gift men bible made sure found reason love story dont think really appreciate paradox anymore paradox key part new testament always trying reconcile things stories love stories slave traders become abolitionists conscientious objectors become war heroes thats kind transformational thing think happen people deep abiding trust love creator mr cromartie hear desmond doss story mr flaherty documentary conscientious objector done maybe played like one two christian film festivals producer found brought us amazing story two years agoi love talking desmond doss talking pacifism one things thats interesting right thats happening growth global christianity think story thats told certainly story hollywood telling think people talking egypt earlier whats going happen 10 million coptic christians front lines mean people risking lives believe one place really interesting think could make great film making day hope someone could come great idea whats happening china theres two interesting things happening brought light good friend mine whos bible study whose name chai ling chai ling supreme commander tiananmen square person see top boxes megaphone talking everybody trying rally troops tanks rolled night ling rescued community buddhists risked lives get hong kong made way france became one classic american stories went woodrow wilson school princeton got masters worked bane went harvard business school started successful business ten years crate smuggled around different provinces china really sort american dream also felt enormous emptiness said cant believe ive material things thought ever wanted feel empty felt tiananmen realized reason felt empty hadnt accepted god life ling became christian asked god expect next ling always dying get back china still day think fourth wanted list china cant go back one thing really dedicating life abolishing chinas onechild policy know pretty pure unmistakable form evil many people anything mean think want review numbers quickly think theres basically hundred million girls missing china right selective abortion ancient preference boys girls takes place china thats happening also onechild policy really think enforce coercive policy like someone gets pregnant well kill baby lot provinces china happening women getting pregnant forced abortions shes brought back pretty compelling pictures china official government slogans say things like 10 graves better one birth whats happening coupled fact theres probably 100 million christians people really believers gospel theyre everything carry protect innocent two things really starting come opposition time also population think right theres probably somewhere 30 40 million men china marriage age never get married disparity continuing grow control right think thats sort equivalent entire american male population thats eligible marriage picture single american eligible marriage right knew would never get married would happen kinds things hoping future perspective theres nothing makes better story nothing powerful terms real transformational element somebody lets god life really best put god charge everything childrens literature historical biographies theres many great examples id love take questions mr cromartie great thank micheal well get first question commercial success movies mr flaherty yes well phil likes say hes got three different kinds businesses forprofit businesses notforprofit businesses intendedforprofit businesses fall intendedforprofit category rather know hits business sometimes movie like lion witch wardrobe comes lion witch wardrobe made 750 million box office made probably another half billion dollars dvds everything else films really expensive make know cost 200 million cost advertise also 100 million incredibly capitalintensive think one things thats going make big difference people figure make movies less people proven real challenge get word great movie advertise movies less get overi think average cost advertising movie 40 million thats even makeim sure guys saw paranormal activity heard movie made 15000 well 15000 plus 30 million paramount spent advertising thats part equation really needs get figured think social media real possibility well stories told mr cromartie move colleagues role waiting superman mr flaherty well weve always interested education civil rights issue always looking project actually starting shoot film may called still rise160the title comes the160great maya angelou poem happens two mothers refuse wait many times moms told yeah schools going get better give us another year give us another two years know youve run time movie played sundance read review called participant producers asked buy movie came alongside participant producers mr cromartie okay paul farhi paul farhi paul farhi washington post thanks much micheal im wondering see spiritual dimension waiting superman dimension opposed plain old public policy mr flaherty yeah dont exclusively spiritual films dont really see spiritual dimension waiting superman think however though church starting get heavily involved education reform really think could make really positive mark got involved know martin luther king think letter birmingham jail says often people tell us wait remember dr king criticized people alongside saying take time dont upset apple cart got ta go slowly dr king said wait means never justice delayed justice denied thats whats happening right particularly issue like public education poor minority communities adversely affected see strong spiritual dimension ed reform debate wed like bring whole idea dont worry peoples children fighting kids haveif really look people consider sons daughters god way children think thats whats going happen continues public policy debate dont think anythings ever going get done becomes true social justice civil rights issue might chance mr cromartie let ask youi several people list want jump movieand maybe cant speak record moviethe narnia movies understand theres argument content lion witch wardrobe various themes able navigate debate done hollywood movie mr flaherty tried gave think something jim daly goes lot people go know tolstoy wrote says cant believe russian orthodox people theyre telling dont listen methodists episcopalians dont know anything go talk methodists like oh russian orthodox people rocker dont listen developing films internally lot discussion include include theres pivotal scene end lion witch wardrobe basically gospel aslan comes back dead lucy susan look say well howd saw die aslan says well theres deeper magic written innocent person gives life traitor time stop death reversed beautiful line right month locked film line theres deeper magic based whats right whats wrong always right totally different movie kept going hygiene tips jeffrey comb hair brush teeth always whats right internal battle right even thats get criticized thing happened amazing grace day movie came big thing wall street journal wilberforces life whitewashed film fought lines put like im great sinner christ great savior know christianity leads action well meditation theres always going people saying didnt enough thats one really sort grates start accept mr cromartie okay mike gerson dan shelby tom fred michael gerson washington post asked question mr cromartie one asked mr gerson mmhmm mr cromartie okay excellent mr flaherty also came voyage dawn treader end film know reepicheep foot half courage know brave mouse whos always running around reepicheeps great represents lewiss sort faith based reason lewis finally came around said well look im hungry eat im thirsty drink im horny sex sort hole cant get sort satisfaction must wasnt made world made another world thats godshaped hole thats happens end voyage drawn treader get aslans country heaven narnia reepicheep decides wants go lot discussions scene well terms would done interesting recommend lisa millers book heaven people havent read yet decided going stick lewis second start see heaven always going fall short wanted sort see look reepicheeps eyes finally made represent theres also line end voyage dawn treader book aslan says know world another name must learn know thats whole reason came narnia knowing little know better everyone eyes line would would battle went right towards end line got know liam neeson producers asked meaning line like oh dont really think aslan christ hes kind like buddha hes like mohammad hes moreso remember wife reading article says goes day rest day damage control kind stuff know guys actors always tough get drawn really tricky theological questions debates know long theyre delivering line well mean really dont care think behind mr cromartie dan gilgoff dan youre dan gilgoff dan gilgoff cnn seems like lot films could described christian films time theyre kind ostentatiously christian like mr flaherty correct mr gilgoffa film like passion christ think provoked lot us start paying much attention films overtly christian marketed christian audiences im wondering films appeal christian audience certainly much broader audience dont one take one films find meaning im wondering much design responding trend christian media previous generation felt tried much bang head christianity proselytize much stuff comes kind reject reason thats part mo mr flaherty yes well interesting sort first decade easy going reading list whats amazing books kids read great themes stories behind stories amazing bridge terabithia story told earlier little girl dies end movie boy left struggling reasons trying figure happened woman wrote book katherine patterson son lost best friend second grade got struck lightening died mom wrote book way son try heal us really interested big questions religion answers lot science know answers lot truth justice friendship loyalty thats always go basis story theres someone represents spiritual point view thats great going sound hollywood therapist wrote book documentary laughter hes professor harvard names armond nicolai 30 years armond teaching class harvard says way world looks big questions bad things happen good people life death basically looked one two ways looked spiritual lens best articulated cs lewis looked secular lens best articulated sigmund freud ive always thought really interesting way approach things long people representing point views best degree possible someone really believes holy spirit long get people asking questions think long try work holy spirit get peoples minds big questions theyll eventually discover truth mr cromartie shelby coffey shelby coffey shelby coffey newseum question beyond fifth grade reading list looking particular stories books documentaries youve mentioned couple passing secondly terms influences work writing scripts working obviously pay attention rest media landscape movies seeing wouldnt make think influence viewing habits audiences youre trying reach take account construction story mr flaherty terms looking right still looking books thats sort picked clean arent many books childrens literature space big followings theres one love called giver fantastic book know dystopia one things seeing right biggest thing right kids wizards vampires dystopias pretty amazing thing look bestselling series right series called hunger games anyone read one unbelievable read one best pageturners ive read last years dystopia 13 different districts year theres lottery one boy one girl chosen district fight death reality show one person left standing theres many kind stories lot people look think theyre sort bleak say spirituality think reflects really sort healthy response always happens hero things rejects materialism woman wins hunger game life luxury comfort rest life rejects take totalitarian regime thing happens giver people always taking things publishing books us thats one way around really expensive route developingjust seeing work investing 100 million story thats big help got lucky one first books published newberry medal prestigious thing kids literature mr cromartie book mr flaherty called savvy homeschooled christian family goes pink bus save father thats coma homeschooled christian families thought going vampires zombies genre hasnt taken hoping developing movie finding great screenwriters frank cottrell boyce wrote book millions great movie danny boyle directed wrote book us called cosmic great book parenting thats looking terms films wouldnt make canti love movies cant think many wouldnt mr coffey meant seeing influencing see films younger people looking theyre influenced influence necessarily mr flaherty oh yeah mr coffeywhat would make mr flaherty amazing look book sales something one hollywood really also talking librarians librarians predict book comes going really amazing sixth sense makes sense theyre pros really understand stories understand components story elements great story talk terms childrens stories really know going example book series diary wimpy kid tried decided wasnt commercial sequel opened last weekend 25 million opening weekend bigger narnia cost like less lunch amazing look narnia example mr coffey makes feel better irving thalberg took pass gone wind grounds civil war movie ever made nickel laughter mr flaherty know theres lot kind things people love generalize like narnia thing amazed lion witch came thought oh easy theres six things justyou know keep printing money prince caspian came made half lion witch wardrobe made looked book sales prince caspian sold half books lion witch wardrobe voyage dawn treader came christmas sold 50 percent less tickets us prince caspian sold perfect correlation 50 percent less terms book sales pretty amazing alwaysyou know exceptions things stories around 60 years readers able make choice like dont like actually love magicians nephew favorite book narnia try use book try couch real business philosophy thats got magicians nephew next silver chair next sequence sold fewest books good look book sales look trends also talk kids teachers librarians mr cromartie tom next fred sally tom tom krattenmaker tom krattenmaker usa today dan asked question going ask compliments let take broader context im interested whole notion sort christian culture christian rock music christian magazines christian media know edgy young evangelical musicians hate whole idea christian rock music breaking maybe could comment see happening regard maybe wisdom whole idea enclave christian pop culture mr flaherty yes forget exact lewis quote dont need christian novelists need novelists christians like lot music like lot think selfdefeating whole ghetto thats built really marginalizes us look one successful musicals history broadway theater les miserables mean doesnt get nose christian les miserables know soul belongs god know made promise long ago gave hope hope gone strength carry mean one calls christian musical know read u2s lyrics read interviews bono talks grace go u2 concert puts psalm words ones calling christian band think people retreat one inch love inspires like think would helpful go known great artists lot folks christian musicians compete level theres sort backlash people go nuts christian band man dont call us whole problem labels know christian band arent theres great story fray got rejected think every christian music label didnt enough jpms jesuses per minute songs laughter sent disk sony goes know number one album billboard best thing ever happened went mainstream listen lyrics theyre longing suffering redemption reconciliation know one number one songs conversation god everything falling apart direct terms theres lot christian music christian films everything else love love theyre great stories great musicians contributing mr cromartie go fred fred barnes next youve mentioned lisa millers book least three times going movie lisas book lisa miller newsweekdaily beast optioning mr flaherty yeah know think available kindle people looking whats great know theres much scripture think lot films great thing films deal supernatural deal worlds mean mentioned lovely bones book peter jackson big challenge cinematically represent heaven people read book 14yearold girls idea heaven going like think thats one reasons movie disappointed always going fall short writer wired forget whokevin kelly see lisas book going kevin kellys book mandatory reading people filmed matrix matrix wasnt based writing order understand society heading people read really think anyone component worlds everything else right people hollywood would love really dont give attribution read say oh yeah well let give little history youve pulled one place fantastic mr cromartie okay fred barnes fred barnes fred barnes weekly standard wanted follow christian movies mean really specifically christian movies see lot ads christian magazines movies scheduled neighborhood theater anyway assume theyre circulated among churches least distributed way seen couple christian movies made church albany georgia facing giants one football team one cant remember name one made three four whichfireproof yeah seen fireproof professional professional movies make question serious movement among christians make movies see leading movies would appealing secular audience mr flaherty think interesting watch facing giants watch fireproof see improvements guys making mr barnes indeed mr flaherty love fact theyre ring thats best way learn get start make films theyre getting better craft theyre getting better storytelling thats love see film tough theres maybe hundred 150 major releases year one 150 tough theres many people sitting waiting tables things waiting get shot rather going making films seen problem ive hit lottery totally lucked terms fell business certainly scalable model investors like tell us think manytheres bench know theres bench strength hollywood christians think everyone getting film school theres idea let become director something kind interesting im noticing younger believers really trying explain whole idea paying dues time explaining idea living life probably best idea move hollywood youre 21 expect youre going real great stories share go live life travel different experiences things think needs bit attitude shift terms happen mr cromartie one part freds question see happening mr flaherty oh without doubt problem people divorcing production distribution lot great people invest films mean films arent cheap matter see one movies know someone separated least hundreds thousands dollars probably millions get film made made without idea bring market theres know maybe five studios film done imagine dont much negotiation strength five places go sitting million dollar asset lot interest month youll take anything get theaters would great lot filmmakers would get together figure create distribution pipeline speaker call united artists mr flaherty yeah exactly think names sale yeah theres something could done thats thing fred yes theres movies still real thought theyre going distribute thats biggest problem mr cromartie okay sally quinn lisa miller sally quinn sally quinn washington post well first would like reiterate said lisas book absolutely fabulous everyone read havent read go buy immediately mr cromartie title ms quinn beheaven called movie werejust following hollywood question viewed hollywood rather secular industry people see little weird kind nut know religious nut take successexcuse blunt take success well sort look youve done oh god really making difference mr flaherty one things im lucky dont live live boston go maybe twice month im much dont know much terms whats happening know proper perception im lucky many people way get hollywood work way theyre assistants years theyre treated awfully theyre junior development know bypassed tell bypassed providence imagine conversation goes lead know weirdness questions ms quinn give us little dialogue mr flaherty whats speaker meet guy providence mr flaherty yeah laughter funding companies know whats interesting probably isany conversation happens faith quickly degenerates questions politics really hard engage people conversations irony paradox talk jesus youre lot better talk christianity youre kind hosed people think general things get away ive lot luck im nose talk think key thing talk storywise talking redemption rehabilitation never presenting cradletograve saints talking fact may heroes faith murderers prostitutes liars adulterers ms quinn get hollywood right mr flaherty exactly yes go ms quinn identify mr flaherty really look biggest question jesus ever got whats definitely get one hollywood yes good idea even perception think theres perception company christian company theres probably 70 people four christians movies make ultimately judgment people opinion theyre going render theyll base films make think people trying figure long family films defined whats know theres swearing theres sex theres fun came little different alcoholism separation death kinds things wanted family movies little different mr cromartie okay author heaven lisa miller ms miller wrote check micheal room mr flaherty right cool thanks arrangement lisa miller ms miller thank much wanted ask walmart theres idea walmart biggest distributor christian books america christian bookstores largely failed walmart sort rigorous vetting process wont sell book actually starts selling well carry guess wonder true come target books films pass walmart test mr flaherty yes weve neverwe make g pg movies weve never problem influence unbelievable greater half dvds family films 60 percent youre walmart youre business interesting thing going going power know goingtheyve started films television network television movies next day theyre available sale walmart thats unbelievable competitive advantage films next question well kind stories going tell kind platform influence ultimately walmart bottom line always wins mean stories sam waltons biography shipped back publisher couldnt sell stories legend always driven reallyim saying control 60 percent business great partners theyre really interested idea recognize power recognize influence example amazing grace couldnt get distributor movie really hard time getting notice walmart great treated like big release best thing one things try make amazing grace relevant todays people tied modern day slavery every effort every marketing piece came along ideas whats happening modern day slavery talking groups like international justice mission salvation army groups combating modern day slavery even people didnt see movie thought good walmart actually ran psa stores drawing attention modern day slavery talking mr cromartie psa means mr flaherty public service announcements yeah theyve really good partners amazing sort sad see whats happened christian bookstores theyve almost surrendered one day remember looking us advertise magazine said look even though people dont shop anymore still look magazine find whats available go buy walmart people willthey wont buy store theyll still see advertise magazine hows turning cheek ms miller yeah mr flaherty powerful players ms miller guess im wondering explicit implicit christian world view among buyers mr flaherty think bottom line thats get stuff gets favored disfavored safe middle question never comes ms miller yeah yeah mr cromartie okay next jeffrey goldberg clare tim jeffrey goldberg jeffrey goldberg atlantic sort two related questions im curious youve tempted make pg13 rrated movie youre looking prurience youre telling stories redemption tell stories sin sin sometimes come rrated fashion lisa miller covers next book laughter ms miller hell mr goldberg hell thats right ms miller sequel mr flaherty loved heaven youll love hell purgatory mr goldberg purgatory right right thats called publishing actually mr flaherty done called dante mr goldberg could dante question actually sort related question actual favorite movies christian movies movies movies christian themes werent made sort christian movies mr flaherty yeah know rule g pg see many opportunities pg13 rrated movies know unbroken book thats thats definitely going pg13 movie going fantastic mr goldberg mean firm policyi mean mr flaherty yeah g pg pg13 ray movie ray charles make xrated life know pg13 challenge mr cromartie ray mr flaherty yeah one wherethis blessed investor like phil read script loved loved ray charles loved music went every distributor said well look let show numbers bio pics dont make much money african american bio pics dont make money smiths biggest star planet couldnt go get people see mohammed ali ones going go see living color guy playing ray charles phil great way said well thats interesting irrelevant im making went financed distributor 35 million actually makes lot easier us stay focused g pg itstheres plenty thats theres plenty pg kind problems one time really came wanted invest world trade center got call oliver stone blue goes like look guys got perception problem everyone thinks youre really right wing got problem everyone thinks im really left wing lets get together like really f minds laughter way ask thats know fantastic story mean guys never survived faith brought yeah mean arei loved saving private ryan one best movies ever made rrated film one favorites wonderful life alltime favorite movie mr cromartie another question though get mr goldberg covered covered reason thinking crossed mind know godfather favorite movie always struck essentially biography satan obviouslyyou know shot sometimes overt religious imagery im wondering know simply moral reason make pg13 mr flaherty oh mr goldberg dont want put boobs screen something like mr flaherty sticktoyourknitting kind thing know want stay realm butand problem happened developing screw tape letters know get real specific terms youre talking mr cromartie movie mr flaherty pg screw tape letters trying mr goldberg cant mr flaherty couldnt figure way didnt want wrong mr cromartie true possibly phil anschutz never movie thats pg13 mr flaherty oh thats think got ta think business terms got guys day long job go get stories everyone wants get made people place start draw line got nothing really morality anything else like got fact theres great business proposition make g pg movie us much easier take policy g pg otherwise people get away everything get theyll running wild theres enough diary wimpy kids missing really lucrative great pg movies know expanded people felt like could look anything could sort define terms wed never get work done becomes debating society open well said penis breath et cant say penis breath justpeople kind missing point mr cromartie claire brinberg tim clare duffy okay claire brinberg claire brinberg abc news remember reading narnia chronicles books school went predominantly jewish school clue aslan anything like really cool lion obviously grow youre like oh wait second wonder partnered disney movie think must little bit marketing push pull remember stories disney trying jesus discussion whatsoever remember really huge church think ft lauderdale narnia day anticipation movies release sorts press materials walden big kind session games pastor clear beginning tell kids saw movie aslan jesus case youre confused go see like preemptive strike part im wondering youre trying movie huge broad commercial success still overt christian themes walk line saying christian movie doesnt christian movie whats marketing push pull struggle working company like disney wants make money mr flaherty people really thought got petrified rather coming right saying exactly said saying yeah haveand cs lewis wrote much problem added confusion record saying well actually allegory supposal try explaining know journalist one line christian know got deadline dont tell supposals know like thought level thing cuter tried get tried talk around bigger hole dug yes tightrope walk didnt well thats voyage dawn treader lot front like yep lewis christian cover time magazine greatest apologist books really enjoyed believers nonbelievers alike lewis wrote said look theres three different ways enjoy books one read like great stories two read see christian symbolism reject three read see symbolism embrace dont care see hope enjoy people getting nervous getting dragged culture wars lot feet inserted mouths mr cromartie tim dalrymple youre next timothy dalrymple timothy dalrymple patheoscom theres book called hobbit also written lisa miller think im curious tried option gone already im also curious animated films seems youve steered clear finally talked integrating efforts education walden done im particularly interested ini know home school guys sought partner kind home school curriculum developers mr flaherty wewith hobbit great first started total wild west know cary college roommate going taking meetings people remember cary coming back saying got hobbit said thats amazing said yeah goes theres stipulation said whats stipulation goes animated rock musical hobbit got rights yes try animated rock musical hobbit creed never returned calls thank god one never got ground sorry tim question hobbit mr dalrymple animated education mr flaherty yes animated weve never gotten around id love justi tried get ferdinand know one favorite books passive history coming know great story fox actually got rights animation studio lot people get rights people studio begin home schooling always trying things lewis know home schooled really funthe thing makes home schooling awesome ranges home schoolers neighborhood kids ride unicycles parents want called unschooling classic sort cambridge stuff side people dont want kids ever social security numbers place terms wide group trying trying figure ways huge exploding population number people home schooling mr cromartie education mr flaherty oh education weits funny thats getting little frayed relationship nea unions used work mr cromartie used work mr flahertyin education yeah used work closely nea particularly reading us first started tried cover bases first thing 3d documentaries james cameron one ghosts the160abyss another one called aliens deep great didnt realize time completely subsidizing james camerons research make 3d movies one guys started company us josh greer remember coming office saying look know think future storytelling think need really invest 3d films really even start look business prospect retrofitting theaters remember saying josh thats gimmick give 3ds going anywhere josh went started company called reald went public june theyre people outfit 3d theaters conversation 100 million ago joshs world wrong terms anticipating went instead ofso lot math science around realized going focus reading nothingthe number one predictor pretty much every socioeconomic problem country ability inability read really trying focus get books kids also try get good reading instruction work harvard ed school jeanne chall reading lab everything try get good models teaching kids read parents colorado actually one things working harvard ed school every mother 2011 thats born going get booklet milestones know kids track learn read idea rather looking instant solution third grade reading level scores important hoping say kids born colorado 2011 percentage kids read grade level third grade increase substantially really looking kids born year get better prepared mr cromartie okay clare duffy clare duffy clare duffy nbc nightly news little bit like jeffs question favorite movies favorites im wondering feel wonderful perhaps probably unintentional depictions dramatizations great spiritual questions stick mind think like id love hit mark something close one films im curious think mr flaherty yeah les mis know perfection thats really good gets another thing tried little experimental always loved cat stevens music growing started company tracked came office great meeting trying figure different projects mr cromartie cat stevens whose name really mr flaherty yusuf mr cromartie jeffrey knows mr flahertyislam whats story trusted anything say record mr goldberg record record care renounces endorsement fatwa calling execution salman rushdie think put away tea tillerman albums used like used listen know socialist zionist camp 70s one day became yusuf islam like oh geez louise mr flaherty never renounced mr goldberg never renounced mr flaherty oh thats amazing mr goldberg yeah actually know rushdie got incredibly pissed jon stewart cat stevens rally jon stewart low moment jon stewart said dont care basically saidyou know rushdie wrote stewart said know guy called execution writing book stewart said yeah im sorry didnt anything kept strange story mr flaherty mentioned saving private ryan earlier like anything shows faith really difficult moments terms people trying rally ones like tender mercies dont know ever saw mr cromartie robert duvall mr flaherty robert duvall thats fantastic movie well theres lot ones deal grace know favorite ones mr cromartie okay barbara bradley hagerty barbara bradley hagerty barbara bradley hagerty npr year think lot films sundance film festival actually religious themes christian themes im wondering youre seeing themes become appealing parents eightyearold kids people like us us may kidsokay know mean people looking specific christian themes edifying themes see sophistication religious films mr flaherty bit im seeing bodyswitching comedies talking animal movies havent time sort see know larger trends im interested younger generation kids growing look interests spirituality look interests volunteering look across board lot hopeful kids big questions theyre scared theyre really interested dialogue hopefully thats happening sundance thats sort reflection younger kids coming system really thoughtful mr cromartie okay paul youre next mr farhi dont quite know frame question hollywood perceived jewish wonder factors perception someone whos christian themes inherent resistance traditional jewishness hollywood mr flaherty well doesntit really doesnt come much also mean think youre hitting something really forgotten fact faith based 1st century rabbi speaker jc jew laughter mr flaherty really biggest challenges lot faithbased stuff lapsed catholics protestants theyre ones say let tell world works grew world let tell goes thats biggest challenge know faithbased films sort lapsed christians mr cromartie people whove abandoned past faith exfundamentalists people like mr flaherty yeah mr cromartie okay carl cannon carl cannon carl cannon realclearpoliticscom tell us getting away faith part one second works thinking movie winndixie thats mr flaherty yeah mr cannon okay thats memory serves thats novel kate decamillo mr flaherty kate decamillo yes mr cannon see getso work mean tell us walk us process get director get writer get novel get property youhow find director get screenplay written much input phil anschutz walk us make mr flaherty youif theres book like first find rights available option book option price make math easy theres price take market period time mr cannon talk details movie named mr flaherty winndixie mr cannon yeah mr flaherty yeah know kate decamillo newbury tale despereaux new book hasnt long theres option price take take market joan singleton woman wrote screenplay joans daughters read school loved joan got idea joan know produced rambo knew make warm cuddly movie dog optioned wrote screenplay fantastic thing get budget mr cannon wrote screenplay coming mr flaherty wrote screenplay fox fox needed bring director mr cannon director mr flaherty dan youve one thats good quick answers mr cannon director mr flaherty wayne wang mr cannon yes mr flaherty yeah came aboard find girl play opal eightyearold girl shes every frame film movie lives dies find fox casting people found great actress annasophia robb went bridge teribithia us well girl denver great girl home schooled time shed one mcdonalds ad something hadnt done much movie florida shot louisiana came think people really surprised huge opening weekend mr cannon didnt even say got involved mr flaherty oh okay find fox rights call fox say would guys like partner film point script theyre cast say yeah wed like one think risky dont know big audience one generally people let theyre nervous movie theyre going let harry potter think something add come aboard situation little anomalous script phase normally common us find book call author agent negotiate book rights hire screenwriter cast hire director theres ones along ride like winndixie waiting superman particularly know different example movie done absolutely influence one helping market pay real wide sort gamut know amazing grace get one line funnest ones obviously get go one single sentence idea make movie seeing screen ones love know like waiting superman youre happy able help financially theres kinds different layers transcript edited clarity accuracy spelling grammar | 7,886 |
<p>CHARLOTTE — Donald Trump on Wednesday pledged what he called a “new deal for black America” as he attempted to make late inroads with a voting bloc that polling shows favors Democrat Hillary Clinton by a vast margin.</p>
<p>“I will be your greatest champion,” Trump said during an campaign rally here. “I will never ever take the African-American community for granted. Never, ever.”</p>
<p>In a scripted speech heavy on policy specifics, the Republican presidential nominee laid out a plan that he said is built on setting up better schools, lowering crime in inner cities and creating more high-paying jobs.</p>
<p>He told the largely white audience that “massive numbers” of black Americans have been ignored and left behind, and he blamed Democrats and Clinton for the “crippling crime and total violence” in the nation’s inner cities.</p>
<p>Trump was speaking in a city that was rocked by protests last month after <a href="" type="internal">police killed an unarmed black</a> <a href="" type="internal">man</a>. In his speech, he accused Clinton of waging a “war on police” that he said puts black lives at risk, and he called for police and residents to work together.</p>
<p>The GOP nominee pledged to remove gang members from inner cities and continued to falsely assert that the national murder rate is the highest it has been in 45 years.</p>
<p>“Some of our inner cities are more dangerous than the war zones we’re reading about and seeing about every night,” Trump said.</p>
<p>The real estate mogul said he wants to allow cities and states to declare disaster areas in blighted communities and give microloans to black entrepreneurs to help spur jobs. He championed school choice, which he called the “great civil rights issue of our time,” and increased funding for historically black colleges and universities.</p>
<p>He proposed tax holidays for inner-city investment and incentives for foreign companies to invest in “blighted American neighborhoods,” though Trump did not say what they were.</p>
<p>He also said that black communities have had their civil rights violated by illegal immigration.</p>
<p />
<p>“No group has been more hurt by decades of illegal immigration than African-Americans,” he said.</p>
<p>Trump’s candidacy is barely registering with African-American voters. Trump had 3 percent support among African-American voters in an ABC News tracking poll released Sunday, compared with Clinton’s 82 percent. Clinton has not matched President Barack Obama’s levels of support, but Trump still runs behind Romney’s 6 percent support among African-Americans in 2012.</p>
<p>Earlier in the day, Trump made a detour to Washington to officially christen a downtown hotel bearing his name, even as his campaign sets its sights on Florida as its make-or-break battleground state less than two weeks before Election Day.</p>
<p>Aides insisted it was a noncampaign event, but when Trump took the stage, he railed against bloated military hospital construction projects, blasted Obamacare price spikes and <a href="" type="internal">congratulated former House speaker Newt Gingrich</a> for sparring Tuesday night with Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly in a contentious prime-time interview.</p>
<p>“That was an amazing interview,” Trump said as he pointed at Gingrich. “We don’t play games, Newt, right? We don’t play games.”</p>
<p>Gingrich and Kelly had tussled over whether news coverage of sexual assault allegations against Trump compares fairly with stories about the ongoing release of hacked emails from top aides to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.</p>
<p>Clinton marked her 69th birthday by making campaign stops in Florida. Her campaign also released two new television commercials it described as “closing arguments” to viewers in several battleground states. One of the messages is voiced by actor Morgan Freeman.</p>
<p>Trump stood on a ballroom stage alongside three of his children who oversee his hotel projects at what was billed as the official grand opening of Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, just blocks from the White House. Trump’s co-mingling of his business interests and presidential aspirations were on clear display in and around the glitzy ballroom where he spoke.</p>
<p>Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Alabama, a top Trump surrogate, was on hand at the Washington event and spoke to reporters about the campaign. Gingrich sat in the front of the room.</p>
<p>Speaking after daughter Ivanka, who has overseen the redevelopment of the Old Post Office building, Trump said the project “shows how to work with our government and to get things done. My theme today is five words: under budget and ahead of schedule. So important. We don’t hear those words too often in government – but you will.”</p>
<p>It was one of many instances in which he has simultaneously promoted his business and political interests. The last time Trump held a major public event at his hotel in the District was last month, when he acknowledged for the first time that President Obama was born in the United States.</p>
<p>He has also met privately there with hotel employees and used it for interviews and meetings with his foreign policy team. NBC News reported Wednesday that Trump has made at least 32 visits to the site since its transformation began nearly two years ago.</p>
<p>On Tuesday, Trump staged a photo-op with employees of his Trump National Doral golf resort near Miami and sought to speak about both campaign themes and his company. He raised money at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach on Monday.</p>
<p>Over the summer, after he effectively clinched the GOP nomination, Trump flew to Scotland to promote his golf courses there. He announced his campaign last year in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York. He even put Trump-branded products on display at an event in March.</p>
<p>But Trump’s holdings have suffered several setbacks. Two restaurant tenants backed out of the Washington project, and room rates listed there in recent weeks are deeply discounted from the original planned prices. The Trump empire recently announced the launch of a new brand, Scion, that will replace the family name on some company properties going forward amid published reports that several properties have seen a drop in business since Trump launched his campaign.</p>
<p>Trump’s reference to Gingrich’s Fox interview came after one of his top campaign aides made an apparent threat against Kelly via Twitter on Tuesday night.</p>
<p>Dan Scavino tweeted that Kelly “made a total fool out of herself tonight- attacking realDonaldTrump. Watch what happens to her after this election is over.”</p>
<p>When Gingrich raised objections in the interview to the level of coverage of the hacking of Clinton’s emails, Kelly shot back: “That is worth covering. And we did.”</p>
<p>Gingrich persisted: “I mean, you want to go back through the tapes of your show recently. You are fascinated with sex, and you don’t care about public policy.”</p>
<p>Gingrich dismissed the allegations against Trump during the interview but repeatedly referred to former president Bill Clinton as a “sexual predator” – citing allegations by several women against the 42nd president dating to the 1970s. Gingrich led Republican congressional investigations of Bill Clinton in the 1990s that resulted in his impeachment. But the Clinton inquests also brought subsequent GOP congressional losses that forced Gingrich to step down as speaker.</p>
<p>Trump said again on Wednesday that he will put $100 million of his own money in the campaign, adding that he is willing “to spend much more than that.”</p>
<p>“I’ll have over $100 million in the campaign,” he told CNN. “Hillary Clinton has nothing in the campaign. She’s all special interests and donors, and they give her the money and then she will do whatever they tell her to do. But I will have over $100 million in the campaign, and I am prepared to go much more than that.”</p>
<p>However, the real estate mogul has put only $56 million in so far, according to Federal Election Commission filings. On Tuesday, his national finance chairman declined to comment on when Trump planned to give the remainder of the money.</p>
<p>Top Republican Party officials said the party’s ground operation – now staffed by 3,100 paid organizers – is having a discernible impact on early voting in states such as North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Nevada, Wisconsin and Iowa.</p>
<p>Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, called the difference between where the party’s ground game is now compared with 2012 “pretty remarkable,” adding that it “will pay dividends for our party on all levels.”</p>
<p>“Because of the ground game, now we are seeing Democrats being taken down a notch in early voting,” he told reporters on a conference call.</p>
<p>Already, RNC organizers have knocked on more than 12 million doors — surpassing the 11.5 million the party’s field staffers contacted in the entire 2012 race, officials said.</p>
<p>Party officials said the operation to get out the vote for the entire GOP ticket would be “fully funded,” despite the Trump campaign’s decision to largely wind down high-dollar fundraisers in the final weeks of the campaign. The bulk of the proceeds from those events went to the RNC for its national voter mobilization effort. But RNC leaders, including Priebus, continue to fundraise for the party, officials said.</p>
<p>Campaigning in Lake Worth, Florida, Clinton acknowledged the opening of Trump’s new hotel by noting that she was traveling Wednesday with José Andrés, the Washington-based celebrity chef who backed out of plans to build a restaurant at the site.</p>
<p>“While the hotel may be new, it’s the same old story,” Clinton told supporters. “He relied on undocumented workers to make his project cheaper. Most of the products in the rooms were made overseas, and he even sued to get his taxes lowered. We know he’s used undocumented workers. And that’s one of the things he’s run his campaign on, about deporting undocumented workers.”</p>
<p>Interviews conducted by The Washington Post with construction workers at the Trump hotel found that the firm may have been relying on some undocumented workers. Several workers, who hail mostly from Central America, earned U.S. citizenship or legal status, while others acknowledged that they remained in the country illegally.</p>
<p>On “The Breakfast Club” radio show on Wednesday, Clinton was asked why she thinks the historic nature of her candidacy isn’t resonating more.</p>
<p>“I have tried to emphasize to people that, hey, just like President Obama was a really good president – and the fact that he was black, I think, was historic and unprecedented – but he also claimed and owned his excellence, and that’s why I’m saying, ‘OK – I think it’s really exciting and historic that I would be the first woman president, but I have a lot of work I want to do.’ And I hope that people will say, ‘Hey, she’s getting it done.’ That’s how I think about it.”</p> | false | 1 | charlotte donald trump wednesday pledged called new deal black america attempted make late inroads voting bloc polling shows favors democrat hillary clinton vast margin greatest champion trump said campaign rally never ever take africanamerican community granted never ever scripted speech heavy policy specifics republican presidential nominee laid plan said built setting better schools lowering crime inner cities creating highpaying jobs told largely white audience massive numbers black americans ignored left behind blamed democrats clinton crippling crime total violence nations inner cities trump speaking city rocked protests last month police killed unarmed black man speech accused clinton waging war police said puts black lives risk called police residents work together gop nominee pledged remove gang members inner cities continued falsely assert national murder rate highest 45 years inner cities dangerous war zones reading seeing every night trump said real estate mogul said wants allow cities states declare disaster areas blighted communities give microloans black entrepreneurs help spur jobs championed school choice called great civil rights issue time increased funding historically black colleges universities proposed tax holidays innercity investment incentives foreign companies invest blighted american neighborhoods though trump say also said black communities civil rights violated illegal immigration group hurt decades illegal immigration africanamericans said trumps candidacy barely registering africanamerican voters trump 3 percent support among africanamerican voters abc news tracking poll released sunday compared clintons 82 percent clinton matched president barack obamas levels support trump still runs behind romneys 6 percent support among africanamericans 2012 earlier day trump made detour washington officially christen downtown hotel bearing name even campaign sets sights florida makeorbreak battleground state less two weeks election day aides insisted noncampaign event trump took stage railed bloated military hospital construction projects blasted obamacare price spikes congratulated former house speaker newt gingrich sparring tuesday night fox news anchor megyn kelly contentious primetime interview amazing interview trump said pointed gingrich dont play games newt right dont play games gingrich kelly tussled whether news coverage sexual assault allegations trump compares fairly stories ongoing release hacked emails top aides democratic presidential candidate hillary clinton clinton marked 69th birthday making campaign stops florida campaign also released two new television commercials described closing arguments viewers several battleground states one messages voiced actor morgan freeman trump stood ballroom stage alongside three children oversee hotel projects billed official grand opening trump international hotel pennsylvania avenue blocks white house trumps comingling business interests presidential aspirations clear display around glitzy ballroom spoke sen jeff sessions ralabama top trump surrogate hand washington event spoke reporters campaign gingrich sat front room speaking daughter ivanka overseen redevelopment old post office building trump said project shows work government get things done theme today five words budget ahead schedule important dont hear words often government one many instances simultaneously promoted business political interests last time trump held major public event hotel district last month acknowledged first time president obama born united states also met privately hotel employees used interviews meetings foreign policy team nbc news reported wednesday trump made least 32 visits site since transformation began nearly two years ago tuesday trump staged photoop employees trump national doral golf resort near miami sought speak campaign themes company raised money maralago resort palm beach monday summer effectively clinched gop nomination trump flew scotland promote golf courses announced campaign last year lobby trump tower new york even put trumpbranded products display event march trumps holdings suffered several setbacks two restaurant tenants backed washington project room rates listed recent weeks deeply discounted original planned prices trump empire recently announced launch new brand scion replace family name company properties going forward amid published reports several properties seen drop business since trump launched campaign trumps reference gingrichs fox interview came one top campaign aides made apparent threat kelly via twitter tuesday night dan scavino tweeted kelly made total fool tonight attacking realdonaldtrump watch happens election gingrich raised objections interview level coverage hacking clintons emails kelly shot back worth covering gingrich persisted mean want go back tapes show recently fascinated sex dont care public policy gingrich dismissed allegations trump interview repeatedly referred former president bill clinton sexual predator citing allegations several women 42nd president dating 1970s gingrich led republican congressional investigations bill clinton 1990s resulted impeachment clinton inquests also brought subsequent gop congressional losses forced gingrich step speaker trump said wednesday put 100 million money campaign adding willing spend much ill 100 million campaign told cnn hillary clinton nothing campaign shes special interests donors give money whatever tell 100 million campaign prepared go much however real estate mogul put 56 million far according federal election commission filings tuesday national finance chairman declined comment trump planned give remainder money top republican party officials said partys ground operation staffed 3100 paid organizers discernible impact early voting states north carolina florida ohio nevada wisconsin iowa reince priebus chairman republican national committee called difference partys ground game compared 2012 pretty remarkable adding pay dividends party levels ground game seeing democrats taken notch early voting told reporters conference call already rnc organizers knocked 12 million doors surpassing 115 million partys field staffers contacted entire 2012 race officials said party officials said operation get vote entire gop ticket would fully funded despite trump campaigns decision largely wind highdollar fundraisers final weeks campaign bulk proceeds events went rnc national voter mobilization effort rnc leaders including priebus continue fundraise party officials said campaigning lake worth florida clinton acknowledged opening trumps new hotel noting traveling wednesday josé andrés washingtonbased celebrity chef backed plans build restaurant site hotel may new old story clinton told supporters relied undocumented workers make project cheaper products rooms made overseas even sued get taxes lowered know hes used undocumented workers thats one things hes run campaign deporting undocumented workers interviews conducted washington post construction workers trump hotel found firm may relying undocumented workers several workers hail mostly central america earned us citizenship legal status others acknowledged remained country illegally breakfast club radio show wednesday clinton asked thinks historic nature candidacy isnt resonating tried emphasize people hey like president obama really good president fact black think historic unprecedented also claimed owned excellence thats im saying ok think really exciting historic would first woman president lot work want hope people say hey shes getting done thats think | 1,030 |
<p>By Mark Miller</p>
<p>CHICAGO (Reuters) – Forewarned is forearmed – and for U.S. seniors, the warning just arrived in the mail.</p>
<p>Each September, enrollees in Medicare prescription drug and Advantage plans receive letters from their insurance companies detailing any changes in coverage for the year ahead. Called the Annual Notice of Change, the document is well worth reviewing, because it arrives just ahead of the annual fall plan open enrollment period, which runs from Oct. 15 to Dec. 7.</p>
<p>In many cases, the letter should be a wake-up call to re-shop coverage, especially where Part D drug plans are concerned. These plans often change their premiums from year to year, along with their rules for cost-sharing, coverage of specific medications – and even whether a specific drug will be covered.</p>
<p>Medicare eligibility begins at age 65, and the first choice is between traditional Medicare and an Advantage plan, an all-in-one managed-care alternative that usually includes prescription drug coverage. Advantage plans also cap out-of-pocket expenses. Seniors who choose traditional Medicare usually add a standalone drug plan; many also add a Medigap supplemental policy. But all drug coverage features can change annually, and Advantage plans can make changes to their networks of healthcare providers at any time.</p>
<p>“What worked for you in the past won’t necessarily be best for you in the future,” said Casey Schwarz, senior counsel for education and federal policy at the Medicare Rights Center, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group. “It’s important to look at your options and evaluate whether you should switch plans.”</p>
<p>Few Medicare plan users re-shop their coverage, and those who do tend to focus only on premiums, said Schwarz. “People often mistakenly just choose the least expensive premium, or one that is middle-of-the-road.”</p>
<p>She urges people also to evaluate the network of providers – pharmacy delivery options in the case of standalone drug plans, and healthcare providers in the case of Advantage plans. Also read carefully the so-called formulary, which describes the rules for coverage of a medication – whether any quantity limits are imposed, or if the red tape of “prior authorization” will be invoked.</p>
<p>MORE COMPLEXITY</p>
<p>Drug plans are becoming more complicated. Most have deductibles, and just over half will charge the full amount permitted under Medicare’s rules ($405), according to the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). And most plans have shifted to using multiple copayment (flat fee) or coinsurance amount (percentage of total cost), rather than a single coinsurance rate. This is especially true for high-cost medications.</p>
<p>“Cost-sharing was more simple in the early days of Part D,” said Juliette Cubanski, associate director of the program on Medicare policy at KFF. Higher coinsurance rates could leave enrollees with substantial out-of-pocket costs, especially for high-cost specialty drugs.</p>
<p>Low-income seniors may face an additional challenge this year in finding a good-fit plan. A low-income subsidy program covers most or all insurance costs for roughly 12 million older Americans. But the number of plans that provide no-premium coverage will fall 6 percent next year – and seven regions will have no more than four plan offerings. Most notably, Florida will have just two.</p>
<p>One bit of good news is the continued shrinking of the notorious “donut hole,” the gap in coverage that affects plan enrollees with intensive drug needs. The gap next year begins when total combined spending by you and your insurance company reaches $3,750 in drug costs, and coverage resumes when total out-of-pocket spending reaches $5,000.</p>
<p>Outside the gap, your plan pays 75 percent of total costs, but that plunges to just 15 percent inside the gap. Under the Affordable Care Act, costs borne by enrollees inside the donut hole are shrinking gradually. In 2018, enrollees who fall into the gap will receive a 65 percent discount on brand-name drugs (up from 60 percent this year). The discount on generics will rise from 49 percent to 56 percent.</p>
<p>HOW TO SHOP PLANS</p>
<p>The best starting point for shopping plans is the Medicare Plan Finder at the Medicare website Plug in your Medicare number and drugs (you will need each drug’s name and dosage). The plan finder then displays a list of plans that match your needs, including their estimated total cost (premiums and out-of-pocket expenses); which drugs are covered; and customer-satisfaction ratings. The finder also will give you advice about drug utilization and restrictions.</p>
<p>If your drug needs are complicated, a range of expert help is available.</p>
<p>State Health Insurance Assistance Programs (SHIPs) provide free counseling on coverage options (click here to find your local SHIP The Trump administration and congressional budget writers have proposed to eliminate SHIP, but any cuts – if they do come at all – will affect this fall’s enrollment season.</p>
<p>The Medicare Rights Center also offers free counseling by phone (1-800-333-4114).</p>
<p>Finally, if you are willing to pay to obtain expert help with plan selection, hire an independent, fee-based counseling service such as Allsup Medicare Advisor (https://www.allsup.com/medicare-advisor) or Goodcare For a few hundred dollars, these firms will provide a written, personalized plan analysis and offer phone consultations.</p> | false | 1 | mark miller chicago reuters forewarned forearmed us seniors warning arrived mail september enrollees medicare prescription drug advantage plans receive letters insurance companies detailing changes coverage year ahead called annual notice change document well worth reviewing arrives ahead annual fall plan open enrollment period runs oct 15 dec 7 many cases letter wakeup call reshop coverage especially part drug plans concerned plans often change premiums year year along rules costsharing coverage specific medications even whether specific drug covered medicare eligibility begins age 65 first choice traditional medicare advantage plan allinone managedcare alternative usually includes prescription drug coverage advantage plans also cap outofpocket expenses seniors choose traditional medicare usually add standalone drug plan many also add medigap supplemental policy drug coverage features change annually advantage plans make changes networks healthcare providers time worked past wont necessarily best future said casey schwarz senior counsel education federal policy medicare rights center nonprofit consumer advocacy group important look options evaluate whether switch plans medicare plan users reshop coverage tend focus premiums said schwarz people often mistakenly choose least expensive premium one middleoftheroad urges people also evaluate network providers pharmacy delivery options case standalone drug plans healthcare providers case advantage plans also read carefully socalled formulary describes rules coverage medication whether quantity limits imposed red tape prior authorization invoked complexity drug plans becoming complicated deductibles half charge full amount permitted medicares rules 405 according kaiser family foundation kff plans shifted using multiple copayment flat fee coinsurance amount percentage total cost rather single coinsurance rate especially true highcost medications costsharing simple early days part said juliette cubanski associate director program medicare policy kff higher coinsurance rates could leave enrollees substantial outofpocket costs especially highcost specialty drugs lowincome seniors may face additional challenge year finding goodfit plan lowincome subsidy program covers insurance costs roughly 12 million older americans number plans provide nopremium coverage fall 6 percent next year seven regions four plan offerings notably florida two one bit good news continued shrinking notorious donut hole gap coverage affects plan enrollees intensive drug needs gap next year begins total combined spending insurance company reaches 3750 drug costs coverage resumes total outofpocket spending reaches 5000 outside gap plan pays 75 percent total costs plunges 15 percent inside gap affordable care act costs borne enrollees inside donut hole shrinking gradually 2018 enrollees fall gap receive 65 percent discount brandname drugs 60 percent year discount generics rise 49 percent 56 percent shop plans best starting point shopping plans medicare plan finder medicare website plug medicare number drugs need drugs name dosage plan finder displays list plans match needs including estimated total cost premiums outofpocket expenses drugs covered customersatisfaction ratings finder also give advice drug utilization restrictions drug needs complicated range expert help available state health insurance assistance programs ships provide free counseling coverage options click find local ship trump administration congressional budget writers proposed eliminate ship cuts come affect falls enrollment season medicare rights center also offers free counseling phone 18003334114 finally willing pay obtain expert help plan selection hire independent feebased counseling service allsup medicare advisor httpswwwallsupcommedicareadvisor goodcare hundred dollars firms provide written personalized plan analysis offer phone consultations | 518 |
<p>What goes up must come down.</p>
<p>Local government officials learned that the hard way last year, when a <a href="" type="internal">Nevada law enacted in 2005</a>to protect residents from ballooning property taxes crippled county, city and school district revenue streams across the state.</p>
<p>The effect is lingering fallout from the Great Recession, which reversed the trend of soaring property values that had necessitated the tax increase caps in the first place.</p>
<p>Now, Clark County Manager Yolanda King wants her top lobbyists to persuade state lawmakers to modify the property tax cap law during the 2017 Nevada Legislature session that begins Feb. 6.</p>
<p>“We’re seeing an increased level of services needed from our taxpayers, but the (property tax) revenue that is used to provide those services to the taxpayers isn’t keeping up,” said King, who is also the county’s former chief financial officer.</p>
<p>County and city governments across Nevada hope Assembly Bill 43 will fix the formula that caused property tax increases to plummet last year, even though assessed property values have been steadily climbing, King said.</p>
<p>“It affects urban, rural, north and south,” said Jeff Fontaine, executive director of the Nevada Association of Counties, which requested the bill. “Our intent is to provide more stability to the property tax revenues, so that the counties can budget and provide the services that their constituents expect. This isn’t about creating a windfall for county governments.”</p>
<p>AB43 will not remove existing stationary caps on annual increases of residential and commercial property taxes, which are set at 3 and 8 percent, respectively. Instead, it would establish a floor of 3 percent for the annual commercial property tax increase.</p>
<p>That’s important, King said, because the formulas used to calculate commercial property tax increases resulted in an increase of 0.2 percent for the 2017 fiscal year. A provision of the law also meant residential property taxes were limited to rising by 0.2 percent.</p>
<p>Fontaine said six counties, including Clark and Washoe, saw property taxes increase by only 0.2 percent last year because of those formulas. Another three counties had increases below 3 percent.</p>
<p>Those numbers were caused by two secondary caps that are part of the law.</p>
<p>The first is a 10-year average for the growth rate of taxable home value. That’s been in decline since 2008 and is expected to be in the negatives through at least 2017 thanks to the Great Recession.</p>
<p>The 0.2 percent increase in 2016 was calculated by doubling the previous year’s Consumer Price Index, a formula used to measure inflation on a national level. Since it’s the larger number of the two secondary caps, it was the 2017 fiscal year’s acting cap.</p>
<p>In addition to establishing a floor for property tax increases, AB43 aims to change the formula in the tax cap law involving the CPI to make it easier to predict annual increases, King said. The bill would change the CPI used from a single year to a 10-year rolling average.</p>
<p>If that formula were already in effect for fiscal year 2017, King said, commercial property tax would have risen 4 percent, and residential property tax would have risen 3 percent.</p>
<p>“AB43 will hopefully smooth out what the CPI percentages look like over a period of time, rather than at one point of time,” King said. “You will and can avoid the fluctuations in what you will pay from year to year.”</p>
<p>In addition to AB43, a team of three Clark County employees is preparing to lobby for two more bills requested by the county, both of which the county submitted to the Legislative Counsel Bureau last year.</p>
<p>Senate Bill 9 is intended to help reduce overcrowding at the county jail.</p>
<p>Assembly Bill 65 would free up $15 million to $20 million a year in the county’s general fund and provide University Medical Center with close to $10 million a year in capital via a reallocation of property tax revenue, King said.</p>
<p>The county’s team includes lead lobbyist Alex Ortiz, the county’s assistant director of administrative services; office of risk management director Les Lee Shell; and coroner John Fudenberg.</p>
<p>Shell and Fudenberg have each lobbied at one other Nevada Legislature session, King said. Ortiz has lobbied at more than six.</p>
<p>Contact Michael Scott Davidson at [email protected] or 702-477-3861. Follow <a href="http://www.twitter.com/davidsonlvrj" type="external">@davidsonlvrj</a> on Twitter.</p>
<p />
<p>CLARK COUNTY LEGISLATIVE PRIORITIES</p>
<p>Senate Bill 9 would allow Nevada counties to request responsibility for creating Presentence Investigation Reports, documents that provide judges with sentencing recommendations for people convicted of felony or gross misdemeanor crimes.</p>
<p>Right now counties pay 70 percent of the cost to create the reports, but the Nevada Department of Public Safety is in charge of making the reports. The state agency’s average completion time on the reports is slower than the 45 days allowed by state law.</p>
<p>Clark County can complete the reports faster and speed up the process of getting convicts out of the county jail, County Manager Yolanda King said.</p>
<p>Assembly Bill 65 would allow the county to use property tax revenue set aside for its indigent assistance fund to make payments to Medicaid’s Upper Payment Limit program, which would be matched by the federal government and come back to University Medical Center, a public hospital.</p>
<p>Doing so would free up $15 million to $20 million a year in the county’s general fund, where the payments to the UPL come from, King said.</p>
<p>AB 65 also would allot a portion of property tax revenue to be used for renovation and expansion projects at UMC.</p>
<p>As written, that amount is up to 2 cents of a property’s tax rate. King said that would amount to close $10 million a year.</p>
<p>graphic</p>
<p /> | false | 1 | goes must come local government officials learned hard way last year nevada law enacted 2005to protect residents ballooning property taxes crippled county city school district revenue streams across state effect lingering fallout great recession reversed trend soaring property values necessitated tax increase caps first place clark county manager yolanda king wants top lobbyists persuade state lawmakers modify property tax cap law 2017 nevada legislature session begins feb 6 seeing increased level services needed taxpayers property tax revenue used provide services taxpayers isnt keeping said king also countys former chief financial officer county city governments across nevada hope assembly bill 43 fix formula caused property tax increases plummet last year even though assessed property values steadily climbing king said affects urban rural north south said jeff fontaine executive director nevada association counties requested bill intent provide stability property tax revenues counties budget provide services constituents expect isnt creating windfall county governments ab43 remove existing stationary caps annual increases residential commercial property taxes set 3 8 percent respectively instead would establish floor 3 percent annual commercial property tax increase thats important king said formulas used calculate commercial property tax increases resulted increase 02 percent 2017 fiscal year provision law also meant residential property taxes limited rising 02 percent fontaine said six counties including clark washoe saw property taxes increase 02 percent last year formulas another three counties increases 3 percent numbers caused two secondary caps part law first 10year average growth rate taxable home value thats decline since 2008 expected negatives least 2017 thanks great recession 02 percent increase 2016 calculated doubling previous years consumer price index formula used measure inflation national level since larger number two secondary caps 2017 fiscal years acting cap addition establishing floor property tax increases ab43 aims change formula tax cap law involving cpi make easier predict annual increases king said bill would change cpi used single year 10year rolling average formula already effect fiscal year 2017 king said commercial property tax would risen 4 percent residential property tax would risen 3 percent ab43 hopefully smooth cpi percentages look like period time rather one point time king said avoid fluctuations pay year year addition ab43 team three clark county employees preparing lobby two bills requested county county submitted legislative counsel bureau last year senate bill 9 intended help reduce overcrowding county jail assembly bill 65 would free 15 million 20 million year countys general fund provide university medical center close 10 million year capital via reallocation property tax revenue king said countys team includes lead lobbyist alex ortiz countys assistant director administrative services office risk management director les lee shell coroner john fudenberg shell fudenberg lobbied one nevada legislature session king said ortiz lobbied six contact michael scott davidson sdavidsonreviewjournalcom 7024773861 follow davidsonlvrj twitter clark county legislative priorities senate bill 9 would allow nevada counties request responsibility creating presentence investigation reports documents provide judges sentencing recommendations people convicted felony gross misdemeanor crimes right counties pay 70 percent cost create reports nevada department public safety charge making reports state agencys average completion time reports slower 45 days allowed state law clark county complete reports faster speed process getting convicts county jail county manager yolanda king said assembly bill 65 would allow county use property tax revenue set aside indigent assistance fund make payments medicaids upper payment limit program would matched federal government come back university medical center public hospital would free 15 million 20 million year countys general fund payments upl come king said ab 65 also would allot portion property tax revenue used renovation expansion projects umc written amount 2 cents propertys tax rate king said would amount close 10 million year graphic | 606 |
<p>WASHINGTON — As Donald Trump labeled himself the worst-treated president in U.S. history, congressional Republicans faced increasing pressure Wednesday to authorize an independent probe into a growing number of controversies involving the White House.</p>
<p>Republicans in the House and Senate are reeling from the constant bombardment of Trump-related actions and statements that have also spooked investors and resulted in a stock market plunge. The growing political drama sent the markets to their biggest one-day decline since September, with the Dow Jones industial average falling 372 points, or 1.8 percent, on Wednesday.</p>
<p>Democrats are pressing for an independent commission to review the firing of FBI Director James Comey, an FBI probe into collusion between Russians and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who served in the Trump campaign, and Trump’s sharing of reported Israeli intelligence with Russia.</p>
<p>Trump denies any wrongdoing in those incidents, and he used a speech to U.S. Coast Guard cadets in Connecticut on Wednesday to cast himself as a victim of an over-zealous media and Congress.</p>
<p>“No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly,” Trump said.</p>
<p>“Adversity makes you stronger,” Trump said. “Don’t give in. Don’t back down.”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, Democrats urged Republicans to authorize funds to staff an independent commission to probe the growing number of allegations involving Trump, including a reported memo from Comey that Trump tried to quell an FBI investigation into Flynn earlier this year.</p>
<p>Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said Congress continues to learn disturbing facts about the president “not just every day, but ladies and gentlemen, every hour.”</p>
<p>“Enough is enough,” said Rep. Ruben Kihuen, D-Nev., during a news conference with Cummings and other Democratic members on key committees conducting investigations.</p>
<p>No rush to judgment</p>
<p>Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the House oversight panel, has asked the FBI to hand over documents relating to Comey’s assertion about White House involvement in the probe into Flynn. Chaffetz has threatened to use his subpoena “pen” to get the materials.</p>
<p>“The problem is, we have been waiting for months for the chairman to pick up his subpoena pen,” Cummings said. “The Republicans are not doing their job in holding the Republican president accountable.”</p>
<p>House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said there were those who would like to do harm to the president and said there would be no rush to judgment.</p>
<p>Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said he would like to see a little “less drama” out of the White House, but told reporters he had not lost confidence in the president.</p>
<p>Still, the Senate Intelligence Committee has asked Comey to appear before the panel to discuss his recent firing and events that led up to that decision by the president, which included a White House dinner and other conversations.</p>
<p>Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., also asked acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe to reappear before the panel. McCabe told the Senate last week that there was no instance of White House interference into the FBI probe of Flynn, who resigned after information surfaced that he lied to administration officials about his ties to Russian officials.</p>
<p>Senate and House intelligence committees are also investigating alleged Russian interference into the 2016 presidential election, and possible collusion between the foreign government and Trump campaign officials.</p>
<p>Intelligence sharing</p>
<p>Both Democrats and Republicans were taken aback this week when it was revealed that, a day after firing Comey, Trump shared information with Russian officials at the White House that was reportedly about a terrorist plot to use laptops in attacks on aircraft.</p>
<p>Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called it deeply disturbing.</p>
<p>In the House, Rep. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., circulated a letter signed by more than 40 Democratic lawmakers and sent to the White House criticizing the president for sharing intelligence, reportedly provided by Israel, with Russia about the terrorist plot.</p>
<p>Trump and White House aides have denied that the president acted improperly in disclosing the intelligence to the Russians.</p>
<p>The congressional letter says the president’s action in sharing the information could endanger third-nation intelligence gathering and hamper future collection and access to vital information.</p>
<p>“Regardless of whether or not the State of Israel publicly confirms these reports, the underlying issue at hand is that the reckless disclosure has the potential to undermine our intelligence relations with all of our allies,” said the letter from Rosen, a member of the House Armed Services Committee.</p>
<p>House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., introduced a discharge petition that would force Republicans to authorize the independent commission. Nevada Democrats Kihuen, Rosen and Rep. Dina Titus all signed it.</p>
<p>It takes 218 votes to bring the petition to the floor. Only two Republican lawmakers have signed the petition so far.</p>
<p>Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said an independent commission would work in conjunction with congressional probes into the controversies.</p>
<p>And he noted that nothing will happen quickly.</p>
<p>“This is going to take time,” Schiff told a news conference.</p>
<p>Contact Gary Martin at 202-662-7390 or [email protected]. Follow @garymartindc on Twitter.</p> | false | 1 | washington donald trump labeled worsttreated president us history congressional republicans faced increasing pressure wednesday authorize independent probe growing number controversies involving white house republicans house senate reeling constant bombardment trumprelated actions statements also spooked investors resulted stock market plunge growing political drama sent markets biggest oneday decline since september dow jones industial average falling 372 points 18 percent wednesday democrats pressing independent commission review firing fbi director james comey fbi probe collusion russians former national security adviser michael flynn served trump campaign trumps sharing reported israeli intelligence russia trump denies wrongdoing incidents used speech us coast guard cadets connecticut wednesday cast victim overzealous media congress politician history say great surety treated worse unfairly trump said adversity makes stronger trump said dont give dont back meanwhile capitol hill democrats urged republicans authorize funds staff independent commission probe growing number allegations involving trump including reported memo comey trump tried quell fbi investigation flynn earlier year rep elijah cummings dmd ranking democrat house oversight government reform committee said congress continues learn disturbing facts president every day ladies gentlemen every hour enough enough said rep ruben kihuen dnev news conference cummings democratic members key committees conducting investigations rush judgment rep jason chaffetz rutah chairman house oversight panel asked fbi hand documents relating comeys assertion white house involvement probe flynn chaffetz threatened use subpoena pen get materials problem waiting months chairman pick subpoena pen cummings said republicans job holding republican president accountable house speaker paul ryan rwis said would like harm president said would rush judgment senate majority leader mitch mcconnell rky said would like see little less drama white house told reporters lost confidence president still senate intelligence committee asked comey appear panel discuss recent firing events led decision president included white house dinner conversations chairman richard burr rnc also asked acting fbi director andrew mccabe reappear panel mccabe told senate last week instance white house interference fbi probe flynn resigned information surfaced lied administration officials ties russian officials senate house intelligence committees also investigating alleged russian interference 2016 presidential election possible collusion foreign government trump campaign officials intelligence sharing democrats republicans taken aback week revealed day firing comey trump shared information russian officials white house reportedly terrorist plot use laptops attacks aircraft sen john mccain rariz chairman senate armed services committee called deeply disturbing house rep jacky rosen dnev circulated letter signed 40 democratic lawmakers sent white house criticizing president sharing intelligence reportedly provided israel russia terrorist plot trump white house aides denied president acted improperly disclosing intelligence russians congressional letter says presidents action sharing information could endanger thirdnation intelligence gathering hamper future collection access vital information regardless whether state israel publicly confirms reports underlying issue hand reckless disclosure potential undermine intelligence relations allies said letter rosen member house armed services committee house democratic leader nancy pelosi dcalif introduced discharge petition would force republicans authorize independent commission nevada democrats kihuen rosen rep dina titus signed takes 218 votes bring petition floor two republican lawmakers signed petition far rep adam schiff dcalif ranking democrat house intelligence committee said independent commission would work conjunction congressional probes controversies noted nothing happen quickly going take time schiff told news conference contact gary martin 2026627390 gmartinreviewjournalcom follow garymartindc twitter | 531 |
<p>In an eclectic weekend of Thoroughbred racing: World Approval won the Woodbine Mile, The Tabulator won the first race on the “Road to the Kentucky Derby” and Winx won her 20th straight race.</p>
<p>Five races, including four for 2-year-olds, offered Breeders’ Cup berths.</p>
<p>Sadly, RIP Penny Chenery.</p>
<p>Turf Mile</p>
<p>World Approval got the best of some world-class turf runners in Saturday’s $800,000 (Canadian) Ricoh Woodbine Mile.</p>
<p>The race was delayed briefly while a flock of geese was chased off the course near the furlong marker. And, when the gates opened, the 12-horse field raced pretty much as a bunched up flock. World Approval, under <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/John_Velazquez/" type="external">John Velazquez</a>, pressed the pace through the first half mile with only about 6 lengths covering the field.</p>
<p>Around the turn, World Approval began to assert himself, finally drawing off to win by 2 1/2 lengths. Lancaster Bomber fought through some traffic early in the stretch run to finish a game second for the Coolmore team and Long On Value rallied from next-last to take third. World Approval, a 5-year-old Northern Afleet gelding, ran 1 mile on firm going in 1:33.05, earning a berth in the Breeders’ Cup Mile through the “Win and You’re In” program. “As long as he’s healthy, we are going to the Breeders’ Cup,” said winning trainer Norm Casse. “Am I confident we can win? I don’t think I would change places with anybody.”</p>
<p>Velazquez, who rode the horse for the first time, said he wasn’t sure who might take the lead. “He broke well today, no one seemed to want the lead, I just kind of left him there and he held on very well,” he said.</p>
<p>It was the third win in four tries this year for World Approval, who carries the black, white and red dots of Live Oak Plantation. All of his wins have come at 1 mile or a sixteenth longer. By contrast, several of his rivals have found more success going longer.</p>
<p>Turf</p>
<p>Johnny Bear, stepping way up in class, put a nostril in front of pacesetting favorite Hawkbill in the final jump to win Saturday’s $300,000 (Canadian) Northern Dancer at Woodbine. Messi was third. Johnny Bear, a 6-year-old English Channel gelding, ran 1 1/2 miles on firm turf in 2:28.35 with Luis Contreras aboard for trainer Ashlee Brnjas. Johnny Bear had been toiling in mid-level optional claimers over the Woodbine turf while Hawkbill arrived in Toronto after finishing second in the Group 1 Grosser Preis von Berlin and, before that, winning the Group 2 Princess of Wales’s Stakes at Newmarket. “I was just thinking to stay in behind the eight horse (Hawkbill) and follow him and it worked out perfect,” Contreras said. “I want to thank everybody for making him 15-1,” added part owner John Brnjas. Hawkbill’s rider, Colm O’Donoghue, said his mount “travelled well and moved great. He hit the line strong and it was a bob of the heads and, unfortunately, it didn’t go his way.”</p>
<p>Canessar saved ground into the stretch turn in Saturday’s $100,000 Laurel Turf Cup, moved up between horses nearing the lane, then found room on the outside to get up and win by 1 1/4 lengths. The favorite, Infinite Wisdom, was second, 2 1/4 lengths to the good of Renown. Canessar, a 4-year-old French-bred gelding by Kendargent, ran 1 1/2 miles on firm turf in 2:25.23 with Feargal Lynch in the irons. It was his first start in the United States for trainer Arnaud Delacour after a successful run in France on the fringes of the big time. Delacour said the gelding will move along the class ladder. “For this race, we thought the timing was right for the Grade 3 at Keeneland,” Delacour said, referring to the Oct. 19 Sycamore.</p>
<p>Filly &amp; Mare Turf</p>
<p>Uni rallied to catch pacesetting La Coronel in the stretch drive in Saturday’s $400,000 Grade II Sands Point Stakes for 3-year-old fillies at Belmont Park and won a long duel by a neck over that rival. Fault was third. Uni, a British-bred daughter of More Than Ready, ran 9 furlongs on the firm inner turf course in 1:48.97 with <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Irad-Ortiz/" type="external">Irad Ortiz</a> Jr. up. Uni was making her third U.S. start after coming from France. She was second in each of the first two runs — the Grade I Belmont Oaks Invitational and the Grade II Lake Placid at Saratoga. Ortiz said the key in the Sands Point was getting a better break. Trainer <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Chad_Brown/" type="external">Chad Brown</a> added, “This is her best race to date and she’s an exciting horse for the future. We really like her.” Brown said he will talk to the owners about the Grade I <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Elizabeth_II/" type="external">Queen Elizabeth</a> II at Keeneland Oct. 14.</p>
<p>Quidura raced behind the leading trio into the stretch run in Saturday’s $250,000 (Canadian) Canadian Stakes at Woodbine, found a path between rivals and was in full command by the sixteenth pole, winning by 1 length over late-running Elysea’s World. Starship Jubilee led the field into the stretch, gave way grudgingly and held on for third. The 1 1/16 miles over firm turf went in 1:45.26. Jockey Junior Alvarado said he never felt trapped behind the leaders. “I knew she was there for me any time I called on her so I wasn’t worried,” he said. Quidura, a 4-year-old English-bred filly by Dubawi, entered the Canadian off a second-place finish to Lady Eli in the Grade I Diana at Saratoga — credential enough to make her the odds-on favorite Saturday. Trainer Graham Motion said he brought Quidura to the Canadian “because of the timing. I really hope to take her to Del Mar for the Breeders’ Cup so I wish this was still a ‘Win and You’re In’,” he said. Raced in Germany early in her career, Quidura is owned by her breeder, Gestut Fahrhof.</p>
<p>On Leave prompted the pace in Saturday’s $150,000 All Along Stakes for fillies and mares at Laurel Park, eased to the lead at the top of the stretch and gradually worked clear, winning by 1 length over Paige. Light Up Our World lost second by a nose after leading most of the way. On Leave, a 4-year-old Stuart Janney III homebred daughter of War Front, ran 1 1/16 miles on firm turf in 1:40.24 with Forest Boyce in the irons for trainer Shug McGaughey.</p>
<p>Turf Sprint</p>
<p>Snowday tracked the pace in Saturday’s $100,000 Laurel Dash, moved to the lead in the lane and held on to win by a head over Class and Cash with Rapid Dan only another head back in third. Snowday, a French-bred 7-year-old gelding by Falco, finished 6 furlongs on firm going in 1:09.02 with Daniel Centeno at the controls. Snowday has made a nice progression from optional claimers this season, winning the My Frenchman Stakes at Monmouth Park before finishing third, beaten only 1/2 length, in the Grade III Turf Monster at Parx in his last start. Mongolian Saturday, the 2015 Breeders’ Cup winner, was second in the Parx race.</p>
<p>Always Thinking came running in deep stretch to upset Saturday’s $100,000 Sensible Lady Turf Dash for fillies and mares at Laurel Park. The 4-year-old Street Sense filly rallied down the outside of rivals and won by 1 1/2 lengths over Fire Key at odds of 25-1. Rocky Policy was third and the odds-on favorite, Miss Ella, was never in the mix after bobbling at the start. Always Thinking, owned by Godolphin and trained by <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Tom_Albertrani/" type="external">Tom Albertrani</a>, ran 6 furlongs on firm turf in 1:07.68, eclipsing the course record of 1:08.00 set by Texas Glitter in 2000. Always Thinking drew into the race from the also-eligible list and picked up her third career win.</p>
<p>Juvenile</p>
<p>The leader on the Road to the Kentucky Derby is: The Tabulator. The Dialed In colt earned 10 Derby qualifying points with a pace-stalking 3/4-length victory in Saturday’s $150,000 Grade III Iroquois Stakes at Churchill Downs, the first on the long list of Road to the Derby races. The favorite, Hollywood Star, finished second and Ten City was third. The Tabulator, with <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Jose_Valdivia/" type="external">Jose Valdivia</a> Jr. up for trainer Arlington-based trainer Larry Rivelli, finished 1 1/16 miles on a fast track in 1:45.50. It was his first start since a win in the Prairie Gold Juvenile in Iowa in July. The Iroquois win also earned The Tabulator a berth in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile via the “Win and You’re In” program. “When we turned for home in front he still looked around a little bit in the stretch,” Valdivia said. “But I’m just glad we were able to get there. With this being the kickoff for the ‘Road to the Kentucky Derby’ and a Breeders’ Cup ‘Win and You’re In’, it’s very exciting to have a horse of this quality.”</p>
<p>Juvenile Turf</p>
<p>Therapist picked up his second win from as many starts in Saturday’s $100,000 Laurel Futurity. The New York-bred Freud colt broke through the gate before the race, then was among the last to exit the machine at the appropriate time. He advanced on the leaders in the lane and was along in the final yards to win by a head over Stroll Smokin. The favorite, Majestic Dunhill, was another 1 1/2 lengths back in third. Therapist got home in 1:09.50. He won his career debut at Belmont Park July 2. “I got lucky he didn’t get hurt in the gate,” Centeno said. “It was only his second start and he got nervous. He broke a little slow and I put him on the rail and I saved all the ground.” <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Christophe_Clement/" type="external">Christophe Clement</a> trains the colt.</p>
<p>Untamed Domain edged by the favorite, Hemp Hemp Hurray in the final yards of Sunday’s $200,000 (Canadian) Summer Stakes at Woodbine, winning by a neck. Admiralty Pier was third. Untamed Domain, an Animal Kingdom colt out of the Lear Fan mare Ciao, ran 1 mile on firm turf in 1:34.73 with <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Joe_Bravo/" type="external">Joe Bravo</a> aboard for trainer Graham Motion. He was the second Animal Kingdom juvenile to find the winner’s circle at Woodbine during the weekend. Grace and Dignity, an Animal Kingdom filly out of the Smart Strike mare Precision Farming, won a Saturday maiden race handily in her first career start.</p>
<p>Juvenile Fillies</p>
<p>Patrona Margarita, dismissed at odds of nearly 24-1, rolled from the middle of the pack in Saturday’s $200,000 Grade II Pocahontas at Churchill Downs and was up to win by 3 3/4 lengths over Kelly’s Humor. Sunny Skies was third and the favorite, retreated to finish ninth. Patrona Margarita, a Texas-bred filly by Special Rate, ran 1 1/16 miles on a fast track in 1:46.35 with <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Brian_Hernandez/" type="external">Brian Hernandez</a> Jr. up. She was last seen finishing a close third in the restricted Texas Thoroughbred Breeders’ Futurity at Lone Star Park in July. The Pocahontas score earned her 10 points toward a potential spot in next spring’s Longines Kentucky Oaks starting gate and a spot in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies thanks to the “Win and You’re In” scheme. The latter opening won’t be used, however. “She’s not Breeders’ Cup eligible so we’ll probably point towards the Alcibiades at Keeneland,” said winning trainer Bret Calhoun.</p>
<p>Ismelucky collared Shaken Memories in deep stretch in Saturday’s $100,000 Barretts Debutante Stakes at Los Alamitos, winning by 1/2 length over that one. Exuberance was third. Ismelucky, a California-bred filly by Lucky Pulpit, ran 6 1/2 furlongs on a fast track in 1:17.84 with <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Kent_Desormeaux/" type="external">Kent Desormeaux</a> riding. After a second-place finish in her first career start, Ismelucky now has two wins from two tries for trainer and part-owner Jeff Bonde. “It was an eventful trip to say the least,” Desormeaux said. “We got slammed at the start by (Funny Bean), then we had to wait for room, and then in the stretch, (Shaken Memories) was using her tail like a fan in front of us. This filly really showed me something today.”</p>
<p>Juvenile Fillies Turf</p>
<p>Wise Gal made it 2-for-2 with a 4 1/4-lengths victory in Saturday’s $100,000 <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Selima_Stakes/" type="external">Selima Stakes</a> at Laurel Park. The Einstein filly was off a tad slowly, came five-wide to challenge for the lead and won despite drifting in late. Madame X. was best of the rest and Eighty Six Mets ran evenly to get show money. Wise Gal, with Steve Hamilton up, ran 6 furlongs on firm going in 1:09.43. She won at first asking over the same course a month earlier.</p>
<p>Capala Temptress raced well back through the early furlongs of Sunday’s $100,000 (Canadian) Selima Stakes at Woodbine, found a seam between rivals at the eighth pole, went through and on to a 3/4-length victory. Pacesetter Dixie Moon was second, a head in front of Wonder Gadot. Capala Temptress, an Irish-bred daughter of Lope de Vega, ran 1 mile on firm going in 1:35.12 with <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Joel_Rosario/" type="external">Joel Rosario</a> riding for Newmarket-based trainer Marco Botti.</p>
<p>Sprint</p>
<p>Chublicious, the outside chance in a field of four, wore down pacesetting Blu Moon Ace in the final yards of Saturday’s $250,000 Grade III Frank J. De Francis Memorial Dash and won by a neck over that one. The favorite, Whitmore, was 1 1/4 lengths back in third and Awesome Banner completed the order of finish. Chublicious, a 6-year-old gelding by Hey Chub, ran 6 furlongs on a fast track in 1:08.75 with Horacio Karamanos in the irons. It was Whitmore’s second straight third-place finish after five consecutive wins. “This is nothing new,” said owner David Gruskos. “The horse runs 1:08. The horse has been running 1:08s and threes on the sheets for two years. This is no mystery.”</p>
<p>Ikerrin Road stalked the pace in Saturday’s $125,000 (Canadian) Bold Venture Stakes at Woodbine, took over from pacesetter Boreal Spirit in the final sixteenth and won by 1 1/4 lengths over that rival. Majestic Slew was third and the favorite, Unbridled Juan, got home fifth of sixth. Ikerrin Road, an Irish-bred 4-year-old son of Iffraaj, scored his second straight win following an optional claimer over the Woodbine Tapeta course. He now is 5-for-7 over all-weather courses.</p>
<p>Filly and Mare Sprint</p>
<p>Saturday’s $100,000 Open Mind Stakes at Churchill Downs was a bit of a hot mess. The odds-on favorite, Ivy Bell, clipped heels while chasing the lead at mid-stretch and dropped jockey Brian Hernandez Jr. Then Mayla, who got home first, was disqualified all the way down to fifth for coming over into the path of Ivy Bell, causing the incident. That left Grace’s Treasure the winner, with the minor awards to Athena and Tricky Zippy. Neither Hernandez nor Ivy Bell was injured in the mishap. “It’s a shame of what the circumstances were,” said winning rider <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Jesus_Castanon/" type="external">Jesus Castanon</a>. “But my horse battled very hard today. I guess a win is a win, right? I’m just glad Brian is okay.” Grace’s Treasure, the adjudged winner, is a 4-year-old Rockport Harbor filly. The win was her second in a row, following an optional claimer at Belterra Park.</p>
<p>Moonlit Promise outfinished River Maid in Sunday’s $100,000 (Canadian) Sweet Briar Too Stakes for fillies and mares at Woodbine, winning by 3/4 length. Southern Ring finished third. Moonlit Promise, a 4-year-old <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Malibu_Moon/" type="external">Malibu Moon</a> filly, ran 6 1/2 furlongs on the all-weather track in 1:15.66 with Gary Boulanger up.</p>
<p>Dirt Mile</p>
<p>In their last race, the Summer Colony at Saratoga, Romantic Vision finished last, beaten 35 lengths, while Blue Prize was second, just a nose behind the winner. In Saturday’s $125,000 Grade III Locust Grove for fillies and mares at Churchill Downs, Romantic Vision outfinished Blue Prize, winning by 1 1/4 lengths over that rival Tiger Moth was third. Romantic Vision, a 5-year-old <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Lemon_Drop_Kid/" type="external">Lemon Drop Kid</a> mare, covered 1 1/16 miles on a fast track in 1:43.91. “We just got a dream trip behind the speed,” said winning rider Brian Hernandez Jr. “When the rail opened up she just responded perfectly and ran on well.” In last year’s Locust Grove, Romantic Vision beat only one rival and finished 24 1/4 lengths behind the winner.</p>
<p>Gigantic Breeze blew by all seven rivals in the stretch run in Sunday’s $200,000 Presque Isle Mile, winning by 4 lengths over Ghost Hunter. The favorite, War Correspondent, was third with a late effort. Gigantic Breeze, a 4-year-old Giant’s Causeway gelding, ran 1 mile on the all-weather course in 1:35.62 with <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Mario_Pino/" type="external">Mario Pino</a> up for trainer Alexander McPherson. The Woodbine-based gelding now has six straight top three finishes.</p>
<p>Over the bounding main:</p>
<p>Australia</p>
<p>For the third straight race, Winx gave her legion of fans some anxious moments in Saturday’s Group 1 Colgate Optic White Stakes at Royal Randwick, breaking a step slowly and leaving a lot to do with only 400 meters to go. But, as she did in the previous two, the super mare got the job done, easing past Happy Clapper at the 100-meter mark and going on to win by a bit more than 1 1/2 lengths over that rival. Foxplay was well back in third. It was the 20th straight victory for Winx, a 6-year-old Street Cry mare, and another box ticked on her road toward a hoped-for third straight Cox Plate. “She’s spot on,” said trainer Chris Waller. “She comes to hand pretty well.” Jockey Hugh Bowman, who never touched his whip, said of Winx’ starting issues, “She’s just tense. She’s just so competitive. She just wants to get on with it. That’s the one chink in her armor.” Waller said he expects Winx will have one more race before the Cox Plate but said he hasn’t yet decided where or when that will be.</p>
<p>One race after Winx’ triumph, Redzel powered home first in the Group 2 Bowerman’s Office Furniture Shorts, making his case for the rapidly approaching first running of the AUS$10 million Everest Stakes. However, a lot of attention was focused on a streak of gray flashing down the middle of the course in the final furlong as Chautauqua hit his best stride. That effort only earned Chautauqua a seventh-place finish but the Shorts is only 1,100 meters as opposed to the 1,200 meters of the Oct. 14 Everest and Chautauqua needed the race after taking more than 5 months off. None of that detracts from the performance of Redzel, a 5-year-old Snitzel gelding who now is 2-for-2 on the young season and winner of four straight dating back to the Australian autumn. “He’s the most improved sprinter in the country and, in my estimation, he’s a genuine chance for the Everest,” said Bowman, scoring the stakes double.</p>
<p>At Flemington, Humidor produced a rather startling upset in the Group 1 PFD Food Services Makybe Diva Stakes, rallying from last and getting home first by 3 1/4 lengths over the favorite, Hartnell. Black Heart Bart was another 1/2 length back in third. Humidor, a 5-year-old Teofilo gelding, wound up last season nicely with a first and second in a pair of Group 1 events but was nowhere in his first two outings this season.</p>
<p>Around the ovals:</p>
<p>Albuquerque</p>
<p>Citizen Geller found his best foot in the final sixteenth of Saturday’s $70,000 Casey Darnell Stakes for New Mexico-breds, outfinishing Stormin the Jewels to win by 1/2 length. The pacesetter, Raider Red, was another neck back in third. Citizen Geller, a 5-year-old Pro Prado gelding, ran 5 1/2 furlongs on a fast track in 1:02.43 with Miguel Perez in the irons.</p>
<p>Presque Isle Downs</p>
<p>Stardoza led from the first jumps in Sunday’s $100,000 Mrs. Henry D. Paxson Memorial for 2-year-old, Pennsylvania-bred fillies and carried on, winning by 1 3/4 length over O’Paddy. P Sue was 2 3/4 lengths farther back in third. Stardoza, a daughter of Data Link, got 6 furlongs on the all-weather track in 1:10.95 with Pablo Morales up.</p>
<p>Canterbury Park</p>
<p>Amy’s Challenge went to the lead in Saturday’s $75,000 Shakopee Juvenile, turned back Mr. Jagermeister’s challenge at the top of the stretch and won by 3/4 length over that one. Another 18 lengths back, it was My Sweet Emma completing the trifecta. Amy’s Challenge, a Kentucky-bred filly by Artie Schiller, ran 6 furlongs on a fast track in 1:09.58 with Jareth Loveberry in the irons.</p>
<p>Sir Navigator dueled for the lead through most of Saturday’s $50,000 Tom Metzen H.B.P.A. Sprint, then edged away in the final stages to win by 1 1/2 lengths. Smooth Chiraz was second, 1/2 length ahead of Aden’s Dream. Sir Navigator, a 5-year-old Henrythenavigator gelding, ran 6 furlongs in 1:10.02 with Israel Hernandez riding.</p>
<p>Gulfstream Park</p>
<p>Extravagant Kid rallied from midpack to win Sunday’s $50,000 Tamiami Handicap by 1 1/4 lengths over Brandi’s Girl. Diddley was third. Extravagant Kid, a 4-year-old gelding by Kiss the Kid, ran 5 furlongs on firm turf in 55.80 seconds for jockey Juan Batista.</p>
<p>Katinka and Surprise Wedding hooked up in a ding-dong stretch duel in Saturday’s $100,000 Miss Gracie Stakes for Florida-bred 3-year-old fillies with Katinka finally prevailing by a nose. The favorite, Gran Cherry, was gaining late but settled for third, another 1/2 length in arrears. Katinka, a Kantharos filly, ran 7 1/2 furlongs on firm turf in 1:31.23 with Leonel Reyes in the irons.</p>
<p>Thistledown</p>
<p>Leona’s Reward wore down pacesetting True Cinder in the stretch run of Saturday’s $75,000 Catlaunch Stakes for Ohio-breds and won by 1/2 length from that one. Mixed Colors fell just a nose short of wresting second from True Cinder and the favorite, Eightthehardway, finished another 7 lengths back in fourth. Leona’s Reward, a 4-year-old Parents’ Reward filly, ran 1 1/16 miles on a fast track in 1:46.42 for jockey Pablo Morales.</p>
<p>Golden Gate Fields</p>
<p>Force circled the leaders in the stretch drive in Sunday’s $65,000 Rolling Green Stakes and took command, winning by 3 1/4 lengths over Camino Del Paraiso. G G Ryder rallied from last to finish third. Force, a 4-year-old Irish-bred gelding by Raven’s Pass, ran 1 1/16 miles on firm turf in 1:43.64 with Juan Hernandez in the irons.</p>
<p>News and notes:</p>
<p>Penny Chenery, whose ownership of Secretariat was the springboard to a career of activism on behalf of horses, women and the sport, has passed away at age 95. Chenery took over management of her father’s Thoroughbred operation in 1967 and struggled until Riva Ridge won the Kentucky Derby in 1972. That achievement was eclipsed the following year as Secretariat swept the Triple Crown series, finishing with a flourish in his 31-length <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Belmont_Stakes/" type="external">Belmont Stakes</a> masterpiece. Chenery used the fame that attached to her star’s triumphs to become active in promoting the industry. She was the first female president of the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association, president of the Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation and one of the first women admitted to The Jockey Club. She was instrumental in founding the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation and created the Secretariat Vox Populi Award and the Secretariat Foundation, which assists and supports various charities within the racing community. She received the 2006 Eclipse Award of Merit for lifetime contributions to the Thoroughbred industry.</p>
<p>Fred W. Hertrich III Friday was elected Chairman of the Breeders’ Cup Board of Directors, replacing William S. Farish Jr. Hertrich, a director since 2015 and chair of the Sponsorship Committee, will serve a two-year term. He is the owner of Watercress Farm in Paris, Ky. Dan Pride of Godolphin was elected as vice chairman, also for a two-year term. Farish served as Chairman from 2006 to 2011, and again from 2013 until Friday. Farish will continue as a Director.</p> | false | 1 | eclectic weekend thoroughbred racing world approval woodbine mile tabulator first race road kentucky derby winx 20th straight race five races including four 2yearolds offered breeders cup berths sadly rip penny chenery turf mile world approval got best worldclass turf runners saturdays 800000 canadian ricoh woodbine mile race delayed briefly flock geese chased course near furlong marker gates opened 12horse field raced pretty much bunched flock world approval john velazquez pressed pace first half mile 6 lengths covering field around turn world approval began assert finally drawing win 2 12 lengths lancaster bomber fought traffic early stretch run finish game second coolmore team long value rallied nextlast take third world approval 5yearold northern afleet gelding ran 1 mile firm going 13305 earning berth breeders cup mile win youre program long hes healthy going breeders cup said winning trainer norm casse confident win dont think would change places anybody velazquez rode horse first time said wasnt sure might take lead broke well today one seemed want lead kind left held well said third win four tries year world approval carries black white red dots live oak plantation wins come 1 mile sixteenth longer contrast several rivals found success going longer turf johnny bear stepping way class put nostril front pacesetting favorite hawkbill final jump win saturdays 300000 canadian northern dancer woodbine messi third johnny bear 6yearold english channel gelding ran 1 12 miles firm turf 22835 luis contreras aboard trainer ashlee brnjas johnny bear toiling midlevel optional claimers woodbine turf hawkbill arrived toronto finishing second group 1 grosser preis von berlin winning group 2 princess waless stakes newmarket thinking stay behind eight horse hawkbill follow worked perfect contreras said want thank everybody making 151 added part owner john brnjas hawkbills rider colm odonoghue said mount travelled well moved great hit line strong bob heads unfortunately didnt go way canessar saved ground stretch turn saturdays 100000 laurel turf cup moved horses nearing lane found room outside get win 1 14 lengths favorite infinite wisdom second 2 14 lengths good renown canessar 4yearold frenchbred gelding kendargent ran 1 12 miles firm turf 22523 feargal lynch irons first start united states trainer arnaud delacour successful run france fringes big time delacour said gelding move along class ladder race thought timing right grade 3 keeneland delacour said referring oct 19 sycamore filly amp mare turf uni rallied catch pacesetting la coronel stretch drive saturdays 400000 grade ii sands point stakes 3yearold fillies belmont park long duel neck rival fault third uni britishbred daughter ready ran 9 furlongs firm inner turf course 14897 irad ortiz jr uni making third us start coming france second first two runs grade belmont oaks invitational grade ii lake placid saratoga ortiz said key sands point getting better break trainer chad brown added best race date shes exciting horse future really like brown said talk owners grade queen elizabeth ii keeneland oct 14 quidura raced behind leading trio stretch run saturdays 250000 canadian canadian stakes woodbine found path rivals full command sixteenth pole winning 1 length laterunning elyseas world starship jubilee led field stretch gave way grudgingly held third 1 116 miles firm turf went 14526 jockey junior alvarado said never felt trapped behind leaders knew time called wasnt worried said quidura 4yearold englishbred filly dubawi entered canadian secondplace finish lady eli grade diana saratoga credential enough make oddson favorite saturday trainer graham motion said brought quidura canadian timing really hope take del mar breeders cup wish still win youre said raced germany early career quidura owned breeder gestut fahrhof leave prompted pace saturdays 150000 along stakes fillies mares laurel park eased lead top stretch gradually worked clear winning 1 length paige light world lost second nose leading way leave 4yearold stuart janney iii homebred daughter war front ran 1 116 miles firm turf 14024 forest boyce irons trainer shug mcgaughey turf sprint snowday tracked pace saturdays 100000 laurel dash moved lead lane held win head class cash rapid dan another head back third snowday frenchbred 7yearold gelding falco finished 6 furlongs firm going 10902 daniel centeno controls snowday made nice progression optional claimers season winning frenchman stakes monmouth park finishing third beaten 12 length grade iii turf monster parx last start mongolian saturday 2015 breeders cup winner second parx race always thinking came running deep stretch upset saturdays 100000 sensible lady turf dash fillies mares laurel park 4yearold street sense filly rallied outside rivals 1 12 lengths fire key odds 251 rocky policy third oddson favorite miss ella never mix bobbling start always thinking owned godolphin trained tom albertrani ran 6 furlongs firm turf 10768 eclipsing course record 10800 set texas glitter 2000 always thinking drew race alsoeligible list picked third career win juvenile leader road kentucky derby tabulator dialed colt earned 10 derby qualifying points pacestalking 34length victory saturdays 150000 grade iii iroquois stakes churchill downs first long list road derby races favorite hollywood star finished second ten city third tabulator jose valdivia jr trainer arlingtonbased trainer larry rivelli finished 1 116 miles fast track 14550 first start since win prairie gold juvenile iowa july iroquois win also earned tabulator berth breeders cup juvenile via win youre program turned home front still looked around little bit stretch valdivia said im glad able get kickoff road kentucky derby breeders cup win youre exciting horse quality juvenile turf therapist picked second win many starts saturdays 100000 laurel futurity new yorkbred freud colt broke gate race among last exit machine appropriate time advanced leaders lane along final yards win head stroll smokin favorite majestic dunhill another 1 12 lengths back third therapist got home 10950 career debut belmont park july 2 got lucky didnt get hurt gate centeno said second start got nervous broke little slow put rail saved ground christophe clement trains colt untamed domain edged favorite hemp hemp hurray final yards sundays 200000 canadian summer stakes woodbine winning neck admiralty pier third untamed domain animal kingdom colt lear fan mare ciao ran 1 mile firm turf 13473 joe bravo aboard trainer graham motion second animal kingdom juvenile find winners circle woodbine weekend grace dignity animal kingdom filly smart strike mare precision farming saturday maiden race handily first career start juvenile fillies patrona margarita dismissed odds nearly 241 rolled middle pack saturdays 200000 grade ii pocahontas churchill downs win 3 34 lengths kellys humor sunny skies third favorite retreated finish ninth patrona margarita texasbred filly special rate ran 1 116 miles fast track 14635 brian hernandez jr last seen finishing close third restricted texas thoroughbred breeders futurity lone star park july pocahontas score earned 10 points toward potential spot next springs longines kentucky oaks starting gate spot breeders cup juvenile fillies thanks win youre scheme latter opening wont used however shes breeders cup eligible well probably point towards alcibiades keeneland said winning trainer bret calhoun ismelucky collared shaken memories deep stretch saturdays 100000 barretts debutante stakes los alamitos winning 12 length one exuberance third ismelucky californiabred filly lucky pulpit ran 6 12 furlongs fast track 11784 kent desormeaux riding secondplace finish first career start ismelucky two wins two tries trainer partowner jeff bonde eventful trip say least desormeaux said got slammed start funny bean wait room stretch shaken memories using tail like fan front us filly really showed something today juvenile fillies turf wise gal made 2for2 4 14lengths victory saturdays 100000 selima stakes laurel park einstein filly tad slowly came fivewide challenge lead despite drifting late madame x best rest eighty six mets ran evenly get show money wise gal steve hamilton ran 6 furlongs firm going 10943 first asking course month earlier capala temptress raced well back early furlongs sundays 100000 canadian selima stakes woodbine found seam rivals eighth pole went 34length victory pacesetter dixie moon second head front wonder gadot capala temptress irishbred daughter lope de vega ran 1 mile firm going 13512 joel rosario riding newmarketbased trainer marco botti sprint chublicious outside chance field four wore pacesetting blu moon ace final yards saturdays 250000 grade iii frank j de francis memorial dash neck one favorite whitmore 1 14 lengths back third awesome banner completed order finish chublicious 6yearold gelding hey chub ran 6 furlongs fast track 10875 horacio karamanos irons whitmores second straight thirdplace finish five consecutive wins nothing new said owner david gruskos horse runs 108 horse running 108s threes sheets two years mystery ikerrin road stalked pace saturdays 125000 canadian bold venture stakes woodbine took pacesetter boreal spirit final sixteenth 1 14 lengths rival majestic slew third favorite unbridled juan got home fifth sixth ikerrin road irishbred 4yearold son iffraaj scored second straight win following optional claimer woodbine tapeta course 5for7 allweather courses filly mare sprint saturdays 100000 open mind stakes churchill downs bit hot mess oddson favorite ivy bell clipped heels chasing lead midstretch dropped jockey brian hernandez jr mayla got home first disqualified way fifth coming path ivy bell causing incident left graces treasure winner minor awards athena tricky zippy neither hernandez ivy bell injured mishap shame circumstances said winning rider jesus castanon horse battled hard today guess win win right im glad brian okay graces treasure adjudged winner 4yearold rockport harbor filly win second row following optional claimer belterra park moonlit promise outfinished river maid sundays 100000 canadian sweet briar stakes fillies mares woodbine winning 34 length southern ring finished third moonlit promise 4yearold malibu moon filly ran 6 12 furlongs allweather track 11566 gary boulanger dirt mile last race summer colony saratoga romantic vision finished last beaten 35 lengths blue prize second nose behind winner saturdays 125000 grade iii locust grove fillies mares churchill downs romantic vision outfinished blue prize winning 1 14 lengths rival tiger moth third romantic vision 5yearold lemon drop kid mare covered 1 116 miles fast track 14391 got dream trip behind speed said winning rider brian hernandez jr rail opened responded perfectly ran well last years locust grove romantic vision beat one rival finished 24 14 lengths behind winner gigantic breeze blew seven rivals stretch run sundays 200000 presque isle mile winning 4 lengths ghost hunter favorite war correspondent third late effort gigantic breeze 4yearold giants causeway gelding ran 1 mile allweather course 13562 mario pino trainer alexander mcpherson woodbinebased gelding six straight top three finishes bounding main australia third straight race winx gave legion fans anxious moments saturdays group 1 colgate optic white stakes royal randwick breaking step slowly leaving lot 400 meters go previous two super mare got job done easing past happy clapper 100meter mark going win bit 1 12 lengths rival foxplay well back third 20th straight victory winx 6yearold street cry mare another box ticked road toward hopedfor third straight cox plate shes spot said trainer chris waller comes hand pretty well jockey hugh bowman never touched whip said winx starting issues shes tense shes competitive wants get thats one chink armor waller said expects winx one race cox plate said hasnt yet decided one race winx triumph redzel powered home first group 2 bowermans office furniture shorts making case rapidly approaching first running aus10 million everest stakes however lot attention focused streak gray flashing middle course final furlong chautauqua hit best stride effort earned chautauqua seventhplace finish shorts 1100 meters opposed 1200 meters oct 14 everest chautauqua needed race taking 5 months none detracts performance redzel 5yearold snitzel gelding 2for2 young season winner four straight dating back australian autumn hes improved sprinter country estimation hes genuine chance everest said bowman scoring stakes double flemington humidor produced rather startling upset group 1 pfd food services makybe diva stakes rallying last getting home first 3 14 lengths favorite hartnell black heart bart another 12 length back third humidor 5yearold teofilo gelding wound last season nicely first second pair group 1 events nowhere first two outings season around ovals albuquerque citizen geller found best foot final sixteenth saturdays 70000 casey darnell stakes new mexicobreds outfinishing stormin jewels win 12 length pacesetter raider red another neck back third citizen geller 5yearold pro prado gelding ran 5 12 furlongs fast track 10243 miguel perez irons presque isle downs stardoza led first jumps sundays 100000 mrs henry paxson memorial 2yearold pennsylvaniabred fillies carried winning 1 34 length opaddy p sue 2 34 lengths farther back third stardoza daughter data link got 6 furlongs allweather track 11095 pablo morales canterbury park amys challenge went lead saturdays 75000 shakopee juvenile turned back mr jagermeisters challenge top stretch 34 length one another 18 lengths back sweet emma completing trifecta amys challenge kentuckybred filly artie schiller ran 6 furlongs fast track 10958 jareth loveberry irons sir navigator dueled lead saturdays 50000 tom metzen hbpa sprint edged away final stages win 1 12 lengths smooth chiraz second 12 length ahead adens dream sir navigator 5yearold henrythenavigator gelding ran 6 furlongs 11002 israel hernandez riding gulfstream park extravagant kid rallied midpack win sundays 50000 tamiami handicap 1 14 lengths brandis girl diddley third extravagant kid 4yearold gelding kiss kid ran 5 furlongs firm turf 5580 seconds jockey juan batista katinka surprise wedding hooked dingdong stretch duel saturdays 100000 miss gracie stakes floridabred 3yearold fillies katinka finally prevailing nose favorite gran cherry gaining late settled third another 12 length arrears katinka kantharos filly ran 7 12 furlongs firm turf 13123 leonel reyes irons thistledown leonas reward wore pacesetting true cinder stretch run saturdays 75000 catlaunch stakes ohiobreds 12 length one mixed colors fell nose short wresting second true cinder favorite eightthehardway finished another 7 lengths back fourth leonas reward 4yearold parents reward filly ran 1 116 miles fast track 14642 jockey pablo morales golden gate fields force circled leaders stretch drive sundays 65000 rolling green stakes took command winning 3 14 lengths camino del paraiso g g ryder rallied last finish third force 4yearold irishbred gelding ravens pass ran 1 116 miles firm turf 14364 juan hernandez irons news notes penny chenery whose ownership secretariat springboard career activism behalf horses women sport passed away age 95 chenery took management fathers thoroughbred operation 1967 struggled riva ridge kentucky derby 1972 achievement eclipsed following year secretariat swept triple crown series finishing flourish 31length belmont stakes masterpiece chenery used fame attached stars triumphs become active promoting industry first female president thoroughbred owners breeders association president graysonjockey club research foundation one first women admitted jockey club instrumental founding thoroughbred retirement foundation created secretariat vox populi award secretariat foundation assists supports various charities within racing community received 2006 eclipse award merit lifetime contributions thoroughbred industry fred w hertrich iii friday elected chairman breeders cup board directors replacing william farish jr hertrich director since 2015 chair sponsorship committee serve twoyear term owner watercress farm paris ky dan pride godolphin elected vice chairman also twoyear term farish served chairman 2006 2011 2013 friday farish continue director | 2,445 |
<p>On Easter Sunday, Christians celebrate an event that inspires more than two billion of the faithful with eternal hope. Jesus spoke often about the life to come. Yet he also spoke about God’s will being done here on Earth. How best to live out one’s faith in this world has been a complicated issue throughout Christian history, and it remains so today.</p>
<p>Since the mid-1970s, one dominant strain of cultural engagement among Christian leaders in America has been to warn about God’s judgment on a disobedient, decadent nation. This approach assumes that the main task of the church is to call us back to moral righteousness. Among the most prominent representatives of this kind of Christian cultural engagement is the Rev. Franklin Graham, the son of the famed evangelist Billy Graham. Last month the younger Mr. Graham warned that our nation has “turned its back on God.” For nations that do this, he said, the “end is near.” The “tide of immorality has risen to new heights,” Mr. Graham said in 2013, with homosexuality and “all the anti-God people” being the main cause. He has gone so far as to praise the autocrat Vladimir V. Putin for his anti-gay policies.</p>
<p>These beliefs have a theological corollary: It is the duty of Christian leaders to fight on behalf of traditional values and to reprove sin. According to Mr. Graham, “We are locked in a war against the Christian faith.”</p>
<p>But this two-generations-long culture war is not going particularly well. The cultural influence of evangelical Christians is rapidly waning. As one religious leader put it to me: “We used to be the home team. Now we’re the away team.” The response from some Christian leaders, like Mr. Graham, is to ratchet up the condemnatory rhetoric. This has led to greater disaffection, especially among younger evangelicals who find this approach to be brittle, alienating and unforgiving. We are living through a moment of introspection and reconsideration, then, as Christians search for an alternative way to engage the culture that is both faithful and effective.</p>
<p>Enter Pope Francis. For those of us who are part of the evangelical movement, the popular leader of the Roman Catholic Church offers an archetype. He views the role of the church not as a combatant in the culture wars but “as a field hospital after battle.” He has also said, “Without mercy, we have little chance nowadays of becoming part of a world of ‘wounded’ persons in need of understanding, forgiveness and love.”</p>
<p>In 2013, the pope <a href="http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2013/documents/papa-francesco_20130728_celebrazione-xxviii-gmg.html" type="external">told</a> a young audience in Rio de Janeiro, “Do not be afraid to go and to bring Christ into every area of life, to the fringes of society, even to those who seem farthest away, most indifferent.” Two weeks ago, Pope Francis did just that, meeting with gay, transgender and H.I.V.-positive prisoners during a visit to Naples.</p>
<p>Pope Francis criticizes the church not for its unwillingness to rebuke sinners but for ignoring the weak and vulnerable. He washed the feet of two women and two Muslims in juvenile detention — the first time a pontiff has included both women and Muslims in the rite. Without changing church doctrine, he has altered how the Catholic Church is seen. These are symbolic acts packed with theological content, reminding us that individuals are infinitely more valuable than moral rules, that failures don’t define us.</p>
<p>Of the two approaches — Franklin versus Francis — the one taken by the pope is not only more popular but also better reflects Christ’s example. Jesus confronted sin, not to be censorious but because it puts us at enmity with God, one another and our true nature. “Go and sin no more” were words meant to produce greater human flourishing. Yet time and again in the Gospels we read about Jesus embracing those denounced by the religious elite of his day.</p>
<p>The authorities were constantly at odds with Jesus because he hung out with the “wrong” people — the despised, the outcast, the ceremonially unclean — and he claimed the authority of God in doing so. Jesus was condemned for being “a friend of tax collectors and sinners” and for consorting with prostitutes. His anger was directed most often against the proud, the hypocritical and the self-righteous. The powerful hated him, while those who were broken flocked to him.</p>
<p>Some of my fellow evangelical Christians may respond by saying they are called to stand against unrighteousness for the good of the whole. But Pope Francis is not reversing the teachings of his church; indeed, Mr. Graham’s and Pope Francis’ views align on matters of marriage and protecting unborn life. The difference has far more to do with tone, animating spirit and emphasis. In the words of the New Testament scholar Richard B. Hays, “What the Bible does say should be heeded carefully, but any ethic that intends to be biblical will seek to get the accents in the right place.”</p>
<p>That is where Mr. Graham and those evangelicals he speaks for have veered off track. He obsesses on some issues while ignoring others, speaks with stridency rather than mercy, and thereby creates a distorted impression of Christianity, one that is at odds with Jesus’ approach.</p>
<p>The award-winning Christian author Philip Yancey once took to asking a question of strangers, when striking up a conversation: “When I say the words ‘evangelical Christian’ what comes to mind?” Mr. Yancey reports that he mostly heard political descriptions — but not once did he hear a description suggestive of grace. This is quite an indictment of a faith in which the concept of grace should be at the very center.</p>
<p>Pope Francis, on the other hand, understands that Jesus’ main mission was to persuade a world in need of God’s love and mercy. If the pontiff speaks of the church primarily as a field hospital, Mr. Graham sees it as a sentencing court.</p>
<p>Steve Hayner, one of the baby boom generation’s most respected evangelical leaders and <a href="https://www.commentarymagazine.com/2015/02/02/friend-steve-hayner/" type="external">my spiritual mentor</a>, died earlier this year. The last time I saw him, he told me that the central characteristics of God are love and grace — and that therefore the central mission of Christians is to extend his hand of grace to others. What God has given to us, we owe to others. “If what you’re doing in your life is leading toward reconciliation and redemption,” he once told me, “then you’re most likely headed in the right direction.”</p>
<p>Pope Francis is heading in that direction. There are an awful lot of evangelical Christians ready to follow his lead.</p>
<p>Peter Wehner is a contributing opinion writer and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who served in the last three Republican administrations.</p> | false | 1 | easter sunday christians celebrate event inspires two billion faithful eternal hope jesus spoke often life come yet also spoke gods done earth best live ones faith world complicated issue throughout christian history remains today since mid1970s one dominant strain cultural engagement among christian leaders america warn gods judgment disobedient decadent nation approach assumes main task church call us back moral righteousness among prominent representatives kind christian cultural engagement rev franklin graham son famed evangelist billy graham last month younger mr graham warned nation turned back god nations said end near tide immorality risen new heights mr graham said 2013 homosexuality antigod people main cause gone far praise autocrat vladimir v putin antigay policies beliefs theological corollary duty christian leaders fight behalf traditional values reprove sin according mr graham locked war christian faith twogenerationslong culture war going particularly well cultural influence evangelical christians rapidly waning one religious leader put used home team away team response christian leaders like mr graham ratchet condemnatory rhetoric led greater disaffection especially among younger evangelicals find approach brittle alienating unforgiving living moment introspection reconsideration christians search alternative way engage culture faithful effective enter pope francis us part evangelical movement popular leader roman catholic church offers archetype views role church combatant culture wars field hospital battle also said without mercy little chance nowadays becoming part world wounded persons need understanding forgiveness love 2013 pope told young audience rio de janeiro afraid go bring christ every area life fringes society even seem farthest away indifferent two weeks ago pope francis meeting gay transgender hivpositive prisoners visit naples pope francis criticizes church unwillingness rebuke sinners ignoring weak vulnerable washed feet two women two muslims juvenile detention first time pontiff included women muslims rite without changing church doctrine altered catholic church seen symbolic acts packed theological content reminding us individuals infinitely valuable moral rules failures dont define us two approaches franklin versus francis one taken pope popular also better reflects christs example jesus confronted sin censorious puts us enmity god one another true nature go sin words meant produce greater human flourishing yet time gospels read jesus embracing denounced religious elite day authorities constantly odds jesus hung wrong people despised outcast ceremonially unclean claimed authority god jesus condemned friend tax collectors sinners consorting prostitutes anger directed often proud hypocritical selfrighteous powerful hated broken flocked fellow evangelical christians may respond saying called stand unrighteousness good whole pope francis reversing teachings church indeed mr grahams pope francis views align matters marriage protecting unborn life difference far tone animating spirit emphasis words new testament scholar richard b hays bible say heeded carefully ethic intends biblical seek get accents right place mr graham evangelicals speaks veered track obsesses issues ignoring others speaks stridency rather mercy thereby creates distorted impression christianity one odds jesus approach awardwinning christian author philip yancey took asking question strangers striking conversation say words evangelical christian comes mind mr yancey reports mostly heard political descriptions hear description suggestive grace quite indictment faith concept grace center pope francis hand understands jesus main mission persuade world need gods love mercy pontiff speaks church primarily field hospital mr graham sees sentencing court steve hayner one baby boom generations respected evangelical leaders spiritual mentor died earlier year last time saw told central characteristics god love grace therefore central mission christians extend hand grace others god given us owe others youre life leading toward reconciliation redemption told youre likely headed right direction pope francis heading direction awful lot evangelical christians ready follow lead peter wehner contributing opinion writer senior fellow ethics public policy center served last three republican administrations | 593 |
<p>Congressional Republicans are engaged in an important internal discussion over how best to use the arcane procedural mechanism known as “budget reconciliation.” Making the right decision about how to employ reconciliation could be the difference between a successful start to a conservative policy revival, or a lost year.</p>
<p>A budget-reconciliation bill is set in motion by the passage of a congressional budget resolution. This year’s budget passed both the House and Senate and calls for the use of reconciliation later in the year. However, the language in the resolution is vague enough to allow for a number of different legislative possibilities.</p>
<p>Budget reconciliation is a powerful tool because the Senate cannot filibuster bills with this designation, which means they can pass with a simple majority of 51 votes, instead of the usual 60. In practical terms, this means Republicans do not need Democratic support to send a reconciliation bill to the president.</p>
<p>Over the years, reconciliation has been used to pass many significant pieces of economic and budgetary legislation, including welfare reform in 1996 and President Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003.</p>
<p>Congressional Republicans are agreed that reconciliation should be available for a legislative response if the Supreme Court sides with the plaintiffs in the King v. Burwell case. Such a decision would puncture a large hole in the health-care law by invalidating insurance subsidies in 37 states. Although the ensuing disruption in insurance markets would be entirely the administration’s fault, Republicans are right to prep a serious legislative response that would help people who are losing subsidies and that also would move away from Obamacare’s heavy-handed strictures.</p>
<p>If, on the other hand, the Court sides with the administration in the King case, the GOP is split on what to do. Some would like to limit the use of reconciliation to full repeal of the ACA. That would be a mistake.</p>
<p>First, it is unlikely that Congress could repeal all of the ACA through reconciliation. Many provisions in the law are regulatory, not budgetary, in nature. The reconciliation process was amended in 1985 with the “Byrd Rule” to prevent senators from attaching non-budgetary items to a reconciliation bill. In practice, that means provisions of bills that have no budgetary effect, or budgetary effects that are “merely incidental” to the main purposes of the provisions, can be knocked out of a reconciliation bill with just 41 votes in the Senate. Some important provisions of the ACA are likely to fall into that category.</p>
<p>Second, repeal of the ACA without a replacement plan is terrible politics. Most Americans continue to oppose Obamacare, but that does not mean they are eager to return to the pre-Obamacare status quo. What they want is sensible reform to cut costs and broaden insurance enrollment without turning over the whole system to the federal government. Repeal without replace sends the signal that Republicans cannot agree on a plan to fix the problems in American health care. Even if Republicans were to successfully get such a bill to the president, he would find it very easy to veto it.</p>
<p>The eventual Republican nominee for president will need to propose a viable alternative to the ACA, which he or she could implement in 2017. During President Obama’s remaining time in office, Congress must satisfy itself with making some progress toward the ultimate goal of a better overall reform plan.</p>
<p>With that in mind, it would be far better to use reconciliation to pass an agenda that is both good policy and good politics, with provisions that roll back selected Obamacare policies and replace others with better reforms. A reconciliation bill should also include other important priorities on the Republican agenda beyond rolling back the ACA.</p>
<p>In health care, the GOP might target the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) — Obamacare’s unaccountable body of 15 technocrats charged with implementing spending cuts in Medicare without Congress’s approval. Many Democrats now realize what a terrible idea this was. If given the chance, they might just vote to kill it even if President Obama digs in his heels to defend it.</p>
<p>Similarly, Republicans could chip away at Obamacare’s requirements, by exempting more lower-income people from the individual mandate and more businesses from the employer mandate. These provisions are among the law’s least popular, so it is likely that some Democrats will join with Republicans in rolling them back. States should be given more flexibility to create alternate health-reform plans to provide coverage to their citizens outside of Obamacare’s strictures and without the need for approval from the bureaucrats in the Department of Health and Human Services. Written properly, all of these provisions could be included in a reconciliation bill and thus impossible for Senate minority leader Harry Reid to stop.</p>
<p>Beyond health care, Republicans could begin the next phase of welfare reform with stepped-up work requirements and more flexibility for states to design and run assistance programs. Comprehensive tax reform is not possible with the current president, but Republicans could advance targeted changes that dispense with some special-interest breaks and use the revenue to rationalize the tax treatment of profits earned abroad and to lower rates as much as possible. Or they could push for savings in Medicare with more competition, innovation, and choice instead of more regulation.</p>
<p>President Obama will oppose many of these ideas, but that should not dissuade Republicans from proceeding with a sensible agenda. Later this year, Republicans and Democrats will be forced to work together again to raise the debt limit and fund the government for fiscal year 2016. If Republicans spend their time this year advancing a realistic and appealing agenda through reconciliation, the party will be in a much stronger position to make demands during the inevitable negotiations that will occur with the president and his allies in Congress.</p>
<p>Reconciliation is a powerful tool that has been used many times over the years to pass important legislation. Republicans can make headway on their agenda if they quickly recognize that, this year, the tool will be most powerful if they use it to advance ideas that the president will be hard-pressed to veto, given that voters see them as sensible steps in the right direction.</p>
<p>— Lanhee J. Chen is the David and Diane Steffy Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and director of domestic policy studies in the public-policy program at Stanford University. James C. Capretta is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.&#160;</p> | false | 1 | congressional republicans engaged important internal discussion best use arcane procedural mechanism known budget reconciliation making right decision employ reconciliation could difference successful start conservative policy revival lost year budgetreconciliation bill set motion passage congressional budget resolution years budget passed house senate calls use reconciliation later year however language resolution vague enough allow number different legislative possibilities budget reconciliation powerful tool senate filibuster bills designation means pass simple majority 51 votes instead usual 60 practical terms means republicans need democratic support send reconciliation bill president years reconciliation used pass many significant pieces economic budgetary legislation including welfare reform 1996 president bushs tax cuts 2001 2003 congressional republicans agreed reconciliation available legislative response supreme court sides plaintiffs king v burwell case decision would puncture large hole healthcare law invalidating insurance subsidies 37 states although ensuing disruption insurance markets would entirely administrations fault republicans right prep serious legislative response would help people losing subsidies also would move away obamacares heavyhanded strictures hand court sides administration king case gop split would like limit use reconciliation full repeal aca would mistake first unlikely congress could repeal aca reconciliation many provisions law regulatory budgetary nature reconciliation process amended 1985 byrd rule prevent senators attaching nonbudgetary items reconciliation bill practice means provisions bills budgetary effect budgetary effects merely incidental main purposes provisions knocked reconciliation bill 41 votes senate important provisions aca likely fall category second repeal aca without replacement plan terrible politics americans continue oppose obamacare mean eager return preobamacare status quo want sensible reform cut costs broaden insurance enrollment without turning whole system federal government repeal without replace sends signal republicans agree plan fix problems american health care even republicans successfully get bill president would find easy veto eventual republican nominee president need propose viable alternative aca could implement 2017 president obamas remaining time office congress must satisfy making progress toward ultimate goal better overall reform plan mind would far better use reconciliation pass agenda good policy good politics provisions roll back selected obamacare policies replace others better reforms reconciliation bill also include important priorities republican agenda beyond rolling back aca health care gop might target independent payment advisory board ipab obamacares unaccountable body 15 technocrats charged implementing spending cuts medicare without congresss approval many democrats realize terrible idea given chance might vote kill even president obama digs heels defend similarly republicans could chip away obamacares requirements exempting lowerincome people individual mandate businesses employer mandate provisions among laws least popular likely democrats join republicans rolling back states given flexibility create alternate healthreform plans provide coverage citizens outside obamacares strictures without need approval bureaucrats department health human services written properly provisions could included reconciliation bill thus impossible senate minority leader harry reid stop beyond health care republicans could begin next phase welfare reform steppedup work requirements flexibility states design run assistance programs comprehensive tax reform possible current president republicans could advance targeted changes dispense specialinterest breaks use revenue rationalize tax treatment profits earned abroad lower rates much possible could push savings medicare competition innovation choice instead regulation president obama oppose many ideas dissuade republicans proceeding sensible agenda later year republicans democrats forced work together raise debt limit fund government fiscal year 2016 republicans spend time year advancing realistic appealing agenda reconciliation party much stronger position make demands inevitable negotiations occur president allies congress reconciliation powerful tool used many times years pass important legislation republicans make headway agenda quickly recognize year tool powerful use advance ideas president hardpressed veto given voters see sensible steps right direction lanhee j chen david diane steffy research fellow hoover institution director domestic policy studies publicpolicy program stanford university james c capretta senior fellow ethics public policy center visiting fellow american enterprise institute160 | 610 |
<p>Turkey and Iraq have stepped up the pressure on Kurdistan after the semi-autonomous region of Iraq voted for independence. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to block Kurdish oil exports through Turkish territory, while Baghdad called for an international boycott of Kurdish oil sales.</p>
<p>Read more</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/news/404719-russia-supports-united-iraq/" type="external" /></p>
<p>The Kurdish people appeared to have voted overwhelmingly for independence on Monday, pending final results. But the Kurdish Regional Government has&#160; <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/9358eb78-a1c0-11e7-b797-b61809486fe2" type="external">said</a>&#160;that the vote, which won’t be recognized internationally, will be a starting point for negotiations with Baghdad, and not the culmination of real independence.</p>
<p>Turkey’s President called the referendum “illegal, null, and void,” and threatened to shut down exports through the pipeline that runs from Kurdistan to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. “Let’s see where they are going to drain off the petrol — we control the valve,” he said. “Once you turn off the valve, it will be over.”</p>
<p>The referendum was also opposed by Iran, as well as the United States, which argued that it would destabilize the region.</p>
<p>Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said on Sunday that all foreign countries should not purchase oil from Kurdistan, arguing that the sales are illegal if not conducted under the auspices of the Iraqi central government. Iraq “asks the neighboring countries and the countries of the world to deal exclusively with the federal government of Iraq in regards to entry posts and oil,” a&#160; <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-kurd-referendum-oil/iraqi-government-asks-foreign-countries-to-stop-oil-trade-with-kurdistan-idUSKCN1BZ0Y0" type="external">statement</a>&#160;from the Prime Minister’s office said.</p>
<p><a href="http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/Aston-Martin-CEO-UK-Fossil-Fuel-Ban-Meaningless.html" type="external">Read more on Oilprice.com:&#160;Aston Martin CEO: UK Fossil Fuel Ban “Meaningless”</a></p>
<p>Kurdistan produces just over 600,000 bpd, or about 15 percent of Iraq’s total output. Most contentiously are the oil fields around disputed areas in Kirkuk, which the Kurds took control of in 2014 when ISIS burst onto the scene and rapidly seized swathes of territory from the Iraqi government. “The Iraqi government is not going to stand still and watch Kirkuk’s integration into Kurdistan, and the mobilization that we’re seeing is an Iraqi effort to reassert control over the contested territory,” Ayham Kamel, director of the Middle East and North Africa at Eurasia Group, said in a&#160; <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-24/iraqi-kurds-to-vote-on-independence-as-neighbors-send-warnings?utm_content=energy&amp;utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&amp;utm_source=twitter&amp;utm_medium=social&amp;cmpid%3D=socialflow-twitter-energy" type="external">Bloomberg</a>&#160;interview. Ethnic clashes “might become a pretext for much wider mobilization,” he added.</p>
<p>Read more</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/news/404658-erdogan-threatens-kurdistan-hunger/" type="external" /></p>
<p>Kurdistan is largely at the mercy of its much more powerful neighbors. The bulk of the region’s finances come from oil exports, much of which go through a pipeline across Turkey to the Mediterranean. If Turkey takes draconian action to shut down Kurdish oil exports, it would cripple the Kurdish economy.</p>
<p>“If this boycott call proves successful, a good 500,000 fewer barrels of crude oil per day would reach the market,” Commerzbank&#160; <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-oil/oil-hits-highest-since-july-2015-producers-say-market-rebalancing-idUSKCN1C002U" type="external">said</a>&#160;in a note. The threat of the boycott, as well as the possible shuttering of oil flows through Turkey, led to a significant increase in crude prices, which touched two-year highs on Monday. Brent rose above $58 per barrel, the highest price in more than two years, although prices fell back slightly on Tuesday.</p>
<p>A more serious scenario would be some sort of military clash between Kurdistan and its neighbors. Turkey conducted military exercises along its border with Kurdistan, and Turkish President Erdogan ominously warned that “we may arrive one night, suddenly.”</p>
<p>Kurdish President Massoud Barzani called for calm and diplomatic negotiations, but on Tuesday the Iraqi government&#160; <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-kurds-referendum/turkey-threatens-retaliation-after-iraqi-kurdish-independence-vote-idUSKCN1C1127?il=0" type="external">ruled out talks</a>. “Barzani is playing a dangerous game of poker,” Anthony Skinner, a director with UK-based forecasting company Verisk Maplecroft, told Bloomberg by email. “He is counting on Turkey, Iran and the U.S. not being able to sustain a united stance on pressuring the KRG.”</p>
<p>The gamble is risky, but if the Kurds can stave off retaliation, there is an upside. Because any clash would be a lop-sided affair, given the lack of international support for formal Kurdish independence, military hostilities are unlikely. Turkey could shut down the pipeline that carries Kurdish oil, but Ankara also benefits from tariffs it receives for allowing those shipments to proceed. Baghdad has much less influence, so if Turkey declines to follow through on its threats, the independence vote could give the Kurdish government some leverage with Baghdad in negotiations over revenue sharing, a longstanding grievance that has not been addressed. The Iraqi government has tried for years to halt Kurdish oil exports, but to no avail.</p>
<p><a href="http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/As-OPEC-Compliance-Peaks-Can-The-Drawdowns-Continue.html" type="external">Read more on Oilprice.com:&#160;As OPEC Compliance Peaks, Can The Drawdowns Continue?</a></p>
<p>The Kurdish government also recently resolved some outstanding issues with energy companies operating within its borders, restructuring debts and sending payments to some drillers. Rosneft just&#160; <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-kurdistan-rosneft/russias-rosneft-clinches-gas-pipeline-deal-with-iraqs-kurdistan-idUSKCN1BT0MQ" type="external">announced</a>&#160;plans to invest $1 billion in Kurdistan to build a natural gas pipeline, a move that comes on the heels of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of loans to the Kurdish government earlier this year, to be paid back by future oil sales. The recent deals bolster Kurdistan’s energy outlook.</p>
<p>In short, the belligerent rhetoric surrounding the independence vote between Kurdistan and its neighbors could have already peaked. That might mean that the case for higher crude oil prices will need to come from elsewhere; oil bulls cannot base their bets on supply disruptions from Kurdistan.</p>
<p>This&#160; <a href="http://oilprice.com/Geopolitics/International/Kurdish-Vote-Wont-Spark-A-Sustained-Oil-Price-Rally.html" type="external">article</a>&#160;was originally published on&#160; <a href="http://oilprice.com/" type="external">Oilprice.com</a></p> | false | 1 | turkey iraq stepped pressure kurdistan semiautonomous region iraq voted independence turkeys president recep tayyip erdogan threatened block kurdish oil exports turkish territory baghdad called international boycott kurdish oil sales read kurdish people appeared voted overwhelmingly independence monday pending final results kurdish regional government has160 said160that vote wont recognized internationally starting point negotiations baghdad culmination real independence turkeys president called referendum illegal null void threatened shut exports pipeline runs kurdistan turkish mediterranean port ceyhan lets see going drain petrol control valve said turn valve referendum also opposed iran well united states argued would destabilize region iraqi prime minister haider alabadi said sunday foreign countries purchase oil kurdistan arguing sales illegal conducted auspices iraqi central government iraq asks neighboring countries countries world deal exclusively federal government iraq regards entry posts oil a160 statement160from prime ministers office said read oilpricecom160aston martin ceo uk fossil fuel ban meaningless kurdistan produces 600000 bpd 15 percent iraqs total output contentiously oil fields around disputed areas kirkuk kurds took control 2014 isis burst onto scene rapidly seized swathes territory iraqi government iraqi government going stand still watch kirkuks integration kurdistan mobilization seeing iraqi effort reassert control contested territory ayham kamel director middle east north africa eurasia group said a160 bloomberg160interview ethnic clashes might become pretext much wider mobilization added read kurdistan largely mercy much powerful neighbors bulk regions finances come oil exports much go pipeline across turkey mediterranean turkey takes draconian action shut kurdish oil exports would cripple kurdish economy boycott call proves successful good 500000 fewer barrels crude oil per day would reach market commerzbank160 said160in note threat boycott well possible shuttering oil flows turkey led significant increase crude prices touched twoyear highs monday brent rose 58 per barrel highest price two years although prices fell back slightly tuesday serious scenario would sort military clash kurdistan neighbors turkey conducted military exercises along border kurdistan turkish president erdogan ominously warned may arrive one night suddenly kurdish president massoud barzani called calm diplomatic negotiations tuesday iraqi government160 ruled talks barzani playing dangerous game poker anthony skinner director ukbased forecasting company verisk maplecroft told bloomberg email counting turkey iran us able sustain united stance pressuring krg gamble risky kurds stave retaliation upside clash would lopsided affair given lack international support formal kurdish independence military hostilities unlikely turkey could shut pipeline carries kurdish oil ankara also benefits tariffs receives allowing shipments proceed baghdad much less influence turkey declines follow threats independence vote could give kurdish government leverage baghdad negotiations revenue sharing longstanding grievance addressed iraqi government tried years halt kurdish oil exports avail read oilpricecom160as opec compliance peaks drawdowns continue kurdish government also recently resolved outstanding issues energy companies operating within borders restructuring debts sending payments drillers rosneft just160 announced160plans invest 1 billion kurdistan build natural gas pipeline move comes heels hundreds millions dollars worth loans kurdish government earlier year paid back future oil sales recent deals bolster kurdistans energy outlook short belligerent rhetoric surrounding independence vote kurdistan neighbors could already peaked might mean case higher crude oil prices need come elsewhere oil bulls base bets supply disruptions kurdistan this160 article160was originally published on160 oilpricecom | 515 |
<p>It will come as no surprise if the Federal Reserve has an announcement to make when its latest policy meeting ends Wednesday: That it’s ready to begin paring its enormous $4.5 trillion portfolio containing Treasurys and mortgage bonds.</p>
<p>The Fed expanded its bond holdings — the major assets on its balance sheet — in the years after the financial crisis erupted in 2008. It bought the bonds to try to hold down mortgage and other loan rates and support a fragile economy.</p>
<p>The Fed stopped buying new bonds in 2014 but kept its balance sheet high by reinvesting the proceeds of maturing bonds.</p>
<p>Now, with a much stronger economy, Fed officials are expected to announce a starting date to begin allowing the bond holdings to shrink gradually. No one is quite sure how the financial markets will respond over time.</p>
<p>One thing not expected Wednesday is any change in the Fed’s key policy rate, which remains in a low range of 1 percent to 1.25 percent. The central bank may signal how likely a rate hike is by December, when some analysts foresee the next increase.</p>
<p>Here are three things to watch for after the Fed’s meeting ends:</p>
<p>REDUCING THE BALANCE SHEET</p>
<p>Just as the Fed had never before engaged in a bond-buying spree of such magnitude, it has never attempted to shrink a portfolio that is now roughly five times its size before the financial crisis.</p>
<p>Under the plan the Fed announced in June, it will start to allow a slight $10 billion in holdings to roll off the balance sheet each month — $6 billion in Treasurys and $4 billion in mortgage bonds. That figure would inch up by $10 billion each quarter until it reaches $50 billion in monthly reductions a year from now. At this rate, the Fed’s balance sheet would still be above $3 trillion by late 2019.</p>
<p>Those sales are expected to exert modest upward pressure on long-term rates, like mortgages. The Fed has given investors months to digest its forthcoming move and has stressed that the paring of its balance sheet will proceed extremely gradually. Still, the risk exists that investors could become spooked by the rising number of bonds being transferred back into private hands. If that were to happen, long-term rates might surge undesirably high, which could weigh on the economy.</p>
<p>Any damage in the markets could also extend to assets such as stocks, which have set record highs as investors have shifted money into stocks and away from low-interest bonds. There is also concern that rates could climb faster if other central banks follow the Fed’s lead and begin reducing their own bond holdings.</p>
<p>STATE OF ECONOMY</p>
<p>The Fed will update its economic forecasts, which are compiled from the projections of its board members and the 12 regional Fed bank presidents. The projection for unemployment will show that the central bank has achieved its 4.6 percent target for full employment: The jobless rate is at 4.4 percent, near a 16-year low.</p>
<p>But the central bank has been going backward in trying to meet its other mandate of stabilizing prices at an annual inflation rate of 2 percent over time. Inflation has stalled, and prices are now rising just 1.4 percent annually. A critical question is whether the Fed has grown troubled or confused about chronically low inflation. Clues to the answer might come in the policy statement the Fed will issue, in its updated economic forecasts or in the news conference Chair Janet Yellen will hold.</p>
<p>Yellen earlier this year blamed temporary factors, such as the introduction of cheaper mobile phone plans, for the persistence of undesirably low inflation. More recently, she has wondered whether something more widespread might be keeping inflation low. If the Fed were to coalesce around that belief, doubts could arise about whether it should keep raising rates or delay further hikes.</p>
<p>Hints of whether the Fed will likely raise rates in December for a third time this year could come from its revised “dot plot,” in which individual Fed officials anonymously post their expectations for future rate hikes. The June “dot plot” had pointed to three rate increases for 2017.</p>
<p>MAKEUP OF THE FED</p>
<p>Beyond her own views on the economy, inflation and the Fed’s balance sheet, Yellen might decide to drop a hint in her news conference about an even more tantalizing topic: Her own future. She will certainly be asked. Yellen’s four-year term as chair will end on Feb. 3.</p>
<p>President Donald Trump has indicated that he is considering asking Yellen to serve another term. He said of the Fed chair last week, “I like her, and I respect her.” But he has also said he is considering other candidates, notably Gary Cohn, head of Trump’s National Economic Council.</p>
<p>When asked about her future, Yellen, the first woman to lead the Fed, has said only that she intends to serve out her term as chair. She has not indicated whether she would or wouldn’t accept a Trump offer to serve another term.</p>
<p>The seven-member Fed board will soon have four openings, after the announcement this month by Stanley Fischer that he is stepping down as vice chairman. So far, Trump has moved to fill only one spot, nominating Randal Quarles, who has yet to be confirmed by the Senate, to the key post of vice chairman for bank supervision.</p>
<p>Many Fed watchers have expressed their belief that Yellen has performed well and deserves a second term as chair.</p> | false | 1 | come surprise federal reserve announcement make latest policy meeting ends wednesday ready begin paring enormous 45 trillion portfolio containing treasurys mortgage bonds fed expanded bond holdings major assets balance sheet years financial crisis erupted 2008 bought bonds try hold mortgage loan rates support fragile economy fed stopped buying new bonds 2014 kept balance sheet high reinvesting proceeds maturing bonds much stronger economy fed officials expected announce starting date begin allowing bond holdings shrink gradually one quite sure financial markets respond time one thing expected wednesday change feds key policy rate remains low range 1 percent 125 percent central bank may signal likely rate hike december analysts foresee next increase three things watch feds meeting ends reducing balance sheet fed never engaged bondbuying spree magnitude never attempted shrink portfolio roughly five times size financial crisis plan fed announced june start allow slight 10 billion holdings roll balance sheet month 6 billion treasurys 4 billion mortgage bonds figure would inch 10 billion quarter reaches 50 billion monthly reductions year rate feds balance sheet would still 3 trillion late 2019 sales expected exert modest upward pressure longterm rates like mortgages fed given investors months digest forthcoming move stressed paring balance sheet proceed extremely gradually still risk exists investors could become spooked rising number bonds transferred back private hands happen longterm rates might surge undesirably high could weigh economy damage markets could also extend assets stocks set record highs investors shifted money stocks away lowinterest bonds also concern rates could climb faster central banks follow feds lead begin reducing bond holdings state economy fed update economic forecasts compiled projections board members 12 regional fed bank presidents projection unemployment show central bank achieved 46 percent target full employment jobless rate 44 percent near 16year low central bank going backward trying meet mandate stabilizing prices annual inflation rate 2 percent time inflation stalled prices rising 14 percent annually critical question whether fed grown troubled confused chronically low inflation clues answer might come policy statement fed issue updated economic forecasts news conference chair janet yellen hold yellen earlier year blamed temporary factors introduction cheaper mobile phone plans persistence undesirably low inflation recently wondered whether something widespread might keeping inflation low fed coalesce around belief doubts could arise whether keep raising rates delay hikes hints whether fed likely raise rates december third time year could come revised dot plot individual fed officials anonymously post expectations future rate hikes june dot plot pointed three rate increases 2017 makeup fed beyond views economy inflation feds balance sheet yellen might decide drop hint news conference even tantalizing topic future certainly asked yellens fouryear term chair end feb 3 president donald trump indicated considering asking yellen serve another term said fed chair last week like respect also said considering candidates notably gary cohn head trumps national economic council asked future yellen first woman lead fed said intends serve term chair indicated whether would wouldnt accept trump offer serve another term sevenmember fed board soon four openings announcement month stanley fischer stepping vice chairman far trump moved fill one spot nominating randal quarles yet confirmed senate key post vice chairman bank supervision many fed watchers expressed belief yellen performed well deserves second term chair | 531 |
<p>By Yawen Chen and Ryan Woo</p>
<p>BEIJING (Reuters) – Chinese data in coming weeks is expected to deliver exactly what its leaders want to hear ahead of a highly sensitive Communist Party Congress – the country’s economic growth remains robust and resilient even as they work to get debt risks under control.</p>
<p>The twice-a-decade party congress that kicks off on Oct. 18 is expected to see President Xi Jinping strengthen his grip in a leadership reshuffle, and will set the political and economic policy tone for China for the next five years.</p>
<p>So far this year, the world’s second-biggest economy has held up better than expected despite views that a clampdown on riskier types of financing and a flurry of measures to cool heated housing prices will drag on activity.</p>
<p>But many economists still contend growth will fade in coming months under the weight of higher borrowing costs, property curbs and the government-mandated shutdown of some highly polluting factories to reduce winter air pollution.</p>
<p>The boost from heavy government stimulus — Beijing’s infrastructure spending spree has helped fuel a year-long construction boom — will also begin to ebb, skeptics argue.</p>
<p>Still, economists polled by Reuters expect China’s economy is heading into the fourth quarter with plenty of momentum.</p>
<p>Growth in industrial output is expected to accelerate to 6.2 percent from a year earlier, from August’s 6 percent, according to a Reuters poll of 24 economists.</p>
<p>Steel mills are believed to be running at full steam to cash in on strong demand and prices, and to build up inventories in case they are ordered to reduce output over winter.</p>
<p>Fixed-asset investment is predicted to have increased 7.7 percent in the first three quarters on-year, only slightly softer than a 7.8 percent rise in January-August.</p>
<p>Retail sales growth is seen edging up to 10.2 percent.</p>
<p>China’s trade performance is also expected to improve after softer-than-expected readings in August raised questions about the sustainability of its domestic and export demand.</p>
<p>Exports are expected to have risen 8.8 percent on-year, while imports may have jumped 13.5 percent, producing a trade surplus of $39.5 billion. A pullback in the strong yuan currency in recent weeks may be giving exporters some relief.</p>
<p>GROWTH VERSUS DEBT</p>
<p>While there is little worry of an economic hard landing, debt risks appear to be back on the radar as Beijing continues to pump out more credit to keep activity humming.</p>
<p>S&amp;P Global Ratings downgraded the country’s credit rating last month, saying China’s attempts to reduce risks from its rapid build-up in debt are not working as quickly as expected and credit growth is still too fast.</p>
<p>China in July set up a new financial stability committee under the State Council to coordinate financial oversight, with the central bank taking on a bigger role.</p>
<p>The People’s Bank of China early this year included off-balance sheet wealth management products in its Macro Prudential (LON:) Assessment (MPA) for the first time to give authorities a better sense of potential risks to the financial system.</p>
<p>September’s loan data will be closely watched for signs of where policy may be going next, as banks have shifted more credit back onto their books in response to the clampdown on shadow financing.</p>
<p>Chinese banks are seen extending 1.1 trillion yuan ($165.33 billion) in new loans in September, up from 1.09 trillion yuan in August.</p>
<p>Credit growth could get an extra boost in coming months after the PBOC on Saturday cut the amount of cash that some banks must hold as reserves for the first time since February 2016. The move is linked with a policy to encourage more lending to struggling smaller firms and the private sector.</p>
<p>It could trigger a flurry of lending as banks look to qualify for lower reserve requirement ratios (RRR) which go into effect in 2018, though some analysts believe the impact on the economy may be tempered if Beijing continues its campaign to rein in debt risks at the same time.</p>
<p>“We believe the RRR cut may not lead to a quick pickup in total credit growth if policy makers continue to strictly enforce the macroprudential assessment (MPA) framework and the new rules related to the financial system cleanup,” Morgan Stanley (NYSE:) wrote in a note to clients.</p>
<p>Inflation data may also offer clues on firms’ debt-servicing capability.</p>
<p>The producer price index (PPI) is tipped to have risen 6.3 percent in September on-year, steady from August.</p>
<p>Profits at industrial companies rose the most in four years in August as commodities prices surged, though a Reuters analysis showed few listed firms have used the windfall this year to retire their debt.</p>
<p>Again, analysts predict producer prices will start to soften in the fourth quarter due to a high base of comparison last year and as overall demand moderates along with economic growth.</p>
<p>The consumer price index (CPI) meanwhile is seen up 1.6 percent on-year in September, versus 1.8 percent in August and well within Beijing’s 2017 target of 3 percent.</p>
<p>Besides the campaign to reduce high levels of debt across the economy, authorities have also been trying to reduce the risk from capital flight by stabilizing the yuan currency.</p>
<p>China’s foreign exchange reserves are expected to have risen for an eighth month to $3.1 trillion in September, as capital curbs and a weakening dollar helped staunch fund outflows.</p>
<p>China is due to announce foreign exchange reserves data on Oct. 7, followed by trade and inflation data on Oct. 13 and Oct. 16 respectively, while loan and money data is expected anytime from Oct. 10 to Oct. 15.</p>
<p>The data will lead up to third quarter gross domestic product (GDP) on Oct. 19. China’s economy grew 6.9 percent in the first half, and is expected to easily meet or beat the government’s full-year target of around 6.5 percent.</p> | false | 1 | yawen chen ryan woo beijing reuters chinese data coming weeks expected deliver exactly leaders want hear ahead highly sensitive communist party congress countrys economic growth remains robust resilient even work get debt risks control twiceadecade party congress kicks oct 18 expected see president xi jinping strengthen grip leadership reshuffle set political economic policy tone china next five years far year worlds secondbiggest economy held better expected despite views clampdown riskier types financing flurry measures cool heated housing prices drag activity many economists still contend growth fade coming months weight higher borrowing costs property curbs governmentmandated shutdown highly polluting factories reduce winter air pollution boost heavy government stimulus beijings infrastructure spending spree helped fuel yearlong construction boom also begin ebb skeptics argue still economists polled reuters expect chinas economy heading fourth quarter plenty momentum growth industrial output expected accelerate 62 percent year earlier augusts 6 percent according reuters poll 24 economists steel mills believed running full steam cash strong demand prices build inventories case ordered reduce output winter fixedasset investment predicted increased 77 percent first three quarters onyear slightly softer 78 percent rise januaryaugust retail sales growth seen edging 102 percent chinas trade performance also expected improve softerthanexpected readings august raised questions sustainability domestic export demand exports expected risen 88 percent onyear imports may jumped 135 percent producing trade surplus 395 billion pullback strong yuan currency recent weeks may giving exporters relief growth versus debt little worry economic hard landing debt risks appear back radar beijing continues pump credit keep activity humming sampp global ratings downgraded countrys credit rating last month saying chinas attempts reduce risks rapid buildup debt working quickly expected credit growth still fast china july set new financial stability committee state council coordinate financial oversight central bank taking bigger role peoples bank china early year included offbalance sheet wealth management products macro prudential lon assessment mpa first time give authorities better sense potential risks financial system septembers loan data closely watched signs policy may going next banks shifted credit back onto books response clampdown shadow financing chinese banks seen extending 11 trillion yuan 16533 billion new loans september 109 trillion yuan august credit growth could get extra boost coming months pboc saturday cut amount cash banks must hold reserves first time since february 2016 move linked policy encourage lending struggling smaller firms private sector could trigger flurry lending banks look qualify lower reserve requirement ratios rrr go effect 2018 though analysts believe impact economy may tempered beijing continues campaign rein debt risks time believe rrr cut may lead quick pickup total credit growth policy makers continue strictly enforce macroprudential assessment mpa framework new rules related financial system cleanup morgan stanley nyse wrote note clients inflation data may also offer clues firms debtservicing capability producer price index ppi tipped risen 63 percent september onyear steady august profits industrial companies rose four years august commodities prices surged though reuters analysis showed listed firms used windfall year retire debt analysts predict producer prices start soften fourth quarter due high base comparison last year overall demand moderates along economic growth consumer price index cpi meanwhile seen 16 percent onyear september versus 18 percent august well within beijings 2017 target 3 percent besides campaign reduce high levels debt across economy authorities also trying reduce risk capital flight stabilizing yuan currency chinas foreign exchange reserves expected risen eighth month 31 trillion september capital curbs weakening dollar helped staunch fund outflows china due announce foreign exchange reserves data oct 7 followed trade inflation data oct 13 oct 16 respectively loan money data expected anytime oct 10 oct 15 data lead third quarter gross domestic product gdp oct 19 chinas economy grew 69 percent first half expected easily meet beat governments fullyear target around 65 percent | 620 |
<p>Two-time UFC heavyweight champion Frank Mir, who signed with the second biggest American MMA promotion Bellator this summer, spoke exclusively to RT Sport about the organization’s heavyweight Grand Prix tournament, which he’ll take part in alongside seven other notable fighters.</p>
<p>Following his 16-year UFC career, Mir signed a contract with Bellator MMA in mid-August of this year, although his last fight came against Mark Hunt more than a year ago, back in March 2016.</p>
<p>One month after the bout with Hunt, Mir was notified of a potential anti-doping violation. One year on, in April 2017, the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) announced that Mir had been given a two-year suspension, as an in-competition sample had tested positive for the “long-term metabolite of dehydrochloromethyltestosterone.”</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/sport/387028-frank-mir-usada-interview/" type="external">READ MORE: ‘USADA can find any athlete guilty, what are your resources to defend yourself?’ – UFC’s Frank Mir</a></p>
<p>The 38-year-old veteran, who still holds the record for the most victories in the UFC’s heavyweight division, will therefore only be eligible to compete again in the US from April 2018.</p>
<p>Mir says he isn’t looking to stay inactive any longer than necessary, and wants to fight as soon as his suspension ends in April. Among the other matchups at Bellator’s heavyweight Grand Prix, Mir will reportedly fight the legendary Russian, Fedor Emelianenko.</p>
<p>We spoke to Mir about the upcoming tournament, his thoughts on the fighters, and his preparations for his comeback after a two-year break.</p>
<p>RT: Bellator recently announced their heavyweight Grand Prix tournament, which they will host next year. What are your thoughts?</p>
<p>Frank Mir: Oh, I’m super excited! I think it’s a phenomenal way for Bellator to come out. The heavyweight division doesn’t have a champion crowned yet. And so to come out this way with some of the talents that they have: myself, Mitrione, Fedor. I think it’s the best way to get attention on it immediately.</p>
<p>RT: How do you rate the fighters taking part in this grand prix?</p>
<p>FM: Everybody in there is great. You have Fedor first and foremost, one of the legends in the heavyweight division. Matt Mitrione is extremely athletic, phenomenal jab. Roy Nelson is always a pain for anybody to fight with. He has a great right hand, which puts everybody to sleep if he lands it, good at stopping takedowns, heavy on top. You have King Mo (Muhammed Lawal), the light heavyweights are all dangerous. They all are great wrestlers. You have Mo who is a national champion. (Ryan) Bader who is a highly decorated wrestler. Quinton Jackson is a good wrestler. And Chael Sonnen, who wrestled on the national level. And they all have good hands, you know. King Mo is a great boxer, good technique. Quinton Jackson has a great left hook. Ryan Bader, you know I’ve trained with him on a reality show, I know how strong he is. So they’re not going to be outmuscled. They all are tough fights.</p>
<p>RT: There’s obviously talk about your fight with Fedor Emelianenko, but Bellator hasn’t officially announced it yet. How do you rate Fedor in his current state?</p>
<p>FM: I think he’s still extremely dangerous. He did everything he does normally. You see how fast he threw the right hand on Mitrione. The difference is everyone else just have gotten a lot better. If Matt Mitrione would fight 10 years ago in Pride, he would have been one of the best fighters in Pride, if we grab Mitrione we are seeing now and put him back there. Back then guys were either good boxers, wrestlers, jiu jitsu guys. You didn’t have a lot of guys who were good at everything. Which Fedor is. He’s good at everything. And now he has to deal with the fact that everybody now is good at everything. There are very few guys that fight at the top level of MMA, that you can say that ‘oh he has zero stand-up’ or ‘oh he has zero ground,’ or ‘he can’t wrestle.’ We don’t really use those terms anymore. Everybody has different athleticism, different mindsets, backgrounds, different personalities. Just like in boxing – not everybody fights the same, even though everybody boxes. (Guillermo) Rigondeaux and (Vasiliy) Lomachenko fight differently, but they’re still boxers. So within MMA, we’re all MMA artists now. And you don’t really have people with blurring holes. So to underestimate Fedor would be a crazy mistake. Watching him on the countdown (videos) to that fight, hitting the bag, working out. What I’ve seen him still doing, I still think he’s a great fighter. I just think that the rest of the world has caught up, so he is not light years ahead of everybody, like he was 10 years ago.</p>
<p>RT: How do you rate your own condition, keeping in mind that by the time you will be cleared to fight, it’s going to be two years since your last fight?</p>
<p>FM: Actually I’ve started training already. Because I’m not planning on training all the way through, I basically want to do two and a half camps leading up to the fight. Train, get in a moderate amount of shape, take time off, rest, then start over. It’s called prioritization. It’s one way to get in this kind of shape. I think the mistake is two ways, guys making when they took a long time off. It’s either: they train the whole time, and they are burntout by the time of the fight, because they didn’t take the time off. Or two, the mistake they make, instead of having a super long training camp, they have their normal training camp, but they weren’t in a great shape to start off with. It’s hard for just one camp to get yourself back. That’s why I think it’s always great to start six months away from when you expect the fight. Train for two months, take a week off. Train for two months, take a week off. And then as your body had a rest and it has a good level to start off with for the last camp, that’s really hard.</p>
<p>[embedded content]</p>
<p>RT: There was also talk about a possible fight in ACB, the promotion that you work for as a commentator. But given the nature of Bellator’s heavyweight grand prix, will you be allowed to compete in any other organization while you stay in the tournament?</p>
<p>FM: Yeah absolutely. It just all depends on my injuries. You know, if I go fight Fedor and we have a have a three-round war and I come out, you know, beaten up, it’s gonna take a lot longer to turn around and fight. But if I go out there and I can catch him in a submission very early or with a punch and the fight is over, then my opportunity to turn around and fight six weeks later, after taking a week off, rest and start up again. Taking two years off is rather a lot of time from my career and I’d actually like to make up for it. We only have that much time that we are going to have this opportunity to get to fight. And I like fighting, I’m like any other athlete, whether you play football, whether you play hockey. You like to do what you do. It’s fun. And I think of the kids on the weekends. And most grown men they pay money to other people to play sports, to go out there and compete. And I want to get as many opportunities to fight as I can.</p>
<p>RT: Have you discussed possible location options with ACB? Would it be in Russia? Europe? Or somewhere else?</p>
<p>FM: Probably somewhere in Europe or Russia. It could be either or. One thing that I’ve brought up to them, that I really wanted to do, and we’re trying to see how hard it is to do with all the political aspects – because my father comes from Cuba, and that’s where a lot of my heritage comes from – I would like to fight in Cuba, before I go. And the ACB is one of the most international organizations that I know of, that seems to do fights everywhere and anywhere. So I think if anybody can get it done, it would be them. The only problem is right now that we’re facing, the biggest obstacle is that the Sports Federation in Cuba doesn’t allow cage competitions. So we can have MMA there, but it has to be in a boxing ring, which the ACB and most (organizations) in the world don’t do that. But still, hopefully it’s a thing that we will be able to get through, before I retire.</p>
<p>RT: You also mentioned on your podcast that you’ll probably go for a training camp in Russia, particularly in Grozny, Chechnya, where ACB has their training base. Have you discussed it with them yet?</p>
<p>FM: Yeah, I’ve actually started the ball rolling. And obviously on their side it’s all open arms, whenever I need to go there. At this point it’s just also making sure that it works out for my family to stay home without me for eight weeks or 10 weeks. And then on top of that is that all their appropriate weight class guys would be there for me. Their light heavyweight champ is pretty dangerous, and honestly if I know that I’m fighting Fedor, I probably wouldn’t fight with a lot of heavyweights, guys who are bigger than I am. I’ll probably fight with guys who are not bigger than 100 kilos, because I’d like to face people that are fast and mobile, which I think is what Fedor possess. Fedor is not a big, huge heavyweight. He’s actually a very small heavyweight, but he has very good speed, very good power and explosion. So I think that sparring with light heavyweights would probably be the best preparation.</p>
<p>by <a href="https://twitter.com/DenisGeykoRT" type="external">Denis Geyko</a> for RT Sport</p> | false | 1 | twotime ufc heavyweight champion frank mir signed second biggest american mma promotion bellator summer spoke exclusively rt sport organizations heavyweight grand prix tournament hell take part alongside seven notable fighters following 16year ufc career mir signed contract bellator mma midaugust year although last fight came mark hunt year ago back march 2016 one month bout hunt mir notified potential antidoping violation one year april 2017 us antidoping agency usada announced mir given twoyear suspension incompetition sample tested positive longterm metabolite dehydrochloromethyltestosterone read usada find athlete guilty resources defend ufcs frank mir 38yearold veteran still holds record victories ufcs heavyweight division therefore eligible compete us april 2018 mir says isnt looking stay inactive longer necessary wants fight soon suspension ends april among matchups bellators heavyweight grand prix mir reportedly fight legendary russian fedor emelianenko spoke mir upcoming tournament thoughts fighters preparations comeback twoyear break rt bellator recently announced heavyweight grand prix tournament host next year thoughts frank mir oh im super excited think phenomenal way bellator come heavyweight division doesnt champion crowned yet come way talents mitrione fedor think best way get attention immediately rt rate fighters taking part grand prix fm everybody great fedor first foremost one legends heavyweight division matt mitrione extremely athletic phenomenal jab roy nelson always pain anybody fight great right hand puts everybody sleep lands good stopping takedowns heavy top king mo muhammed lawal light heavyweights dangerous great wrestlers mo national champion ryan bader highly decorated wrestler quinton jackson good wrestler chael sonnen wrestled national level good hands know king mo great boxer good technique quinton jackson great left hook ryan bader know ive trained reality show know strong theyre going outmuscled tough fights rt theres obviously talk fight fedor emelianenko bellator hasnt officially announced yet rate fedor current state fm think hes still extremely dangerous everything normally see fast threw right hand mitrione difference everyone else gotten lot better matt mitrione would fight 10 years ago pride would one best fighters pride grab mitrione seeing put back back guys either good boxers wrestlers jiu jitsu guys didnt lot guys good everything fedor hes good everything deal fact everybody good everything guys fight top level mma say oh zero standup oh zero ground cant wrestle dont really use terms anymore everybody different athleticism different mindsets backgrounds different personalities like boxing everybody fights even though everybody boxes guillermo rigondeaux vasiliy lomachenko fight differently theyre still boxers within mma mma artists dont really people blurring holes underestimate fedor would crazy mistake watching countdown videos fight hitting bag working ive seen still still think hes great fighter think rest world caught light years ahead everybody like 10 years ago rt rate condition keeping mind time cleared fight going two years since last fight fm actually ive started training already im planning training way basically want two half camps leading fight train get moderate amount shape take time rest start called prioritization one way get kind shape think mistake two ways guys making took long time either train whole time burntout time fight didnt take time two mistake make instead super long training camp normal training camp werent great shape start hard one camp get back thats think always great start six months away expect fight train two months take week train two months take week body rest good level start last camp thats really hard embedded content rt also talk possible fight acb promotion work commentator given nature bellators heavyweight grand prix allowed compete organization stay tournament fm yeah absolutely depends injuries know go fight fedor threeround war come know beaten gon na take lot longer turn around fight go catch submission early punch fight opportunity turn around fight six weeks later taking week rest start taking two years rather lot time career id actually like make much time going opportunity get fight like fighting im like athlete whether play football whether play hockey like fun think kids weekends grown men pay money people play sports go compete want get many opportunities fight rt discussed possible location options acb would russia europe somewhere else fm probably somewhere europe russia could either one thing ive brought really wanted trying see hard political aspects father comes cuba thats lot heritage comes would like fight cuba go acb one international organizations know seems fights everywhere anywhere think anybody get done would problem right facing biggest obstacle sports federation cuba doesnt allow cage competitions mma boxing ring acb organizations world dont still hopefully thing able get retire rt also mentioned podcast youll probably go training camp russia particularly grozny chechnya acb training base discussed yet fm yeah ive actually started ball rolling obviously side open arms whenever need go point also making sure works family stay home without eight weeks 10 weeks top appropriate weight class guys would light heavyweight champ pretty dangerous honestly know im fighting fedor probably wouldnt fight lot heavyweights guys bigger ill probably fight guys bigger 100 kilos id like face people fast mobile think fedor possess fedor big huge heavyweight hes actually small heavyweight good speed good power explosion think sparring light heavyweights would probably best preparation denis geyko rt sport | 853 |
<p>Senate Republican leaders released a revised health-care plan&#160;Thursday that would provide an added $70 billion to stabilize insurance exchanges over a decade in an effort to win over GOP holdouts.</p>
<p>The change comes on top of $112 billion provided for the same purpose in an earlier measure by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is hoping the modified bill will revive prospects for their embattled Obamacare repeal effort, which stalled about two weeks ago.</p>
<p>The new measure discards earlier plans to repeal three Obamacare taxes on the wealthy, according to the summary. That move effectively freed up about $230 billion in cash to bolster health expenditures.</p>
<p>The revised bill also includes a provision that would allow people for the first time to use health savings accounts to pay insurance premiums, according to the document.</p>
<p>It's not clear whether the changes will gain enough backing to get through the Senate. More than half a dozen Republican and Democratic senators also have discussed alternatives to the GOP plan, which was developed without consulting Democrats.</p>
<p>Indeed, Republican Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana on Thursday morning released their own alternative health plan that would shift much of current federal funding for Obamacare insurance and future funding directly to states, according to a statement from Graham's office. Cassidy said he wants to offer his plan as an amendment to McConnell's bill.</p>
<p>Because of the GOP's narrow 52-48 majority, Republican leaders can lose no more than two votes in their party amid united Democratic opposition to efforts to repeal Obamacare. Republicans say that even if the GOP plan fails, they can't leave the Affordable Care Act untouched because insurers are pulling out of some areas.</p>
<p>Courting Moderates</p>
<p>The changes include provisions intended to appeal to moderates worried about premium spikes predicted by the Congressional Budget Office and others under the previous bill.</p>
<p>But while the bill omits a series of tax cuts for the wealthy in a nod to moderates, conservatives get major changes legalizing far skimpier plans that aren't part of the Obamacare exchanges.</p>
<p>Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who had opposed plans to advance an earlier version of the bill in late June, said Thursday that he will support debating the current bill, although he isn't ready to give his full backing.</p>
<p>It's not immediately clear if the effort at finding a balance of more money to assuage moderates' fears of higher premiums for poorer, older, sicker people will be enough to gain their support. Many have been skeptical or opposed to the idea of creating bare-bones plans that could siphon off healthy, young people and therefore cause premiums to rise in the exchanges.</p>
<p>The plan funnels billions of subsidies into those exchange plans to mitigate that effect.</p>
<p>But, overall, the bill still has far less money going into Medicaid and health subsidies than the Affordable Care Act. And senators have said they want to see a Congressional Budget Office estimate to determine how it impacts the insurance market and their states.</p>
<p>The revised draft would keep the earlier bill's language allowing people earning up to 350 percent of the poverty level to receive subsidies. And it would keep a skimpier benchmark for subsidies than the Affordable Care Act's silver plan, which would result in higher out-of-pocket expenses.</p>
<p>The new plan would also allow people to purchase a high-deductible catastrophic plan with federal tax credits, and include a provision prohibiting abortion coverage except in cases of rape or incest or to save the life of the mother in plans eligible for tax credits.</p>
<p>Covering the Sick</p>
<p>The revised bill includes a federal fund that would pay health insurers to cover costs of sicker people seeking individual coverage on the insurance exchanges.</p>
<p>To qualify for the funds, insurers would have to meet minimum coverage standards in the exchange, while also offering coverage off the exchange that meets state requirements. Those buying state-governed plans wouldn't be allowed to use federal tax credits to buy their coverage but could tap tax-advantaged health savings accounts to cover the costs.</p>
<p>To appeal to lawmakers in high cost states like Alaska, 1 percent of expanded state innovation and stability grants would be reserved specifically to subsidize insurance in states where premiums are at least 75 percent higher than the national average.</p>
<p>Starting in 2022, states would have to share in the costs of those funds with their own money, with states having to shoulder 35 percent of the burden in 2026.</p>
<p>The bill changes the calculation for determining Medicaid payments to hospitals to assist with uncompensated care that is expected to more accurately allot the funds based on a state's uninsured population instead of Medicaid enrollment as the original legislation did. Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, tweeted Wednesday that one of his priorities for changing the bill involved increasing those funds for hospitals in his state.</p>
<p>Basic Plans</p>
<p>Republican leaders included a version of an amendment proposed by Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and GOP Senator Mike Lee of Utah.</p>
<p>Cruz and Lee want to allow insurers to offer cheap, bare-bones plans alongside those that meet the more comprehensive coverage requirements of Obamacare. Critics in both parties say the proposal would essentially put people with pre-existing conditions in the Obamacare insurance pool and allow young, healthy people to buy cheaper plans in a separate pool.</p>
<p>But Lee wrote in a tweet Thursday morning that he hasn't seen the new language of the amendment added to the bill and is "withholding judgment."</p>
<p>Republican leaders asked the CBO to provide an analysis with, and without, the provision.</p>
<p>Cruz said Thursday he won't vote to let the health bill advance unless his proposal, or something very similar, is sent to the full Senate.</p>
<p>"I think we're making significant progress, and I look forward to attending the meeting," Cruz said Thursday.</p>
<p>Plan "Unworkable"</p>
<p>But health insurers have said the plan backed by Cruz would destabilize the insurance market and undermine protections for sick people. The BlueCross BlueShield Association called the Cruz plan "unworkable."</p>
<p>America's Health Insurance Plans, the industry's main lobbying group, said his proposal would hurt the market by dividing healthy and sick people into separate groups. The sick people, AHIP said, would face extraordinarily high premiums, or might not be able to find coverage.</p>
<p>Without having seen McConnell's latest plan, more than half a dozen Republican and Democratic senators have discussed alternatives - a bipartisan approach that would infuriate conservatives and probably would be a hard sell in the House, where lawmakers in May passed their own plan to gut Obamacare.</p>
<p>After the bill is released and scoured by the Congressional Budget Office, it will become clearer whether Republican leaders have found a balance between moderates' desire for more spending for Medicaid and subsidies for Obamacare's insurance exchanges, and conservatives seeking a smaller government role in health care.</p>
<p>"There's a lot of different viewpoints, a lot of different feelings about it and they all have to be taken into consideration if you want to put together enough votes to pass the doggone thing," said Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican.</p>
<p>"Like the Old Bill"</p>
<p>GOP Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a Tea Party stalwart, said Wednesday he will oppose the new measure and vote to block it from floor consideration - without having seen the legislation. That means Republicans can lose support from only one more of their members.</p>
<p>"The new bill looks a lot like the old bill except it spends more money, taxes more and does little to assuage the concerns of conservatives," Paul told reporters. "At this point, I cannot support the bill."</p>
<p>As part of a drive to lure other support with more health funding, Republican leaders chose to retain several Obamacare tax increases, a reversal from the earlier measure. That includes Obamacare's 3.8 percent tax on net investment income for people who earn more than $200,000 and couples with incomes over $250,000, as well as a 0.9 percent Medicare surtax on the same incomes.</p>
<p>The plan also scraps a tax break for health-insurance executives' pay, keeping an Obamacare provision allowing health insurance companies to deduct from their taxes $500,000 of the pay of each top official. That's a tougher restriction than the limit imposed on other companies, which is $1 million per executive.</p>
<p>Those changes are designed to address concerns of moderates, including Bob Corker of Tennessee and Susan Collins of Maine, after Democrats and other critics said the earlier version cut taxes for the wealthy at the expense of low-income and sick people. The three tax items produce a revenue stream of nearly $232 billion over a decade.</p> | false | 1 | senate republican leaders released revised healthcare plan160thursday would provide added 70 billion stabilize insurance exchanges decade effort win gop holdouts change comes top 112 billion provided purpose earlier measure senate majority leader mitch mcconnell hoping modified bill revive prospects embattled obamacare repeal effort stalled two weeks ago new measure discards earlier plans repeal three obamacare taxes wealthy according summary move effectively freed 230 billion cash bolster health expenditures revised bill also includes provision would allow people first time use health savings accounts pay insurance premiums according document clear whether changes gain enough backing get senate half dozen republican democratic senators also discussed alternatives gop plan developed without consulting democrats indeed republican senators lindsey graham south carolina bill cassidy louisiana thursday morning released alternative health plan would shift much current federal funding obamacare insurance future funding directly states according statement grahams office cassidy said wants offer plan amendment mcconnells bill gops narrow 5248 majority republican leaders lose two votes party amid united democratic opposition efforts repeal obamacare republicans say even gop plan fails cant leave affordable care act untouched insurers pulling areas courting moderates changes include provisions intended appeal moderates worried premium spikes predicted congressional budget office others previous bill bill omits series tax cuts wealthy nod moderates conservatives get major changes legalizing far skimpier plans arent part obamacare exchanges republican senator ron johnson wisconsin opposed plans advance earlier version bill late june said thursday support debating current bill although isnt ready give full backing immediately clear effort finding balance money assuage moderates fears higher premiums poorer older sicker people enough gain support many skeptical opposed idea creating barebones plans could siphon healthy young people therefore cause premiums rise exchanges plan funnels billions subsidies exchange plans mitigate effect overall bill still far less money going medicaid health subsidies affordable care act senators said want see congressional budget office estimate determine impacts insurance market states revised draft would keep earlier bills language allowing people earning 350 percent poverty level receive subsidies would keep skimpier benchmark subsidies affordable care acts silver plan would result higher outofpocket expenses new plan would also allow people purchase highdeductible catastrophic plan federal tax credits include provision prohibiting abortion coverage except cases rape incest save life mother plans eligible tax credits covering sick revised bill includes federal fund would pay health insurers cover costs sicker people seeking individual coverage insurance exchanges qualify funds insurers would meet minimum coverage standards exchange also offering coverage exchange meets state requirements buying stategoverned plans wouldnt allowed use federal tax credits buy coverage could tap taxadvantaged health savings accounts cover costs appeal lawmakers high cost states like alaska 1 percent expanded state innovation stability grants would reserved specifically subsidize insurance states premiums least 75 percent higher national average starting 2022 states would share costs funds money states shoulder 35 percent burden 2026 bill changes calculation determining medicaid payments hospitals assist uncompensated care expected accurately allot funds based states uninsured population instead medicaid enrollment original legislation senator marco rubio florida republican tweeted wednesday one priorities changing bill involved increasing funds hospitals state basic plans republican leaders included version amendment proposed republican senator ted cruz texas gop senator mike lee utah cruz lee want allow insurers offer cheap barebones plans alongside meet comprehensive coverage requirements obamacare critics parties say proposal would essentially put people preexisting conditions obamacare insurance pool allow young healthy people buy cheaper plans separate pool lee wrote tweet thursday morning hasnt seen new language amendment added bill withholding judgment republican leaders asked cbo provide analysis without provision cruz said thursday wont vote let health bill advance unless proposal something similar sent full senate think making significant progress look forward attending meeting cruz said thursday plan unworkable health insurers said plan backed cruz would destabilize insurance market undermine protections sick people bluecross blueshield association called cruz plan unworkable americas health insurance plans industrys main lobbying group said proposal would hurt market dividing healthy sick people separate groups sick people ahip said would face extraordinarily high premiums might able find coverage without seen mcconnells latest plan half dozen republican democratic senators discussed alternatives bipartisan approach would infuriate conservatives probably would hard sell house lawmakers may passed plan gut obamacare bill released scoured congressional budget office become clearer whether republican leaders found balance moderates desire spending medicaid subsidies obamacares insurance exchanges conservatives seeking smaller government role health care theres lot different viewpoints lot different feelings taken consideration want put together enough votes pass doggone thing said senate finance chairman orrin hatch utah republican like old bill gop senator rand paul kentucky tea party stalwart said wednesday oppose new measure vote block floor consideration without seen legislation means republicans lose support one members new bill looks lot like old bill except spends money taxes little assuage concerns conservatives paul told reporters point support bill part drive lure support health funding republican leaders chose retain several obamacare tax increases reversal earlier measure includes obamacares 38 percent tax net investment income people earn 200000 couples incomes 250000 well 09 percent medicare surtax incomes plan also scraps tax break healthinsurance executives pay keeping obamacare provision allowing health insurance companies deduct taxes 500000 pay top official thats tougher restriction limit imposed companies 1 million per executive changes designed address concerns moderates including bob corker tennessee susan collins maine democrats critics said earlier version cut taxes wealthy expense lowincome sick people three tax items produce revenue stream nearly 232 billion decade | 900 |
<p>President Obama is in the early stages of setting a political trap for the GOP — one he hopes will take one of his greatest weaknesses and turn it into a strength.</p>
<p>The weakness Obama has is that he is viewed as fiscally reckless by much of the electorate, having engineered an unprecedented spending binge even before he passed into law a hugely expensive new entitlement program in health care. At a time when the deficit and debt are more potent political issues than ever, and when those who are viewed as responsible for them are more vulnerable than ever, Obama and Democrats in Congress are in a quandary.</p>
<p>What to do?</p>
<p>If you're Obama, the answer is to admit America faces a fiscal crisis, ignore the fact that you are now a key contributor to it, then force Republicans into an uncomfortable choice: either sign on to large tax increases to cut into the deficit and the debt, or refuse to do so, in which case Obama will then blame Republicans for not taking the necessary steps to put our fiscal house in order.</p>
<p>The deficit commission is one vehicle the president will use; there are sure to be others.</p>
<p>So what can Republicans do to keep Obama's attempt from succeeding?</p>
<p>Several things, I think. The first is to remind voters — morning, noon and night, on weekends as well weekdays – that Dr. Obama is largely responsible for building the fiscal Frankenstein we face. Last year the federal government spent $1.67 for every dollar it collected; the deficit reached a record $1.4 trillion. The president has proposed budgets that double the debt in five years and triples it in 10 years. And according to the Congressional Budget Office, our debt is headed to more than $20 trillion in 2020. (As a reference point, from 1789 through 2008, America accumulated less than $6 trillion of public debt.)</p>
<p>While Obama faced a very serious situation when he took office, he's taken steps that have made things far worse. It's also worth pointing out that if Obama were serious about putting a dent into the deficit, he would have used the cuts he is hoping to achieve in Medicare toward paying down the debt. Instead, Obama is using the promise of future cuts to finance a new, hugely expensive middle-class entitlement. Obama has also taken the money that banks have paid back as part of their TARP loans and used it to for yet more “stimulus” spending.</p>
<p>Obama has, for now at least, forfeited the right to be taken seriously on spending. Having him preach on the dangers of our fiscal imbalance is like John Edwards or Mark Sanford preaching on the joys of marital fidelity. It won't work, and it shouldn't be tried.</p>
<p>Second, Republicans need to show iron discipline in making it clear that tax increases are not the best or only option when it comes to reducing the deficit and debt. At the top of the list goes spending, and in particular Obamacare. Obama's success at nationalizing health care has made our fiscal situation, which was already reaching crisis proportions, far more acute. If you are badly wounded in battle you need to do several things to get well — but the first thing you need to do is remove the sword in your side. Obamacare is the fiscal sword in our side; Republicans should demand that those who put it there kindly remove it. Once they do, Republicans can say, they will look at other options. But until they do, Republicans won't.</p>
<p>Republicans have a considerable advantage in this confrontation. Obamacare, after all, continues to get more and more unpopular. According to <a href="http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/healthcare/march_2010/health_care_law" type="external">Rasmussen Reports</a>, three weeks after Congress passed the health care legislation, support for its repeal ticked upward four points to 58 percent — including 50 percent of respondents who “strongly” favor repeal.</p>
<p>These numbers are bad for Democrats — they know — and they continue to worsen with every passing week. Many Democrats and journalists insisted that passage of health care legislation would be a boon to Obama and his party, since it would rally his base and demonstrate to the country that Democrats could govern. In fact, support for Obamacare continues to collapse, to the point that there is very little chance that it can be rebuilt between now and November (and probably long after that). If Republicans frame the national debate between higher taxes and repealing elements of Obamacare, they should do quite well.</p>
<p>Third, Republicans need to articulate the case for why tax cuts are not only better for individual families but for our society. People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed, Samuel Johnson said, and the task for Republican leaders at every level is to remind the country why lower taxes are an engine of economic growth and greater prosperity — and, in turn, lower federal budget deficits — while higher taxes are a prescription for economic stagnation and decline. That isn't an original argument to make, but it is an effective one. Sometimes people in politics can get so caught up in the game of coming up with “new” ideas that we don't pay sufficient attention to some pretty good old ideas. What matters isn't whether an argument is “new” or “old”; what matters is whether it's wise and true. That doesn't mean that under no circumstances can taxes ever be raised; but at this stage, given that the main engine of our fiscal crisis is spending and, in particular, unrestrained entitlement programs, that is where our attention needs to be focused.</p>
<p>Fourth, Republicans need to connect Obama's fiscal policies to a larger narrative: Obama, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and their congressional foot soldiers are engaged in an effort to remake our country in fundamental ways. It is no state secret that they are enamored with big government and drawn to centralized authority, equality of outcomes more than equality of opportunity. They want the public sector to dominate our mixed economy. They are instinctively critical of free enterprise and the wealth-creators of our society.</p>
<p>Obama has set the frame for the upcoming election: a debate between those who want to expand the size, scope and reach of government at a time when confidence in government is near record lows versus those who want to limit and in some respects even roll back the power of the state. At different moments in our history the public has wanted different things. In the current environment, it's clear where public sentiment lies. And come November, those sentiments will alter the political landscape in ways that will, I think, have ramifications that extend for a decade to come. The 2010 midterm elections could be that significant — and for Democrats, that brutal.</p>
<p>Peter Wehner is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. He served in the Bush White House as director of the office of strategic initiative.</p> | false | 1 | president obama early stages setting political trap gop one hopes take one greatest weaknesses turn strength weakness obama viewed fiscally reckless much electorate engineered unprecedented spending binge even passed law hugely expensive new entitlement program health care time deficit debt potent political issues ever viewed responsible vulnerable ever obama democrats congress quandary youre obama answer admit america faces fiscal crisis ignore fact key contributor force republicans uncomfortable choice either sign large tax increases cut deficit debt refuse case obama blame republicans taking necessary steps put fiscal house order deficit commission one vehicle president use sure others republicans keep obamas attempt succeeding several things think first remind voters morning noon night weekends well weekdays dr obama largely responsible building fiscal frankenstein face last year federal government spent 167 every dollar collected deficit reached record 14 trillion president proposed budgets double debt five years triples 10 years according congressional budget office debt headed 20 trillion 2020 reference point 1789 2008 america accumulated less 6 trillion public debt obama faced serious situation took office hes taken steps made things far worse also worth pointing obama serious putting dent deficit would used cuts hoping achieve medicare toward paying debt instead obama using promise future cuts finance new hugely expensive middleclass entitlement obama also taken money banks paid back part tarp loans used yet stimulus spending obama least forfeited right taken seriously spending preach dangers fiscal imbalance like john edwards mark sanford preaching joys marital fidelity wont work shouldnt tried second republicans need show iron discipline making clear tax increases best option comes reducing deficit debt top list goes spending particular obamacare obamas success nationalizing health care made fiscal situation already reaching crisis proportions far acute badly wounded battle need several things get well first thing need remove sword side obamacare fiscal sword side republicans demand put kindly remove republicans say look options republicans wont republicans considerable advantage confrontation obamacare continues get unpopular according rasmussen reports three weeks congress passed health care legislation support repeal ticked upward four points 58 percent including 50 percent respondents strongly favor repeal numbers bad democrats know continue worsen every passing week many democrats journalists insisted passage health care legislation would boon obama party since would rally base demonstrate country democrats could govern fact support obamacare continues collapse point little chance rebuilt november probably long republicans frame national debate higher taxes repealing elements obamacare quite well third republicans need articulate case tax cuts better individual families society people need reminded often need instructed samuel johnson said task republican leaders every level remind country lower taxes engine economic growth greater prosperity turn lower federal budget deficits higher taxes prescription economic stagnation decline isnt original argument make effective one sometimes people politics get caught game coming new ideas dont pay sufficient attention pretty good old ideas matters isnt whether argument new old matters whether wise true doesnt mean circumstances taxes ever raised stage given main engine fiscal crisis spending particular unrestrained entitlement programs attention needs focused fourth republicans need connect obamas fiscal policies larger narrative obama speaker nancy pelosi senate majority leader harry reid congressional foot soldiers engaged effort remake country fundamental ways state secret enamored big government drawn centralized authority equality outcomes equality opportunity want public sector dominate mixed economy instinctively critical free enterprise wealthcreators society obama set frame upcoming election debate want expand size scope reach government time confidence government near record lows versus want limit respects even roll back power state different moments history public wanted different things current environment clear public sentiment lies come november sentiments alter political landscape ways think ramifications extend decade come 2010 midterm elections could significant democrats brutal peter wehner senior fellow ethics public policy center washington dc served bush white house director office strategic initiative | 622 |
<p>WASHINGTON — A day to plot legislative strategy on Capitol Hill exploded with drama as Republican Sen. Jeff Flake announced Tuesday he would not seek re-election in a speech aimed at President Donald Trump’s demeanor — just hours after the president exchanged insults with another GOP senator on social media.</p>
<p>Flake, who along with Nevada Sen. Dean Heller are considered the most vulnerable GOP incumbents facing re-election, had tangled with Trump on numerous occasions and faced a primary opponent backed by the president.</p>
<p>Without mentioning Trump by name, Flake said an impulse in political discourse to “threaten and scapegoat” was undermining the nation’s values and turning the country into a “fearful, backward-looking people.”</p>
<p>“We must stop pretending that the degradation of politics in our executive branch are normal, they’re not normal,” said Flake, Arizona’s junior senator. “It’s reckless, outrageous, and undignified.”</p>
<p>The Great America Alliance, an issue advocacy group set up by former White House advisers, called Flake’s decision to bow out a “monumental win for the entire Trump movement and should serve as another warning shot to the failed Republican establishment.”</p>
<p>Flake delivered his speech on the Senate floor, just moments after Trump met with the Senate GOP caucus to discuss tax reform, judicial nominations and his upcoming rollout of measures to combat opioid abuse.</p>
<p>Trump received applause from the Republicans inside the room. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., described the meeting as “very upbeat.”</p>
<p>But just hours before the GOP luncheon, Trump and Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., became involved in a verbal spat that played out on the social media platform Twitter.</p>
<p>Trump and Corker spar</p>
<p>Corker called Trump “utterly untruthful” and said he would never support the president in an election again.</p>
<p>Trump replied that Corker couldn’t get elected “dog catcher” in Tennessee.</p>
<p>Corker announced earlier this year that he would not seek re-election to the Senate, and he has been an outspoken critic of the president, even insinuating that the president is mentally unstable.</p>
<p>At the White House, spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders called Flake and Corker “petty,” and suggested Corker was out “to get a headline or two” before he leaves office.</p>
<p>At the Capitol, the developments were a distraction.</p>
<p>Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who has also felt the sting of Trump’s insults, dismissed the swirling controversy between the president and Corker.</p>
<p>“The issue we are concentrating on is the agenda we have for the American people,” McConnell told reporters. “The president shares that agenda.</p>
<p>“If there is anything that unifies Republicans it’s tax reform,” McConnell said.</p>
<p>But the dust up involving the president brought a rebuke from Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who said the Senate had serious issues to deal with, instead of dealing with insults hurled daily by Trump against lawmakers.</p>
<p>“We need President Trump to roll up his sleeve and get to work,” Schumer said. “Stop tweeting and start leading.”</p>
<p />
<p>Tax bill up next</p>
<p>The House is expected to pass a budget this week, which would allow lawmakers to pass tax bills that could add $1.5 trillion to the deficit over 10 years.</p>
<p>Trump is seeking a reform of the tax code, simplifying it by creating just three brackets instead of seven. He also wants to reduce the corporate tax rate and double the current standard deduction for individuals and couples.</p>
<p>The president and Republican leaders say tax cuts and reforms will provide a pay raise for the middle class and create jobs.</p>
<p>“Let’s get this done,” McConnell said.</p>
<p>Democrats, however, said the proposals put forth by the president would benefit the wealthiest Americans while doing little for middle-class workers.</p>
<p>“It’s one untruth after untruth after untruth, as Sen. Corker put it,” Schumer said.</p>
<p>Specifics are expected next week when Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, the chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, is to unveil the tax reform plan Republicans want to push through the lower chamber.</p>
<p>Senate lawmakers are also working on a proposal.</p>
<p>Under budget reconciliation rules, the Senate can pass a tax bill with a simple majority — something it could not muster on health care repeal and replacement plans.</p>
<p>Despite Republican control of the House, Senate and White House, the GOP has yet to chalk a major legislative victory for the president — who has chided House and Senate leaders for failing to repeal Obamacare.</p>
<p>“His presidency thus far has been a total flop,” Schumer said.</p>
<p>Trump has not shied away from hardball tactics against lawmakers in his own party. He backed Flake’s tea party challenger, Kelli Ward, for example.</p>
<p>Trump’s former strategist, Steve Bannon, has pledged to use the Great America PAC to fund challengers against Republican incumbents.</p>
<p>The Great America Alliance, the issue advocacy organization, has endorsed Las Vegas lawyer Danny Tarkanian in the GOP primary against Heller in Nevada.</p>
<p>Contact Gary Martin at <a href="" type="internal">[email protected]</a> or 202-662-7390. Follow <a href="https://twitter.com/garymartindc" type="external">@garymartindc</a> on Twitter.</p>
<p>Leaving the Senate</p>
<p>Arizona:</p>
<p>—Jeff Flake, 56, Republican</p>
<p>1st term</p>
<p>Former association executive</p>
<p>Tennessee:</p>
<p>—Bob Corker, 65, Republican</p>
<p>2nd term</p>
<p>Businessman</p>
<p /> | false | 1 | washington day plot legislative strategy capitol hill exploded drama republican sen jeff flake announced tuesday would seek reelection speech aimed president donald trumps demeanor hours president exchanged insults another gop senator social media flake along nevada sen dean heller considered vulnerable gop incumbents facing reelection tangled trump numerous occasions faced primary opponent backed president without mentioning trump name flake said impulse political discourse threaten scapegoat undermining nations values turning country fearful backwardlooking people must stop pretending degradation politics executive branch normal theyre normal said flake arizonas junior senator reckless outrageous undignified great america alliance issue advocacy group set former white house advisers called flakes decision bow monumental win entire trump movement serve another warning shot failed republican establishment flake delivered speech senate floor moments trump met senate gop caucus discuss tax reform judicial nominations upcoming rollout measures combat opioid abuse trump received applause republicans inside room sen rand paul rky described meeting upbeat hours gop luncheon trump sen bob corker rtenn became involved verbal spat played social media platform twitter trump corker spar corker called trump utterly untruthful said would never support president election trump replied corker couldnt get elected dog catcher tennessee corker announced earlier year would seek reelection senate outspoken critic president even insinuating president mentally unstable white house spokeswoman sarah huckabee sanders called flake corker petty suggested corker get headline two leaves office capitol developments distraction senate majority leader mitch mcconnell rky also felt sting trumps insults dismissed swirling controversy president corker issue concentrating agenda american people mcconnell told reporters president shares agenda anything unifies republicans tax reform mcconnell said dust involving president brought rebuke senate minority leader charles schumer dny said senate serious issues deal instead dealing insults hurled daily trump lawmakers need president trump roll sleeve get work schumer said stop tweeting start leading tax bill next house expected pass budget week would allow lawmakers pass tax bills could add 15 trillion deficit 10 years trump seeking reform tax code simplifying creating three brackets instead seven also wants reduce corporate tax rate double current standard deduction individuals couples president republican leaders say tax cuts reforms provide pay raise middle class create jobs lets get done mcconnell said democrats however said proposals put forth president would benefit wealthiest americans little middleclass workers one untruth untruth untruth sen corker put schumer said specifics expected next week rep kevin brady rtexas chairman taxwriting house ways means committee unveil tax reform plan republicans want push lower chamber senate lawmakers also working proposal budget reconciliation rules senate pass tax bill simple majority something could muster health care repeal replacement plans despite republican control house senate white house gop yet chalk major legislative victory president chided house senate leaders failing repeal obamacare presidency thus far total flop schumer said trump shied away hardball tactics lawmakers party backed flakes tea party challenger kelli ward example trumps former strategist steve bannon pledged use great america pac fund challengers republican incumbents great america alliance issue advocacy organization endorsed las vegas lawyer danny tarkanian gop primary heller nevada contact gary martin gmartinreviewjournalcom 2026627390 follow garymartindc twitter leaving senate arizona jeff flake 56 republican 1st term former association executive tennessee bob corker 65 republican 2nd term businessman | 531 |
<p>Barring a political earthquake, President Bush will leave office without achieving his goal of transforming Social Security. That’s too bad. A successful Social Security effort would be a significant down payment on much needed entitlement reform. But sooner or later, Social Security will find its way back onto the public agenda. The program’s financial problems are simply too big to set aside indefinitely.</p>
<p>In a nutshell, Social Security’s long-term prospects are bleak because of rapid and unprecedented population aging. Part of the demographic story is, of course, good news about longer lives. When Social Security started, the average man could expect to live about 12 years after reaching retirement at age 65. Today, he can expect to live 16 years.</p>
<p>But by far the most important factor in aging over the long run is falling fertility. Societies that do not produce children will, quite naturally, grow older. And there is simply no bigger problem than a low birth rate for a conventional “pay-as-you-go” pension system like Social Security. Without a steady stream of “payers,” the system cannot “go.”</p>
<p>What is not widely understood–despite the work of analysts like Allan Carlson, Phillip Longman, and John Mueller, among others–is that Social Security itself contributes significantly to the problem of low fertility. Odd as it may sound to the modern ear, a primary motivation for having children in earlier times was economic security in old age. As parents became frail and less productive, it was expected that one or more of their adult children would take care of them, oftentimes by bringing them into their homes. Married couples thus “invested” in numerous children, in part, to ensure there would be family members to care for them in their twilight years. With state-run Social Security, the government has largely assumed this family responsibility. Married couples have a greatly diminished economic incentive to have children, because now they are counting on–and paying for–government-based old age support.</p>
<p>This insight is neither new nor conceived of by conservative opponents of the welfare state. As noted frequently by Carlson, Gunnar Myrdal, the eminent Swedish socialist economist, observed in the 1940s that state-run, pay-as-you-go pension systems are built on a fundamental “contradiction”: They reduce the economic incentive within a family to have children, even as they remain ever dependent on a new generation of productive workers.</p>
<p>The evidence for Social Security’s role in fertility decline is compelling and has been confirmed by numerous researchers. A 2005 study by economists Michele Boldrin, Mariacristina De Nardi, and Larry Jones found that a government-run pension system equal to 10 percent of a country’s economy correlates with a reduction in the Total Fertility Rate (TFR)–which measures the average number of births per woman during her lifetime–of between 0.7 and 1.6 children, after controlling for other variables (no one suggests government pensions are the only reason fertility has dropped).This is extraordinary given that most industrialized countries now have TFRs well below 2.0. Importantly, this research indicates that program size matters. The bigger the Social Security scheme, the steeper the fertility decline.</p>
<p>Japan, now the world’s oldest society, presents a striking case study. Government spending on Japan’s state-run pension system increased dramatically in recent decades, from about 1.3 percent of national income in 1965 to more than 12 percent today. During this same period, Japan’s TFR fell from about 2.0 to 1.3. The economic consequences of this plunging birth rate will be severe in the years ahead, as the workforce contracts significantly. Japan’s working age population–those ages 20 to 64–is expected to decline from 79 million in 2000 to just under 50 million in 2050, a 37 percent drop. With a smaller workforce expected, Japan has been forced to reform its Social Security program three times since 1994 and has scheduled a 0.354 percentage point payroll tax rate hike every year between 2004 and 2017–increasing the tax from 13.6 percent of wages to 18.3 percent. The evidence suggests that this tax increase will only serve to further suppress the one variable that could eventually bring Japan back from the brink–more children and, therefore, more future workers.</p>
<p>The pattern is similar, if not as dramatic, throughout the developed world, including in the United States. The Total Fertility Rate fell precipitously as Social Security expanded in size, from a high of 3.5 in 1955 to a low of 1.8 in 1975. It has since recovered slightly to 2.0. Today, France has a TFR of 1.9, the U.K. is at 1.6, and Germany, Italy, and Canada all have TFRs below 1.4.</p>
<p>The crucial role that fertility plays in pay-as-you-go systems is evident in the future projections for Social Security. Current mid-range estimates assume the U.S. TFR will remain at 2.0 indefinitely, but the resulting modest growth in the U.S. workforce is insufficient to keep up with the ever-growing number of retirees. By 2080, the ratio of the working age population to the elderly will be just 2.4 to 1, down from 4.9 today. A gap between Social Security spending and tax collections is expected to open up beginning in 2017 and widen substantially in the ensuing years, reaching about 1.8 percent of GDP in 2080.</p>
<p>But the future of the U.S. fertility rate is not set in stone, and further improvement would greatly ease the financial strain. A steady rise in the TFR to 2.8–last seen around 1965–would eliminate about one-half of the projected financial shortfall in the Social Security program over a 75-year period. On the other hand, a fall in the U.S. TFR to the levels found in most of Europe would open a much wider gap in Social Security’s finances and precipitate an even deeper crisis in the program.</p>
<p>Acknowledgment of Social Security’s role in fertility decline is not an argument for abandoning government-sponsored old age support. The elderly–and their adult children–far prefer financial independence to dependence, and Social Security provides important protection against destitution, a common problem in earlier eras for the elderly with no family support. But reformers must understand the population contradiction at the heart of Social Security if they are to think clearly about the future of the system.</p>
<p>The starting point for a sensible reform of Social Security should be opposition to any proposal that would increase the program’s current size–including proposals to initiate personal savings accounts with “add-on” contributions. The current Social Security payroll tax rate and wage base–12.4 percent of wages up to $97,500 in 2007–should be ceilings (the taxable wage limit is already indexed to increase with average wage growth each year). The temptation among some Republicans to accept a tax hike to get a bipartisan Social Security deal should be resisted; it would only lead to further pressure on the birth rate. Social Security’s financing gap will need to be closed with benefit adjustments, such as increases in the retirement age and reductions in the benefit formula for higher wage earners.</p>
<p>But reform should not stop there. Today, two workers with identical wage histories pay the same contributions and get the same retirement benefits, even if one of them has numerous children–with all of the expense that entails–and the other has none. That’s not fair or prudent, as it undervalues the program’s need for investment in human capital. Longman, Carlson, and others have suggested reforms that would begin to correct this flawed accounting. These proposals would give workers who are raising a family either a payroll or income tax break or a boost in their retirement benefit to compensate for the costs of investing in future taxpayers.</p>
<p>The point for conservatives is that any discussion of fixing Social Security should properly focus on strengthening young families, which will be both more popular with voters and better policy than approaches that ignore the fertility problem. Placing the cost of any reform within Social Security–a child credit that lowers the payroll tax, for instance–will also ensure there is no increase in the program’s unfunded liabilities, as any added costs would have to be offset with benefit reductions, which should also boost fertility. Incorporating automatic, ongoing adjustments in the benefit formula over time, based on actual changes in fertility (as well as longevity), could help sell the reform in Congress. Proponents could then argue that benefits would automatically increase if the fertility rate improves as hoped.</p>
<p>No one should be under any illusion, however. Reversing the long-term slide toward smaller families will take more than a creative Social Security plan. My Ethics and Public Policy Center colleague John Mueller has noted that higher fertility accompanies more frequent religious practice, for instance. Clearly there are powerful social trends at work that can only be addressed with cultural renewal. But Social Security is contributing to the problem, and its reform should be part of the solution.</p>
<p>James C. Capretta, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, was an associate director at the Office of Management and Budget from 2001 to 2004.</p>
<p /> | false | 1 | barring political earthquake president bush leave office without achieving goal transforming social security thats bad successful social security effort would significant payment much needed entitlement reform sooner later social security find way back onto public agenda programs financial problems simply big set aside indefinitely nutshell social securitys longterm prospects bleak rapid unprecedented population aging part demographic story course good news longer lives social security started average man could expect live 12 years reaching retirement age 65 today expect live 16 years far important factor aging long run falling fertility societies produce children quite naturally grow older simply bigger problem low birth rate conventional payasyougo pension system like social security without steady stream payers system go widely understooddespite work analysts like allan carlson phillip longman john mueller among othersis social security contributes significantly problem low fertility odd may sound modern ear primary motivation children earlier times economic security old age parents became frail less productive expected one adult children would take care oftentimes bringing homes married couples thus invested numerous children part ensure would family members care twilight years staterun social security government largely assumed family responsibility married couples greatly diminished economic incentive children counting onand paying forgovernmentbased old age support insight neither new conceived conservative opponents welfare state noted frequently carlson gunnar myrdal eminent swedish socialist economist observed 1940s staterun payasyougo pension systems built fundamental contradiction reduce economic incentive within family children even remain ever dependent new generation productive workers evidence social securitys role fertility decline compelling confirmed numerous researchers 2005 study economists michele boldrin mariacristina de nardi larry jones found governmentrun pension system equal 10 percent countrys economy correlates reduction total fertility rate tfrwhich measures average number births per woman lifetimeof 07 16 children controlling variables one suggests government pensions reason fertility droppedthis extraordinary given industrialized countries tfrs well 20 importantly research indicates program size matters bigger social security scheme steeper fertility decline japan worlds oldest society presents striking case study government spending japans staterun pension system increased dramatically recent decades 13 percent national income 1965 12 percent today period japans tfr fell 20 13 economic consequences plunging birth rate severe years ahead workforce contracts significantly japans working age populationthose ages 20 64is expected decline 79 million 2000 50 million 2050 37 percent drop smaller workforce expected japan forced reform social security program three times since 1994 scheduled 0354 percentage point payroll tax rate hike every year 2004 2017increasing tax 136 percent wages 183 percent evidence suggests tax increase serve suppress one variable could eventually bring japan back brinkmore children therefore future workers pattern similar dramatic throughout developed world including united states total fertility rate fell precipitously social security expanded size high 35 1955 low 18 1975 since recovered slightly 20 today france tfr 19 uk 16 germany italy canada tfrs 14 crucial role fertility plays payasyougo systems evident future projections social security current midrange estimates assume us tfr remain 20 indefinitely resulting modest growth us workforce insufficient keep evergrowing number retirees 2080 ratio working age population elderly 24 1 49 today gap social security spending tax collections expected open beginning 2017 widen substantially ensuing years reaching 18 percent gdp 2080 future us fertility rate set stone improvement would greatly ease financial strain steady rise tfr 28last seen around 1965would eliminate onehalf projected financial shortfall social security program 75year period hand fall us tfr levels found europe would open much wider gap social securitys finances precipitate even deeper crisis program acknowledgment social securitys role fertility decline argument abandoning governmentsponsored old age support elderlyand adult childrenfar prefer financial independence dependence social security provides important protection destitution common problem earlier eras elderly family support reformers must understand population contradiction heart social security think clearly future system starting point sensible reform social security opposition proposal would increase programs current sizeincluding proposals initiate personal savings accounts addon contributions current social security payroll tax rate wage base124 percent wages 97500 2007should ceilings taxable wage limit already indexed increase average wage growth year temptation among republicans accept tax hike get bipartisan social security deal resisted would lead pressure birth rate social securitys financing gap need closed benefit adjustments increases retirement age reductions benefit formula higher wage earners reform stop today two workers identical wage histories pay contributions get retirement benefits even one numerous childrenwith expense entailsand none thats fair prudent undervalues programs need investment human capital longman carlson others suggested reforms would begin correct flawed accounting proposals would give workers raising family either payroll income tax break boost retirement benefit compensate costs investing future taxpayers point conservatives discussion fixing social security properly focus strengthening young families popular voters better policy approaches ignore fertility problem placing cost reform within social securitya child credit lowers payroll tax instancewill also ensure increase programs unfunded liabilities added costs would offset benefit reductions also boost fertility incorporating automatic ongoing adjustments benefit formula time based actual changes fertility well longevity could help sell reform congress proponents could argue benefits would automatically increase fertility rate improves hoped one illusion however reversing longterm slide toward smaller families take creative social security plan ethics public policy center colleague john mueller noted higher fertility accompanies frequent religious practice instance clearly powerful social trends work addressed cultural renewal social security contributing problem reform part solution james c capretta fellow ethics public policy center associate director office management budget 2001 2004 | 884 |
<p><a href="http://variety.com/t/joan-didion/" type="external">Joan Didion</a> has been at the center of our cultural and political life for more than five decades, writing incisively on everything from war to rock music to murder in books such as “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” “The White Album,” and “Salvador.” As an essayist, novelist, critic, and screenwriter, she’s inspired a passionate following that is nearly unmatched in American letters. That status reached near deification levels with 2005’s “The Year of Magical Thinking.” In it, she reflects on her own personal tragedy, recounting her grief after the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne and her struggle to deal with the fatal illness of her daughter, Quintana Roo. By writing so unflinchingly about such a painful topic, she formed an even deeper connection with her readers.</p>
<p>It took her nephew, the filmmaker <a href="http://variety.com/t/griffin-dunne/" type="external">Griffin Dunne</a>, to convince Didion to do what she had long resisted — sit down and shareher personal and professional remembrances on camera. The fruits of their labor, the brilliant new documentary, “ <a href="http://variety.com/2014/film/news/joan-didion-documentary-kickstarter-1201345405/" type="external">Joan Didion</a>: The Center Will Not Hold,” premieres at the New York Film Festival on Wednesday. It debuts on Netflix on October 27. Dunne spoke with Variety on the eve of the film’s festival launch.</p>
<p>How did you get the idea to do a documentary on your aunt?</p>
<p>It started six years ago. Joan asked me to shoot a promotional short movie that her publishers wanted to promote her book “Blue Nights.” We had a good time doing it and she loved the process. I pushed my luck and said, “what about doing a documentary?” No one had done one — her choice, by the way. She agreed and then I thought, “oh boy, I’m going to have to get the God damn money to do it the right way and the way she deserves.”</p>
<p>So you went to Kickstarter?</p>
<p>Yes, so I went to Kickstarter. I was conservative and asked for a lot less than what I needed. That may have been a mistake, because by lunch time on the first day we had reached our limit. So armed with that response and with the trailer I shot for Kickstarter, which had gone viral, I went to Netflix. They came on and were able to give me a proper budget.</p>
<p>Why has Joan opted not to do documentaries?</p>
<p>It’s not that she avoids publicity. Every time she has a book come out she stomps around and promotes it. But I think she presumed rightly that if she let someone make a documentary about her, and that someone didn’t know her well, it would be more of a full time commitment. She was also concerned it could end up being kind of a dry, academic kind of exercise.</p>
<p>How comfortable was she talking about her life on camera?</p>
<p>Nobody’s ever accused Joan of being a chatterbox. She sometimes answers in two or three words and that’s the end of that, not out of real reluctance, but out of a natural brevity that’s like her writing.</p>
<p>She did open up to me. One of the aspects that touched me and that I’m most proud of is the difference in expression when she’s talking to me in interviews and the archival footage of her on talk shows. There’s a very different expression on her face when she’s being interviewed by someone she doesn’t really know.</p>
<p>I asked her once in an email why she was letting me make a movie about her and her response was, because I couldn’t think of a compelling reason to say no. That’s pure Joan.</p>
<p>Were there any topics she insisted were off limits?</p>
<p>None. Her attitude was I’m a writer, you’re a filmmaker. I don’t tell you how to make a film and you don’t tell me how to write a book. She’s also written extensively about loss and family and grief and good times and bad times. She expected me to go there.</p>
<p>What was your first exposure to her work?</p>
<p>It was reading “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” I was too young to be a participant in the sixties, but I was fascinated by these hippies she had ingratiated herself with and who let her hang out with them. She told this story about a little kid on acid that left a huge impression on me. I remember thinking, as many people who were adults did, that it didn’t seem like all fun and games or peace and love and understanding. Even as a 12 year old the darkness of that environment really came through. It wasn’t the image that commercials were putting out there.</p>
<p>Readers seem almost possessive of her work. Why does she inspire such an intense feeling in her fans?</p>
<p>One of the burdens in taking this on is that people have such an intimate relationship with her work. It’s the same kind of personal relationship that others feel to Bob Dylan or JD Salinger. It’s like <a href="http://juliaallison.com/goodbye-to-all-that-by-joan-didion/" type="external">her essay</a> about leaving New York — she writes something about an individual experience that’s totally relatible. It’s about outgrowing a city and movie on with life and going to the next chapter.</p>
<p>Things only get more personal with “The Year of Magical Thinking.” She wrote about her grief as a reporter would write about the subject. It resonated with millions of readers who had experienced their own losses.</p>
<p>Throughout her career she also seemed to have a knack for writing on topic. She was so keyed into the cultural and political conversation.</p>
<p>She seemed to be writing about events that people were living through exactly at that time. Be it the Manson murders or the Iraq War or Salvador or the Central Park Five, she had insights and observations that gave texture and meaning and depth to disorder and chaos and were quite prophetic. She helped people make sense of their times.</p>
<p>Is it possible for a writer to have that kind of profile today?</p>
<p>Christopher Hitchens, in his time, gained that kind of national attention with his curiosity, his passion, and his anger. That’s the exception to the rule. In the film, I show Tom Brokaw interviewing Joan in 1977 for a four part series on “The Today Show.” That would never happen today.</p>
<p>She also had the advantage of having great photographers take pictures of her that are as iconic as those Che t-shirts.Before people read Joan, they’ve seen photos of her.</p>
<p>She also wrote screenplays with John Gregory Dunne for films like “Up Close &amp; Personal” and “The Panic in Needle Park.” What attracted her to Hollywood.</p>
<p>She alway loved movies. As a kid, she’d go to her father’s base and watch John Wayne movies. That made a huge impression on her. She also realized that you could make more in Hollywood than as a novelist. But she and John loved screenwriting. They loved sending pages back and forth. They also loved the game and the social etiquette of Hollywood. John knew all about the art of the deal. They always had great gossip and knew who was up and who was out at Warner’s or Columbia. They found great humor in the work and they dug the money.</p>
<p>Since this film will be streaming soon, does Joan use Netflix?</p>
<p>Like too many people in my family, Joan is a serious Luddite. She has an assistant who has hooked up all that stuff for her, but she prefers looking at DVDs.</p> | false | 1 | joan didion center cultural political life five decades writing incisively everything war rock music murder books slouching towards bethlehem white album salvador essayist novelist critic screenwriter shes inspired passionate following nearly unmatched american letters status reached near deification levels 2005s year magical thinking reflects personal tragedy recounting grief death husband john gregory dunne struggle deal fatal illness daughter quintana roo writing unflinchingly painful topic formed even deeper connection readers took nephew filmmaker griffin dunne convince didion long resisted sit shareher personal professional remembrances camera fruits labor brilliant new documentary joan didion center hold premieres new york film festival wednesday debuts netflix october 27 dunne spoke variety eve films festival launch get idea documentary aunt started six years ago joan asked shoot promotional short movie publishers wanted promote book blue nights good time loved process pushed luck said documentary one done one choice way agreed thought oh boy im going get god damn money right way way deserves went kickstarter yes went kickstarter conservative asked lot less needed may mistake lunch time first day reached limit armed response trailer shot kickstarter gone viral went netflix came able give proper budget joan opted documentaries avoids publicity every time book come stomps around promotes think presumed rightly let someone make documentary someone didnt know well would full time commitment also concerned could end kind dry academic kind exercise comfortable talking life camera nobodys ever accused joan chatterbox sometimes answers two three words thats end real reluctance natural brevity thats like writing open one aspects touched im proud difference expression shes talking interviews archival footage talk shows theres different expression face shes interviewed someone doesnt really know asked email letting make movie response couldnt think compelling reason say thats pure joan topics insisted limits none attitude im writer youre filmmaker dont tell make film dont tell write book shes also written extensively loss family grief good times bad times expected go first exposure work reading slouching towards bethlehem young participant sixties fascinated hippies ingratiated let hang told story little kid acid left huge impression remember thinking many people adults didnt seem like fun games peace love understanding even 12 year old darkness environment really came wasnt image commercials putting readers seem almost possessive work inspire intense feeling fans one burdens taking people intimate relationship work kind personal relationship others feel bob dylan jd salinger like essay leaving new york writes something individual experience thats totally relatible outgrowing city movie life going next chapter things get personal year magical thinking wrote grief reporter would write subject resonated millions readers experienced losses throughout career also seemed knack writing topic keyed cultural political conversation seemed writing events people living exactly time manson murders iraq war salvador central park five insights observations gave texture meaning depth disorder chaos quite prophetic helped people make sense times possible writer kind profile today christopher hitchens time gained kind national attention curiosity passion anger thats exception rule film show tom brokaw interviewing joan 1977 four part series today show would never happen today also advantage great photographers take pictures iconic che tshirtsbefore people read joan theyve seen photos also wrote screenplays john gregory dunne films like close amp personal panic needle park attracted hollywood alway loved movies kid shed go fathers base watch john wayne movies made huge impression also realized could make hollywood novelist john loved screenwriting loved sending pages back forth also loved game social etiquette hollywood john knew art deal always great gossip knew warners columbia found great humor work dug money since film streaming soon joan use netflix like many people family joan serious luddite assistant hooked stuff prefers looking dvds | 603 |
<p>A first-generation Norwegian teen clashes with the traditional values and expectations of her Pakistani émigré parents in the compelling coming-of-age drama “ <a href="http://variety.com/t/what-will-people-say/" type="external">What Will People Say</a>,” from director-writer <a href="http://variety.com/t/iram-haq/" type="external">Iram Haq</a>. Like her feature debut “I Am Yours,” Haq’s sophomore work smartly probes the problems of a character caught between cultures, while the nuanced screenplay once again draws on her own harrowing life experience. Audiences and critics alike should say good things about “People.” The kinetically shot film brims with authenticity and immediacy and benefits from a deeply sympathetic turn from sublime discovery <a href="http://variety.com/t/maria-mozhdah/" type="external">Maria Mozhdah</a> as the lead. Niche arthouse play looks likely in many territories.</p>
<p>The story unfolds in three acts. When we first meet her, pretty 16-year-old Nisha (Mozhdah) is living a double life. Outside the home, she appears to be a normal, well-adjusted, Western values-oriented high-school girl who hangs out with friends, shoots hoops, dances at clubs and flirts with boys; she’s even unafraid to sample a little alcohol and weed. Meanwhile, at home, she pays lip service to the role of dutiful Pakistani daughter, greeting friends and relatives in Urdu and passing around home-cooked delicacies. Her sour, nagging mother (Ekavali Khanna) constantly worries about how the rest of the community regards their family and her perhaps too-assimilated daughter, but since bright, destined-to-be-a-doctor Nisha is the apple of her father (Adil Hussain), Mirza’s, eye, she can get away with a lot. Thus, she finds time to slip out and join her friends, but always slips back to bed before dad performs his nightly check on his sleeping children.</p>
<p>One night, Nisha takes a big chance by allowing her handsome boyfriend Daniel (Isak Lie Harr) to follow her back to her room. By Norwegian standards, she’s doing nothing wrong, just a little cuddling and kissing, but when her father discovers them, he goes ballistic and beats the two youngsters. Norwegian social services takes Nisha into protective custody while her parents continue to trumpet their belief that she has lost her virginity and destroyed their honor. The local Pakistani community circles around, unanimous in their criticism. They advise Nisha’s father that he must make an example of her with a punishment so strong that none of their offspring would dare to make the same mistake.</p>
<p>Nisha misses the warmth of her family and is all too eager to make up with them. When her mother calls and says that they want her to come home to discuss matters, she believes it’s true. But when her father and brother (Ali Arfan) come to pick her up, they have another destination in mind — her aunt’s home, some 200 miles outside Islamabad.</p>
<p>The second act takes place in Pakistan, where Nisha has been brought and left against her will. Her aunt (Sheeba Chaddha) is harsh with her, making her work around the house and in the kitchen. She tolerates no rebellion, locking Nisha in a closet when she tries to contact friends through an internet café. Her uncle (Lalit Parimoo) burns her Norwegian passport and warns her that if she attempts such communication again, her father will marry her to a peasant and she will have to spend the rest of her life milking buffalos. Eventually, though traumatized, Nisha settles down and finds some pleasure in exploring her parents’ culture — but scandal seems to find her despite her best intentions.</p>
<p>The second act further proves that “People” is no run-of-the-mill coming-of-age story. While out one night with her cousin, Amir (Rohit Saraf), Nisha endures an encounter with the police so shocking it’s hard to believe that Haq could bear to put it on film. She stages the scene so powerfully that it takes the audience’s breath away. Afterward, poor wronged Nisha once again receives the blame for actions that were no fault of her own, and that lead to even stronger attempts by her family to control her.</p>
<p>Although one may argue that the character of Nisha’s father transforms too easily from doting dad to tyrant, Haq definitely makes him a complex and conflicted character. The director clearly conveys the love that exists between father and daughter,but which cannot end happily because of the wide gulf between their cultures.</p>
<p>Impressively lensed in Norway, Sweden, Germany and India (Rajasthan stands in for Nisha’s father’s ancestral home), “People” represents a big step up from Haq’s more modestly scaled debut, but it’s a move she handles with assurance and aplomb. She develops the father-daughter relationship visually as well as verbally, showing the action from both their perspectives. The film is also attuned to the small glances and movements of the supporting characters, which carry more weight than words.</p>
<p>Reviewed at Toronto International Film Festival (Platform), Sept. 8, 2017. Running time: 106 MIN. (Original title: ‘Hva vil folk si’)</p>
<p>(Norway-Germany-Sweden) A Mer Film production in co-production with Rohfilm Factory, Zentropa Sweden, ZDF/Arte, Creative Europe, Beta Cinema, with support from the Norwegian Film Institute, Eurimages, Nordisk Film &amp; TV Fond, DFF, MDM, MB-B, Filmförderungsanstalt, Nordmedia Film und Mediengesellshaft Niedersachsen/Bremen, Swedish Film Institute, Film i Väst. (International sales: Beta Cinema, Munich.) Producer: Maria Ekerhovd. Executive producer: Axel Helgeland. Co-producers: Karsten Stöter, Lizette Jonjic, Madeleine Ekman.</p>
<p>Director, writer: Iram Haq. Camera (color, HD, widescreen): Nadim Carlsen, Editors: Janus Billeskov Jansen, Anne Østerud. Music: Martin Pedersen, Lorenz Dangel.</p>
<p>Maria Mozhdah, Adil Hussain, Rohit Saraf, Ali Arfan, Sheeba Chaddha, Lalit Parimoo, Ekavali Khanna (Norwegian, Urdu dialogue) &#160; &#160;</p> | false | 1 | firstgeneration norwegian teen clashes traditional values expectations pakistani émigré parents compelling comingofage drama people say directorwriter iram haq like feature debut haqs sophomore work smartly probes problems character caught cultures nuanced screenplay draws harrowing life experience audiences critics alike say good things people kinetically shot film brims authenticity immediacy benefits deeply sympathetic turn sublime discovery maria mozhdah lead niche arthouse play looks likely many territories story unfolds three acts first meet pretty 16yearold nisha mozhdah living double life outside home appears normal welladjusted western valuesoriented highschool girl hangs friends shoots hoops dances clubs flirts boys shes even unafraid sample little alcohol weed meanwhile home pays lip service role dutiful pakistani daughter greeting friends relatives urdu passing around homecooked delicacies sour nagging mother ekavali khanna constantly worries rest community regards family perhaps tooassimilated daughter since bright destinedtobeadoctor nisha apple father adil hussain mirzas eye get away lot thus finds time slip join friends always slips back bed dad performs nightly check sleeping children one night nisha takes big chance allowing handsome boyfriend daniel isak lie harr follow back room norwegian standards shes nothing wrong little cuddling kissing father discovers goes ballistic beats two youngsters norwegian social services takes nisha protective custody parents continue trumpet belief lost virginity destroyed honor local pakistani community circles around unanimous criticism advise nishas father must make example punishment strong none offspring would dare make mistake nisha misses warmth family eager make mother calls says want come home discuss matters believes true father brother ali arfan come pick another destination mind aunts home 200 miles outside islamabad second act takes place pakistan nisha brought left aunt sheeba chaddha harsh making work around house kitchen tolerates rebellion locking nisha closet tries contact friends internet café uncle lalit parimoo burns norwegian passport warns attempts communication father marry peasant spend rest life milking buffalos eventually though traumatized nisha settles finds pleasure exploring parents culture scandal seems find despite best intentions second act proves people runofthemill comingofage story one night cousin amir rohit saraf nisha endures encounter police shocking hard believe haq could bear put film stages scene powerfully takes audiences breath away afterward poor wronged nisha receives blame actions fault lead even stronger attempts family control although one may argue character nishas father transforms easily doting dad tyrant haq definitely makes complex conflicted character director clearly conveys love exists father daughterbut end happily wide gulf cultures impressively lensed norway sweden germany india rajasthan stands nishas fathers ancestral home people represents big step haqs modestly scaled debut move handles assurance aplomb develops fatherdaughter relationship visually well verbally showing action perspectives film also attuned small glances movements supporting characters carry weight words reviewed toronto international film festival platform sept 8 2017 running time 106 min original title hva vil folk si norwaygermanysweden mer film production coproduction rohfilm factory zentropa sweden zdfarte creative europe beta cinema support norwegian film institute eurimages nordisk film amp tv fond dff mdm mbb filmförderungsanstalt nordmedia film und mediengesellshaft niedersachsenbremen swedish film institute film väst international sales beta cinema munich producer maria ekerhovd executive producer axel helgeland coproducers karsten stöter lizette jonjic madeleine ekman director writer iram haq camera color hd widescreen nadim carlsen editors janus billeskov jansen anne Østerud music martin pedersen lorenz dangel maria mozhdah adil hussain rohit saraf ali arfan sheeba chaddha lalit parimoo ekavali khanna norwegian urdu dialogue 160 160 | 556 |
<p>GREEN BAY, Wis. — The <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Detroit-Lions/" type="external">Detroit Lions</a> found the perfect remedy for a three-game losing streak.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Green_Bay_Packers/" type="external">Green Bay Packers</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Matthew_Stafford/" type="external">Matthew Stafford</a> threw his 200th career touchdown pass as the Lions beat the punchless Packers 30-17 on Monday night.</p>
<p>Stafford passed for 361 yards and two touchdowns. Detroit’s Golden Tate had seven catches for 113 yards, and <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Marvin-Jones/" type="external">Marvin Jones</a> had seven receptions for 107 yards and two touchdowns.</p>
<p>“We went into this game thinking that this needed to be a statement game,” Tate said.</p>
<p>A bye week did nothing to help the Packers (4-4). With <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Aaron_Rodgers/" type="external">Aaron Rodgers</a> on injured reserve and Brett Hundley at quarterback, they have lost three in a row.</p>
<p>Detroit (4-4) put the game away on a drive spanning the third and fourth quarters. Stafford’s 25-yard completion to Jones on third-and-10 was the key play, making the Lions 6 of 9 on third down.</p>
<p>On first-and-goal at the 1, Packers linebacker <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Blake-Martinez/" type="external">Blake Martinez</a> stripped the ball from running back <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Ameer-Abdullah/" type="external">Ameer Abdullah</a>, but right tackle Ricky Wagner recovered. The Packers kept the Lions out of the end zone on second and third down, too, before <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Matt_Prater/" type="external">Matt Prater</a>‘s 19-yard field goal made it 20-3.</p>
<p>Still, the 17-point lead was too much for the Hundley-led Packers, who couldn’t solve Detroit’s defense.</p>
<p>“We just knew that he wouldn’t be able to do the stuff that Aaron does at the line of scrimmage, so we wanted to go out there and make it tough for him,” Lions cornerback <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Darius-Slay/" type="external">Darius Slay</a> said. “He is a talented guy. He is an NFL quarterback, for sure, but we knew it would be tough for him to make all the checks like (Rodgers) does.”</p>
<p>Hundley didn’t surpass 100 passing yards until a 46-yard catch and run by <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Randall-Cobb/" type="external">Randall Cobb</a> about four minutes into the fourth quarter. Hundley’s 1-yard sneak pulled Green Bay within 20-10 with 9:52 remaining.</p>
<p>Detroit immediately answered with a perfectly timed screen to running back <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Theo-Riddick/" type="external">Theo Riddick</a> against a Packers blitz, resulting in a gain of 63 yards. One play later, Stafford threw his second touchdown pass of the night to Jones, an 11-yard connection that made it 27-10.</p>
<p>At that point, the 77,575 fans in attendance fled for the exits.</p>
<p>The Lions piled up 417 yards of offense and finished 8 of 13 on third down. The Packers finished with 311 yards — 75 of those were on a garbage-time touchdown drive — and were 2 of 9 on third down. That led to a time-of-possession disparity of nearly 14 minutes.</p>
<p>“I think really the biggest thing for us to improve on is third down and, frankly, defensively third down,” Packers coach <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Mike_McCarthy/" type="external">Mike McCarthy</a> said. “They totally controlled the third-down battle tonight. I thought that was a huge factor in the game. We have work to do, and that’s the fact of the matter. We’ve got to do it fast, and that’s our plan. We got relatively healthy coming out of the bye. I thought we had a very good week of practice and we didn’t play as well as Detroit tonight, and that’s stating the obvious.”</p>
<p>Before Rodgers sustained a broken collarbone, the Packers were averaging 27 points per game. In the three games with Hundley, they have scored 10, 17 and 17 points in losses to the <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Minnesota-Vikings/" type="external">Minnesota Vikings</a>, <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/New-Orleans-Saints/" type="external">New Orleans Saints</a> and Detroit, respectively.</p>
<p>“Everybody wants to score five touchdowns, have a perfect quarterback rating and win,” said Hundley, who completed 26 of 38 passes for 245 yards. “This game was a step in the right direction. I think I did some good things. Obviously, it wasn’t enough of them, but (the) first start for sure wasn’t the breakout game everybody wants. There’s ups and downs in everything. You can’t be perfect all the time. I felt comfortable today. There were some good things done, and we’ve just got to make those big plays.”</p>
<p>Stafford completed 26 of 33 passes.</p>
<p>“Those guys on the outside were doing a great job of winning,” he said. “I was just trying to get it to the open guy. All sorts of guys were winning. And when we can spread people out and use a bunch of weapons like we did tonight, we are at our best.”</p>
<p>NOTES: Detroit’s Matthew Stafford is the fourth quarterback younger than 30 to throw 200 touchdown passes. … For the second consecutive week, Detroit LT <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Greg_Robinson/" type="external">Greg Robinson</a> was inactive. Brian Mihalik got the start. Mihalik exited with an undisclosed injury in the second quarter and was replaced by Emmett Cleary. With starter Taylor Decker on the physically unable to perform list, Cleary was the Lions’ fourth-stringer at the position. … Mihalik returned and caught Stafford’s final pass of the night, a loss of 4 yards on a deflection. … WR Marvin Jones, who caught six passes for 205 yards and two touchdowns in last year’s game at Lambeau Field, has four touchdowns in four career games vs. Green Bay. … The Packers had their No. 1 offensive line together for the second time all season, but RT Bryan Bulaga sustained an injured right knee in the fourth quarter. … Green Bay QB Brett Hundley has thrown one touchdown pass in three games.</p> | false | 1 | green bay wis detroit lions found perfect remedy threegame losing streak green bay packers matthew stafford threw 200th career touchdown pass lions beat punchless packers 3017 monday night stafford passed 361 yards two touchdowns detroits golden tate seven catches 113 yards marvin jones seven receptions 107 yards two touchdowns went game thinking needed statement game tate said bye week nothing help packers 44 aaron rodgers injured reserve brett hundley quarterback lost three row detroit 44 put game away drive spanning third fourth quarters staffords 25yard completion jones thirdand10 key play making lions 6 9 third firstandgoal 1 packers linebacker blake martinez stripped ball running back ameer abdullah right tackle ricky wagner recovered packers kept lions end zone second third matt praters 19yard field goal made 203 still 17point lead much hundleyled packers couldnt solve detroits defense knew wouldnt able stuff aaron line scrimmage wanted go make tough lions cornerback darius slay said talented guy nfl quarterback sure knew would tough make checks like rodgers hundley didnt surpass 100 passing yards 46yard catch run randall cobb four minutes fourth quarter hundleys 1yard sneak pulled green bay within 2010 952 remaining detroit immediately answered perfectly timed screen running back theo riddick packers blitz resulting gain 63 yards one play later stafford threw second touchdown pass night jones 11yard connection made 2710 point 77575 fans attendance fled exits lions piled 417 yards offense finished 8 13 third packers finished 311 yards 75 garbagetime touchdown drive 2 9 third led timeofpossession disparity nearly 14 minutes think really biggest thing us improve third frankly defensively third packers coach mike mccarthy said totally controlled thirddown battle tonight thought huge factor game work thats fact matter weve got fast thats plan got relatively healthy coming bye thought good week practice didnt play well detroit tonight thats stating obvious rodgers sustained broken collarbone packers averaging 27 points per game three games hundley scored 10 17 17 points losses minnesota vikings new orleans saints detroit respectively everybody wants score five touchdowns perfect quarterback rating win said hundley completed 26 38 passes 245 yards game step right direction think good things obviously wasnt enough first start sure wasnt breakout game everybody wants theres ups downs everything cant perfect time felt comfortable today good things done weve got make big plays stafford completed 26 33 passes guys outside great job winning said trying get open guy sorts guys winning spread people use bunch weapons like tonight best notes detroits matthew stafford fourth quarterback younger 30 throw 200 touchdown passes second consecutive week detroit lt greg robinson inactive brian mihalik got start mihalik exited undisclosed injury second quarter replaced emmett cleary starter taylor decker physically unable perform list cleary lions fourthstringer position mihalik returned caught staffords final pass night loss 4 yards deflection wr marvin jones caught six passes 205 yards two touchdowns last years game lambeau field four touchdowns four career games vs green bay packers 1 offensive line together second time season rt bryan bulaga sustained injured right knee fourth quarter green bay qb brett hundley thrown one touchdown pass three games | 512 |
<p>As the FCC prepares to vote on <a href="http://variety.com/2017/biz/news/fcc-net-neutrality-vote-delay-1202629637/" type="external">Chairman Ajit Pai’s plan to repeal net neutrality rules</a>, a vast list of musicians and independent labels —R.E.M., Neko Case, members of Wilco, Fugazi, the Kills and many more — have signed a statement in defense of <a href="http://variety.com/t/net-neutrality/" type="external">net neutrality</a>. The statement was organized by nonprofit organizations Future of Music Coalition and CASH Music.</p>
<p>The full list of signatories and the text of the letter is below. It is also available at musicforahealthyinternet.org, where artists and fans can access a call tool to contact their congressional representatives.</p>
<p>“As musicians, composers, producers, and independent labels representing diverse backgrounds, traditions, genres, and communities, we urge the Federal Communications Commission to protect the open internet as a vehicle for free expression and collaboration.</p>
<p>“We’ve built careers and big parts of our lives around our passion for music — creating it and connecting with listeners. Today, the internet is one of the primary places this work happens.&#160; We rely on it for everything from booking tours to selling merchandise, to collaborating with musicians on the other side of the globe. The fundamental principle of openness online has enabled artists to connect directly with each other and with audiences, empowering us to distribute our work and reach fans in a multiplicity of ways. At its best, the open internet has allowed for a flourishing of diverse voices, allowing to compete alongside the biggest companies, creating connections across geographic barriers, offering choice, flexibility, and creative autonomy.</p>
<p>“To truly make good on the remarkable democratic potential of the internet, the fundamental infrastructure underpinning it all must be neutral and nondiscriminatory. Unfortunately, the FCC’s current proposal would amount to a sharp turn in the opposite direction. It would allow big cable and wireless companies to create new pay-to-play fast lanes, disadvantaging those who cannot pay for preferential treatment, and replicating the industry’s past problems with payola. Allowing broadband providers to control this once-open platform shifts leverage away from individual artists, creators, and small businesses, and interferes with freedom of speech and expression.</p>
<p>“The implications for free expression also extend to digital service providers. Without strong <a href="http://variety.com/2017/politics/news/fcc-net-neutrality-stolen-identity-1202629775/" type="external">net neutrality</a> protections, digital retailers will have to compete to better meet the needs of the ISPs that can block, throttle, or slow down access to their offerings. These services should instead be competing to better serve the needs of diverse musicians and listeners. Artists and labels’ choices about how and where to bring their work to the market could likewise be constrained by what the ISPs prefer, rather than what works best for their individual business and creative goals.</p>
<p>“Of course, network neutrality alone is not sufficient to ensure a healthy internet, where free expression thrives, creative labor is fairly compensated, consumer privacy is respected, and diverse voices can reach audiences. But it is a necessary foundation for fair competition.</p>
<p>“We urge the FCC to sustain the existing, strong net neutrality rules, based on Title II of the Communications Act. The FCC should maintain bright line rules against blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization on both fixed and mobile connections, as well as maintaining ongoing oversight of other types of discrimination.</p>
<p>Musicians</p>
<p>18th &amp; Addison</p>
<p>Aabaraki</p>
<p>Aaron Wagner</p>
<p>Adron</p>
<p>Afi Scruggs</p>
<p>AJ Pantaleo</p>
<p>Alan Epstein</p>
<p>Alec Ounsworth (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah)</p>
<p>Alison Mosshart (The Kills, The Dead Weather)</p>
<p>Allan Wilson (!!!, Secret Drum Band)</p>
<p>Alot Alot</p>
<p>Amanda Palmer</p>
<p>American Lions</p>
<p>Amy Klein</p>
<p>Andrew Adkins</p>
<p>Anna Altman</p>
<p>Antibalas</p>
<p>Antietam</p>
<p>Apostle of Solitude</p>
<p>Arthur Noll</p>
<p>Arrington de Dionyso</p>
<p>Asa Horvitz</p>
<p>Auburn X</p>
<p>BATHS</p>
<p>Beauty Pill</p>
<p>Bedroom Hijinks</p>
<p>Betsy Ganz</p>
<p>Black Belt Eagle Scout</p>
<p>Blue Lotus</p>
<p>Bob D’Amico (Sebadoh, Fiery Furnaces)</p>
<p>Bottle Caps For Dollars</p>
<p>Bound by Entrails</p>
<p>Braille Stars</p>
<p>Brave New Girl</p>
<p>Brendan Canty</p>
<p>Brent Knopf (Ramona Falls, Menomena, Eyelids)</p>
<p>Brian Henneman, Bottle Rockets</p>
<p>Brodie Jenkins (Cathedrals)</p>
<p>Bryan Divisions</p>
<p>Bucket</p>
<p>Bunny’s A Swine</p>
<p>Calamity Jane</p>
<p>Califone</p>
<p>Cheer-Accident</p>
<p>Ché Aimee Dorval</p>
<p>Chris Faroe</p>
<p>Citizen Ten</p>
<p>Craig Finn (The Hold Steady)</p>
<p>Cuddle Formation</p>
<p>Cumulus</p>
<p>Cursive</p>
<p>Dagan Thogerson (Murder by Death)</p>
<p>Dan Friel (Parts &amp; Labor, Upper Wilds)</p>
<p>Daniel Wagner</p>
<p>Daniel Wander</p>
<p>Dark Rodeo</p>
<p>Darrell Westrick</p>
<p>Dave Easley</p>
<p>Dave Narcizo (Throwing Muses)</p>
<p>David Bazan</p>
<p>David Poe</p>
<p>David Rosane &amp; the Zookeepers</p>
<p>Deborah Crooks</p>
<p>Declan Zapala</p>
<p>Deerhoof</p>
<p>Delerium Tremors</p>
<p>Dennis Driscoll</p>
<p>Denver Meatpacking Company</p>
<p>Dethrone the Deceiver</p>
<p>Devin Gallagher (Typhoon, Ghosties)</p>
<p>DJ Spooky</p>
<p>Dogleg</p>
<p>dominoThief</p>
<p>Downtown Boys</p>
<p>Dubais</p>
<p>Dubistry</p>
<p>Dude York</p>
<p>Earth</p>
<p>Eli Janney</p>
<p>Elijah</p>
<p>Eluvium</p>
<p>EMA</p>
<p>Emily Reo</p>
<p>Enablers</p>
<p>Erin McKeown</p>
<p>Erocka Kwal</p>
<p>Flash Car</p>
<p>Fred Thomas</p>
<p>Flobots</p>
<p>Franz Nicolay</p>
<p>GRYPT</p>
<p>GWAR</p>
<p>Gabriel Teodros</p>
<p>Gaian Heart Tribe</p>
<p>Gas Hound</p>
<p>Glassmen</p>
<p>Golden Hour</p>
<p>Good Shade</p>
<p>Harry &amp; The Potters</p>
<p>Hazel</p>
<p>Hazel Atlas</p>
<p>Helen Kellers Ukulele</p>
<p>Helen Kelter Skelter</p>
<p>Holly Herndon &amp; Mat Dryhurst</p>
<p>HousePlant</p>
<p>Hurry Up</p>
<p>Ian MacKaye</p>
<p>Iji</p>
<p>Insect Ark</p>
<p>Iron Curtain</p>
<p>It Keeps Snowing</p>
<p>J Shogren</p>
<p>Jace Clayton</p>
<p>James Radcliffe</p>
<p>James William Roy</p>
<p>Jane Don’t</p>
<p>Jarboe</p>
<p>Jared Benge</p>
<p>Jay B</p>
<p>Jeff Mangum &amp; Astra Taylor, Neutral Milk Hotel</p>
<p>Jeff Rosenstock</p>
<p>Jeff Tweedy &amp; Spencer Tweedy</p>
<p>Jeffrey Lewis</p>
<p>Jen Strickland</p>
<p>Jeremy Bible</p>
<p>Jesse R Berlin</p>
<p>Jill Sobule</p>
<p>Jimmy Keane</p>
<p>Joe Royall</p>
<p>John Kyle</p>
<p>John Wilkes Booth</p>
<p>John Zay</p>
<p>Jon Spencer</p>
<p>Jonathan Edwards (Panic Room, Luna Rossa)</p>
<p>Jonny X and the Groadies</p>
<p>Julie Cafritz (Free Kitten, Pussy Galore)</p>
<p>Julie Cira &amp; The Wake</p>
<p>Kathy Foster (The Thermals)</p>
<p>Keba Robinson (Crosslegged)</p>
<p>Kevin de Souza (Uptown Boys Choir)</p>
<p>Killer Mike</p>
<p>Kimya Dawson</p>
<p>Kristin Forbes</p>
<p>Kristin Hersh</p>
<p>Kronos Quartet</p>
<p>Kyle McDonald (ZAUM)</p>
<p>Kyle Morton (Typhoon)</p>
<p>Ladykiller</p>
<p>Lapel</p>
<p>Laurie Marie</p>
<p>Lee Baines III &amp; The Glory Fires</p>
<p>Lee Rose</p>
<p>Lightbath</p>
<p>Lisa Schonberg (Secret Drum Band, Explode Into Colors)</p>
<p>Little Big Noise</p>
<p>Loch &amp; Key</p>
<p>Lovely Little Girls</p>
<p>Mad Hallelujah Tribe</p>
<p>Mag.Lo</p>
<p>Marcia Liebenow</p>
<p>Mark Empire</p>
<p>Matthew Caws (Nada Surf)</p>
<p>Matthew Romain</p>
<p>Megabog</p>
<p>Melkbelly</p>
<p>Merchandise</p>
<p>Merrill Garbus (tUnE-yArDs)</p>
<p>Maggie May Morris (Genders, Sunbathe)</p>
<p>Michael Peterson</p>
<p>Mike Sturgill</p>
<p>Mike Watt</p>
<p>Mike Wroblewski (Genders, Paper Brain)</p>
<p>Mirah</p>
<p>Muse en Lystrala (Sirenne, Geek Musica, Crown of Melusine, Umbra Oceania)</p>
<p>Mutual Benefit</p>
<p>My Morning Jacket</p>
<p>Naked Blue</p>
<p>Nate Sabat (Mile Twelve)</p>
<p>Neko Case</p>
<p>Nicholas Hewitt</p>
<p>Nichole Wagner</p>
<p>Nylon Otters</p>
<p>Of Sleeping Bears</p>
<p>Okilly Dokilly</p>
<p>P.J. Franco and The Burnouts</p>
<p>Pallet House</p>
<p>Personal Best</p>
<p>Petaluma</p>
<p>Pete Gitlin</p>
<p>Peter Fish</p>
<p>Peter Stone Brown</p>
<p>Pieter Hilton (Typhoon, Deathlist, Sunbathe, Genders, Secret Drum Band)</p>
<p>Pile</p>
<p>Priests</p>
<p>Pyrosonic</p>
<p>R-SHON</p>
<p>R.E.M.</p>
<p>Rachel Blumberg</p>
<p>Rachel Marco-Havens</p>
<p>Radiator Hospital</p>
<p>Rah Zen</p>
<p>Rebecca Gates</p>
<p>Reeves Gabrels</p>
<p>Rob Alley</p>
<p>Robert “Neutron” Sound</p>
<p>Roland Marconi</p>
<p>Rosali</p>
<p>Rübezahl</p>
<p>STIG</p>
<p>Sacha Mullin</p>
<p>Sarah Fausett</p>
<p>Sarah Shook &amp; the Disarmers</p>
<p>Scarves</p>
<p>Seconds Before Landing</p>
<p>Seluekos</p>
<p>Seracs</p>
<p>Silvio Navarro</p>
<p>Simone White</p>
<p>Skating Polly</p>
<p>Skye Wallace</p>
<p>Slow Mass</p>
<p>Slow Wolves Club</p>
<p>Snow Bored</p>
<p>Space Coyote</p>
<p>SpaceWalker</p>
<p>Speedy Ortiz</p>
<p>Spencer Douglas</p>
<p>Spoonboy</p>
<p>Stay Inside</p>
<p>Stella</p>
<p>Steven Shanks (TimidBlue)</p>
<p>Summer Cannibals</p>
<p>Superchunk</p>
<p>Swearing At Motorists</p>
<p>TW Walsh</p>
<p>Taarka</p>
<p>Tanya Donelly (Belly)</p>
<p>Tara Jane O’Neil</p>
<p>Team Dresch</p>
<p>Thao &amp; The Get Down Stay Down</p>
<p>The Beginner’s Mynd</p>
<p>The Blow</p>
<p>The Buzzards of Fuzz</p>
<p>The Easy Leaves</p>
<p>The Furr</p>
<p>The Goat Wizard</p>
<p>The Josephines</p>
<p>The Moonracers</p>
<p>The New Restaurants</p>
<p>The SpeNerds</p>
<p>The Superweaks</p>
<p>Thrust Club</p>
<p>Thunderfish</p>
<p>Tift Merritt</p>
<p>Tim Lulofs</p>
<p>Tobi Vail (Bikini Kill, Spider and the Webs)</p>
<p>Told Slant</p>
<p>Tom Smith</p>
<p>Trash Panda</p>
<p>Turnip King</p>
<p>Tyler Stacy</p>
<p>Universal Doctrine</p>
<p>Urðarmáni</p>
<p>Vince SanFilippo/The Artist Formally Known As Vince</p>
<p>West of 69</p>
<p>Whims</p>
<p>Wild Cody</p>
<p>Wild Nothing</p>
<p>Will Johnson</p>
<p>Will Sheff (Okkervil River)</p>
<p>Will Stratton</p>
<p>Wimps</p>
<p>World Children’s Choir</p>
<p>Worriers</p>
<p>Xaddax</p>
<p>xtraspicy</p>
<p>YACHT</p>
<p>Zachary Lipez (Publicist UK)</p>
<p>Zohra Atash (Azar Swan)</p>
<p>Zoë Keating</p>
<p>Label + industry signers include</p>
<p>15 Passenger</p>
<p>American Association of Independent Music</p>
<p>Andrew Hill (Off the Record Studio)</p>
<p>Army of Bad Luck</p>
<p>Atlantic Rhythms</p>
<p>Bad Friend Records</p>
<p>Bloodshot Records</p>
<p>Cadence Independent Media</p>
<p>Captured Tracks</p>
<p>Carpark Records</p>
<p>Crash Symbols</p>
<p>Cuneiform Records</p>
<p>DZ Tapes</p>
<p>Decoder Magazine</p>
<p>Disposable America</p>
<p>DjinnFizz</p>
<p>Dischord</p>
<p>Don Giovanni Records</p>
<p>Ear Trumpet Labs</p>
<p>Ergotone Records</p>
<p>Exotic Fever</p>
<p>Experimedia</p>
<p>Exploding In Sound</p>
<p>Fandango Records</p>
<p>Fire Talk Records</p>
<p>Furious Hooves</p>
<p>Hardly Art</p>
<p>Heirship Records</p>
<p>Heavy Gel</p>
<p>IFS Records</p>
<p>Ingrown Records</p>
<p>Interrobang Records</p>
<p>JMC Aggregate</p>
<p>Kill Rock Stars</p>
<p>Kitten Charmer</p>
<p>Lame-O Records</p>
<p>Master Hand Records</p>
<p>Merge Records</p>
<p>MilShap Music</p>
<p>Misra Records</p>
<p>Objectively Good Records &amp; Tapes</p>
<p>Old Line Audio</p>
<p>Omnian Music Group</p>
<p>Partisan Records</p>
<p>Polyvinyl Records</p>
<p>Posture Records</p>
<p>Regalia Records</p>
<p>Related Records</p>
<p>Rob Budowsky (Manager, Jacuzzi Boys)</p>
<p>Sarang Bang Records</p>
<p>Secretly Group</p>
<p>Shaking Shanghai</p>
<p>Sinderlyn Records</p>
<p>Sister Polygon Records</p>
<p>Slumberland Records</p>
<p>Sooper Records</p>
<p>Sub Pop</p>
<p>Tape Modulator</p>
<p>Temporary Residence</p>
<p>Third Man Records</p>
<p>Thirsty Ear Recordings</p>
<p>Thrill Jockey</p>
<p>Tiny Radars</p>
<p>To Live A Lie Records</p>
<p>Top Shelf Records</p>
<p>Trubee Records</p>
<p>Viva Ska Radio</p>
<p>Wallflower Records</p>
<p>Warpaint Records”</p> | false | 1 | fcc prepares vote chairman ajit pais plan repeal net neutrality rules vast list musicians independent labels rem neko case members wilco fugazi kills many signed statement defense net neutrality statement organized nonprofit organizations future music coalition cash music full list signatories text letter also available musicforahealthyinternetorg artists fans access call tool contact congressional representatives musicians composers producers independent labels representing diverse backgrounds traditions genres communities urge federal communications commission protect open internet vehicle free expression collaboration weve built careers big parts lives around passion music creating connecting listeners today internet one primary places work happens160 rely everything booking tours selling merchandise collaborating musicians side globe fundamental principle openness online enabled artists connect directly audiences empowering us distribute work reach fans multiplicity ways best open internet allowed flourishing diverse voices allowing compete alongside biggest companies creating connections across geographic barriers offering choice flexibility creative autonomy truly make good remarkable democratic potential internet fundamental infrastructure underpinning must neutral nondiscriminatory unfortunately fccs current proposal would amount sharp turn opposite direction would allow big cable wireless companies create new paytoplay fast lanes disadvantaging pay preferential treatment replicating industrys past problems payola allowing broadband providers control onceopen platform shifts leverage away individual artists creators small businesses interferes freedom speech expression implications free expression also extend digital service providers without strong net neutrality protections digital retailers compete better meet needs isps block throttle slow access offerings services instead competing better serve needs diverse musicians listeners artists labels choices bring work market could likewise constrained isps prefer rather works best individual business creative goals course network neutrality alone sufficient ensure healthy internet free expression thrives creative labor fairly compensated consumer privacy respected diverse voices reach audiences necessary foundation fair competition urge fcc sustain existing strong net neutrality rules based title ii communications act fcc maintain bright line rules blocking throttling paid prioritization fixed mobile connections well maintaining ongoing oversight types discrimination musicians 18th amp addison aabaraki aaron wagner adron afi scruggs aj pantaleo alan epstein alec ounsworth clap hands say yeah alison mosshart kills dead weather allan wilson secret drum band alot alot amanda palmer american lions amy klein andrew adkins anna altman antibalas antietam apostle solitude arthur noll arrington de dionyso asa horvitz auburn x baths beauty pill bedroom hijinks betsy ganz black belt eagle scout blue lotus bob damico sebadoh fiery furnaces bottle caps dollars bound entrails braille stars brave new girl brendan canty brent knopf ramona falls menomena eyelids brian henneman bottle rockets brodie jenkins cathedrals bryan divisions bucket bunnys swine calamity jane califone cheeraccident ché aimee dorval chris faroe citizen ten craig finn hold steady cuddle formation cumulus cursive dagan thogerson murder death dan friel parts amp labor upper wilds daniel wagner daniel wander dark rodeo darrell westrick dave easley dave narcizo throwing muses david bazan david poe david rosane amp zookeepers deborah crooks declan zapala deerhoof delerium tremors dennis driscoll denver meatpacking company dethrone deceiver devin gallagher typhoon ghosties dj spooky dogleg dominothief downtown boys dubais dubistry dude york earth eli janney elijah eluvium ema emily reo enablers erin mckeown erocka kwal flash car fred thomas flobots franz nicolay grypt gwar gabriel teodros gaian heart tribe gas hound glassmen golden hour good shade harry amp potters hazel hazel atlas helen kellers ukulele helen kelter skelter holly herndon amp mat dryhurst houseplant hurry ian mackaye iji insect ark iron curtain keeps snowing j shogren jace clayton james radcliffe james william roy jane dont jarboe jared benge jay b jeff mangum amp astra taylor neutral milk hotel jeff rosenstock jeff tweedy amp spencer tweedy jeffrey lewis jen strickland jeremy bible jesse r berlin jill sobule jimmy keane joe royall john kyle john wilkes booth john zay jon spencer jonathan edwards panic room luna rossa jonny x groadies julie cafritz free kitten pussy galore julie cira amp wake kathy foster thermals keba robinson crosslegged kevin de souza uptown boys choir killer mike kimya dawson kristin forbes kristin hersh kronos quartet kyle mcdonald zaum kyle morton typhoon ladykiller lapel laurie marie lee baines iii amp glory fires lee rose lightbath lisa schonberg secret drum band explode colors little big noise loch amp key lovely little girls mad hallelujah tribe maglo marcia liebenow mark empire matthew caws nada surf matthew romain megabog melkbelly merchandise merrill garbus tuneyards maggie may morris genders sunbathe michael peterson mike sturgill mike watt mike wroblewski genders paper brain mirah muse en lystrala sirenne geek musica crown melusine umbra oceania mutual benefit morning jacket naked blue nate sabat mile twelve neko case nicholas hewitt nichole wagner nylon otters sleeping bears okilly dokilly pj franco burnouts pallet house personal best petaluma pete gitlin peter fish peter stone brown pieter hilton typhoon deathlist sunbathe genders secret drum band pile priests pyrosonic rshon rem rachel blumberg rachel marcohavens radiator hospital rah zen rebecca gates reeves gabrels rob alley robert neutron sound roland marconi rosali rübezahl stig sacha mullin sarah fausett sarah shook amp disarmers scarves seconds landing seluekos seracs silvio navarro simone white skating polly skye wallace slow mass slow wolves club snow bored space coyote spacewalker speedy ortiz spencer douglas spoonboy stay inside stella steven shanks timidblue summer cannibals superchunk swearing motorists tw walsh taarka tanya donelly belly tara jane oneil team dresch thao amp get stay beginners mynd blow buzzards fuzz easy leaves furr goat wizard josephines moonracers new restaurants spenerds superweaks thrust club thunderfish tift merritt tim lulofs tobi vail bikini kill spider webs told slant tom smith trash panda turnip king tyler stacy universal doctrine urðarmáni vince sanfilippothe artist formally known vince west 69 whims wild cody wild nothing johnson sheff okkervil river stratton wimps world childrens choir worriers xaddax xtraspicy yacht zachary lipez publicist uk zohra atash azar swan zoë keating label industry signers include 15 passenger american association independent music andrew hill record studio army bad luck atlantic rhythms bad friend records bloodshot records cadence independent media captured tracks carpark records crash symbols cuneiform records dz tapes decoder magazine disposable america djinnfizz dischord giovanni records ear trumpet labs ergotone records exotic fever experimedia exploding sound fandango records fire talk records furious hooves hardly art heirship records heavy gel ifs records ingrown records interrobang records jmc aggregate kill rock stars kitten charmer lameo records master hand records merge records milshap music misra records objectively good records amp tapes old line audio omnian music group partisan records polyvinyl records posture records regalia records related records rob budowsky manager jacuzzi boys sarang bang records secretly group shaking shanghai sinderlyn records sister polygon records slumberland records sooper records sub pop tape modulator temporary residence third man records thirsty ear recordings thrill jockey tiny radars live lie records top shelf records trubee records viva ska radio wallflower records warpaint records | 1,115 |
<p>Whether she knew it or not, when Vanita Gupta, the acting head of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/05/10/for-the-two-women-battling-north-carolina-law-prejudice-is-a-personal-issue/" type="external">stated</a> earlier this month that trans women are women and trans men are men, she was making a metaphysical claim.</p>
<p>Her claim is that men and women are not most fundamentally human persons. Rather, they are minds unmoored from human bodies. But the law does not govern human minds; indeed, it cannot. The law governs human persons, who are always and everywhere embodied. And human bodies are always and everywhere sexed.</p>
<p>Clearly, the most tragic casualties of this latest social experiment are the vulnerable boys, girls, men, and women undergoing medical “treatments” in an attempt to align their given bodies with their troubled minds. Perhaps the second greatest casualty is the rule of law itself. Law, after all, is comprised of language. Indeed, it is adherence to the meaning of language that makes the rule of law possible. Though one may have quibbles with Justice Scalia’s brand of originalism, the late justice’s view that the people of our constitutional republic are governed legitimately not by legislative intent or judicial sentiment, but by the public meaning of the language of a law at the time of its enactment, has force for precisely this reason: so that we are a people governed by law and not by men.</p>
<p>The gross misappropriation of executive power on the part of the Obama administration to utterly remake the meaning of very basic legal terms—understood by Americans to yield particular meaning until May 2016—threatens not only our <a href="http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2016/05/16952/" type="external">structure of government</a>; it threatens the rule of law itself. This distortion of legal language is a particular threat to laws concerning women.</p>
<p>Ejecting the Human Body from Law</p>
<p>When the DOJ uses the word “woman” to include biological men who believe they are women, it is not only changing that particular legal term. It is upending how law works and why it has legitimacy. The particular legal terms the DOJ seeks to change—male and female, man and woman—are foundational to our system of law. They are foundational because our sexed bodies are constitutive of who we are as human persons. In a fanciful attempt to de-sex the legal terms men and women, we eliminate bodies from the law. But the law can only govern embodied persons—because those are the only kind of persons there are.</p>
<p>British philosopher Daniel Moody makes this point in his recent book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Flesh-Made-Word-against-abortion/dp/1530726530/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1464033606&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=Flesh+Made+Word" type="external">The Flesh Made Word</a>. He writes:</p>
<p>Sex points to the whole of somebody. If we were to take away John’s hands, we would be left with somebody, but to take away John’s sex we would need to take away the whole of this body, which would leave nobody. . . . Sex is neither a part of the body nor a property of the body. Sex is the name we use to point toward that thing which the body itself is constituted of. Sex is not something we do. It is something we are.</p>
<p>Unable to redefine the natural realities named Male and Female, [the law] has instead separated its use of those names from the definitions belonging to non-interchangeable sexed bodies. John and Joan continue to be male-sexed and female-sexed and they can still legally access the names Male and Female. But in [law] those names no longer have bodies behind them. In ejecting sex from man-made law we eject whole bodies. [Thus,] Joan’s whole body has been left shrouded in a cloak of legal silence, legally invisible.</p>
<p>In the world the DOJ has planned, men and women are no longer governed as embodied persons. Instead, they are “made of language.” As Moody puts it, a transgendered man “speaks his ‘femaleness’ into existence.”</p>
<p>But this movement from a law that governs embodied persons to a fiction called law that (attempts to) govern individuals’ changeable states of mind does not affect only those who refer to themselves as “trans.” By <a href="http://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/bachiochi-erika/" type="external">ejecting the body from law</a>, every individual’s legal identity rests not on the reality of his or her given, embodied existence but instead on his or her selected “gender identity.” Our legal identity as “male” or “female” in this brave new world is not who we are—it is what we have chosen. The full consequences of this sort of existential voluntarism at the ground level of the law are unknowable, yet if Nietzsche is to be fully vindicated, they will include a will to power frightful in its impact on the weak and vulnerable. (I’m reminded of when my husband jested at the birth of our first child, “We could even teach her that black was white and white was black.” Indeed.)</p>
<p>Erasing Woman</p>
<p>Once the law subordinates the sexed body to a subjectively determined “gender identity,” the sexed body becomes legally invisible. When Judith Butler, the intellectual guru of the trans movement, channels Nietzsche and states that there is “no doer before the deed,” no person or subject before his or her “performative utterance,” she is intimating that women as a distinct class should be removed from social understanding, and so, ipso facto, from the law. (Trans&#160; <a href="http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/17888-not-everyone-who-has-an-abortion-is-a-woman-how-to-frame-the-abortion-rights-issue" type="external">activists</a> now refuse to refer to abortion as a “women’s issue,” since men, they claim, can get pregnant too.)</p>
<p>Whatever one makes of the merits of feminist identity politics as a whole, to deny that women are a legal class distinct from men is to erase the female body from social, legal, and political consideration. This is deeply problematic for a whole host of reasons, including but not limited to: legislating on and healing from sexual assault (whose perpetrators are disproportionately male);&#160; <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/sex-difference-deniers/article/2000287" type="external">researching and treating</a> women’s distinctive nutritional, medical, and pharmaceutical needs; promoting the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Why-Gender-Matters-Teachers-Differences/dp/0767916255" type="external">proven</a> merits of single-sex educational and sports programs; and creating <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/40380323?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents" type="external">authentic solutions</a> for those who seek flexible work arrangements in order to prioritize family obligations (the <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/12/moms-who-cut-back-at-work-are-happier/282460/" type="external">vast majority</a> of whom continue to be women). Radical feminists have taken <a href="http://www.mercatornet.com/conjugality/view/navel-gazing-about-gender-while-the-world-burns/17944" type="external">note</a>, and many of them have <a href="https://sexandgenderintro.com/about-2/" type="external">written</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B8Q6D4a6TM" type="external">spoken</a> out against the movement to legally codify transgenderism. Because of this inexcusably “essentialist” perspective, they have been <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gender-Hurts-Feminist-Analysis-Transgenderism/dp/0415539404?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1&amp;redirect=true&amp;ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o03_s00" type="external">cast out</a> from Gender Studies departments, which have beentrans-formed by the gender ideology of Foucault and Butler.</p>
<p>But feminism only makes sense if one takes seriously the sexed body—and the reproductive asymmetry inherent therein. As British political theorist and radical feminist Rebecca Reilly-Cooper <a href="https://sexandgenderintro.com/" type="external">writes</a>,</p>
<p>Women’s oppression has its historical roots and its ostensible justification in female biology and the exploitation of female reproductive labour.&#160;Altering the definition of the word “female” so that it now means “any person who believes themselves to be female” is not only <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPVNxYkawao" type="external">conceptually incoherent</a>&#160;. . .&#160;it also <a href="http://notazerosumgame.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/what-gender-is-and-what-gender-isnt.html" type="external">&#160;removes the possibility of&#160;analysing the structural oppression of female persons as a class</a>, by eradicating the terminology we use to describe the material conditions of their existence. . . . If we do not recognise the material reality of biological sex and its significance as an axis of oppression,&#160;women’s experience of oppression becomes literally unspeakable. We lose the terminology and tools of analysis – tools carefully developed by generations of feminists working before us—to make sense of female experience, and of the reality of negotiating a male-dominated world in a female body [emphasis in original].</p>
<p>Those of us who disagree sharply with radical feminists on a whole host of issues must here agree: It is not evidence of biological determinism or essentialism to state the facts of the human body. But it is sexist to deny—or worse, despise—them.</p>
<p>The Truth of Sexual Dimorphism</p>
<p>Male and female are the names given to the two sexes according to their potential reproductive function. The reality that some infants are born “intersex” does not deny this; it points to the difficult fact that exceptions in nature do occur, often tragically, and that as a civilized society, we ought to find the most compassionate and medically sound response. The same is true of those who experience sexual dysphoria. But hard cases make bad law: the reality of intersexuality ought not distort the law governing the vast majority of human beings, born as male and female. As Reilly-Cooper puts it: “The fact that some humans are intersex in no way diminishes the truth of sexual dimorphism, any more than the fact that some humans are born missing lower limbs diminishes the truth of the statement&#160;that humans are bipedal.”</p>
<p>Our distinctive reproductive function is why we distinguish between the two embodied instantiations of humanity at all (though we are also learning more about how sexual difference affects <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/sex-difference-deniers/article/2000287" type="external">medical treatment</a>&#160;as well). When the bodies of men and women are joined in the sexual act—in an act of love, mere consent, or by violent force—women’s bodies have the capacity to gestate newly created vulnerable human beings. Men’s bodies do not. This reality of reproductive asymmetry, and the serious consequences that can flow from it for women, are the raison d’etre of feminism. Each form of feminism seeks to answer the question of how society ought to respond to reproductive asymmetry, given the shared goal of women’s authentic freedom and equality.</p>
<p>Before the trans movement <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2016/05/what-gender-anyway" type="external">appropriated the term</a> “gender” to describe a subjective, chosen, de-sexed identity, “gender” was the term used by most feminists to critique what they understood as the socially constructed overlay on biological sex: the cultural norms and rules a man or woman was to follow based on his or her respective biological sex. Often, these norms cast women as (nurturing) caregivers and men as (aggressive) breadwinners.</p>
<p>The Influence of Justice Ginsburg</p>
<p>The Supreme Court, through the <a href="http://www.nyulawreview.org/sites/default/files/pdf/NYULawReview-85-1-Franklin.pdf" type="external">tutelage</a> of Ruth Bader Ginsburg as an advocate and then justice, imported this “gender” critique into its sex discrimination jurisprudence. The high court refers to illicit “gender” bias as “sex-role stereotyping”—in other words, impermissibly impinging on the freedom of men and women to shape their own destinies. The idea that men and women’s differentiated reproductive capacities ought not influence how employers (Title VII) or the state (the Equal Protection Clause) treat them is fundamental to US anti-discrimination law.</p>
<p>In a legal argument almost certainly unforeseen by the Supreme Court, trans activists look to a 1989 Title VII case, <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=780752418377134939&amp;q=Price+Waterhouse+Cooper+v.+Hopkins&amp;hl=en&amp;as_sdt=6,31" type="external">Price Waterhouse Cooper v. Hopkins</a>, as interpreted by a 2004 Sixth Circuit case, to bolster their legal claim that current sex discrimination law implicitly includes them as a protected class. In Price Waterhouse Cooper, the Court held that the defendant firm had impermissibly discriminated on the basis of “gender” by rejecting the plaintiff for promotion because she did not “act like a woman.” In 2004, in <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=988234023344471066&amp;q=Smith+v.+City+of+Salem&amp;hl=en&amp;as_sdt=6,31" type="external">Smith v. City of Salem</a>, the Sixth Circuit relied on Price Waterhouse to extend anti-discrimination protection to a male fireman who was “transitioning to female” since the government had fired the officer due to his failure to conform to sex stereotypes. Although transgender activists may try to argue otherwise, the court simply said that Smith’s identifying as transgender did not prevent his anti-discrimination claim.</p>
<p>As it turns out, the Supreme Court itself has offered a limiting principle for sex discrimination that excludes the Obama Administration’s current machinations: the sexed body. When Justice Ginsburg joined the high court, she brought along <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/05/09/prominent-feminist-bans-on-sex-discrimination-emphatically-do-not-require-unisex-restrooms/" type="external">the view</a> that the law could harmonize equality with other values implicit in biological difference. Writing the Court’s opinion in the <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1428365285620704265&amp;q=united+states+v+virginia&amp;hl=en&amp;as_sdt=6,31" type="external">1996 case</a>&#160;that struck down the historic male-only admissions policy of Virginia Military Institute, Ginsburg wrote: “Inherent differences between men and women . . . remain cause for celebration, but not for denigration of the members of either sex or for artificial constraints on an individual’s opportunity.”&#160;Notably, Ginsburg dropped a footnote indicating that women’s admission to VMI would require “alterations necessary to afford members of each sex privacy from the other sex” in living arrangements. As of 1996, the privacy accommodations the different sexes would require seemed obvious enough, even to the highest ranking feminist in the land.</p>
<p>The sexed-body-as-limiting-principle is the primary reason the Court (to the chagrin of a conflicted Ginsburg) has not accepted the popular legal theory that abortion regulations ought to be understood as sex discrimination, despite a constant stream of amicus briefs pleading that they do so. The reproductive differences between men and women give rise to permissible statutory distinctions between them, at least as far as the Equal Protection Clause is concerned, when it comes to pregnancy and abortion. As I have written&#160; <a href="http://www.harvard-jlpp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/34_3_889_Bachiochi.pdf" type="external">elsewhere</a>,</p>
<p>a legislature does not engage in sex‐role stereotyping when it passes a law that is based upon the biological facts of childbearing (for example, that women, and not men, gestate and bear children), but that it is sex‐role stereotyping when a law seeks to define traditionally the social roles of men and women in reliance upon those biological facts (for example, because women bear children, they care less about their professional work).</p>
<p>Thus, if the Court remains consistent in its own understanding of sex discrimination, restrained as it is by bodily difference, the Obama administration’s wild interpretations will find no shelter there.</p>
<p>A Sexual Equality Dependent on Abortion Is to Blame</p>
<p>Radical feminists should be commended for resisting the trans movement’s current attempts to erase the female body from our law. But a feminism that embraces abortion as its sine qua non must bear part of the blame. It is one thing to claim that traditional gender norms confined women unfairly to roles and traits that denied them the opportunity to use their talents to contribute to the broader community. Few would now disagree with that basic “gender” critique. It is another thing altogether to assert that the equality of the sexes depends on women having the legal authority to destroy the child’s body growing within their own body.</p>
<p>Like the transgender’s attempt to alter his given body to better fit his ailing mind, the abortion activist seeks to distort women’s given bodies to fit into a culture ailing in its hostility to dependent children. For a <a href="http://newbostonpost.com/2016/01/25/feminism-and-abortion-what-would-susan-say/" type="external">prior generation</a> of feminists, the biological asymmetry between men and women was a prescription for authentic social change, not a license to distort the wondrous capacity of the female body. Thus, it is no surprise that a society that rejects women’s bodies and the bodies of their vulnerable children would now countenance a distortion in the law so great that it portends the ejection ofevery body.</p>
<p>The current gender ideology is an error of the greatest magnitude, a threat to the rule of law, and a derailing of efforts to reshape society to come into accord with the givenness of our vulnerable, imperfect, and deeply sexed bodies. The modern debate about what women’s reproductive capacity means for the equality of the sexes has been raging since Susan B. Anthony picked up her pen. This debate ought to continue, undeterred by those who would reject the body—in all its goodness—from our law.</p>
<p>Erika Bachiochi is a Visiting Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a Research Fellow at the Murphy Institute at St. Thomas School of Law. She is working on a book on women, rights, and the Supreme Court.</p> | false | 1 | whether knew vanita gupta acting head civil rights division department justice stated earlier month trans women women trans men men making metaphysical claim claim men women fundamentally human persons rather minds unmoored human bodies law govern human minds indeed law governs human persons always everywhere embodied human bodies always everywhere sexed clearly tragic casualties latest social experiment vulnerable boys girls men women undergoing medical treatments attempt align given bodies troubled minds perhaps second greatest casualty rule law law comprised language indeed adherence meaning language makes rule law possible though one may quibbles justice scalias brand originalism late justices view people constitutional republic governed legitimately legislative intent judicial sentiment public meaning language law time enactment force precisely reason people governed law men gross misappropriation executive power part obama administration utterly remake meaning basic legal termsunderstood americans yield particular meaning may 2016threatens structure government threatens rule law distortion legal language particular threat laws concerning women ejecting human body law doj uses word woman include biological men believe women changing particular legal term upending law works legitimacy particular legal terms doj seeks changemale female man womanare foundational system law foundational sexed bodies constitutive human persons fanciful attempt desex legal terms men women eliminate bodies law law govern embodied personsbecause kind persons british philosopher daniel moody makes point recent book flesh made word writes sex points whole somebody take away johns hands would left somebody take away johns sex would need take away whole body would leave nobody sex neither part body property body sex name use point toward thing body constituted sex something something unable redefine natural realities named male female law instead separated use names definitions belonging noninterchangeable sexed bodies john joan continue malesexed femalesexed still legally access names male female law names longer bodies behind ejecting sex manmade law eject whole bodies thus joans whole body left shrouded cloak legal silence legally invisible world doj planned men women longer governed embodied persons instead made language moody puts transgendered man speaks femaleness existence movement law governs embodied persons fiction called law attempts govern individuals changeable states mind affect refer trans ejecting body law every individuals legal identity rests reality given embodied existence instead selected gender identity legal identity male female brave new world areit chosen full consequences sort existential voluntarism ground level law unknowable yet nietzsche fully vindicated include power frightful impact weak vulnerable im reminded husband jested birth first child could even teach black white white black indeed erasing woman law subordinates sexed body subjectively determined gender identity sexed body becomes legally invisible judith butler intellectual guru trans movement channels nietzsche states doer deed person subject performative utterance intimating women distinct class removed social understanding ipso facto law trans160 activists refuse refer abortion womens issue since men claim get pregnant whatever one makes merits feminist identity politics whole deny women legal class distinct men erase female body social legal political consideration deeply problematic whole host reasons including limited legislating healing sexual assault whose perpetrators disproportionately male160 researching treating womens distinctive nutritional medical pharmaceutical needs promoting proven merits singlesex educational sports programs creating authentic solutions seek flexible work arrangements order prioritize family obligations vast majority continue women radical feminists taken note many written spoken movement legally codify transgenderism inexcusably essentialist perspective cast gender studies departments beentransformed gender ideology foucault butler feminism makes sense one takes seriously sexed bodyand reproductive asymmetry inherent therein british political theorist radical feminist rebecca reillycooper writes womens oppression historical roots ostensible justification female biology exploitation female reproductive labour160altering definition word female means person believes female conceptually incoherent160 160it also 160removes possibility of160analysing structural oppression female persons class eradicating terminology use describe material conditions existence recognise material reality biological sex significance axis oppression160womens experience oppression becomes literally unspeakable lose terminology tools analysis tools carefully developed generations feminists working usto make sense female experience reality negotiating maledominated world female body emphasis original us disagree sharply radical feminists whole host issues must agree evidence biological determinism essentialism state facts human body sexist denyor worse despisethem truth sexual dimorphism male female names given two sexes according potential reproductive function reality infants born intersex deny points difficult fact exceptions nature occur often tragically civilized society ought find compassionate medically sound response true experience sexual dysphoria hard cases make bad law reality intersexuality ought distort law governing vast majority human beings born male female reillycooper puts fact humans intersex way diminishes truth sexual dimorphism fact humans born missing lower limbs diminishes truth statement160that humans bipedal distinctive reproductive function distinguish two embodied instantiations humanity though also learning sexual difference affects medical treatment160as well bodies men women joined sexual actin act love mere consent violent forcewomens bodies capacity gestate newly created vulnerable human beings mens bodies reality reproductive asymmetry serious consequences flow women raison detre feminism form feminism seeks answer question society ought respond reproductive asymmetry given shared goal womens authentic freedom equality trans movement appropriated term gender describe subjective chosen desexed identity gender term used feminists critique understood socially constructed overlay biological sex cultural norms rules man woman follow based respective biological sex often norms cast women nurturing caregivers men aggressive breadwinners influence justice ginsburg supreme court tutelage ruth bader ginsburg advocate justice imported gender critique sex discrimination jurisprudence high court refers illicit gender bias sexrole stereotypingin words impermissibly impinging freedom men women shape destinies idea men womens differentiated reproductive capacities ought influence employers title vii state equal protection clause treat fundamental us antidiscrimination law legal argument almost certainly unforeseen supreme court trans activists look 1989 title vii case price waterhouse cooper v hopkins interpreted 2004 sixth circuit case bolster legal claim current sex discrimination law implicitly includes protected class price waterhouse cooper court held defendant firm impermissibly discriminated basis gender rejecting plaintiff promotion act like woman 2004 smith v city salem sixth circuit relied price waterhouse extend antidiscrimination protection male fireman transitioning female since government fired officer due failure conform sex stereotypes although transgender activists may try argue otherwise court simply said smiths identifying transgender prevent antidiscrimination claim turns supreme court offered limiting principle sex discrimination excludes obama administrations current machinations sexed body justice ginsburg joined high court brought along view law could harmonize equality values implicit biological difference writing courts opinion 1996 case160that struck historic maleonly admissions policy virginia military institute ginsburg wrote inherent differences men women remain cause celebration denigration members either sex artificial constraints individuals opportunity160notably ginsburg dropped footnote indicating womens admission vmi would require alterations necessary afford members sex privacy sex living arrangements 1996 privacy accommodations different sexes would require seemed obvious enough even highest ranking feminist land sexedbodyaslimitingprinciple primary reason court chagrin conflicted ginsburg accepted popular legal theory abortion regulations ought understood sex discrimination despite constant stream amicus briefs pleading reproductive differences men women give rise permissible statutory distinctions least far equal protection clause concerned comes pregnancy abortion written160 elsewhere legislature engage sexrole stereotyping passes law based upon biological facts childbearing example women men gestate bear children sexrole stereotyping law seeks define traditionally social roles men women reliance upon biological facts example women bear children care less professional work thus court remains consistent understanding sex discrimination restrained bodily difference obama administrations wild interpretations find shelter sexual equality dependent abortion blame radical feminists commended resisting trans movements current attempts erase female body law feminism embraces abortion sine qua non must bear part blame one thing claim traditional gender norms confined women unfairly roles traits denied opportunity use talents contribute broader community would disagree basic gender critique another thing altogether assert equality sexes depends women legal authority destroy childs body growing within body like transgenders attempt alter given body better fit ailing mind abortion activist seeks distort womens given bodies fit culture ailing hostility dependent children prior generation feminists biological asymmetry men women prescription authentic social change license distort wondrous capacity female body thus surprise society rejects womens bodies bodies vulnerable children would countenance distortion law great portends ejection ofevery body current gender ideology error greatest magnitude threat rule law derailing efforts reshape society come accord givenness vulnerable imperfect deeply sexed bodies modern debate womens reproductive capacity means equality sexes raging since susan b anthony picked pen debate ought continue undeterred would reject bodyin goodnessfrom law erika bachiochi visiting fellow ethics public policy center research fellow murphy institute st thomas school law working book women rights supreme court | 1,377 |
<p>ALAMEDA, Calif. — A year ago, the Oakland Raiders were the popular choice as a breakthrough team, having gone from 3-13 to a competitive 7-9 in their first season under head coach Jack Del Rio.</p>
<p>The Raiders made that pick look pretty smart. They went 12-4, earning their first playoff appearance in 14 seasons.</p>
<p>Taking that big step — and knowing that the Raiders could have conceivably won the division and reached the AFC title game had it not been for a Week 16 broken fibula sustained by quarterback Derek Carr — big things are expected in 2017.</p>
<p>How big?</p>
<p>Anything less than challenging the New England Patriots for AFC and NFL supremacy will be considered a disappointment.</p>
<p>With that as a backdrop, the Raiders report to training camp in Napa on July 28 with their first practice the following day. It’s Super Bowl or bust for a home fan base that is hoping for a going-away present before the franchise departs to a new stadium in Las Vegas in 2020.</p>
<p>The schedule is brutal, but there are no excuses — not with foundation piece players on both sides of the ball. Carr is newly crowned as the NFL’s highest paid player (per season) by virtue of a five-year, $125 million contract. Defensive end Khalil Mack is the reigning NFL Defensive Player of the Year.</p>
<p>Del Rio understands the expectations and welcomes them, but his goals will be incremental in training camp and the preseason.</p>
<p>“Just go out there and try and get a little bit better every day,” Del Rio said. “You have lofty goals, down-the-road kind of goals, but it’s about the work you put in every day. That’s the process of becoming a really good football team. That’s what we’ll be about.”</p>
<p>In terms of health, there should be no major concerns as camp opens. Carr played without limitations in the off-season and looks to be at full strength. He promises his outlook won’t be any different in terms of daily improvement.</p>
<p>“When we came in here, and our situation wasn’t very pretty, all we cared about was busting our tail, outworking everybody, competing our tails off and doing it with class and honor,” Carr said. “We respect all our opponents but we fear nobody. It didn’t happen overnight. It’s something we had to work on.</p>
<p>“Super Bowl teams, all championship teams, have that quiet confidence. Some are less quiet than others, but they definitely have that characteristic.</p>
<p>TOP THREE TRAINING CAMP GOALS</p>
<p>–Improve coverage and communication in secondary. Blown coverages were routine as the Raiders gave up an NFL-high 61 pass plays of 20 yards or more and were tied with Tampa Bay with a league-worst 16 plays of 40 yards or more. To fix the problem, the Raiders drafted cornerback Gareon Conley and safety Obi Melifonwu with their first two picks and hired John Pagano as an assistant head coach who will tackle the communication issues.</p>
<p>–Develop an interior pass rush. Despite the presence of Khalil Mack as one of the NFL’s premier edge players, the Raiders had only 25 sacks. Eleven came from Mack and seven from strong-side linebacker Bruce Irvin. The Raiders hope Mario Edwards Jr., a base end who slides inside in the nickel, can provide a middle push, and they’ll also look to develop third-round pick Eddie Vanderdoes of UCLA.</p>
<p>–Successfully integrate Marshawn Lynch and Jared Cook to the offense. Lynch came out of retirement to join his hometown team and participated in the offseason program to get up to speed. He’ll be brought along deliberately as the Raiders look to replace the 788 yards and 12 rushing touchdowns of departed free agent Latavius Murray. Cook, in theory, gives Carr his first legit middle of the field threat as a tight end; getting that combo going will only enhance Amari Cooper and Michael Crabtree on the outside.</p>
<p>PROJECTED CAMP DEPTH CHART</p>
<p>QUARTERBACKS: Starter — Derek Carr. Backups — Connor Cook, EJ Manuel.</p>
<p>RUNNING BACKS: Starters — Marshawn Lynch, FB Jamize Olawale. Backups — Jalen Richard, DeAndre Washington, Taiwan Jones, Elijah Hood, John Crockett.</p>
<p>TIGHT ENDS: Starter — Jared Cook. Backups — Lee Smith, Clive Walford, Gabe Holmes, Pharaoh Brown, Cooper Helfet, Ryan O’Malley.</p>
<p>WIDE RECEIVERS: Starters — Michael Crabtree, Amari Cooper. Backups — Seth Roberts, Cordarrelle Patterson, K.J. Brant, Keon Hatcher, Johnny Holton, Jayden Mickens, Isaac Whitney, Ishmael Zamora.</p>
<p>OFFENSIVE LINEMEN: Starters — LT Donald Penn, LG Kelechi Osemele, C Rodney Hudson, RT Gabe Jackson, RT Marshall Newhouse. Backups — T Austin Howard, G/C Jon Feliciano, T David Sharpe, T Chauncey Briggs, T Jylan Ware, T Ian Silberman, G Denver Kirkland, G Omi Omiole, G Jordan Simmons.</p>
<p>DEFENSIVE LINEMEN: Starters — RDE Mario Edwards Jr., LDT Darius Latham, NT Justin Ellis, LDE Khalil Mack. Backups – DE/DT Denico Autry, DE/DT Jihad Ward, DE Branden Jackson, DE Jimmy Bean, DE Fadol Brown, DE Chris Casher, DT Eddie Vanderdoes, DT Paul Boyette, DT Treyvon Hester.</p>
<p>LINEBACKERS: Starters — SLB Bruce Irvin, MLB Cory James, WLB Jelani Jenkins. Backups — OLB Tyrell Adams, OLB Shilique Calhoun, OLB Najee Harris, MLB Ben Heeney, MLB Marquel Lee, OLB LaTroy Lewis, OLB Nicholas Morrow, OLB Brady Sheldon, OLB Xavier Luster-Woodson, OLB/DE James Cowser.</p>
<p>DEFENSIVE BACKS: Starters — LCB David Amerson, RCB Sean Smith, SS Karl Joseph, FS Reggie Nelson. Backups — CB Gareon Conley (nickel), S Obi Melifonwu, CB TJ Carrie, CB Kenneth Durden, CB Antonio Hamilton, CB Chris Humes, CB Dexter McDonald, CB/S Keith McGill, CB Breon Borders, S Anthony Cioffi, S Ricky Jefferson, S Marcus McWilson.</p>
<p>SPECIAL TEAMS: K Sebastian Janikowski, K Giorgio Tavecchio, P Marquette King, LS Jon Condo, PR Jalen Richard, KOR Cordarrelle Patterson.</p> | false | 1 | alameda calif year ago oakland raiders popular choice breakthrough team gone 313 competitive 79 first season head coach jack del rio raiders made pick look pretty smart went 124 earning first playoff appearance 14 seasons taking big step knowing raiders could conceivably division reached afc title game week 16 broken fibula sustained quarterback derek carr big things expected 2017 big anything less challenging new england patriots afc nfl supremacy considered disappointment backdrop raiders report training camp napa july 28 first practice following day super bowl bust home fan base hoping goingaway present franchise departs new stadium las vegas 2020 schedule brutal excuses foundation piece players sides ball carr newly crowned nfls highest paid player per season virtue fiveyear 125 million contract defensive end khalil mack reigning nfl defensive player year del rio understands expectations welcomes goals incremental training camp preseason go try get little bit better every day del rio said lofty goals downtheroad kind goals work put every day thats process becoming really good football team thats well terms health major concerns camp opens carr played without limitations offseason looks full strength promises outlook wont different terms daily improvement came situation wasnt pretty cared busting tail outworking everybody competing tails class honor carr said respect opponents fear nobody didnt happen overnight something work super bowl teams championship teams quiet confidence less quiet others definitely characteristic top three training camp goals improve coverage communication secondary blown coverages routine raiders gave nflhigh 61 pass plays 20 yards tied tampa bay leagueworst 16 plays 40 yards fix problem raiders drafted cornerback gareon conley safety obi melifonwu first two picks hired john pagano assistant head coach tackle communication issues develop interior pass rush despite presence khalil mack one nfls premier edge players raiders 25 sacks eleven came mack seven strongside linebacker bruce irvin raiders hope mario edwards jr base end slides inside nickel provide middle push theyll also look develop thirdround pick eddie vanderdoes ucla successfully integrate marshawn lynch jared cook offense lynch came retirement join hometown team participated offseason program get speed hell brought along deliberately raiders look replace 788 yards 12 rushing touchdowns departed free agent latavius murray cook theory gives carr first legit middle field threat tight end getting combo going enhance amari cooper michael crabtree outside projected camp depth chart quarterbacks starter derek carr backups connor cook ej manuel running backs starters marshawn lynch fb jamize olawale backups jalen richard deandre washington taiwan jones elijah hood john crockett tight ends starter jared cook backups lee smith clive walford gabe holmes pharaoh brown cooper helfet ryan omalley wide receivers starters michael crabtree amari cooper backups seth roberts cordarrelle patterson kj brant keon hatcher johnny holton jayden mickens isaac whitney ishmael zamora offensive linemen starters lt donald penn lg kelechi osemele c rodney hudson rt gabe jackson rt marshall newhouse backups austin howard gc jon feliciano david sharpe chauncey briggs jylan ware ian silberman g denver kirkland g omi omiole g jordan simmons defensive linemen starters rde mario edwards jr ldt darius latham nt justin ellis lde khalil mack backups dedt denico autry dedt jihad ward de branden jackson de jimmy bean de fadol brown de chris casher dt eddie vanderdoes dt paul boyette dt treyvon hester linebackers starters slb bruce irvin mlb cory james wlb jelani jenkins backups olb tyrell adams olb shilique calhoun olb najee harris mlb ben heeney mlb marquel lee olb latroy lewis olb nicholas morrow olb brady sheldon olb xavier lusterwoodson olbde james cowser defensive backs starters lcb david amerson rcb sean smith ss karl joseph fs reggie nelson backups cb gareon conley nickel obi melifonwu cb tj carrie cb kenneth durden cb antonio hamilton cb chris humes cb dexter mcdonald cbs keith mcgill cb breon borders anthony cioffi ricky jefferson marcus mcwilson special teams k sebastian janikowski k giorgio tavecchio p marquette king ls jon condo pr jalen richard kor cordarrelle patterson | 647 |
<p>In Chariots of Fire, two of the elders of Cambridge University invite the young Jewish runner Harold Abrahams to a formal, black-tie luncheon, during which they try to dissuade the upstart undergraduate from using a professional trainer to prepare for the forthcoming Paris Olympics. Abrahams declines to follow Oxbridge athletic orthodoxy and leaves in something of a huff. The Master of Trinity (brilliantly played by John Gielgud) sighs and says to the Master of Caius, “Another God, another mountaintop.”</p>
<p>It’s a scene worth keeping in mind when parsing the recent Vatican decision to take into a form of ecclesiastical receivership the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the umbrella association that represents the majority of American orders of sisters. On April 18, after years of study, the Holy See appointed Archbishop J. Peter Sartain of Seattle to oversee the LCWR’s activities, supervise the LCWR’s adherence to the Church’s liturgical norms, review its links to affiliated organizations like the political advocacy group “Network,” and guide a revision of the LCWR’s statutes. Sartain will be assisted by Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Ill. (appropriately enough, a veteran ice-hockey goalie used to taking hard shots), and Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo (whose theological analysis of the LCWR’s activities over the past decade shaped the decision to appoint Sartain as the Holy See’s delegate in charge of the LCWR).</p>
<p>That imagery — three men, acting on behalf of a male-dominated Curia, assuming leadership of an organization of women religious — proved irresistible to Vatican critics, eager to drive home the point that the Catholic Church doesn’t care about one half of the human race (as the proprietor of a once-great American newspaper once told his new Rome bureau chief as she was leaving the U.S). Others were eager to use the Vatican action to prop up crumbling public support for Obamacare: The good sisters of the LCWR supported Obamacare; the aging misogynists at the Vatican whacked the LCWR; see, Obamacare must be right, just, proper, and helpful toward salvation! The problem with the former criticism, of course, is that the Catholic Church is the greatest educator of women throughout the Third World and the most generous provider of women’s health care in Africa and Asia; there, the Church also works to defend women’s rights within marriage, while its teaching on the dignity of the human person challenges the traditional social and cultural taboos that disempower women. As for the notion that the Church’s Roman leadership put the clamps on the LCWR because “the Vatican” objects to Obamacare, well, that would be the first European-style welfare-state initiative to which “the Vatican” has objected in living memory.</p>
<p>What both these lines of critique fail to grasp is that the problem posed by many of the sisters within the religious orders that make up the LCWR, and by the LCWR as an organization, is precisely the problem noted by the Master of Trinity: “Another God, another mountaintop.” The difference is that Harold Abrahams acknowledged his unorthodox views, while the LCWR leadership, to vary the cinematic metaphors, took on the role of Captain Renault, professing itself “shocked, shocked” that anyone could imagine anything doctrinally awry in the organization or its affiliated orders.</p>
<p>A few facts — not an abundant commodity in the early coverage of the controversy — might help clarify both the current situation and the likely next moves in this ecclesiastical drama.</p>
<p>The Leadership Conference of Women Religious is a kind of trade association. Its membership is composed of orders (known in Catholic argot as “congregations”) of religious women who take perpetual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. These women are often called “nuns,” although technically nuns live in cloisters and the LCWR congregations have active, public ministries in education, health care, and social service; thus their members are more properly called “sisters.” These congregations control billions of dollars of assets, given to them back in the day when the sisters who ran Bing Crosby’s parish school in The Bells of St. Mary’s were the Hollywood idealization of an actual reality.</p>
<p>No more. Sister Mary Benedict (Ingrid Bergman) and the other sisters at the fictional St. Mary’s wore religious habits, lived in a convent, led a rigorous prayer life, taught the catechism without question, eschewed the public eye — and while they may have jousted with male ecclesiastical authorities like Bing Crosby’s Father Chuck O’Malley, it was O’Malley who made the final decisions for the parish and the school, and Bergman and the sisters who obeyed, even if they didn’t like it. Yet the final scene in the movie has Sister Benedict teaching the somewhat-full-of-himself Father O’Malley a thing or two about faith — a resolution reached and a lesson taught, not by rebellion, but by obedience.</p>
<p>Those days are long gone, and it’s both absurd and dishonest for the media and the Catholic Left to propagate the myth that the 21st-century life of those religious women whose orders are LCWR members is just a modernized version of The Bells of St. Mary’s. Yes, many sisters continue to do many good works. On the other hand, almost none of the sisters in LCWR congregations wear religious habits; most have long since abandoned convent life for apartments and other domestic arrangements; their spiritual life is more likely to be influenced by the Enneagram and Deepak Chopra than by Teresa of Avila and Edith Stein; their notions of orthodoxy are, to put it gently, innovative; and their relationship to Church authority is best described as one of barely concealed contempt.</p>
<p>Some communities of LWCR sisters no longer participate regularly in the Eucharist, because they cannot abide the “patriarchy” of a male priest-celebrant presiding at Mass. Thus faux Eucharists celebrated by a circle of women are not unknown in these communities. Even those LCWR-affiliated communities that hold, tenuously, to the normal sacramental life of the Church regularly bend the liturgical norms to the breaking point in order to radically minimize the role of the priest-celebrant; at one such Mass I attended years ago, the priest did virtually nothing except pronounce the words of consecration.</p>
<p>The other fact to be noted about the LCWR congregations — largely unremarked in the Gadarene rush to pit plucky nuns against Neanderthal prelates — is that they’re dying. The years immediately following the Second Vatican Council saw a mass exodus from American convents; and in the four and a half decades since the Council concluded, American Catholic women’s religious life in the LCWR congregations has suffered various forms of theological, spiritual, and behavioral meltdown. In the face of those two large truths, young Catholic women have quite sensibly decided that, if they wish to do good works or be political activists while dressing like middle-class professionals and living in apartments, there is little reason to bind themselves, even in an attenuated way, to the classic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience — each of which has undergone a radical reinterpretation in the LCWR congregations. So the LCWR orders are becoming greyer and greyer, to the point where their demise is, from a demographic point of view, merely a matter of time: perhaps a few decades down the road, absent truly radical renewal. (Meanwhile, the congregations of religious women that have retained the habit, a regular prayer life, and a commitment to Catholic orthodoxy are growing.)</p>
<p>There are more than a few ironies in this particular fire. One of them was pointed out by author Ann Carey in her 1997 book, Sisters in Crisis, which, while based on research in the LCWR archives and authorized by the LCWR, was subsequently denounced by the Conference — a preview of its “shocked, shocked” reaction to the recent Vatican acti on. Carey was under no romantic illusions about mid-20th century American religious life when she began her work; by showing that many sisters of the pre-Vatican II decades were poorly educated, poorly formed, and badly overworked, Carey made clear that genuine reform was essential if the remarkable flourishing of women’s religious life in the United States — something quite without parallel in the world, in terms of numbers — was going to be sustained. Yet Carey also showed how the “reform” undertaken before, during, and after the Council pulled so hard on the central threads of religious life (and especially on the understanding of the vows) that the entire tapestry unraveled.</p>
<p>Moreover, Carey discovered that the beginnings of this “reform” were largely designed by men: priest-consultants brought in to advise the LCWR’s predecessor organization, address its annual conferences, and help redesign sister-formation programs. Ironically enough, it was men, not liberated women, who charted the path to the radical feminism that eventually led too many LCWR sisters and the LCWR itself into a mental universe unmoored from even the minimal requisites of Christian orthodoxy.</p>
<p>“Minimal requisites” is no exaggeration. As Bishop Blair’s analysis of the LCWR’s assemblies makes unmistakably clear — and from materials readily available from the LCWR — there is very little in the Creed and the Catechism of the Catholic Church that is not up for grabs in the LCWR’s world: the Trinity; the divinity of Christ; the sacraments; the constitution of the Church as episcopally ordered and governed; the very idea of “doctrine”; the notion of moral absolutes; the nature of marriage; the inalienability of the right to life — Catholic teaching on all of these is not infrequently regarded in the LCWR and among its affiliated orders as impossibly old hat because of that teaching’s alleged linkage to “patriarchy.” That doctrinal implosion, further influenced by feminist leadership theory of the woolliest sort, set the stage for the tortured re-readings of poverty, chastity, and obedience to be found in the extensive literature that shapes the theological imagination of many of the sisters in LCWR congregations, those congregations’ leadership, and the LCWR itself.</p>
<p>And here is the next, great irony: In their determination to be countercultural, many LCWR-affiliated sisters have become precisely the opposite, parodies of political correctness who embraced every imaginable New Age “spirituality” and march in lockstep with American political progressivism as it has defined itself since the Sixties. Thus the sisters formed in the LCWR cast of mind are not at all countercultural. In public life, it’s the pro-life cause, which they largely eschew, that is the real counterculture. And in religious life, it’s the dynamic orthodoxy of post-Vatican II, post-John Paul II Catholicism — the Church of the “New Evangelization” — that poses a dramatic and demanding challenge to the soggy “spirituality” of postmodern America; many LCWR sisters, for their part, regarded John Paul the Great as a hopeless misogynist and never forgave his 1994 apostolic letter reaffirming that the Church is authorized to ordain only men to the ministerial priesthood. The Catholic Church that has stood fast against the Obama administration’s encroachments on religious freedom is the real counterculture; the LCWR, for its part, has become very much part of the progressive establishment.</p>
<p>The shock in all this, therefore, is not the shock the LCWR unpersuasively confessed when the Vatican decision to take it into receivership was made public. The shock was that the Vatican had finally acted, decisively, after three decades of half-hearted (and failed) attempts to achieve some sort of serious conversation with the LCWR about its obvious and multiple breaches of the boundaries of orthodoxy.</p>
<p>Acts two, three, and four in this drama are not likely to be pacific. Given the LCWR’s self-understanding as an evolutionary (or revolutionary) vanguard challenging the patriarchal evils embedded in the Catholic Church’s forms of governance, it is not easy to see how the LCWR can accept a situation in which a man — Archbishop Sartain — will guide the revision of the organization’s statutes while making the final decisions about the topics to be discussed and the speakers to be chosen for LCWR annual assemblies. Immediately after the public announcement of the Vatican action, Sister Joan Chittister, O.S.B., a leading exponent of the LCWR worldview, said flatly that “there is only one way to deal with this . . . they [the LCWR] would have to disband canonically and regroup as an unofficial interest group.” Whatever else it may have conveyed about her ecclesiastical sensibility, Sister Joan’s reaction had the virtue of honesty. The LCWR and many of the sisters in its affiliated congregations have been living for decades in what I have come to call “psychological schism”: While they remain canonically inside the Church’s legal boundaries, they nevertheless adhere to “another God” and seek “another mountaintop.” Sister Joan’s immediate reaction honestly recognized that and drew the curtain on a long-running charade.</p>
<p>To be sure, a self-dissolution of the LCWR would create any number of problems. It might well provoke payback in the form of congregations of women religious taking their health-care systems even farther out of the orbit of Catholic life and practice. That, in turn, might lead to all sorts of legal unpleasantness. But that is almost certain to happen in any event, for the dying of the LCWR orders is going to lead to an endless series of legal battles over property originally given to the sisters on the understanding that they were an integral part of the Catholic Church.</p>
<p>Thus, if the LCWR refuses to accept the Vatican’s decision and dissolves itself, the realities of the situation will be clarified. And that would be an improvement over the muddle — created in part by the resistance of the sisters and in part by the fecklessness of Church authorities — that has gone on for decades. A clear delineation of who stands on which side of the boundaries of Catholic orthodoxy and orthopraxis, which are not infinitely elastic, would have a cleansing effect.</p>
<p>And that cleansing might, just might, be the beginning of authentic reform among the once-great orders of women religious in the United States that are members of the LCWR. That reform would not aim to re-create the lost world of The Bells of St. Mary’s. It would aim at the further development of forms of women’s religious life — already being lived in orders that are not members of the LCWR — that make their own unique contribution to the culture-forming counterculture that is the Catholicism of the New Evangelization.</p>
<p>– George Weigel is distinguished senior fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.</p> | false | 1 | chariots fire two elders cambridge university invite young jewish runner harold abrahams formal blacktie luncheon try dissuade upstart undergraduate using professional trainer prepare forthcoming paris olympics abrahams declines follow oxbridge athletic orthodoxy leaves something huff master trinity brilliantly played john gielgud sighs says master caius another god another mountaintop scene worth keeping mind parsing recent vatican decision take form ecclesiastical receivership leadership conference women religious umbrella association represents majority american orders sisters april 18 years study holy see appointed archbishop j peter sartain seattle oversee lcwrs activities supervise lcwrs adherence churchs liturgical norms review links affiliated organizations like political advocacy group network guide revision lcwrs statutes sartain assisted bishop thomas paprocki springfield ill appropriately enough veteran icehockey goalie used taking hard shots bishop leonard blair toledo whose theological analysis lcwrs activities past decade shaped decision appoint sartain holy sees delegate charge lcwr imagery three men acting behalf maledominated curia assuming leadership organization women religious proved irresistible vatican critics eager drive home point catholic church doesnt care one half human race proprietor oncegreat american newspaper told new rome bureau chief leaving us others eager use vatican action prop crumbling public support obamacare good sisters lcwr supported obamacare aging misogynists vatican whacked lcwr see obamacare must right proper helpful toward salvation problem former criticism course catholic church greatest educator women throughout third world generous provider womens health care africa asia church also works defend womens rights within marriage teaching dignity human person challenges traditional social cultural taboos disempower women notion churchs roman leadership put clamps lcwr vatican objects obamacare well would first europeanstyle welfarestate initiative vatican objected living memory lines critique fail grasp problem posed many sisters within religious orders make lcwr lcwr organization precisely problem noted master trinity another god another mountaintop difference harold abrahams acknowledged unorthodox views lcwr leadership vary cinematic metaphors took role captain renault professing shocked shocked anyone could imagine anything doctrinally awry organization affiliated orders facts abundant commodity early coverage controversy might help clarify current situation likely next moves ecclesiastical drama leadership conference women religious kind trade association membership composed orders known catholic argot congregations religious women take perpetual vows poverty chastity obedience women often called nuns although technically nuns live cloisters lcwr congregations active public ministries education health care social service thus members properly called sisters congregations control billions dollars assets given back day sisters ran bing crosbys parish school bells st marys hollywood idealization actual reality sister mary benedict ingrid bergman sisters fictional st marys wore religious habits lived convent led rigorous prayer life taught catechism without question eschewed public eye may jousted male ecclesiastical authorities like bing crosbys father chuck omalley omalley made final decisions parish school bergman sisters obeyed even didnt like yet final scene movie sister benedict teaching somewhatfullofhimself father omalley thing two faith resolution reached lesson taught rebellion obedience days long gone absurd dishonest media catholic left propagate myth 21stcentury life religious women whose orders lcwr members modernized version bells st marys yes many sisters continue many good works hand almost none sisters lcwr congregations wear religious habits long since abandoned convent life apartments domestic arrangements spiritual life likely influenced enneagram deepak chopra teresa avila edith stein notions orthodoxy put gently innovative relationship church authority best described one barely concealed contempt communities lwcr sisters longer participate regularly eucharist abide patriarchy male priestcelebrant presiding mass thus faux eucharists celebrated circle women unknown communities even lcwraffiliated communities hold tenuously normal sacramental life church regularly bend liturgical norms breaking point order radically minimize role priestcelebrant one mass attended years ago priest virtually nothing except pronounce words consecration fact noted lcwr congregations largely unremarked gadarene rush pit plucky nuns neanderthal prelates theyre dying years immediately following second vatican council saw mass exodus american convents four half decades since council concluded american catholic womens religious life lcwr congregations suffered various forms theological spiritual behavioral meltdown face two large truths young catholic women quite sensibly decided wish good works political activists dressing like middleclass professionals living apartments little reason bind even attenuated way classic vows poverty chastity obedience undergone radical reinterpretation lcwr congregations lcwr orders becoming greyer greyer point demise demographic point view merely matter time perhaps decades road absent truly radical renewal meanwhile congregations religious women retained habit regular prayer life commitment catholic orthodoxy growing ironies particular fire one pointed author ann carey 1997 book sisters crisis based research lcwr archives authorized lcwr subsequently denounced conference preview shocked shocked reaction recent vatican acti carey romantic illusions mid20th century american religious life began work showing many sisters prevatican ii decades poorly educated poorly formed badly overworked carey made clear genuine reform essential remarkable flourishing womens religious life united states something quite without parallel world terms numbers going sustained yet carey also showed reform undertaken council pulled hard central threads religious life especially understanding vows entire tapestry unraveled moreover carey discovered beginnings reform largely designed men priestconsultants brought advise lcwrs predecessor organization address annual conferences help redesign sisterformation programs ironically enough men liberated women charted path radical feminism eventually led many lcwr sisters lcwr mental universe unmoored even minimal requisites christian orthodoxy minimal requisites exaggeration bishop blairs analysis lcwrs assemblies makes unmistakably clear materials readily available lcwr little creed catechism catholic church grabs lcwrs world trinity divinity christ sacraments constitution church episcopally ordered governed idea doctrine notion moral absolutes nature marriage inalienability right life catholic teaching infrequently regarded lcwr among affiliated orders impossibly old hat teachings alleged linkage patriarchy doctrinal implosion influenced feminist leadership theory woolliest sort set stage tortured rereadings poverty chastity obedience found extensive literature shapes theological imagination many sisters lcwr congregations congregations leadership lcwr next great irony determination countercultural many lcwraffiliated sisters become precisely opposite parodies political correctness embraced every imaginable new age spirituality march lockstep american political progressivism defined since sixties thus sisters formed lcwr cast mind countercultural public life prolife cause largely eschew real counterculture religious life dynamic orthodoxy postvatican ii postjohn paul ii catholicism church new evangelization poses dramatic demanding challenge soggy spirituality postmodern america many lcwr sisters part regarded john paul great hopeless misogynist never forgave 1994 apostolic letter reaffirming church authorized ordain men ministerial priesthood catholic church stood fast obama administrations encroachments religious freedom real counterculture lcwr part become much part progressive establishment shock therefore shock lcwr unpersuasively confessed vatican decision take receivership made public shock vatican finally acted decisively three decades halfhearted failed attempts achieve sort serious conversation lcwr obvious multiple breaches boundaries orthodoxy acts two three four drama likely pacific given lcwrs selfunderstanding evolutionary revolutionary vanguard challenging patriarchal evils embedded catholic churchs forms governance easy see lcwr accept situation man archbishop sartain guide revision organizations statutes making final decisions topics discussed speakers chosen lcwr annual assemblies immediately public announcement vatican action sister joan chittister osb leading exponent lcwr worldview said flatly one way deal lcwr would disband canonically regroup unofficial interest group whatever else may conveyed ecclesiastical sensibility sister joans reaction virtue honesty lcwr many sisters affiliated congregations living decades come call psychological schism remain canonically inside churchs legal boundaries nevertheless adhere another god seek another mountaintop sister joans immediate reaction honestly recognized drew curtain longrunning charade sure selfdissolution lcwr would create number problems might well provoke payback form congregations women religious taking healthcare systems even farther orbit catholic life practice turn might lead sorts legal unpleasantness almost certain happen event dying lcwr orders going lead endless series legal battles property originally given sisters understanding integral part catholic church thus lcwr refuses accept vaticans decision dissolves realities situation clarified would improvement muddle created part resistance sisters part fecklessness church authorities gone decades clear delineation stands side boundaries catholic orthodoxy orthopraxis infinitely elastic would cleansing effect cleansing might might beginning authentic reform among oncegreat orders women religious united states members lcwr reform would aim recreate lost world bells st marys would aim development forms womens religious life already lived orders members lcwr make unique contribution cultureforming counterculture catholicism new evangelization george weigel distinguished senior fellow washingtons ethics public policy center holds william e simon chair catholic studies | 1,328 |
<p>UFC veteran Dennis Siver, who fought for the promotion for a decade and recently signed with Russia’s ACB, spoke exclusively to RT Sport to share his memories about past years in MMA, as well as his hopes for the future.</p>
<p>A German citizen of Russian descent, 38-year-old Siver fought as many as 21 times in the UFC. This week he signed a four-fight deal with Absolute Championship Berkut (ACB), where he’ll compete in the lightweight division.</p>
<p>Following the news, RT Sport spoke with the MMA veteran ( <a href="http://www.sherdog.com/fighter/Dennis-Siver-9817" type="external">23-11</a>) to learn more about his move as well as his past experience in the UFC, which included fights with such notable stars as Conor McGregor, BJ Penn and Donald Cerrone.</p>
<p>RT: We learned a few days ago that you’ve signed a multi-fight contract with ACB. Could you tell us a little more about how it all came about?</p>
<p>Dennis Siver: As my UFC contract had expired and I didn’t receive a new offer from them, we started to look for other options. I always wanted to fight in my homeland of Russia, so the ACB option was an easy choice for me. Plus they made a good offer. My first fight will be in Germany, which I also represent. But, as I said, I would love to perform in Russia. And I know that ACB hosts big events in Moscow and St. Petersburg.</p>
<p>RT: Did you follow ACB before signing with them?</p>
<p>DS: Yes, of course I’d heard of ACB before. They host their tournaments all over the world, they sign good fighters, they sign guys with UFC experience. There are some fighters on their roster who I know, some fighters from Germany. Plus I like the fact that in ACB they concentrate more on good fights rather than trash-talking. I’m that sort of a person myself. I like to concentrate on the training, concentrate on the fights. I don’t like it when people insult each other for no reason just to sell their fight. I respect my opponents, we all do the same thing. So I’m glad to join a promotion with such a concept.</p>
<p>RT: Talking about the trash-talking and insults. Before your fight with Conor McGregor back in 2015, among other things he called you a Nazi. What was your reaction back then?</p>
<p>DS: It just showed his level. He just wants to say things to be noticed. Although he doesn’t even know what he’s talking about. It’s just pure ignorance. He didn’t even know that although I represent Germany, I come from Russia. And then again, calling a person a Nazi just because he represents Germany is pure ignorance.</p>
<p>RT: What part of Russia do you come from? And did you start your way in the martial arts back in Russia?</p>
<p>DS: I come from Siberia, from the city of Omsk. And yes, that is where I began my way in martial arts. I started in kickboxing. I competed for about three years at the junior level before moving to Germany, when I was around 17. Then in Germany, I continued to compete in kickboxing, and won the German championship the same year. Then I went for the world championship, but I didn’t really achieve great results; I was only 18 back then. Then I had a few years’ break before switching to MMA when I was around 23. And eventually I got into the UFC, where I fought for 10 years.</p>
<p>RT: What other fights from your 10-year career in the UFC stand out for you the most?</p>
<p>DS: Perhaps my last fight against BJ Penn. Because it was the most recent fight, it was a victory against such a legendary fighter. But there were other memorable fights in my career as well. My victory against <a href="http://www.sherdog.com/fighter/George-Sotiropoulos-11702" type="external">George Sotiropoulos</a> in his native Australia, where the whole crowd was against me, booing me, throwing plastic glasses at me and so on. The same thing applies to my fight in England against <a href="http://www.sherdog.com/fighter/Paul-Kelly-14028" type="external">Paul Kelly</a>. Obviously, a hostile crowd, booing me and all that. But they went silent after I knocked him out. Plus my fights on UFC cards in Germany were memorable for me too.</p>
<p>RT: Ten years in the UFC is a pretty long stretch. How do you rate the growth and development of the UFC in the last 10 years, being part of the organization for a decade?</p>
<p>DS: From the very beginning of my career in the UFC everything was organized very professionally, all the small aspects. And it’s only got better throughout the years. Fighters are making better money now, as the sport of MMA is developing. UFC host more events internationally. Back in the days they mostly hosted them in the States. Generally, MMA is a different sport now. Athletes are much more skilled and much better developed now. The only thing that I personally didn’t like was the fact that in the last few years, the UFC have taken a turn from the sport aspect towards showmanship. They want fighters to be more active on social media, make big statements when talking to the press. Maybe it helps to develop the sport, but sometimes people cross the line with the things they say. And it just doesn’t look natural. They insult each other in front of the cameras, then they shake hands after the fight and say that they only wanted to promote the fight.</p>
<p>RT: When you say that the UFC want fighters to provoke their opponents to promote fights, do they say it directly, or that is just something that fighters understand from their policy?</p>
<p>DS: No, they say it directly. They say ,‘do it,’ and the more you do it the better. They say it will be better for you. Maybe they’re right, I don’t know. They don’t really force anyone. But yes, they do recommend it directly. I’m not against general media coverage, when they film the way you train, when they film your gym. Fans want to know more about the fighters. But insulting each other just to sell your fight is one thing that I don’t understand. I’m glad that in ACB they see it the other way around and concentrate more on the fights.</p>
<p>Oh… Germany you’re in for a treat! <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ACB75?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" type="external">#ACB75</a> is coming to the Carl Benz Arena in Stuttgart on November 25th with Dennis Siver headlining!</p>
<p>The German has signed a multi-fight deal with the promotion.</p>
<p>Welcome <a href="https://twitter.com/DennisSiver?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" type="external">@DennisSiver</a> <a href="https://t.co/typRYkYUBJ" type="external">pic.twitter.com/typRYkYUBJ</a></p>
<p>— ACB Fighting League (@ACB_League) <a href="https://twitter.com/ACB_League/status/928394299242315778?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" type="external">November 8, 2017</a></p>
<p>RT: Talking about the fights in ACB, your first will be in Stuttgart, Germany, at ACB 75. Do you know the name of your opponent?</p>
<p>DS: No, I don’t know the name yet. I know that ACB have a few options for me, but they need to finalize some details and then they will announce the name. But I’m glad to fight on the card in Germany.</p>
<p>RT: We also know that you’re going to compete in the lightweight division in ACB. Is there anyone in their roster you want to fight in particular?</p>
<p>DS: My goal is to fight for the belt. I have a four-fight deal, so hopefully after a few victories I’ll get a title shot. But I have to win all my fights first of all. ACB have a solid roster and there won’t be any easy fights. My other goal, as I already said, is to fight at their big tournaments in Russia. I’ve always wanted to fight in my homeland. In Moscow, St. Petersburg or my native Omsk. But to get this chance I have to show great results. So I’ll show ACB fans everything I’m capable of.</p>
<p>by <a href="https://twitter.com/DenisGeykoRT" type="external">Denis Geyko</a> for RT Sport</p> | false | 1 | ufc veteran dennis siver fought promotion decade recently signed russias acb spoke exclusively rt sport share memories past years mma well hopes future german citizen russian descent 38yearold siver fought many 21 times ufc week signed fourfight deal absolute championship berkut acb hell compete lightweight division following news rt sport spoke mma veteran 2311 learn move well past experience ufc included fights notable stars conor mcgregor bj penn donald cerrone rt learned days ago youve signed multifight contract acb could tell us little came dennis siver ufc contract expired didnt receive new offer started look options always wanted fight homeland russia acb option easy choice plus made good offer first fight germany also represent said would love perform russia know acb hosts big events moscow st petersburg rt follow acb signing ds yes course id heard acb host tournaments world sign good fighters sign guys ufc experience fighters roster know fighters germany plus like fact acb concentrate good fights rather trashtalking im sort person like concentrate training concentrate fights dont like people insult reason sell fight respect opponents thing im glad join promotion concept rt talking trashtalking insults fight conor mcgregor back 2015 among things called nazi reaction back ds showed level wants say things noticed although doesnt even know hes talking pure ignorance didnt even know although represent germany come russia calling person nazi represents germany pure ignorance rt part russia come start way martial arts back russia ds come siberia city omsk yes began way martial arts started kickboxing competed three years junior level moving germany around 17 germany continued compete kickboxing german championship year went world championship didnt really achieve great results 18 back years break switching mma around 23 eventually got ufc fought 10 years rt fights 10year career ufc stand ds perhaps last fight bj penn recent fight victory legendary fighter memorable fights career well victory george sotiropoulos native australia whole crowd booing throwing plastic glasses thing applies fight england paul kelly obviously hostile crowd booing went silent knocked plus fights ufc cards germany memorable rt ten years ufc pretty long stretch rate growth development ufc last 10 years part organization decade ds beginning career ufc everything organized professionally small aspects got better throughout years fighters making better money sport mma developing ufc host events internationally back days mostly hosted states generally mma different sport athletes much skilled much better developed thing personally didnt like fact last years ufc taken turn sport aspect towards showmanship want fighters active social media make big statements talking press maybe helps develop sport sometimes people cross line things say doesnt look natural insult front cameras shake hands fight say wanted promote fight rt say ufc want fighters provoke opponents promote fights say directly something fighters understand policy ds say directly say better say better maybe theyre right dont know dont really force anyone yes recommend directly im general media coverage film way train film gym fans want know fighters insulting sell fight one thing dont understand im glad acb see way around concentrate fights oh germany youre treat acb75 coming carl benz arena stuttgart november 25th dennis siver headlining german signed multifight deal promotion welcome dennissiver pictwittercomtyprykyubj acb fighting league acb_league november 8 2017 rt talking fights acb first stuttgart germany acb 75 know name opponent ds dont know name yet know acb options need finalize details announce name im glad fight card germany rt also know youre going compete lightweight division acb anyone roster want fight particular ds goal fight belt fourfight deal hopefully victories ill get title shot win fights first acb solid roster wont easy fights goal already said fight big tournaments russia ive always wanted fight homeland moscow st petersburg native omsk get chance show great results ill show acb fans everything im capable denis geyko rt sport | 633 |
<p>Ecclesia semper reformanda:&#160;the Church always to be reformed. Well, of course. But today, as always, the question is, what makes for authentic reform in the Church? Perhaps a rabbinical story recounted in a popular 1950s Catholic novel,&#160; <a href="http://www.overlookpress.com/cardinal.html" type="external">The Cardinal</a>, helps focus the question.</p>
<p>The scene set by author Henry Morton ­Robinson takes place in a New York hotel, where an early attempt at ecumenical reconciliation and interfaith dialogue, a kind of parliament of religions, is meeting. After numerous vacuous statements are made by this, that, or the other Christian cleric, an elderly rabbi gets up and tells a story.</p>
<p>There was a king, it seems, who owned a precious diamond that he cherished more than anything else in the world. One day, alas, a clumsy servant dropped the diamond, which was deeply scratched as a result. The finest jewelers in the kingdom were summoned to the palace, but despite their best efforts they could not repair the king’s diamond. One day, however, an exceptionally skillful jeweler wandered into the kingdom and learned of the sad condition of the king’s diamond. He volun­teered his services – and by his marvelous, almost miraculous, craftsmanship, he carved onto the diamond a beautiful rose, rendering the deepest part of the scratch the rose’s stem.</p>
<p>In the novel, the rabbi does not explicate his parable. But its meaning for a proper understanding of&#160;ecclesia semper reformanda&#160;should be obvious enough. All true reform in the Church is by reference to what is deepest in the Church: the “form” or constitution, which I use in its British, not American, sense, given to the Church by Christ the Lord. That deep “form” is the root from which the disfigurement of the Church can be transformed into renewal and reform.</p>
<p>Authentic Christian reform, in other words, is not a matter of human cleverness, and still less of human willfulness. If the Church is willed by Christ and empowered by the Holy Spirit, then authentic reform means recovering – making a source of renewal – some aspect or other of the Church’s “form” that has been lost, marred, misconceived, or even forgotten. Authentic reform means reaching back and bringing into the future something that has been lost in the Church’s present. Authentic ecclesial reform is always&#160;re-form.</p>
<p>We can see this process of re-forming the Church in late-twentieth-century Catholicism’s embrace of religious freedom at the Second Vatican Council, and in the intellectual reclamation project that prepared the way for the Council’s&#160;Declaration on Religious Freedom.</p>
<p>For a variety of historical reasons, including the Reformation and the wars of religion, early-modern Catholic church–state theory favored a confessional state in which political authority was wedded to spiritual authority and the state supported, promoted, and in some instances even enforced the Catholic Church’s truth claims. Buttressing this institutional arrangement was a rationale: “error has no rights.” The net result was what came to be known as the “thesis/hypothesis” model. The preferred arrangement, in which the Catholic Church enjoyed both the legal protection and financial support of the state, was the “thesis.” Over against this thesis stood the “hypothesis”: the confessionally neutral state, which could be tolerated if that was what historical contingency demanded.</p>
<p>Various new developments called this thesis/hypothesis model into question. Secularization in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had not abated in countries where the Church still enjoyed state favor. There was the counter-experience of the United States, where the confessionally neutral state turned out to be very good for the Church, which was prospering and growing even as established churches in Europe were dying. And so Catholic reformers began to think what had once seemed unthinkable: that maybe establishment is a snare and delusion. If establishment sapped the Church’s evangelical energies, perhaps the marriage of spiritual and political authority wasn’t such a good idea after all. Concurrently, the notion that “error has no rights” began to be critiqued by theologians who insisted that persons had rights, even if their opinions were erroneous.</p>
<p>Reform means reaching back and bringing into the future something that has been lost in the Church.</p>
<p>Above all, however, the reform of Catholic church–state theory that resulted in Vatican II’s&#160;Declaration on Religious Freedom&#160;was due to a reclamation of a gospel truth that had, somehow, been lost in the flux of history: the act of faith, to be authentic, must be a free act. Coerced faith is no faith, or at best faux faith. “God wishes to be adored by people who are free,” as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith would later put it in the&#160;Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation.</p>
<p>That understanding of the nature of faith – a free embrace of the offer of friendship and communion with the Son of God – is part of the Church’s Christ-given “form.” Retrieving it, and then applying it to contemporary social and political life, made the 1965&#160;Declaration on Religious Freedom&#160;possible. The Catholic Church did not embrace religious freedom as a basic human right because it finally surrendered to Enlightenment political theory. The Catholic Church’s affirmation of religious freedom was an authentic reform that re-formed Catholic church–state theory by retrieving a lost element of the Church’s constitutive form and using that element as a means of genuine renewal.</p>
<p>As in every other moment in the Church’s history, living the motto&#160;ecclesia semper reformanda&#160;in the twenty-first century will mean returning to the sources, the roots, of Christian faith.</p>
<p>This means, first of all, deepening the encounter with Jesus Christ. As Pope Benedict XVI never tired of repeating, Christianity does not begin with an idea or a program but with a person: the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, who walks along the Emmaus Roads of this century and invites all into the fellowship of his friends. A constantly re-forming Church is a Church always seeking the face of the Lord. Friendship with Jesus Christ is not only the beginning of the Church, but also the beginning of all authentic reform in the Church.</p>
<p>And as the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council taught, not least in their efforts to return the Bible to its rightful place in the Catholic Church’s life, meeting the Lord means meeting him in his word, the revealed word of God in Holy Scripture. For from that meeting, we learn to see the world aright.</p>
<p>Original sin, we might say, is both the original myopia and the original astigmatism. Because of original sin, we see the world askew: the myopia of original sin gives us a squinty-eyed and narrow view of the world and ourselves, while the astigmatism of original sin further blurs and distorts our vision. In order to see the world (and ourselves) aright, we need corrective lenses. Those lenses are ground by an immersion in the Bible, through which we learn to see the world (and ourselves) in proper focus.</p>
<p>This is especially urgent in times of cultural confusion like our own. The culture of Me – the culture of the imperial autonomous Self, the culture of freedom understood as license and willfulness – envelopes the twenty-first-century West like a dense fog. Seeing through that fog requires a visual acuity that the world can not give. Seeing the world through biblical lenses – through the “inversions” of the Beatitudes, for example – cures our personal myopias and astigmatisms so that the deep truths of the human condition come into clearer focus.</p>
<p>Helping the people of the Church see the world aright through biblical lenses is the first task of the Church’s preachers, and thus renewing homiletics must always be part of any authentic ecclesial reform. Preaching-as-therapy, preaching-as-political-education, even preaching-as-moral-exhortation – none of these is adequate to the homiletic task in a reforming Church today. If we would look for models of how expository, biblically rich preaching ought to be done, we can look to another root of the faith once delivered to the saints: the sermons of the great Church Fathers. They, too, sought to help their people see the world of late antiquity, in which old certainties and venerable institutions were crumbling, aright. Their world was not all that different from ours, in which truth is subjectivized and institutions once thought to be built into the human condition (like marriage and the family) are being deconstructed. And so immersion in patristic preaching can be a way to retrieve another lost element of the Church’s form and make it into a source of renewal.</p>
<p>When Joseph Ratzinger was elected Bishop of Rome on April 19, 2005, both those who applauded the conclave’s decision and those who deplored it dusted off their copies of a small book of the new pope’s essays,&#160; <a href="https://www.ignatius.com/Products/FAF-A/faith-and-the-future.aspx" type="external">Faith and the Future</a>,&#160;and made a beeline for its last chapter, “What Will the Church Look Like in 2000?” There, both Ratzinger fans and Ratzinger critics found the passages that have become perhaps the most frequently cited of this great theologian’s voluminous works:</p>
<p>From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge – a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so she will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, she will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, she will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members.… But in all the changes at which one might guess, the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her center: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world.…</p>
<p>But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the full horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.</p>
<p>No serious Christian theologian, and certainly no pope, wants to shrink the Church: that we may take as axiomatic. What Ratzinger was outlining here was not a plan, but the reality of&#160;ecclesia semper reformanda&#160;in the late-modern and postmodern West. Genetically transmitted Christianity – the faith passed along by ethnic custom – was finished. Virtually no one in the Church of the twenty-first century, Ratzinger saw in 1970, would be able to answer the question, “Why are you a Christian?” by replying, “Because my great-grandmother was born in Bavaria” (or County Cork, or Cracow, or Guadalajara, or Palermo – or even South Boston). The only faith possible under late-modern and postmodern conditions is faith freely embraced in a free decision, made possible by an encounter with the risen Lord, Jesus Christ. Therefore, whatever institutions of ecclesial life would remain after what Ratzinger dubbed “the trial of this sifting” (which he believed had been underway for more than a century) would have to reconceive themselves as launching pads for mission, communities where those who had received the gift of faith would have to learn how to offer it to others. That gift would not bring with it, as in the past, social status. But it would bring something far more important: it would bring hope, rooted in faith and exercised in charity.</p>
<p>What the twenty-first-century Church needs most are witnesses: men and women on fire with missionary zeal.&#160;Both Ratzinger’s papal predecessor and his papal successor have shared this vision, if with different accents. John Paul II called Catholicism – and by extension, all of Christianity – into a “New Evangelization” whose biblical metaphor was Luke 5:4: the Church must leave the shallow and brackish waters of institutional maintenance and, like the disciples on the Sea of Galilee, “put out into the deep” – the roiling, storm-tossed waters of a world that has lost its bearings. In what he has called the grand strategy document of his papacy,&#160; <a href="http://www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/homiletics/upload/Pope-Francis-Exhortation-The-Homily.pdf" type="external">Evangelii Gaudium</a>&#160;(The Joy of the Gospel), Pope Francis struck a similar note, calling for a “Church permanently in mission” in which the nobility of life displayed by ­Ratzinger’s “little flock of believers” would touch the lives of the walking wounded of the postmodern world, and thereby offer what the world has been searching for, if unwittingly: friendship with Jesus Christ, who is the answer to the question that is every human life, and incorporation into the communion of his friends.</p>
<p>All of which is to say that the reformation we need at this quincentenary of Wittenberg is a re-formed Church of saints. The cultural dissolution of the West precludes arguing people into the faith. Very few people are going to be argued into belief in a world that accepts “your truth” and “my truth,” but not&#160;the&#160;truth. Yes, the Church needs theologians. Yes, the Church needs fully catechized men and women who can make persuasive arguments, but what the reformed Church of the twenty-first century needs most are witnesses: men and women on fire with missionary zeal, because they have been embraced by the love of Christ and are passionate to share that love with others; men and women who see the world through a biblical optic; men and women sanctified by the sacraments; men and women who know, with Saint Paul, that the trials of the present age are preparing within the&#160;ecclesia semper reformandaan “eternal weight of glory” (2 Cor. 4:17).</p>
<p>George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Catholic theologian and one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He holds EPPC’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.</p> | false | 1 | ecclesia semper reformanda160the church always reformed well course today always question makes authentic reform church perhaps rabbinical story recounted popular 1950s catholic novel160 cardinal helps focus question scene set author henry morton robinson takes place new york hotel early attempt ecumenical reconciliation interfaith dialogue kind parliament religions meeting numerous vacuous statements made christian cleric elderly rabbi gets tells story king seems owned precious diamond cherished anything else world one day alas clumsy servant dropped diamond deeply scratched result finest jewelers kingdom summoned palace despite best efforts could repair kings diamond one day however exceptionally skillful jeweler wandered kingdom learned sad condition kings diamond volunteered services marvelous almost miraculous craftsmanship carved onto diamond beautiful rose rendering deepest part scratch roses stem novel rabbi explicate parable meaning proper understanding of160ecclesia semper reformanda160should obvious enough true reform church reference deepest church form constitution use british american sense given church christ lord deep form root disfigurement church transformed renewal reform authentic christian reform words matter human cleverness still less human willfulness church willed christ empowered holy spirit authentic reform means recovering making source renewal aspect churchs form lost marred misconceived even forgotten authentic reform means reaching back bringing future something lost churchs present authentic ecclesial reform always160reform see process reforming church latetwentiethcentury catholicisms embrace religious freedom second vatican council intellectual reclamation project prepared way councils160declaration religious freedom variety historical reasons including reformation wars religion earlymodern catholic churchstate theory favored confessional state political authority wedded spiritual authority state supported promoted instances even enforced catholic churchs truth claims buttressing institutional arrangement rationale error rights net result came known thesishypothesis model preferred arrangement catholic church enjoyed legal protection financial support state thesis thesis stood hypothesis confessionally neutral state could tolerated historical contingency demanded various new developments called thesishypothesis model question secularization europe nineteenth twentieth centuries abated countries church still enjoyed state favor counterexperience united states confessionally neutral state turned good church prospering growing even established churches europe dying catholic reformers began think seemed unthinkable maybe establishment snare delusion establishment sapped churchs evangelical energies perhaps marriage spiritual political authority wasnt good idea concurrently notion error rights began critiqued theologians insisted persons rights even opinions erroneous reform means reaching back bringing future something lost church however reform catholic churchstate theory resulted vatican iis160declaration religious freedom160was due reclamation gospel truth somehow lost flux history act faith authentic must free act coerced faith faith best faux faith god wishes adored people free congregation doctrine faith would later put the160instruction christian freedom liberation understanding nature faith free embrace offer friendship communion son god part churchs christgiven form retrieving applying contemporary social political life made 1965160declaration religious freedom160possible catholic church embrace religious freedom basic human right finally surrendered enlightenment political theory catholic churchs affirmation religious freedom authentic reform reformed catholic churchstate theory retrieving lost element churchs constitutive form using element means genuine renewal every moment churchs history living motto160ecclesia semper reformanda160in twentyfirst century mean returning sources roots christian faith means first deepening encounter jesus christ pope benedict xvi never tired repeating christianity begin idea program person second person holy trinity walks along emmaus roads century invites fellowship friends constantly reforming church church always seeking face lord friendship jesus christ beginning church also beginning authentic reform church fathers second vatican council taught least efforts return bible rightful place catholic churchs life meeting lord means meeting word revealed word god holy scripture meeting learn see world aright original sin might say original myopia original astigmatism original sin see world askew myopia original sin gives us squintyeyed narrow view world astigmatism original sin blurs distorts vision order see world aright need corrective lenses lenses ground immersion bible learn see world proper focus especially urgent times cultural confusion like culture culture imperial autonomous self culture freedom understood license willfulness envelopes twentyfirstcentury west like dense fog seeing fog requires visual acuity world give seeing world biblical lenses inversions beatitudes example cures personal myopias astigmatisms deep truths human condition come clearer focus helping people church see world aright biblical lenses first task churchs preachers thus renewing homiletics must always part authentic ecclesial reform preachingastherapy preachingaspoliticaleducation even preachingasmoralexhortation none adequate homiletic task reforming church today would look models expository biblically rich preaching ought done look another root faith delivered saints sermons great church fathers sought help people see world late antiquity old certainties venerable institutions crumbling aright world different truth subjectivized institutions thought built human condition like marriage family deconstructed immersion patristic preaching way retrieve another lost element churchs form make source renewal joseph ratzinger elected bishop rome april 19 2005 applauded conclaves decision deplored dusted copies small book new popes essays160 faith future160and made beeline last chapter church look like 2000 ratzinger fans ratzinger critics found passages become perhaps frequently cited great theologians voluminous works crisis today church tomorrow emerge church lost much become small start afresh less beginning longer able inhabit many edifices built prosperity number adherents diminishes lose many social privileges contrast earlier age seen much voluntary society entered free decision small society make much bigger demands initiative individual members changes one might guess church find essence afresh full conviction always center faith triune god jesus christ son god made man presence spirit end world trial sifting past great power flow spiritualized simplified church men totally planned world find unspeakably lonely completely lost sight god feel full horror poverty discover little flock believers something wholly new discover hope meant answer always searching secret serious christian theologian certainly pope wants shrink church may take axiomatic ratzinger outlining plan reality of160ecclesia semper reformanda160in latemodern postmodern west genetically transmitted christianity faith passed along ethnic custom finished virtually one church twentyfirst century ratzinger saw 1970 would able answer question christian replying greatgrandmother born bavaria county cork cracow guadalajara palermo even south boston faith possible latemodern postmodern conditions faith freely embraced free decision made possible encounter risen lord jesus christ therefore whatever institutions ecclesial life would remain ratzinger dubbed trial sifting believed underway century would reconceive launching pads mission communities received gift faith would learn offer others gift would bring past social status would bring something far important would bring hope rooted faith exercised charity twentyfirstcentury church needs witnesses men women fire missionary zeal160both ratzingers papal predecessor papal successor shared vision different accents john paul ii called catholicism extension christianity new evangelization whose biblical metaphor luke 54 church must leave shallow brackish waters institutional maintenance like disciples sea galilee put deep roiling stormtossed waters world lost bearings called grand strategy document papacy160 evangelii gaudium160the joy gospel pope francis struck similar note calling church permanently mission nobility life displayed ratzingers little flock believers would touch lives walking wounded postmodern world thereby offer world searching unwittingly friendship jesus christ answer question every human life incorporation communion friends say reformation need quincentenary wittenberg reformed church saints cultural dissolution west precludes arguing people faith people going argued belief world accepts truth truth not160the160truth yes church needs theologians yes church needs fully catechized men women make persuasive arguments reformed church twentyfirst century needs witnesses men women fire missionary zeal embraced love christ passionate share love others men women see world biblical optic men women sanctified sacraments men women know saint paul trials present age preparing within the160ecclesia semper reformandaan eternal weight glory 2 cor 417 george weigel distinguished senior fellow ethics public policy center catholic theologian one americas leading public intellectuals holds eppcs william e simon chair catholic studies | 1,222 |
<p>Hana Shalabi still dreams of having the opportunity to travel and explore life beyond the familiar horizon of life under siege.</p>
<p>Throughout her hunger strike of exactly 47 days, Hana Shalabi never slept consistently for a number of hours. In the first few days of her strike, she would doze off only to wake up with the sudden fear that someone was trying to hurt her.</p>
<p>But after the first week of the hunger strike, having nothing but a few sips of water a day, her body simply ceased to function in any normal way. So, instead of sleeping, she would fall into a state of delirium, overtaken by frenzied hallucination where memories and persisting future fears coalesced into a sonata of night terror.</p>
<p>I interviewed Hana recently, through a series of discussions that extended for hours, trying to understand what compelled her to risk her life to obtain conditional freedom in Gaza, and to present her story as a showcase for the phenomena of hunger strikes as a form of political struggle inside Israeli prisons, where currently over 7,000 Palestinian prisoners are held, over 500 of them without trial.</p>
<p>Hana was born on the February 7, 1982, the same year that Palestinian factions were driven out from Lebanon and the refugees of the Sabra and Shatila Camps were slaughtered en masse. When her father, Yahya, and her mother, Badia, were finished with having children, the final tally was ten. Of the six females, Hana was somewhere in the middle, after Najah, Salam and Huda, and before Wafa and Zahira. Samir was the youngest of the brothers, and only two years older than Hana.</p>
<p>Hana’s family originally came from Haifa. They were exiled from that beautiful port city, along with hundreds of thousands who today constitute the bulk of Palestinian refugees. After a relatively brief but arduous journey, they settled in the village of Burqin, not far away from Safad in the north, and adjacent to the town and refugee camp of Jenin.</p>
<p>Burqin, tucked gently near the Marj Ibn Amer Valley, offered the Shalabis a temporary respite from an otherwise harsh existence. But that relief was rudely interrupted when Hana was still a child. She was eight years old, chewing on a hearty sandwich of Za’tar and eggs when a boy named Mohammed, from the neighborhood, dashed towards her as fast as he could.</p>
<p>He fell on his knees and whispered to her for the last time, “Please help me.” She stood motionless. When he finally collapsed, a large hole in the back of his head revealed itself. He had been shot by the Israeli army moments earlier. That took place during the first uprising, and the boy was one of many who were killed in Burgin. Hana joined the rebellion by collecting rocks for the boys who confronted soldiers as they raided the village almost daily.</p>
<p>Hana, now 33, speaks of these memories with the same purity of a child who was swept with the euphoria of a revolution, which she barely comprehended in any articulate sense. She was angry at the death of Mohammed, and that was that.</p>
<p>She grew up angry, a rage that was reflected in many people all around her. Her brother, Omar, had joined the Black Panthers, whose members were all sons of peasants and cheap Arab laborers in Israel. They met in caves deep in the mountains and used to hide there for days before descending upon the villages, masked and armed, to declare strikes and to mobilize the people to rebel. But when Omar was injured during a nightly skirmish with the soldiers, the secret became known to everyone, including her livid father, Yahya, who realized that his constant attempts to keep his kids out of trouble had failed horribly.</p>
<p>The story of Omar was repeated, time and again, among her other siblings, who were almost all involved in the Resistance in various capacities. Huda, the older sister, was jailed for allegedly attempting to stab a solider, soon after her fiancé was ambushed and killed by the Israeli army. His name was Mohammed al-Sadi. He was killed while on his way to officially propose.&#160; Huda learned of his murder on the radio.</p>
<p>Samir was the youngest of the boys. Soldiers, who raided the Shalabi family home often, terrified him. He hid under the bed as they destroyed everything in the house, tore his school books and urinated in their olive oil containers. At 13, he left school and, a few years later, he brandished a gun and joined the Resistance, living mostly in the mountains. When the Israeli army killed him, he was one of 17 others marked for death, all fighters with various factions. He was killed, along with a comrade of his, near the valley where Samir spent many of his days playing as a boy and helping his father care for their land.</p>
<p>Samir was an avid horseman, and Hana grew up to love horses, as well. However, she resisted her father’s incessant attempt at persuading her to become a veterinarian. She wanted to study law in Tunisia, a dream that is yet to be fulfilled.</p>
<p>Samir was her best friends. They shared secrets, and just before he marched off to his last battle, he had asked her to make sure that his coffin was covered with flowers, especially red Hanoun, that grew wild all around Burgin. She kept her promise.</p>
<p>Shortly after Samir was killed in 2005, Hana was arrested by the Palestinian Authority who accused her of plotting an attack on Israel to avenge her brother. They interrogated her for many days, and when she denied the accusation, a Palestinian officer slapped her across her face until it grew numb and she fell to the ground.</p>
<p>Later, the Israelis arrested her. They kept her in an underground dungeon and subjected her to months of relentless physical and psychological torture. When this, too, failed, they sentenced her to six months of administrative detention that was renewed several times. After spending years in captivity, she was freed on October 18, 2011, from HaSharon Prison. Her release, and that of hundreds of others, was the outcome of an agreement between Hamas and Israel, after which an Israeli soldier, who was captured by the Resistance years ago, was also set free.</p>
<p>The celebration lasted for months; when it subsided, she was arrested again and thrown in jail. Her latest experience was even more humiliating, details of which are divulged reservedly by Hana. On the day of her second arrest, on February 16, 2012, her jailors were particularly brutal, but she was also exceptionally determined.&#160; The Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot claimed that Hana was plotting to kidnap a solider, but Hana had no patience to engage her interrogators in a discussion. Instead, she went on a hunger strike that lasted for 47 days. Her main demand was her freedom.</p>
<p>In the latter stage of her strike, when death was looming, she opened her eyes in an Israeli hospital where her arms and legs were chained to the bed. She was in Haifa, a discovery that brought a smile on her lips. “This is the land from which my family came,” she said softly as her smile grew wider.&#160; Her declaration was communicated to the guards and, in turn, to the prison authority, which immediately ordered her removal to outside Haifa. Hana had never visited Haifa and, for a fleeing moment, had settled with the joyful idea of dying there.</p>
<p>Following a deal signed under suspicious conditions and involving the PA, she ended her hunger strike in exchange for her freedom, but only to be deported to the Gaza Strip. The agreement stated that Hana was to be repatriated to the West Bank three years later, but she never did, and neither Israel nor the PA honored their side of the agreement.</p>
<p>Hana insists on embracing life, even within the confines of war-torn and besieged Gaza. “If I don’t, the Israelis win. I cannot give them that satisfaction,” she told me. “Resistance is insisting on living and thriving, despite the pain.”</p>
<p>She still dreams of having the opportunity to travel and explore life beyond the familiar horizon of life under siege.</p>
<p>(This article is based on a chapter entitled: Death Note, in my forthcoming book on people’s history of Palestine.)</p> | false | 1 | hana shalabi still dreams opportunity travel explore life beyond familiar horizon life siege throughout hunger strike exactly 47 days hana shalabi never slept consistently number hours first days strike would doze wake sudden fear someone trying hurt first week hunger strike nothing sips water day body simply ceased function normal way instead sleeping would fall state delirium overtaken frenzied hallucination memories persisting future fears coalesced sonata night terror interviewed hana recently series discussions extended hours trying understand compelled risk life obtain conditional freedom gaza present story showcase phenomena hunger strikes form political struggle inside israeli prisons currently 7000 palestinian prisoners held 500 without trial hana born february 7 1982 year palestinian factions driven lebanon refugees sabra shatila camps slaughtered en masse father yahya mother badia finished children final tally ten six females hana somewhere middle najah salam huda wafa zahira samir youngest brothers two years older hana hanas family originally came haifa exiled beautiful port city along hundreds thousands today constitute bulk palestinian refugees relatively brief arduous journey settled village burqin far away safad north adjacent town refugee camp jenin burqin tucked gently near marj ibn amer valley offered shalabis temporary respite otherwise harsh existence relief rudely interrupted hana still child eight years old chewing hearty sandwich zatar eggs boy named mohammed neighborhood dashed towards fast could fell knees whispered last time please help stood motionless finally collapsed large hole back head revealed shot israeli army moments earlier took place first uprising boy one many killed burgin hana joined rebellion collecting rocks boys confronted soldiers raided village almost daily hana 33 speaks memories purity child swept euphoria revolution barely comprehended articulate sense angry death mohammed grew angry rage reflected many people around brother omar joined black panthers whose members sons peasants cheap arab laborers israel met caves deep mountains used hide days descending upon villages masked armed declare strikes mobilize people rebel omar injured nightly skirmish soldiers secret became known everyone including livid father yahya realized constant attempts keep kids trouble failed horribly story omar repeated time among siblings almost involved resistance various capacities huda older sister jailed allegedly attempting stab solider soon fiancé ambushed killed israeli army name mohammed alsadi killed way officially propose160 huda learned murder radio samir youngest boys soldiers raided shalabi family home often terrified hid bed destroyed everything house tore school books urinated olive oil containers 13 left school years later brandished gun joined resistance living mostly mountains israeli army killed one 17 others marked death fighters various factions killed along comrade near valley samir spent many days playing boy helping father care land samir avid horseman hana grew love horses well however resisted fathers incessant attempt persuading become veterinarian wanted study law tunisia dream yet fulfilled samir best friends shared secrets marched last battle asked make sure coffin covered flowers especially red hanoun grew wild around burgin kept promise shortly samir killed 2005 hana arrested palestinian authority accused plotting attack israel avenge brother interrogated many days denied accusation palestinian officer slapped across face grew numb fell ground later israelis arrested kept underground dungeon subjected months relentless physical psychological torture failed sentenced six months administrative detention renewed several times spending years captivity freed october 18 2011 hasharon prison release hundreds others outcome agreement hamas israel israeli soldier captured resistance years ago also set free celebration lasted months subsided arrested thrown jail latest experience even humiliating details divulged reservedly hana day second arrest february 16 2012 jailors particularly brutal also exceptionally determined160 israeli newspaper yediot ahronot claimed hana plotting kidnap solider hana patience engage interrogators discussion instead went hunger strike lasted 47 days main demand freedom latter stage strike death looming opened eyes israeli hospital arms legs chained bed haifa discovery brought smile lips land family came said softly smile grew wider160 declaration communicated guards turn prison authority immediately ordered removal outside haifa hana never visited haifa fleeing moment settled joyful idea dying following deal signed suspicious conditions involving pa ended hunger strike exchange freedom deported gaza strip agreement stated hana repatriated west bank three years later never neither israel pa honored side agreement hana insists embracing life even within confines wartorn besieged gaza dont israelis win give satisfaction told resistance insisting living thriving despite pain still dreams opportunity travel explore life beyond familiar horizon life siege article based chapter entitled death note forthcoming book peoples history palestine | 722 |
<p>A version of this essay appears in&#160;Confessions of a Heretic&#160;by Roger Scruton, which will be published&#160;in the U.K. on March 28, 2016.</p>
<p>In a significant essay entitled “Mourning and Melancholia”, Freud writes of “the work of mourning”, meaning the psychic process whereby a cherished object is finally laid to rest, as it were buried in the unconscious, and the ego liberated from its grip. Until the work of mourning has been accomplished, Freud argues, new life, new loves and new engagement with the world are all difficult if not impossible. This is the explanation of the state that used to be known as melancholia – as he sees it – a kind of willed helplessness in which the world is seen as alien and unmanageable.</p>
<p>I am not, in general, persuaded by Freud’s psychology. But in this matter, it seems to me, he was on the right lines. We lose many things in our lives. But some losses are existential losses. They take away some part of what we are. After such a loss, we are in a new and unfamiliar world, in which the support on which we had depended – perhaps unknowingly – is no longer available. The loss of a parent, especially during one’s early years, is a world-changing experience, and orphans are marked for life by this. The loss of a spouse can be equally traumatic, as is the loss of children, who take with them into the void all the most tender feelings of their parents. Such losses leave us helpless, and even if we find a way of healing the wounds that they make, the scars will remain.</p>
<p>Religions, laws and customs all provide for the ritual mourning of beloved people. But there are no clear precedents for the work of mourning when what is mourned is a nation, a civilisation or a place. And if it is true that Richard Strauss was mourning, in Metamorphosen, the Germany that he had known and which had been destroyed by the Second World War, then there is an added problem that he must certainly have encountered, which is the great difficulty we all have, in mourning what we condemn. The work of mourning, as Freud conceived it, is a work of redemption, in which the lost figure is blessed in the memory of the one he leaves behind. All funeral rites and all elegies for the dead are designed to highlight the virtues and to minimise the vices of the departed person. Mourning is a process of reconciliation, a work of forgiveness, in which the dead person is retrospectively granted the right to die. But what if the departed person cannot be forgiven? What if his vices are an immoveable obstacle to all attempts to accept him? Then mourning becomes impossible.</p>
<p>Germans after the war felt this about their country. The Germany that we know from art, music and literature – the Germany of the Gothic cathedrals and the gingerbread cities, of Dürer and Grünewald, of Luther’s Bible, of Goethe, Schiller, Kant and Hegel, the Germany of the romantic poets and of the greatest continuous musical tradition that the world will ever know – that Germany had been poisoned in people’s thoughts by Hitler. It would have been easier to deal with the memory of the Hitler years if they had been imposed on Germany by some alien power which had sought to obliterate this great nation, as the Mongols obliterated the civilisation centred on Baghdad, or as the Chinese are at this moment obliterating Tibet. But it was not like that. The Nazis proclaimed themselves heirs to German civilisation. Hitler was not just a madman: he was an aesthete and an intellectual, like Stalin and Mao; he emphasised in all his speeches the history and achievements of the German people; he invoked the art, music and philosophy of Germany as justifications for his cause and objects of his pride. And the Germans followed him on his path of conquest, sharing his triumphs and forced very soon to share his disastrous defeat. Although their music was not destroyed by the war, their cities – the greatest cities in Europe – were reduced to rubble, their civilian population exposed to the horrors of blanket bombing and the rapine of the Soviet Army, and the noses of the survivors rubbed in the unspeakable reality of the Holocaust. Their country was destroyed, but it was impossible to mourn it.</p>
<p>Two psychoanalysts, the husband and wife pair Margarete Nielsen and Alexander Mitscherlich, reflected on this situation in a book published in 1967 – Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern – the Impossibility of Mourning. The Germans could not grieve for their dead and at the same time accept the guilt that their dead had incurred. Even the heroic self-sacrifice of the German armies on the Russian front could not be given as a proof of virtue. All were guilty – guilty not only for the insane destruction of their country, but also for the crimes against humanity and civilisation that had been unleashed by the Nazis. The world insisted that the Germans accept their guilt. Hence the world denied them the relief of mourning. Their dead lay unburied in their conscience, like Polynices outside the walls of Thebes. As in the Antigone of Sophocles, piety called for mourning while politics forbade it.</p>
<p>Exactly what were Strauss’s feelings in the matter I do not know. The generally accepted story is that he composed Metamorphosen on hearing of the destruction by bombing of the Munich Hoftheater, where so many of his artistic triumphs had been celebrated. The words “in memoriam” appear in the score at the point where he quotes from the funeral march of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, and some have interpreted this as indicating that the piece is a memorial to Beethoven.</p>
<p>As with all such speculations, I believe we should step back from the composer’s biography and ask ourselves, instead, how we might attach a meaning to this great masterpiece. Nielsen and Mitscherlich were fundamentally right concerning the difficulty that modern Germans find themselves under, when it comes to mourning for their dead. But Strauss’s music invites a more general mourning, and one that we too can share. It is contemporary with another work of mourning by a German artist, the extraordinary novel Dr Faustus by Thomas Mann. Music is the theme of Mann’s novel, which paints the hair-raising portrait of a modern composer who lives under a Faustian pact with the devil, and whose mission is to “take back the 9th Symphony”.</p>
<p>Mann’s work too was written in response to the destruction of the German cities. It is a work of despair; but like Strauss, Mann believed that, even in despair, art can bring a message of reconciliation. By showing the spiritual truth of our times, art redeems that truth, incorporates it into the ever-flowing history of consciousness. We can lose everything; but if we are still conscious of that loss and what it means, then there is something that we have not lost. All is not lost, if art remains, to show that all is lost. That is the message of Dr Faustus, and for people of my generation this message marked out Mann’s novel as the companion piece to Eliot’s Waste Land: those great works of art were invitations to accept that we live at the end of things, and yet can find cause to rejoice in the fact that we know this, and know what it means.</p>
<p>Strauss’s work is a work of music: but it is also about music, in something like the way that Mann’s novel is about music. Mann’s hero tries to remake German music in defiance of itself: his theories (loosely based on those of Schoenberg) involve a rejection of tonality. The idiom of harmony and counterpoint, based on the triad and the scale, is, for Adrian Leverkühn, Mann’s composer hero, an exhausted idiom, incapable of capturing the Mephistophelian negation that has now taken up residence in the heart of our civilisation. Tonality must be defied, if music is still to have a meaning. Strauss, by contrast, defies the defiance. In all his late works he tells us that rumours of the death of tonality are exaggerated. We can mourn our lost civilisation in its own musical language.</p>
<p>Metamorphosen is a tribute to the stringed instruments that emancipated Western music from the human voice. Violins, violas and cellos have the inflections of the human voice without the pollution of speech. They are the voice itself, disembodied, transferred to the imaginary space of music and there endowed with a soul. It is the melodic, not the percussive, aspect of the strings that Strauss exploits: none of the instruments plays pizzicato throughout the piece. The work was initially conceived as a string septet. Later Strauss reworked it for 23 solo instruments, bringing to the fore its contrapuntal character.</p>
<p>This contrapuntal organisation is telling us something, not about music only, but about the nature of our civilisation in general and Ger-many’s contribution to it in particular. If it is not too pompous a way of putting it, Western civilisation is itself a contrapuntal achievement. It arose through the contest and conciliation of many voices, moving freely and independently, but harmonising through law and custom, without the need for any enforced unity or control from above. This fact had been noticed by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, and in particular by Adam Smith in Scotland and Schiller in Germany. Ours is an order arising out of freedom, a form of collective adjustment and conciliation. And it is this that had been jeopardised by the fascist and communist dictatorships of the 20th century, which sought to impose a new and conscripted unity on the people, organised by a single Party under a single command. And, just as regimentation had destroyed the civilising process in Germany, so had it destroyed German music, imposing the artificial order of serialism on what should have been the spontaneous singing of the human voice. In Metamorphosen Strauss was celebrating a lost form of social order, with a contrapuntal texture that recalls the 40-part motet Spem in alium by Thomas Tallis. Polyphony of this complexity always points the listener in a religious direction. And Strauss’s work is no exception. In mourning our civilisation, it tells us, we are also turning towards God. Not that Strauss was a believer: only that he understood the religious need of human beings, and answered to it in his music.</p>
<p>The reference to the stumbling theme of the Eroica slow movement is not the only allusion contained in this piece. The second subject takes off from the lament of King Marke, in Tristan and Isolde, over the faithless Tristan. You can read a lot into this. Tristan and Isolde have been taken far beyond the daylight world of social order, into a darkness from which there is eventually no return. Marke is grieving not only over the loss of his friend and his wife, but over the destruction of everything by a force that erupts uncontrollably into human affairs from another region, the region where death and sacrifice are the ruling principles. Yet his grieving leitmotiv has a supremely human tenderness – it contains an offer of forgiveness, of the kind that only a parent can make, and at the same time a recognition that the two lovers lie beyond the reach of forgiveness, in a world where the voice of duty is silenced, and death reigns supreme. Just such a world was Germany at the end of the Second World War.</p>
<p>Those features are worth noting, I think, since they serve to emphasise the very metaphysical character of Strauss’s lament. Like Thomas Mann, he is reaching for a kind of absolute mourning, one that passes beyond the grief for this or that beloved object, to embrace the loss of everything significant, even the loss of significance itself, as we might put it, the loss of loss. Only this can embrace the enormity of what the Germans had undergone, and the enormity of their own crime in dragging the rest of Europe down with them into the abyss.</p>
<p>For this reason it is impossible to understand this work merely as an elegy. An elegy is a way of accepting the loss of some precious thing. It rejoices in the fact that the precious thing was given. If it is sad, it is with an accepting sadness. An elegy says: this we were given, and it is gone, but we should be grateful for it, and try to live up to its memory. We in England are very familiar with elegiac music. We too suffered loss, but loss of a very different kind, in the First World War, which took away the social order, the pastoral way of life, and the noble aspirations of the English, and dumped us suddenly and brutally in the modern world. Much of our modern music is an invocation of things of which we are bereft. Works like the Cello Concerto of Elgar, the Fifth Symphony of Vaughan Williams, and the Concerto for Double String Orchestra by Tippett, invoke our lost pastoral homeland in a spirit of tender regret. They offer us a manageable sadness, which is also an encouragement. Something of all that remains, they say: something to live up to, material to re-forge and recast in a renewed attempt at living rightly. I hear this in the later works of Vaughan Williams, and especially in his Pilgrim’s Progress. By mourning what we have lost, we also regain it, in another and transmuted form. So the elegy tells us.</p>
<p>I once wrote a book entitled England: an Elegy. I was aware when writing it that I was emphasising the good, not the evil, that my country had stood for. But I felt entitled to do so, not merely because the good in my view outweighed the evil, but also because I was embarking on a legitimate work of mourning, just as Elgar had embarked on such a work in his Cello Concerto. Elegies are attempts at reconciliation and redemption, works of mourning in the sense intended by Freud. Strauss’s Metamorphosen is not, in that sense an elegy. It is a work de profundis, which looks back to what has been lost as the returning traveller looks at the bombed-out remnants of his city, in which not a survivor can be found. It is a work without hope, and without any promise for the future. Yet for all that, it is a great work of art; and one that still speaks to us.</p>
<p>Roger Scruton is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.</p> | false | 1 | version essay appears in160confessions heretic160by roger scruton published160in uk march 28 2016 significant essay entitled mourning melancholia freud writes work mourning meaning psychic process whereby cherished object finally laid rest buried unconscious ego liberated grip work mourning accomplished freud argues new life new loves new engagement world difficult impossible explanation state used known melancholia sees kind willed helplessness world seen alien unmanageable general persuaded freuds psychology matter seems right lines lose many things lives losses existential losses take away part loss new unfamiliar world support depended perhaps unknowingly longer available loss parent especially ones early years worldchanging experience orphans marked life loss spouse equally traumatic loss children take void tender feelings parents losses leave us helpless even find way healing wounds make scars remain religions laws customs provide ritual mourning beloved people clear precedents work mourning mourned nation civilisation place true richard strauss mourning metamorphosen germany known destroyed second world war added problem must certainly encountered great difficulty mourning condemn work mourning freud conceived work redemption lost figure blessed memory one leaves behind funeral rites elegies dead designed highlight virtues minimise vices departed person mourning process reconciliation work forgiveness dead person retrospectively granted right die departed person forgiven vices immoveable obstacle attempts accept mourning becomes impossible germans war felt country germany know art music literature germany gothic cathedrals gingerbread cities dürer grünewald luthers bible goethe schiller kant hegel germany romantic poets greatest continuous musical tradition world ever know germany poisoned peoples thoughts hitler would easier deal memory hitler years imposed germany alien power sought obliterate great nation mongols obliterated civilisation centred baghdad chinese moment obliterating tibet like nazis proclaimed heirs german civilisation hitler madman aesthete intellectual like stalin mao emphasised speeches history achievements german people invoked art music philosophy germany justifications cause objects pride germans followed path conquest sharing triumphs forced soon share disastrous defeat although music destroyed war cities greatest cities europe reduced rubble civilian population exposed horrors blanket bombing rapine soviet army noses survivors rubbed unspeakable reality holocaust country destroyed impossible mourn two psychoanalysts husband wife pair margarete nielsen alexander mitscherlich reflected situation book published 1967 die unfähigkeit zu trauern impossibility mourning germans could grieve dead time accept guilt dead incurred even heroic selfsacrifice german armies russian front could given proof virtue guilty guilty insane destruction country also crimes humanity civilisation unleashed nazis world insisted germans accept guilt hence world denied relief mourning dead lay unburied conscience like polynices outside walls thebes antigone sophocles piety called mourning politics forbade exactly strausss feelings matter know generally accepted story composed metamorphosen hearing destruction bombing munich hoftheater many artistic triumphs celebrated words memoriam appear score point quotes funeral march beethovens eroica symphony interpreted indicating piece memorial beethoven speculations believe step back composers biography ask instead might attach meaning great masterpiece nielsen mitscherlich fundamentally right concerning difficulty modern germans find comes mourning dead strausss music invites general mourning one share contemporary another work mourning german artist extraordinary novel dr faustus thomas mann music theme manns novel paints hairraising portrait modern composer lives faustian pact devil whose mission take back 9th symphony manns work written response destruction german cities work despair like strauss mann believed even despair art bring message reconciliation showing spiritual truth times art redeems truth incorporates everflowing history consciousness lose everything still conscious loss means something lost lost art remains show lost message dr faustus people generation message marked manns novel companion piece eliots waste land great works art invitations accept live end things yet find cause rejoice fact know know means strausss work work music also music something like way manns novel music manns hero tries remake german music defiance theories loosely based schoenberg involve rejection tonality idiom harmony counterpoint based triad scale adrian leverkühn manns composer hero exhausted idiom incapable capturing mephistophelian negation taken residence heart civilisation tonality must defied music still meaning strauss contrast defies defiance late works tells us rumours death tonality exaggerated mourn lost civilisation musical language metamorphosen tribute stringed instruments emancipated western music human voice violins violas cellos inflections human voice without pollution speech voice disembodied transferred imaginary space music endowed soul melodic percussive aspect strings strauss exploits none instruments plays pizzicato throughout piece work initially conceived string septet later strauss reworked 23 solo instruments bringing fore contrapuntal character contrapuntal organisation telling us something music nature civilisation general germanys contribution particular pompous way putting western civilisation contrapuntal achievement arose contest conciliation many voices moving freely independently harmonising law custom without need enforced unity control fact noticed philosophers enlightenment particular adam smith scotland schiller germany order arising freedom form collective adjustment conciliation jeopardised fascist communist dictatorships 20th century sought impose new conscripted unity people organised single party single command regimentation destroyed civilising process germany destroyed german music imposing artificial order serialism spontaneous singing human voice metamorphosen strauss celebrating lost form social order contrapuntal texture recalls 40part motet spem alium thomas tallis polyphony complexity always points listener religious direction strausss work exception mourning civilisation tells us also turning towards god strauss believer understood religious need human beings answered music reference stumbling theme eroica slow movement allusion contained piece second subject takes lament king marke tristan isolde faithless tristan read lot tristan isolde taken far beyond daylight world social order darkness eventually return marke grieving loss friend wife destruction everything force erupts uncontrollably human affairs another region region death sacrifice ruling principles yet grieving leitmotiv supremely human tenderness contains offer forgiveness kind parent make time recognition two lovers lie beyond reach forgiveness world voice duty silenced death reigns supreme world germany end second world war features worth noting think since serve emphasise metaphysical character strausss lament like thomas mann reaching kind absolute mourning one passes beyond grief beloved object embrace loss everything significant even loss significance might put loss loss embrace enormity germans undergone enormity crime dragging rest europe abyss reason impossible understand work merely elegy elegy way accepting loss precious thing rejoices fact precious thing given sad accepting sadness elegy says given gone grateful try live memory england familiar elegiac music suffered loss loss different kind first world war took away social order pastoral way life noble aspirations english dumped us suddenly brutally modern world much modern music invocation things bereft works like cello concerto elgar fifth symphony vaughan williams concerto double string orchestra tippett invoke lost pastoral homeland spirit tender regret offer us manageable sadness also encouragement something remains say something live material reforge recast renewed attempt living rightly hear later works vaughan williams especially pilgrims progress mourning lost also regain another transmuted form elegy tells us wrote book entitled england elegy aware writing emphasising good evil country stood felt entitled merely good view outweighed evil also embarking legitimate work mourning elgar embarked work cello concerto elegies attempts reconciliation redemption works mourning sense intended freud strausss metamorphosen sense elegy work de profundis looks back lost returning traveller looks bombedout remnants city survivor found work without hope without promise future yet great work art one still speaks us roger scruton senior fellow ethics public policy center | 1,160 |
<p>It will come as a surprise to most Americans that President Obama wants to change the shape of our homes and neighborhoods. So how does Obama hope to make us live? The short answer is, “like sardines.” At least that what the libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation&#160; <a href="https://www.pacificlegal.org/Release/Lawsuit-says-Plan-Bay-Areas-drafters-wore-blinders" type="external">said</a>&#160;as it&#160; <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-Citizens-sues-Plan-Bay-Area-4710383.php" type="external">filed</a>&#160;a lawsuit last week against the Obama-supported bureaucrats who created “Plan Bay Area,” an ambitious blueprint to block the creation of new suburbs and force the next 30 years of development in the nine-county San Francisco metropolitan region into a few hyper-dense, Manhattan-style enclaves.</p>
<p>The bureaucratic lingo for this brand of social engineering is TOD, “transit oriented development.” That’s short for letting suburban highways deteriorate while squeezing as many apartments and businesses as possible into tiny neighborhoods around subway stations, so people stop using their cars. With plenty of help from the Obama administration, ambitious plans to impose TOD are about to leap from the Bay Area to Minneapolis-St. Paul. Meanwhile, the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s&#160; <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/08/08/obama-administration-using-housing-department-to-compel-diversity-in/" type="external">new “fair housing” rule</a>&#160;is laying the groundwork for the nationalization of TOD.</p>
<p>The new lawsuit slams TOD as a bunch of “draconian development prescriptions” designed to “micro-manage people’s lifestyle choices.” There is a way forward, says the Pacific Legal Foundation, “without curtailing people’s freedom to live in detached homes in suburban and rural areas with lawns and gardens.” Not if the Obama administration has anything to say about it.</p>
<p>I laid out the history, philosophy, and strategy behind Obama’s second-term assault on America’s suburbs in&#160; <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Spreading-Wealth-Robbing-Suburbs-Cities/dp/1595230920/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1358868447&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=" type="external">Spreading the Wealth</a>, and explained&#160; <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/354734/regionalism-obamas-quiet-anti-suburban-revolution-stanley-kurtz" type="external">last month</a>&#160;how that plan was advancing in San Francisco. Now let’s have a look at the Twin Cities, where TOD is about to go big in the form of a-soon-to-be-released, Obama-supported regional plan that provides an excellent preview of what America as a whole is in for.</p>
<p>Minnesota conservative commentator&#160; <a href="http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentaries/218173402.html" type="external">Katherine Kersten recently described</a>&#160;the emerging outlines of Thrive MSP 2040, a plan to be released this fall by Minneapolis-St. Paul’s “Met Council,” an unelected body that “regionalists” want to turn into a kind of super-government, capable of overriding the wishes of formerly-independent suburbs on issues like zoning, transportation, and education. Kersten warns that the Met Council is planning to withhold the local, state, and federal funding it controls from municipalities that refuse to bow to its plan to densify urban areas at the expense of suburbs. Available documents validate Kersten’s warnings, and provide a close-up view of the Obama administration’s strategy for transforming the way we live.</p>
<p>From the Obama administration’s perspective, Minneapolis offers an opportunity to orchestrate a veritable symphony of bureaucratic coercion. That’s because “regionalism”– the drive to replace independent suburban governments with an overarching metropolitan authority–has a long history in Minnesota. A relatively powerful regional body, the Met Council, has existed there for decades. Similarly, the regionalist dream of “tax-base sharing,” in which the bulk of suburbs are forced to subsidize cities (and a few less-well-off “inner-ring” suburbs) has been in place in the Twin Cities for years. Up to now, however, Twin-City TOD policies have been weak.</p>
<p>By pressing the Met Council to forcibly densify the region, the Obama administration can hit Minnesota suburbs with a double whammy–redirecting both development and governing authority toward urban centers. Minnesota’s full-spectrum regionalist model can then be pressed on the country at large.</p>
<p>Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development has awarded a $5 million “Regional Planning Grant” to Minnesota’s Met Council. That grant has been instrumental in establishing “ <a href="http://www.corridorsofopportunity.org/" type="external">Corridors of Opportunity</a>,” a program dedicated to turbo-charging the Met Council’s push for dense development in the Twin Cities.</p>
<p>While this tangle of bureaucratic structures and jargon is confusing, the bottom line is straightforward. The Obama administration is funding a program dedicated to pressing the next thirty years of development in the Twin-Cities region into tiny neighborhoods around train stations. The same federally-funded program is handing the Met Council a toolkit for forcing dense development on unwilling local governments. And the same toolkit the administration is using to press TOD (dense, “transit oriented development”) on Minnesota is being built into the administration’s newly-issued national “fair housing” rule.</p>
<p>You can see the process playing out in the Met Council’s “ <a href="http://metrocouncil.org/getattachment/050f7635-d434-4deb-b1fa-24210b64a0e9/.aspx" type="external">TOD Strategic Action Plan</a>,” issued in June of 2013. This document was produced by the Met Council unit set up to incorporate the Obama-administration grant, and&#160; <a href="http://councilmeetings.metc.state.mn.us/community_dev/2012/080612/info%202%20Allison%20Bell%20August%206%202012_v5.pdf" type="external">embodies its influence</a>. The document also serves as a preview of the thirty-year regional plan slated to be released by the Met Council this fall.</p>
<p>Running beneath the TOD Strategic Action Plan’s 84 pages of mind-numbing bureaucratic prose is an unmistakable preoccupation with coercion. The authors clearly realize that the public doesn’t like dense development. Yet these unelected bureaucrats are determined to force it on an unwilling region. In an uncharacteristically blunt passage, the bureaucrats are exhorted to “be brave,” to stop making non-binding development recommendations and play hardball instead. Minnesota’s Met Council is out to impose TOD by force.</p>
<p>How? By holding back local, state, and federal monies from municipalities that refuse to knuckle-under and zone for TOD. The report holds up the San Francisco Bay Area as a model. There federal money to repair roads and bridges is held back from jurisdictions that refuse to go along with TOD. In effect, the Obama administration’s grant is pressing the San Francisco model on the Twin Cities, and will soon be in a position to do the same to the rest of the country.</p>
<p>TOD takes time. According to the report, dense development comes in stages. At first, for example, there may be plenty of parking near TOD-style subway stops. Nothing, at that point, would seem unusual to the public. In the next phase of TOD, however, the parking lots get plowed under and replaced with still more stack-and-pack housing, leaving residents and visitors with few options besides public transportation. At this point, the report notes, the “public sector” will need to turn “aggressive,” to ensure that parking lots disappear while density grows.</p>
<p>Complaints about “too much parking” run through this report and related documents. For example, regionalist bureaucrats tout an&#160; <a href="http://www.startribune.com/local/minneapolis/163640936.html" type="external">article</a>&#160;detailing efforts to double the population of downtown Minneapolis over the next decade by building on existing parking lots. Instead of working to create&#160; <a href="http://www.joelkotkin.com/content/00785-childless-city" type="external">family-friendly neighborhoods</a>&#160;of detached homes with yards, safe streets, and good schools within city boundaries, the Met Council is intent on building a hyper-dense downtown playground for single professionals and boomer empty-nesters. Will that push even more families with young children out of the city?</p>
<p>The TOD Strategic Action Plan insists that nearly all of the Met Council’s money needs to be poured into the TOD zones, “even if this results in geographic inequity in the distribution of resources.” In other words, money that in the past might have maintained suburban commuter highways will now be channeled into TOD.</p>
<p>So can we at least be confident that poor and minority communities will benefit from all of the resources flowing into TOD? Not at all. Even the pro-regionalist, leftist community organizers who back TOD (and receive funding from the federal grant)&#160; <a href="http://www.healthimpactproject.org/resources/body/Healthy-Corridor-Technical-Report.pdf" type="external">worry</a>&#160;that dense development will price poor and minority residents out of their homes and businesses. That’s why these regionalists are demanding even more bureaucratic micro-management of TOD. Some local residents will get taxpayer-subsidized low-income housing in TOD. Yet the likelihood that dense urban development will raise rents, harm existing minority-owned businesses, drive out the jobs on which many minorities rely, and largely displace their communities, is high. A net gain from TOD for the less-well-off residents of the Twin Cities is far from assured.</p>
<p>With Minnesota a prime regionalist outpost, the Met Council is required by law to submit a 30-year regional plan to the state. Now, however, that plan will also be a federal “deliverable” under terms of the Obama administration’s grant. And the Obama administration requires a second crucial deliverable from the Met Council, a “Fair Housing and Equity Assessment” (FHEA). The FHEA, which maps where poor and minority residents of the Minneapolis-St. Paul region live in relation to things like public transportation and business districts, bears a strong resemblance to the “Assessment of Fair Housing” (AFH), that the Obama administration’s controversial new “fair housing” regulation is now requiring of every municipality accepting federal housing aid.</p>
<p>The fair housing mapping tool effectively creates the density requirements that are forcing government-imposed TOD into the Twin City’s 30-year regional plan. That is, by redefining “fair housing” as proximity to public transportation and business centers, this mapping tool amounts to a requirement that grant recipients build TOD, or risk federal aid cutoffs and lawsuits.</p>
<p>And the mapping process imposed on Minnesota’s Met Council by its federal planning grant is about to be forced on nearly every municipality in the country by the Obama administration’s sweeping new “fair housing” rule. In other words, the Obama administration is trying to push hyper-dense TOD on everyone now, not just liberal-leaning regions like the Bay Area and the Twin Cities that apply for special planning grants. The same density-creating “fairness maps” now required of Minneapolis-St. Paul’s regional planners will soon have to be produced by cities, towns, and suburbs across the country.</p>
<p>San Francisco and Minneapolis are the model the rest of us will shortly be pressed to follow. So get to know TOD. It’s how Obama wants you to live.</p>
<p>Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.</p> | false | 1 | come surprise americans president obama wants change shape homes neighborhoods obama hope make us live short answer like sardines least libertarian pacific legal foundation160 said160as it160 filed160a lawsuit last week obamasupported bureaucrats created plan bay area ambitious blueprint block creation new suburbs force next 30 years development ninecounty san francisco metropolitan region hyperdense manhattanstyle enclaves bureaucratic lingo brand social engineering tod transit oriented development thats short letting suburban highways deteriorate squeezing many apartments businesses possible tiny neighborhoods around subway stations people stop using cars plenty help obama administration ambitious plans impose tod leap bay area minneapolisst paul meanwhile department housing urban developments160 new fair housing rule160is laying groundwork nationalization tod new lawsuit slams tod bunch draconian development prescriptions designed micromanage peoples lifestyle choices way forward says pacific legal foundation without curtailing peoples freedom live detached homes suburban rural areas lawns gardens obama administration anything say laid history philosophy strategy behind obamas secondterm assault americas suburbs in160 spreading wealth explained160 last month160how plan advancing san francisco lets look twin cities tod go big form asoontobereleased obamasupported regional plan provides excellent preview america whole minnesota conservative commentator160 katherine kersten recently described160the emerging outlines thrive msp 2040 plan released fall minneapolisst pauls met council unelected body regionalists want turn kind supergovernment capable overriding wishes formerlyindependent suburbs issues like zoning transportation education kersten warns met council planning withhold local state federal funding controls municipalities refuse bow plan densify urban areas expense suburbs available documents validate kerstens warnings provide closeup view obama administrations strategy transforming way live obama administrations perspective minneapolis offers opportunity orchestrate veritable symphony bureaucratic coercion thats regionalism drive replace independent suburban governments overarching metropolitan authorityhas long history minnesota relatively powerful regional body met council existed decades similarly regionalist dream taxbase sharing bulk suburbs forced subsidize cities lesswelloff innerring suburbs place twin cities years however twincity tod policies weak pressing met council forcibly densify region obama administration hit minnesota suburbs double whammyredirecting development governing authority toward urban centers minnesotas fullspectrum regionalist model pressed country large obamas department housing urban development awarded 5 million regional planning grant minnesotas met council grant instrumental establishing corridors opportunity program dedicated turbocharging met councils push dense development twin cities tangle bureaucratic structures jargon confusing bottom line straightforward obama administration funding program dedicated pressing next thirty years development twincities region tiny neighborhoods around train stations federallyfunded program handing met council toolkit forcing dense development unwilling local governments toolkit administration using press tod dense transit oriented development minnesota built administrations newlyissued national fair housing rule see process playing met councils tod strategic action plan issued june 2013 document produced met council unit set incorporate obamaadministration grant and160 embodies influence document also serves preview thirtyyear regional plan slated released met council fall running beneath tod strategic action plans 84 pages mindnumbing bureaucratic prose unmistakable preoccupation coercion authors clearly realize public doesnt like dense development yet unelected bureaucrats determined force unwilling region uncharacteristically blunt passage bureaucrats exhorted brave stop making nonbinding development recommendations play hardball instead minnesotas met council impose tod force holding back local state federal monies municipalities refuse knuckleunder zone tod report holds san francisco bay area model federal money repair roads bridges held back jurisdictions refuse go along tod effect obama administrations grant pressing san francisco model twin cities soon position rest country tod takes time according report dense development comes stages first example may plenty parking near todstyle subway stops nothing point would seem unusual public next phase tod however parking lots get plowed replaced still stackandpack housing leaving residents visitors options besides public transportation point report notes public sector need turn aggressive ensure parking lots disappear density grows complaints much parking run report related documents example regionalist bureaucrats tout an160 article160detailing efforts double population downtown minneapolis next decade building existing parking lots instead working create160 familyfriendly neighborhoods160of detached homes yards safe streets good schools within city boundaries met council intent building hyperdense downtown playground single professionals boomer emptynesters push even families young children city tod strategic action plan insists nearly met councils money needs poured tod zones even results geographic inequity distribution resources words money past might maintained suburban commuter highways channeled tod least confident poor minority communities benefit resources flowing tod even proregionalist leftist community organizers back tod receive funding federal grant160 worry160that dense development price poor minority residents homes businesses thats regionalists demanding even bureaucratic micromanagement tod local residents get taxpayersubsidized lowincome housing tod yet likelihood dense urban development raise rents harm existing minorityowned businesses drive jobs many minorities rely largely displace communities high net gain tod lesswelloff residents twin cities far assured minnesota prime regionalist outpost met council required law submit 30year regional plan state however plan also federal deliverable terms obama administrations grant obama administration requires second crucial deliverable met council fair housing equity assessment fhea fhea maps poor minority residents minneapolisst paul region live relation things like public transportation business districts bears strong resemblance assessment fair housing afh obama administrations controversial new fair housing regulation requiring every municipality accepting federal housing aid fair housing mapping tool effectively creates density requirements forcing governmentimposed tod twin citys 30year regional plan redefining fair housing proximity public transportation business centers mapping tool amounts requirement grant recipients build tod risk federal aid cutoffs lawsuits mapping process imposed minnesotas met council federal planning grant forced nearly every municipality country obama administrations sweeping new fair housing rule words obama administration trying push hyperdense tod everyone liberalleaning regions like bay area twin cities apply special planning grants densitycreating fairness maps required minneapolisst pauls regional planners soon produced cities towns suburbs across country san francisco minneapolis model rest us shortly pressed follow get know tod obama wants live stanley kurtz senior fellow ethics public policy center | 945 |
<p>Last month, the Republican-controlled <a href="wjla.com/news/nation-world/how-will-the-internet-change-after-the-fcc-repeal-of-net-neutrality" type="external">Federal Communications Commission voted 3 to 2</a> to overturn a 2015 rule on net neutrality and now state and federal elected officials are working to codify what they see as the founding principle of the internet, that all traffic is created equal.</p>
<p>Currently, all 49 Senate Democrats and one Republican have put their support behind a resolution to restore the net neutrality rules and regulations implemented by President Barack Obama's FCC. They only need one more Republican to join them in order to overturn the December decision and trigger a broader debate on maintaining a free and open internet.</p>
<p>"There's an old saying: If it's not broke, don't fix it," said Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, the sponsor of the resolution. "The extent to which there is a problem [with the 2015 rule], it still has not been articulated in a way that is backed by evidence."</p>
<p>Under the 2015 rule, the FCC addressed <a href="ktvl.com/news/nation-world/how-will-the-internet-change-after-the-fcc-repeal-of-net-neutrality" type="external">three critical elements of net neutrality</a>, creating "bright line" rules prohibiting content blocking, throttling users internet speeds and creating internet "fast-lanes," that some users could pay for to get content to their audience faster than a competitor.</p>
<p>Markey explained, that until the <a href="abc6onyourside.com/news/nation-world/how-will-the-internet-change-after-the-fcc-repeal-of-net-neutrality" type="external">FCC overturned the rule in December</a>, a small internet-based competitor or individual user had "unfettered access to the internet. The broadband company cannot discriminate against you, make you pay more, slow down your service, or bock your service in an arbitrary way."</p>
<p>"The intent of the amendment is to have a debate on that," he said.</p>
<p>In the public sphere, that debate caught fire in the months leading up to December FCC vote. One side argued that repealing net neutrality would give internet service providers unfair leverage over consumers and internet-based companies, that ISPs could block or degrade access to content, "throttle" internet speed, and charge content providers a fee (paid prioritization) to use internet "fast lanes."</p>
<p>On the other side, it was said that the new rule would restore the " <a href="ksnv.com/news/nation-world/how-will-the-internet-change-after-the-fcc-repeal-of-net-neutrality" type="external">light-touch</a>" regulatory environment that existed before 2015, and that in turn would spur investment in new broadband infrastructure and create greater competition in a highly consolidated marketplace of internet service providers.</p>
<p>On the whole, support for the broad principles of a free and fair internet cut across party lines. According to one recent survey by the University of Maryland Program for Public Consultation, 83 percent of respondents were against the FCC decision to repeal net neutrality rules, and 75 percent of those polled were Republican.</p>
<p>Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the sole Republican supporting the CRA resolution, said she hopes more members of her party support the CRA resolution, noting that while the Obama-era rules are not perfect, throwing them out completely is "anti-consumer."</p>
<p>The rule change by the Trump FCC, "would allow an internet service provider to favor certain content over others, to block certain content or slow it down," she argued. "And I don't think that's what the internet is supposed to be all about."</p>
<p>A Democratic supporter of the resolution noted on Thursday that the bill is "gaining momentum." But the partisan atmosphere in Washington threatens to disrupt what could be a bipartisan issue.</p>
<p>Sen. Markey explained, "The extent to which it was a Republican FCC that repealed those laws, I think it masks a lot of potential Republican support."</p>
<p>If Senate Democrats are able to pull off a vote to restore the previous net neutrality framework, it will be a short-lived victory.</p>
<p>According to Republican Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the CRA resolution "is sort of a shiny object for Democrats to shoot at, but it doesn't get them a result." In other words, it may pass the Senate, but it won't pass the Republican-controlled House and it won't be signed into law by President Donald Trump.</p>
<p>"The best way to get a result, if you want to address the issue," Thune added, "is through legislation."</p>
<p>That was the approach Thune and a number of others initially proposed in 2015 when the Obama FCC was preparing its rules. Thune <a href="https://www.commerce.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2015/1/congressional-leaders-unveil-draft-legislation-ensuring-consumer-protections-and-innovative-internet" type="external">crafted a bill that would have banned blocking, throttling and paid prioritization</a>. Rather than "heavy-handed and open-ended regulations that stifle the Internet," Thune argued for "permanent legislation" and "clear enduring rules."</p>
<p>According to one study cited by FCC chairman Rajit Pai, there is evidence that the regulations did stifle the growth of the internet during the two years it was in effect. <a href="https://www.ustelecom.org/blog/broadband-investment-dropped-2016" type="external">USTelecom</a>, a lobbying group representing the telecommunications industry, reported in October that broadband companies reduced their investment in new infrastructure by $2.4 billion between 2014 and 2016.</p>
<p>"Frankly, that's bad," Rep. Steve Stivers of Ohio said, noting that was the first time in the history of the internet, outside of the recession, that investment in broadband has declined.</p>
<p>Stivers is one of the sponsors of a bill he believes will promote infrastructure investments, preserve the principles of net neutrality and could even earn bipartisan support.</p>
<p>"I think our bill keeps a free and open internet that also allows for big investments in infrastructure," he explained, adding that with the old regulations, the internet "could die under its own weight the way a lot of our other infrastructure is."</p>
<p>The Open Internet Preservation Act, "enshrines" into law prohibitions against blocking and throttling, the congressman noted. However, it allows <a href="https://sinclairstoryline.com/news/nation-world/how-will-the-internet-change-after-the-fcc-repeal-of-net-neutrality" type="external">paid prioritization</a>, the practice that was banned under the 2015 FCC rule.</p>
<p>"Paid prioritization can bring some huge benefits to consumers," Stivers argued. "It's kind of like everything else, people who want a Cadillac pay for a Cadillac, people who don't might get a Hyundai."</p>
<p>So far, the Open Internet Preservation Act doesn't have a single Democrat supporting it. Thune has no plans to restart a conversation with his Democratic colleagues about a legislative fix. And Markey remains one vote short in the Senate and dozens of votes short in the House.</p>
<p>In the likely event Congress remains locked in a stalemate, some believe the fate of the internet will be decided in the courts.</p>
<p>This week, <a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/369473283/State-Attorneys-General-File-Net-Neutrality-Complaint#from_embed" type="external">21 state attorneys general and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit</a> to block the FCC from rolling back the old net neutrality rules.</p>
<p>Led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, the suit claims the latest FCC repeal is "arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion."</p>
<p>Sen. Markey believes they have a strong standing in the court. He is filing an amicus brief in the suit, along with more than a dozen other Democratic lawmakers.</p>
<p>The FCC's reasons for overturning the Obama-era rules, Markey said, "will not, we think, stand scrutiny at the federal courts."</p>
<p>Roslyn Layton, an American Enterprise Institute technology policy expert who served on the Trump FCC transition team, described the lawsuit as a "political PR stunt."</p>
<p>She explained that while there are problems with the way the current U.S. law deals with internet service providers, the FCC is within its jurisdiction to repeal the 2015 rule. The states, however, simply don't have the authority to supersede federal regulatory authorities and "regulate the internet" themselves.</p>
<p>At the same time, Layton argued that the "doomsday scenario" that the states and others say will emerge as a result of the <a href="wjla.com/news/nation-world/how-will-the-internet-change-after-the-fcc-repeal-of-net-neutrality" type="external">December FCC repeal vote</a>, is not likely to occur.</p>
<p>"The idea that somehow there's no oversight or no enforcement [against throttling or blocking], that's nonsense," Layton said. "Now we have four cops on the beat."</p>
<p>Today, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice and state attorneys general all have the authority to protect consumers and prevent net neutrality abuses. That includes FCC transparency requirements, FTC anti-trust protections and other measures to prevent unfair and deceptive practices.</p>
<p>While the side arguing to preserve the 2015 net neutrality rule has pointed to the powerful ISP lobbying interests, like Verizon, AT&amp;T, Comcast and others, who may threaten consumers, Layton believes the argument is skewed. What the supporters of the 2015 rule have failed to point out are the powerful lobbying interests representing the companies that use the majority of internet bandwidth.</p>
<p>Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, Hulu, "these are the companies that use a lot of bandwidth, they take up <a href="https://venturebeat.com/2015/12/07/streaming-services-now-account-for-over-70-of-peak-traffic-in-north-america-netflix-dominates-with-37/" type="external">70 to 80 percent of all the traffic</a>...and they don't pay a penny," she said. Instead, the costs of the heavy bandwidth users are passed on to consumers by the ISPs as they expand capacity.</p>
<p>"Right now Amazon pays zero, you pay 100 percent," she continued. "What net neutrality is is price control that says Amazon can only pay zero and you have to pay 100 percent."</p>
<p>At the beginning of the year, the Internet Association, which represents dozens of large tech companies from Amazon and Spotify to Twitter and Netflix, announced its plans to join a lawsuit against the latest FCC rule.</p>
<p>The association issued a statement saying it "intends to act as an intervenor in judicial action against this order" and will continue to push lawmakers for "strong, enforceable net neutrality protections through a legislative solution."</p> | false | 1 | last month republicancontrolled federal communications commission voted 3 2 overturn 2015 rule net neutrality state federal elected officials working codify see founding principle internet traffic created equal currently 49 senate democrats one republican put support behind resolution restore net neutrality rules regulations implemented president barack obamas fcc need one republican join order overturn december decision trigger broader debate maintaining free open internet theres old saying broke dont fix said massachusetts sen ed markey sponsor resolution extent problem 2015 rule still articulated way backed evidence 2015 rule fcc addressed three critical elements net neutrality creating bright line rules prohibiting content blocking throttling users internet speeds creating internet fastlanes users could pay get content audience faster competitor markey explained fcc overturned rule december small internetbased competitor individual user unfettered access internet broadband company discriminate make pay slow service bock service arbitrary way intent amendment debate said public sphere debate caught fire months leading december fcc vote one side argued repealing net neutrality would give internet service providers unfair leverage consumers internetbased companies isps could block degrade access content throttle internet speed charge content providers fee paid prioritization use internet fast lanes side said new rule would restore lighttouch regulatory environment existed 2015 turn would spur investment new broadband infrastructure create greater competition highly consolidated marketplace internet service providers whole support broad principles free fair internet cut across party lines according one recent survey university maryland program public consultation 83 percent respondents fcc decision repeal net neutrality rules 75 percent polled republican sen susan collins maine sole republican supporting cra resolution said hopes members party support cra resolution noting obamaera rules perfect throwing completely anticonsumer rule change trump fcc would allow internet service provider favor certain content others block certain content slow argued dont think thats internet supposed democratic supporter resolution noted thursday bill gaining momentum partisan atmosphere washington threatens disrupt could bipartisan issue sen markey explained extent republican fcc repealed laws think masks lot potential republican support senate democrats able pull vote restore previous net neutrality framework shortlived victory according republican sen john thune south dakota cra resolution sort shiny object democrats shoot doesnt get result words may pass senate wont pass republicancontrolled house wont signed law president donald trump best way get result want address issue thune added legislation approach thune number others initially proposed 2015 obama fcc preparing rules thune crafted bill would banned blocking throttling paid prioritization rather heavyhanded openended regulations stifle internet thune argued permanent legislation clear enduring rules according one study cited fcc chairman rajit pai evidence regulations stifle growth internet two years effect ustelecom lobbying group representing telecommunications industry reported october broadband companies reduced investment new infrastructure 24 billion 2014 2016 frankly thats bad rep steve stivers ohio said noting first time history internet outside recession investment broadband declined stivers one sponsors bill believes promote infrastructure investments preserve principles net neutrality could even earn bipartisan support think bill keeps free open internet also allows big investments infrastructure explained adding old regulations internet could die weight way lot infrastructure open internet preservation act enshrines law prohibitions blocking throttling congressman noted however allows paid prioritization practice banned 2015 fcc rule paid prioritization bring huge benefits consumers stivers argued kind like everything else people want cadillac pay cadillac people dont might get hyundai far open internet preservation act doesnt single democrat supporting thune plans restart conversation democratic colleagues legislative fix markey remains one vote short senate dozens votes short house likely event congress remains locked stalemate believe fate internet decided courts week 21 state attorneys general district columbia filed lawsuit block fcc rolling back old net neutrality rules led new york attorney general eric schneiderman suit claims latest fcc repeal arbitrary capricious abuse discretion sen markey believes strong standing court filing amicus brief suit along dozen democratic lawmakers fccs reasons overturning obamaera rules markey said think stand scrutiny federal courts roslyn layton american enterprise institute technology policy expert served trump fcc transition team described lawsuit political pr stunt explained problems way current us law deals internet service providers fcc within jurisdiction repeal 2015 rule states however simply dont authority supersede federal regulatory authorities regulate internet time layton argued doomsday scenario states others say emerge result december fcc repeal vote likely occur idea somehow theres oversight enforcement throttling blocking thats nonsense layton said four cops beat today federal communications commission federal trade commission department justice state attorneys general authority protect consumers prevent net neutrality abuses includes fcc transparency requirements ftc antitrust protections measures prevent unfair deceptive practices side arguing preserve 2015 net neutrality rule pointed powerful isp lobbying interests like verizon atampt comcast others may threaten consumers layton believes argument skewed supporters 2015 rule failed point powerful lobbying interests representing companies use majority internet bandwidth netflix amazon youtube hulu companies use lot bandwidth take 70 80 percent trafficand dont pay penny said instead costs heavy bandwidth users passed consumers isps expand capacity right amazon pays zero pay 100 percent continued net neutrality price control says amazon pay zero pay 100 percent beginning year internet association represents dozens large tech companies amazon spotify twitter netflix announced plans join lawsuit latest fcc rule association issued statement saying intends act intervenor judicial action order continue push lawmakers strong enforceable net neutrality protections legislative solution | 871 |
<p />
<p>The recent developments in Ukraine came about in the midst of the ongoing Winter Olympics in the Russian Black Sea resort city of Sochi. As a result of those developments, the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who is a Russophile politician, disgracefully fled from the presidential palace in the capital Kiev and has sought refuge in a yet unknown location. The only thing that he did was to post a short video footage in which Yanukovych claimed that he is still the legitimate president of Ukraine.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the Russian President Vladimir Putin was busy watching the games in Sochi and had less time to totally focus on Ukraine’s developments. He even left the duty of announcing Russia’s overall views on these developments to his prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, who in turn, took part in a press conference and described political developments in Ukraine as an ‘armed insurgency’ and ‘illegitimate’.</p>
<p>Regardless of the description used to explain the country’s developments, there is no doubt that Russia considers them as extremely detrimental to its interests as they will potentially pave the way for the West to increase its influence in a geopolitically sensitive part of Moscow’s sphere of influence.</p>
<p>A strong presumption about Russia’s stance on Ukraine’s developments is that the Russians have not remained idle in the meantime and have been working out an effective strategy in order to reduce the geopolitical costs of what is going on in this East European country for Moscow. The past experiences in Chechnya and Georgia, and the current experience in Syria has shown that when they find themselves faced with a major geopolitical threat, Russians are not manipulated by the Western countries’ political frown or smile.</p>
<p>On the other hand, Russia’s passivity in Ukraine and its indifference toward the fate of Russian people living in that country will deal a drastic blow to the legitimacy of Putin inside Russia. It should not be forgotten that the main reason which prompted the Russian people to vote for Putin in three presidential elections was his success in the revival of the past grandeur of Slavic people. Therefore, Putin is very sensitive about this issue.</p>
<p>The question that has occupied observers of Ukraine’s developments is what cards are available to Moscow to play vis-à-vis the ongoing developments in Ukraine?</p>
<p>A review of the available evidence and also analysis of remarks made by Russian prime minister and its foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, about the interim government in Ukraine, shows that Moscow has no plan to get along with the new Ukrainian government. Therefore, other alternatives should be taken into consideration. It seems that in view of Putin’s character and the overall direction in which the Russian foreign policy moves in the “near abroad,” there are three options available to Moscow with regard to developments in Ukraine:</p>
<p>1. Offering military support for Yanukovych and restoring the past situation to Ukraine.</p>
<p>This option has been getting momentum after he apparently has been given sanctuary by the Russian authorities as well as were allowed a statement on his behalf to be read out on Russian TV and distributed by all Russia’s main news agencies in February 27, 2014, in which he officially declares himself still president of Ukraine and denounces the new government in Kiev as “extremist” and the parliament as illegitimate.</p>
<p>Although such a measure will relatively change the situation in Ukraine to Russia’s benefit, it will have negative consequences as well. On the one hand, due to West’s support for new Ukrainian government, the country may be pushed toward an all-out civil war. The West may even form a so-called Ukraine liberation army in order to fight the Russian forces, which will face the leaders in Kremlin with another experience like what they already witnessed in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Of course, due to the possibility of Ukraine’s crisis spilling over into European countries, such a turn of events will be also costly for the West. On the other hand, this measure may interrupt cooperation between Russia and the West in various fields and also cause Putin’s main foreign policy strategy, which is rivalry combined with cooperation with the West, to grind to failure. Such an outcome would be very costly for both sides of the conflict.</p>
<p>2. Disintegration of Ukraine.</p>
<p>Given the fact that the people living in eastern part of Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula are mostly of Russian origin and also since the lion’s share of Ukraine’s industries and economic potentials are located in this region, Russia may be willing to see a divided Ukraine in which the less developed part will be given to the West.</p>
<p>We can see early sign of this issue by occupation of the governmental buildings by pro-Russian unidentified armed men in Simferopol, who hoisted a Russian flag from the roof. In that case, Russia will be able to flaunt the power of the Russian part of the country at people living in the Commonwealth of Independent States and remind them of possible costs of inattention to Russian population in those countries.</p>
<p>The division of Ukraine will also put Russia’s mind at ease about the strategic marine base in Crimea for a long time. Of course, the disintegration of Ukraine should take place in such a way that the eastern part of the country would have still direct access to Eastern Europe for the transfer of Russian gas to European countries. The main problem with the disintegration of Ukraine is that few countries will be possibly ready to recognize the Eastern Ukraine and, as a result, the new country would face a crisis of international legitimacy.</p>
<p>3. Establishment of a new interim government in Ukraine.</p>
<p>This third option will see an end to the interim government of Alexander Turchinov through international mediation. Subsequently, and through the agreement of Russia, a new interim government will be formed supported by all parties involved in the conflict, which would especially take into account the concerns of Russia. In view of the realities on the ground, this seems to be an unlikely option. However, the course of developments may force the conflicting parties to move in that direction because it will be also a face-saving option for all parties in Ukraine crisis.</p>
<p>Regardless of which one of the above options will finally take place, the reality that should be taken into consideration is that Russia will certainly not remain indifferent toward what is going on in Ukraine. Just this morning (February 27), the Russian foreign ministry issued a new warning that it would “strongly and uncompromisingly” defend the rights of its compatriots and alongside the Russian army and fighter jets now on combat alert indicates that, if diplomacy fails, Moscow will use its iron fist to respond to the country’s developments.</p> | false | 1 | recent developments ukraine came midst ongoing winter olympics russian black sea resort city sochi result developments ukrainian president viktor yanukovych russophile politician disgracefully fled presidential palace capital kiev sought refuge yet unknown location thing post short video footage yanukovych claimed still legitimate president ukraine hand russian president vladimir putin busy watching games sochi less time totally focus ukraines developments even left duty announcing russias overall views developments prime minister dmitry medvedev turn took part press conference described political developments ukraine armed insurgency illegitimate regardless description used explain countrys developments doubt russia considers extremely detrimental interests potentially pave way west increase influence geopolitically sensitive part moscows sphere influence strong presumption russias stance ukraines developments russians remained idle meantime working effective strategy order reduce geopolitical costs going east european country moscow past experiences chechnya georgia current experience syria shown find faced major geopolitical threat russians manipulated western countries political frown smile hand russias passivity ukraine indifference toward fate russian people living country deal drastic blow legitimacy putin inside russia forgotten main reason prompted russian people vote putin three presidential elections success revival past grandeur slavic people therefore putin sensitive issue question occupied observers ukraines developments cards available moscow play visàvis ongoing developments ukraine review available evidence also analysis remarks made russian prime minister foreign minister sergey lavrov interim government ukraine shows moscow plan get along new ukrainian government therefore alternatives taken consideration seems view putins character overall direction russian foreign policy moves near abroad three options available moscow regard developments ukraine 1 offering military support yanukovych restoring past situation ukraine option getting momentum apparently given sanctuary russian authorities well allowed statement behalf read russian tv distributed russias main news agencies february 27 2014 officially declares still president ukraine denounces new government kiev extremist parliament illegitimate although measure relatively change situation ukraine russias benefit negative consequences well one hand due wests support new ukrainian government country may pushed toward allout civil war west may even form socalled ukraine liberation army order fight russian forces face leaders kremlin another experience like already witnessed afghanistan course due possibility ukraines crisis spilling european countries turn events also costly west hand measure may interrupt cooperation russia west various fields also cause putins main foreign policy strategy rivalry combined cooperation west grind failure outcome would costly sides conflict 2 disintegration ukraine given fact people living eastern part ukraine crimean peninsula mostly russian origin also since lions share ukraines industries economic potentials located region russia may willing see divided ukraine less developed part given west see early sign issue occupation governmental buildings prorussian unidentified armed men simferopol hoisted russian flag roof case russia able flaunt power russian part country people living commonwealth independent states remind possible costs inattention russian population countries division ukraine also put russias mind ease strategic marine base crimea long time course disintegration ukraine take place way eastern part country would still direct access eastern europe transfer russian gas european countries main problem disintegration ukraine countries possibly ready recognize eastern ukraine result new country would face crisis international legitimacy 3 establishment new interim government ukraine third option see end interim government alexander turchinov international mediation subsequently agreement russia new interim government formed supported parties involved conflict would especially take account concerns russia view realities ground seems unlikely option however course developments may force conflicting parties move direction also facesaving option parties ukraine crisis regardless one options finally take place reality taken consideration russia certainly remain indifferent toward going ukraine morning february 27 russian foreign ministry issued new warning would strongly uncompromisingly defend rights compatriots alongside russian army fighter jets combat alert indicates diplomacy fails moscow use iron fist respond countrys developments | 605 |
<p>WASHINGTON — Pressure mounted Tuesday on Democrat Rep. Ruben Kihuen of Nevada to step down over <a href="" type="internal">allegations of sexual harassment</a> following the resignation of a more senior colleague who succumbed to calls by party leaders to relinquish his seat for similar activity.</p>
<p>The congressional office was in turmoil as some staff members threatened to quit, a Democrat close to the lawmaker said, and the chief of staff sent out a memo obtained by Politico that sought jobs for employees who wanted to leave.</p>
<p>The developments came as Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the longest-serving member of the House, told a Detroit radio station that he would resign on Tuesday. He endorsed his son for the seat.</p>
<p>Conyers faced an Ethics Committee investigation into multiple allegations that he harassed women who worked on his staff.</p>
<p>Kihuen, a freshman, was accused by a finance employee on his congressional campaign in Nevada of making unwanted advances and inappropriately touching her on at least two occasions.</p>
<p>The allegations against Kihuen were first reported by BuzzFeed last Friday.</p>
<p>Reaction to the allegation against Kihuen was swift, with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Rep. Ben Lujan, D-N.M., chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Nevada Democrats calling for Kihuen’s immediate resignation.</p>
<p>Kihuen, in a statement Friday, apologized to the former campaign staffer, but said he did not recollect the incidents the way that she had portrayed them.</p>
<p>The lawmaker, who represents North Las Vegas, Mesquite and Pahrump, could not be reached by telephone on Tuesday. He has not returned multiple requests for comment.</p>
<p>Kihuen claims party leaders knew</p>
<p>However, Kihuen told ABC News on Tuesday that he <a href="" type="internal">would not resign</a> from his seat. He also said party leaders knew last year about the former campaign staffer’s allegations of misconduct but stood by his campaign nonetheless. Kihuen questioned why they are calling for his resignation now, more than a year later.</p>
<p>“I do find it interesting that the DCCC, Leader [Nancy] Pelosi and Chairman Ben Ray Lujan — they knew about these allegations last year,” Kihuen told ABC. “They looked into them. They didn’t find anything, and they continued investing millions of dollars in my campaign. They went out there and campaigned for me.”</p>
<p>But Pelosi and Lujan both denied knowing about the allegations against Kihuen before BuzzFeed published its report, ABC News reported.</p>
<p>“Sadly, this is not the case. Leader Pelosi first learned of these allegations from BuzzFeed last week,” Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Pelosi, told ABC.</p>
<p>“Congressman Kihuen’s statement is not true,” Meredith Kelly, DCCC communications director, said.</p>
<p>Over the weekend, after speaking with Pelosi, Kihuen decided not to step down from Congress, according a Democratic operative familiar with the congressman’s decision.</p>
<p>Late Monday, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus called an emergency meeting to discuss Kihuen’s decision. The caucus was divided on whether to support a call for his resignation, according to the Democrat familiar with the ongoing events.</p>
<p>On Tuesday in Las Vegas, Gov. Brian Sandoval, a Republican, said at a news conference that he knew of the Kihuen allegations only through media reports, but said if accusations against elected officials are confirmed “there should be consequences.”</p>
<p>“With regard to the congressman, only he knows. And he’s somebody who’s going to have to answer that question. And if indeed it’s true, then he should step down,” Sandoval said.</p>
<p>Turmoil among congressional staff</p>
<p>Also on Tuesday, Kihuen staff members threatened to quit, the Democratic operative said.</p>
<p>And Kihuen’s chief of staff, Peter Koltac, sent a note to other Democratic congressional offices seeking positions for staff members who wanted to leave, according to Politico. At least one staff member has resigned.</p>
<p>While Conyers was under investigation by the Ethics Committee, it was unknown whether a complaint has been filed with the secretive panel over the allegations against Kihuen.</p>
<p>A spokesman for the committee replied “no comment” when asked if a complaint was filed.</p>
<p>If a complaint is made, historically the chairman and ranking member would have to agree to investigate the allegation. The committee would have 90 days to look into the matter and determine if further action is warranted.</p>
<p>The committee, in the past, has investigated incidents that have occurred during a congressional campaign, or before a lawmaker took office.</p>
<p>The committee announced Nov. 21 that it was reviewing allegations surrounding Conyers.</p>
<p>On Monday, yet another allegation was lodged against the 88-year-old House member, when a woman who said she worked for him for more than a decade, Elisa Grubbs, said he slid his hand up her skirt and rubbed her thighs while she was sitting next to him in church.</p>
<p>Grubbs also said she repeatedly saw Conyers touching and stroking the legs and buttocks of other female staffers. Such behavior “was a regular part of life while working in the office of Rep. Conyers,” she said.</p>
<p>Grubbs is the cousin of another accuser, Marion Brown, who reached a confidential, taxpayer-funded settlement of more than $27,000 over allegations that Conyers sexually harassed her. That settlement came to light in mid-November, setting off the cascade of allegations against the congressman.</p>
<p>At least two other women who worked for him have accused him of sexual misconduct.</p>
<p>A lawyer for Conyers previously denied the allegations and said the congressman would fight to clear his name. That changed Tuesday when Conyers announced his resignation during an interview on a radio show. He defiantly said his legacy would not be diminished by “what we’re going through now.”</p>
<p>Conyers is currently hospitalized in Detroit where he is being treated for stress.</p>
<p>Kihuen and Conyers are just two of member of Congress who have been accused of improprieties in a growing social movement to stop harassment.</p>
<p>Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., has been accused by several women of inappropriate behavior.</p>
<p>Last week it was disclosed that taxpayers paid for an $84,000 settlement with a former spokeswoman for Rep. Blake Farenthold, R-Texas, who accused him of sexual harassment.</p>
<p>Sexual impropriety also underlies a heated Senate campaign in Alabama where Roy Moore, a Republican, has been accused of sexual misconduct against teen-aged girls decades ago.</p>
<p>President Donald Trump, also accused of sexual misbehavior in the past, has endorsed Moore and encouraged him to continue his campaign, despite calls from leading Senate Republicans for Moore to end his candidacy in the special election to be held next week.</p>
<p>Review-Journal staff writer Colton Lochhead and the Associated Press contributed to this report.</p>
<p>Contact Gary Martin at <a href="" type="internal">[email protected]</a> or 202-662-7390. Follow <a href="https://twitter.com/garymartindc" type="external">@garymartindc</a> on Twitter.</p> | false | 1 | washington pressure mounted tuesday democrat rep ruben kihuen nevada step allegations sexual harassment following resignation senior colleague succumbed calls party leaders relinquish seat similar activity congressional office turmoil staff members threatened quit democrat close lawmaker said chief staff sent memo obtained politico sought jobs employees wanted leave developments came rep john conyers dmich longestserving member house told detroit radio station would resign tuesday endorsed son seat conyers faced ethics committee investigation multiple allegations harassed women worked staff kihuen freshman accused finance employee congressional campaign nevada making unwanted advances inappropriately touching least two occasions allegations kihuen first reported buzzfeed last friday reaction allegation kihuen swift house minority leader nancy pelosi dcalif rep ben lujan dnm chairman democratic congressional campaign committee nevada democrats calling kihuens immediate resignation kihuen statement friday apologized former campaign staffer said recollect incidents way portrayed lawmaker represents north las vegas mesquite pahrump could reached telephone tuesday returned multiple requests comment kihuen claims party leaders knew however kihuen told abc news tuesday would resign seat also said party leaders knew last year former campaign staffers allegations misconduct stood campaign nonetheless kihuen questioned calling resignation year later find interesting dccc leader nancy pelosi chairman ben ray lujan knew allegations last year kihuen told abc looked didnt find anything continued investing millions dollars campaign went campaigned pelosi lujan denied knowing allegations kihuen buzzfeed published report abc news reported sadly case leader pelosi first learned allegations buzzfeed last week drew hammill spokesman pelosi told abc congressman kihuens statement true meredith kelly dccc communications director said weekend speaking pelosi kihuen decided step congress according democratic operative familiar congressmans decision late monday congressional hispanic caucus called emergency meeting discuss kihuens decision caucus divided whether support call resignation according democrat familiar ongoing events tuesday las vegas gov brian sandoval republican said news conference knew kihuen allegations media reports said accusations elected officials confirmed consequences regard congressman knows hes somebody whos going answer question indeed true step sandoval said turmoil among congressional staff also tuesday kihuen staff members threatened quit democratic operative said kihuens chief staff peter koltac sent note democratic congressional offices seeking positions staff members wanted leave according politico least one staff member resigned conyers investigation ethics committee unknown whether complaint filed secretive panel allegations kihuen spokesman committee replied comment asked complaint filed complaint made historically chairman ranking member would agree investigate allegation committee would 90 days look matter determine action warranted committee past investigated incidents occurred congressional campaign lawmaker took office committee announced nov 21 reviewing allegations surrounding conyers monday yet another allegation lodged 88yearold house member woman said worked decade elisa grubbs said slid hand skirt rubbed thighs sitting next church grubbs also said repeatedly saw conyers touching stroking legs buttocks female staffers behavior regular part life working office rep conyers said grubbs cousin another accuser marion brown reached confidential taxpayerfunded settlement 27000 allegations conyers sexually harassed settlement came light midnovember setting cascade allegations congressman least two women worked accused sexual misconduct lawyer conyers previously denied allegations said congressman would fight clear name changed tuesday conyers announced resignation interview radio show defiantly said legacy would diminished going conyers currently hospitalized detroit treated stress kihuen conyers two member congress accused improprieties growing social movement stop harassment sen al franken dminn accused several women inappropriate behavior last week disclosed taxpayers paid 84000 settlement former spokeswoman rep blake farenthold rtexas accused sexual harassment sexual impropriety also underlies heated senate campaign alabama roy moore republican accused sexual misconduct teenaged girls decades ago president donald trump also accused sexual misbehavior past endorsed moore encouraged continue campaign despite calls leading senate republicans moore end candidacy special election held next week reviewjournal staff writer colton lochhead associated press contributed report contact gary martin gmartinreviewjournalcom 2026627390 follow garymartindc twitter | 619 |
<p>As the Catholic Church and the Obama administration approach the first anniversary of what has become the most serious confrontation between the Church and the federal government in U.S. history — a confrontation caused by a regulatory mandate implementing Obamacare — a review of the strategic situation is in order, with an eye to the terrain ahead. But given the confusions about this struggle that were sown in many minds during the presidential campaign (not least by the vice president of the United States), it is important to begin by remembering just what is being contested here.</p>
<p>THE MANDATE Early in 2012, the Obama administration first announced, and then finalized, a regulation implementing the “preventive services” requirement of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare. Issued by the Department of Health and Human Services, the regulation generally requires that health-insurance plans, including plans sponsored by employers, provide contraceptives, abortifacient drugs, and sterilizations without any cost (or “co-pay”) to the insured. While the mandate exempted certain religious employers, its definition of a “religious employer” was absurdly narrow and would not exempt the vast majority of Catholic educational, social-service, and health-care institutions, because they employ non-Catholics and serve non-Catholics.</p>
<p>The HHS mandate thus requires most Catholic institutions and employers to provide “reproductive-health services” or “preventive services” that the Catholic Church judges to be gravely immoral. In doing so, the mandate seriously burdens Catholics in the free exercise of their religious convictions. Those convictions are not abstractions. Religiously informed Catholic moral convictions are culture-building and institution-forming: They shape the ethos and activities of Catholic educational, charitable, and social-service agencies, and they shape the professional lives as well as the personal lives of conscientious Catholics.</p>
<p>Thus, in contesting the HHS mandate, the Catholic Church is defending and promoting religious freedom in full, as that first freedom touches both institutions and individuals. The Church is claiming the fundamental religious-liberty right to be itself, not least in its service to the poor, the vulnerable, and the marginalized; and the Church is defending the fundamental religious-liberty right of the people of the Church to be themselves, in their professional as well as their personal lives. In claiming and defending religious freedom in full, the Church is defending the American understanding, with which Catholic teaching is in full accord, that “religious freedom” cannot be reduced (as the Obama administration seems to want to do) to a privacy right to certain lifestyle choices — in this case, the choice to worship. Religious freedom in full is far more than freedom to worship without civil liability, although it surely includes that.</p>
<p>It should also be remembered, indeed underscored, that the Obama administration has laid this burden on Catholic institutions and Catholic employers in an unnecessary, and thus aggressive, way. The U.S. government has numerous ways to distribute contraceptives and abortifacient drugs, and to provide sterilizations. It need not conscript Catholic institutions and Catholic employers as governmental agents in order to meet the administration’s public-policy goals. Attempting to do so through coercive state power (i.e., the power to levy heavy monetary fines for non-compliance) breaches what has long been understood to be a secure boundary between the state and civil society in the United States.</p>
<p>THE BISHOPS’ RESPONSE Confronted by this challenge, which they did not seek but which they could not ignore, the Catholic bishops of the United States, under the leadership of their conference president, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, and the chairman of their conference’s special committee on religious liberty, Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore, mounted a principled, vigorous campaign against this unconstitutional, discriminatory, and wholly unnecessary regulation throughout 2012. The bishops first tried to convince the administration that the HHS mandate should be rescinded. The administration then floated the notion of an “accommodation” that would nominally shift the obligation of providing (and paying for) coverage of “preventive services” from religious institutions and conscientious employers to the insurance companies. The bishops recognized this tactic for the shell game it was, repeated their call for rescission of the mandate, and reiterated their willingness to explain and defend their concerns to the administration.</p>
<p>The administration being unwilling to yield, the bishops reaffirmed their united opposition to the mandate at a meeting of their conference’s administrative board in March and again at a meeting of the full conference in June. The bishops also sponsored a “Fortnight for Freedom,” which sparked religious-freedom rallies around the country and culminated on Independence Day in a nationally televised Mass attended by an overflow congregation of more than 5,000 at Washington’s Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Throughout the summer and fall, individual bishops and state Catholic conferences underscored the primary importance of religious freedom as an issue in the 2012 election campaign. Exit polls on November 6 indicated that the bishops’ case was heard by a clear majority of those Catholics who regularly attend Mass.</p>
<p>THE LEGAL CHALLENGE Had Obamacare been deemed unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, the immediate crisis for both Catholic institutions and conscientious Catholic employers would have abated, as the HHS mandate and other implementing regulations would have been rendered moot. But as no such outcome was assured, dozens of plaintiffs, including both Catholics and Protestants, filed suit specifically against the mandate in federal courts across the country. As of mid-December 2012, there are more than 110 such plaintiffs, including colleges, universities, charities, voluntary associations, businesses, and dioceses. Over 40 such suits are now being litigated.</p>
<p>The plaintiffs in these suits have argued that the mandate violates the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which was passed by overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. According to RFRA, the U.S. government may substantially burden the free exercise of religion only if it is clear that such burdening is the “least restrictive means of furthering [a] compelling governmental interest.” Given the multiple ways in which the government already “furthers” its stated interest in facilitating the distribution of contraceptives and abortifacient drugs and in providing sterilizations, it seems clear that the mandate is a wholly unnecessary burden on employers who have objections to providing such services on the grounds of religious conviction.</p>
<p>As I write, plaintiffs have obtained preliminary injunctive relief against the mandate in four cases. Only two adverse rulings on the merits have been handed down; both are oddly argued, and one of them is currently being appealed in the Tenth Circuit. Moreover, each of the six cases in which decisions have been rendered involves a for-profit business, a class of litigants whose religious-liberty claims are regarded skeptically in some quarters. Thus it seems not unreasonable to expect similar anti-mandate decisions on behalf of non-profit employers, e.g., religious colleges and universities, religious charities, religious social-service agencies, religious health-care facilities, and dioceses.</p>
<p>The course of litigation to date suggests that a Supreme Court decision on the HHS mandate will not require another tortuous revisiting of the First Amendment. The mandate has very little chance of clearing the high bar set by RFRA for burdening the free exercise of rel igion, which is the legal question at the forefront of the mandate lawsuits. Thus it seems eminently reasonable to expect that the legal challenges to the mandate will ultimately be vindicated by a Supreme Court that, in January 2012, upheld the “ministerial exemption” from equal-employment-opportunity law in a 9 to 0 decision in which the Obama administration’s two Court nominees joined.</p>
<p>FROM NOW TO THEN A year into this contest, the Catholic Church in the United States has every reason to think it is winning the battle for religious freedom that it was compelled to engage when the HHS mandate was finalized. Yet there will be a substantial period of time — probably a year and a half, perhaps longer — before the final legal decision is rendered. Meanwhile, the mandate went into force on August 1, 2012 (for any health-insurance-plan renewal initiated after that date), although many Catholic institutions have been able to take advantage of a year-long “safe harbor” (i.e., non-compliance) period conceded by the administration — a period described by Cardinal Dolan as “a year in which we’re supposed to figure out how to violate our consciences” and a concession obviously intended to punt the mandate issue down the field, past the 2012 election. With the safe harbor set to expire on August 1, 2013, what should be the Church’s strategic approach between now and then — between the impending full implementation of the mandate after the safe-harbor period ends and what can reasonably be expected to be a final victory in the Supreme Court?</p>
<p>1. The first thing to keep firmly in mind is that the mandate is just that — an arbitrary regulation implementing the Obamacare law, not a regulation statutorily required by that legislation. The mandate can be rescinded by future regulatory action; the mandate would have been rescinded had the 2012 election turned out differently; the administration could rescind it now, if it chose; a future administration could rescind it. Despite the Supreme Court’s June 2012 decision in NFIB v. Sebelius and the president’s reelection, the mandate is not set in legal concrete, now or in the future.</p>
<p>2. If the mandate is not a settled matter, neither is the extent of the safe-harbor period. If the administration chose, it could extend the safe harbor beyond August 1, 2013, and broaden it to include for-profit employers — and if it really intended no burden on Catholic employers, it would do so, until such time as the courts settled the matter of the mandate’s legality. Still, absent such unlikely action from an administration that has always seemed determined to bring the Catholic Church (and other institutions of civil society) to heel, the “safe harbor” can be extended and broadened legislatively: as part of budget negotiations between the House of Representatives and the White House, or by a denial of appropriations to enforce the mandate. There is strong sentiment against the mandate in the House of Representatives, and effective ways should be found to bring that sentiment to bear, quickly, on an extension of the safe harbor, which would bring at least temporary relief to those institutions and employers that now face difficult decisions about compliance.</p>
<p>3. From the outset of the controversy, the U.S. bishops have taken the correct constitutional and legal position that the HHS mandate is an unjust infringement of the rights of both Church institutions and employers with conscientious objections to providing insurance coverage for “services” they deem morally objectionable. It is imperative that this both/and approach be maintained until a legal victory is achieved. Thus the bishops must firmly reject any Obama administration attempt to split the opposition by providing an “accommodation” for religious institutions while insisting that the mandate applies to lay employers with religiously informed conscientious objections. Any agreement to such an “accommodation” would not only undercut the legal case being pursued; it would do grave damage to the bishops’ teaching authority and capacity for future pastoral leadership.</p>
<p>4. Absent an extension of the safe-harbor period and a broadening of its scope, there are no easy answers to the dilemmas faced by those with conscientious objections who are now required, or soon will be, to comply with the mandate. Interim tactics to address these dilemmas will likely be suggested by Church leaders or theologians or both. Any such interim tactics cannot concede the principle that the mandate is unjust and illegal; ought not establish irreversible practices or precedents; and must not undercut the larger strategic goal of defeating the mandate at law.</p>
<p>5. Given the 2012 election results, the most promising route to final victory in this contest lies through the federal courts. It is entirely possible, indeed probable, that a judicial consensus holding that the mandate is a clear violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act will form in 2013 — a consensus that will likely support relief for both Church institutions and for-profit employers. Thus it is imperative that great care should be taken to avoid undermining the prospects for a satisfactory judicial resolution of the matter — either by public discussion of potential “deals” to be made with the administration, or by the imprudent airing of interesting but abstract theological questions that will inevitably be interpreted by the media and the public, and may be interpreted by the administration and the courts, as an attempt to justify a way out of the current conflict or, worse, to legitimate a surrender under duress. This is a legal and political battle, not a university seminar in moral theology, and it must be approached as such.</p>
<p>THOMAS MORE, STRATEGIST AND TACTICIAN Throughout 2012, the memory of St. Thomas More — the lord chancellor of England who gave up his office and eventually lost his life because he refused to sacrifice his religious convictions and conscience to the will of King Henry VIII — has loomed over the mandate debate. As this issue continues to be contested in 2013, it is important to remember that More was a principled politician and a tactically skillful lawyer who wanted to use the arts of politics, and the available mechanisms found in the law, to defend a good cause and vindicate the rights of conscience.</p>
<p>That is what the U.S. bishops have been doing for the past year: using the available legal instruments and the arts of persuasion to remedy a serious injustice.</p>
<p>Religious leaders are, by nature and training, understanding and accommodating. But in the case of the HHS mandate, there can be no accommodation, for what is at issue is a first principle of justice that touches every American, even as it bears on the future health of American democracy and the future existence of a robust civil society in these United States. Throughout 2012, the Catholic bishops rightly insisted that this is not a Catholic fight, but rather an American fight: a battle to vindicate what has been recognized since the Founding as the first freedom, religious freedom.</p>
<p>That will be as true in 2013 as it was in 2012. The Catholic Church, with its allies from other religious communities and its allies among constitutionalists, will best serve God and country by working with tenacity and skill in the tangle of legal argument and political persuasion, until the mandate is no more. That is the strategic goal, which the Church seeks for America as well as for itself and its people. The legal path to victory is the appropriate, indeed the essential, tactical method suggested by a proper understanding of the cardinal political virtue of prudence.</p>
<p>George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. and holds EPPC’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.</p> | false | 1 | catholic church obama administration approach first anniversary become serious confrontation church federal government us history confrontation caused regulatory mandate implementing obamacare review strategic situation order eye terrain ahead given confusions struggle sown many minds presidential campaign least vice president united states important begin remembering contested mandate early 2012 obama administration first announced finalized regulation implementing preventive services requirement patient protection affordable care act popularly known obamacare issued department health human services regulation generally requires healthinsurance plans including plans sponsored employers provide contraceptives abortifacient drugs sterilizations without cost copay insured mandate exempted certain religious employers definition religious employer absurdly narrow would exempt vast majority catholic educational socialservice healthcare institutions employ noncatholics serve noncatholics hhs mandate thus requires catholic institutions employers provide reproductivehealth services preventive services catholic church judges gravely immoral mandate seriously burdens catholics free exercise religious convictions convictions abstractions religiously informed catholic moral convictions culturebuilding institutionforming shape ethos activities catholic educational charitable socialservice agencies shape professional lives well personal lives conscientious catholics thus contesting hhs mandate catholic church defending promoting religious freedom full first freedom touches institutions individuals church claiming fundamental religiousliberty right least service poor vulnerable marginalized church defending fundamental religiousliberty right people church professional well personal lives claiming defending religious freedom full church defending american understanding catholic teaching full accord religious freedom reduced obama administration seems want privacy right certain lifestyle choices case choice worship religious freedom full far freedom worship without civil liability although surely includes also remembered indeed underscored obama administration laid burden catholic institutions catholic employers unnecessary thus aggressive way us government numerous ways distribute contraceptives abortifacient drugs provide sterilizations need conscript catholic institutions catholic employers governmental agents order meet administrations publicpolicy goals attempting coercive state power ie power levy heavy monetary fines noncompliance breaches long understood secure boundary state civil society united states bishops response confronted challenge seek could ignore catholic bishops united states leadership conference president cardinal timothy dolan new york chairman conferences special committee religious liberty archbishop william lori baltimore mounted principled vigorous campaign unconstitutional discriminatory wholly unnecessary regulation throughout 2012 bishops first tried convince administration hhs mandate rescinded administration floated notion accommodation would nominally shift obligation providing paying coverage preventive services religious institutions conscientious employers insurance companies bishops recognized tactic shell game repeated call rescission mandate reiterated willingness explain defend concerns administration administration unwilling yield bishops reaffirmed united opposition mandate meeting conferences administrative board march meeting full conference june bishops also sponsored fortnight freedom sparked religiousfreedom rallies around country culminated independence day nationally televised mass attended overflow congregation 5000 washingtons basilica national shrine immaculate conception throughout summer fall individual bishops state catholic conferences underscored primary importance religious freedom issue 2012 election campaign exit polls november 6 indicated bishops case heard clear majority catholics regularly attend mass legal challenge obamacare deemed unconstitutional us supreme court immediate crisis catholic institutions conscientious catholic employers would abated hhs mandate implementing regulations would rendered moot outcome assured dozens plaintiffs including catholics protestants filed suit specifically mandate federal courts across country middecember 2012 110 plaintiffs including colleges universities charities voluntary associations businesses dioceses 40 suits litigated plaintiffs suits argued mandate violates 1993 religious freedom restoration act rfra passed overwhelming majorities houses congress signed law president bill clinton according rfra us government may substantially burden free exercise religion clear burdening least restrictive means furthering compelling governmental interest given multiple ways government already furthers stated interest facilitating distribution contraceptives abortifacient drugs providing sterilizations seems clear mandate wholly unnecessary burden employers objections providing services grounds religious conviction write plaintiffs obtained preliminary injunctive relief mandate four cases two adverse rulings merits handed oddly argued one currently appealed tenth circuit moreover six cases decisions rendered involves forprofit business class litigants whose religiousliberty claims regarded skeptically quarters thus seems unreasonable expect similar antimandate decisions behalf nonprofit employers eg religious colleges universities religious charities religious socialservice agencies religious healthcare facilities dioceses course litigation date suggests supreme court decision hhs mandate require another tortuous revisiting first amendment mandate little chance clearing high bar set rfra burdening free exercise rel igion legal question forefront mandate lawsuits thus seems eminently reasonable expect legal challenges mandate ultimately vindicated supreme court january 2012 upheld ministerial exemption equalemploymentopportunity law 9 0 decision obama administrations two court nominees joined year contest catholic church united states every reason think winning battle religious freedom compelled engage hhs mandate finalized yet substantial period time probably year half perhaps longer final legal decision rendered meanwhile mandate went force august 1 2012 healthinsuranceplan renewal initiated date although many catholic institutions able take advantage yearlong safe harbor ie noncompliance period conceded administration period described cardinal dolan year supposed figure violate consciences concession obviously intended punt mandate issue field past 2012 election safe harbor set expire august 1 2013 churchs strategic approach impending full implementation mandate safeharbor period ends reasonably expected final victory supreme court 1 first thing keep firmly mind mandate arbitrary regulation implementing obamacare law regulation statutorily required legislation mandate rescinded future regulatory action mandate would rescinded 2012 election turned differently administration could rescind chose future administration could rescind despite supreme courts june 2012 decision nfib v sebelius presidents reelection mandate set legal concrete future 2 mandate settled matter neither extent safeharbor period administration chose could extend safe harbor beyond august 1 2013 broaden include forprofit employers really intended burden catholic employers would time courts settled matter mandates legality still absent unlikely action administration always seemed determined bring catholic church institutions civil society heel safe harbor extended broadened legislatively part budget negotiations house representatives white house denial appropriations enforce mandate strong sentiment mandate house representatives effective ways found bring sentiment bear quickly extension safe harbor would bring least temporary relief institutions employers face difficult decisions compliance 3 outset controversy us bishops taken correct constitutional legal position hhs mandate unjust infringement rights church institutions employers conscientious objections providing insurance coverage services deem morally objectionable imperative bothand approach maintained legal victory achieved thus bishops must firmly reject obama administration attempt split opposition providing accommodation religious institutions insisting mandate applies lay employers religiously informed conscientious objections agreement accommodation would undercut legal case pursued would grave damage bishops teaching authority capacity future pastoral leadership 4 absent extension safeharbor period broadening scope easy answers dilemmas faced conscientious objections required soon comply mandate interim tactics address dilemmas likely suggested church leaders theologians interim tactics concede principle mandate unjust illegal ought establish irreversible practices precedents must undercut larger strategic goal defeating mandate law 5 given 2012 election results promising route final victory contest lies federal courts entirely possible indeed probable judicial consensus holding mandate clear violation religious freedom restoration act form 2013 consensus likely support relief church institutions forprofit employers thus imperative great care taken avoid undermining prospects satisfactory judicial resolution matter either public discussion potential deals made administration imprudent airing interesting abstract theological questions inevitably interpreted media public may interpreted administration courts attempt justify way current conflict worse legitimate surrender duress legal political battle university seminar moral theology must approached thomas strategist tactician throughout 2012 memory st thomas lord chancellor england gave office eventually lost life refused sacrifice religious convictions conscience king henry viii loomed mandate debate issue continues contested 2013 important remember principled politician tactically skillful lawyer wanted use arts politics available mechanisms found law defend good cause vindicate rights conscience us bishops past year using available legal instruments arts persuasion remedy serious injustice religious leaders nature training understanding accommodating case hhs mandate accommodation issue first principle justice touches every american even bears future health american democracy future existence robust civil society united states throughout 2012 catholic bishops rightly insisted catholic fight rather american fight battle vindicate recognized since founding first freedom religious freedom true 2013 2012 catholic church allies religious communities allies among constitutionalists best serve god country working tenacity skill tangle legal argument political persuasion mandate strategic goal church seeks america well people legal path victory appropriate indeed essential tactical method suggested proper understanding cardinal political virtue prudence george weigel distinguished senior fellow ethics public policy center washington dc holds eppcs william e simon chair catholic studies | 1,328 |
<p>WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump may have found the pursuit in which a nonpolitician can succeed where professional politicians often have fared miserably — disaster management. As he heads to Florida on Thursday, Trump can feel confident that, where Irma sowed chaos, he uncharacteristically brought order.</p>
<p>Many of Trump’s predecessors have found that a president can never do enough. After the catastrophic 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, President Barack Obama was forced to admit his administration’s response lacked “sufficient urgency.” In 2005, Hurricane Katrina ravaged the reputation of President George W. Bush, years after his father, George H.W. Bush, was accused of being sluggish in response to the Category 5 Hurricane Andrew.</p>
<p>In his handling of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, Trump has shown a gift for displaying confidence and a know-how about handling real estate — even when it is stewing in fetid water. His past life as a developer also gives him a sophisticated take on logistics that recognizes how essential electricity, water and fuel are to making communities livable again. Right now, you have to work hard to find critics of his handling of two perfect storms.</p>
<p>“So far this looks pretty close to textbook,” said Chuck DeVore of the Texas Public Policy Foundation in Austin, who described Trump’s response to the disasters as “exemplary.”</p>
<p>“I don’t think I’ve seen one complaint about the national response in Texas,” said Matt Mackowiak, a GOP strategist who works in Texas and Washington.</p>
<p>In short, Trump and Washington elected officials have learned from mistakes of the past and are determined not to repeat them.</p>
<p>All of Washington recalls how critics slammed Bush after Katrina for flying over flooded country on his way back to Washington from a vacation at his Texas ranch. A gesture that was supposed to show a caring leader instead was framed as the act of an aloof executive. Trump did not make the same mistake.</p>
<p>Visiting Texas after Harvey</p>
<p>Trump visited Texas twice. During the first visit on Aug. 30, he and his entourage touched down in Corpus Christi and Austin — not Houston, the White House explained, because the president did not want to disrupt recovery efforts. Trump tweeted, “After witnessing first hand the horror &amp; devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey, my heart goes out even more so to the great people of Texas!”</p>
<p>Critics pounded on Trump’s inference that he had seen Harvey’s worst work firsthand. Jason Silverstein at the New York Daily News called Trump’s tweet “a category 5 exaggeration.”</p>
<p>Within the week, Trump visited Houston, where his attention was welcome.</p>
<p>Alan Bernstein, director of communications for Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, said the mayor would describe his meeting with Trump as “brief” and “good.” Trump promised advanced funding from FEMA, not reimbursement. Trump understood the importance of debris removal.</p>
<p>When Turner asked for special funding for local first responders whose homes were flooded, Bernstein recalled, “The president literally gave a thumbs-up to that idea — although we’ve been told it may not happen at this time.”</p>
<p>Did it help that Trump was visiting a state that gave him a nine-point edge over Hillary Clinton in the election and one where he could work with Republican Gov. Greg Abbott? “It doesn’t hurt,” Bernstein noted.</p>
<p>Houston, however, went for Clinton by a sizable margin, and Turner is a Democrat. “I have not heard the mayor complain either in public or in private that the White House is falling down on any of its responsibilities to Houston,” said Bernstein. Obviously, Bernstein added, if Trump doesn’t deliver on promises he made, Turner will hold Trump accountable.</p>
<p>FEMA’s response</p>
<p>It helps, too, that Trump’s pick to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Brock Long, has firsthand experience in America’s highest-profile modern catastrophes. Long worked for FEMA during Katrina and Hurricane Rita and headed the Alabama Emergency Management Agency during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.</p>
<p>Trump’s FEMA has made it a priority to help open stores that provide the hardware needed to rebuild their homes in the wake of Harvey and Irma. Trump’s FEMA is not looking for permanent solutions to housing needs, so much as short-term solutions.</p>
<p>“Our role is to provide sort of the bridge to get through the disaster,” FEMA spokesman Kurt Pickering told ABC News. “We are not intended to make people or households back the way they were before, to make them whole. We’re designed to get them through the emergency.”</p>
<p>It also helps that Trump cut a deal with Democratic leaders that led to swift congressional approval of a measure that put a $15 billion down payment on aid for Harvey and Irma recovery.</p>
<p>“FEMA would have run out of money last Friday,” noted Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., on “Face the Nation.”</p>
<p>Nelson added, “And there is the cooperation between the federal level, the state and the locals. That has been seamless cooperation, unlike 25 years ago in Hurricane Andrew, when you did not have that cooperation.”</p>
<p>Homeland security adviser Tom Bossert echoed Nelson. “I believe Harvey, as I said earlier, was the best integrated, unified, joint federal, local, state response effort that our country has seen in its history,” he told reporters Monday. Bossert also credited the military for providing “the largest flotilla in our nation’s history” to help with recovery efforts in Florida, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, St. Maarten and other non-U.S. islands.</p>
<p>“The overall response to these disasters has been improving over time,” said Mackowiak, and technology has been very helpful. In 2005, for example, flood victims couldn’t apply for assistance on their phones as they can now.</p>
<p>According to FEMA, the government already has approved 223,246 applications for assistance, including $181 million in public assistance grants for Harvey survivors.</p>
<p>The can-do aura could fade over time. As DeVore noted, while storm damage was swift, the long-term recovery will be slow-moving and will present opportunities for “fraud, waste and corruption.”</p>
<p>For the moment, however, Trump has become an executive focused on specific problems. When reporters asked him about the cost of the cleanup Sunday, he responded, “Right now, we’re worried about lives, not cost.”</p>
<p>Contact Debra J. Saunders at [email protected] or 202-662-7391. Follow <a href="http://www.twitter.com/@DebraJSaunders" type="external">@DebraJSaunders</a> on Twitter.</p> | false | 1 | washington president donald trump may found pursuit nonpolitician succeed professional politicians often fared miserably disaster management heads florida thursday trump feel confident irma sowed chaos uncharacteristically brought order many trumps predecessors found president never enough catastrophic 2010 deepwater horizon oil spill president barack obama forced admit administrations response lacked sufficient urgency 2005 hurricane katrina ravaged reputation president george w bush years father george hw bush accused sluggish response category 5 hurricane andrew handling hurricanes harvey irma trump shown gift displaying confidence knowhow handling real estate even stewing fetid water past life developer also gives sophisticated take logistics recognizes essential electricity water fuel making communities livable right work hard find critics handling two perfect storms far looks pretty close textbook said chuck devore texas public policy foundation austin described trumps response disasters exemplary dont think ive seen one complaint national response texas said matt mackowiak gop strategist works texas washington short trump washington elected officials learned mistakes past determined repeat washington recalls critics slammed bush katrina flying flooded country way back washington vacation texas ranch gesture supposed show caring leader instead framed act aloof executive trump make mistake visiting texas harvey trump visited texas twice first visit aug 30 entourage touched corpus christi austin houston white house explained president want disrupt recovery efforts trump tweeted witnessing first hand horror amp devastation caused hurricane harvey heart goes even great people texas critics pounded trumps inference seen harveys worst work firsthand jason silverstein new york daily news called trumps tweet category 5 exaggeration within week trump visited houston attention welcome alan bernstein director communications houston mayor sylvester turner said mayor would describe meeting trump brief good trump promised advanced funding fema reimbursement trump understood importance debris removal turner asked special funding local first responders whose homes flooded bernstein recalled president literally gave thumbsup idea although weve told may happen time help trump visiting state gave ninepoint edge hillary clinton election one could work republican gov greg abbott doesnt hurt bernstein noted houston however went clinton sizable margin turner democrat heard mayor complain either public private white house falling responsibilities houston said bernstein obviously bernstein added trump doesnt deliver promises made turner hold trump accountable femas response helps trumps pick head federal emergency management agency brock long firsthand experience americas highestprofile modern catastrophes long worked fema katrina hurricane rita headed alabama emergency management agency deepwater horizon oil spill trumps fema made priority help open stores provide hardware needed rebuild homes wake harvey irma trumps fema looking permanent solutions housing needs much shortterm solutions role provide sort bridge get disaster fema spokesman kurt pickering told abc news intended make people households back way make whole designed get emergency also helps trump cut deal democratic leaders led swift congressional approval measure put 15 billion payment aid harvey irma recovery fema would run money last friday noted sen bill nelson dfla face nation nelson added cooperation federal level state locals seamless cooperation unlike 25 years ago hurricane andrew cooperation homeland security adviser tom bossert echoed nelson believe harvey said earlier best integrated unified joint federal local state response effort country seen history told reporters monday bossert also credited military providing largest flotilla nations history help recovery efforts florida puerto rico us virgin islands st maarten nonus islands overall response disasters improving time said mackowiak technology helpful 2005 example flood victims couldnt apply assistance phones according fema government already approved 223246 applications assistance including 181 million public assistance grants harvey survivors cando aura could fade time devore noted storm damage swift longterm recovery slowmoving present opportunities fraud waste corruption moment however trump become executive focused specific problems reporters asked cost cleanup sunday responded right worried lives cost contact debra j saunders dsaundersreviewjournalcom 2026627391 follow debrajsaunders twitter | 618 |
<p>Privatization Is A Ramp For Corruption and Insouciance Is a Ramp for War</p>
<p>Libertarian ideology favors privatization.&#160; However, in practice, “privatization” is usually very different in result than libertarian ideology postulates. Almost always, privatization becomes a way for well-connected private interests to loot both the public purse and the general welfare.</p>
<p>&lt;img class="alignleft wp-image-19646 size-medium" title="Paul Craig Roberts" src="https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/paul-craig-roberts-alexander-hamilton1-300x210.jpg" alt="Paul Craig Roberts" width="300" height="210" /&gt; Most privatizations, such as those that have occurred in France and UK during the neoliberal era, and in Greece today and Ukraine tomorrow, are lootings of public assets by politically-connected private interests.</p>
<p>Another form of privatization is to turn traditional government functions, such as prison operation and many supply functions of the armed services, such as feeding the troops, over to private companies at a large increase in cost to the public. Essentially, the libertarian ideology is used to provide lucrative public contracts to a few favored persons who then reward the politicians. This is called “free enterprise.” [Editor’s clarification: this practice, sometimes described as “crony capitalism”, is contrary to both libertarianism and free markets].</p>
<p>The privatization of prisons in the US is an example of the extraordinary cost and injustice of privatization. Privatization of prisons requires ever higher rates of incarceration in order to build profitability. The US, supposedly “a land of liberty” has by far the highest incarceration rates of all countries.&#160; The “free” US has not only the highest percentage of its population in prison but also the highest absolute number.</p>
<p>“Authoritarian” China with four times the US population has fewer citizens in prison.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/privatization-of-the-us-prison-system/5377824" type="external">This article</a> shows how well prison privatization works for well-connected private interests.</p>
<p>It also shows the extraordinary shame, corruption, and discredit that prison privatization has brought to the US.</p>
<p>A few years ago, I wrote about&#160;the conviction of two judges who were paid by privatized juvenile detention facilities to sentence kids to their facilities.</p>
<p>As Alain of Lille and later Karl Marx said, “Money is all.” In America money is all that is important to the political system and to the bulk of the population. Essentially, America has no other values.</p>
<p>Another great libertarian fantasy is Wall Street. In the libertarian mythology, Wall Street is the mother of entrepreneurs and of the start-up companies that blossom into&#160;industrial, manufacturing, and commercial giants. In actual fact, Wall Street is the mother of enormous corruption. As Nomi Prins shows in All The President’s Bankers, it has always been the case.</p>
<p>Recently, there has been a spate of Wall Street whistleblowers. Many are reported by Pam Martins on her site, <a href="http://wallstreetonparade.com/2014/04/insiders-tell-all-both-the-stock-market-and-the-sec-are-rigged/" type="external">Wall Street On Parade</a>. Unlike libertarian ideologues, Prins and Marten are former Wall Street insiders and know what they are talking about.&#160;[Editor’s clarification: Prins in the article cited refers to the corruption as “crony capitalism”, which, again, is contrary to libertarianism and free market ideology.]</p>
<p>All US financial markets are rigged for the benefit of a few. We have had the exposure of high frequency trading front-running buy and sell orders. We have had the exposure of the big banks rigging the LIBOR interest rate and the London gold price fix. We have had the exposure of the Federal Reserve rigging via its dependent bullion banks the price of gold in the futures market. We have had the exposure in Congressional hearings of the rigging of metal and commodity prices. The dollar’s exchange value is rigged.&#160; And so forth.&#160; Yet no heads have rolled. Recently a SEC prosecuting attorney, James Kidney, retired. Upon his retirement, he proclaimed that his cases against the criminal big banks have been suppressed by SEC higher ups who have their eyes fixed on big jobs with the banks they are protecting while in government service.</p>
<p>So there you have it. The United States government is so overwhelmingly corrupt that even the financial regulatory agencies have been corrupted by the money of the private capitalists they are supposed to regulate.</p>
<p>America the corrupted.&#160; That is what we have become.</p>
<p>Not even Vladimir Putin understands how totally corrupt and insensitive to humanity Washington is.</p>
<p>Putin’s response to the Ukraine crisis created by Washington’s coup in Kiev is to rely on&#160;“Russia’s Western partners,” the UN, the Obama regime, John Kerry, etc., to work out a reasonable solution to the crisis.</p>
<p>Putin’s hope for a diplomatic solution is unrealistic. The NATO governments are bought-and-paid-for by Washington. For example, Germany is not a country. Germany is a mere piece of Washington’s empire. The German government will do as Washington says. The German government represents Washington’s agenda. The European governments to whom Putin is speaking are not listening.</p>
<p>Paul Wolfowitz, the neoconservative who as Deputy Secretary of Defense presided over the orchestration of the false evidence used by the Bush regime to launch Washington’s wars in the Middle East, declared the minimization of Russian power as the “first objective” of US foreign and military policy:</p>
<p>“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.”</p>
<p>What Wolfowitz means by “hostile power” is any power independent of Washington’s hegemony.</p>
<p>Washington overthrew the elected Ukraine government in order to orchestrate a crisis that would distract Russia from Washington’s adventures in Syria and Iran and in order to demonize Russia as an invader rebuilding an empire that is a danger to Europe. Washington will use this demonization in order to break-up growing economic relationships between Russia and Europe. The purpose of sanctions is not to punish Russia, but to break up economic relationships.</p>
<p>Washington’s strategy is audacious and brings risk of war.&#160; If the West had an independent media, Washington’s plan would fail. But instead of a media, the West has a Ministry of Propaganda. The New York Times has even found a replacement for Judith Miller. As you might have forgot or never known, Judith Miller was the New York Times reporter who filled the Times with Bush regime neoconservative lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.&#160; Instead of examining and exposing the Bush regime’s false claims, the New York Times bolstered the regime’s case for war by using the newspaper’s credibility to advance the neoconservative war agenda.</p>
<p>The new Judith Miller is David M. Herszenhorn, with accomplices Andrew Roth, Noah Sneider, and Andrew Higgins.&#160;Herszenhorn <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/world/europe/russia-is-quick-to-bend-truth-about-ukraine.html?ref=davidmherszenhorn&amp;_r=0" type="external">dismisses</a> the totality of Russian media accounts of events in Ukraine as “an extraordinary propaganda campaign” designed to hide the fact from the Russian population that the entire Ukraine crisis is the fault of the Russian government: “And so began another day of bluster and hyperbole, of the misinformation, exaggerations, conspiracy theories, overheated rhetoric and, occasionally, outright lies about the political crisis in Ukraine that have emanated from the highest echelons of the Kremlin and reverberated on state-controlled Russian television, hour after hour, day after day, week after week.” I have never read a more blatant piece of propaganda than Herszenhorn’s. He bases his report on two “authorities,” Lilia Shevtsova of the American-funded Carnegie Moscow Center, and Mark Galeotti, a NYU professor.</p>
<p>According to Herszenhorn, the widespread protests in eastern Ukraine are entirely the fault of the protesters who are putting on a show for propaganda purposes. The protests are not a response to words and deeds of the Washington-installed stooge government in Kiev. Herszenhorn dismisses reports of extreme nationalist neo-nazi Russophobia as “sinister claims” and regards the Washington-imposed unelected government in Kiev as legal. However, Herszenhorn regards governments formed as a result of referendums to be illegal unless approved by Washington.</p>
<p>If you place your faith in Herszenhorn, you will dismiss all reports such as those below as lies and propaganda:</p>
<p>The Western World is the World of the Matrix protected by the Ministry of Propaganda.&#160; Western populations are removed from reality. They live in a world of propaganda and disinformation. The actual situation is far worse than the “Big Brother” reality described by George Orwell in his book, 1984.</p>
<p>The ideology known as neoconservatism, which has controlled US governments since Clinton’s second term, has the world set on a path to war and destruction. Instead of raising questions about this path, the Western media hurries the world down the path. Read what medical doctors report will be the result of <a href="http://original.antiwar.com/lawrence-wittner/2014/04/14/your-doctors-are-worried/" type="external">the neoconservative Obama regime’s belief</a> that nuclear war can be won.</p>
<p>The Chinese government has called for “de-americanizing the world.” The Russian legislature understands that being part of the dollar payments system is a Russian subsidy to American Imperialism. The Russian legislator, Mikhail Degtyaryov <a href="http://rt.com/politics/russian-dollar-abandon-parliament-085/" type="external">told Izvestia</a> that “The dollar is evil. It is a dirty green paper stained with blood of hundreds of thousands of civilian citizens of Japan, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Korea and Vietnam.”</p>
<p>However, Russian industry spokesmen, possibly on Washington’s payroll but likely just people without a clue, said that Russia was bound by contracts to the dollar system and that perhaps in 10 or 15 years Russia could take a more intelligent approach.&#160; That is assuming that Russia would still be capable of acting in its own interests after suffering 10 or 15 years more of US financial imperialism.</p>
<p>Every country that wishes to have an independent existence without living under Washington’s thumb should immediately depart the dollar payment system, which is a form of US control over other countries. That is the only purpose that the dollar system serves.</p>
<p>Many countries are afflicted by economists trained in the US in the neoliberal tradition.</p>
<p>Their US education is a form of brainwashing that ensures that their advice renders their governments impotent against Washington’s imperialism.</p>
<p>Despite the obvious threats that Washington poses, many do not recognize the threats because of Washington’s pose as “the greatest democracy.”&#160; However, scholars looking for this democracy cannot find it in the US. The evidence is that <a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-u-s-is-not-a-democracy-it-is-an-oligarchy/5377765" type="external">the US is an oligarchy</a>, not a democracy.</p>
<p>An oligarchy is a country that is run for private interests.&#160; These private interests—Wall Street, the military/security complex, oil and natural gas, and agribusiness—seek domination, a goal well served by the neoconservative ideology of US hegemony.</p>
<p>The American Oligarchs win even when they lose.&#160; Finally, Washington’s notorious torture prison, Abu Ghraib, <a href="http://news.antiwar.com/2014/04/15/after-al-qaeda-expansion-iraqs-infamous-abu-ghraib-finally-closes/" type="external">has been closed</a>. &#160;But not by Washington. The Iraqi city fell last week to “defeated” al-Qaeda. &#160;Remember, we won the war in Iraq. &#160;$3 trillion wasted, but that’s not the way the military/security complex sees it. &#160;The war was a great victory for profits.</p>
<p>How much longer will dumbshit americans fall for the flag-waving deception?</p>
<p>The Republicans used the wars in order to create huge budget deficits and national debt that are now being used to dismantle the social safety net, including Social Security and Medicare. There’s talk of privatizing Social Security and Medicare.&#160;More profits for Oligarchs in the offering. The gullibility of the American population is really without compare.</p>
<p>The gullibility of the American public will doom the world to extinction.</p> | false | 1 | privatization ramp corruption insouciance ramp war libertarian ideology favors privatization160 however practice privatization usually different result libertarian ideology postulates almost always privatization becomes way wellconnected private interests loot public purse general welfare ltimg classalignleft wpimage19646 sizemedium titlepaul craig roberts srchttpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads201402paulcraigrobertsalexanderhamilton1300x210jpg altpaul craig roberts width300 height210 gt privatizations occurred france uk neoliberal era greece today ukraine tomorrow lootings public assets politicallyconnected private interests another form privatization turn traditional government functions prison operation many supply functions armed services feeding troops private companies large increase cost public essentially libertarian ideology used provide lucrative public contracts favored persons reward politicians called free enterprise editors clarification practice sometimes described crony capitalism contrary libertarianism free markets privatization prisons us example extraordinary cost injustice privatization privatization prisons requires ever higher rates incarceration order build profitability us supposedly land liberty far highest incarceration rates countries160 free us highest percentage population prison also highest absolute number authoritarian china four times us population fewer citizens prison article shows well prison privatization works wellconnected private interests also shows extraordinary shame corruption discredit prison privatization brought us years ago wrote about160the conviction two judges paid privatized juvenile detention facilities sentence kids facilities alain lille later karl marx said money america money important political system bulk population essentially america values another great libertarian fantasy wall street libertarian mythology wall street mother entrepreneurs startup companies blossom into160industrial manufacturing commercial giants actual fact wall street mother enormous corruption nomi prins shows presidents bankers always case recently spate wall street whistleblowers many reported pam martins site wall street parade unlike libertarian ideologues prins marten former wall street insiders know talking about160editors clarification prins article cited refers corruption crony capitalism contrary libertarianism free market ideology us financial markets rigged benefit exposure high frequency trading frontrunning buy sell orders exposure big banks rigging libor interest rate london gold price fix exposure federal reserve rigging via dependent bullion banks price gold futures market exposure congressional hearings rigging metal commodity prices dollars exchange value rigged160 forth160 yet heads rolled recently sec prosecuting attorney james kidney retired upon retirement proclaimed cases criminal big banks suppressed sec higher ups eyes fixed big jobs banks protecting government service united states government overwhelmingly corrupt even financial regulatory agencies corrupted money private capitalists supposed regulate america corrupted160 become even vladimir putin understands totally corrupt insensitive humanity washington putins response ukraine crisis created washingtons coup kiev rely on160russias western partners un obama regime john kerry etc work reasonable solution crisis putins hope diplomatic solution unrealistic nato governments boughtandpaidfor washington example germany country germany mere piece washingtons empire german government washington says german government represents washingtons agenda european governments putin speaking listening paul wolfowitz neoconservative deputy secretary defense presided orchestration false evidence used bush regime launch washingtons wars middle east declared minimization russian power first objective us foreign military policy first objective prevent reemergence new rival either territory former soviet union elsewhere poses threat order posed formerly soviet union dominant consideration underlying new regional defense strategy requires endeavor prevent hostile power dominating region whose resources would consolidated control sufficient generate global power wolfowitz means hostile power power independent washingtons hegemony washington overthrew elected ukraine government order orchestrate crisis would distract russia washingtons adventures syria iran order demonize russia invader rebuilding empire danger europe washington use demonization order breakup growing economic relationships russia europe purpose sanctions punish russia break economic relationships washingtons strategy audacious brings risk war160 west independent media washingtons plan would fail instead media west ministry propaganda new york times even found replacement judith miller might forgot never known judith miller new york times reporter filled times bush regime neoconservative lies iraqi weapons mass destruction160 instead examining exposing bush regimes false claims new york times bolstered regimes case war using newspapers credibility advance neoconservative war agenda new judith miller david herszenhorn accomplices andrew roth noah sneider andrew higgins160herszenhorn dismisses totality russian media accounts events ukraine extraordinary propaganda campaign designed hide fact russian population entire ukraine crisis fault russian government began another day bluster hyperbole misinformation exaggerations conspiracy theories overheated rhetoric occasionally outright lies political crisis ukraine emanated highest echelons kremlin reverberated statecontrolled russian television hour hour day day week week never read blatant piece propaganda herszenhorns bases report two authorities lilia shevtsova americanfunded carnegie moscow center mark galeotti nyu professor according herszenhorn widespread protests eastern ukraine entirely fault protesters putting show propaganda purposes protests response words deeds washingtoninstalled stooge government kiev herszenhorn dismisses reports extreme nationalist neonazi russophobia sinister claims regards washingtonimposed unelected government kiev legal however herszenhorn regards governments formed result referendums illegal unless approved washington place faith herszenhorn dismiss reports lies propaganda western world world matrix protected ministry propaganda160 western populations removed reality live world propaganda disinformation actual situation far worse big brother reality described george orwell book 1984 ideology known neoconservatism controlled us governments since clintons second term world set path war destruction instead raising questions path western media hurries world path read medical doctors report result neoconservative obama regimes belief nuclear war chinese government called deamericanizing world russian legislature understands part dollar payments system russian subsidy american imperialism russian legislator mikhail degtyaryov told izvestia dollar evil dirty green paper stained blood hundreds thousands civilian citizens japan serbia afghanistan iraq syria libya korea vietnam however russian industry spokesmen possibly washingtons payroll likely people without clue said russia bound contracts dollar system perhaps 10 15 years russia could take intelligent approach160 assuming russia would still capable acting interests suffering 10 15 years us financial imperialism every country wishes independent existence without living washingtons thumb immediately depart dollar payment system form us control countries purpose dollar system serves many countries afflicted economists trained us neoliberal tradition us education form brainwashing ensures advice renders governments impotent washingtons imperialism despite obvious threats washington poses many recognize threats washingtons pose greatest democracy160 however scholars looking democracy find us evidence us oligarchy democracy oligarchy country run private interests160 private interestswall street militarysecurity complex oil natural gas agribusinessseek domination goal well served neoconservative ideology us hegemony american oligarchs win even lose160 finally washingtons notorious torture prison abu ghraib closed 160but washington iraqi city fell last week defeated alqaeda 160remember war iraq 1603 trillion wasted thats way militarysecurity complex sees 160the war great victory profits much longer dumbshit americans fall flagwaving deception republicans used wars order create huge budget deficits national debt used dismantle social safety net including social security medicare theres talk privatizing social security medicare160more profits oligarchs offering gullibility american population really without compare gullibility american public doom world extinction | 1,071 |
<p>Obamacare is no longer a theoretical proposition. It is now being implemented, if with some notable exceptions for the portions of the law the Obama administration finds particularly inconvenient. Millions of Americans are experiencing its consequences directly, and millions more are forming their opinions of it based on what they are hearing of its effects. Those opinions are generally not positive. The fact that many of the law’s congressional supporters are now running scared for fear of voter backlash is a good indication of how poorly the rollout is going.</p>
<p>Obamacare’s travails seem likely to play into the hands of the law’s Republican opponents this year, even if the GOP does very little to try to reverse or slow the law’s implementation. The inevitable displeasure of those forced into inferior coverage with diminished access to care at higher cost because of Obamacare (and the concern of those who fear they might be) appears set to overwhelm the approval of those benefiting from its redistributive mechanisms, and so to swing the political pendulum at least somewhat to the right. Off-year elections in an incumbent president’s second term already tend to go poorly for that president’s party, and Obamacare appears likely to exacerbate that trend.</p>
<p>But to fully capitalize on the political opportunity before them, and to set the stage for a genuine rollback of Obamacare and its replacement with a far better alternative, Republicans in Congress cannot be satisfied to sit back and watch the disaster unfold. They should take the initiative, as they did at several crucial moments in 2013, and push legislation that would speed up the process of unwinding Obamacare and lay out for the public their concrete plans for a real reform.</p>
<p>The GOP should begin by renewing its commitment to protect Americans from being coerced into Obamacare. That means jettisoning, or at a minimum delaying, the individual mandate. The mandate has always been among the least popular elements of this unpopular law, and it has grown increasingly difficult to defend as the rollout has proceeded and more Americans have found themselves forced out of coverage they liked and faced with the prospect of paying a penalty (or a tax, as Chief Justice Roberts would have it) for not buying coverage they don’t like.</p>
<p>The Congressional Budget Office’s most recent estimates (made before the rollout of Obamacare began) assumed some $2 billion would be collected in 2015 from households forced to pay this uninsured tax for 2014. If the average payment is $500, that would mean 4 million Americans. And the number could be much higher if enrollment in exchange coverage is as low as it is now expected to be.</p>
<p>It is hard to imagine Democrats being able to sustain support for such an unpopular proposition, especially in light of the president’s unilateral decision to exempt those with canceled 2013 individual policies from the tax in 2014. Indeed, it is possible, and perhaps even likely, that the president will eventually take the next logical step himself and waive the tax for everyone in 2014 (though he would presumably wait to take such a step until after the enrollment period closes at the end of March). This is all the more reason why Republicans should make repealing this mandate, and codifying the president’s own delay of the employer mandate, their top priority in 2014, just as it was in 2013.</p>
<p>In addition to a repeal or delay of the individual and employer mandates, Republicans should hammer the other weak link in the Obamacare chain: the back-door subsidy that promises a massive bailout for insurance companies. Like the mandate, the promise of bailouts is there to persuade insurers to play ball despite the system’s irrationality.</p>
<p>Especially troubling is the “risk corridor” provision of the law, under which taxpayers are on the hook for covering large portions of the losses that insurers incur on the Obamacare exchanges. If an insurer pays out claims that exceed 108 percent of its premium collections, taxpayers would cover about 75 percent of its losses.</p>
<p>A mirror-image provision is also supposed to recoup 75 percent of any profits above 108 percent of premium collections. But because Obamacare’s design is so flawed and its rollout has been so bungled, enrollees in the exchange insurance plans are likely to be significantly older and sicker than the insurance company actuaries assumed (there was also a great deal of political pressure on insurers to lowball their premiums in this first year of the program). There will thus likely be few if any insurers rebating profits under this risk-corridor provision, only a large cost to the taxpayer. The insurers are counting on this massive bailout to avoid a bloodbath of losses from Obamacare.</p>
<p>An all-out assault on this aspect of Obamacare is well justified on both policy and political grounds​—​indeed, very few issues have the potential to unite voters politically like this one. It is hard to imagine that many Americans, regardless of their political leanings, want taxpayers to be on the hook for covering the losses of shareholder-owned insurance companies. The promise of such a bailout effectively amounts to collusion between these companies and the Obama administration at the expense of the public: Insurers avoid pricing coverage in ways that take account of the distorted risk profiles of the exchanges so as to give the law a better chance of surviving a little longer, and in return the administration cushions their losses with taxpayer dollars.</p>
<p>There is certainly room for risk-sharing and reinsurance in a rational insurance system, should insurers desire it, but such mechanisms must be symmetrical: The losses of some insurers should be cushioned by funds drawn from the profits of other insurers. That is how the Congressional Budget Office assumed these provisions would function in Obamacare, and they projected them to be budget neutral. But risk corridors would only work this way in a market that was properly structured and allowed insurers to price for risk​—​so that while the risk might be unevenly divided among insurers, it would be accounted for by the market as a whole. Obamacare’s exchanges are not rational insurance markets, and its risk-corridor provision now looks to be very far from budget neutral. This year it could easily cost taxpayers hundreds of millions and perhaps billions of dollars.</p>
<p>Republicans should therefore propose either to eliminate entirely the program’s risk-corridor provisions (as a bill introduced by Florida senator Marco Rubio and Rep. Tim Griffin of Arkansas would do) or to make them explicitly budget neutral, requiring that payments to insurers suffering losses be reduced proportionally so they total an amount no larger than the payments from insurers reaping profits. That way, insurers who chose to participate in the exchanges would together bear the consequences of a failure to price their products appropriately, rather than making the taxpayer pay for their mistakes and allowing them again to lowball premiums next year to keep this broken new system on life-support.</p>
<p>It is important to understand how crucial the prospect of a taxpayer bailout of insurers is to the future of Obamacare. Insurers facing the prospect of participating in the exchanges in 2015 without the backstop of a taxpayer bailout would be forced either to price their products properly (and therefore likely well above their 2014 premiums) or withdraw from the exchanges altogether. Either way, the law will become even less attractive to middle-income and moderate-wage households who get little or nothing in subsidies. Insisting on budget neutrality or repealing these provisions would, like the elimination of the individual mandate, not only make good political sense but also help to speed the unwinding of Obamacare, which is essential to the ultimate repeal of the law and its replacement with a real reform of American health care.</p>
<p>For that very reason, the insurers and the Democrats are certain to mightily resist a repeal of the bailout provisions. But the more intense their resistance, the more it will reinforce the case against the law. A program that cannot survive without a massive taxpayer bailout of private insurers is not a program that is working. It is a program that is failing, and needs to be replaced.</p>
<p>Finally, Republicans should continue their efforts to minimize the harm to people with pre-Obamacare insurance coverage that they would like to keep. Their efforts to enable those whose policies were canceled to retain them late last year yielded a chaotic and lawless administration move to empower insurers in some states to continue offering those policies. That has helped some people, but a legislative reprieve would be more stable and effective, and should also be extended to small businesses​—​many of which obtained early renewals of 2013 policies and so will be facing cancellations in the course of 2014. These look likely to affect millions of families, and Republicans should help those who like their coverage to keep it.</p>
<p>Each of these measures would be both politically popular and substantively helpful to the cause of unwinding Obama-care and moving toward the law’s replacement. Obamacare has already encountered enormous difficulties in its early months, and more are in the offing. But Republicans cannot stand aside and assume the law will collapse of its own weight. The administration and its supporters in Congress will do all they can to mask the faults of this monstrosity and enable its survival, and they will further assert that bare survival is the new definition of success. Republicans should respond with measures that help voters see that Obamacare is neither inescapable nor irreversible​—​by saying no to the mandates, the bailouts, and the forced coverage cancellations that Obamacare requires to stay alive.</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | false | 1 | obamacare longer theoretical proposition implemented notable exceptions portions law obama administration finds particularly inconvenient millions americans experiencing consequences directly millions forming opinions based hearing effects opinions generally positive fact many laws congressional supporters running scared fear voter backlash good indication poorly rollout going obamacares travails seem likely play hands laws republican opponents year even gop little try reverse slow laws implementation inevitable displeasure forced inferior coverage diminished access care higher cost obamacare concern fear might appears set overwhelm approval benefiting redistributive mechanisms swing political pendulum least somewhat right offyear elections incumbent presidents second term already tend go poorly presidents party obamacare appears likely exacerbate trend fully capitalize political opportunity set stage genuine rollback obamacare replacement far better alternative republicans congress satisfied sit back watch disaster unfold take initiative several crucial moments 2013 push legislation would speed process unwinding obamacare lay public concrete plans real reform gop begin renewing commitment protect americans coerced obamacare means jettisoning minimum delaying individual mandate mandate always among least popular elements unpopular law grown increasingly difficult defend rollout proceeded americans found forced coverage liked faced prospect paying penalty tax chief justice roberts would buying coverage dont like congressional budget offices recent estimates made rollout obamacare began assumed 2 billion would collected 2015 households forced pay uninsured tax 2014 average payment 500 would mean 4 million americans number could much higher enrollment exchange coverage low expected hard imagine democrats able sustain support unpopular proposition especially light presidents unilateral decision exempt canceled 2013 individual policies tax 2014 indeed possible perhaps even likely president eventually take next logical step waive tax everyone 2014 though would presumably wait take step enrollment period closes end march reason republicans make repealing mandate codifying presidents delay employer mandate top priority 2014 2013 addition repeal delay individual employer mandates republicans hammer weak link obamacare chain backdoor subsidy promises massive bailout insurance companies like mandate promise bailouts persuade insurers play ball despite systems irrationality especially troubling risk corridor provision law taxpayers hook covering large portions losses insurers incur obamacare exchanges insurer pays claims exceed 108 percent premium collections taxpayers would cover 75 percent losses mirrorimage provision also supposed recoup 75 percent profits 108 percent premium collections obamacares design flawed rollout bungled enrollees exchange insurance plans likely significantly older sicker insurance company actuaries assumed also great deal political pressure insurers lowball premiums first year program thus likely insurers rebating profits riskcorridor provision large cost taxpayer insurers counting massive bailout avoid bloodbath losses obamacare allout assault aspect obamacare well justified policy political groundsindeed issues potential unite voters politically like one hard imagine many americans regardless political leanings want taxpayers hook covering losses shareholderowned insurance companies promise bailout effectively amounts collusion companies obama administration expense public insurers avoid pricing coverage ways take account distorted risk profiles exchanges give law better chance surviving little longer return administration cushions losses taxpayer dollars certainly room risksharing reinsurance rational insurance system insurers desire mechanisms must symmetrical losses insurers cushioned funds drawn profits insurers congressional budget office assumed provisions would function obamacare projected budget neutral risk corridors would work way market properly structured allowed insurers price riskso risk might unevenly divided among insurers would accounted market whole obamacares exchanges rational insurance markets riskcorridor provision looks far budget neutral year could easily cost taxpayers hundreds millions perhaps billions dollars republicans therefore propose either eliminate entirely programs riskcorridor provisions bill introduced florida senator marco rubio rep tim griffin arkansas would make explicitly budget neutral requiring payments insurers suffering losses reduced proportionally total amount larger payments insurers reaping profits way insurers chose participate exchanges would together bear consequences failure price products appropriately rather making taxpayer pay mistakes allowing lowball premiums next year keep broken new system lifesupport important understand crucial prospect taxpayer bailout insurers future obamacare insurers facing prospect participating exchanges 2015 without backstop taxpayer bailout would forced either price products properly therefore likely well 2014 premiums withdraw exchanges altogether either way law become even less attractive middleincome moderatewage households get little nothing subsidies insisting budget neutrality repealing provisions would like elimination individual mandate make good political sense also help speed unwinding obamacare essential ultimate repeal law replacement real reform american health care reason insurers democrats certain mightily resist repeal bailout provisions intense resistance reinforce case law program survive without massive taxpayer bailout private insurers program working program failing needs replaced finally republicans continue efforts minimize harm people preobamacare insurance coverage would like keep efforts enable whose policies canceled retain late last year yielded chaotic lawless administration move empower insurers states continue offering policies helped people legislative reprieve would stable effective also extended small businessesmany obtained early renewals 2013 policies facing cancellations course 2014 look likely affect millions families republicans help like coverage keep measures would politically popular substantively helpful cause unwinding obamacare moving toward laws replacement obamacare already encountered enormous difficulties early months offing republicans stand aside assume law collapse weight administration supporters congress mask faults monstrosity enable survival assert bare survival new definition success republicans respond measures help voters see obamacare neither inescapable irreversibleby saying mandates bailouts forced coverage cancellations obamacare requires stay alive 160 | 841 |
<p />
<p>As the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) continue to convulse with political change, contagion in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has been conspicuously absent. The region has its fair share of rulers-for-life, but none has to date hinted at granting concessions similar to what is being offered by the leaders of MENA, in an attempt to appease their political opponents. Given the number of highly indebted poor countries in SSA, the region would appear ripe for similar uprisings, yet meaningful protests have only erupted in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Gabon and Zimbabwe.</p>
<p>In the days and weeks following the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, 45 social justice activists were arrested and charged with treason in Zimbabwe. Their crime was having viewed video footage of events in Egypt and Tunisia, and trying to organize similar <a href="http://www.kubatanablogs.net/kubatana/?p=4937http://www.kubatanablogs.net/kubatana/?p=4937" type="external">protests</a>. In Gabon, more than 20 protestors were injured as demonstrators were met with rubber bullets and <a href="http://allafrica.com/stories/201102220512.html" type="external">tear gas</a> from riot police in a mass rally. Since then the UN accused the Bongo government of numerous abuses amidst fears that the protests will turn into a wider <a href="https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/Africa-Monitor/2011/0212/Now-that-Egypt-s-Mubarak-is-out-could-Gabon-s-Bongo-be-next" type="external">social conflict</a>. In Cameroon the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has <a href="http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportID=27407" type="external">reported</a> that three people were killed and more than 100 arrested over the past month. In Burkina Faso, six deaths and the torching of public buildings followed riots over the death of a student in police custody, which prompted the government to close all six universities in the country. In all these cases the protest movements failed to attract broad-based popular support, so many of SSA’s long-time dictators have not been tested by a wave of popular anger. Are we likely to see mass protests soon, and if not, why not?</p>
<p>Not so different south of the Sahara</p>
<p>Both regions have leaders who have remained in power for decades and become accustomed to abusing power without opposition. While North Africa’s longest serving leaders have been in power ranging from 22 to 40 years, eight countries south of the Sahara have leaders who have been in power for 17 years or more: Equatorial Guinea (32), Angola (32), Zimbabwe (31), Cameroon (31), Uganda (25), Burkina Faso (24), the Gambia (18) and Rwanda (17). In addition, Congo-Brazzaville’s President Sassou Nguesso has been in power for 27 of the last 32 years, and Gabon’s Omar Bongo and his son have ruled since 1967 (44 years).</p>
<p>Many of the statistics regarding health and welfare of citizens in SSA are more severe than those in MENA, and many of the longest-standing regimes in both regions are among the world’s most repressive. The regions also share rampant unemployment and high levels of poverty and corruption. Table 1 below compares levels of unemployment and corruption among states in both regions:</p>
<p>Why then have the populations of SSA’s poorest and most repressed states failed to rise up against their rulers? One reason is that they undoubtedly see the instability and chaos that can result. The rapidly deteriorating crisis in the Ivory Coast appears to have focused minds in the region, with the dislocation of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12718544" type="external">450,000</a> new refugees and a crippled economy. A quarter of the African Union’s member states either have presidential elections under way, or will have elections in the next 12 months. This represents 41% of the region’s population.1 That so many people expect to be able to choose their next leaders in a relatively short period of time may well have tempered enthusiasm for immediate regime change – even if the electoral process is likely to be flawed or even rigged, as has been the case in the past. No short-term elections are expected in Equatorial Guinea, Zimbabwe, or Angola, where protest movements there have been either relatively muted or non-existent.</p>
<p>A different dynamic</p>
<p>Much of North Africa boasts an ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic homogeneity that contrasts sharply with SSA’s vast diversity, which helps explain why SSA has not seen popular uprisings on the same scale as MENA. A sense of unity and commonality of purpose between protestors of different socioeconomic strata and ideological, religious and political views coupled Islamists side by side with secularists, with Muslims and Christians praying together in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. By and large however, most Arab states — and those of North Africa in particular — have relative cultural, ethnic, linguistic and religious homogeneity, which cannot be said of most sub-Saharan states. This shared identity has contributed to a greater sense of national identity amongst North Africans that can <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/08/revolution-winds-change-reach-across-sahara?INTCMP=SRCH" type="external">transcend</a> political boundaries. In comparison, south of the Sahara, where ethnic, religious and cultural differences have contributed to numerous civil and cross-border wars since the 1960s, this common sense of identity is often subordinate to tribal and ethnic loyalties.</p>
<p>A good example of this is the role played by national armies in North Africa. Largely independent of politics and ideology, the armed forces of both Tunisia and Egypt were praised for their independence and restraint during their respective crises. In many nations in SSA, this type of (largely) neutral military is often not present. Militaries are more often than not loyal to the strong man — who is often drawn from the same ethnic group — and not the nation per se. Militaries and indeed police are often seen as <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/08/revolution-winds-change-reach-across-sahara?INTCMP=SRCH" type="external">sources</a> of instability and violence, rather than protection. Since it is unlikely that the ethnic group of a president would be protesting, soldiers have been known to fire indiscriminately on protestors, as <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12646355" type="external">recently</a> happened in the Ivory Coast. The fear of military brutality may also have been augmented by the response of the Gaddafi regime in Libya – something that has been debated by Western governments in relation to their willingness to intervene, but any public discussion of the impact on budding protest movements has been notably absent.</p>
<p>The proximity of the North African revolts to Europe impacted the relative swiftness of responses from European governments, as did the impact of European responses to the unrest among the Tunisian and Egyptian populations, which are more connected to the Continent than their SSA’n counterparts. The familiarity of MENA’s population with social media stands in stark contrast to their southern counterparts, who are much more accustomed to relying on independent voices from the diaspora population living in Europe and the U.S. Such technological constraints have made it difficult for ordinary Africans to calibrate the power of a united and determined people. Higher levels of urbanization also played a role in the success of the MENA movements, with an average of 52% of North Africans living in cities, compared with 37% of citizens of SSA.2</p>
<p>Self Interest Prevails</p>
<p>It is unlikely that any of the small protest movements in SSA will escalate on the scale necessary to force some of the region’s longest serving rulers to step down. If protests do escalate, it is likely that they will be met with violence and repression, given that the West’s failure to intervene in Libya, and is reluctant to put boots on the ground in countries that are neither resource rich nor otherwise strategically important to the West. Doomsday predictions about potential refugee flows should additional North African regimes fall serve to garner attention from potentially impacted governments in Europe, but the West’s <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67566/behzad-yaghmaian/out-of-africa" type="external">greater fear</a> is an exodus of refugees from SSA to Western shores. So the outcome of any spontaneous uprisings in SSA may ultimately depend on the relative importance of the countries to the developed world, either by virtue of their natural resources or strategic positioning. While not a new element in crafting foreign policy among western governments, it is distasteful, coming at a time when the aspirations of millions rides on their perceived importance to people and countries that already have freedom and democracy.</p>
<p>Notes</p>
<p>1Statistic compiled by author</p>
<p>2Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, World Population Prospects: The 2006 Revision and World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007 Revision.</p>
<p>*Daniel Wagner is managing director of Country Risk Solutions, a political risk consulting firm based in Connecticut, and also senior advisor to the PRS Group.</p> | false | 1 | middle east north africa mena continue convulse political change contagion subsaharan africa ssa conspicuously absent region fair share rulersforlife none date hinted granting concessions similar offered leaders mena attempt appease political opponents given number highly indebted poor countries ssa region would appear ripe similar uprisings yet meaningful protests erupted burkina faso cameroon gabon zimbabwe days weeks following uprisings tunisia egypt 45 social justice activists arrested charged treason zimbabwe crime viewed video footage events egypt tunisia trying organize similar protests gabon 20 protestors injured demonstrators met rubber bullets tear gas riot police mass rally since un accused bongo government numerous abuses amidst fears protests turn wider social conflict cameroon un office coordination humanitarian affairs reported three people killed 100 arrested past month burkina faso six deaths torching public buildings followed riots death student police custody prompted government close six universities country cases protest movements failed attract broadbased popular support many ssas longtime dictators tested wave popular anger likely see mass protests soon different south sahara regions leaders remained power decades become accustomed abusing power without opposition north africas longest serving leaders power ranging 22 40 years eight countries south sahara leaders power 17 years equatorial guinea 32 angola 32 zimbabwe 31 cameroon 31 uganda 25 burkina faso 24 gambia 18 rwanda 17 addition congobrazzavilles president sassou nguesso power 27 last 32 years gabons omar bongo son ruled since 1967 44 years many statistics regarding health welfare citizens ssa severe mena many longeststanding regimes regions among worlds repressive regions also share rampant unemployment high levels poverty corruption table 1 compares levels unemployment corruption among states regions populations ssas poorest repressed states failed rise rulers one reason undoubtedly see instability chaos result rapidly deteriorating crisis ivory coast appears focused minds region dislocation 450000 new refugees crippled economy quarter african unions member states either presidential elections way elections next 12 months represents 41 regions population1 many people expect able choose next leaders relatively short period time may well tempered enthusiasm immediate regime change even electoral process likely flawed even rigged case past shortterm elections expected equatorial guinea zimbabwe angola protest movements either relatively muted nonexistent different dynamic much north africa boasts ethnic religious cultural linguistic homogeneity contrasts sharply ssas vast diversity helps explain ssa seen popular uprisings scale mena sense unity commonality purpose protestors different socioeconomic strata ideological religious political views coupled islamists side side secularists muslims christians praying together cairos tahrir square large however arab states north africa particular relative cultural ethnic linguistic religious homogeneity said subsaharan states shared identity contributed greater sense national identity amongst north africans transcend political boundaries comparison south sahara ethnic religious cultural differences contributed numerous civil crossborder wars since 1960s common sense identity often subordinate tribal ethnic loyalties good example role played national armies north africa largely independent politics ideology armed forces tunisia egypt praised independence restraint respective crises many nations ssa type largely neutral military often present militaries often loyal strong man often drawn ethnic group nation per se militaries indeed police often seen sources instability violence rather protection since unlikely ethnic group president would protesting soldiers known fire indiscriminately protestors recently happened ivory coast fear military brutality may also augmented response gaddafi regime libya something debated western governments relation willingness intervene public discussion impact budding protest movements notably absent proximity north african revolts europe impacted relative swiftness responses european governments impact european responses unrest among tunisian egyptian populations connected continent ssan counterparts familiarity menas population social media stands stark contrast southern counterparts much accustomed relying independent voices diaspora population living europe us technological constraints made difficult ordinary africans calibrate power united determined people higher levels urbanization also played role success mena movements average 52 north africans living cities compared 37 citizens ssa2 self interest prevails unlikely small protest movements ssa escalate scale necessary force regions longest serving rulers step protests escalate likely met violence repression given wests failure intervene libya reluctant put boots ground countries neither resource rich otherwise strategically important west doomsday predictions potential refugee flows additional north african regimes fall serve garner attention potentially impacted governments europe wests greater fear exodus refugees ssa western shores outcome spontaneous uprisings ssa may ultimately depend relative importance countries developed world either virtue natural resources strategic positioning new element crafting foreign policy among western governments distasteful coming time aspirations millions rides perceived importance people countries already freedom democracy notes 1statistic compiled author 2population division department economic social affairs united nations secretariat world population prospects 2006 revision world urbanization prospects 2007 revision daniel wagner managing director country risk solutions political risk consulting firm based connecticut also senior advisor prs group | 761 |
<p>The most senior Senate Republican is siding with several women alleging sexual misconduct against a candidate from his own party, as a fifth woman claims that Alabama Republican Senate nominee Roy Moore tried to rape her when she was a teenager.</p>
<p>Speaking to reporters on Monday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) told reporters that Moore should be expelled from the Senate even if he wins the upcoming December 12 special election.</p>
<p>“I believe the women,” McConnell said, according to <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/mcconnell-says-he-believes-roy-moore-accusers-calls-him-quit-n820266" type="external">NBC News</a>. “I think he should step aside.”</p>
<p>Moore fired back at McConnell, saying that he is the one who should step down because he “has failed conservatives and must be replaced.”</p>
<p>During the September race to fill the Alabama senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, McConnell supported Moore’s opponent, Luther Strange.</p>
<p>Former White House chief strategist and Breitbart News executive chairman Steve Bannon, who is on a mission to oust McConnell from his leadership post, accused McConnell, the GOP establishment, Democrats and the Washington Post of carrying out a “coordinated hit” on Moore.</p>
<p>“This is just another desperate attempt by Mitch McConnell to keep power, and it’s not going to work,” Bannon said in an interview with SiriusXM host Alex Marlow, according to <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2017/11/13/bannon-republican-establishment-media-launched-weaponized-hit-judge-moore/" type="external">Breitbart</a>. “This is an orchestrated hit from the Uniparty.”</p>
<p>Last week, the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/woman-says-roy-moore-initiated-sexual-encounter-when-she-was-14-he-was-32/2017/11/09/1f495878-c293-11e7-afe9-4f60b5a6c4a0_story.html?utm_term=.1f68c4622879" type="external">Washington Post</a> published a report detailing the accounts of four women who accused the former state Supreme Court Judge of sexual assault. All of the women said they were between the ages of 14 and 18 when Moore allegedly assaulted them.</p>
<p>Moore has denied the allegations, which he called “the very definition of fake news.”</p>
<p>“These allegations are completely false and are a desperate political attack by the National Democrat Party and the Washington Post on this campaign,” Moore said, according to <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/359636-roy-moore-accused-of-sexual-encounter-with-14-year-old-girl-when-he-was-32" type="external">The Hill</a>.</p>
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<p>The Obama-Clinton Machine’s liberal media lapdogs just launched the most vicious and nasty round of attacks against me I’ve EVER faced!</p>
<p>We are are in the midst of a spiritual battle with those who want to silence our message. (1/4) <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ALSen?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" type="external">#ALSen</a></p>
<p>— Judge Roy Moore (@MooreSenate) <a href="https://twitter.com/MooreSenate/status/928770918758928384?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" type="external">November 9, 2017</a></p>
<p />
<p>In the immediate aftermath of the story, Senators John McCain (R-Arizona) and Jeff Flake (R-Arizona), who have both made fiery speeches against President Donald Trump, said the report was enough to call for Moore to drop out of the race.</p>
<p />
<p>The allegations against Roy Moore are deeply disturbing and disqualifying. He should immediately step aside and allow the people of Alabama to elect a candidate they can be proud of.</p>
<p>— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) <a href="https://twitter.com/SenJohnMcCain/status/928709913953624066?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" type="external">November 9, 2017</a></p>
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<p />
<p>If there is any shred of truth to the allegations against Roy Moore, he should step aside immediately.</p>
<p>— Jeff Flake (@JeffFlake) <a href="https://twitter.com/JeffFlake/status/928699607122628608?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" type="external">November 9, 2017</a></p>
<p />
<p>On Friday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/11/10/press-gaggle-press-secretary-sarah-sanders-et-al-en-route-da-nang" type="external">told reporters</a> that Trump, who supported Moore’s opponent in the election, has called on him to step down “if these allegations are true.”</p>
<p>“Like most Americans, the President believes that we cannot allow a mere allegation – in this case, one from many years ago – to destroy a person’s life,” Huckabee Sanders said. “However, the president also believes that if these allegations are true, Judge Moore will do the right thing and step aside.”</p>
<p>A number of other lawmakers have also withdrawn their endorsements for Moore and called for him to step down, including Senators Bob Corker (R-Tennessee) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), both of whom have made recent statements against the Trump administration.</p>
<p />
<p>Look, I’m sorry, but even before these reports surfaced, Roy Moore’s nomination was a bridge too far.</p>
<p>— Senator Bob Corker (@SenBobCorker) <a href="https://twitter.com/SenBobCorker/status/929385667058126849?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" type="external">November 11, 2017</a></p>
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<p />
<p>I have now read Mr. Moore’s statement and listened to his radio interview in which he denies the charges. I did not find his denials to be convincing and believe that he should withdraw from the Senate race in Alabama.</p>
<p>— Sen. Susan Collins (@SenatorCollins) <a href="https://twitter.com/SenatorCollins/status/930142355696553986?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" type="external">November 13, 2017</a></p>
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<p />
<p>Based on the allegations against Roy Moore, his response and what is known, I withdraw support.</p>
<p>— Bill Cassidy (@BillCassidy) <a href="https://twitter.com/BillCassidy/status/929506170636767233?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" type="external">November 12, 2017</a></p>
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<p />
<p>Having read the detailed description of the incidents, as well as the response from Judge Moore and his campaign, I can no longer endorse his candidacy for the US Senate.</p>
<p>— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) <a href="https://twitter.com/SenMikeLee/status/929121651828187141?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" type="external">November 10, 2017</a></p>
<p />
<p>On Monday, National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Cory Gardner (R-Colorado) said the Senate should expel Moore even if he wins the special election next month.</p>
<p>“I believe the individuals speaking out against Roy Moore spoke with courage and truth, proving he is unfit to serve in the United States Senate and he should not run for office,” Gardner said, according to the <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/roy-moore-gardner-expel_us_5a09fdb5e4b0b17ffcdf957c?ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000067" type="external">Huffington Post</a>. “If he refuses to withdraw and wins, the Senate should vote to expel him, because he does not meet the ethical and moral requirements of the United States Senate.”</p>
<p>The last time a senator was <a href="https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Expulsion_Censure.htm" type="external">successfully expelled</a> was in 1862, when Senator Jesse Bright (D-Indiana) was charged with supporting the Confederate rebellion.</p>
<p>On Monday, Beverly Young Nelson came forward with new allegations that Moore sexually assaulted her when she was 16 years old. Nelson said that in the late 19‘70’s, Moore, who was in his 30’s, came to the restaurant where she worked and offered to give her a ride home.</p>
<p>Instead of driving her home, Nelson said Moore drove her to a deserted area and locked the door to keep her inside. Nelson said that Moore touched her breasts, tried to pull off her shirt and pushed her head toward his crotch. &#160;</p>
<p>“I thought that he was going to rape me,” Nelson said, according to the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/new-sex-assault-allegation-hits-moore-withdrawal-calls-grow/2017/11/13/a5a08142-c8d0-11e7-b506-8a10ed11ecf5_story.html?utm_term=.33c40407456c" type="external">Washington Post</a>.</p>
<p>When Moore stopped, Nelson said that he told her to stay quiet, adding that no one would believe her because he was a powerful judge at the time.</p>
<p>“He looked at me, and he told me, ‘You’re just a child.’ And he said, ‘I am the district attorney of Etowah County, and if you tell anyone about this, no one will ever believe you,” Nelson added.</p>
<p>After the most recent allegation, Flake said that if he was a voter in Alabama, he would rather vote for a Democrat than vote for Moore.</p>
<p>“If the choice is between Roy Moore and a Democrat —– the Democrat, no doubt,” Flake said, according to the <a href="http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/jeff-flake-no-doubt-id-support-a-democrat-over-roy-moore/article/2640568" type="external">Washington Examiner</a>. “I would literally — … iIf I were in Alabama —, I would run to the polling place to vote for the Democrat.”</p>
<p>[embedded content]</p> | false | 1 | senior senate republican siding several women alleging sexual misconduct candidate party fifth woman claims alabama republican senate nominee roy moore tried rape teenager speaking reporters monday senate majority leader mitch mcconnell rkentucky told reporters moore expelled senate even wins upcoming december 12 special election believe women mcconnell said according nbc news think step aside moore fired back mcconnell saying one step failed conservatives must replaced september race fill alabama senate seat vacated attorney general jeff sessions mcconnell supported moores opponent luther strange former white house chief strategist breitbart news executive chairman steve bannon mission oust mcconnell leadership post accused mcconnell gop establishment democrats washington post carrying coordinated hit moore another desperate attempt mitch mcconnell keep power going work bannon said interview siriusxm host alex marlow according breitbart orchestrated hit uniparty last week washington post published report detailing accounts four women accused former state supreme court judge sexual assault women said ages 14 18 moore allegedly assaulted moore denied allegations called definition fake news allegations completely false desperate political attack national democrat party washington post campaign moore said according hill obamaclinton machines liberal media lapdogs launched vicious nasty round attacks ive ever faced midst spiritual battle want silence message 14 alsen judge roy moore mooresenate november 9 2017 immediate aftermath story senators john mccain rarizona jeff flake rarizona made fiery speeches president donald trump said report enough call moore drop race allegations roy moore deeply disturbing disqualifying immediately step aside allow people alabama elect candidate proud john mccain senjohnmccain november 9 2017 shred truth allegations roy moore step aside immediately jeff flake jeffflake november 9 2017 friday white house press secretary sarah huckabee sanders told reporters trump supported moores opponent election called step allegations true like americans president believes allow mere allegation case one many years ago destroy persons life huckabee sanders said however president also believes allegations true judge moore right thing step aside number lawmakers also withdrawn endorsements moore called step including senators bob corker rtennessee susan collins rmaine made recent statements trump administration look im sorry even reports surfaced roy moores nomination bridge far senator bob corker senbobcorker november 11 2017 read mr moores statement listened radio interview denies charges find denials convincing believe withdraw senate race alabama sen susan collins senatorcollins november 13 2017 based allegations roy moore response known withdraw support bill cassidy billcassidy november 12 2017 read detailed description incidents well response judge moore campaign longer endorse candidacy us senate mike lee senmikelee november 10 2017 monday national republican senatorial committee chairman cory gardner rcolorado said senate expel moore even wins special election next month believe individuals speaking roy moore spoke courage truth proving unfit serve united states senate run office gardner said according huffington post refuses withdraw wins senate vote expel meet ethical moral requirements united states senate last time senator successfully expelled 1862 senator jesse bright dindiana charged supporting confederate rebellion monday beverly young nelson came forward new allegations moore sexually assaulted 16 years old nelson said late 1970s moore 30s came restaurant worked offered give ride home instead driving home nelson said moore drove deserted area locked door keep inside nelson said moore touched breasts tried pull shirt pushed head toward crotch 160 thought going rape nelson said according washington post moore stopped nelson said told stay quiet adding one would believe powerful judge time looked told youre child said district attorney etowah county tell anyone one ever believe nelson added recent allegation flake said voter alabama would rather vote democrat vote moore choice roy moore democrat democrat doubt flake said according washington examiner would literally iif alabama would run polling place vote democrat embedded content | 604 |
<p>The Lord High Almighty Pooh-Bah of threats. The Grand Ayatollah of nuclear menace.</p>
<p>As we all know only too well, the United States and Israel would hate to see Iran possessing nuclear weapons. Being “the only nuclear power in the Middle East” is a great card for Israel to have in its hand. But — in the real, non-propaganda world — is USrael actually fearful of an attack from a nuclear-armed Iran? In case you’ve forgotten …</p>
<p>In 2007, in a closed discussion, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that in her opinion “Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel.” She “also criticized the exaggerated use that [Israeli] Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears.”[1]</p>
<p>2009: “A senior Israeli official in Washington” asserted that “Iran would be unlikely to use its missiles in an attack [against Israel] because of the certainty of retaliation.”[2]</p>
<p>In 2010 the Sunday Times of London (January 10) reported that Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, war hero, pillar of the Israeli defense establishment, and former director-general of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission, “believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons.”</p>
<p>Early last month, US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told a television audience: “Are they [Iran] trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No, but we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability.”[3]</p>
<p>A week later we could read in the New York Times (January 15) that “three leading Israeli security experts — the Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo, a former Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, and a former military chief of staff, Dan Halutz — all recently declared that a nuclear Iran would not pose an existential threat to Israel.”</p>
<p>Then, a few days afterward, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, in an interview with Israeli Army Radio (January 18), had this exchange:</p>
<p>Question: Is it Israel’s judgment that Iran has not yet decided to turn its nuclear potential into weapons of mass destruction?</p>
<p>Barak: People ask whether Iran is determined to break out from the control [inspection] regime right now … in an attempt to obtain nuclear weapons or an operable installation as quickly as possible. Apparently that is not the case.</p>
<p>Lastly, we have the US Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, in a report to Congress: “We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons. … There are “certain things [the Iranians] have not done” that would be necessary to build a warhead.”[4]</p>
<p>Admissions like the above — and there are others — are never put into headlines by the American mass media; indeed, only very lightly reported at all; and sometimes distorted — On the Public Broadcasting System (PBS News Hour, January 9), the non-commercial network much beloved by American liberals, the Panetta quote above was reported as: “But we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability, and that’s what concerns us.” Flagrantly omitted were the preceding words: “Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No …”[5]</p>
<p>One of Israel’s leading military historians, Martin van Creveld, was interviewed by Playboy magazine in June 2007:</p>
<p>Playboy: Can the World live with a nuclear Iran?</p>
<p>Van Creveld: The U.S. has lived with a nuclear Soviet Union and a nuclear China, so why not a nuclear Iran? I’ve researched how the U.S. opposed nuclear proliferation in the past, and each time a country was about to proliferate, the U.S. expressed its opposition in terms of why this other country was very dangerous and didn’t deserve to have nuclear weapons. Americans believe they’re the only people who deserve to have nuclear weapons, because they are good and democratic and they like Mother and apple pie and the flag. But Americans are the only ones who have used them. … We are in no danger at all of having an Iranian nuclear weapon dropped on us. We cannot say so too openly, however, because we have a history of using any threat in order to get weapons … thanks to the Iranian threat, we are getting weapons from the U.S. and Germany.”</p>
<p>And throughout these years, regularly, Israeli and American officials have been assuring us that Iran is World Nuclear Threat Number One, that we can’t relax our guard against them, that there should be no limit to the ultra-tough sanctions we impose upon the Iranian people and their government. Repeated murder and attempted murder of Iranian nuclear scientists, sabotage of Iranian nuclear equipment with computer viruses, the sale of faulty parts and raw materials, unexplained plane crashes, explosions at Iranian facilities … Who can be behind this but USrael? How do we know? It’s called “plain common sense”. Or do you think it was Costa Rica? Or perhaps South Africa? Or maybe Thailand?</p>
<p>Defense Secretary Panetta recently commented on one of the assassinations of an Iranian scientist. He put it succinctly: “That’s not what the United States does.”[6]</p>
<p>Does anyone know Leon Panetta’s email address? I’d like to send him my list of United States assassination plots. More than 50 foreign leaders were targeted over the years, many successfully.[7]</p>
<p>Not long ago, Iraq and Iran were regarded by USrael as the most significant threats to Israeli Middle-East hegemony. Thus was born the myth of Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the United States proceeded to turn Iraq into a basket case. That left Iran, and thus was born the myth of the Iranian Nuclear Threat. As it began to sink in that Iran was not really that much of a nuclear threat, or that this “threat” was becoming too difficult to sell to the rest of the world, USrael decided that, at a minimum, it wanted regime change. The next step may be to block Iran’s lifeline — oil sales using the Strait of Hormuz. Ergo, the recent US and EU naval buildup near the Persian Gulf, an act of war trying to goad Iran into firing the first shot. If Iran tries to counter this blockade it could be the signal for another US Basket Case, the fourth in a decade, with the devastated people of Libya and Afghanistan, along with Iraq, currently enjoying America’s unique gift of freedom and democracy.</p>
<p>On January 11, the Washington Post reported: “In addition to influencing Iranian leaders directly, [a US intelligence official] says another option here is that [sanctions] will create hate and discontent at the street level so that the Iranian leaders realize that they need to change their ways.”</p>
<p>How utterly charming, these tactics and goals for the 21st century by the leader of “The Free World”. (Is that expression still used?)</p>
<p>The neo-conservative thinking (and Barack Obama can be regarded as often being a fellow traveler of such) is even more charming than that. Listen to Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at America’s most prominent neo-con think tank, American Enterprise Institute:</p>
<p>The biggest problem for the United States is not Iran getting a nuclear weapon and testing it, it’s Iran getting a nuclear weapon and not using it. Because the second that they have one and they don’t do anything bad, all of the naysayers are going to come back and say, “See, we told you Iran is a responsible power. We told you Iran wasn’t getting nuclear weapons in order to use them immediately.” … And they will eventually define Iran with nuclear weapons as not a problem.[8]</p>
<p>What are we to make of that and all the other quotations above? I think it gets back to my opening statement: Being “the only nuclear power in the Middle East” is a great card for Israel to have in its hand. Is USrael willing to go to war to hold on to that card?</p>
<p>Notes</p>
<p>[1] Haaretz.com (Israel), October 25, 2007; print edition October 26</p>
<p>[2] Washington Post, March 5, 2009</p>
<p>[3] “Face the Nation”, CBS, January 8, 2012; <a href="http://ufohunterorguk.com/2012/01/12/us-defense-secretary-leon-panetta-admits-iran-not-making-nuclear-weapons/" type="external">see video</a></p>
<p>[4] The Guardian (London), January 31, 2012</p>
<p>[5]&#160; <a href="http://www.fair.org/blog/2012/01/10/pbss-dishonest-iran-edit/" type="external">“PBS’s Dishonest Iran Edit”</a>, FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), January 10, 2012</p>
<p>[6] Reuters, January 12, 2012</p>
<p>[7] <a href="http://killinghope.org/bblum6/assass.htm" type="external">http://killinghope.org/bblum6/assass.htm</a></p>
<p>[8] <a href="http://politicalcorrection.org/fpmatters/201112020008" type="external">Video of Pletka making these remarks</a></p> | false | 1 | lord high almighty poohbah threats grand ayatollah nuclear menace know well united states israel would hate see iran possessing nuclear weapons nuclear power middle east great card israel hand real nonpropaganda world usrael actually fearful attack nucleararmed iran case youve forgotten 2007 closed discussion israeli foreign minister tzipi livni said opinion iranian nuclear weapons pose existential threat israel also criticized exaggerated use israeli prime minister ehud olmert making issue iranian bomb claiming attempting rally public around playing basic fears1 2009 senior israeli official washington asserted iran would unlikely use missiles attack israel certainty retaliation2 2010 sunday times london january 10 reported brigadiergeneral uzi eilam war hero pillar israeli defense establishment former directorgeneral israels atomic energy commission believes probably take iran seven years make nuclear weapons early last month us secretary defense leon panetta told television audience iran trying develop nuclear weapon know theyre trying develop nuclear capability3 week later could read new york times january 15 three leading israeli security experts mossad chief tamir pardo former mossad chief efraim halevy former military chief staff dan halutz recently declared nuclear iran would pose existential threat israel days afterward israeli defense minister ehud barak interview israeli army radio january 18 exchange question israels judgment iran yet decided turn nuclear potential weapons mass destruction barak people ask whether iran determined break control inspection regime right attempt obtain nuclear weapons operable installation quickly possible apparently case lastly us director national intelligence james clapper report congress know however iran eventually decide build nuclear weapons certain things iranians done would necessary build warhead4 admissions like others never put headlines american mass media indeed lightly reported sometimes distorted public broadcasting system pbs news hour january 9 noncommercial network much beloved american liberals panetta quote reported know theyre trying develop nuclear capability thats concerns us flagrantly omitted preceding words trying develop nuclear weapon 5 one israels leading military historians martin van creveld interviewed playboy magazine june 2007 playboy world live nuclear iran van creveld us lived nuclear soviet union nuclear china nuclear iran ive researched us opposed nuclear proliferation past time country proliferate us expressed opposition terms country dangerous didnt deserve nuclear weapons americans believe theyre people deserve nuclear weapons good democratic like mother apple pie flag americans ones used danger iranian nuclear weapon dropped us say openly however history using threat order get weapons thanks iranian threat getting weapons us germany throughout years regularly israeli american officials assuring us iran world nuclear threat number one cant relax guard limit ultratough sanctions impose upon iranian people government repeated murder attempted murder iranian nuclear scientists sabotage iranian nuclear equipment computer viruses sale faulty parts raw materials unexplained plane crashes explosions iranian facilities behind usrael know called plain common sense think costa rica perhaps south africa maybe thailand defense secretary panetta recently commented one assassinations iranian scientist put succinctly thats united states does6 anyone know leon panettas email address id like send list united states assassination plots 50 foreign leaders targeted years many successfully7 long ago iraq iran regarded usrael significant threats israeli middleeast hegemony thus born myth iraqi weapons mass destruction united states proceeded turn iraq basket case left iran thus born myth iranian nuclear threat began sink iran really much nuclear threat threat becoming difficult sell rest world usrael decided minimum wanted regime change next step may block irans lifeline oil sales using strait hormuz ergo recent us eu naval buildup near persian gulf act war trying goad iran firing first shot iran tries counter blockade could signal another us basket case fourth decade devastated people libya afghanistan along iraq currently enjoying americas unique gift freedom democracy january 11 washington post reported addition influencing iranian leaders directly us intelligence official says another option sanctions create hate discontent street level iranian leaders realize need change ways utterly charming tactics goals 21st century leader free world expression still used neoconservative thinking barack obama regarded often fellow traveler even charming listen danielle pletka vice president foreign defense policy studies americas prominent neocon think tank american enterprise institute biggest problem united states iran getting nuclear weapon testing iran getting nuclear weapon using second one dont anything bad naysayers going come back say see told iran responsible power told iran wasnt getting nuclear weapons order use immediately eventually define iran nuclear weapons problem8 make quotations think gets back opening statement nuclear power middle east great card israel hand usrael willing go war hold card notes 1 haaretzcom israel october 25 2007 print edition october 26 2 washington post march 5 2009 3 face nation cbs january 8 2012 see video 4 guardian london january 31 2012 5160 pbss dishonest iran edit fair fairness accuracy reporting january 10 2012 6 reuters january 12 2012 7 httpkillinghopeorgbblum6assasshtm 8 video pletka making remarks | 787 |
<p>Weary Republicans in Washington may be ready to move on from health care, but conservatives across the United States are warning the GOP-led Congress not to abandon its pledge to repeal the Obama-era health law — or risk a political nightmare in next year’s elections.</p>
<p>The Senate’s failure to pass repeal legislation has outraged the Republican base and triggered a new wave of fear. The stunning collapse has exposed a party so paralyzed by ideological division that it could not deliver on its top campaign pledge.</p>
<p>After devoting months to the debate and seven years to promising to kill the Affordable Care Act, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., simply said: “It’s time to move on.”</p>
<p>But that’s simply not an option for a conservative base energized by its opposition to the health law. Local party leaders, activists and political operatives are predicting payback for Republicans lawmakers if they don’t revive the fight.</p>
<p>“This is an epic fail for Republicans,” said Tim Phillips, president of Americans For Prosperity, the political arm of the conservative Koch Brothers’ network. “Their failure to keep their promise will hurt them. It will.”</p>
<p>To the American Conservative Union, the three Republican senators who blocked the stripped-down repeal bill that failed in the wee hours Friday are “sellouts.” A Trump-sanctioned super political action committee did not rule out running ads against uncooperative Republicans, which it did recently against Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev.</p>
<p>There are limited options for directly punishing the renegade senators — John McCain of Arizona, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine. None of the three is up for re-election next fall. McCain, whose dramatic “no” vote killed the bill, , was just re-elected to a 6-year term and has probably faced his last election, has brain cancer and is hardly moved by electoral threats.</p>
<p>Still, broad disillusionment among conservative voters could have an impact beyond just a few senators. Primary election challenges or a low turnout could mean trouble for all Republicans. Democrats need to flip 24 seats to take control of the House of Representatives, a shift that would dramatically re-shape the last two years of Trump’s first term.</p>
<p>“If you look at competitive districts, swing districts, or districts where Republicans could face primary challenges, this is something that will be a potent electoral issue,” Republican pollster Chris Wilson said of his party’s health care failure. “I don’t think this is something voters are going to forget.”</p>
<p>One such challenger has emerged. Conservative activist Shak Hill, a former Air Force pilot, plans to run against second-term GOP Rep. Barbara Comstock in a competitive northern Virginia district.</p>
<p>Hill told The Associated Press that Comstock, who voted against a GOP House health care repeal bill in May, “has failed the moral test of her time in Congress.”</p>
<p>The leaders of other groups, such as Women Vote Trump, have begun to court primary challengers to punish those members of Congress deemed insufficiently committed to President Donald Trump’s agenda.</p>
<p>“I expect that we will get involved in primaries,” said the group’s co-founder, Amy Kremer. “You cannot continue to elect the same people over and over again and expect different results.”</p>
<p>On Capitol Hill, some Republicans insist their health care overhaul could be saved in the short term. Yet party leaders — backed by outside groups — are signaling that they would probably move on to taxes. Republicans hoped the issue would bring some party unity, even as realists in Washington view the a tax overhaul — something that hasn’t happened in more than 30 years — as one of the most complex legislative projects possible.</p>
<p>The Trump administration has become engulfed in internal drama over personnel and personalities. Trump on Friday ousted his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and replacing him with Home Security Secretary John Kelly. The president did not appear to share conservatives’ outrage about the Senate’s vote, but repeated his promises to remake the health system.</p>
<p>“You can’t have everything,” Trump said, adding: “We’ll get it done. We’re going to get it.”</p>
<p>Around the country, Republican voters continue to support efforts to repeal former President Barack Obama’s health law, even if there is little agreement on an alternative.</p>
<p>A CNN poll released last week found that 83 percent of Republicans favor some form of repeal, while only 11 percent of Republicans want the party to abandon the repeal effort. Among all adults, 52 percent of voters favor some sort of repeal, with 34 percent favored repeal only if replacement could be enacted at the same time.</p>
<p>“The political pressure on something like this is real,” said GOP strategist Mike Shields. “I don’t think this is over.”</p>
<p>Like others Republican operatives, Shields said the party’s ability to enact the rest of Trump’s agenda — taxes, infrastructure and the border wall — could help “mitigate how upset people will be” about health care.</p>
<p>“If this is part of a general trend,” he said of the GOP’s governing struggles, “I think that can be pretty disastrous for 2018.”</p>
<p>Republicans will be held responsible for any negative economic fallout from the current health system’s failure, said Paul Shumaker, a North Carolina Republican pollster and senior adviser to Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C.</p>
<p>As early as October, voters are likely to see increased costs as insurance companies notify people about their new rates. By next October, it will be too late to unlink Republicans from the problem, Shumaker said.</p>
<p>For now at least, many Trump supporters blame the Republican Party’s problems on its leaders in Congress.</p>
<p>“They certainly didn’t have their house in order,” said Larry Wood of Waynesboro, Virginia, who voted for Trump only after supporting Ohio Gov. John Kasich in the 2016 GOP primary. The 69-year-old retired homebuilder says the failure falls at the feet of Congress.</p>
<p>Trump seems content to let the current system collapse.</p>
<p>“As I said from the beginning, let ObamaCare implode, then deal. Watch!” he said in a tweet.</p>
<p>Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa. Associated Press writer Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.</p> | false | 1 | weary republicans washington may ready move health care conservatives across united states warning gopled congress abandon pledge repeal obamaera health law risk political nightmare next years elections senates failure pass repeal legislation outraged republican base triggered new wave fear stunning collapse exposed party paralyzed ideological division could deliver top campaign pledge devoting months debate seven years promising kill affordable care act senate majority leader mitch mcconnell rky simply said time move thats simply option conservative base energized opposition health law local party leaders activists political operatives predicting payback republicans lawmakers dont revive fight epic fail republicans said tim phillips president americans prosperity political arm conservative koch brothers network failure keep promise hurt american conservative union three republican senators blocked strippeddown repeal bill failed wee hours friday sellouts trumpsanctioned super political action committee rule running ads uncooperative republicans recently sen dean heller rnev limited options directly punishing renegade senators john mccain arizona lisa murkowski alaska susan collins maine none three reelection next fall mccain whose dramatic vote killed bill reelected 6year term probably faced last election brain cancer hardly moved electoral threats still broad disillusionment among conservative voters could impact beyond senators primary election challenges low turnout could mean trouble republicans democrats need flip 24 seats take control house representatives shift would dramatically reshape last two years trumps first term look competitive districts swing districts districts republicans could face primary challenges something potent electoral issue republican pollster chris wilson said partys health care failure dont think something voters going forget one challenger emerged conservative activist shak hill former air force pilot plans run secondterm gop rep barbara comstock competitive northern virginia district hill told associated press comstock voted gop house health care repeal bill may failed moral test time congress leaders groups women vote trump begun court primary challengers punish members congress deemed insufficiently committed president donald trumps agenda expect get involved primaries said groups cofounder amy kremer continue elect people expect different results capitol hill republicans insist health care overhaul could saved short term yet party leaders backed outside groups signaling would probably move taxes republicans hoped issue would bring party unity even realists washington view tax overhaul something hasnt happened 30 years one complex legislative projects possible trump administration become engulfed internal drama personnel personalities trump friday ousted chief staff reince priebus replacing home security secretary john kelly president appear share conservatives outrage senates vote repeated promises remake health system cant everything trump said adding well get done going get around country republican voters continue support efforts repeal former president barack obamas health law even little agreement alternative cnn poll released last week found 83 percent republicans favor form repeal 11 percent republicans want party abandon repeal effort among adults 52 percent voters favor sort repeal 34 percent favored repeal replacement could enacted time political pressure something like real said gop strategist mike shields dont think like others republican operatives shields said partys ability enact rest trumps agenda taxes infrastructure border wall could help mitigate upset people health care part general trend said gops governing struggles think pretty disastrous 2018 republicans held responsible negative economic fallout current health systems failure said paul shumaker north carolina republican pollster senior adviser sen richard burr rnc early october voters likely see increased costs insurance companies notify people new rates next october late unlink republicans problem shumaker said least many trump supporters blame republican partys problems leaders congress certainly didnt house order said larry wood waynesboro virginia voted trump supporting ohio gov john kasich 2016 gop primary 69yearold retired homebuilder says failure falls feet congress trump seems content let current system collapse said beginning let obamacare implode deal watch said tweet beaumont reported des moines iowa associated press writer bill barrow atlanta contributed report | 621 |
<p>By Dustin Volz</p>
<p>WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Internet giants, including Alphabet’s Google (O:) and Facebook (O:), are moving to compromise on several major policy issues as they adjust to an abrupt shift in the political winds in Washington.</p>
<p>Just last week, the U.S. Senate took a big step toward advancing legislation that would partially strip away the internet industry’s bedrock legal protection, a 1996 law that shields companies from liability for the activities of their users.</p>
<p>At the same time, Democratic senators are writing legislation that would create new disclosure rules for online political ads after Facebook this month revealed that suspected Russian trolls purchased more than $100,000 worth of divisive ads on its platform during the 2016 election cycle. The U.S. Federal Election Commission is considering bringing in Facebook and other tech firms for a public hearing.</p>
<p>Unlike in Europe, where they have faced a bevy of new rules and billion-dollar fines, internet giants have avoided virtually all types of government regulation in the United States, even as their market power continues to grow. Amazon (O:), for example, controls more than a third of U.S. online commerce, while Google and Facebook combined account for more than sixty percent of the U.S. digital ad market.</p>
<p>Internet firms have from their inception urged U.S. politicians in both parties to treat their industry as a nascent sector in need of unique protections. These firms enjoyed an especially close relationship with the Democratic administration of former President Barack Obama, which saw several officials go to work for Google upon leaving the White House.</p>
<p>But some Democrats, still bitter over Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 election, are now expressing alarm at the industry’s power. Virginia Senator Mark Warner, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, this month compared political ads on social media to the “wild, wild West” and is working on legislation to require more disclosure.</p>
<p>On the Republican side, President Donald Trump has been hostile to the tech industry in many of his public remarks. Google and Facebook have been repeatedly attacked from the right for alleged liberal bias and a globalist outlook.</p>
<p>Now, the Internet firms are backpedaling from earlier positions as they seek to avoid regulation, according to congressional aides, industry lobbyists and company sources.</p>
<p>“Tech is no longer the golden goose,” said one technology industry source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Maybe it’s a good thing we start behaving like a rational part of the economy.”</p>
<p>Silicon Valley lobbyists and congressional aides in both parties were quick to temper talk of a sweeping regulatory crackdown, in part because the government agencies that could move against the industry, notably the Federal Trade Commission, remain severely understaffed.</p>
<p>But the shift in tone is palpable.</p>
<p>On Thursday, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said the company, for the first time, would make it possible for anyone to see details about political ads that run on Facebook, which, unlike television ads, do not fall under U.S. law requiring disclosure of who pays for them. Requiring such transparency is one of the key provisions of the proposed legislation on online political ads.</p>
<p>The company also said it would turn over to congressional investigators political ads that it says were likely purchased by Russian entities during and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election.</p>
<p>The moves marked an about-face for Zuckerberg, who after the November election said it was a “crazy idea” to think that activity on Facebook swayed the vote.</p>
<p>Facebook has also shifted its stance on proposed changes to the liability protections for internet companies, formally known as Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. The legislation, which is aimed at stopping online sex trafficking, has been fiercely opposed by companies that see it as a threat to openness and innovation on the internet.</p>
<p>But after an emotional hearing last week featuring testimony from the mother of a murdered sex-trafficking victim – which followed two big tech companies, Oracle (N:) and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (N:), breaking ranks with industry peers on the issue – Facebook and Google have opened the door to negotiation on the bill, according to congressional aides and industry sources.</p>
<p>In a statement, Erin Egan, Facebook’s vice president of U.S. policy, said the company believed a legislative solution was possible to “address this terrible problem while ensuring that the internet remains open and free and that responsible companies can continue to work to stop sex trafficking before it happens.”</p>
<p>The tech industry in recent years has neutralized other ideas percolating in the halls of Congress that it perceived as threatening, including calls to weaken encryption and demands that social media companies report “terrorist” activity to the government.</p>
<p>But the effort to amend Section 230 is seen as different. The fast progress of legislation, introduced in August, has alarmed lobbyists and company representatives who initially predicted it would not go far in an otherwise gridlocked Congress.</p>
<p>The bill comes after years of law enforcement lobbying for a crackdown on the online classified site backpage.com, which is used for sex advertising. The measure would make it easier for states and sex trafficking victims to sue social media networks, advertisers and others who fail to keep exploitative material off their platforms.</p>
<p>Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, the lead architect of the Section 230 legislation, said in an interview with Reuters that he was confident his measure would become law this congressional term, with or without Silicon Valley’s cooperation.</p>
<p>The bill has attracted bipartisan support from nearly a third of the Senate; a companion measure has similar backing in the House of Representatives. Portman said he had met with Trump’s daughter and advisor, Ivanka Trump, who expressed strong support.</p>
<p>“Frankly, I am disappointed (that) more in the technology industry are not joining us on this effort,” Portman said. “It is in their interest to be supportive of a solution on this problem.”</p> | false | 1 | dustin volz washington reuters internet giants including alphabets google facebook moving compromise several major policy issues adjust abrupt shift political winds washington last week us senate took big step toward advancing legislation would partially strip away internet industrys bedrock legal protection 1996 law shields companies liability activities users time democratic senators writing legislation would create new disclosure rules online political ads facebook month revealed suspected russian trolls purchased 100000 worth divisive ads platform 2016 election cycle us federal election commission considering bringing facebook tech firms public hearing unlike europe faced bevy new rules billiondollar fines internet giants avoided virtually types government regulation united states even market power continues grow amazon example controls third us online commerce google facebook combined account sixty percent us digital ad market internet firms inception urged us politicians parties treat industry nascent sector need unique protections firms enjoyed especially close relationship democratic administration former president barack obama saw several officials go work google upon leaving white house democrats still bitter russias alleged meddling 2016 election expressing alarm industrys power virginia senator mark warner vice chairman senate intelligence committee month compared political ads social media wild wild west working legislation require disclosure republican side president donald trump hostile tech industry many public remarks google facebook repeatedly attacked right alleged liberal bias globalist outlook internet firms backpedaling earlier positions seek avoid regulation according congressional aides industry lobbyists company sources tech longer golden goose said one technology industry source spoke condition anonymity maybe good thing start behaving like rational part economy silicon valley lobbyists congressional aides parties quick temper talk sweeping regulatory crackdown part government agencies could move industry notably federal trade commission remain severely understaffed shift tone palpable thursday facebook chief executive mark zuckerberg said company first time would make possible anyone see details political ads run facebook unlike television ads fall us law requiring disclosure pays requiring transparency one key provisions proposed legislation online political ads company also said would turn congressional investigators political ads says likely purchased russian entities 2016 us presidential election moves marked aboutface zuckerberg november election said crazy idea think activity facebook swayed vote facebook also shifted stance proposed changes liability protections internet companies formally known section 230 1996 communications decency act legislation aimed stopping online sex trafficking fiercely opposed companies see threat openness innovation internet emotional hearing last week featuring testimony mother murdered sextrafficking victim followed two big tech companies oracle n hewlett packard enterprise n breaking ranks industry peers issue facebook google opened door negotiation bill according congressional aides industry sources statement erin egan facebooks vice president us policy said company believed legislative solution possible address terrible problem ensuring internet remains open free responsible companies continue work stop sex trafficking happens tech industry recent years neutralized ideas percolating halls congress perceived threatening including calls weaken encryption demands social media companies report terrorist activity government effort amend section 230 seen different fast progress legislation introduced august alarmed lobbyists company representatives initially predicted would go far otherwise gridlocked congress bill comes years law enforcement lobbying crackdown online classified site backpagecom used sex advertising measure would make easier states sex trafficking victims sue social media networks advertisers others fail keep exploitative material platforms republican senator rob portman ohio lead architect section 230 legislation said interview reuters confident measure would become law congressional term without silicon valleys cooperation bill attracted bipartisan support nearly third senate companion measure similar backing house representatives portman said met trumps daughter advisor ivanka trump expressed strong support frankly disappointed technology industry joining us effort portman said interest supportive solution problem | 590 |
<p />
<p>Following is the written version of my part in a five-member panel’s presentation to the House’s Homeland Security Committee on 9 October 2013.&#160; I ran late on 8 October 2013 and so failed to provide the committee’s members with a typed-up version of my opening statement before the hearing. I submitted it to them on 10 October 2013.</p>
<p>As things turned out, my tardiness did not really matter. The committee’s Chairman was knowledgeable, polite, and interested in what each panel member had to say, agreeing with some and challenging others. The rest of the Committee — at least those who showed up — was a train wreck or ignorance, arrogance, partisanship, and incompetence.</p>
<p>The Democratic members used most of their allotted time to chastise the Republicans for the government’s shutdown. The three Republicans who spoke to me — especially one from New York — had no interest in what I said about the growing certainty that the Islamists’ war soon will be fought, in part, in North America. Instead, the Republicans used most of their time to satisfy their AIPAC paymasters by praising and defending Israel, for whom they have what Alexander Hamilton would describe as a “womanish attachment.”</p>
<p>One lad from South Carolina also added a short homily on how the religion of Moses and Abraham made the United States and Israel one and the same. And another fellow from Utah was bent on getting me to name the names of people at the CIA who know what is blisteringly obvious to all but the 535 members of Congress — that our ties to Israel are a clear and increasingly mortal threat to U.S. security, its economy, and the lives of Americans because it is one of the central motivations of our Islamist enemies. I refused to play ball. Utah’s contemporary version of Tail-gunner Joe McCarthy also added that he “knows” all Muslims hate all Americans, their freedoms, and women’s rights and that is why they are attacking us. He must have been briefed by that preacher from South Carolina, or by Senators Graham and McCain, the Knesset members masquerading as U.S. Senators.[1]</p>
<p>Finally, in what has been a genuine and touching surprise, I have received several dozen e-mails from Americans who said they appreciated what I had to say to the committee. I want to thank them publicly for their kind words, and say that while they encourage me to continue speaking out, I must confess that I think there is little hope of preventing combat against Islamist forces in the United States in the years ahead. The quite large Homeland Security Committee probably is a pretty good microcosm of the attitudes of both the House and the Senate on these issues, and, if this judgment is correct, most of these ladies and gentlemen do not give a damn about the safety of American lives and property here at home.</p>
<p>Indeed, after listening to some of the members of this committee, as well as to the last three presidents and many others in Congress and the media for the last fifteen years, it seems likely that many would silently welcome attacks in the United States so they could say “we and Israel are now in the same boat.” They then could go on with their daily businesses of war, taxing, and graft as usual.</p>
<p>What this means for Americans is that time is running out, and that there is every reason for them to exercise their rights under the 2nd Amendment as soon and as fully as possible. It seems likely that within the foreseeable future Americans will be called to defend themselves against Islamist fighters and/or an oppressive federal government that too-late sees that its deliberate lies about Islamist motivation, its willingness to facilitate U.S. military defeat overseas, its failure to control U.S. borders, and its groveling to Israel and the Saudi police-state have combined to bring war to our shores and that the only response it has is severe martial law—better known as tyranny.</p>
<p>One hopes that Phillip Bobbitt was right in his fine new book about Machiavelli’s thought when he argues that, in times when a republic’s leaders “become unsuitable,” one of the great strengths of a republic lies in “the ruthlessness of the public, which can replace its leaders according to the demands of circumstances.”[2]</p>
<p>Notes</p>
<p>[1] <a href="http://homeland.house.gov/hearing/hearing-al-shabaab-al-nusra-how-westerners-joining-terror-groups-overseas-affect-homeland" type="external">http://homeland.house.gov/hearing/hearing-al-shabaab-al-nusra-how-westerners-joining-terror-groups-overseas-affect-homeland</a></p>
<p>[2] Phillip Bobbitt. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009W6VK70/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B009W6VK70&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=forepolijour-20" type="external">The Garments of Court and Palace: Machiavelli and the World He Made</a>. New York: Grove Press, 2013, p. 90</p>
<p>__________</p>
<p>NOTES ON U.S. AND WESTERN JIHADIS RETRUNING HOME</p>
<p>9 October 2013</p>
<p>Michael F. Scheuer</p>
<p>(1) As America enters the seventeenth year of the war that much of Islam formally began waging against it in 1996, American and other Western Muslims have been traveling to support and/or fight alongside the mujahedin since the mid-1980s.</p>
<p>(2.) From the 1980s through today, U.S. Muslim citizens who go overseas to fight jihad return to America with several attributes, some old and some knew, but all strongly held.</p>
<p>(3) As I noted at the start, the subject of our discussion today is about a phenomenon&#160; that is nearly 40 years old. It is clearly more dangerous today than ever before, but the factors that cause the problem — the factors that motivate young Muslim Americans to jihad — have been the same over time.</p>
<p>And while there are a number of factors that motivate these young people — including Saudi-sponsored and funded religious education in the United States, and the bonds of family, clan, tribe, and nationalism that remain strong and vibrant even after immigration — the first and most important motivation for these American Muslims to go to war is the bipartisan and interventionist foreign policy of the U.S. government and the existence of Israel and numerous un-Islamic tyrannies in the Arab world, all supported by the United States.</p>
<p>Indeed, since Laden declared war on America in 1996, al-Qaeda and its allies have had — from their perspective –only two indispensable allies: Allah and U.S. and Western interventionism.</p>
<p>(4) To conclude my opening statement, I would say that while what American Muslim mujahedin bring back with them from jihad is important, what they find in the United States upon returning is will be much more important in motivating what I believe will become combat situations — like the recent event in Nairobi and others much worse — in the United States over the next decade.</p>
<p>(5) And if you think that I place too much emphasis on the motivation provided to U.S. citizens and other Western mujahedin by U.S. and Western interventionism, I would draw your attention to the reality that, to the best of my knowledge, neither we nor any of our NATO partners have yet to capture a Western Islamist fighter whose words or documents have shown a motivation to attack based on hatred for liberty, elections, or gender equality. Invariably, they attribute their motivation to U.S. and Western military intervention in the Islamic world and U.S. and Western support for Israel and various Muslim tyrannies.</p> | false | 1 | following written version part fivemember panels presentation houses homeland security committee 9 october 2013160 ran late 8 october 2013 failed provide committees members typedup version opening statement hearing submitted 10 october 2013 things turned tardiness really matter committees chairman knowledgeable polite interested panel member say agreeing challenging others rest committee least showed train wreck ignorance arrogance partisanship incompetence democratic members used allotted time chastise republicans governments shutdown three republicans spoke especially one new york interest said growing certainty islamists war soon fought part north america instead republicans used time satisfy aipac paymasters praising defending israel alexander hamilton would describe womanish attachment one lad south carolina also added short homily religion moses abraham made united states israel one another fellow utah bent getting name names people cia know blisteringly obvious 535 members congress ties israel clear increasingly mortal threat us security economy lives americans one central motivations islamist enemies refused play ball utahs contemporary version tailgunner joe mccarthy also added knows muslims hate americans freedoms womens rights attacking us must briefed preacher south carolina senators graham mccain knesset members masquerading us senators1 finally genuine touching surprise received several dozen emails americans said appreciated say committee want thank publicly kind words say encourage continue speaking must confess think little hope preventing combat islamist forces united states years ahead quite large homeland security committee probably pretty good microcosm attitudes house senate issues judgment correct ladies gentlemen give damn safety american lives property home indeed listening members committee well last three presidents many others congress media last fifteen years seems likely many would silently welcome attacks united states could say israel boat could go daily businesses war taxing graft usual means americans time running every reason exercise rights 2nd amendment soon fully possible seems likely within foreseeable future americans called defend islamist fighters andor oppressive federal government toolate sees deliberate lies islamist motivation willingness facilitate us military defeat overseas failure control us borders groveling israel saudi policestate combined bring war shores response severe martial lawbetter known tyranny one hopes phillip bobbitt right fine new book machiavellis thought argues times republics leaders become unsuitable one great strengths republic lies ruthlessness public replace leaders according demands circumstances2 notes 1 httphomelandhousegovhearinghearingalshabaabalnusrahowwesternersjoiningterrorgroupsoverseasaffecthomeland 2 phillip bobbitt garments court palace machiavelli world made new york grove press 2013 p 90 __________ notes us western jihadis retruning home 9 october 2013 michael f scheuer 1 america enters seventeenth year war much islam formally began waging 1996 american western muslims traveling support andor fight alongside mujahedin since mid1980s 2 1980s today us muslim citizens go overseas fight jihad return america several attributes old knew strongly held 3 noted start subject discussion today phenomenon160 nearly 40 years old clearly dangerous today ever factors cause problem factors motivate young muslim americans jihad time number factors motivate young people including saudisponsored funded religious education united states bonds family clan tribe nationalism remain strong vibrant even immigration first important motivation american muslims go war bipartisan interventionist foreign policy us government existence israel numerous unislamic tyrannies arab world supported united states indeed since laden declared war america 1996 alqaeda allies perspective two indispensable allies allah us western interventionism 4 conclude opening statement would say american muslim mujahedin bring back jihad important find united states upon returning much important motivating believe become combat situations like recent event nairobi others much worse united states next decade 5 think place much emphasis motivation provided us citizens western mujahedin us western interventionism would draw attention reality best knowledge neither nato partners yet capture western islamist fighter whose words documents shown motivation attack based hatred liberty elections gender equality invariably attribute motivation us western military intervention islamic world us western support israel various muslim tyrannies | 613 |
<p>In one sense,&#160; <a href="http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/cline-v-oklahoma-coalition-for-reproductive-justice/?wpmp_switcher=desktop" type="external">Cline v. Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice</a>&#160;promises to mark a new chapter in the U.S. Supreme Court’s now-forty-year-old project of regulating the practice of abortion in America.&#160; The Court has never before evaluated a legal restriction on the so-called “abortion pill.”&#160; At the same time, the case presents essentially the same doctrinal issue that was addressed by the Court in&#160; <a href="http://www.bloomberglaw.com/public/document/Gonzales_v_Carhart_550_US_124_127_S_Ct_1610_167_LEd2d_480_2007_Co" type="external">Gonzales v. Carhart</a>&#160;(2007).&#160; Whereas&#160;Gonzales&#160;dealt with the federal government’s efforts to restrict one particularly grisly and controversial method of abortion typically performed later in pregnancy (intact dilation and extraction, also known as partial-birth abortion),&#160;Cline&#160;involves an Oklahoma law restricting the prescription of abortion-inducing drugs (given early in pregnancy) to the protocol authorized by the FDA’s final printed label. Despite these minor differences of context,&#160;Cline&#160;can be resolved squarely within the principles set forth by Justice Kennedy in&#160;Gonzales.</p>
<p>In&#160;Gonzales, the Court upheld the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, despite the fact that the law prohibited entirely the use of a specific abortion procedure throughout every stage of pregnancy, based on the federal government’s interests in promoting respect for unborn life, preserving the integrity of the medical profession, and preventing a coarsening of the polity’s moral sense.&#160; In affirming the ban, the Court made clear that even in the vexed matter of abortion, “[w]here the state has a rational basis to act, and it does not impose an undue burden, the State may use its regulatory power to bar certain procedures and substitute others, all in furtherance of its legitimate interests in regulating the medical profession.” The law did not impose an “undue burden” on women seeking abortions (the current standard for evaluating abortion regulations that apply before fetal viability) because it did not limit access to other commonly used methods of abortion deemed safe by practitioners.&#160; For the same reason, it was not fatal to the bill that the law lacked a “health exception” to the general prohibition on partial birth abortions.&#160; To be sure, abortion rights advocates and their sympathetic medical experts objected that there were imaginable circumstances in which partial-birth abortion might be the safest option, and thus the ban was dangerous for women’s health.&#160; Medical and scientific experts defending the bill disagreed with this speculative assessment.&#160; The Court concluded that even in the face of such uncertainty and disagreement among experts, state and federal governments retain wide discretion to pass legislation regulating the practice of medicine, including laws that override the preferences of abortion providers (and, by extension, their patients) and direct them to use a “reasonable alternative procedure” instead of their favored option.</p>
<p>Cline&#160;presents the same type of dispute, in virtually identical form.&#160; In 2000, the FDA approved the drug Mifeprex&#160; (also known as mifepristone or RU-486) for the termination of pregnancy.&#160; The FDA approved Mifeprex pursuant to its&#160; <a href="http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRSearch.cfm?CFRPart=314&amp;showFR=1&amp;subpartNode=21:5.0.1.1.4.8" type="external">special regulatory authority</a>&#160;to “fast track” certain drugs to market – a process usually reserved for medicines that treat life-threatening conditions, such as cancer or AIDS.&#160; In order to ensure safe use under the expedited approval process, the FDA imposed restrictions on the use of Mifeprex.&#160; Among other things, the final printed label for Mifeprex limits its use to the first forty-nine days of gestation, and prescribes a variety of conditions both regarding qualifications for prescribing physicians and the process for administering the drug to patients.&#160; In the years that have followed, as is often the case, abortion practitioners have developed “off-label” protocols that are different from that provided in the FDA’s final printed label.&#160; These new regimens use different dosages, and have extended the usage of the drug to sixty-three days post-fertilization.</p>
<p>In 2011, the state of Oklahoma moved to restrict the use of abortion-inducing drugs to the FDA protocol, out of concerns for women’s safety, including especially for risks associated with hemorrhaging and retained tissue (in case of incomplete expulsion of the now-deceased unborn child).&#160; By that time there had been eight deaths from sepsis during Mifeprex use – none of which involved the FDA protocol.</p>
<p>Abortion rights advocates and practitioners responded that this law was medically unjustified and unduly burdened women’s range of choices for abortion.&#160; Supporters of the Oklahoma law argued in response that the law is rooted in a legitimate state interest (safeguarding women’s health), supported by sufficient (if disputed) medical and scientific evidence.&#160; Moreover, they argued that the law does not amount to an “undue” or unsafe burden on women seeking abortion.&#160; The concrete effect of the law is to limit drug-induced abortion to the first forty-nine days of gestation, using the FDA protocol – a regimen that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG)&#160; <a href="http://www.irefonline.it/websites/iref/home_sds.nsf/wAll/IDCW-6TZL79/$file/bibliografia%20viale_1.pdf" type="external">declares</a>&#160;“safe and effective” for this stage of pregnancy.</p>
<p>From fifty to sixty-three days’ gestation, women in Oklahoma have an alternative to drug-induced abortions deemed very safe by practitioners – namely, surgical abortion.&#160; Supporters of the law cited peer-reviewed studies suggesting that surgical abortion is&#160;safer&#160;than drug-induced abortion, because of lower risks hemorrhaging and incomplete abortion (requiring additional surgical intervention).&#160; They also cite expert evidence that drug-induced abortion could be&#160;riskier&#160;for women whose health might be endangered by surgical abortion (given concerns about hemorrhaging and retained tissue).&#160; Most strikingly, even&#160;abortion rights supporters and their experts&#160;have recently argued vigorously in the Texas state legislature that surgical abortion is&#160;so safe&#160;that it need not be performed in ambulatory surgery centers. And in California, abortion rights supporters recently celebrated passage of a law allowing non-physicians to perform surgical abortions.&#160; Accordingly, supporters of the bill argue that restricting the use of abortion-inducing drugs to just over twelve weeks’ gestation does not materially restrict women’s choice for abortion, nor does it impose any risks to their health.</p>
<p>The parallels between&#160;Cline&#160;and&#160;Gonzales&#160;are striking.&#160; In both cases, the government moved to limit a particular form of abortion in the name of pursuing some other important good, based on substantial (but contested) evidence. In both cases, the restrictions left women free to seek other common modes of abortion regarded as extremely safe by practitioners.&#160; That is, both laws channeled abortion providers and their patients towards a “reasonable alternative option.”</p>
<p>The Oklahoma Supreme Court declared the law invalid in an undertheorized, conclusory, and strikingly spare opinion.&#160; It merely asserted, without discussion, that the law ran afoul ofCasey&#160;and thus could not stand.&#160; This explanatory minimalism and shifting of responsibility to U.S. Supreme Court precedent may reflect a survival strategy on the part of the Oklahoma justices (eight of nine of whom were appointed by governors who supported abortion rights) who must stand for regular statewide retention votes in a state whose electorate appears to care very deeply for the unborn.&#160; But even so, it is clear that the Oklahoma Court’s opinion was not faithful to&#160;Gonzales&#160;– an opinion that it does not even cite, despite the obvious similarities.</p>
<p>The U.S. Supreme Court has certified two questions to the Oklahoma Supreme Court regarding the scope of the law, namely, whether it bans the use of misoprostol (a drug specifically mentioned in the FDA protocol that the statute incorporates) and whether it forbids the use of drugs to treat ectopic pregnancies (a procedure that is excluded from the definition of “abortion” under Oklahoma law).&#160; Contrary to the assertions of opponents of the law, only the most implausible and tortured reading of the challenged statute could yield a positive answer to either question.&#160; It is difficult to imagine that the Oklahoma Supreme Court would adopt such a strained construction.</p>
<p>Assuming that the Oklahoma Court adopts the most reasonable interpretation of the challenged law, and assuming further that the U.S. Supreme Court decides&#160;Cline&#160;on the merits, a straightforward application of&#160;Gonzales&#160;would require reversal.&#160; Oklahoma, like any state, is entitled to regulate the practice of medicine — including abortion — for the purpose of safeguarding the health of the people within its borders.&#160; This is&#160;a fortiori&#160;true when the state legislature’s judgment is supported by substantial (albeit contested) medical authority — including the research relied on by the FDA in the first instance.&#160; The case for sustaining the law is clearer still where, as here, its effect is merely to close a two-week window (fifty to sixty-three days’ gestation) during which abortion-inducing drugs may be used, and equally safe (arguably safer) options are available.&#160; Failure to reverse the Oklahoma Supreme Court here would reinstate the “abortionist’s veto” that Justice Kennedy rightly rejected in&#160;Gonzales&#160;and constrict the state’s authority to pursue laws meant to promote the health and welfare of its people.</p>
<p>Carter Snead is a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.</p> | false | 1 | one sense160 cline v oklahoma coalition reproductive justice160promises mark new chapter us supreme courts nowfortyyearold project regulating practice abortion america160 court never evaluated legal restriction socalled abortion pill160 time case presents essentially doctrinal issue addressed court in160 gonzales v carhart1602007160 whereas160gonzales160dealt federal governments efforts restrict one particularly grisly controversial method abortion typically performed later pregnancy intact dilation extraction also known partialbirth abortion160cline160involves oklahoma law restricting prescription abortioninducing drugs given early pregnancy protocol authorized fdas final printed label despite minor differences context160cline160can resolved squarely within principles set forth justice kennedy in160gonzales in160gonzales court upheld partial birth abortion ban act 2003 despite fact law prohibited entirely use specific abortion procedure throughout every stage pregnancy based federal governments interests promoting respect unborn life preserving integrity medical profession preventing coarsening politys moral sense160 affirming ban court made clear even vexed matter abortion state rational basis act impose undue burden state may use regulatory power bar certain procedures substitute others furtherance legitimate interests regulating medical profession law impose undue burden women seeking abortions current standard evaluating abortion regulations apply fetal viability limit access commonly used methods abortion deemed safe practitioners160 reason fatal bill law lacked health exception general prohibition partial birth abortions160 sure abortion rights advocates sympathetic medical experts objected imaginable circumstances partialbirth abortion might safest option thus ban dangerous womens health160 medical scientific experts defending bill disagreed speculative assessment160 court concluded even face uncertainty disagreement among experts state federal governments retain wide discretion pass legislation regulating practice medicine including laws override preferences abortion providers extension patients direct use reasonable alternative procedure instead favored option cline160presents type dispute virtually identical form160 2000 fda approved drug mifeprex160 also known mifepristone ru486 termination pregnancy160 fda approved mifeprex pursuant its160 special regulatory authority160to fast track certain drugs market process usually reserved medicines treat lifethreatening conditions cancer aids160 order ensure safe use expedited approval process fda imposed restrictions use mifeprex160 among things final printed label mifeprex limits use first fortynine days gestation prescribes variety conditions regarding qualifications prescribing physicians process administering drug patients160 years followed often case abortion practitioners developed offlabel protocols different provided fdas final printed label160 new regimens use different dosages extended usage drug sixtythree days postfertilization 2011 state oklahoma moved restrict use abortioninducing drugs fda protocol concerns womens safety including especially risks associated hemorrhaging retained tissue case incomplete expulsion nowdeceased unborn child160 time eight deaths sepsis mifeprex use none involved fda protocol abortion rights advocates practitioners responded law medically unjustified unduly burdened womens range choices abortion160 supporters oklahoma law argued response law rooted legitimate state interest safeguarding womens health supported sufficient disputed medical scientific evidence160 moreover argued law amount undue unsafe burden women seeking abortion160 concrete effect law limit druginduced abortion first fortynine days gestation using fda protocol regimen american college obstetricians gynecologists acog160 declares160safe effective stage pregnancy fifty sixtythree days gestation women oklahoma alternative druginduced abortions deemed safe practitioners namely surgical abortion160 supporters law cited peerreviewed studies suggesting surgical abortion is160safer160than druginduced abortion lower risks hemorrhaging incomplete abortion requiring additional surgical intervention160 also cite expert evidence druginduced abortion could be160riskier160for women whose health might endangered surgical abortion given concerns hemorrhaging retained tissue160 strikingly even160abortion rights supporters experts160have recently argued vigorously texas state legislature surgical abortion is160so safe160that need performed ambulatory surgery centers california abortion rights supporters recently celebrated passage law allowing nonphysicians perform surgical abortions160 accordingly supporters bill argue restricting use abortioninducing drugs twelve weeks gestation materially restrict womens choice abortion impose risks health parallels between160cline160and160gonzales160are striking160 cases government moved limit particular form abortion name pursuing important good based substantial contested evidence cases restrictions left women free seek common modes abortion regarded extremely safe practitioners160 laws channeled abortion providers patients towards reasonable alternative option oklahoma supreme court declared law invalid undertheorized conclusory strikingly spare opinion160 merely asserted without discussion law ran afoul ofcasey160and thus could stand160 explanatory minimalism shifting responsibility us supreme court precedent may reflect survival strategy part oklahoma justices eight nine appointed governors supported abortion rights must stand regular statewide retention votes state whose electorate appears care deeply unborn160 even clear oklahoma courts opinion faithful to160gonzales160 opinion even cite despite obvious similarities us supreme court certified two questions oklahoma supreme court regarding scope law namely whether bans use misoprostol drug specifically mentioned fda protocol statute incorporates whether forbids use drugs treat ectopic pregnancies procedure excluded definition abortion oklahoma law160 contrary assertions opponents law implausible tortured reading challenged statute could yield positive answer either question160 difficult imagine oklahoma supreme court would adopt strained construction assuming oklahoma court adopts reasonable interpretation challenged law assuming us supreme court decides160cline160on merits straightforward application of160gonzales160would require reversal160 oklahoma like state entitled regulate practice medicine including abortion purpose safeguarding health people within borders160 is160a fortiori160true state legislatures judgment supported substantial albeit contested medical authority including research relied fda first instance160 case sustaining law clearer still effect merely close twoweek window fifty sixtythree days gestation abortioninducing drugs may used equally safe arguably safer options available160 failure reverse oklahoma supreme court would reinstate abortionists veto justice kennedy rightly rejected in160gonzales160and constrict states authority pursue laws meant promote health welfare people carter snead professor law university notre dame fellow ethics public policy center | 851 |
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<p>&lt;img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1387" title="obama_israeli-flag_baz-ratner_reuters" src="https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/obama_israeli-flag_baz-ratner_reuters.jpg" alt="obama_israeli-flag_baz-ratner_reuters" width="350" height="197" srcset="https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/obama_israeli-flag_baz-ratner_reuters.jpg 500w, https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/obama_israeli-flag_baz-ratner_reuters-150x85.jpg 150w, https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/obama_israeli-flag_baz-ratner_reuters-300x169.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 350px) 100vw, 350px" /&gt;</p>
<p>The US can bring peace to the Middle East, but US taxpayers have to advocate to the government how they want their money spent via US foreign policy.</p>
<p>On Friday in Dresden, Germany, a day after his speech in Cairo, President Barack Obama continued his comments about Mideast peace.</p>
<p>He said: “Now I just have to say one more time. The US can’t solve this problem. The US can be a partner in solving the problem, but ultimately the parties involved are going to have to make a decision that the prosperity and the security of their people is best-served by negotiations and compromises, and we can’t force them to most those difficult decisions.”</p>
<p>Soon after his speech in Cairo on Thursday, the Israeli Government rejected Obama’s request for Israel to stop building settlements. Unless the White House takes a hard line with Israel, nothing will change.</p>
<p>US Taxpayer Money</p>
<p>If Americans knew how the US Government gives billions of American taxpayer money as military aid to Israel annually, more people would call on the Obama Administration to stop funneling US taxpayer money into the military occupation of the Palestinians. This occupation includes Israeli settlement construction on Palestinian land, which means Israel will never allow a viable, contiguous Palestinian state to become reality.</p>
<p>According to Obama’s Fiscal Year 2010 Appendix, the Department of State and Other International Programs, under the Military Financing Program (p. 829), here is what it says: “For necessary expenses for grants to enable the President to carry out the provisions of section 23 of the Arms Export Control Act, [$4,635,000,000] $5,274,390,000: Provided, That of the funds appropriated under this heading, not less than $2,380,000,000 shall be available for grants only for Israel..” so Obama can forget about his appeal to Israel.</p>
<p>Metaphorically, the repo agent cannot renegotiate conditions for peace, prosperity and security when the white phosphorous shells and money were already left in the tank’s trunk.</p>
<p>Obama claims he can provide Israelis and Palestinians a framework and a forum to achieve their goals. Obama gives the Israeli Military the keys to laissez-faire “let them do as they please,” military strategy. In his speeches, Obama made no mention of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East, George J. Mitchell, is scheduled to return to the Middle East, where he will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday. This meeting is a follow-up to last Thursday’s speech in Cairo.</p>
<p>Mideast Peace – Humanitarian Style</p>
<p>If I had flown to Cairo on Air Force One, I would have made sure I brought with me humanitarian aid. I would have given it to the thousands of children in Egypt’s Resala orphanages and to the Palestinians suffering in Gaza and the West Bank. Instead of extending a rhetorical olive branch, tree saplings grow peace and prosperity. Although Israel destroyed Gaza’s airport several years ago, and the Israeli Military controls the air space, sea and land surrounding the Palestinian Territories, I am sure they would have accommodated the American president. At the border crossing, Obama would have seen the people stranded and the humanitarian resources not reaching the people for reconstruction.</p>
<p>Even though it is nice to travel to tourist sites on freshly-paved roads, why not take the road less traveled? Why not go to the neighborhoods and villages to have conversations with the people? Despite the possibility people may comment on US-foreign policy, it gives one the opportunity to learn about their daily lives. It is only by engaging with people – no matter their race, religion, gender, or nationality – where peace lies.</p>
<p>Wasn’t that the mechanics of the 2008 Presidential Campaign? Talking with people about their daily lives?</p>
<p>How can any political leader understand what life is like for people in another part of the world within a matter of hours or with no contact at all? When people feel concrete actions, and they experience a real, viable plan that makes a difference in their lives, they are receptive to opinions and diverse, points of view. Actions must follow the words. Otherwise, words are meaningless.</p>
<p>In his defense, Obama’s visit to Cairo and Buchenwald were positive steps. However, when he made no mention of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in his speeches, his avoidance points to the extent real change takes place in the Holy Land and the Mideast Region. A speech with no road to change is like a ride on an ox-drawn cart, or a ride in a back roads’ tuk-tuk: the passengers will not travel far.</p>
<p>People need the key/al-miftah to unlock the doors to their survival.</p>
<p>Did the 2008 campaign for change end last November?</p>
<p>On November 4, 2008, in Chicago’s Grant Park, Obama gave his election victory speech. He said: “…And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces, to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world, our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.”</p>
<p>For the people who struggle, who suffer and who remain trapped by concrete walls and electrified fences, maybe the Sphinx has the answer.</p> | false | 1 | ltimg classaligncenter sizefull wpimage1387 titleobama_israeliflag_bazratner_reuters srchttpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads200906obama_israeliflag_bazratner_reutersjpg altobama_israeliflag_bazratner_reuters width350 height197 srcsethttpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads200906obama_israeliflag_bazratner_reutersjpg 500w httpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads200906obama_israeliflag_bazratner_reuters150x85jpg 150w httpswwwforeignpolicyjournalcomwpcontentuploads200906obama_israeliflag_bazratner_reuters300x169jpg 300w sizesmaxwidth 350px 100vw 350px gt us bring peace middle east us taxpayers advocate government want money spent via us foreign policy friday dresden germany day speech cairo president barack obama continued comments mideast peace said say one time us cant solve problem us partner solving problem ultimately parties involved going make decision prosperity security people bestserved negotiations compromises cant force difficult decisions soon speech cairo thursday israeli government rejected obamas request israel stop building settlements unless white house takes hard line israel nothing change us taxpayer money americans knew us government gives billions american taxpayer money military aid israel annually people would call obama administration stop funneling us taxpayer money military occupation palestinians occupation includes israeli settlement construction palestinian land means israel never allow viable contiguous palestinian state become reality according obamas fiscal year 2010 appendix department state international programs military financing program p 829 says necessary expenses grants enable president carry provisions section 23 arms export control act 4635000000 5274390000 provided funds appropriated heading less 2380000000 shall available grants israel obama forget appeal israel metaphorically repo agent renegotiate conditions peace prosperity security white phosphorous shells money already left tanks trunk obama claims provide israelis palestinians framework forum achieve goals obama gives israeli military keys laissezfaire let please military strategy speeches obama made mention israels operation cast lead gaza obamas special envoy middle east george j mitchell scheduled return middle east meet israeli prime minister benjamin netanyahu tuesday meeting followup last thursdays speech cairo mideast peace humanitarian style flown cairo air force one would made sure brought humanitarian aid would given thousands children egypts resala orphanages palestinians suffering gaza west bank instead extending rhetorical olive branch tree saplings grow peace prosperity although israel destroyed gazas airport several years ago israeli military controls air space sea land surrounding palestinian territories sure would accommodated american president border crossing obama would seen people stranded humanitarian resources reaching people reconstruction even though nice travel tourist sites freshlypaved roads take road less traveled go neighborhoods villages conversations people despite possibility people may comment usforeign policy gives one opportunity learn daily lives engaging people matter race religion gender nationality peace lies wasnt mechanics 2008 presidential campaign talking people daily lives political leader understand life like people another part world within matter hours contact people feel concrete actions experience real viable plan makes difference lives receptive opinions diverse points view actions must follow words otherwise words meaningless defense obamas visit cairo buchenwald positive steps however made mention israels operation cast lead gaza speeches avoidance points extent real change takes place holy land mideast region speech road change like ride oxdrawn cart ride back roads tuktuk passengers travel far people need keyalmiftah unlock doors survival 2008 campaign change end last november november 4 2008 chicagos grant park obama gave election victory speech said watching tonight beyond shores parliaments palaces huddled around radios forgotten corners world stories singular destiny shared new dawn american leadership hand people struggle suffer remain trapped concrete walls electrified fences maybe sphinx answer | 513 |
<p>PHOENIX — In his 24 years as metro Phoenix’s sheriff, <a href="" type="internal">Joe Arpaio survived scandals and dodged investigations</a> that would easily have sunk the careers of many politicians.</p>
<p>He locked up journalists and made criminal cases against political adversaries who tangled with him, investigated judges and misspent $100 million in jail funds. He let investigations into child rape cases languish because officers were pulled away, in part, to help in Arpaio’s immigrant efforts.</p>
<p>Arpaio was found to have violated the civil rights of Latinos in a racial-profiling case expected to cost taxpayers $92 million by next summer.</p>
<p>His critics felt like they finally won a measure of accountability against the lawman after he was found guilty earlier this month <a href="" type="internal">on a misdemeanor contempt charge</a> for flouting the courts in carrying out his signature immigration patrols.</p>
<p>But their victory was upended when <a href="" type="internal">a pardon by his most powerful political ally</a> — President Donald Trump — allowed Arpaio to wiggle out of legal jeopardy again.</p>
<p>“Arpaio played up to Trump, and Trump is a good old boy, and he doesn’t give a damn about us — only likes people of his own mind and from his base,” said Mary Rose Wilcox, a former county official who was charged with crimes in a now-discredited corruption case brought by Arpaio. “He wanted red meat, and Arpaio was that red meat.”</p>
<p>For Arpaio, the pardon is the ultimate vindication after repeatedly complaining that he was being unfairly targeted for merely enforcing the law in arresting immigrants in the country illegally.</p>
<p>He celebrated the victory at an Italian restaurant with his wife and said he’ll discuss more about his future early next week. The former sheriff vowed to remain active politically, and issued a fundraising appeal for his legal defense fund within an hour or two of the pardon’s announcement Friday afternoon. Arpaio, reached Saturday, declined to comment further.</p>
<p>A judge nominated to the bench by former President George W. Bush ordered Arpaio to stop his immigration patrols in 2011 amid allegations that his officers were racially profiling Latinos. The judge later found Arpaio’s office systematically profiled Latinos and recommended a criminal charge against the sheriff for prolonging the patrols 17 months after he had ordered them stopped.</p>
<p>The pardon drew widespread condemnation among Latinos, Democrats and even some Republicans who believe the move is offensive to immigrants at a time of deep racial divisions in the aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville. Some conservatives said it was a long-overdue action to preserve the legacy of a man they say was punished for doing his job.</p>
<p>“It’s a misdemeanor equal to a barking-dog complaint,” said Tom Morrissey, a former chairman of the Arizona Republican Party. “To spend millions of taxpayer dollars to go after Sheriff Joe for doing his job, I think, was kind of ridiculous.”</p>
<p>The reality is that taxpayers in Phoenix and its suburbs will pay for Arpaio’s racial profiling for years to come.</p>
<p>The overall profiling case against Arpaio and his office has already cost taxpayers $66 million on items such as attorney fees, officer training and an alert system to spot problematic behavior by sheriff’s deputies. Over the next year, it will cost an additional $26 million, largely for adding officers to the effort to comply with a court-ordered overhaul of the agency.</p>
<p>The financial toll is expected to continue until the sheriff’s office comes in full compliance for three straight years with court-ordered changes. The sheriff’s office was deemed 40 percent compliant in the first phase of the overhaul and 58 percent compliant in its second phase, according to the latest report measuring the agency’s progress.</p>
<p>Taxpayers have footed another $82 million in judgments, settlements and legal fees for the sheriff’s office, covering issues such as lawsuits over deaths in his jails and the lawman’s failed investigations of political enemies. That tally includes $3.5 million paid to a family of a developmentally disabled girl who was molested while Arpaio’s office did not investigate her abuser.</p>
<p>“Joe Arpaio received a pardon yesterday,” Maricopa County Supervisor Steve Gallardo, a longtime Arpaio critic, said Saturday. “The taxpayers did not receive a pardon.”</p>
<p>While Arpaio had long defied predictions of his political demise, the costs of the profiling case and the criminal case against the Republican sheriff are believed to have contributed to his loss in November to Democrat Paul Penzone, a little-known retired Phoenix police sergeant.</p>
<p>Arpaio suffered a cruel irony on election night: He lost the heavily Republican Maricopa County by nearly 13 percentage points, while Trump — who shares similar views on immigration as Arpaio — won by more than 3 percentage points.</p>
<p>Morrissey blamed a steady stream of negative news about Arpaio from local reporters for Arpaio’s loss.</p>
<p>“It was day after day after day of the media attacking him,” Morrissey said.</p>
<p>Wilcox offered a different explanation: Voters grew tired of Arpaio’s legal problems and penchant for self-promotion, but were not familiar with Trump.</p>
<p>Arpaio’s “abuses were so well documented that finally people said we had enough,” Wilcox said. “They didn’t know Trump.”</p>
<p>Related</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">US judge seeks criminal contempt charges against Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Feds to charge Arizona sheriff Arpaio for defying judge’s orders</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Ex-Arizona sheriff Arpaio loses bid for jury trial in contempt case</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Immigration enforcement trial begins for ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Former Arizona sheriff resumes bid to recuse judge from profiling case</a></p>
<p /> | false | 1 | phoenix 24 years metro phoenixs sheriff joe arpaio survived scandals dodged investigations would easily sunk careers many politicians locked journalists made criminal cases political adversaries tangled investigated judges misspent 100 million jail funds let investigations child rape cases languish officers pulled away part help arpaios immigrant efforts arpaio found violated civil rights latinos racialprofiling case expected cost taxpayers 92 million next summer critics felt like finally measure accountability lawman found guilty earlier month misdemeanor contempt charge flouting courts carrying signature immigration patrols victory upended pardon powerful political ally president donald trump allowed arpaio wiggle legal jeopardy arpaio played trump trump good old boy doesnt give damn us likes people mind base said mary rose wilcox former county official charged crimes nowdiscredited corruption case brought arpaio wanted red meat arpaio red meat arpaio pardon ultimate vindication repeatedly complaining unfairly targeted merely enforcing law arresting immigrants country illegally celebrated victory italian restaurant wife said hell discuss future early next week former sheriff vowed remain active politically issued fundraising appeal legal defense fund within hour two pardons announcement friday afternoon arpaio reached saturday declined comment judge nominated bench former president george w bush ordered arpaio stop immigration patrols 2011 amid allegations officers racially profiling latinos judge later found arpaios office systematically profiled latinos recommended criminal charge sheriff prolonging patrols 17 months ordered stopped pardon drew widespread condemnation among latinos democrats even republicans believe move offensive immigrants time deep racial divisions aftermath violence charlottesville conservatives said longoverdue action preserve legacy man say punished job misdemeanor equal barkingdog complaint said tom morrissey former chairman arizona republican party spend millions taxpayer dollars go sheriff joe job think kind ridiculous reality taxpayers phoenix suburbs pay arpaios racial profiling years come overall profiling case arpaio office already cost taxpayers 66 million items attorney fees officer training alert system spot problematic behavior sheriffs deputies next year cost additional 26 million largely adding officers effort comply courtordered overhaul agency financial toll expected continue sheriffs office comes full compliance three straight years courtordered changes sheriffs office deemed 40 percent compliant first phase overhaul 58 percent compliant second phase according latest report measuring agencys progress taxpayers footed another 82 million judgments settlements legal fees sheriffs office covering issues lawsuits deaths jails lawmans failed investigations political enemies tally includes 35 million paid family developmentally disabled girl molested arpaios office investigate abuser joe arpaio received pardon yesterday maricopa county supervisor steve gallardo longtime arpaio critic said saturday taxpayers receive pardon arpaio long defied predictions political demise costs profiling case criminal case republican sheriff believed contributed loss november democrat paul penzone littleknown retired phoenix police sergeant arpaio suffered cruel irony election night lost heavily republican maricopa county nearly 13 percentage points trump shares similar views immigration arpaio 3 percentage points morrissey blamed steady stream negative news arpaio local reporters arpaios loss day day day media attacking morrissey said wilcox offered different explanation voters grew tired arpaios legal problems penchant selfpromotion familiar trump arpaios abuses well documented finally people said enough wilcox said didnt know trump related us judge seeks criminal contempt charges arizona sheriff joe arpaio feds charge arizona sheriff arpaio defying judges orders exarizona sheriff arpaio loses bid jury trial contempt case immigration enforcement trial begins exsheriff joe arpaio former arizona sheriff resumes bid recuse judge profiling case | 544 |
<p>SPOILER ALERT:&#160;Do not read if you have not yet watched “Number One,” the eighth episode of the second season of “ <a href="http://variety.com/t/this-is-us/" type="external">This Is Us</a>.”</p>
<p>On “ <a href="http://variety.com/2017/artisans/production/this-is-us-composer-runaways-1202609674/" type="external">This Is Us</a>,” Kevin Pearson ( <a href="http://variety.com/t/justin-hartley/" type="external">Justin Hartley</a>) has been on a downward spiral for the past few episodes — struggling with his addiction to pills triggered by an old knee injury. In “Number One,” when he visited his high school for the retirement of his jersey number, he hit a new low. He slept with an old classmate-turned-doctor and stole a sheet off her prescription pad — and then lost his father’s necklace, his symbol of hope.</p>
<p>“I wanted to make sure that we told a story that was honest and true, especially because this is something that people deal with a lot,” Hartley tells&#160;Variety. “It’s very dangerous. You can lose your wealth, you can lose your friends, you can lose your trust, you can lose your dignity, you can lose everything. We didn’t want to just tell a drug story real quick and then just wrap it up in a bow.”</p>
<p>Here, Hartley talks with&#160;Variety about whether Kevin’s breakdown in “Number One” is his true rock bottom, whether he’ll be able to help Kate, and how his father’s death plays into all of his issues.</p>
<p>Kevin was clearly in pain, and a couple of times actually verbalized that, and yet no one could really see him through his celebrity. What were the conversations around why that happened?</p>
<p>Some of the things we came to were just that people just assume that you’re OK. I’ve actually done it — I’ve been on the other end of it where something will happen and it’s catastrophic, and you’re sitting there like, “What the hell? How did this happen out of nowhere?” But then you go replay it, and you realize, “Oh my God, my friend was doing this and I wasn’t paying attention.” The next thing you know he’s in the hospital, and it wasn’t all of a sudden but for whatever reason, I was choosing to think he was OK. And I think part of Kevin’s thing that he goes through is that he had football when he was a kid, he was popular in high school, he’s an actor, he has money, he has friends&#160;— I put that in quotes&#160;— he had Sophie, everybody likes him. So people just assume he’s always OK. He’s always making jokes, he’s charming.</p>
<p>Do you feel like this episode was Kevin’s rock bottom? Is he ready to get better now?</p>
<p>I hope so. I think something’s got to give. This episode meant so much to me because I know what it means to carry the weight of a relationship on your shoulders and be like, “As long as that person is kicking and breathing and in my life, there’s a chance there will be closure, there’s a chance that something might happen.” And then when he loses that necklace, it was like all hope was lost. So hopefully that’s his rock bottom, because I think sometimes you need that to realize where the hell they are.</p>
<p>At the end, it seems like he finally wants to ask for help from Randall (Sterling K. Brown), but he’s met with another family tragedy in Kate’s (Chrissy Metz) miscarriage.&#160;</p>
<p>And how interesting is that that Kevin and Randall have this very difficult relationship [but] he actually goes back to get help from Randall? How close Kate and Kevin are, it’s interesting that he goes to Randall. He doesn’t have his dad, and I think if his dad was there he’d obviously go to him, but he knows Randall will be there for him. But when he gets there, it’s like, “This is not about you, man. We can’t do this right now.” So he is self-aware enough to realize there’s a bigger story here&#160;— which is also kind of heartbreaking, as well, because he needs help right now, and he’s not really in a position to get it. It’s tough.</p>
<p>Do you think Kevin has been aware of the parallels between his addiction and his father’s?</p>
<p>The injury happened, and I think there was a moment where he didn’t want to take the medication for fear that he would go down that path. I don’t think he just took it and thought, “Well, whatever.” I think he is aware of the gene in the family, that they’re all addicts, more than anyone else. He sees what Kate goes through and what his dad went through, and he’s aware that he has that in him. And so, when he finally chooses to take the medication, I think it was just because the pain was legitimately too much, and he didn’t want to fail at anything, and he was going to go to whatever lengths to succeed at this one thing and that it would be fine [because] he only needed it for a second. But of course that’s not how that stuff works. And I think once he was in that state of being high and drunk and depressed and alone, he just kept shoveling crap on top of himself. He was the one inflicting pain on himself, and he’s not capable of dealing with it. And once he was in that state of f–ked up, I don’t think much was going through his head about drawing the parallels, it was just, “How can I feel sorry for myself and inflict as much pain because I deserve it?” It was just a self-loathing, awful place.</p>
<p>That being said, he didn’t spiral down a completely dark rabbit hole of partying with teenagers.&#160;</p>
<p>Well, he’s not a criminal! He’s got morals, he’s not a bad person.</p>
<p>But sometimes when you’re that messed up, you’re not thinking clearly and you do reprehensible things.</p>
<p>Yeah, and one of the things that happens with Kevin is that I think he’s aware of the fact that he doesn’t really want to bring anyone else down there with him. That’s a kid&#160;— she’s probably 18 in the show, but that’s a child, and he’s 37 years old. And also, he’s not in a position where he’s trying to have company. The whole Charlotte thing happened, in my mind, because he’s smart enough to realize that she’s a doctor and has access to something that he needs. I think that was a calculated move on his part.</p>
<p>Kevin didn’t fully break down and ask for help until he realized he lost his father’s necklace. So do you feel like he won’t be able to truly fix the other things in his life until he finally deals with his father’s death?</p>
<p>I think so. It’s not only his father’s death, it’s how he died and the whole Miguel thing and the rift that he had with his mom. It’s all of that combined. I think it’s all together. I think the knee will heal on its own, and I think he can kick this drug habit that he has for a while, but at the root of it, eventually he’s going to have to go down that path and deal with his father’s death&#160; or otherwise it’s a slippery slope and like a record that just keeps repeating. He had to deal with the fact that that necklace and whatever it symbolized to him meant so much to him. It was the last physical object he had of his father, and he never got any closure of his relationship with his father. And you start to see what he was going through with his father when he died&#160;— and they weren’t in a good place. He carries that around with him, and I think that necklace that he wore was the promise of a better day.</p>
<p>How will the show shed more light on how Jack died in the next few episodes?</p>
<p>We’ve seen it with Kate, we’ve seen her kind of admit that she feels responsible for her father’s death, and I think what you see as the show goes on is they all have that guilt that they carry. You can blame yourself for anything&#160;— you can blame yourself for things that might not be your fault. And I think everybody involved carries a lot of guilt, especially for Kevin because as you see in [this] episode, in that moment in time, he was not nice to [Jack]; he was a little prick. But at the same time, I see both sides of the story. He was embarrassed. His father told him certain things, and he sees his father in a certain way and thinks, “This guy doesn’t make mistakes, and I’m going to be just like him,” and that’s not at all what it was. He’s got some anger and resentment toward his father, and he’s at that age where all of your anger and resentment comes to the surface anyway. It’s kind of a perfect storm.</p>
<p>Were you operating under the assumption that the necklace came from Jack’s brother and that Kevin even knows his father has a brother?</p>
<p>It’s difficult because this show is constantly changing. When you think you know something, something else will happen, and you’re like “OK,” and that’s the nature of the show. I choose to operate under the assumption that yeah, I do know, but I also know he doesn’t talk about it. But I could be totally wrong, by the way. I could find out that Kevin doesn’t know. What we do know, what he says, is that he was given it at a time when he was lost and had no direction and felt like he had no purpose. So, that story will be told.</p>
<p>“This Is Us” airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on NBC.</p> | false | 1 | spoiler alert160do read yet watched number one eighth episode second season us us kevin pearson justin hartley downward spiral past episodes struggling addiction pills triggered old knee injury number one visited high school retirement jersey number hit new low slept old classmateturneddoctor stole sheet prescription pad lost fathers necklace symbol hope wanted make sure told story honest true especially something people deal lot hartley tells160variety dangerous lose wealth lose friends lose trust lose dignity lose everything didnt want tell drug story real quick wrap bow hartley talks with160variety whether kevins breakdown number one true rock bottom whether hell able help kate fathers death plays issues kevin clearly pain couple times actually verbalized yet one could really see celebrity conversations around happened things came people assume youre ok ive actually done ive end something happen catastrophic youre sitting like hell happen nowhere go replay realize oh god friend wasnt paying attention next thing know hes hospital wasnt sudden whatever reason choosing think ok think part kevins thing goes football kid popular high school hes actor money friends160 put quotes160 sophie everybody likes people assume hes always ok hes always making jokes hes charming feel like episode kevins rock bottom ready get better hope think somethings got give episode meant much know means carry weight relationship shoulders like long person kicking breathing life theres chance closure theres chance something might happen loses necklace like hope lost hopefully thats rock bottom think sometimes need realize hell end seems like finally wants ask help randall sterling k brown hes met another family tragedy kates chrissy metz miscarriage160 interesting kevin randall difficult relationship actually goes back get help randall close kate kevin interesting goes randall doesnt dad think dad hed obviously go knows randall gets like man cant right selfaware enough realize theres bigger story here160 also kind heartbreaking well needs help right hes really position get tough think kevin aware parallels addiction fathers injury happened think moment didnt want take medication fear would go path dont think took thought well whatever think aware gene family theyre addicts anyone else sees kate goes dad went hes aware finally chooses take medication think pain legitimately much didnt want fail anything going go whatever lengths succeed one thing would fine needed second course thats stuff works think state high drunk depressed alone kept shoveling crap top one inflicting pain hes capable dealing state fked dont think much going head drawing parallels feel sorry inflict much pain deserve selfloathing awful place said didnt spiral completely dark rabbit hole partying teenagers160 well hes criminal hes got morals hes bad person sometimes youre messed youre thinking clearly reprehensible things yeah one things happens kevin think hes aware fact doesnt really want bring anyone else thats kid160 shes probably 18 show thats child hes 37 years old also hes position hes trying company whole charlotte thing happened mind hes smart enough realize shes doctor access something needs think calculated move part kevin didnt fully break ask help realized lost fathers necklace feel like wont able truly fix things life finally deals fathers death think fathers death died whole miguel thing rift mom combined think together think knee heal think kick drug habit root eventually hes going go path deal fathers death160 otherwise slippery slope like record keeps repeating deal fact necklace whatever symbolized meant much last physical object father never got closure relationship father start see going father died160 werent good place carries around think necklace wore promise better day show shed light jack died next episodes weve seen kate weve seen kind admit feels responsible fathers death think see show goes guilt carry blame anything160 blame things might fault think everybody involved carries lot guilt especially kevin see episode moment time nice jack little prick time see sides story embarrassed father told certain things sees father certain way thinks guy doesnt make mistakes im going like thats hes got anger resentment toward father hes age anger resentment comes surface anyway kind perfect storm operating assumption necklace came jacks brother kevin even knows father brother difficult show constantly changing think know something something else happen youre like ok thats nature show choose operate assumption yeah know also know doesnt talk could totally wrong way could find kevin doesnt know know says given time lost direction felt like purpose story told us airs tuesdays 9 pm nbc | 725 |
<p>Cinematographer <a href="http://variety.com/tag/roger-deakins/" type="external">Roger Deakins</a> has amassed 13 Oscar nominations throughout his career for work on films like “The Shawshank Redemption,” “No Country for Old Men,” and “Skyfall.” It has become a slice of Oscar trivia that he has yet to win, tied for the record on that score with the late George J. Folsey (“The Great Ziegfeld,” “Adam’s Rib”). <a href="http://variety.com/tag/denis-villeneuve/" type="external">Denis Villeneuve</a>’s massive blockbuster sequel “ <a href="http://variety.com/tag/blade-runner-2049/" type="external">Blade Runner 2049</a>” may or may not be the turning of the tide for <a href="http://variety.com/2017/film/in-contention/blade-runner-2049-oscars-warner-bros-mad-max-1202575485/" type="external">Deakins at the Academy Awards</a>, but judging by his response to such factoids, he isn’t losing any sleep over it. He’s just happy to still be doing the work of visual storytelling. He continues to perform at a high level, and he’s forged a partnership with Villeneuve over the course of three films now (“Prisoners” and “Sicario” being the others) that makes for one of the great visual signatures in modern cinema.</p>
<p>Deakins spoke to Variety about his work on the new film, which has <a href="http://variety.com/2017/film/news/blade-runner-2049-reviews-roundup-ryan-gosling-1202576407/" type="external">been hailed by some critics</a> as a masterpiece of genre filmmaking.</p>
<p>Variety: This is easily one of the biggest projects of your career. Did it feel like that? Did it&#160;feel like a moment?</p>
<p><a href="http://variety.com/2017/artisans/news/roger-deakins-emmanuel-lubezki-1202559770-1202559770/" type="external">Roger Deakins</a>: A moment, I don’t know about that. It just felt long, you know? It was a long time because I was involved very early on, and over the summer I’ve been involved in the final effects work and timing, so it’s been quite a long haul.</p>
<p>When Denis first approached you about working on the film, what was your first instinct? Was there trepidation, given that it’s the sequel to such a beloved cinema milestone?</p>
<p>Yeah, absolutely. But there were kind of rumors of it while we were doing “Sicario,” that they would ask Denis [to direct it]. So it was floating around. When he asked me, you couldn’t really say no. It’s really nice the reviews are pretty good, because it was a difficult one, in terms of, you know, some people are going to want you to do things similar to the original, but then others would say, “Well, it’s just a copy.” But it’s very much Denis’ film, and I realized that going into it, that he was going to make his own movie.</p>
<p>So you didn’t go back and look at Jordan Cronenweth’s work in the original film, even for like an aesthetic continuity or anything?</p>
<p>We didn’t talk about it and I didn’t want to go there. I can’t light like Jordan. It was a different time and he had a different sensibility. I would have been lost and it wouldn’t have been at all satisfying to try and replicate somebody else’s work.</p>
<p>Was “Blade Runner” a landmark film for you at all? It continues to inspire new generations of filmmakers.</p>
<p>I remember thinking it was more of a detective movie that paid homage to film noir more than it did to science-fiction. I was a big fan of science-fiction and Philip Dick, and frankly, the film is so far away from the book. The main character is such an antihero in the book. It’s very different. Not that it’s not great. I was just a bit thrown when I first saw it; it wasn’t what I expected at all.</p>
<p>Were there any touchstones of note when you and Denis started in on the look of the new film? Any photography or artwork that inspired you?</p>
<p>We basically trawled the internet looking for ideas. Denis and I scouted in London because at one time we had hoped to shoot in London, but there was no stage space. A lot of the Brutalist architecture in London became the key, really. [Production designer] Dennis Gassner said what informed him the most was when Denis said he wanted it to feel Brutalist, that severe concrete architecture that started in the 1950s.</p>
<p>With Las Vegas, Denis wanted it to have the red dust. We discussed it at length and we came up with these images of Sydney during the dust storm that they had a few years ago. There are these wonderful photos of the Sydney Opera House and it’s covered with red dust. That formed the basis for Las Vegas.</p>
<p>Speaking of Gassner, his work is stunning here and I often find his presence is noteworthy vis a vis your work. You’ve shot his sets for decades now — numerous Coen brothers collaborations, Sam Mendes’ films, etc. Tell me about that interplay.</p>
<p>Most of the conceptualization happened as we were storyboarding, and Dennis was with us in Montreal. It was a group think tank. I’ve known Dennis for years and we’ve worked very closely, but Denis is very specific on what he wants. I think most of the concepts of the design were very much Denis’ vision, to use an overused word.</p>
<p>In the film’s promotional materials you’ve spoken about the set and lighting challenges being some of the most significant of your career. Could you be a little more specific about that?</p>
<p>You set your own kind of challenges, really. I could have bounced a light off the ceilings of the sets and just shot, but you kind of want to do something that expresses what’s on the page. I looked at a lot of images on the internet and got lighting ideas for different sets. It was a big thing to coordinate what I wanted to do with what Dennis wanted to do in terms of the design. And I was probably working with the art directors more than with Dennis, as we got closer to shooting, because it was a practical thing about how I could light a set and where I needed a space — the nitty gritty of design in terms of lighting it. The lighting of K’s apartment and his building was something I discussed with Dennis early on, about how you build in practicals and what would they look like and could they be slightly unusual but not distracting. It’s something that evolves.</p>
<p>The biggest challenge, in a way, was finding a look for Jared Leto’s character, Wallace’s, interiors. It’s a very minimal Brutalist architecture, but then I looked at the way architects had used light, and they used water in a ceiling or something to allow light to filter through and you get all these kind of caustic patterns. I thought of the idea that this guy, who is blind, was actually living in this space with artificial sunlight moving everywhere. So then I decided I wanted all the lights moving, so it ups the complexity and the headache factor. [Laughs.] I didn’t have to do that but it seemed like a good thing to do.</p>
<p>It seems like more than any other film you’ve done, the visual effects on this one are sort of seamlessly integrated and part of the overall world. So what impact did that element have on your work?</p>
<p>Denis and I wanted to do as much as possible in-camera and we insisted when we had the actors, at least, all the foreground and mid-ground would be in-camera. So when we shot K’s rooftop in the rain with Joi [a holographic artificial intelligence application], for instance, that early sequence, I talked to the art department about doing forced perspective, miniature buildings. We didn’t have a huge stage space so the art department built things in miniature, so you got the feeling of the distance and the scale from a smaller space.</p>
<p>I find myself wondering if you applied anything you might have learned on “Skyfall” here. There was that Shanghai sequence with the big LED jellyfish and then some similar motifs in the holographic imagery of “ <a href="http://variety.com/2017/digital/news/american-made-tops-studios-tv-ad-spending-1202578260/" type="external">Blade Runner 2049</a>.”</p>
<p>That actually is a good point. The idea of doing forced perspective, that’s what we did on that set in “Skyfall.” That was basically all in-camera. The glass rooms, the office space is real, what you see outside is real space, but everything else is slightly forced perspective. The big LED screen that has the jellyfish on it in “Skyfall,” we used a similar technique with the big Joi ad at the end of “Blade Runner.” We had to have a 40×30 LED screen projecting back the pink figure of Joi that we had shot in pre-production, and she was on a blue background, so basically when you were looking over Ryan [Gosling]’s shoulder, the whole perspective and color and feel was accurate. Obviously the image is replaced and made to look a little more electronic, but you’re basically shooting something that’s real, which not only helps the actors but gives a reality to the whole thing. All the atmosphere we had on that stage, the color interacts with the atmosphere and it lights Ryan the correct way. That’s something we could have done with a lighting effect and green screen, but it would never look as real as it does.</p>
<p>Did you employ some of that in the Las Vegas interiors, where there are these projected holograms of Elvis Presley and other entertainers in a key action sequence?</p>
<p>Some of the shots with Elvis — we had an Elvis lookalike, so some of the shots had him in, and then we’d shoot another take without the actors in the background so they could make Elvis transparent. And we also shot him as an element that was put in. But most of the lighting was done when we shot Ryan and Harrison [Ford], so it all fit in the space.</p>
<p>All of that sounds really fun.</p>
<p>That was kind of fun! But it’s also scary, because there were so many sets and so many challenging situations, which, okay, for my fault they were challenging, but we weren’t often on a set for more than a few days. So it was often quite a turnaround.</p>
<p>So what’s next for you? I haven’t seen anything announced about your next gig yet.</p>
<p>I’m starting prep in a couple of weeks on a film that starts shooting in January. It’s called <a href="http://variety.com/2017/film/news/ansel-elgort-goldfinch-adaptation-1202574604/" type="external">“The Goldfinch.”</a></p>
<p>Do you expect to work on “Dune” with Denis?</p>
<p>He hasn’t mentioned it. I haven’t mentioned it. I don’t know. You read so many things about what he might or might not do. So I don’t know.</p>
<p>With just a handful of films you guys have a fantastic partnership going. And I meant to ask you what you thought of Bradford Young’s work on “Arrival.”</p>
<p>Oh, it was great. I mean, that’s the thing. You work with Denis and your work gets lifted, really.</p>
<p>I don’t know if I’ve ever really broached this with you because it’s sort of a jinx, I guess, but by now it should be obvious you have a wave of support to finally get you an Academy Award.</p>
<p>Oh, you know, I’m too old for all of that. Whatever. Just doing it is enough, and still doing the job. What you do doesn’t change. The fun is doing it. I’m really pleased the film is getting some good reactions. It has something to say. It makes people think. And it’s quite different from a lot of what you see. I read <a href="http://variety.com/2017/film/reviews/blade-runner-2049-review-1202576220/" type="external">one review</a> that mentioned Andrei Tarkovsky, and it mentioned that “Blade Runner 2049” owes as much to Tarkovsky as anything else. And it was a compliment, which is kind of nice, because his name isn’t exactly praise in Hollywood!</p>
<p>I was just going to say, if we can work Tarkovsky into our blockbusters, that’s fantastic.</p>
<p>Yeah! I thought, “Wow, that must be a first.”</p> | false | 1 | cinematographer roger deakins amassed 13 oscar nominations throughout career work films like shawshank redemption country old men skyfall become slice oscar trivia yet win tied record score late george j folsey great ziegfeld adams rib denis villeneuves massive blockbuster sequel blade runner 2049 may may turning tide deakins academy awards judging response factoids isnt losing sleep hes happy still work visual storytelling continues perform high level hes forged partnership villeneuve course three films prisoners sicario others makes one great visual signatures modern cinema deakins spoke variety work new film hailed critics masterpiece genre filmmaking variety easily one biggest projects career feel like it160feel like moment roger deakins moment dont know felt long know long time involved early summer ive involved final effects work timing quite long haul denis first approached working film first instinct trepidation given sequel beloved cinema milestone yeah absolutely kind rumors sicario would ask denis direct floating around asked couldnt really say really nice reviews pretty good difficult one terms know people going want things similar original others would say well copy much denis film realized going going make movie didnt go back look jordan cronenweths work original film even like aesthetic continuity anything didnt talk didnt want go cant light like jordan different time different sensibility would lost wouldnt satisfying try replicate somebody elses work blade runner landmark film continues inspire new generations filmmakers remember thinking detective movie paid homage film noir sciencefiction big fan sciencefiction philip dick frankly film far away book main character antihero book different great bit thrown first saw wasnt expected touchstones note denis started look new film photography artwork inspired basically trawled internet looking ideas denis scouted london one time hoped shoot london stage space lot brutalist architecture london became key really production designer dennis gassner said informed denis said wanted feel brutalist severe concrete architecture started 1950s las vegas denis wanted red dust discussed length came images sydney dust storm years ago wonderful photos sydney opera house covered red dust formed basis las vegas speaking gassner work stunning often find presence noteworthy vis vis work youve shot sets decades numerous coen brothers collaborations sam mendes films etc tell interplay conceptualization happened storyboarding dennis us montreal group think tank ive known dennis years weve worked closely denis specific wants think concepts design much denis vision use overused word films promotional materials youve spoken set lighting challenges significant career could little specific set kind challenges really could bounced light ceilings sets shot kind want something expresses whats page looked lot images internet got lighting ideas different sets big thing coordinate wanted dennis wanted terms design probably working art directors dennis got closer shooting practical thing could light set needed space nitty gritty design terms lighting lighting ks apartment building something discussed dennis early build practicals would look like could slightly unusual distracting something evolves biggest challenge way finding look jared letos character wallaces interiors minimal brutalist architecture looked way architects used light used water ceiling something allow light filter get kind caustic patterns thought idea guy blind actually living space artificial sunlight moving everywhere decided wanted lights moving ups complexity headache factor laughs didnt seemed like good thing seems like film youve done visual effects one sort seamlessly integrated part overall world impact element work denis wanted much possible incamera insisted actors least foreground midground would incamera shot ks rooftop rain joi holographic artificial intelligence application instance early sequence talked art department forced perspective miniature buildings didnt huge stage space art department built things miniature got feeling distance scale smaller space find wondering applied anything might learned skyfall shanghai sequence big led jellyfish similar motifs holographic imagery blade runner 2049 actually good point idea forced perspective thats set skyfall basically incamera glass rooms office space real see outside real space everything else slightly forced perspective big led screen jellyfish skyfall used similar technique big joi ad end blade runner 4030 led screen projecting back pink figure joi shot preproduction blue background basically looking ryan goslings shoulder whole perspective color feel accurate obviously image replaced made look little electronic youre basically shooting something thats real helps actors gives reality whole thing atmosphere stage color interacts atmosphere lights ryan correct way thats something could done lighting effect green screen would never look real employ las vegas interiors projected holograms elvis presley entertainers key action sequence shots elvis elvis lookalike shots wed shoot another take without actors background could make elvis transparent also shot element put lighting done shot ryan harrison ford fit space sounds really fun kind fun also scary many sets many challenging situations okay fault challenging werent often set days often quite turnaround whats next havent seen anything announced next gig yet im starting prep couple weeks film starts shooting january called goldfinch expect work dune denis hasnt mentioned havent mentioned dont know read many things might might dont know handful films guys fantastic partnership going meant ask thought bradford youngs work arrival oh great mean thats thing work denis work gets lifted really dont know ive ever really broached sort jinx guess obvious wave support finally get academy award oh know im old whatever enough still job doesnt change fun im really pleased film getting good reactions something say makes people think quite different lot see read one review mentioned andrei tarkovsky mentioned blade runner 2049 owes much tarkovsky anything else compliment kind nice name isnt exactly praise hollywood going say work tarkovsky blockbusters thats fantastic yeah thought wow must first | 910 |
<p />
<p>The conflict in Syria continues to take lives on both sides in what increasingly looks like a civil war. The bloodshed in <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16959446" type="external">Homs</a> has captured most attention in recent days, but we should not forget violence in the <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/syrian-army-general-assassinated-by-gunmen-in-damascus-1.412317" type="external">capital</a> <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/middle-east-live/2012/jan/06/syria-protests-as-arab-league-mission-continues" type="external">Damascus</a> and other Syrian <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16978803" type="external">towns</a>, under government control, where lives have been lost and a climate of fear prevails. Twenty-four hour news coverage means unlimited hunger for detail, factual, exaggerated or invented. Newspapers and broadcasters have acquired a taste for ‘privileged’ information from interest groups, and report it uncritically as if it were true, especially since the events of September 11, 2001. For interest groups offering ‘privileged’ information, what is revealed, and when, becomes central in the propaganda war, and news outlets are mere tools.</p>
<p>This tendency is again apparent in the reporting of the conflict in Syria. Groups of Syrian exiles, such as the Istanbul-based Syrian National Council (the name reminds of the Libyan National Council), have gained a grip over what we hear in Western countries. The Syrian government’s reluctant dealings with the foreign media have not helped, but there are indications of it learning the lesson slowly. One lobby group calling itself the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights projects itself as the authentic voice on events inside Syria.</p>
<p>The Syrian <a href="http://www.syriahr.org/" type="external">Observatory</a> is a London-based group that regularly makes unverifiable <a href="http://rt.com/news/syrian-ngo-western-support-755/" type="external">claims</a> of large casualties in the conflict, victims of Assad’s forces. The observatory rarely talks about casualties on the government side and is dedicated to Assad’s overthrow. When accuracy in reporting in Syria is paramount, news outlets in the West are saturated with questionable sources and uncorroborated claims. From areas in government control, information is sparse.</p>
<p>Professing to tell a secret whose veracity, or lack thereof, is already known to people has an underlying and deliberate motive. The BBC recently said it had seen a ‘leaked’ <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-16821218" type="external">NATO</a> report showing what the major actors were up to in Afghanistan. Among the secrets were indications that the Taliban were expanding their influence in the country; they were infiltrating the Afghan army and the police, made possible by government corruption; the militants were gaining support in the population; Afghans preferred Taliban rule, not that of the present government; and Pakistan’s military intelligence agency ISI was continuing to manipulate senior Taliban leaders, whose whereabouts and activities were known to it. How many times have we heard all that before?</p>
<p>The context of the ‘leaked’ NATO report was more important than its recycled content. That the Taliban have a relatively small, though unknown, membership is not a secret. Support for them is growing in Pashtun areas, and on the rise, is no secret either, given their activities and reach. Penetration of the militants into the army and the police has been obvious for years. One needs to remember attacks from inside Afghanistan’s security forces on fellow Afghan and foreign troops, government buildings and officials. Afghans have learned through history that foreign occupiers have come and gone. Afghan has to live with Afghan, including Taliban relatives and neighbors.</p>
<p>That Pakistan’s military intelligence ISI has been involved in Afghanistan is a story at least 30 years old, first with the Mujahideen and then their successors, the Taliban. Indeed the CIA armed the Mujahideen in the 1980s against the Soviet occupation forces, and then the Clinton administration in the 1990s briefly flirted with the Taliban as they expanded their control in Afghanistan. I discuss all this in my book, <a href="http://www.potomacbooksinc.com/Books/SearchResults.aspx?str=deepak+tripathi" type="external">Breeding Ground</a> (Potomac Books, Inc., Washington, D.C., 2011). The ISI’s relationship with these groups is rather like the CIA’s or the Soviet KGB’s activities in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and other parts of the world. Claims about the NATO report telling anything new are absurd.</p>
<p>A more interesting aspect of the ‘leaked’ report concerns realpolitik. The leak was timed to coincide with a visit by Pakistan’s foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar to Kabul, where she was holding talks with President Karzai. The visiting foreign minister was left responding to accusations against her country’s role in Afghanistan going back 30 years or more, instead of talks she had just had.</p>
<p>Two events in 2011 caused a breakdown in America’s relationship with its ally in the ‘war on terror.’ One was the covert operation by U.S special forces to kill Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad deep inside Pakistani territory in May. The other event was the killing of 24 Pakistani troops by the Americans inside Pakistan. U.S. attempts to blame the incident on the Pakistanis made it worse. Washington has had to pay a price in lost cooperation, including access to <a href="http://www.dawn.com/2011/12/11/us-vacated-shamsi-airbase-within-time-limit-gilani.html" type="external">Shamsi</a> airbase in a remote part of Balochistan province, and blocked NATO supply routes.</p>
<p>Further, the direct relationship President George W. Bush had forged with Pakistan’s military has soured. And the military and Pakistani courts are, in their separate ways, lining up against President Asif Ali Zardari and his civilian government. Speculation is rife in Islamabad that the Supreme Court will find Zardari’s prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gailani, in contempt for not initiating corruption charges against the sitting president. And if Gailani were to be found guilty, it would trigger an early general election, which Zardari’s People’s Party could lose.</p>
<p>Context is everything in news. The ‘leaked’ NATO report on the military situation in Afghanistan was largely recycled information, useful for the official leakers and journalists who got the scoop. Immediately after the ‘leak’ came, the U.S. defense secretary Leon Panetta’s statement that the Obama administration may <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-16843361" type="external">wind down</a> American combat operations in Afghanistan in 2013, a year before had been envisaged until recently. Was the NATO ‘leak’ an attempt by the military establishment to pre-empt President Obama’s plan for an early withdrawal from Afghanistan? The timing certainly complicated the Pakistani foreign minister’s talks with President Karzai in Kabul. Who might gain from the NATO report? And in Syria, in the midst of an escalating conflict and its human cost, who might lose or gain among the internal and external actors? These are the questions that beg answers. For without such context, reporting is no more than a means to serve the interests of political actors making news and journalists chasing scoops.</p> | false | 1 | conflict syria continues take lives sides increasingly looks like civil war bloodshed homs captured attention recent days forget violence capital damascus syrian towns government control lives lost climate fear prevails twentyfour hour news coverage means unlimited hunger detail factual exaggerated invented newspapers broadcasters acquired taste privileged information interest groups report uncritically true especially since events september 11 2001 interest groups offering privileged information revealed becomes central propaganda war news outlets mere tools tendency apparent reporting conflict syria groups syrian exiles istanbulbased syrian national council name reminds libyan national council gained grip hear western countries syrian governments reluctant dealings foreign media helped indications learning lesson slowly one lobby group calling syrian observatory human rights projects authentic voice events inside syria syrian observatory londonbased group regularly makes unverifiable claims large casualties conflict victims assads forces observatory rarely talks casualties government side dedicated assads overthrow accuracy reporting syria paramount news outlets west saturated questionable sources uncorroborated claims areas government control information sparse professing tell secret whose veracity lack thereof already known people underlying deliberate motive bbc recently said seen leaked nato report showing major actors afghanistan among secrets indications taliban expanding influence country infiltrating afghan army police made possible government corruption militants gaining support population afghans preferred taliban rule present government pakistans military intelligence agency isi continuing manipulate senior taliban leaders whose whereabouts activities known many times heard context leaked nato report important recycled content taliban relatively small though unknown membership secret support growing pashtun areas rise secret either given activities reach penetration militants army police obvious years one needs remember attacks inside afghanistans security forces fellow afghan foreign troops government buildings officials afghans learned history foreign occupiers come gone afghan live afghan including taliban relatives neighbors pakistans military intelligence isi involved afghanistan story least 30 years old first mujahideen successors taliban indeed cia armed mujahideen 1980s soviet occupation forces clinton administration 1990s briefly flirted taliban expanded control afghanistan discuss book breeding ground potomac books inc washington dc 2011 isis relationship groups rather like cias soviet kgbs activities afghanistan libya syria parts world claims nato report telling anything new absurd interesting aspect leaked report concerns realpolitik leak timed coincide visit pakistans foreign minister hina rabbani khar kabul holding talks president karzai visiting foreign minister left responding accusations countrys role afghanistan going back 30 years instead talks two events 2011 caused breakdown americas relationship ally war terror one covert operation us special forces kill osama bin laden abbottabad deep inside pakistani territory may event killing 24 pakistani troops americans inside pakistan us attempts blame incident pakistanis made worse washington pay price lost cooperation including access shamsi airbase remote part balochistan province blocked nato supply routes direct relationship president george w bush forged pakistans military soured military pakistani courts separate ways lining president asif ali zardari civilian government speculation rife islamabad supreme court find zardaris prime minister yousaf raza gailani contempt initiating corruption charges sitting president gailani found guilty would trigger early general election zardaris peoples party could lose context everything news leaked nato report military situation afghanistan largely recycled information useful official leakers journalists got scoop immediately leak came us defense secretary leon panettas statement obama administration may wind american combat operations afghanistan 2013 year envisaged recently nato leak attempt military establishment preempt president obamas plan early withdrawal afghanistan timing certainly complicated pakistani foreign ministers talks president karzai kabul might gain nato report syria midst escalating conflict human cost might lose gain among internal external actors questions beg answers without context reporting means serve interests political actors making news journalists chasing scoops | 588 |
<p>“To thine own self be true,” says Shakespeare’s Polonius, “and thou canst be false to no man.” Live in truth, urged Vaclav Havel. “Let the lie come into the world,” wrote Solzhenitsyn, “but not through me.” How seriously should we take these pronouncements, and how do we obey them?</p>
<p>There are two kinds of untruth – lying and faking. The person who is lying says what he or she does not believe. The person who is faking says what he believes, though only for the time being and for the purpose in hand.</p>
<p>Anyone can lie. It suffices to say something with the intention to deceive. Faking, however, is an achievement. To fake things you have to take people in, yourself included. The liar can pretend to be shocked when his lies are exposed, but his pretence is part of the lie. The fake really is shocked when he is exposed, since he has created around himself a community of trust, of which he himself is a member.</p>
<p>In all ages people have lied in order to escape the consequences of their actions, and the first step in moral education is to teach children not to tell fibs. But faking is a cultural phenomenon, more prominent in some periods than in others. There is very little faking in the society described by Homer, for example, or in that described by Chaucer. By the time of Shakespeare, however, poets and playwrights are beginning to take a strong interest in this new human type.</p>
<p>In Shakespeare’s King Lear the wicked sisters Goneril and Regan belong to a world of fake emotion, persuading themselves and their father that they feel the deepest love, when in fact they are entirely heartless. But they don’t really know themselves to be heartless – if they did, they could not behave so brazenly. The tragedy of King Lear begins when the real people – Kent, Cordelia, Edgar, Gloucester – are driven out by the fakes.</p>
<p>The fake is a person who has rebuilt himself, with a view to occupying another social position than the one that would be natural to him. Such is Molière’s Tartuffe, the religious impostor who takes control of a household through a display of scheming piety. Like Shakespeare, Moliere perceives that faking goes to the very heart of the person engaged in it. Tartuffe is not simply a hypocrite, who pretends to ideals that he does not believe in. He is a fabricated person, who believes in his own ideals since he is just as illusory as they are.</p>
<p>Tartuffe’s faking is a matter of sanctimonious religion. With the decline of religion during the 19th Century there came about a new kind of faking. The romantic poets and painters turned their backs on religion and sought salvation through art. They believed in the genius of the artist, endowed with a special capacity to transcend the human condition in creative ways, breaking all the rules in order to achieve a new order of experience. Art became an avenue to the transcendental, the gateway to a higher kind of knowledge.</p>
<p>Originality therefore became the test that distinguishes true from fake art. It is hard to say in general terms what originality consists in, but we have examples enough – Titian, Beethoven, Goethe, Baudelaire. But those examples teach us that originality is hard. It cannot be snatched from the air, even if there are those natural prodigies like Rimbaud and Mozart who seem to do just that. Originality requires learning, hard work, the mastery of a medium and – most of all – the refined sensibility and openness to experience that have suffering and solitude as their normal cost.</p>
<p>To gain the status of an original artist is therefore not easy. But in a society where art is revered as the highest cultural achievement, the rewards are enormous. Hence there is a motive to fake it. Artists and critics get together in order to take themselves in, the artists posing as the originators of astonishing breakthroughs, the critics posing as the penetrating judges of the true avant garde.</p>
<p>In this way Duchamp’s famous urinal became a kind of paradigm for modern artists. This is how it is done, the critics said. Take an idea, put it on display, call it art and brazen it out. The trick was repeated with Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes, and then later with the pickled sharks and cows of Damien Hirst. In each case the critics have gathered like clucking hens around the new and inscrutable egg, and the fake is projected to the public with all the apparatus required for its acceptance as the real thing. So powerful is the impetus towards the collective fake that it is now rare to be a finalist for the Turner prize without producing some object or event that shows itself to be art only because the critics have said that it is.Original gestures of the kind introduced by Duchamp cannot really be repeated – like jokes they can be made only once. Hence the cult of originality very quickly leads to repetition. The habit of faking becomes so deeply engrained that no judgement is certain, except the judgement that this before us is the “real thing” and not a fake at all, which in turn is a fake judgement. All that we know, in the end, is that anything is art, because nothing is.</p>
<p>It is worth asking ourselves why the cult of fake originality has such a powerful appeal to our cultural institutions, so that every museum and art gallery, and every publicly funded concert hall, has to take it seriously. The early modernists – Stravinsky and Schoenberg in music, Eliot and Pound in poetry, Matisse in painting and Loos in architecture – were united in the belief that popular taste had become corrupted, that sentimentality, banality and kitsch had invaded the various spheres of art and eclipsed their messages. Tonal harmonies had been corrupted by popular music, figurative painting had been trumped by photography, rhyme and meter had become the stuff of Christmas cards, and the stories had been too often told. Everything out there, in the world of naive and unthinking people, was kitsch.</p>
<p>Modernism was the attempt to rescue the sincere, the truthful, the arduously achieved, from the plague of fake emotion. No one can doubt that the early modernists succeeded in this enterprise, endowing us with works of art that keep the human spirit alive in the new circumstances of modernity, and which establish continuity with the great traditions of our culture. But modernism gave way to routines of fakery. The arduous task of maintaining the tradition proved less attractive than the cheap ways of rejecting it. Instead of Picasso’s lifelong study, to present the modern woman’s face in a modern idiom, you could just do what Duchamp did, and paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa.</p>
<p>The interesting fact, however, is that the habit of faking it has arisen from the fear of fakes. Modernist art was a reaction against fake emotion, and the comforting cliches of popular culture. The intention was to sweep away the pseudo-art that cushions us with sentimental lies and to put reality, the reality of modern life, with which real art alone can come to terms, in the place of it. Hence for a long time now it has been assumed that there can be no authentic creation in the sphere of high art which is not in some way a “challenge” to the complacencies of our public culture. Art must give offence against the bourgeois taste for the conforming and the comfortable, which are simply other names for kitsch and cliche. But the result of this is that offence becomes a cliche. If the public has become so immune to shock that only a dead shark in formaldehyde will awaken a brief spasm of outrage, then the artist must produce a dead shark in formaldehyde – this, at least, is an authentic gesture.</p>
<p>There grew around the modernists a class of critics and impresarios, therefore, who offered to explain just why it is not a waste of your time to stare at a pile of bricks, to sit quietly through 10 minutes of excruciating noise, or to study a crucifix pickled in urine. To convince themselves that they are true progressives, who ride in the vanguard of history, the new impresarios surround themselves with others of their kind, promoting them to all committees that are relevant to their status, and expecting to be promoted in their turn. Thus arose the modernist establishment – the self-contained circle of critics who form the backbone of our cultural institutions and who trade in “originality”, “transgression” and “breaking new paths”. Those are the routine terms issued by the arts council bureaucrats and the museum establishment, whenever they want to spend public money on something that they would never dream of having in their living room. But these terms are cliches, as are the things they are used to praise. Hence the flight from cliche ends in cliche, and the attempt to be genuine ends in fake.</p>
<p>If the reaction against fake emotion leads to fake art, how do we discover the real thing? That is the question I shall explore in my next two talks.</p>
<p>— Roger Scruton is a Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center</p> | false | 1 | thine self true says shakespeares polonius thou canst false man live truth urged vaclav havel let lie come world wrote solzhenitsyn seriously take pronouncements obey two kinds untruth lying faking person lying says believe person faking says believes though time purpose hand anyone lie suffices say something intention deceive faking however achievement fake things take people included liar pretend shocked lies exposed pretence part lie fake really shocked exposed since created around community trust member ages people lied order escape consequences actions first step moral education teach children tell fibs faking cultural phenomenon prominent periods others little faking society described homer example described chaucer time shakespeare however poets playwrights beginning take strong interest new human type shakespeares king lear wicked sisters goneril regan belong world fake emotion persuading father feel deepest love fact entirely heartless dont really know heartless could behave brazenly tragedy king lear begins real people kent cordelia edgar gloucester driven fakes fake person rebuilt view occupying another social position one would natural molières tartuffe religious impostor takes control household display scheming piety like shakespeare moliere perceives faking goes heart person engaged tartuffe simply hypocrite pretends ideals believe fabricated person believes ideals since illusory tartuffes faking matter sanctimonious religion decline religion 19th century came new kind faking romantic poets painters turned backs religion sought salvation art believed genius artist endowed special capacity transcend human condition creative ways breaking rules order achieve new order experience art became avenue transcendental gateway higher kind knowledge originality therefore became test distinguishes true fake art hard say general terms originality consists examples enough titian beethoven goethe baudelaire examples teach us originality hard snatched air even natural prodigies like rimbaud mozart seem originality requires learning hard work mastery medium refined sensibility openness experience suffering solitude normal cost gain status original artist therefore easy society art revered highest cultural achievement rewards enormous hence motive fake artists critics get together order take artists posing originators astonishing breakthroughs critics posing penetrating judges true avant garde way duchamps famous urinal became kind paradigm modern artists done critics said take idea put display call art brazen trick repeated andy warhols brillo boxes later pickled sharks cows damien hirst case critics gathered like clucking hens around new inscrutable egg fake projected public apparatus required acceptance real thing powerful impetus towards collective fake rare finalist turner prize without producing object event shows art critics said isoriginal gestures kind introduced duchamp really repeated like jokes made hence cult originality quickly leads repetition habit faking becomes deeply engrained judgement certain except judgement us real thing fake turn fake judgement know end anything art nothing worth asking cult fake originality powerful appeal cultural institutions every museum art gallery every publicly funded concert hall take seriously early modernists stravinsky schoenberg music eliot pound poetry matisse painting loos architecture united belief popular taste become corrupted sentimentality banality kitsch invaded various spheres art eclipsed messages tonal harmonies corrupted popular music figurative painting trumped photography rhyme meter become stuff christmas cards stories often told everything world naive unthinking people kitsch modernism attempt rescue sincere truthful arduously achieved plague fake emotion one doubt early modernists succeeded enterprise endowing us works art keep human spirit alive new circumstances modernity establish continuity great traditions culture modernism gave way routines fakery arduous task maintaining tradition proved less attractive cheap ways rejecting instead picassos lifelong study present modern womans face modern idiom could duchamp paint moustache mona lisa interesting fact however habit faking arisen fear fakes modernist art reaction fake emotion comforting cliches popular culture intention sweep away pseudoart cushions us sentimental lies put reality reality modern life real art alone come terms place hence long time assumed authentic creation sphere high art way challenge complacencies public culture art must give offence bourgeois taste conforming comfortable simply names kitsch cliche result offence becomes cliche public become immune shock dead shark formaldehyde awaken brief spasm outrage artist must produce dead shark formaldehyde least authentic gesture grew around modernists class critics impresarios therefore offered explain waste time stare pile bricks sit quietly 10 minutes excruciating noise study crucifix pickled urine convince true progressives ride vanguard history new impresarios surround others kind promoting committees relevant status expecting promoted turn thus arose modernist establishment selfcontained circle critics form backbone cultural institutions trade originality transgression breaking new paths routine terms issued arts council bureaucrats museum establishment whenever want spend public money something would never dream living room terms cliches things used praise hence flight cliche ends cliche attempt genuine ends fake reaction fake emotion leads fake art discover real thing question shall explore next two talks roger scruton senior fellow ethics public policy center | 766 |
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<p>MONDAY, July 31, 2017 (HealthDay News) — More than one out of three average Americans used a prescription opioid painkiller in 2015, despite growing concerns these medicines are promoting widespread addiction and overdose deaths, a new federal study shows.</p>
<p>Nearly 92 million U.S. adults, or about 38 percent of the population, took a legitimately prescribed opioid like OxyContin or Percocet in 2015, according to results from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.</p>
<p>“The proportion of adults who receive these medications in any year seemed startling to me,” said study co-author Dr. Wilson Compton, deputy director of the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse.</p>
<p>“It’s an awful lot of people who take these, mostly for medical purposes, but within that a significant percentage end up misusing them,” he added.</p>
<p>The survey found that 11.5 million people, or nearly 5 percent of the population, misused prescription opioids they’d obtained through illicit means.</p>
<p>About 1.9 million Americans (0.8 percent) reported full-fledged opioid addiction.</p>
<p>Overall, the results indicate that the medical profession is doing a poor job of appropriately prescribing opioid painkillers, Compton said.</p>
<p>Previous studies have found “there’s still four times the rate of prescribing there was 15 years ago,” Compton said. “Even though the rates have leveled off, we have a long way to go in improving medical care so these are not as overprescribed as they are currently.”</p>
<p>Many people receive opioids they don’t need and pass them on to relatives who aren’t getting the treatment they need for chronic pain, the researchers noted.</p>
<p>These painkillers are highly addictive and potentially deadly. The number of overdose deaths involving opioids has quadrupled since 1999, concurrent with the quadrupling of opioid prescriptions, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.</p>
<p>The survey defined prescription opioid misuse as people taking the painkillers without a prescription, taking larger doses than prescribed, or using the drugs to get high, Compton said.</p>
<p>Of those who misused prescription opioids, more than 50 percent got the medications as hand-me-downs from family or friends. Overall, nearly 60 percent of misuse involved taking opioids without a prescription.</p>
<p>“That tells us there are a lot of leftover medications,” Compton said. “In many cases, physicians could write smaller prescriptions, or avoid them completely for those who benefit from ibuprofen or acetaminophen,” for example, Motrin, Advil or Tylenol.</p>
<p>People misusing opioids most often do so in a sincere attempt to treat pain, according to their survey responses.</p>
<p>Two-thirds of those who misused opioids said they were motivated by relief from physical pain, while only one in 10 said they misused painkillers to relax or get high, the survey reports.</p>
<p>“That tells me we need to do a better job of assessing and treating pain,” Compton said.</p>
<p>The broken system of prescribing opioids stretches back at least a decade, and has its roots in the belief that pain should be considered a “fifth vital sign” just as important as blood pressure, pulse, respiratory rate and level of oxygen saturation, said Dr. Jack Ende, president of the American College of Physicians.</p>
<p>“If patients were not totally rid of their pain, that implied the physician was not doing his or her job or really didn’t care,” Ende said. “That movement went way beyond proper medical care, so much so that there was a lot of overprescription of opioids for noncancer pain.”</p>
<p>Physicians now are encouraged to prescribe lower doses of opioids for shorter periods of time, Ende said, and new laws allow pharmacists to choose to fill only half of a prescription.</p>
<p>Doctors need to adopt a stepped-care approach to pain management, said Dr. Karen Lasser. She’s an associate professor of medicine and public health at the Boston University School of Medicine’s Clinical Addiction Research &amp; Education (CARE) Unit.</p>
<p>With this approach, doctors would first try to manage pain using nondrug means — such as physical therapy, yoga or acupuncture — or prescribe milder pain medications, including aspirin, ibuprofen or acetaminophen, Lasser said.</p>
<p>“There would be guidelines for all the medications you should try before you get to opioids,” Lasser said.</p>
<p>In addition, patients should have to sign an opioid treatment agreement outlining the risks and benefits of such therapy, so they understand the potential for addiction, Lasser suggested.</p>
<p>Ende pointed out that the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is key to sorting out imbalances in opioid prescription.</p>
<p>People with health insurance can be properly diagnosed and covered for nondrug pain treatments — like physical therapy — “rather than scrounge for opioids,” Ende said.</p>
<p>“At least we can exhale today knowing that Medicaid funding will not be cut imminently, because without Medicaid we have no chance of making headway” against the prescription opioid epidemic, Ende said. He added that insurance also helps cover treatment for addiction.</p>
<p>The National Survey on Drug Use and Health is a door-to-door survey that allows participants to log answers directly into a computer, providing anonymity that promotes honest responses, Compton said. About 51,200 people completed the survey interview for 2015.</p>
<p>The study was published online July 31 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.</p>
<p>More information For more on the prescription opioid epidemic, visit the <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/epidemic/index.html" type="external">U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention</a>.</p>
<p>Copyright © 2017 HealthDay. All rights reserved.</p> | false | 1 | monday july 31 2017 healthday news one three average americans used prescription opioid painkiller 2015 despite growing concerns medicines promoting widespread addiction overdose deaths new federal study shows nearly 92 million us adults 38 percent population took legitimately prescribed opioid like oxycontin percocet 2015 according results national survey drug use health proportion adults receive medications year seemed startling said study coauthor dr wilson compton deputy director us national institute drug abuse awful lot people take mostly medical purposes within significant percentage end misusing added survey found 115 million people nearly 5 percent population misused prescription opioids theyd obtained illicit means 19 million americans 08 percent reported fullfledged opioid addiction overall results indicate medical profession poor job appropriately prescribing opioid painkillers compton said previous studies found theres still four times rate prescribing 15 years ago compton said even though rates leveled long way go improving medical care overprescribed currently many people receive opioids dont need pass relatives arent getting treatment need chronic pain researchers noted painkillers highly addictive potentially deadly number overdose deaths involving opioids quadrupled since 1999 concurrent quadrupling opioid prescriptions according us centers disease control prevention survey defined prescription opioid misuse people taking painkillers without prescription taking larger doses prescribed using drugs get high compton said misused prescription opioids 50 percent got medications handmedowns family friends overall nearly 60 percent misuse involved taking opioids without prescription tells us lot leftover medications compton said many cases physicians could write smaller prescriptions avoid completely benefit ibuprofen acetaminophen example motrin advil tylenol people misusing opioids often sincere attempt treat pain according survey responses twothirds misused opioids said motivated relief physical pain one 10 said misused painkillers relax get high survey reports tells need better job assessing treating pain compton said broken system prescribing opioids stretches back least decade roots belief pain considered fifth vital sign important blood pressure pulse respiratory rate level oxygen saturation said dr jack ende president american college physicians patients totally rid pain implied physician job really didnt care ende said movement went way beyond proper medical care much lot overprescription opioids noncancer pain physicians encouraged prescribe lower doses opioids shorter periods time ende said new laws allow pharmacists choose fill half prescription doctors need adopt steppedcare approach pain management said dr karen lasser shes associate professor medicine public health boston university school medicines clinical addiction research amp education care unit approach doctors would first try manage pain using nondrug means physical therapy yoga acupuncture prescribe milder pain medications including aspirin ibuprofen acetaminophen lasser said would guidelines medications try get opioids lasser said addition patients sign opioid treatment agreement outlining risks benefits therapy understand potential addiction lasser suggested ende pointed affordable care act obamacare key sorting imbalances opioid prescription people health insurance properly diagnosed covered nondrug pain treatments like physical therapy rather scrounge opioids ende said least exhale today knowing medicaid funding cut imminently without medicaid chance making headway prescription opioid epidemic ende said added insurance also helps cover treatment addiction national survey drug use health doortodoor survey allows participants log answers directly computer providing anonymity promotes honest responses compton said 51200 people completed survey interview 2015 study published online july 31 annals internal medicine information prescription opioid epidemic visit us centers disease control prevention copyright 2017 healthday rights reserved | 541 |
<p>WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump spoke Sunday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a brief conversation that Trump described as “very nice,” and Netanyahu called “very warm.”</p>
<p>Netanyahu, in a statement issued by his office, said Trump had invited him to visit the White House in February, although a final date was not yet set. They discussed the Iran nuclear deal, the “peace process with the Palestinians,” and other issues, the Israeli leader said, adding that he had “expressed his desire to work closely … with no daylight between the United States and Israel.”</p>
<p>The White House provided no initial details of the call, which was scheduled to last 30 minutes. Trump characterized it to reporters gathered to witnesses the swearing in of his new White House staff.</p>
<p>Speaking at that event, Trump said that he would meet soon with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, both of whom he spoke with by telephone on Saturday. A Mexico meeting may come as early as the end of this month, White House officials said.</p>
<p>“We’re going to start renegotiating about NAFTA and immigration and security on the border,” Trump said. “Mexico has been terrific. … I think we’re going to have a very good result.” NAFTA is the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Trump has said is unfair to the United States; both Trudeau and Pena Nieto have said they are willing to discuss its terms.</p>
<p>Trump’s first face-to-face meeting with a foreign leader, however, will come Friday, when he receives British Prime Minister Theresa May at the White House.</p>
<p>In a statement Sunday, May’s government said the meeting would “primarily be an opportunity to get to know one another and to establish the basis for a productive working relationship.” The statement said May would also address a weekend meeting of Republican lawmakers that Trump is also scheduled to attend.</p>
<p>May, who is struggling to implement her country’s vote to leave the European Union — is seeking a strong bilateral trade relationship with the United States as she prepares for EU negotiations.</p>
<p>Earlier on Sunday, Netanyahu tweeted that “Stopping the Iranian threat, and the threat reflected in the bad nuclear agreement with Iran, continues to be a supreme goal of Israel.”</p>
<p>Netanyahu also met with his security cabinet on Sunday, telling them that he would allow continued construction of Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem, according to Israeli media accounts.</p>
<p>Those settlements are considered illegal by most of the world. The Obama administration called them “illegitimate” and “obstacles to peace.” Israel disputed this.</p>
<p>On Sunday, Jerusalem’s construction committee approved 566 housing units in East Jerusalem settlements.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat said that Trump was a “true friend” to Israel, referring to a reported statement by Trump press secretary Sean Spicer that the administration was at the “very beginning stages” of discussing a move of the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.</p>
<p>“We will offer them all the assistance necessary,” Barkat said in a statement. “The U.S. has sent a message to the world that it recognizes Jerusalem as the united capital of Israel.”</p>
<p>No country in the world has its Israel embassy in Jerusalem, which is also claimed by the Palestinians as their capital. While Congress long ago passed a resolution ordering the move, both Republican and Democratic presidents have repeatedly waived the order on national security grounds.</p>
<p>Trump pledged during his campaign to move the embassy, and his designated ambassador to Israel, New York bankruptcy lawyer David Friedman, has called the move was a “big priority” for the new administration.</p>
<p>Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas met with Jordanian King Abdullah II on Sunday to discuss what to do if Trump makes good on the promised move. Jordan plays an important role in Jerusalem as a caretaker of the holy Muslim sites in the eastern side of the city.</p>
<p>Abbas said in a statement after his meeting with the king, “We wish two thing of the new American administration: First, to stop talks about moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem; and second, to get involved in conducting serious negotiations between Palestine and Israel to reach a political solution which is for the best interest of Palestinians, Israelis and the whole region.”</p>
<p>In his confirmation hearing, secretary of state nominee Rex Tillerson called Israel “our most important ally in the region,” and criticized former president Barack Obama for undermining Israeli security, but did not directly address the embassy question.</p>
<p>Tillerson’s confirmation was all but assured on Sunday, when a pair of Republican senators who had expressed concerns about him announced they will vote to confirm him. Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, two traditional GOP hawks who have voiced skepticism about Tillerson’s ties to Russia, released a joint statement saying that after much thought, they have decided to back him.</p>
<p>The Senate Foreign Relations Committee plans to vote Monday afternoon on Tillerson. Regardless of the outcome, his nomination will move to the full Senate floor for a vote, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said last week.</p>
<p>While much of the drama about Tillerson’s fate has faded, there is still the question of how Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., will vote in the committee. Rubio grilled Tillerson about Russia during his confirmation hearing and seemed dissatisfied with some of his responses.</p>
<p>In appearances on Sunday talk shows, both McCain and Graham made clear that they remain uncertain about Trump’s foreign policy intentions, and that they hope to work with those they approve of in the Cabinet, some of whose ideas have contrasted with those expressed by the new White House.</p>
<p>If Trump’s promise to put “America first” is “a throwback to the ’20s and ’30s isolationism … the world will deteriorate even quicker, Graham said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “If it is a new way of Ronald Reagan peace through strength, I would like to work with you.”</p>
<p>“I don’t know what America first means,” Graham said. On issues such as a new relationship with Russia, or possible cuts in foreign aid, he said, “I would tell him…talk to General Mattis,” Trump’s newly confirmed Defense Secretary, who has emphasized the use of “soft power” and working with allies.</p>
<p>Tillerson understands those same priorities, Graham said, adding that Trump should not “be weak on Russia.”</p>
<p>McCain, speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” echoed concerns about Russia, and Trump’s call for warmer relations, adding that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “a war criminal.”</p>
<p>He said Mattis, Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, newly confirmed Secretary of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, and Dan Coats, named as Director of National Security, shared his view that Russia is “our major challenge.”</p>
<p>“I couldn’t have picked a better team,” McCain said. “And so I’m confident that [Trump] will listen to them and be guided by them.”</p>
<p>Asked whether he had “utmost confidence” in Trump himself, McCain said “I do not know, because he has made so many comments that are contradictory.”</p> | false | 1 | washington president donald trump spoke sunday israeli prime minister benjamin netanyahu brief conversation trump described nice netanyahu called warm netanyahu statement issued office said trump invited visit white house february although final date yet set discussed iran nuclear deal peace process palestinians issues israeli leader said adding expressed desire work closely daylight united states israel white house provided initial details call scheduled last 30 minutes trump characterized reporters gathered witnesses swearing new white house staff speaking event trump said would meet soon canadian prime minister justin trudeau mexican president enrique pena nieto spoke telephone saturday mexico meeting may come early end month white house officials said going start renegotiating nafta immigration security border trump said mexico terrific think going good result nafta north american free trade agreement trump said unfair united states trudeau pena nieto said willing discuss terms trumps first facetoface meeting foreign leader however come friday receives british prime minister theresa may white house statement sunday mays government said meeting would primarily opportunity get know one another establish basis productive working relationship statement said may would also address weekend meeting republican lawmakers trump also scheduled attend may struggling implement countrys vote leave european union seeking strong bilateral trade relationship united states prepares eu negotiations earlier sunday netanyahu tweeted stopping iranian threat threat reflected bad nuclear agreement iran continues supreme goal israel netanyahu also met security cabinet sunday telling would allow continued construction jewish settlements east jerusalem according israeli media accounts settlements considered illegal world obama administration called illegitimate obstacles peace israel disputed sunday jerusalems construction committee approved 566 housing units east jerusalem settlements meanwhile jerusalem mayor nir barkat said trump true friend israel referring reported statement trump press secretary sean spicer administration beginning stages discussing move us embassy israel tel aviv jerusalem offer assistance necessary barkat said statement us sent message world recognizes jerusalem united capital israel country world israel embassy jerusalem also claimed palestinians capital congress long ago passed resolution ordering move republican democratic presidents repeatedly waived order national security grounds trump pledged campaign move embassy designated ambassador israel new york bankruptcy lawyer david friedman called move big priority new administration palestinian authority president mahmoud abbas met jordanian king abdullah ii sunday discuss trump makes good promised move jordan plays important role jerusalem caretaker holy muslim sites eastern side city abbas said statement meeting king wish two thing new american administration first stop talks moving us embassy jerusalem second get involved conducting serious negotiations palestine israel reach political solution best interest palestinians israelis whole region confirmation hearing secretary state nominee rex tillerson called israel important ally region criticized former president barack obama undermining israeli security directly address embassy question tillersons confirmation assured sunday pair republican senators expressed concerns announced vote confirm sens john mccain arizona lindsey graham south carolina two traditional gop hawks voiced skepticism tillersons ties russia released joint statement saying much thought decided back senate foreign relations committee plans vote monday afternoon tillerson regardless outcome nomination move full senate floor vote senate foreign relations chairman bob corker rtenn said last week much drama tillersons fate faded still question sen marco rubio rfla vote committee rubio grilled tillerson russia confirmation hearing seemed dissatisfied responses appearances sunday talk shows mccain graham made clear remain uncertain trumps foreign policy intentions hope work approve cabinet whose ideas contrasted expressed new white house trumps promise put america first throwback 20s 30s isolationism world deteriorate even quicker graham said cbss face nation new way ronald reagan peace strength would like work dont know america first means graham said issues new relationship russia possible cuts foreign aid said would tell himtalk general mattis trumps newly confirmed defense secretary emphasized use soft power working allies tillerson understands priorities graham said adding trump weak russia mccain speaking abcs week echoed concerns russia trumps call warmer relations adding russian president vladimir putin war criminal said mattis trump national security adviser michael flynn newly confirmed secretary homeland security secretary john kelly dan coats named director national security shared view russia major challenge couldnt picked better team mccain said im confident trump listen guided asked whether utmost confidence trump mccain said know made many comments contradictory | 689 |
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<p>“Tear down the walls!” “No calculations!” — John Baird, speaking the U.N.</p>
<p>Canada’s Foreign Minister, John Baird, in lieu of Prime Minister Harper, read a prepared text to a mainly empty U.N. General Assembly hall during the recent gathering of world leaders. His speech was roughly divided in half, the first part criticizing the U.N., the second half performing for its U.S./Israel overlords by criticizing Syria and Iran and actions related to them.</p>
<p>The latter, Iran and Syria, I have dealt with before, and his criticisms are simply reflections of Israeli/U.S. rhetoric on the two nations. There are many double standards in those arguments, many that can reflect back on the U.S. and Israel, as well as their allied Arab states (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the GCC states among others) that are supporting the U.S. and Israel in their verbal and physical threats against the two countries. What is new in this speech is the criticism of the U.N. as navel gazing and not being successful in its actions.</p>
<p>Don’t do as we do, do as we say….</p>
<p>Baird started speaking in French, asking for a moment of silence for the diplomats who have lost their lives in service over that past year. Without waiting a moment, he then turned to English—a language he reads more proficiently than French—to call out the U.N.</p>
<p>He tried a nautical analogy at first. By seeing Canada as a Maritime nation, with seas on three sides, he described how a sailor set sail with the North Star as a clear guiding light. This metaphor then becomes how Canada sets “fixed principles and chart[s] a course for immutable goals.” Those principles—well-being, prosperity, dignity, and security—he indicated are found in the U.N. Charter. Except that prosperity and security are not found in the Charter, although wellbeing and dignity are, along with equal rights for women, justice and respect for international law, and fundamental faith in human rights. Obviously true security comes from the others, not as is commonly conflated today from an ever increasingly militarized state (more below).</p>
<p>Baird then presents the case that we “Measure results by measuring results” not by “best efforts…good intentions…or calculating inputs.” A statement of meaningless obviousness, except that at home in Canada, everything comes down to the almighty dollar, the Conservative government’s favorite way of measuring results by “calculating inputs.” Our economy is measured by “calculating inputs,” our health services and education are all “calculated inputs.” The question then is obvious, how can something be “measured” without a “calculated input?”</p>
<p>Input this</p>
<p>Allow me a moment to return to the “maritime nation” analogy and some calculated inputs. Input one: the Atlantic coast in September received its highest level of rainfall for the month ever. Input two: the Arctic coast witnessed the lowest ever recorded loss of summer ice, at the fastest rate ever. Input three: the Pacific coast, at least the southern part near Vancouver/Victoria, received the least rain ever for the August-September period.</p>
<p>Three record inputs in one season. Perhaps that is why the Canadian government does not like “calculated inputs” because they speak the truth to their dismal environmental record. The current government’s agenda works against the environment, against global warming, against the indigenous cultures as exemplified by the tar sands developments in Alberta. The giga-tonnes of carbon that the tar sands are spewing into the atmosphere, the tonnes of chemical pollutants that accompany them or work their way through the water system, the huge amount of fracking required—and its demands on water and other poisonous chemicals—are all “inputs” this government does not want to be “calculated.” The government only wants to “measure results”—the billions of dollars of corporate profits from which they extract very little in royalties.</p>
<p>Another case of unwanted inputs, those nasty calculations that get in the way of conservative success, is the dollar amounts concerning the Conservative’s <a href="http://www.ctvnews.ca/w5/f-35-fighter-jet-is-it-the-pinnacle-of-technology-its-creators-claim-1.966893" type="external">attempt to buy the U.S. F-35 fighter jet</a>:</p>
<p>[I]n April 2012, Canada’s Auditor General, Michael Ferguson, blasted the government’s cost estimates and the way the Department of National Defence chose the F-35 without a competition.</p>
<p>“The department did not provide parliament with full cost information, or fully inform decision makers about the risks of this program,” Ferguson said during a news conference to announce his report.</p>
<p>In June 2012, the Government Accountability Office, the U.S Government agency that investigates how taxpayer dollars are spent, reported:</p>
<p>The cost of building just one F-35 had doubled from $81 million to $161 million.</p>
<p>Full production would be delayed by years.</p>
<p>Testing was behind schedule.</p>
<p>That’s a lot of “calculated inputs” that the current Conservative government wishes they could ignore and simply “measure results,” that is to buy the damned plane regardless of costs.</p>
<p>I’ll say it again…and again…and again…(but won’t do it)</p>
<p>The speech continued with a rambling section on how the U.N. kept looking at itself and not acting enough on the world stage. In repetitious tautological reiterations of the same idea, Baird says the U.N. “must spend less time looking at itself, and more time focussed on the problems that demand its attention.” Moments later, the U.N. should not participate in “inward looking exercises.” The U.N. should measure its achievements “not how [it] arranges its affairs.” It spends “too much time on itself.”</p>
<p>Then comes the big line, the line that actually rings true for Canada’s increasing loss of democracy: “The preoccupation with procedure and process must yield to substance and results.”</p>
<p>Yes, Baird for once reveals the truth about Canadian democracy as run by the Conservatives! Forget procedure and due process, we’re going to do what we want to do regardless. Which is why the Conservatives twice cancelled parliament (once to avoid a non-confidence vote, and the second time to avoid questions on Canada’s complicity with torture in Afghanistan) and once was found in contempt of Parliament, the latter partly as a result of the F-35 debacle as noted above—obviously “calculated inputs” can be harmful for democratic health.</p>
<p>This is a government that manipulated the voting process (in Canada called the “robocalling scandal”), and that fired many of its scientists and requires the others—and all other assistants—to vet questions received and answers given through a media coordinator for the government, those scientific “calculated inputs” being a bit too much for the government to comprehend, as noted above with climate change. This is the government that recently wrapped up numerous changes in many laws into one large omnibus bill pretending to be the budget, and then limited debate on all the issues created.</p>
<p>At least in this instance, there are no double standards, Baird is simply asking the U.N. to do as Canada’s Conservatives have done recently and avoid those nasty “procedures and processes” that are involved with democracy.</p>
<p>Oh, Lord….</p>
<p>Somewhat confused about his own religion, Baird invoked the Creator, saying “Those of us who recognize a Creator….” continuing on saying that we should “use the Creator’s gifts for the well-being of all.” Well, what a wonderful little homily for the assembly.</p>
<p>So why the Creator … as if God won’t do? Is it because you were trying to hide the Conservatives’ attempts to demonize the Islamic people of the world, as PM Harper has said that “Islamicism is the greatest threat to Canada”? Is it because you support the Jewish God but do not want to adversely affect your relationship with the Christian God? Or vice versa?</p>
<p>Or are you trying to play up to our local indigenous groups who have always used the terminology of a Creator? There are of course several indigenous groups on the proposed route for the noxious tar sands to be shipped from Alberta through their territory, territory long revered as made by the Creator and held sacred by the indigenous people as the basis of their life and culture. The government certainly does not want “calculated inputs” on this line of thinking as the costs in dollar terms extrapolated from environmental and cultural damages would simply put stop to the project.</p>
<p />
<p /> | false | 1 | tear walls calculations john baird speaking un canadas foreign minister john baird lieu prime minister harper read prepared text mainly empty un general assembly hall recent gathering world leaders speech roughly divided half first part criticizing un second half performing usisrael overlords criticizing syria iran actions related latter iran syria dealt criticisms simply reflections israelius rhetoric two nations many double standards arguments many reflect back us israel well allied arab states saudi arabia bahrain gcc states among others supporting us israel verbal physical threats two countries new speech criticism un navel gazing successful actions dont say baird started speaking french asking moment silence diplomats lost lives service past year without waiting moment turned englisha language reads proficiently frenchto call un tried nautical analogy first seeing canada maritime nation seas three sides described sailor set sail north star clear guiding light metaphor becomes canada sets fixed principles charts course immutable goals principleswellbeing prosperity dignity securityhe indicated found un charter except prosperity security found charter although wellbeing dignity along equal rights women justice respect international law fundamental faith human rights obviously true security comes others commonly conflated today ever increasingly militarized state baird presents case measure results measuring results best effortsgood intentionsor calculating inputs statement meaningless obviousness except home canada everything comes almighty dollar conservative governments favorite way measuring results calculating inputs economy measured calculating inputs health services education calculated inputs question obvious something measured without calculated input input allow moment return maritime nation analogy calculated inputs input one atlantic coast september received highest level rainfall month ever input two arctic coast witnessed lowest ever recorded loss summer ice fastest rate ever input three pacific coast least southern part near vancouvervictoria received least rain ever augustseptember period three record inputs one season perhaps canadian government like calculated inputs speak truth dismal environmental record current governments agenda works environment global warming indigenous cultures exemplified tar sands developments alberta gigatonnes carbon tar sands spewing atmosphere tonnes chemical pollutants accompany work way water system huge amount fracking requiredand demands water poisonous chemicalsare inputs government want calculated government wants measure resultsthe billions dollars corporate profits extract little royalties another case unwanted inputs nasty calculations get way conservative success dollar amounts concerning conservatives attempt buy us f35 fighter jet april 2012 canadas auditor general michael ferguson blasted governments cost estimates way department national defence chose f35 without competition department provide parliament full cost information fully inform decision makers risks program ferguson said news conference announce report june 2012 government accountability office us government agency investigates taxpayer dollars spent reported cost building one f35 doubled 81 million 161 million full production would delayed years testing behind schedule thats lot calculated inputs current conservative government wishes could ignore simply measure results buy damned plane regardless costs ill say againand againand againbut wont speech continued rambling section un kept looking acting enough world stage repetitious tautological reiterations idea baird says un must spend less time looking time focussed problems demand attention moments later un participate inward looking exercises un measure achievements arranges affairs spends much time comes big line line actually rings true canadas increasing loss democracy preoccupation procedure process must yield substance results yes baird reveals truth canadian democracy run conservatives forget procedure due process going want regardless conservatives twice cancelled parliament avoid nonconfidence vote second time avoid questions canadas complicity torture afghanistan found contempt parliament latter partly result f35 debacle noted aboveobviously calculated inputs harmful democratic health government manipulated voting process canada called robocalling scandal fired many scientists requires othersand assistantsto vet questions received answers given media coordinator government scientific calculated inputs bit much government comprehend noted climate change government recently wrapped numerous changes many laws one large omnibus bill pretending budget limited debate issues created least instance double standards baird simply asking un canadas conservatives done recently avoid nasty procedures processes involved democracy oh lord somewhat confused religion baird invoked creator saying us recognize creator continuing saying use creators gifts wellbeing well wonderful little homily assembly creator god wont trying hide conservatives attempts demonize islamic people world pm harper said islamicism greatest threat canada support jewish god want adversely affect relationship christian god vice versa trying play local indigenous groups always used terminology creator course several indigenous groups proposed route noxious tar sands shipped alberta territory territory long revered made creator held sacred indigenous people basis life culture government certainly want calculated inputs line thinking costs dollar terms extrapolated environmental cultural damages would simply put stop project | 740 |
<p>Since Donald Trump <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/08/12/trump_art_of_the_deal_is_my_second_favorite_book_first_is_the_bible.html" type="external">assures us</a> that the Bible is his favorite book, it’s worth asking: Just what is his theology?</p>
<p>After <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/06/20/how-can-trump-win-the-many-undecided-evangelicals-we-asked-them/" type="external">Mr. Trump</a>met with hundreds of evangelical Christians a couple of weeks ago, James Dobson, who is among the <a href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2016/june-web-only/whos-who-of-trumps-tremendous-faith-advisors.html" type="external">most influential</a> leaders in the evangelical world and serves on Mr. Trump’s evangelical executive advisory board, <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/religious-right-leader-sees-trump-baby-christian" type="external">declared</a> that “Trump appears to be tender to things of the Spirit,” by which Dr. Dobson meant the Holy Spirit.</p>
<p>Of all the descriptions of Mr. Trump we’ve heard this election season, this may be the most farcical. As described by St. Paul, the “fruit of the Spirit” includes forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, hardly qualities one associates with Mr. Trump. It shows you the lengths Mr. Trump’s supporters will go to in order to rationalize their enthusiastic support of him.</p>
<p>Dr. Dobson is not alone. Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, has praised Mr. Trump’s life as in many ways <a href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2016/june-web-only/whos-who-of-trumps-tremendous-faith-advisors.html" type="external">exemplary</a> and said that he <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/transcript-donald-trumps-closed-door-meeting-with-evangelical-leaders-195810824.html" type="external">believes</a> that “Donald Trump is God’s man to lead our nation.” Eric Metaxas, who has written popular biographies of William Wilberforce and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, has <a href="http://www.mikeonline.com/ericmetaxas-was-at-donald-trumps-speech-to-evangelical-christians-and-he-gives-mike-the-inside-story/" type="external">rhapsodized</a> about Mr. Trump and argued that Christians “must” vote for him because he is “the <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/436751/eric-metaxas-virtue-and-donald-trump" type="external">last best hope</a> of keeping America from sliding into oblivion.”</p>
<p>And should your conscience tell you that Mr. Trump might not be the right choice, Robert Jeffress, the influential pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, explains that “any Christian who would sit at home and not vote for the Republican nominee” is “motivated by pride rather than principle.”</p>
<p>This fulsome embrace of Mr. Trump is rather problematic, since he embodies a worldview that is incompatible with Christianity. If you trace that worldview to its source, Christ would not be anywhere in the vicinity.</p>
<p>Time and again Mr. Trump has shown contempt for those he perceives as weak and vulnerable — “losers,” in his vernacular. They include P.O.W.s, people with disabilities, those he deems physically unattractive and those he considers politically powerless. He bullies and threatens people he believes are obstacles to his ambitions. He disdains compassion and empathy, to the point where his instinctive response to the largest mass shooting in American history was to congratulate himself: “Appreciate the congrats for being right.”</p>
<p>What Mr. Trump admires is strength. For him, a person’s intrinsic worth is tied to worldly success and above all to power. He never seems free of his obsession with it. In his <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/08/12/trump_art_of_the_deal_is_my_second_favorite_book_first_is_the_bible.html" type="external">comments</a> to that gathering of evangelicals, Mr. Trump said this: “And I say to you folks, because you have such power, such influence. Unfortunately the government has weeded it away from you pretty strongly. But you’re going to get it back. Remember this: If you ever add up, the men and women here are the most important, powerful lobbyists. You’re more powerful. Because you have men and women, you probably have something like 75, 80 percent of the country believing. But you don’t use your power. You don’t use your power.”</p>
<p>In eight sentences Mr. Trump mentioned some variation of power six times, to a group of individuals who have professed their love and loyalty to Jesus, who in his most famous sermon declared, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” and “Blessed are the meek,” who said, “My strength is made perfect in weakness,” and who was humiliated and crucified by the powerful.</p>
<p>To better understand Mr. Trump’s approach to life, ethics and politics, we should not look to Christ but to Friedrich Nietzsche, who was repulsed by Christianity and Christ. “What is good?” Nietzsche asks in “The Anti-Christ”: “Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is evil? Whatever springs from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power increases – that resistance is overcome.”</p>
<p>Whether or not he has read a word of Nietzsche (I’m guessing not), Mr. Trump embodies a Nietzschean morality rather than a Christian one. It is characterized by indifference to objective truth (there are no facts, only interpretations), the repudiation of Christian concern for the poor and the weak, and disdain for the powerless. It celebrates the “Übermensch,” or Superman, who rejects Christian morality in favor of his own. For Nietzsche, strength was intrinsically good and weakness was intrinsically bad. So, too, for Donald Trump.</p>
<p>Those who believe this is merely reductionism should consider the words of Jesus: Do you have eyes but fail to see and ears but fail to hear? Mr. Trump’s entire approach to politics rests on dehumanization. If you disagree with him or oppose him, you are not merely wrong. You are worthless, stripped of dignity, the object of derision. This attitude is central to who Mr. Trump is and explains why it pervades and guides his campaign. If he is elected president, that might-makes-right perspective would infect his entire administration.</p>
<p>All of this is important because of what it says about Mr. Trump as a prospective president. But it is also revealing for what it says about Christians who now testify on his behalf (there are plenty who don’t). The calling of Christians is to be “salt and light” to the world, to model a philosophy that defends human dignity, and to welcome the stranger in our midst. It is to stand for justice, dispense grace and be agents of reconciliation in a broken world. And it is to take seriously the words of the prophet Micah, “And what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, and to love kindness and mercy, and to humble yourself and walk humbly with your God?”</p>
<p>Evangelical Christians who are enthusiastically supporting Donald Trump are signaling, even if unintentionally, that this calling has no place in politics and that Christians bring nothing distinctive to it — that their past moral proclamations were all for show and that power is the name of the game.</p>
<p>The French philosopher and theologian Jacques Ellul wrote: “Politics is the church’s worst problem. It is her constant temptation, the occasion of her greatest disasters, the trap continually set for her by the prince of this world.” In rallying round Mr. Trump, evangelicals have walked into the trap. The rest of the world sees it. Why don’t they?</p>
<p>Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, served in the last three Republican administrations and is a contributing opinion writer.</p> | false | 1 | since donald trump assures us bible favorite book worth asking theology mr trumpmet hundreds evangelical christians couple weeks ago james dobson among influential leaders evangelical world serves mr trumps evangelical executive advisory board declared trump appears tender things spirit dr dobson meant holy spirit descriptions mr trump weve heard election season may farcical described st paul fruit spirit includes forbearance kindness goodness faithfulness gentleness selfcontrol hardly qualities one associates mr trump shows lengths mr trumps supporters go order rationalize enthusiastic support dr dobson alone jerry falwell jr president liberty university praised mr trumps life many ways exemplary said believes donald trump gods man lead nation eric metaxas written popular biographies william wilberforce dietrich bonhoeffer rhapsodized mr trump argued christians must vote last best hope keeping america sliding oblivion conscience tell mr trump might right choice robert jeffress influential pastor first baptist church dallas explains christian would sit home vote republican nominee motivated pride rather principle fulsome embrace mr trump rather problematic since embodies worldview incompatible christianity trace worldview source christ would anywhere vicinity time mr trump shown contempt perceives weak vulnerable losers vernacular include pows people disabilities deems physically unattractive considers politically powerless bullies threatens people believes obstacles ambitions disdains compassion empathy point instinctive response largest mass shooting american history congratulate appreciate congrats right mr trump admires strength persons intrinsic worth tied worldly success power never seems free obsession comments gathering evangelicals mr trump said say folks power influence unfortunately government weeded away pretty strongly youre going get back remember ever add men women important powerful lobbyists youre powerful men women probably something like 75 80 percent country believing dont use power dont use power eight sentences mr trump mentioned variation power six times group individuals professed love loyalty jesus famous sermon declared blessed poor spirit blessed meek said strength made perfect weakness humiliated crucified powerful better understand mr trumps approach life ethics politics look christ friedrich nietzsche repulsed christianity christ good nietzsche asks antichrist whatever augments feeling power power power man evil whatever springs weakness happiness feeling power increases resistance overcome whether read word nietzsche im guessing mr trump embodies nietzschean morality rather christian one characterized indifference objective truth facts interpretations repudiation christian concern poor weak disdain powerless celebrates Übermensch superman rejects christian morality favor nietzsche strength intrinsically good weakness intrinsically bad donald trump believe merely reductionism consider words jesus eyes fail see ears fail hear mr trumps entire approach politics rests dehumanization disagree oppose merely wrong worthless stripped dignity object derision attitude central mr trump explains pervades guides campaign elected president mightmakesright perspective would infect entire administration important says mr trump prospective president also revealing says christians testify behalf plenty dont calling christians salt light world model philosophy defends human dignity welcome stranger midst stand justice dispense grace agents reconciliation broken world take seriously words prophet micah lord require justly love kindness mercy humble walk humbly god evangelical christians enthusiastically supporting donald trump signaling even unintentionally calling place politics christians bring nothing distinctive past moral proclamations show power name game french philosopher theologian jacques ellul wrote politics churchs worst problem constant temptation occasion greatest disasters trap continually set prince world rallying round mr trump evangelicals walked trap rest world sees dont peter wehner senior fellow ethics public policy center served last three republican administrations contributing opinion writer | 549 |
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1596985178?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=wwweppcorg-20&amp;linkCode=xm2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creativeASIN=1596985178" type="external">What's So Great About Christianity</a> by Dinesh D'Souza (Regnery, 348 pp., $27.95)</p>
<p>In the last few years we have seen a spate of bestselling anti-God books from a group of prominent writers and first-rate minds, including Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens. These men, deeply hostile to religion in general and Christianity in particular, are also formidable debaters. Last fall, I attended a debate in which Hitchens carved to pieces a leading Christian theologian who conceded far too much, defended his faith far too little, and sought common ground where none exists.</p>
<p>Dinesh D'Souza has seen the same thing. “Precisely because the Christians usually duck and run, the atheists have had it too easy,” he writes. “Their arguments have gone largely unanswered. They have been flogging the carcass of 'fundamentalism' without having to encounter the horse kick of a vigorous traditional Christianity.”</p>
<p>D'Souza's horse kick comes in the form of this new book. And quite a kick it is. D'Souza offers a persuasive, scholarly, and intelligent rebuttal to the main charges made by those who proudly carry the banner of atheism. And unlike the work of some leading atheists, D'Souza's book is blessedly free of rancor and reckless statements.</p>
<p>It is also filled with interesting and surprising facts, especially regarding the demographic shifts in global Christianity. For instance, D'Souza notes that Christianity is the fastest-growing religion in the world today (although Islam is the fastest-growing religion in Europe). In 1900, more than 80 percent of Christians lived in Europe and America; today, 60 percent live in the developing world–with more than two out of three evangelical Christians now living in Asia, Africa, and South America. Today there are more churchgoing Presbyterians in Ghana than in Scotland. Christianity is thriving in China and India, nations which have the fastest growth rates in the world–and at current growth rates, China will, in a few decades, become the largest Christian country in the world.</p>
<p>“The vital centers of Christianity today are no longer Geneva, Rome, Paris, or London,” D'Souza writes. “They are Buenos Aires, Manila, Kinshasa, and Addis Ababa.”</p>
<p>But the core of D'Souza's book is a systematic response to the main arguments put forth by contemporary atheists and the historical figures on whom they rely. D'Souza sets out to demonstrate seven things: First, Christianity is the main foundation of Western civilization and the root of our most cherished values. Second, the latest discoveries of modern science support the claim that a divine being created the universe. Third, Darwin's theory of evolution strengthens, not undermines, evidence for supernatural design. Fourth, nothing in science makes miracles impossible. Fifth, it is reasonable to have faith. Sixth, atheism, not religion, is responsible for the mass murders of history. And seventh, atheism is motivated not by reason but a kind of “cowardly moral escapism.”</p>
<p>All seven arguments are worth examining–but it is on the issue of evolution, Darwinism, and morality that I found D'Souza's discussion most interesting. He distinguishes between evolution, a scientific theory which is not hostile to religion, and Darwinism, which is a “metaphysical stance and a political ideology.” (D'Souza believes in the former and rejects the latter.) When Darwinists like Dennett invoke evolution as an “all-purpose explanation in cosmology, psychology, culture, ethics, politics, and religion,” D'Souza writes, they go far beyond the evidence. And in appropriating Charles Darwin's name, they actually do a disservice to it.</p>
<p>Evolution explains a great deal, but it is a theory with inherent limits. For one thing, evolution cannot explain the beginning of life, and Darwin didn't even attempt it. And among the limitations on evolution is that it cannot explain human rationality or morality. Of all the differences between man and the lower animals, Darwin said, the moral sense (or conscience) is the most important.</p>
<p>Leading Darwinists like Dennett, Dawkins, and Steven Pinker, D'Souza tells us, attempt to explain morality as a product of evolution and natural selection. What appears to be altruism is actually a genetically programmed strategy for survival and reproduction.</p>
<p>Thus the theory of “kin selection,” a form of genetic selection, provides an explanation for why we behave more altruistically toward relatives than strangers. It has to do with ensuring our genes get passed to the next generation. And the theory of “reciprocal altruism,” developed by the biologist Robert Trivers, argues that it will benefit an animal to behave altruistically towards another if there is an expectation of the favor being returned in the future. The cost of an altruistic act is off-set by the likely benefit of a future favor. Morality, then, is based on self-interest.</p>
<p>Yet, as D'Souza points out, the entire framework of Darwinist analysis does not come close to providing a comprehensive account for morality. We frequently see examples of people acting morally and against self-interest; in fact, we hold a special place of honor for those who die while trying to save people whom they have never met. The late Ernst Mayr, a leading evolutionary biologist, admitted that “altruism toward strangers is a behavior not supported by natural selection.”</p>
<p>Beyond that, we should ask: On what grounds does a person who does not believe in God make the case for inherent human dignity and worth? How does one create a system of justice and make a compelling case against, say, slavery if you begin with three propositions: the universe was created by chance, it will end in nothing, and there is no external source of authority to which to resort?</p>
<p>If you are a materialist, how do you derive a belief in a moral law that is binding on you and others? How do you get from the “is” to the “ought”? And how do you respond to a Nietzschean who tells you “your belief is fine for you, but it is not binding to me. God is dead–and I choose to follow the Will to Power”? An atheist may disagree with this Nietzschean sentiment, but he has no persuasive philosophical or moral ground on which to make his stand.</p>
<p>Even supposing that human beings have a moral sense based on evolution, why choose to follow it? After all, we have lots of instincts–some noble and some base. Why choose the more noble ones, like cooperation and sympathy, fidelity and fair play? Why not use your power against those you have authority over? Why not rig the game in order to advance your own self-interest?</p>
<p>This does not mean atheists cannot live ethical lives or advocate moral principles. Many do. It's just that they cannot anchor it in anything durable (an appeal to “human solidarity” won't do the trick). Another reason for this is parasitic. Certain religious precepts are now part of our social DNA. And so we take it for granted that, as the Founders said, all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. We believe, as Abraham Lincoln did, that “nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows.” The moral atheist certainly exists, but it is because he lives in a society that takes a transcendent morality for granted. If the atheistic enterprise were to prevail, these beliefs would be unmoored–and the moral world it would create would be barren and bleak.</p>
<p>In the end, of course, atheists are not attacking simply a religious institution or set of theological beliefs; they are attacking a person, and not just any person. The target of their wrath is the most compelling figure in human history, a man full of grace and truth. What dr ives this animus toward Christ is hard to fathom; perhaps it is the notion of the perfect dying for the imperfect. In any event, their unceasing invective is less shocking than it is tiresome and even childish.</p>
<p>The Apostle Peter wrote to his fellow Christians, “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” Dinesh D'Souza, a Christian born in India and educated in America, has provided the reason for his hope. That he has done so in such a comprehensive and impressive fashion is a testimony to the quality of his mind and the depth of his faith.</p>
<p>— Peter Wehner, former deputy assistant to President Bush, is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.</p> | false | 1 | whats great christianity dinesh dsouza regnery 348 pp 2795 last years seen spate bestselling antigod books group prominent writers firstrate minds including richard dawkins sam harris daniel dennett christopher hitchens men deeply hostile religion general christianity particular also formidable debaters last fall attended debate hitchens carved pieces leading christian theologian conceded far much defended faith far little sought common ground none exists dinesh dsouza seen thing precisely christians usually duck run atheists easy writes arguments gone largely unanswered flogging carcass fundamentalism without encounter horse kick vigorous traditional christianity dsouzas horse kick comes form new book quite kick dsouza offers persuasive scholarly intelligent rebuttal main charges made proudly carry banner atheism unlike work leading atheists dsouzas book blessedly free rancor reckless statements also filled interesting surprising facts especially regarding demographic shifts global christianity instance dsouza notes christianity fastestgrowing religion world today although islam fastestgrowing religion europe 1900 80 percent christians lived europe america today 60 percent live developing worldwith two three evangelical christians living asia africa south america today churchgoing presbyterians ghana scotland christianity thriving china india nations fastest growth rates worldand current growth rates china decades become largest christian country world vital centers christianity today longer geneva rome paris london dsouza writes buenos aires manila kinshasa addis ababa core dsouzas book systematic response main arguments put forth contemporary atheists historical figures rely dsouza sets demonstrate seven things first christianity main foundation western civilization root cherished values second latest discoveries modern science support claim divine created universe third darwins theory evolution strengthens undermines evidence supernatural design fourth nothing science makes miracles impossible fifth reasonable faith sixth atheism religion responsible mass murders history seventh atheism motivated reason kind cowardly moral escapism seven arguments worth examiningbut issue evolution darwinism morality found dsouzas discussion interesting distinguishes evolution scientific theory hostile religion darwinism metaphysical stance political ideology dsouza believes former rejects latter darwinists like dennett invoke evolution allpurpose explanation cosmology psychology culture ethics politics religion dsouza writes go far beyond evidence appropriating charles darwins name actually disservice evolution explains great deal theory inherent limits one thing evolution explain beginning life darwin didnt even attempt among limitations evolution explain human rationality morality differences man lower animals darwin said moral sense conscience important leading darwinists like dennett dawkins steven pinker dsouza tells us attempt explain morality product evolution natural selection appears altruism actually genetically programmed strategy survival reproduction thus theory kin selection form genetic selection provides explanation behave altruistically toward relatives strangers ensuring genes get passed next generation theory reciprocal altruism developed biologist robert trivers argues benefit animal behave altruistically towards another expectation favor returned future cost altruistic act offset likely benefit future favor morality based selfinterest yet dsouza points entire framework darwinist analysis come close providing comprehensive account morality frequently see examples people acting morally selfinterest fact hold special place honor die trying save people never met late ernst mayr leading evolutionary biologist admitted altruism toward strangers behavior supported natural selection beyond ask grounds person believe god make case inherent human dignity worth one create system justice make compelling case say slavery begin three propositions universe created chance end nothing external source authority resort materialist derive belief moral law binding others get ought respond nietzschean tells belief fine binding god deadand choose follow power atheist may disagree nietzschean sentiment persuasive philosophical moral ground make stand even supposing human beings moral sense based evolution choose follow lots instinctssome noble base choose noble ones like cooperation sympathy fidelity fair play use power authority rig game order advance selfinterest mean atheists live ethical lives advocate moral principles many anchor anything durable appeal human solidarity wont trick another reason parasitic certain religious precepts part social dna take granted founders said men created equal endowed creator certain unalienable rights believe abraham lincoln nothing stamped divine image likeness sent world trodden degraded imbruted fellows moral atheist certainly exists lives society takes transcendent morality granted atheistic enterprise prevail beliefs would unmooredand moral world would create would barren bleak end course atheists attacking simply religious institution set theological beliefs attacking person person target wrath compelling figure human history man full grace truth dr ives animus toward christ hard fathom perhaps notion perfect dying imperfect event unceasing invective less shocking tiresome even childish apostle peter wrote fellow christians always prepared give answer everyone asks give reason hope dinesh dsouza christian born india educated america provided reason hope done comprehensive impressive fashion testimony quality mind depth faith peter wehner former deputy assistant president bush senior fellow ethics public policy center | 744 |
<p>By ERIKA KINETZ</p>
<p>XIANGYANG, China ( <a href="https://www.apnews.com/99ac9cdd8eb347b19d63ad4bec186817/Chinese-mom-pays-price-for-husband's-probe-of-Ivanka-Trump" type="external">AP</a>) — With two young children, Deng Guilian hadn’t planned on going back to work. That changed after her husband was arrested while investigating labor abuses at Chinese suppliers for Ivanka Trump’s brand.</p>
<p>Now the 36-year-old mom works the overnight shift at a karaoke parlor and stays in a dorm nearby. She gets just three days off a month to see her kids.</p>
<p>“They seem accustomed to not having their mom,” Deng said of her 7-year-old daughter, Chen Chen, and 4-year-old son, Bo Bo.</p>
<p>She flashed an uneasy smile.</p>
<p>Ivanka Trump has sought to bring an aura of female empowerment to her lifestyle brand and spoken out for women’s rights from her post at the White House. But her legacy has been less than empowering for at least one woman in China.</p>
<p>In May, Deng’s husband, Hua Haifeng, and two of his colleagues were accused of illegally using secret recording devices and thrown in jail while investigating factories that made shoes for Ivanka Trump’s brand. The group they were working for, a New York non-profit called China Labor Watch, obtained evidence of forced overtime and pay as low as $1 an hour, as well as a video of a manager berating a worker for apparently arranging shoes in the wrong order.</p>
<p>“If I see them f---ing messed up again,” the manager yells, “I’ll beat you right here.” Another worker was left with blood dripping from his head after a manager hit him with the sharp end of <a href="http://bit.ly/2naJC19" type="external">a high heeled shoe</a> , according to three eyewitnesses who spoke to the AP.</p>
<p>The Huajian Group, which runs the factories where the abuses allegedly occurred, has called the charges “completely not true to the facts.”</p>
<p>The investigators were released after 30 days, but the bail conditions — restrictions on travel, regular meetings with the police — have made it hard for Hua to find work.</p>
<p>Hua was ordered not to speak to the media and declined to comment for this story.</p>
<p>Ivanka Trump, who still owns but no longer closely manages her namesake brand, has remained silent about human rights issues within her brand’s supply chain — and labor conditions in China, where tons of her products are made and a generation of women like Deng has left their children to go work.</p>
<p>“As a public figure, she has the ability and resources to not only work on labor conditions at her own brand’s factories, but also to help improve labor conditions of the global supply chain as a whole,” said China Labor Watch founder Li Qiang. “However, she did not use her influence to do these things.”</p>
<p>Trump’s brand and spokesman declined to comment for this story, but in her 2017 best-seller, “Women Who Work,” Trump spoke about her commitment to improving “the lives of countless women and girls” and acknowledged that her father’s presidential campaign gave her “an unprecedented opportunity to advocate for change.”</p>
<p>Her daughter, Arabella, who is one year younger than Chen Chen, has also been an inspiration.</p>
<p>“When I think about the opportunities Arabella will have available to her in the United States, compared with some of the six hundred million girls growing up in developing countries, I’m even more inspired to make a difference,” she wrote.</p>
<p>Arabella and her two little brothers are her “greatest passion,” Ivanka Trump wrote. “I’m the first person they see in the morning, and the last to give kisses at night.”</p>
<p>Deng, meanwhile, has traded life with her kids for a mirrored room at a karaoke parlor, where she sells drinks and snacks on the 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift. Days she spends in a dormitory, where she and a co-worker share a bed with a Snoopy headboard. Room and board are free, but she makes less than 2000 yuan ($316) a month. It’s not enough.</p>
<p>Neighbors in their small, hardscrabble town on the outskirts of Xiangyang, in central China’s Hubei province, seem convinced Hua sold state secrets to the U.S., Deng said. The family worries Hua could get plucked up by police any day and vanish from their lives again. But Deng said she has no regrets.</p>
<p>“Maybe he’s not such a big, important person,” she said. “But every time he helps a worker resolve a problem, put yourself in that person’s position. Personally, I think it’s a very meaningful thing to do.”</p>
<p>Deng said her children have become more subdued since their father’s time in jail.</p>
<p>“The shadow is that when they don’t see their father, they keep calling him,” she said. Bo Bo has grown reasonable beyond his years. “He’s such a small child but when he talks he seems just like an adult,” Deng said, while Chen Chen tends to follow her dad around. “My daughter has never asked about what happened, but I can sense she knows many things.”</p>
<p>On a recent Sunday off, Deng’s children wandered in and out of the kitchen as she cooked. Their house is so cold everyone keeps their coats on inside.</p>
<p>At 5 p.m., when it was time for Deng to go back to work, Bo Bo darted around his mom. Chen Chen sat at a small table nearby, coloring.</p>
<p>“Do you want to see mama off?” Deng called to her daughter.</p>
<p>“No,” Chen Chen muttered.</p>
<p>Deng tried again: “Come on, what’s wrong? You’re not happy?”</p>
<p>Chen Chen stared at her pink marker.</p>
<p>Finally, Deng had to go. She mussed her son’s hair as they walked out into the last light of day. Bo Bo closed the big metal gate after his mom.</p>
<p>Chen Chen kept coloring.</p> | false | 1 | erika kinetz xiangyang china ap two young children deng guilian hadnt planned going back work changed husband arrested investigating labor abuses chinese suppliers ivanka trumps brand 36yearold mom works overnight shift karaoke parlor stays dorm nearby gets three days month see kids seem accustomed mom deng said 7yearold daughter chen chen 4yearold son bo bo flashed uneasy smile ivanka trump sought bring aura female empowerment lifestyle brand spoken womens rights post white house legacy less empowering least one woman china may dengs husband hua haifeng two colleagues accused illegally using secret recording devices thrown jail investigating factories made shoes ivanka trumps brand group working new york nonprofit called china labor watch obtained evidence forced overtime pay low 1 hour well video manager berating worker apparently arranging shoes wrong order see fing messed manager yells ill beat right another worker left blood dripping head manager hit sharp end high heeled shoe according three eyewitnesses spoke ap huajian group runs factories abuses allegedly occurred called charges completely true facts investigators released 30 days bail conditions restrictions travel regular meetings police made hard hua find work hua ordered speak media declined comment story ivanka trump still owns longer closely manages namesake brand remained silent human rights issues within brands supply chain labor conditions china tons products made generation women like deng left children go work public figure ability resources work labor conditions brands factories also help improve labor conditions global supply chain whole said china labor watch founder li qiang however use influence things trumps brand spokesman declined comment story 2017 bestseller women work trump spoke commitment improving lives countless women girls acknowledged fathers presidential campaign gave unprecedented opportunity advocate change daughter arabella one year younger chen chen also inspiration think opportunities arabella available united states compared six hundred million girls growing developing countries im even inspired make difference wrote arabella two little brothers greatest passion ivanka trump wrote im first person see morning last give kisses night deng meanwhile traded life kids mirrored room karaoke parlor sells drinks snacks 6 pm 2 shift days spends dormitory coworker share bed snoopy headboard room board free makes less 2000 yuan 316 month enough neighbors small hardscrabble town outskirts xiangyang central chinas hubei province seem convinced hua sold state secrets us deng said family worries hua could get plucked police day vanish lives deng said regrets maybe hes big important person said every time helps worker resolve problem put persons position personally think meaningful thing deng said children become subdued since fathers time jail shadow dont see father keep calling said bo bo grown reasonable beyond years hes small child talks seems like adult deng said chen chen tends follow dad around daughter never asked happened sense knows many things recent sunday dengs children wandered kitchen cooked house cold everyone keeps coats inside 5 pm time deng go back work bo bo darted around mom chen chen sat small table nearby coloring want see mama deng called daughter chen chen muttered deng tried come whats wrong youre happy chen chen stared pink marker finally deng go mussed sons hair walked last light day bo bo closed big metal gate mom chen chen kept coloring | 529 |
<p>Friedrich von Hayek used to say that there was lurking just beneath the surface of socialism — and not very far beneath its surface either — a nostalgic primitivism. Since nobody’s notion of the socialist ideal has ever existed in a modern, industrialized society, the unspoken but powerful image of that ideal in the socialist mind is an Edenic tribal past when (so it is supposed) people held all things in common and no one had as yet committed the original sin of distinguishing between meum and tuum.</p>
<p>Hayek might have cited Swept Away — either the original version by Lina Wertmüller of 1974 or the new remake by Guy Ritchie — in support of his thesis. Though the original version was more heavily freighted with Communist theorizing, the political subtext is hardly less obvious in Mr Ritchie’s version, which stars Mrs. Ritchie (a.k.a. Madonna) in the role of the nasty capitalist dame converted to the workers’ cause (or at least to a worker) by being stranded on an island with an Italian communist fisherman. It’s the Ritchie bitch as the bitchy rich, as an unkind person might say.</p>
<p>Those familiar with her career will know that Madonna has never had much truck with modesty, and she is no more shy about donning the mantle of economic theory than she has been about any other kind of skimpy costume. Her version of what she calls “the laws of capitalism” is that “the proprietor of goods can set any price that he sees fit,” a principle which, however useless in the real world, at least produces an ironic resonance when it is quoted back at her by Peppe the fisherman — played by Adriano Giannini, the son of Giancarlo Giannini who played the role in Miss Wertmüller’s film — when she is literally starving and so at his mercy.</p>
<p>Peppe’s price is for the rich bitch to become his bitch, and she pays it rather more willingly than a strict regard for verisimilitude might allow. Remarkably, I thought, Mr. Ritchie leaves in his revised version of this parable quite a lot of what many will think of as the unacceptable primitivism of the original. True, he cuts the rape which in 1974 must still have been thought of as a reasonable way for males of the revolutionary classes to get through to over-civilized females of the boss class. But it is not exactly feminist, either, that Peppe takes her up to the point of penetrative sex by force, then induces her to say “yes,” then refuses her, insisting that she must fall in love with him. “I’m going to be your god, is that clear?”</p>
<p>All too clear, alas. In any case, the caveman standard of domestic relations still so far applies as to allow Peppe to knock Mrs Ritchie about and treat her as his slave. Only thus, apparently, can she learn her place in the revolutionary society of the island and call him “master,” as per instruction, serving him in stereotypically housewifely ways. Obviously, it is but a slight step from here to crawling on her knees in the sand to him, kissing his feet and begging him to be her lord as well as master. Thus is answered her comically rich-bitchy prayer on finding herself marooned: “Where is God when you need Him?”</p>
<p>One cannot but feel, however, that the material girl’s learning to adore this peasant ruffian is as much an instance of her husband’s nostalgia as the film’s crude politics. Mr Ritchie has a good eye and a talent for plotting — though the latter has not been much in evidence since Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels — but he has no understanding of character at all. Mrs Ritchie is absolutely the last woman in the world to persuade us of her idyllic contentment while living in a shack, on an otherwise deserted island, with a crude but masterful domestic abuser. She’s much more believable as the rich bitch who, if she were actually stranded with such a fellow, would soon have him kissing her feet. But then that scenario wouldn’t work as socialist romance.</p>
<p>Though the original version was more heavily freighted with Communist theorizing, the political subtext is hardly less obvious in Mr Ritchie’s version, which stars Mrs. Ritchie (a.k.a. Madonna) in the role of the nasty capitalist dame converted to the workers’ cause (or at least to a worker) by being stranded on an island with an Italian communist fisherman. It’s the Ritchie bitch as the bitchy rich, as an unkind person might say.</p>
<p>Those familiar with her career will know that Madonna has never had much truck with modesty, and she is no more shy about donning the mantle of economic theory than she has been about any other kind of skimpy costume. Her version of what she calls “the laws of capitalism” is that “the proprietor of goods can set any price that he sees fit,” a principle which, however useless in the real world, at least produces an ironic resonance when it is quoted back at her by Peppe the fisherman — played by Adriano Giannini, the son of Giancarlo Giannini who played the role in Miss Wertmüller’s film — when she is literally starving and so at his mercy.</p>
<p>Peppe’s price is for the rich bitch to become his bitch, and she pays it rather more willingly than a strict regard for verisimilitude might allow. Remarkably, I thought, Mr. Ritchie leaves in his revised version of this parable quite a lot of what many will think of as the unacceptable primitivism of the original. True, he cuts the rape which in 1974 must still have been thought of as a reasonable way for males of the revolutionary classes to get through to over-civilized females of the boss class. But it is not exactly feminist, either, that Peppe takes her up to the point of penetrative sex by force, then induces her to say “yes,” then refuses her, insisting that she must fall in love with him. “I’m going to be your god, is that clear?”</p>
<p>All too clear, alas. In any case, the caveman standard of domestic relations still so far applies as to allow Peppe to knock Mrs Ritchie about and treat her as his slave. Only thus, apparently, can she learn her place in the revolutionary society of the island and call him “master,” as per instruction, serving him in stereotypically housewifely ways. Obviously, it is but a slight step from here to crawling on her knees in the sand to him, kissing his feet and begging him to be her lord as well as master. Thus is answered her comically rich-bitchy prayer on finding herself marooned: “Where is God when you need Him?”</p>
<p>One cannot but feel, however, that the material girl’s learning to adore this peasant ruffian is as much an instance of her husband’s nostalgia as the film’s crude politics. Mr Ritchie has a good eye and a talent for plotting — though the latter has not been much in evidence since Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels — but he has no understanding of character at all. Mrs Ritchie is absolutely the last woman in the world to persuade us of her idyllic contentment while living in a shack, on an otherwise deserted island, with a crude but masterful domestic abuser. She’s much more believable as the rich bitch who, if she were actually stranded with such a fellow, would soon have him kissing her feet. But then that scenario wouldn’t work as socialist romance.</p> | false | 1 | friedrich von hayek used say lurking beneath surface socialism far beneath surface either nostalgic primitivism since nobodys notion socialist ideal ever existed modern industrialized society unspoken powerful image ideal socialist mind edenic tribal past supposed people held things common one yet committed original sin distinguishing meum tuum hayek might cited swept away either original version lina wertmüller 1974 new remake guy ritchie support thesis though original version heavily freighted communist theorizing political subtext hardly less obvious mr ritchies version stars mrs ritchie aka madonna role nasty capitalist dame converted workers cause least worker stranded island italian communist fisherman ritchie bitch bitchy rich unkind person might say familiar career know madonna never much truck modesty shy donning mantle economic theory kind skimpy costume version calls laws capitalism proprietor goods set price sees fit principle however useless real world least produces ironic resonance quoted back peppe fisherman played adriano giannini son giancarlo giannini played role miss wertmüllers film literally starving mercy peppes price rich bitch become bitch pays rather willingly strict regard verisimilitude might allow remarkably thought mr ritchie leaves revised version parable quite lot many think unacceptable primitivism original true cuts rape 1974 must still thought reasonable way males revolutionary classes get overcivilized females boss class exactly feminist either peppe takes point penetrative sex force induces say yes refuses insisting must fall love im going god clear clear alas case caveman standard domestic relations still far applies allow peppe knock mrs ritchie treat slave thus apparently learn place revolutionary society island call master per instruction serving stereotypically housewifely ways obviously slight step crawling knees sand kissing feet begging lord well master thus answered comically richbitchy prayer finding marooned god need one feel however material girls learning adore peasant ruffian much instance husbands nostalgia films crude politics mr ritchie good eye talent plotting though latter much evidence since lock stock two smoking barrels understanding character mrs ritchie absolutely last woman world persuade us idyllic contentment living shack otherwise deserted island crude masterful domestic abuser shes much believable rich bitch actually stranded fellow would soon kissing feet scenario wouldnt work socialist romance though original version heavily freighted communist theorizing political subtext hardly less obvious mr ritchies version stars mrs ritchie aka madonna role nasty capitalist dame converted workers cause least worker stranded island italian communist fisherman ritchie bitch bitchy rich unkind person might say familiar career know madonna never much truck modesty shy donning mantle economic theory kind skimpy costume version calls laws capitalism proprietor goods set price sees fit principle however useless real world least produces ironic resonance quoted back peppe fisherman played adriano giannini son giancarlo giannini played role miss wertmüllers film literally starving mercy peppes price rich bitch become bitch pays rather willingly strict regard verisimilitude might allow remarkably thought mr ritchie leaves revised version parable quite lot many think unacceptable primitivism original true cuts rape 1974 must still thought reasonable way males revolutionary classes get overcivilized females boss class exactly feminist either peppe takes point penetrative sex force induces say yes refuses insisting must fall love im going god clear clear alas case caveman standard domestic relations still far applies allow peppe knock mrs ritchie treat slave thus apparently learn place revolutionary society island call master per instruction serving stereotypically housewifely ways obviously slight step crawling knees sand kissing feet begging lord well master thus answered comically richbitchy prayer finding marooned god need one feel however material girls learning adore peasant ruffian much instance husbands nostalgia films crude politics mr ritchie good eye talent plotting though latter much evidence since lock stock two smoking barrels understanding character mrs ritchie absolutely last woman world persuade us idyllic contentment living shack otherwise deserted island crude masterful domestic abuser shes much believable rich bitch actually stranded fellow would soon kissing feet scenario wouldnt work socialist romance | 634 |
<p>On the eve of the playoffs, <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Denny_Hamlin/" type="external">Denny Hamlin</a>‘s stirring victory at the Darlington Raceway has been declared encumbered by NASCAR due to some finagling in the rear suspension that likely gave him a faster car than his competition.</p>
<p>If a front-line team like <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Joe_Gibbs/" type="external">Joe Gibbs</a> Racing has one of its crews willing to risk fudging on the rules, is the sanctioning body’s penalty system a sufficient deterrent to teams trying to win a championship?</p>
<p>Since he had already qualified for the playoffs with a previous victory, Hamlin will be one of the 16 drivers advancing after the season’s final regular-season race Saturday night in Richmond. In this case, encumbered means that in addition to fines and loss of points, Hamlin will not get the five playoff bonus points usually awarded a winner.</p>
<p>Perhaps as significantly, a magnificent drive by Hamlin will be remembered for the wrong reasons. Give anyone in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series a slight advantage and the driver tends to suddenly look unbeatable. <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Michael_Waltrip/" type="external">Michael Waltrip</a>, for example, won only four Cup races and all of those wins took place on restrictor plate tracks during the time the DEI team had an acknowledged advantage — (one considered legal) — in horsepower.</p>
<p>Perhaps the discovery of irregularities in the Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota entry of Hamlin will deter such fudging once the playoffs begin at the Chicagoland Speedway. If a contending team is caught during the 10-race title run, it could very well spell the end of any chances of advancing to the all-important final round of the championship.</p>
<p>Historically, teams have always tried to find a way through inspection without necessarily adhering to the rules.</p>
<p>For the sanction body’s first four decades, it was considered part of the sport. It is, after all, a test of mechanical ingenuity among other things. And there was, to some extent, honor among thieves when it came to stealing victory. If you could get your car past NASCAR before the race with a few illegalities, then have at it. It was the same option for everybody and part of the game.</p>
<p>But that approach can quickly escalate into something beyond getting a little advantage here and there.</p>
<p>Gary Nelson, the former rules enforcer for NASCAR, has told an interesting story about his days as a crew chief. Convinced that Junior Johnson was bribing the official in charge of weighing cars at the Riverside, Calif. track on the old wooden scales, Nelson resulted to some trickery of his own.</p>
<p>During a private test session, he hooked up a wire to the scales and buried it in the nearby sandy soil. When his cars were weighed prior to the race several weeks later, a crew member surreptitiously pulled the wire hard enough to make up for about 100 pounds of weight. Nelson’s car thus entered the race 100 pounds light — a significant advantage on the road circuit.</p>
<p>The present picture is different due to so many millions of dollars on the line that derive from corporate sponsorship. NASCAR’s premier series now has major league status and outright cheating taints its championship.</p>
<p>Teams have expected NASCAR to maintain a level playing field and often found it frustrating when the sanctioning body was too dull or politically encumbered to make sure everybody was playing by the same rules. Nelson wasn’t the first to take matters into his own hands due to frustration.</p>
<p>The best example of anger at NASCAR for falling down on the job occurred in 1983, when Maurice Petty used paraffin in his engine to skate past the electronic inspection device used to scan displacement before races. He knew other teams were also using the same tactic and decided to do something about it. If he thought NASCAR would handle the problem privately, his judgement was very mistaken.</p>
<p>Petty believed rival Junior Johnson was skirting the rules to gather points for <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Darrell_Waltrip/" type="external">Darrell Waltrip</a> in the championship. By finishing second, the team collected near maximum points without worrying about a post-race inspection. When <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Richard_Petty/" type="external">Richard Petty</a> won the fall race in Charlotte with an oversize engine, the post-race inspection produced a major public scandal and a huge penalty for “The King.” The fallout resulted in much stiffer penalties and manual inspection of several cars’ engines after races.</p>
<p>The new rules, procedures and penalties cleared up the use of oversize engines very quickly and permanently.</p>
<p>That has not been the case with this year’s use of the “encumbered finish” rule. The threat of losing points has not been enough to deter teams. Hamlin’s loss of 35 driver and owner points and his crew chief for two races was the fifth violation bad enough to garner a Level 1 penalty. Each of the Team Penske cars of <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Brad_Keselowski/" type="external">Brad Keselowski</a> (Phoenix) and Joey Logano (Richmond, Darlington) have been caught. <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Kevin_Harvick/" type="external">Kevin Harvick</a>‘s entry from Stewart-Haas Racing has also been penalized after his finish at Phoenix was declared encumbered.</p>
<p>With the current extensive post-race inspection process at the R&amp;D Center — which includes the first-place and second-place cars plus one other optional pick — there seems to be little doubt about NASCAR’s ability to catch those fudging on the rules. But are the penalties enough to deter teams?</p>
<p>Apparently not. This sets up the rather gut-wrenching scenario of a victory on Sunday being declared null and void three days later. Never mind!</p>
<p>NASCAR is caught between a sport driven by money and cars. If an entire team is suspended for one race instead of just the crew chief, suddenly the team’s sponsor has been denied the opportunity to leverage its investment. Over time, this might encourage both team owners and sponsors to start looking outside NASCAR racing for opportunities to compete.</p>
<p>But if NASCAR really wants to eliminate the out-of-kilter idea of letting teams keep a sullied victory in the record book plus penalties, something more draconian is needed.</p> | false | 1 | eve playoffs denny hamlins stirring victory darlington raceway declared encumbered nascar due finagling rear suspension likely gave faster car competition frontline team like joe gibbs racing one crews willing risk fudging rules sanctioning bodys penalty system sufficient deterrent teams trying win championship since already qualified playoffs previous victory hamlin one 16 drivers advancing seasons final regularseason race saturday night richmond case encumbered means addition fines loss points hamlin get five playoff bonus points usually awarded winner perhaps significantly magnificent drive hamlin remembered wrong reasons give anyone monster energy nascar cup series slight advantage driver tends suddenly look unbeatable michael waltrip example four cup races wins took place restrictor plate tracks time dei team acknowledged advantage one considered legal horsepower perhaps discovery irregularities joe gibbs racing toyota entry hamlin deter fudging playoffs begin chicagoland speedway contending team caught 10race title run could well spell end chances advancing allimportant final round championship historically teams always tried find way inspection without necessarily adhering rules sanction bodys first four decades considered part sport test mechanical ingenuity among things extent honor among thieves came stealing victory could get car past nascar race illegalities option everybody part game approach quickly escalate something beyond getting little advantage gary nelson former rules enforcer nascar told interesting story days crew chief convinced junior johnson bribing official charge weighing cars riverside calif track old wooden scales nelson resulted trickery private test session hooked wire scales buried nearby sandy soil cars weighed prior race several weeks later crew member surreptitiously pulled wire hard enough make 100 pounds weight nelsons car thus entered race 100 pounds light significant advantage road circuit present picture different due many millions dollars line derive corporate sponsorship nascars premier series major league status outright cheating taints championship teams expected nascar maintain level playing field often found frustrating sanctioning body dull politically encumbered make sure everybody playing rules nelson wasnt first take matters hands due frustration best example anger nascar falling job occurred 1983 maurice petty used paraffin engine skate past electronic inspection device used scan displacement races knew teams also using tactic decided something thought nascar would handle problem privately judgement mistaken petty believed rival junior johnson skirting rules gather points darrell waltrip championship finishing second team collected near maximum points without worrying postrace inspection richard petty fall race charlotte oversize engine postrace inspection produced major public scandal huge penalty king fallout resulted much stiffer penalties manual inspection several cars engines races new rules procedures penalties cleared use oversize engines quickly permanently case years use encumbered finish rule threat losing points enough deter teams hamlins loss 35 driver owner points crew chief two races fifth violation bad enough garner level 1 penalty team penske cars brad keselowski phoenix joey logano richmond darlington caught kevin harvicks entry stewarthaas racing also penalized finish phoenix declared encumbered current extensive postrace inspection process rampd center includes firstplace secondplace cars plus one optional pick seems little doubt nascars ability catch fudging rules penalties enough deter teams apparently sets rather gutwrenching scenario victory sunday declared null void three days later never mind nascar caught sport driven money cars entire team suspended one race instead crew chief suddenly teams sponsor denied opportunity leverage investment time might encourage team owners sponsors start looking outside nascar racing opportunities compete nascar really wants eliminate outofkilter idea letting teams keep sullied victory record book plus penalties something draconian needed | 561 |
<p>For the better part of a half century, the&#160;New York Times, and similarly situated purveyors of news and opinion, have eagerly awaited the Great Catholic Cave-In: that blessed moment when, at long last, the Catholic Church, like many other Christian communities, would concede that the sexual revolution had gotten it right all along and would adjust its teaching and practice to suit. A&#160;Times&#160;“breaking story” on October 13, under the headline “Vatican Signals More Tolerance Toward Gays and Remarriage,” might have struck the unwary or uninformed (or those equally committed to the&#160;Times&#160;agenda in these matters) as a signal that&#160;Der Tag, the Day, had finally arrived.</p>
<p>Thus Elisabetta Povoledo wrote that “an important meeting at the Vatican used remarkably conciliatory language on Monday toward gay and divorced Catholics, signaling a possible easing of the church’s rigid attitudes on homosexuality and the sanctity of marriage.” It would be hard to cram more misinformation into one sentence.</p>
<p>1) The notion that the Catholic Church approaches suffering people who struggle with chastity, failing marriages, or both with “rigid attitudes” is slander. Yes, there are priests and bishops who sometimes display a lack of pastoral charity in these difficult circumstances. But they are a distinct minority. As any serious Catholic with experience of the Church’s confessional practice knows, confessors are far more compassionate and understanding than this kind of Dan Brown caricature suggests.</p>
<p>2) Moreover, what the Catholic Church believes about the ethics of human love and about marriage is not a matter of “attitudes.” It’s a matter of truths. Many of those truths can be demonstrated by reason, if people are willing to work through a reasonable argument. Some of those truths, especially those pertaining to the permanence of marriage, come from the Church’s Lord himself. To suggest that any of these truths are matters of “attitude” is another form of slander.</p>
<p>3) And then there’s the slam implicit in that phrase, “rigid attitudes&#160;.&#160;.&#160;.&#160;on the sanctity of marriage.” Does the&#160;Times&#160;now espouse&#160;flaccid&#160;attitudes toward the sanctity of marriage? Would a culture further corrupted by marital breakdown and divorce be more to the&#160;Times’s liking?</p>
<p>4) Beyond these typical bits of&#160;Times-speak, Ms. Povoledo utterly misrepresented the document on which she was putatively reporting. It was not issued by “a meeting” or by “the Vatican.” It was not an authoritative document in any sense; it was an interim report on themes that had been raised in the previous ten days of debate and discussion at the synod. It had absolutely no legislative weight — synod documents are consultative, not legislative — and I am told by those who were there that various formulations in the report were seriously criticized in the synod debates. Moreover, the interim report will be chewed over in the ten synod language-based discussion groups — where, one suspects, further criticisms will be aired — before any final report is issued. To turn this kind of interim report into the virtual equivalent of a papal encyclical is ludicrous on its face.</p>
<p>The 2014 synod is an agenda-setting exercise that was intended by Pope Francis to help prepare the work of the 2015 Synod on the Family. The pope knows full well that marriage and the family are in crisis throughout the world. In his own remarks before the synod, he said that he hoped the synod would lift up the beauty of Christian marriage and Christian family life in a world too dominated by what he’s often called a “throwaway culture,” the throwaways all too frequently including spouses and children. That some bishops, theologians, and bishop-theologians from dying local churches in Europe have tried to use the synod to instruct the entire Catholic Church on appropriate pastoral solutions to difficult and tangled human situations will strike some as cheeky, and others as just bizarre. But whatever those synod fathers and advisers thought they were doing, what they effectively have done is to contribute to the false sense that this, at last, is the moment of the Great Catholic Cave-In.</p>
<p>The synod fathers are wrestling with difficult questions. How does the Catholic Church best approach, in a pastoral and charitable way, those who are living in what the Church has no option but to consider, objectively speaking, irregular situations? How does a Church of sinners — which is what all of us Catholics are — call people in those situations to the conversion to which all Christians are constantly called? How can it bring people to see the truth of their situation, and how can it best help them deal with that? These are not simple matters; matters of the heart rarely are. A decent respect for the difficulties and the delicate human situations with which the synod fathers and the pope are grappling demands something better from the putative newspaper of record than a throwaway line about “rigid attitudes.”</p>
<p>And if the&#160;Times&#160;and others really want to dig into a serious debate that’s underway beneath the surface at the 2014 synod, they might consider this: The experience of the 20th and early 21st centuries suggests that there is an iron law built into the Christian encounter with modernity, according to which Christian communities that maintain a clear sense of their doctrinal and moral boundaries survive and even flourish, while Christian communities whose doctrinal and moral boundaries become porous wither and eventually die. Why have the Catholic leaders who have gotten the most press at this synod, including Cardinal Walter Kasper of Germany, failed to grasp that? Why do they want to emulate the pattern charted by the dying communities of liberal Protestantism? And how do those who&#160;have&#160;learned that lesson craft pastorally effective strategies that address real situations of suffering without compromising the truth?</p>
<p>That’s the real issue at this synod, and it will be the real issue at its successor next year.</p>
<p>— George Weigel is distinguished senior fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.</p> | false | 1 | better part half century the160new york times similarly situated purveyors news opinion eagerly awaited great catholic cavein blessed moment long last catholic church like many christian communities would concede sexual revolution gotten right along would adjust teaching practice suit a160times160breaking story october 13 headline vatican signals tolerance toward gays remarriage might struck unwary uninformed equally committed the160times160agenda matters signal that160der tag day finally arrived thus elisabetta povoledo wrote important meeting vatican used remarkably conciliatory language monday toward gay divorced catholics signaling possible easing churchs rigid attitudes homosexuality sanctity marriage would hard cram misinformation one sentence 1 notion catholic church approaches suffering people struggle chastity failing marriages rigid attitudes slander yes priests bishops sometimes display lack pastoral charity difficult circumstances distinct minority serious catholic experience churchs confessional practice knows confessors far compassionate understanding kind dan brown caricature suggests 2 moreover catholic church believes ethics human love marriage matter attitudes matter truths many truths demonstrated reason people willing work reasonable argument truths especially pertaining permanence marriage come churchs lord suggest truths matters attitude another form slander 3 theres slam implicit phrase rigid attitudes160160160160on sanctity marriage the160times160now espouse160flaccid160attitudes toward sanctity marriage would culture corrupted marital breakdown divorce the160timess liking 4 beyond typical bits of160timesspeak ms povoledo utterly misrepresented document putatively reporting issued meeting vatican authoritative document sense interim report themes raised previous ten days debate discussion synod absolutely legislative weight synod documents consultative legislative told various formulations report seriously criticized synod debates moreover interim report chewed ten synod languagebased discussion groups one suspects criticisms aired final report issued turn kind interim report virtual equivalent papal encyclical ludicrous face 2014 synod agendasetting exercise intended pope francis help prepare work 2015 synod family pope knows full well marriage family crisis throughout world remarks synod said hoped synod would lift beauty christian marriage christian family life world dominated hes often called throwaway culture throwaways frequently including spouses children bishops theologians bishoptheologians dying local churches europe tried use synod instruct entire catholic church appropriate pastoral solutions difficult tangled human situations strike cheeky others bizarre whatever synod fathers advisers thought effectively done contribute false sense last moment great catholic cavein synod fathers wrestling difficult questions catholic church best approach pastoral charitable way living church option consider objectively speaking irregular situations church sinners us catholics call people situations conversion christians constantly called bring people see truth situation best help deal simple matters matters heart rarely decent respect difficulties delicate human situations synod fathers pope grappling demands something better putative newspaper record throwaway line rigid attitudes the160times160and others really want dig serious debate thats underway beneath surface 2014 synod might consider experience 20th early 21st centuries suggests iron law built christian encounter modernity according christian communities maintain clear sense doctrinal moral boundaries survive even flourish christian communities whose doctrinal moral boundaries become porous wither eventually die catholic leaders gotten press synod including cardinal walter kasper germany failed grasp want emulate pattern charted dying communities liberal protestantism who160have160learned lesson craft pastorally effective strategies address real situations suffering without compromising truth thats real issue synod real issue successor next year george weigel distinguished senior fellow washingtons ethics public policy center holds william e simon chair catholic studies | 525 |
<p>A man dressed in black tactical-style gear and armed with an assault rifle opened fire inside a church in a small South Texas community on Sunday, killing 26 people and wounding at least 16 others in what the governor called the deadliest mass shooting in the state's history, <a href="http://news4sanantonio.com/news/local/meet-the-guy-that-chased-down-the-suspected-church-shooter" type="external">our affiliate KABB/WOAI reported</a>.</p>
<p>The dead ranged in age from 5 to 72 years old.</p>
<p>The attacker has been identified as Devin Kelley. He’s described as a white man in his 20s who was wearing black tactical gear and a ballistic vest when he pulled into a gas station across from the First Baptist Church around 11:20 a.m.</p>
<p>He crossed the street and started firing a Ruger AR rifle at the church, said Freeman Martin, a regional director of the Texas Department of Safety, then continued firing after entering the white wood-frame building, where an 11 a.m. service was scheduled. As he left, he was confronted by an armed resident and another man who chased him. A short time later, the suspect was found dead in his vehicle at the county line, Martin said.</p>
<p>One of the men who tracked down the alleged killer is Johnnie Langendorff. We caught up to him when he came back to the scene to get his vehicle.</p>
<p>“I did what I thought I needed to do,” said Langendorff.</p>
<p>“They said that there’s a shooting. I pursued and I just just did what I thought was the right thing to do.”</p>
<p>We then asked Langendorff if he knew there were more weapons in the car and he possibly stopped further attacks.</p>
<p>“I didn’t know that,” he said.</p>
<p>Until an autopsy is performed no way to tell if he committed suicide or was killed by someone else.</p>
<p>Kelley lived in a San Antonio suburb and didn't appear to be linked to organized terrorist groups. Investigators were looking at social media posts Kelley made in the days before Sunday's attack, including one that appeared to show an AR-15 semiautomatic weapon.</p>
<p>RELATED: <a href="" type="internal">Texas Gov. Abbott confirmed 26 dead at First Baptist Church shooting</a></p>
<p>In a brief statement, the Pentagon confirmed he had served in the Air Force "at one point." Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek said records show that Kelley served in Logistics Readiness at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico from 2010 until his discharge. The date of his discharge and the circumstances under which he left the service were not immediately available.</p>
<p>Investigators weren't ready to discuss a possible motive for the attack. 23 of the dead were found dead in the church, two were found outside and one died after being taken to a hospital.</p>
<p>Addressing the news conference, Gov. Greg Abbott called the attack the worst mass shooting in Texas history. "There are no words to describe the pure evil that we witnessed in Sutherland Springs today," Abbott said. "Our hearts are heavy at the anguish in this small town, but in time of tragedy, we see the very best of Texas. May God comfort those who've lost a loved one, and may God heal the hurt in our communities."</p>
<p>Among those killed was the church pastor's 14-year-old daughter, Annabelle Pomeroy. Pastor Frank Pomeroy, and his wife, Sherri, were both out of town in two different states when the attack occurred, Sherri Pomeroy wrote in a text message to the AP.</p>
<p>RELATED: <a href="" type="internal">Here are some of the First Baptist Church victims</a></p>
<p>"We lost our 14 year old daughter today and many friends," she wrote. "Neither of us has made it back into town yet to personally see the devastation. I am at the charlotte airport trying to get home as soon as i can."</p>
<p>Federal law enforcement swarmed the small rural community of a few hundred residents 30 miles southeast of San Antonio after the attack, including ATF investigators and members of the FBI's evidence collection team.</p>
<p>At least 16 wounded were taken to hospitals, hospital officials said, including eight taken by medical helicopter to the Brooke Army Medical Center. Another eight victims were taken to Connally Memorial Medical Center, located in Floresville about 10 miles from the church, including four who were later transferred to University Hospital in San Antonio for higher-level care, said spokeswoman Megan Posey.</p>
<p>Alena Berlanga, a Floresville resident who was monitoring the chaos on a police scanner and in Facebook community groups, said everyone knows everyone else in the sparsely populated county.</p>
<p>"This is horrific for our tiny little tight-knit town," Berlanga said. "Everybody's going to be affected and everybody knows someone who's affected."</p>
<p>Regina Rodriguez, who arrived at the church a couple of hours after the shooting, walked up to the police barricade and hugged a person she was with. She said her father, 51-year-old Richard Rodriguez, attends the church every Sunday, and she hadn't been able to reach him. She said she feared the worst.</p>
<p>Church member Nick Uhlig, 34, wasn't at Sunday's service, but he said his cousins were at the church and that his family was told at least one of them, a woman with three children and pregnant with another, was among the dead.</p>
<p>"We just gathered to bury their grandfather on Thursday," he said, shaking his head. "This is the only church here. We have Bible study, men's Bible study, vacation Bible school. Somebody went in and started shooting."</p>
<p>President Donald Trump, who was in Japan, where he was on an Asian trip, called the shooting an "act of evil" and said he was monitoring the situation.</p>
<p>"We're shocked. Shocked and dismayed," said state Sen. Judith Zaffirini, a Laredo Democrat whose district includes Sutherland Springs, a rural community known for its peanut festival, which was held last month. "It's especially shocking when it's such a small, serene area. These rural areas, they are so beautiful and so loving."</p>
<p>Later Sunday, two sheriff's vans were parked outside the gate of a cattle fence surrounding the address listed for Kelley on the rural, western outskirts of New Braunfels, north of San Antonio, preventing a group of waiting journalists from entering. Officials from the Comal County Sherriff's Office and the Texas Rangers declined to comment or say if they had raided his home.</p>
<p>Ryan Albers, 16, who lives across the road said he heard intensifying gunfire coming from that direction in recent days.</p>
<p>"It's really loud. At first I thought someone was blasting," Albers said. "It had to be coming from somewhere pretty close. It was definitely not just a shotgun or someone hunting. It was someone using automatic weapon fire."</p>
<p>The church has posted videos of its Sunday services on a YouTube channel, raising the possibility that the shooting was captured on video.</p>
<p>In a video of its Oct. 8 service, a congregant who spoke and read Scripture pointed to the Oct. 1 Las Vegas shooting a week earlier as evidence of the "wicked nature" of man. That shooting left 58 dead and more than 500 injured.</p>
<p>Until Sunday, the deadliest mass shooting in Texas had been a 1991 attack in Killeen, when a mentally disturbed man crashed his pickup truck through a restaurant window at lunchtime and started shooting people, killing 23 and injuring more than 20 others.</p>
<p>The University of Texas was the site of one of the most infamous mass shootings in American history, when U.S. Marine sniper Charles Whitman climbed the Austin campus' clock tower in 1966 and began firing on stunned people below, killing 13 and wounding nearly three dozen others. He had killed his wife and mother before heading to the tower, one victim died a week later and medical examiners eventually attributed a 17th death to Whitman in 2001.</p>
<p>President Donald Trump has promised his administration's full support to the investigation of a Texas church shooting that left 26 dead and about 20 wounded.</p>
<p>Speaking to U.S. and Japanese business leaders in Tokyo Monday morning during his Asian trip, Trump highlighted that this "act of evil" at a place of sacred worship.</p>
<p>Trump says: "Our hearts are broken but in dark times — and these are dark times — such as these, Americans do what they do best." He says Americans will pull together to help those suffering.</p>
<p>Trump says he will continue monitoring the investigation during his 11-day tour.</p>
<p>Here's a timeline of the deadliest US mass shootings in the last decade.</p>
<p>The Associated Press contributed to this report.</p> | false | 1 | man dressed black tacticalstyle gear armed assault rifle opened fire inside church small south texas community sunday killing 26 people wounding least 16 others governor called deadliest mass shooting states history affiliate kabbwoai reported dead ranged age 5 72 years old attacker identified devin kelley hes described white man 20s wearing black tactical gear ballistic vest pulled gas station across first baptist church around 1120 crossed street started firing ruger ar rifle church said freeman martin regional director texas department safety continued firing entering white woodframe building 11 service scheduled left confronted armed resident another man chased short time later suspect found dead vehicle county line martin said one men tracked alleged killer johnnie langendorff caught came back scene get vehicle thought needed said langendorff said theres shooting pursued thought right thing asked langendorff knew weapons car possibly stopped attacks didnt know said autopsy performed way tell committed suicide killed someone else kelley lived san antonio suburb didnt appear linked organized terrorist groups investigators looking social media posts kelley made days sundays attack including one appeared show ar15 semiautomatic weapon related texas gov abbott confirmed 26 dead first baptist church shooting brief statement pentagon confirmed served air force one point air force spokeswoman ann stefanek said records show kelley served logistics readiness holloman air force base new mexico 2010 discharge date discharge circumstances left service immediately available investigators werent ready discuss possible motive attack 23 dead found dead church two found outside one died taken hospital addressing news conference gov greg abbott called attack worst mass shooting texas history words describe pure evil witnessed sutherland springs today abbott said hearts heavy anguish small town time tragedy see best texas may god comfort whove lost loved one may god heal hurt communities among killed church pastors 14yearold daughter annabelle pomeroy pastor frank pomeroy wife sherri town two different states attack occurred sherri pomeroy wrote text message ap related first baptist church victims lost 14 year old daughter today many friends wrote neither us made back town yet personally see devastation charlotte airport trying get home soon federal law enforcement swarmed small rural community hundred residents 30 miles southeast san antonio attack including atf investigators members fbis evidence collection team least 16 wounded taken hospitals hospital officials said including eight taken medical helicopter brooke army medical center another eight victims taken connally memorial medical center located floresville 10 miles church including four later transferred university hospital san antonio higherlevel care said spokeswoman megan posey alena berlanga floresville resident monitoring chaos police scanner facebook community groups said everyone knows everyone else sparsely populated county horrific tiny little tightknit town berlanga said everybodys going affected everybody knows someone whos affected regina rodriguez arrived church couple hours shooting walked police barricade hugged person said father 51yearold richard rodriguez attends church every sunday hadnt able reach said feared worst church member nick uhlig 34 wasnt sundays service said cousins church family told least one woman three children pregnant another among dead gathered bury grandfather thursday said shaking head church bible study mens bible study vacation bible school somebody went started shooting president donald trump japan asian trip called shooting act evil said monitoring situation shocked shocked dismayed said state sen judith zaffirini laredo democrat whose district includes sutherland springs rural community known peanut festival held last month especially shocking small serene area rural areas beautiful loving later sunday two sheriffs vans parked outside gate cattle fence surrounding address listed kelley rural western outskirts new braunfels north san antonio preventing group waiting journalists entering officials comal county sherriffs office texas rangers declined comment say raided home ryan albers 16 lives across road said heard intensifying gunfire coming direction recent days really loud first thought someone blasting albers said coming somewhere pretty close definitely shotgun someone hunting someone using automatic weapon fire church posted videos sunday services youtube channel raising possibility shooting captured video video oct 8 service congregant spoke read scripture pointed oct 1 las vegas shooting week earlier evidence wicked nature man shooting left 58 dead 500 injured sunday deadliest mass shooting texas 1991 attack killeen mentally disturbed man crashed pickup truck restaurant window lunchtime started shooting people killing 23 injuring 20 others university texas site one infamous mass shootings american history us marine sniper charles whitman climbed austin campus clock tower 1966 began firing stunned people killing 13 wounding nearly three dozen others killed wife mother heading tower one victim died week later medical examiners eventually attributed 17th death whitman 2001 president donald trump promised administrations full support investigation texas church shooting left 26 dead 20 wounded speaking us japanese business leaders tokyo monday morning asian trip trump highlighted act evil place sacred worship trump says hearts broken dark times dark times americans best says americans pull together help suffering trump says continue monitoring investigation 11day tour heres timeline deadliest us mass shootings last decade associated press contributed report | 814 |
<p>The continuing debate over how to repeal and replace Obamacare has stumbled over what to do with people who got health insurance through that legislation. Neither the House nor the Senate version has gotten it right, placing passage of the GOP’s core promise for seven years in jeopardy.</p>
<p>This job would be much easier if only the Republicans would follow Ronald Reagan’s principles — which were not what many think they are.</p>
<p>Contrary to myth, Reagan wasn’t an anti-government zealot. As he told one 1958 audience, he wouldn’t repeal most government welfare programs “regardless of the price.” He told another audience in 1961, that “any person in the United States who requires medical attention and cannot provide for himself should have it provided for him.” To that end, he supported the Kerr-Mills Act, which gave federal grants to states pay for health care for poor senior citizens. He even told one friend that if “the money [the bill appropriated] isn’t enough, I think we should put up more.”</p>
<p>He didn’t change those ideas as he grew older. He continued to express support for the idea that no one should be denied medical care for lack of funds in letters as late as 1979. As president, he signed the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, which requires hospitals to stabilize a patient in an emergency condition regardless of that person’s ability to pay.</p>
<p>Reagan wanted smaller government, but he raised California’s taxes in 1967 rather than slash welfare and Medicaid spending. His 1971 welfare reform bill that removed the able-bodied from the rolls also increased welfare checks for people staying in the program by 43%. He was proud of this and called it “giving them a raise”.</p>
<p>As president, he made clear that budget cutting would only target those who didn’t need government help. People who “through no fault of their own” relied on taxpayer support — “the poverty stricken, the disabled, the elderly, all those with true need” — could “be assured that the social safety net of programs they depend on are exempt from any cuts”.</p>
<p>Reagan even raised taxes as president to keep safety nets intact. His 1983 bipartisan reform to save Social Security, for example, raised Social Security taxes and subjected part of wealthy seniors’ Social Security payments to the income tax. He was especially supportive of the latter provision, arguing it was “a step toward correcting a mistake in the program — there should have been a means test from the beginning”.</p>
<p>Reagan’s core beliefs always prioritized helping people in need over saving money or abstract principles regarding liberty. Today’s Republicans, however, often seem to have exactly the opposite priorities.</p>
<p>Both the Senate and House bills capped federal government contributions to Medicaid, which provides medical care to the poorest Americans. But contribution caps to the states over time will force the states to change their programs, perhaps endangering some people’s health care coverage.</p>
<p>House Speaker Paul Ryan’s prior Medicare reform proposals have run into the same challenge. Ryan wants to turn Medicare, which provides health insurance to those 65 and older, into a program that only guarantees the elderly receive a set amount of money for health insurance rather than ensures they get all the care they need regardless of the cost. This would prevent expected large spending hikes by capping the federal government’s contribution to Medicare. But the specific programs he has presented have been criticized as endangering the ability of many seniors to purchase the care they will need.</p>
<p>In both cases, Ryan seems to prefer eliminating fiscal risk for the nation over eliminating health risk for people.</p>
<p>Ronald Reagan would never have done that. As he told Congress 1982, “we can be compassionate about human needs without being complacent about budget extravagance”. Reagan-inspired entitlement reform would balance both goals, placing human need before budget savings whenever possible.</p>
<p>Reagan likely would have wanted enough funding to give people meaningful access to health care while giving states the leeway to give their citizens affordable plans. A health-care bill that focused less on controlling costs and cutting taxes and more on these ideas would both pass public muster and end up cutting spending in the long run.</p>
<p>Other major entitlements can also be reformed by focusing on need first. Why do people with millions of dollars in savings get roughly the same Medicare subsidies as those who are barely scraping by? Why shouldn’t well-off seniors have all their Social Security checks subject to income tax as well as have the growth rate in their benefits cut? Why should wealthy farmers qualify for&#160; <a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/story/what-the-proposed-20-cut-in-agricultural-subsidies-mean-for-your-grocery-bill-2017-06-07" type="external">farm subsidies</a>&#160;that guarantee them a high income when the rest of us take our lumps if our luck turns bad?</p>
<p>Reagan supported these measures and more at one point after this turn to the right. Why can’t today’s GOP try these first rather than risk that those who need help will go without?</p>
<p>Ronald Reagan was beloved by Americans, and not just by conservatives. His compassionate conservatism earned the support of millions of Democrats who wanted what he offered. “He isn’t like a Republican,” one worker said in 1984. “He’s more like an American, which is what we really need”.</p>
<p>If today’s GOP can act more like Reagan, they can solve our country’s problems and become the majority party for years to come. If they don’t, they risk alienating the millions of Democrats and Independents whose votes in November put Trump in the White House and saved the GOP Senate majority.</p>
<p>And that would lead to Democratic control and much larger government as far as the eye can see.</p>
<p>Henry Olsen&#160;is the author of “ <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062475282/the-working-class-republican" type="external">The Working Class Republican: Ronald Reagan and the Return of Blue-Collar Conservatism</a>” (HarperCollins, 2017). He is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.</p> | false | 1 | continuing debate repeal replace obamacare stumbled people got health insurance legislation neither house senate version gotten right placing passage gops core promise seven years jeopardy job would much easier republicans would follow ronald reagans principles many think contrary myth reagan wasnt antigovernment zealot told one 1958 audience wouldnt repeal government welfare programs regardless price told another audience 1961 person united states requires medical attention provide provided end supported kerrmills act gave federal grants states pay health care poor senior citizens even told one friend money bill appropriated isnt enough think put didnt change ideas grew older continued express support idea one denied medical care lack funds letters late 1979 president signed emergency medical treatment labor act requires hospitals stabilize patient emergency condition regardless persons ability pay reagan wanted smaller government raised californias taxes 1967 rather slash welfare medicaid spending 1971 welfare reform bill removed ablebodied rolls also increased welfare checks people staying program 43 proud called giving raise president made clear budget cutting would target didnt need government help people fault relied taxpayer support poverty stricken disabled elderly true need could assured social safety net programs depend exempt cuts reagan even raised taxes president keep safety nets intact 1983 bipartisan reform save social security example raised social security taxes subjected part wealthy seniors social security payments income tax especially supportive latter provision arguing step toward correcting mistake program means test beginning reagans core beliefs always prioritized helping people need saving money abstract principles regarding liberty todays republicans however often seem exactly opposite priorities senate house bills capped federal government contributions medicaid provides medical care poorest americans contribution caps states time force states change programs perhaps endangering peoples health care coverage house speaker paul ryans prior medicare reform proposals run challenge ryan wants turn medicare provides health insurance 65 older program guarantees elderly receive set amount money health insurance rather ensures get care need regardless cost would prevent expected large spending hikes capping federal governments contribution medicare specific programs presented criticized endangering ability many seniors purchase care need cases ryan seems prefer eliminating fiscal risk nation eliminating health risk people ronald reagan would never done told congress 1982 compassionate human needs without complacent budget extravagance reaganinspired entitlement reform would balance goals placing human need budget savings whenever possible reagan likely would wanted enough funding give people meaningful access health care giving states leeway give citizens affordable plans healthcare bill focused less controlling costs cutting taxes ideas would pass public muster end cutting spending long run major entitlements also reformed focusing need first people millions dollars savings get roughly medicare subsidies barely scraping shouldnt welloff seniors social security checks subject income tax well growth rate benefits cut wealthy farmers qualify for160 farm subsidies160that guarantee high income rest us take lumps luck turns bad reagan supported measures one point turn right cant todays gop try first rather risk need help go without ronald reagan beloved americans conservatives compassionate conservatism earned support millions democrats wanted offered isnt like republican one worker said 1984 hes like american really need todays gop act like reagan solve countrys problems become majority party years come dont risk alienating millions democrats independents whose votes november put trump white house saved gop senate majority would lead democratic control much larger government far eye see henry olsen160is author working class republican ronald reagan return bluecollar conservatism harpercollins 2017 senior fellow ethics public policy center | 563 |
<p>The good news is that she lost.</p>
<p>The bad news is that he won.</p>
<p>I expect I’m not alone in having had that bifurcated reaction in the wee hours of November 9. It is certainly good news that the Clinton Machine has been brought low, in part by its own arrogant buy-in to the identity politics it promoted and then got burned by, and in part by Mrs. Clinton’s inability to project anything resembling warmth or sincerity. It’s certainly good news that able Republican senators were reelected, and that the odds are vastly improved on a new Supreme Court justice who will think more like the late, great Antonin Scalia and less like Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It’s good news that, with Republicans firmly in control of the Senate and the House of Representatives and an inexperienced president about to be inaugurated, Congress has a real opportunity to reclaim its rightful role in the constitutional order. And it’s good news that so much of a grotesquely biased punditocracy and media were smitten hip and thigh on the night of November 8–9, struggling to comprehend what they deemed impossible and looking increasingly foolish as they did so.</p>
<p>The bad news remains: Donald J. Trump is president-elect of the United States. Like others who opposed his nomination and declined to vote for him, I hope he continues to show the magnanimity displayed in his victory speech, which was not, to put it gently, a hallmark of his campaign — even as I hope that he reconsiders some of his more bizarre positions while following through on his promises to pro-life and pro-religious-freedom-in-full voters. I hope Mr. Trump begins to know what he does not know, recognizes that he needs people around him with the wit and courage to tell him bluntly when he’s wrong, finds himself able advisers (rather than sycophants), and in general grows up under the burdens of the awesome office he sought and won.</p>
<p>As for more good news and bad news:</p>
<p>The good news is that some long-neglected issues — such as the condition of those who haven’t benefited from the economic dynamism of globalization and the transformations of economic life caused by the IT revolution — have been put on the national agenda as never before. The bad news is that no one, including Trump, has much of an idea of how to empower those who have fallen through the floorboards during globalization, and his promise of a trillion dollars of infrastructure spending doesn’t begin to address the question of those men who have willfully dropped out of the work force in what is one part of a larger moral-cultural crisis in America. Some serious, creative, innovative thinking is needed on this front, which is one where center-left and center-right might actually find some common ground.</p>
<p>The good news is that identity politics took a shellacking, a point Mrs. Clinton seemed not to have grasped in her delayed concession speech Wednesday morning. It was always absurd for her to claim the mantle of feminist heroine, given both her personal job history (almost entirely empowered by her husband and her connection to him) and the fact that we live in a world that has seen Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, and a host of other able, tough-minded women successfully run their respective countries. There is no “glass ceiling,” and there is no reason to think that Mrs. Clinton’s defeat was anything other than that: the voters’ not-irrational, and certainly not misogynistic, reaction to a candidate carrying an awful lot of baggage, lacking a coherent message, and deploying an unattractive personality.</p>
<p>The bad news on this front is that the American Left is now so beholden to identity politics that it’s not easy to see the Democratic party extricating itself from the coils of what I’ve come to think of as “ism-ism.” And the problem is not just feminist identity politics but racial identity politics. I flew out of Washington for a speaking engagement early Wednesday morning and was serenaded on the Beltway by the laments of an African-American novelist bemoaning on National Public Radio (of course!) the fact, or so she claimed, that the stunning results of the presidential election were a matter of “whitelash.” This does not bode well.</p>
<p>If, as seems likely, that will become the orthodoxy about 2016 in much of the African-American political leadership of the country, then there is little hope that there will be progress in our inner-urban areas. Rather, look for an intensification of agitations like Black Lives Matter, whose principal accomplishment to date, insofar as I can tell, has been to help create the circumstances in which even more innocent African Americans have been killed in our cities. There was a small glimmer of hope on this front in the scathing open letter to Mrs. Clinton organized by black Pentecostal ministers in the last weeks of the election cycle, which took a bold pro-life stand against her complicity in the abortion-driven decimation of the African-American community. Whether that bold initiative, energized by the Reverend Eugene Rivers and Dr. Jacqueline Rivers, has legs remains to be seen, but it certainly should.</p>
<p>The good news is that the impending retirement of President Obama affords the United States an opportunity to recalibrate its foreign policy after the serial disasters the Obama administration has concocted across the world stage. The bad news is that President-elect Trump’s occasional forays into foreign policy over the past year vacillated between the silly and the sinister. The claim in some quarters on the Morning After that Trump might calm down Vladimir Putin is ludicrous. Putin marches to his own dangerous drummer and is more likely to play Trump than Trump is to play him. The earliest possible statement from the president-elect that he regards NATO as the bedrock of Western security might help forestall further Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine, the Baltics, Moldova, Georgia, and elsewhere, in what promises to be a very dangerous interregnum period between the feckless, outgoing Obama administration and the untried and untested Trump administration.</p>
<p>The good news is that the new administration is pledged to defend religious freedom in full, which includes the natural and constitutional right of religious institutions to be themselves in their charitable and educational work, as well as in their worship. The Little Sisters of the Poor and similar religious communities can look to the future with less foreboding on November 9 than they did on the morning of November 8. The bad news is that the cultural assault on religious freedom will continue. And the further bad news is that, in a country manifestly in need of a moral and cultural reawakening, far too many religious leaders in this election cycle proved more interested in maintaining or getting face-time with and access to power than in speaking truth to power.</p>
<p>The good news is that there seems to be no inclination on the part of the defeated to charge conspiracies, election-rigging, etc., although there will certainly be some of that in the commentariat, with FBI director James Comey looming large in the villain’s role. The bad news is that the vitriol of the campaign was not just cosmetic. Election 2016 tore the scabs off some very sore wounds in the body politic, and healing those wounds is not going to be easy. For we are, and have been since at least 2000 and arguably 1996, a country badly divided along what a philosopher or theologian would call “anthropological” lines — a country riven by two very different and likely incommensurable ideas of the human person.</p>
<p>One, which found what still strikes me as an unworthy vessel in Donald Trump, believes that there are truths built into the world and into us and that respecting those truths makes for happiness, civility, and human flourishing. The other believes that there are no such truths, that everything in the human condition is malleable and plastic, and that you are what you say you are or aspire to be, even if the elementary facts of biology beg to differ. The latter camp may have overreached recently in its quasi-fascist campus antics, its bathroom campaigns, and its determination to force lifestyle libertinism on the entire country through state power. But there is little indication that either political party, to date, has found either the will or the way to affirm the universality of human dignity while saying “Enough is enough” to the partisans of plastic human nature, who have weaponized “gender” ideology and confusions into a blunt instrument of intimidation and coercion.</p>
<p>A friend with a lot of sense texted me on the Morning After with the shrewd observation that&#160;while he was vastly enjoying the discomfiture of the commentariat, what had happened on November 8 was “reaction, not renewal.” He went on to note that a lot of what was being reacted against ought to be taken seriously, from the plight of those left behind to the plague of political correctness and its corrosive impact on democracy. But, he concluded, the reaction had found itself a dangerous vehicle in Mr. Trump. And that about sums up my good news/bad news view of things with Election 2016 mercifully in the rearview mirror. Looking ahead, we have to hope for the good news that Mr. Trump proves himself as adept a leader as he has been a demagogue, and that he brings men and women of talent, integrity, and imagination to Washington with him.</p>
<p>— George Weigel is the Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies. &#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;</p> | false | 1 | good news lost bad news expect im alone bifurcated reaction wee hours november 9 certainly good news clinton machine brought low part arrogant buyin identity politics promoted got burned part mrs clintons inability project anything resembling warmth sincerity certainly good news able republican senators reelected odds vastly improved new supreme court justice think like late great antonin scalia less like ruth bader ginsburg good news republicans firmly control senate house representatives inexperienced president inaugurated congress real opportunity reclaim rightful role constitutional order good news much grotesquely biased punditocracy media smitten hip thigh night november 89 struggling comprehend deemed impossible looking increasingly foolish bad news remains donald j trump presidentelect united states like others opposed nomination declined vote hope continues show magnanimity displayed victory speech put gently hallmark campaign even hope reconsiders bizarre positions following promises prolife proreligiousfreedominfull voters hope mr trump begins know know recognizes needs people around wit courage tell bluntly hes wrong finds able advisers rather sycophants general grows burdens awesome office sought good news bad news good news longneglected issues condition havent benefited economic dynamism globalization transformations economic life caused revolution put national agenda never bad news one including trump much idea empower fallen floorboards globalization promise trillion dollars infrastructure spending doesnt begin address question men willfully dropped work force one part larger moralcultural crisis america serious creative innovative thinking needed front one centerleft centerright might actually find common ground good news identity politics took shellacking point mrs clinton seemed grasped delayed concession speech wednesday morning always absurd claim mantle feminist heroine given personal job history almost entirely empowered husband connection fact live world seen golda meir margaret thatcher angela merkel host able toughminded women successfully run respective countries glass ceiling reason think mrs clintons defeat anything voters notirrational certainly misogynistic reaction candidate carrying awful lot baggage lacking coherent message deploying unattractive personality bad news front american left beholden identity politics easy see democratic party extricating coils ive come think ismism problem feminist identity politics racial identity politics flew washington speaking engagement early wednesday morning serenaded beltway laments africanamerican novelist bemoaning national public radio course fact claimed stunning results presidential election matter whitelash bode well seems likely become orthodoxy 2016 much africanamerican political leadership country little hope progress innerurban areas rather look intensification agitations like black lives matter whose principal accomplishment date insofar tell help create circumstances even innocent african americans killed cities small glimmer hope front scathing open letter mrs clinton organized black pentecostal ministers last weeks election cycle took bold prolife stand complicity abortiondriven decimation africanamerican community whether bold initiative energized reverend eugene rivers dr jacqueline rivers legs remains seen certainly good news impending retirement president obama affords united states opportunity recalibrate foreign policy serial disasters obama administration concocted across world stage bad news presidentelect trumps occasional forays foreign policy past year vacillated silly sinister claim quarters morning trump might calm vladimir putin ludicrous putin marches dangerous drummer likely play trump trump play earliest possible statement presidentelect regards nato bedrock western security might help forestall russian aggression eastern ukraine baltics moldova georgia elsewhere promises dangerous interregnum period feckless outgoing obama administration untried untested trump administration good news new administration pledged defend religious freedom full includes natural constitutional right religious institutions charitable educational work well worship little sisters poor similar religious communities look future less foreboding november 9 morning november 8 bad news cultural assault religious freedom continue bad news country manifestly need moral cultural reawakening far many religious leaders election cycle proved interested maintaining getting facetime access power speaking truth power good news seems inclination part defeated charge conspiracies electionrigging etc although certainly commentariat fbi director james comey looming large villains role bad news vitriol campaign cosmetic election 2016 tore scabs sore wounds body politic healing wounds going easy since least 2000 arguably 1996 country badly divided along philosopher theologian would call anthropological lines country riven two different likely incommensurable ideas human person one found still strikes unworthy vessel donald trump believes truths built world us respecting truths makes happiness civility human flourishing believes truths everything human condition malleable plastic say aspire even elementary facts biology beg differ latter camp may overreached recently quasifascist campus antics bathroom campaigns determination force lifestyle libertinism entire country state power little indication either political party date found either way affirm universality human dignity saying enough enough partisans plastic human nature weaponized gender ideology confusions blunt instrument intimidation coercion friend lot sense texted morning shrewd observation that160while vastly enjoying discomfiture commentariat happened november 8 reaction renewal went note lot reacted ought taken seriously plight left behind plague political correctness corrosive impact democracy concluded reaction found dangerous vehicle mr trump sums good newsbad news view things election 2016 mercifully rearview mirror looking ahead hope good news mr trump proves adept leader demagogue brings men women talent integrity imagination washington george weigel distinguished senior fellow washingtons ethics public policy center holds william e simon chair catholic studies 160160160160 | 816 |
<p>The central bank’s ability to create money to support stock prices negates the price discovery function of the stock market.</p>
<p>Are we witnessing the corruption of central banks? Are we observing the money-creating powers of central banks being used to drive up prices in the stock market for the benefit of the mega-rich?</p>
<p>These questions came to mind when we learned that the central bank of Switzerland, the Swiss National Bank, purchased 3,300,000 shares of Apple stock in the first quarter of this year, adding 500,000 shares in the second quarter. Smart money would have been selling, not buying.</p>
<p>It turns out that the Swiss central bank, in addition to its Apple stock, holds very large equity positions, ranging from $250,000,000 to $637,000,000, in numerous US corporations—Exxon Mobil, Microsoft, Google, Johnson &amp; Johnson, General Electric, Procter &amp; Gamble, Verizon, AT&amp;T, Pfizer, Chevron, Merck, Facebook, Pepsico, Coca Cola, Disney, Valeant, IBM, Gilead, Amazon.</p>
<p>Among this list of the Swiss central bank’s holdings are stocks which are responsible for more than 100% of the year-to-date rise in the S&amp;P 500 prior to the latest sell-off.</p>
<p>What is going on here?</p>
<p>The purpose of central banks was to serve as a “lender of last resort” to commercial banks faced with a run on the bank by depositors demanding cash withdrawals of their deposits.</p>
<p>Banks would call in loans in an effort to raise cash to pay off depositors. Businesses would fail, and the banks would fail from their inability to pay depositors their money on demand.</p>
<p>As time passed, this rationale for a central bank was made redundant by government deposit insurance for bank depositors, and central banks found additional functions for their existence. The Federal Reserve, for example, under the Humphrey-Hawkins Act, is responsible for maintaining full employment and low inflation. By the time this legislation was passed, the worsening “Phillips Curve tradeoffs” between inflation and employment had made the goals inconsistent. The result was the introduction by the Reagan administration of the supply-side economic policy that cured the simultaneously rising inflation and unemployment.</p>
<p>Neither the Federal Reserve’s charter nor the Humphrey-Hawkins Act says that the Federal Reserve is supposed to stabilize the stock market by purchasing stocks. The Federal Reserve is supposed to buy and sell bonds in open market operations in order to encourage employment with lower interest rates or to restrict inflation with higher interest rates.</p>
<p>If central banks purchase stocks in order to support equity prices, what is the point of having a stock market? The central bank’s ability to create money to support stock prices negates the price discovery function of the stock market.</p>
<p>The problem with central banks is that humans are fallible, including the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and all the board members and staff. Nobel prize-winner Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz established that the Great Depression was the consequence of the failure of the Federal Reserve to expand monetary policy sufficiently to offset the restriction of the money supply due to bank failure. When a bank failed in the pre-deposit insurance era, the money supply would shrink by the amount of the bank’s deposits. During the Great Depression, thousands of banks failed, wiping out the purchasing power of millions of Americans and the credit creating power of thousands of banks.</p>
<p>The Fed is prohibited from buying equities by the Federal Reserve Act. But an amendment in 2010—Section 13(3)—was enacted to permit the Fed to buy AIG’s insolvent Maiden Lane assets. This amendment also created a loophole which enables the Fed to lend money to entities that can use the funds to buy stocks. Thus, the Swiss central bank could be operating as an agent of the Federal Reserve.</p>
<p>If central banks cannot properly conduct monetary policy, how can they conduct an equity policy? Some astute observers believe that the Swiss National Bank is acting as an agent for the Federal Reserve and purchases large blocs of US equities at critical times to arrest stock market declines that would puncture the propagandized belief that all is fine here in the US economy.</p>
<p>We know that the US government has a “plunge protection team” consisting of the US Treasury and Federal Reserve. The purpose of this team is to prevent unwanted stock market crashes.</p>
<p>Is the stock market decline of August 20-21 welcome or unwelcome?</p>
<p>At this point we do not know. In order to keep the dollar up, the basis of US power, the Federal Reserve has promised to raise interest rates, but always in the future. The latest future is next month. The belief that a hike in interest rates is in the cards keeps the US dollar from losing exchange value in relation to other currencies, thus preventing a flight from the dollar that would reduce the Uni-power to Third World status.</p>
<p>The Federal Reserve can say that the stock market decline indicates that the recovery is in doubt and requires more stimulus. The prospect of more liquidity could drive the stock market back up. As asset bubbles are in the way of the Fed’s policy, a decline in stock prices removes the equity market bubble and enables the Fed to print more money and start the process up again.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the stock market decline last Thursday and Friday could indicate that the players in the market have comprehended that the stock market is an artificially inflated bubble that has no real basis. Once the psychology is destroyed, flight sets in.</p>
<p>If flight turns out to be the case, it will be interesting to see if central bank liquidity and purchases of stocks can stop the rout.</p>
<p>This article was originally published at <a href="http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2015/08/23/central-banks-become-corrupting-force-paul-craig-roberts-dave-kranzler/" type="external">PaulCraigRoberts.org</a> and has been used here with permission.</p> | false | 1 | central banks ability create money support stock prices negates price discovery function stock market witnessing corruption central banks observing moneycreating powers central banks used drive prices stock market benefit megarich questions came mind learned central bank switzerland swiss national bank purchased 3300000 shares apple stock first quarter year adding 500000 shares second quarter smart money would selling buying turns swiss central bank addition apple stock holds large equity positions ranging 250000000 637000000 numerous us corporationsexxon mobil microsoft google johnson amp johnson general electric procter amp gamble verizon atampt pfizer chevron merck facebook pepsico coca cola disney valeant ibm gilead amazon among list swiss central banks holdings stocks responsible 100 yeartodate rise sampp 500 prior latest selloff going purpose central banks serve lender last resort commercial banks faced run bank depositors demanding cash withdrawals deposits banks would call loans effort raise cash pay depositors businesses would fail banks would fail inability pay depositors money demand time passed rationale central bank made redundant government deposit insurance bank depositors central banks found additional functions existence federal reserve example humphreyhawkins act responsible maintaining full employment low inflation time legislation passed worsening phillips curve tradeoffs inflation employment made goals inconsistent result introduction reagan administration supplyside economic policy cured simultaneously rising inflation unemployment neither federal reserves charter humphreyhawkins act says federal reserve supposed stabilize stock market purchasing stocks federal reserve supposed buy sell bonds open market operations order encourage employment lower interest rates restrict inflation higher interest rates central banks purchase stocks order support equity prices point stock market central banks ability create money support stock prices negates price discovery function stock market problem central banks humans fallible including chairman federal reserve board board members staff nobel prizewinner milton friedman anna schwartz established great depression consequence failure federal reserve expand monetary policy sufficiently offset restriction money supply due bank failure bank failed predeposit insurance era money supply would shrink amount banks deposits great depression thousands banks failed wiping purchasing power millions americans credit creating power thousands banks fed prohibited buying equities federal reserve act amendment 2010section 133was enacted permit fed buy aigs insolvent maiden lane assets amendment also created loophole enables fed lend money entities use funds buy stocks thus swiss central bank could operating agent federal reserve central banks properly conduct monetary policy conduct equity policy astute observers believe swiss national bank acting agent federal reserve purchases large blocs us equities critical times arrest stock market declines would puncture propagandized belief fine us economy know us government plunge protection team consisting us treasury federal reserve purpose team prevent unwanted stock market crashes stock market decline august 2021 welcome unwelcome point know order keep dollar basis us power federal reserve promised raise interest rates always future latest future next month belief hike interest rates cards keeps us dollar losing exchange value relation currencies thus preventing flight dollar would reduce unipower third world status federal reserve say stock market decline indicates recovery doubt requires stimulus prospect liquidity could drive stock market back asset bubbles way feds policy decline stock prices removes equity market bubble enables fed print money start process hand stock market decline last thursday friday could indicate players market comprehended stock market artificially inflated bubble real basis psychology destroyed flight sets flight turns case interesting see central bank liquidity purchases stocks stop rout article originally published paulcraigrobertsorg used permission | 554 |
<p>Cracow—Somewhere on the far side of what Tom Wolfe called the Halusian Gulp, Father Francis X. Murphy, C.Ss.R., is reading the July 11 Washington Post and groaning—if, that is, his purgatorial purification has been effective.</p>
<p>For it was Father Murphy who, covering the Second Vatican Council for The New Yorker under the pseudonym “Xavier Rynne,” concocted the cowboys-and-Indians hermeneutic of all things Catholic that has plagued the mainstream media’s reporting and commentary on the Catholic Church for two generations: There are good-guy Catholics, known as “liberals” or “progressives,” who want to make the Church relevant to contemporary society and culture; and there are bad-guy Catholics, known as “conservatives” or “traditionalists,” who want to retreat into catacombs of intransigence because of their inability to grasp or comprehend a modern (and, latterly, postmodern) world they regard with horror.</p>
<p>Now, to be sure, a writer like Murphy, trying to explain the 21st ecumenical council in history to the generally secularized readership of The New Yorker, had a problem on his hands. How could even a gifted and witty scribe (which Murphy/Rynne was) explain, let alone make exciting, arcane debates over doctrine, often conducted in a strange vocabulary, for people who regarded “doctrine” as a synonym for “mindlessness” and “intellectual immaturity,” and in a culture where pragmatism and “technique” had conquered all? Murphy/Rynne had excellent inside sources in Rome, where he had long worked; what he needed was what would now be called—cue fingernails scraping down blackboard—a “narrative.” So Murphy/Rynne hit on a brilliant strategy, perfectly adapted to the Sixties and the middle years of Kennedy Camelot: treat Vatican II as a political contest between the forces of light and the forces of reaction; run everything and everybody at the council through those filters; and then watch readers acclaim, with one voice, “I get it!”</p>
<p>So, beginning 50 years ago this coming October, “Xavier Rynne”/Francis X. Murphy set in analytic concrete an interpretation of the Catholic Church, its internal affairs, and its engagement with public life that is ubiquitous in the 21st-century mainstream media—and not only in the United States. Here too in Poland, the cowboys-and-Indians hermeneutic dominates the national media, although the preferred good-guy/bad-guy categories are “open Church” and “closed Church.” The same nonsense prevails throughout the rest of Europe, even as the European Catholicism that most enthusiastically embraced the “progressive” or “open Church” model shrinks into ecclesial and public inconsequence.</p>
<p>The problem, of course, is that the cowboys-Indians/left-right optic is incapable of grappling with the fact that the Catholic Church is about true-and-false, not liberal-and-conservative. So why its long shelf life? The tenacity of the Rynne hermeneutic is, in a way, quite understandable. In a culture in which people imagine that religious conviction is a lifestyle choice of no more intellectual or moral consequence than the choice of a pet, it takes serious effort to grasp that what the Catholic Church teaches about the nature of God or the requisites for ministerial ordination is entirely different from the choice between a schnauzer and a dachshund. And in a secularized culture in which “choice” is the one sacred word, a Church that insists that its leadership teaches authoritatively is going to be easily portrayed as ham-handed, insensitive, out of step. Yet for all that the Rynne optic on matters Catholic is a perfect fit for postmodern America (as it was a perfect fit for the Sixties), its profligate use is too often a sign of intellectual laziness—and, I would suggest, a violation of a basic journalistic canon, according to which the reporter’s first task, like the historian’s, is to understand the subject as he, she, or it understands himself, herself, or itself.</p>
<p>The perceptual distortions the Rynne optic inevitably creates were on full display in a story in that July 11 Post about teachers at a Catholic Sunday school in the diocese of Arlington, Va., who had resigned rather than profess that they believed, and would teach, what the Catholic Church believes and teaches. One might, at first blush, think it entirely unexceptionable that the Catholic bishop of Arlington, who has responsibility for the integrity of the Catholic “brand” in his diocese, would require that teachers in his parish schools and Sunday schools believe and teach what the Church believes and teaches. But that was not the Post‘s view of the matter. Its reporter crafted a narrative straight out of the Rynne playbook and portrayed the dispute in Arlington as one between conscience-driven laity (women, of course) and an ecclesiastical establishment dominated by authoritarian males (who had not learned the lessons of ecclesiastical acquiescence to the Nazis, no less!). That the Catholic Church has not only the right but the responsibility to ensure that what is taught in its schools is what the teaching authority of the Church teaches to be true went completely unremarked in the story.</p>
<p>But why should it be remarked, if all this is just a matter of choice among opinions, none of which has any greater claim to authority than another? Why not assume that “conscience” is some kind of trump card that has nothing to do with truth? Why not parse the entire Arlington situation (and thousands of others like it, over the decades) as a political struggle pitting crusty conservatives against heroic liberals?</p>
<p>When Rynne/Murphy created the liberals-vs.-conservatives story line of modern Catholicism in the fall of 1962, there was, it must be said, something to it. Pope John XXIII did open the Second Vatican Council on October 11, 1962, by appealing to history as the “teacher of life” and gently scolding the “prophets of gloom” who saw nothing but disaster in modernity. The early days of Vatican II were dominated by a political struggle in which entrenched curial forces committed to a specific way of doing theology and a specific understanding of the Church and its authority battled for control of the council’s agenda with bishops who had more pastoral experience and whose thinking was being shaped by theologians open to a variety of methods in Catholic theology. Echoes of that struggle, which was won by the forces Rynne portrayed (and not without reason) as the good guys, continued until the council closed on December 8, 1965.</p>
<p>All of that can be freely admitted. At the same time, it is also true that elements of Rynne’s “good guy” faction then went more than a bit overboard, imagining Vatican II as a council of rupture with the past—a new starting point for the Church’s self-understanding and teaching, untethered to an authoritative tradition and taking its intellectual cues, not from the Bible or the Creeds, but from the ambient public culture. And when that began to happen, some of Rynne’s good guys—including the present pope, then a theological adviser to the cardinal archbishop of Cologne, an influential council father—foresaw deep trouble and began to speak and write of Vatican II as a council that had to be understood in continuity with the past. And according to this optic, while Vatican II certainly stretched and expanded older forms of Catholic self-understanding, it did so in an organic way, developing what was already implicit in the Church’s doctrine. Vatican II did not, in other words, reinvent the Catholic Church. For the Church had no authority to reinvent the constitutional form it had been given by Christ himself, just as it had no authority to reinvent the truths that the Church had grasped over the centuries under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.</p>
<p>Some things, in other words, were not matters of “choice.” Some things were settled. And while the Church’s understanding of settled things could be deepened, the settled things th emselves were not ultimately fungible.</p>
<p>The party of ultimate fungibility is dying in the Catholic Church. It has almost no resonance in those places where the Church is growing rapidly, like Africa. It has proven itself a pastoral failure in Europe. It has proven itself intellectually sterile throughout the developed world, where a younger generation of theologians is far more interested in exploring the Catholic tradition than deconstructing it. There is ample room in the Catholic Church for theological exploration, but in the future, that exploration is going to take place within certain boundaries; and when those boundaries are breached, the “brand” is going to be defended. This is not so much a matter of authority—as in “Who’s in charge?”—as it is a matter of doctrinal integrity, clear identity, and evangelical purpose. For both doctrinal integrity and clear identity are essential if the Catholic Church is to become the vibrant evangelical movement it must be in order to preach the Gospel effectively and form communities of decency and compassion in an increasingly hostile cultural environment.</p>
<p>So, as we approach the golden anniversary of the opening of Vatican II, perhaps it’s time to lay “Xavier Rynne” to rest once and for all. There are a virtual infinity of interesting Catholic stories available to inquiring journalists; virtually none of them makes sense if parsed in liberal-vs.-conservative terms. Rynne/Murphy had a good run. But the days when that optic on all things Catholic made even a modicum of sense are long past. Only the intellectually lazy or ideologically besotted will fail to recognize that—and to move beyond it, into that real engagement with history for which Blessed John XXIII rightly called.</p>
<p>George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.</p> | false | 1 | cracowsomewhere far side tom wolfe called halusian gulp father francis x murphy cssr reading july 11 washington post groaningif purgatorial purification effective father murphy covering second vatican council new yorker pseudonym xavier rynne concocted cowboysandindians hermeneutic things catholic plagued mainstream medias reporting commentary catholic church two generations goodguy catholics known liberals progressives want make church relevant contemporary society culture badguy catholics known conservatives traditionalists want retreat catacombs intransigence inability grasp comprehend modern latterly postmodern world regard horror sure writer like murphy trying explain 21st ecumenical council history generally secularized readership new yorker problem hands could even gifted witty scribe murphyrynne explain let alone make exciting arcane debates doctrine often conducted strange vocabulary people regarded doctrine synonym mindlessness intellectual immaturity culture pragmatism technique conquered murphyrynne excellent inside sources rome long worked needed would calledcue fingernails scraping blackboarda narrative murphyrynne hit brilliant strategy perfectly adapted sixties middle years kennedy camelot treat vatican ii political contest forces light forces reaction run everything everybody council filters watch readers acclaim one voice get beginning 50 years ago coming october xavier rynnefrancis x murphy set analytic concrete interpretation catholic church internal affairs engagement public life ubiquitous 21stcentury mainstream mediaand united states poland cowboysandindians hermeneutic dominates national media although preferred goodguybadguy categories open church closed church nonsense prevails throughout rest europe even european catholicism enthusiastically embraced progressive open church model shrinks ecclesial public inconsequence problem course cowboysindiansleftright optic incapable grappling fact catholic church trueandfalse liberalandconservative long shelf life tenacity rynne hermeneutic way quite understandable culture people imagine religious conviction lifestyle choice intellectual moral consequence choice pet takes serious effort grasp catholic church teaches nature god requisites ministerial ordination entirely different choice schnauzer dachshund secularized culture choice one sacred word church insists leadership teaches authoritatively going easily portrayed hamhanded insensitive step yet rynne optic matters catholic perfect fit postmodern america perfect fit sixties profligate use often sign intellectual lazinessand would suggest violation basic journalistic canon according reporters first task like historians understand subject understands perceptual distortions rynne optic inevitably creates full display story july 11 post teachers catholic sunday school diocese arlington va resigned rather profess believed would teach catholic church believes teaches one might first blush think entirely unexceptionable catholic bishop arlington responsibility integrity catholic brand diocese would require teachers parish schools sunday schools believe teach church believes teaches posts view matter reporter crafted narrative straight rynne playbook portrayed dispute arlington one consciencedriven laity women course ecclesiastical establishment dominated authoritarian males learned lessons ecclesiastical acquiescence nazis less catholic church right responsibility ensure taught schools teaching authority church teaches true went completely unremarked story remarked matter choice among opinions none greater claim authority another assume conscience kind trump card nothing truth parse entire arlington situation thousands others like decades political struggle pitting crusty conservatives heroic liberals rynnemurphy created liberalsvsconservatives story line modern catholicism fall 1962 must said something pope john xxiii open second vatican council october 11 1962 appealing history teacher life gently scolding prophets gloom saw nothing disaster modernity early days vatican ii dominated political struggle entrenched curial forces committed specific way theology specific understanding church authority battled control councils agenda bishops pastoral experience whose thinking shaped theologians open variety methods catholic theology echoes struggle forces rynne portrayed without reason good guys continued council closed december 8 1965 freely admitted time also true elements rynnes good guy faction went bit overboard imagining vatican ii council rupture pasta new starting point churchs selfunderstanding teaching untethered authoritative tradition taking intellectual cues bible creeds ambient public culture began happen rynnes good guysincluding present pope theological adviser cardinal archbishop cologne influential council fatherforesaw deep trouble began speak write vatican ii council understood continuity past according optic vatican ii certainly stretched expanded older forms catholic selfunderstanding organic way developing already implicit churchs doctrine vatican ii words reinvent catholic church church authority reinvent constitutional form given christ authority reinvent truths church grasped centuries guidance holy spirit things words matters choice things settled churchs understanding settled things could deepened settled things th emselves ultimately fungible party ultimate fungibility dying catholic church almost resonance places church growing rapidly like africa proven pastoral failure europe proven intellectually sterile throughout developed world younger generation theologians far interested exploring catholic tradition deconstructing ample room catholic church theological exploration future exploration going take place within certain boundaries boundaries breached brand going defended much matter authorityas whos chargeas matter doctrinal integrity clear identity evangelical purpose doctrinal integrity clear identity essential catholic church become vibrant evangelical movement must order preach gospel effectively form communities decency compassion increasingly hostile cultural environment approach golden anniversary opening vatican ii perhaps time lay xavier rynne rest virtual infinity interesting catholic stories available inquiring journalists virtually none makes sense parsed liberalvsconservative terms rynnemurphy good run days optic things catholic made even modicum sense long past intellectually lazy ideologically besotted fail recognize thatand move beyond real engagement history blessed john xxiii rightly called george weigel distinguished senior fellow washingtons ethics public policy center holds william e simon chair catholic studies | 823 |
<p>It started out cold as ice, and then turned warm and friendly. Now the tortured relationship between President Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan has gone cool again, with the Republican president making clear he has no qualms about bucking the GOP leader to cut deals with his Democratic foes.</p>
<p>The two men dined at the White House Thursday night and discussed legislative challenges ahead for the fall, a get-together that was scheduled over Congress’ August recess, long before the head-spinning events of this week. In a moment that stunned Washington, Trump cut a debt and disaster aid deal Wednesday with Congress’ Democratic leaders as Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell watched on helplessly, after lobbying unsuccessfully for much different terms.</p>
<p>The moment distilled the inherent tensions between Trump, 71, a former Democrat and ideologically flexible deal-maker, and Ryan, 47, a loyal Republican whose discomfort with Trump led him to withhold his endorsement for weeks last year.</p>
<p>After Trump was elected the two papered over their differences and even developed a rapport, talking frequently during health care negotiations earlier this year, as each understood they needed the other to advance individual and shared goals. But their phone calls have tapered off of late and Trump has expressed his frustration with GOP leaders on multiple fronts, culminating in the president’s decision to ditch them and join hands with the Democrats instead.</p>
<p>Trump exulted in his newly bipartisan approach Thursday, declaring it “a great thing for our country,” while Ryan mostly grinned and bore it.</p>
<p>At the Capitol on Wednesday, Ryan had deemed a three-month debt ceiling increase as “unworkable” and “ridiculous.” Yet an hour later, Trump overruled his strong objections to side with the Democrats.</p>
<p>The president’s rebuff on the debt came just days after Trump ignored Ryan’s pleas not to end the program to aid immigrants brought to the country as children and living here illegally. Instead, Trump ended the program and tossed the issue to Congress to resolve in six months.</p>
<p>The debt deal headed for House passage Friday along with $15 billion in disaster aid and a three-month government funding extension.</p>
<p>Indeed for Ryan, GOP reactions to the deal exposed some lurking threats to his perch atop a conference where unrest brews nearly ceaselessly among conservatives, and there have been recent rumblings of a possible coup.</p>
<p>Trump remains highly popular in the conservative districts occupied by many House Republicans, much more so than Ryan himself, who is scorned by many in the GOP base as an establishment sell-out. In a whipsawed moment, some House Republicans defended Trump’s handling of a deal they don’t like, while simultaneously criticizing Ryan, who had been overruled by the president. It also underscored the political pressure on Ryan to try to remain in the president’s good graces even when Trump is flirting with Democrats.</p>
<p>Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, said the message in his conservative district is that “congressional Republicans need to get behind the president.”</p>
<p>That sentiment “makes him weaker,” King said of Ryan.</p>
<p>Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona described Ryan as “very unpopular” in his district, while regard for Trump is “pretty high.”</p>
<p>As far as his constituents are concerned, Gosar said, they’d be happy if Ryan got the boot and Trump stayed. “That’s kind of the mantra in my district,” he said.</p>
<p>For his part, Trump has soured on the Republican congressional leadership in recent months, fuming to associates that they led him astray on their health care strategy, among other complaints.</p>
<p>The president has told those close to him that he regrets choosing to tackle the repeal and replace of Barack Obama’s health care law as his first legislative push. He has singled out Ryan for blame, saying the speaker assured him it would pass and instead handed him an early, humiliating failure, before ultimate House passage of a revived bill, according to three White House and outside advisers familiar with the conversations but not authorized to speak about them publicly.</p>
<p>GOP health care efforts collapsed in the Senate in July.</p>
<p>Trump has spoken to Ryan less frequently in recent weeks, particularly after the departure of his first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, who has deep Wisconsin ties to the speaker. Priebus would sometimes broker the calls and stress to each man their importance, according to two people familiar with the conversations. Those calls have occurred less often since John Kelly took over as chief of staff.</p>
<p>Though Trump has expressed particular anger at McConnell for the failed Senate health care vote and for not protecting him from the Russia investigation, he grudgingly has told associates that he is aware of the Senate leader’s grip on power. He has spoken less glowingly about Ryan’s own ability to lead due to the shorter House terms and the growing insurgency within the conservative Freedom Caucus.</p>
<p>Ryan’s position is seen as secure for now, if only because it is widely accepted that no other House Republican could garner the support needed to replace him. But even allies believe his tenure in the job could be finite, and might depend in part on the whims of a president with whom he has no real deep ties.</p>
<p>“I think any speaker is going to have a very difficult time in this environment,” said Rep. Tom Reed, R-N.Y. “The nature of that job, I think, over time, they don’t last.”</p> | false | 1 | started cold ice turned warm friendly tortured relationship president donald trump house speaker paul ryan gone cool republican president making clear qualms bucking gop leader cut deals democratic foes two men dined white house thursday night discussed legislative challenges ahead fall gettogether scheduled congress august recess long headspinning events week moment stunned washington trump cut debt disaster aid deal wednesday congress democratic leaders ryan senate majority leader mitch mcconnell watched helplessly lobbying unsuccessfully much different terms moment distilled inherent tensions trump 71 former democrat ideologically flexible dealmaker ryan 47 loyal republican whose discomfort trump led withhold endorsement weeks last year trump elected two papered differences even developed rapport talking frequently health care negotiations earlier year understood needed advance individual shared goals phone calls tapered late trump expressed frustration gop leaders multiple fronts culminating presidents decision ditch join hands democrats instead trump exulted newly bipartisan approach thursday declaring great thing country ryan mostly grinned bore capitol wednesday ryan deemed threemonth debt ceiling increase unworkable ridiculous yet hour later trump overruled strong objections side democrats presidents rebuff debt came days trump ignored ryans pleas end program aid immigrants brought country children living illegally instead trump ended program tossed issue congress resolve six months debt deal headed house passage friday along 15 billion disaster aid threemonth government funding extension indeed ryan gop reactions deal exposed lurking threats perch atop conference unrest brews nearly ceaselessly among conservatives recent rumblings possible coup trump remains highly popular conservative districts occupied many house republicans much ryan scorned many gop base establishment sellout whipsawed moment house republicans defended trumps handling deal dont like simultaneously criticizing ryan overruled president also underscored political pressure ryan try remain presidents good graces even trump flirting democrats rep steve king riowa said message conservative district congressional republicans need get behind president sentiment makes weaker king said ryan rep paul gosar arizona described ryan unpopular district regard trump pretty high far constituents concerned gosar said theyd happy ryan got boot trump stayed thats kind mantra district said part trump soured republican congressional leadership recent months fuming associates led astray health care strategy among complaints president told close regrets choosing tackle repeal replace barack obamas health care law first legislative push singled ryan blame saying speaker assured would pass instead handed early humiliating failure ultimate house passage revived bill according three white house outside advisers familiar conversations authorized speak publicly gop health care efforts collapsed senate july trump spoken ryan less frequently recent weeks particularly departure first chief staff reince priebus deep wisconsin ties speaker priebus would sometimes broker calls stress man importance according two people familiar conversations calls occurred less often since john kelly took chief staff though trump expressed particular anger mcconnell failed senate health care vote protecting russia investigation grudgingly told associates aware senate leaders grip power spoken less glowingly ryans ability lead due shorter house terms growing insurgency within conservative freedom caucus ryans position seen secure widely accepted house republican could garner support needed replace even allies believe tenure job could finite might depend part whims president real deep ties think speaker going difficult time environment said rep tom reed rny nature job think time dont last | 526 |
<p>It’s a lucky thing for me that Whit Stillman, who is an old friend of the American Spectator, makes such good movies. If he made bad ones, I should have to be diplomatic, but that is a necessity which has yet to arise. I thought his first film, Metropolitan (1990) was funny, clever and charming. Barcelona (1994) was all that and more—an ambitious attempt to understand just what it meant to be an American among uncomprehending and sometimes contemptuous foreigners. His new film, The Last Days of Disco, is his best yet. Set in “the very early 1980s,” it is a warm, touching, funny look back at a time when the first young, educated generation to come to maturity after the social devastation of the 1960s and early 70s tried in its own rather feckless and ramshackle way to reconstruct a social life for young adults.</p>
<p>His characters are, in effect, the children of The Ice Storm a few years out of college and working in New York. Their parents have been left behind in the suburbs with their third marriages and their recreational drugs. They have no guidance to offer in the reinvention of courtship rituals, which are to them just hypocritical obstacles in the way of untrammeled sexual gratification. The kids, left to themselves, are not entirely sure that such hypocrisies are necessary or desirable. They, especially the girls, are almost as vulnerable as their older sisters to the charge of “prudery.” But they cling for dear life to what few principles they have been able to salvage from the wreck of social order and decency.</p>
<p>College friends Alice (Chloë Sevigny) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) find themselves working for the same publishing company as assistant editors. Alice is shy, intellectual, conservative in manners and is not even sure she likes the tart-tongued, amoral Charlotte, but they get an apartment together with Holly (Tara Subkoff)—a so-called “railroad apartment” in which all the rooms are in line and there is no hallway. Alice and Charlotte are bitterly mocked by their colleague at work, Dan (Matt Ross), who fancies himself as a radical and a labor organizer. He resents the fact that the girls’ meagre pay from the publisher is supplemented by allowances from their well-to-do parents and that they will probably marry rich professional husbands.</p>
<p>Their circle of friends includes Jimmy (Mackenzie Astin), a young advertising executive who is building his career on his friendship with Des (Chris Eigeman), an assistant manager at a Studio 54 type club who can get him and sometimes the firm’s clients in, despite the hostility to ad men of the doorman, Van (Burr Steers) and the sleazy club owner, Bernie (David Thornton). Des is developing a bad cocaine habit and discarding the many women he sleeps with after he is tired of them by telling them that he thinks he is gay. That way they pity and sympathize with him instead of cursing him. Des is on to Bernie’s crooked ways, but he himself is being protected by a Harvard pal (Des is a dropout) called Josh (Matt Keeslar), now working in the D.A.’s office and compiling a case against Bernie, whose arrest for money-laundering and drugs comes at the film’s climax.</p>
<p>Bernie’s prejudice against ad men (they’re too nice) proves justified as Jimmy is bringing the feds into the club as clients—though neither Jimmy nor Bernie knows it. Jimmy thinks he’s just bringing in clients, characteristically forgetting that the IRS is the firm’s biggest client. Jimmy is thus unwittingly assisting Josh’s investigation of the club and completing a circle of problematical friendships and loyalties, as Jimmy depends on Des and Des depends on Josh. The women are not involved in the working out of this masculine drama. As Josh says to Des, “I consider you a person of some integrity—except, you know, in your relations with women.” Yet their drama takes place quietly in the background, like the women’s publishing careers, behind the sexual dance which is the apparent focus of all these disco-goers.</p>
<p>Josh, who is working to shut the club down, is the paradoxical theorist and self-described “loyal adherent of the disco movement.” The jocular political language suggests ironic mockery of the politically engagé 60s generation, but there is also a serious point behind it for these orphans of the revolution. It is hard not to conclude that Josh is the spokesman for Stillman’s own discomania. And the other characters are only less articulate believers that it is “tremendously important that there be more group social life and not all this ferocious pairing off”—which, even in their young lives, they have learned to look on with great suspicion. Charlotte, in particular, sees the disco as a form of female empowerment and, surveying the crowds of men on the dance floor, remarks that “We’re in complete control. . .Look out there! There are a lot of choices.”</p>
<p>Unfortunately, this does not prevent them from making bad choices once the “ferocious pairing off” begins. Bowled over to think that Tom (Robert Sean Leonard) is interested in her, the virginal and socially awkward Alice turns for advice to the more worldly-wise Charlotte, who gives her instructions in how to be seductive. Alice tries it out on Tom with instant success, only to learn that Tom had been attracted by her innocence. In the light of day, he is repulsed by her seductive patter, picked up from Charlotte, including her affecting to believe that Scrooge McDuck is “sexy.” Witheringly, Tom says: “Is there no limit?” More seriously, their single night of passion results in Alice’s being infected with both gonorrhea and genital herpes. She becomes an instant casualty of the sexual revolution with her first experience of love-making.</p>
<p>Like disco itself, her fragile “virtue”—just listen to the despicable Tom as he savors the word’s quaintness on his tongue—never stood a chance against the crushing force of social anomie. Yet, also like disco, the film is very upbeat and admiring of these young people—even the less admirable ones—for having made an effort to live more ordered and gracious lives than might have been thought possible in a world where Josh is considered “a serious nut case” and sufferer from “religious mania.” It is Des who tells the story of Josh’s “breakdown” in college, which seems to have consisted of his once publicly singing that lovely hymn by Whittier which begins “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind,/Forgive our foolish ways.”</p>
<p>Yet perhaps even Des is capable of being touched by the last two verses of the hymn, which go:</p>
<p>Drop thy still dews of quietness, Till all our strivings cease: Take from our souls the strain and stress, And let our ordered lives confess The beauty of thy peace. Breathe through the heats of our desire Thy coolness and thy balm; Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire; Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire, O still, small voice of calm.</p>
<p>Josh asks Alice, “Do you think I’m a wacko?” She shakes her head no, then yes. The coyness and playfulness of the gesture is itself a kind of allusion to the “old idea” of marriage which Alice, for understandable reasons, is beginning to think might even have been best after all. At any rate, even Charlotte doesn’t think of Josh’s hymn-singing as all that unusual. She herself, she says, often sings “Amazing Grace,” and then proceeds to do so.</p>
<p>There is a sly self-mockery in all this, as there is in having the final “pairing off” match the two couples who were obviously best suited to each other from the start. Best of all is the final paean to disco, after the closing of the club seems to herald its demise, from those who are given pause by the fact that they have “lived through a period that’s over.” Even now they are able to look forward to the ridicule that will attach to the clothes and some of the music and that campy John Travolta pose from Saturday Night Fever that everyone remembers about the period. The next wave of young people to come along won’t know that “disco was much more and much better than all that”—but our heroes believe that it will come back.</p>
<p>This is a film of tremendous riches, particularly in the writing. By that I don’t just mean that the dialogue is witty—though it is. These days, every third-rate disaster movie gets in comedy writers to drop one-liners in the script like raisins in a pudding. Here the humor is much more allusive and intellectual. One can only guess at what proportion of today’s movie-going audience will see the joke when Bernie says: “I care about ideas deeply. Did you know that my senior paper was on Ernest Hemingway?” Or when radical Dan says of the girls’ railroad apartment that “It was built for tenement families, and now the yuppie ‘roommates’ are crowding them out.” The number of those who will rock with merriment at the image of those poor tenement families—long since removed to the suburbs and upscale neighborhoods—starving outside in the snow cannot, one supposes, be large.</p>
<p>As these examples may suggest, Stillman’s subtle comedy of character and manners is of a quality which has hardly been seen in American movies since poor Preston Sturges breathed his last. And its purposes are not only satirical. I particularly liked the bit where shy Josh warns Alice that “Some men say they won’t take no for an answer, but I’m not like that. I will take no for an answer.”</p>
<p>“OK. No,” says Alice.</p>
<p>“You don’t mean that!” says Josh, aghast.</p>
<p>“No,” says Alice with a smile.</p>
<p>The delicacy with which she punctures his rather charming self-conceit is Stillman’s own, and is often applied to himself and his intellectual style of humor. In one scene, for example, Josh takes the explicatory scalpel so memorably applied to The Graduate in Barcelona to Disney’s Lady and the Tramp. The film, he says, is designed to reinforce the female urge to date bad guys as an obviously bimbo-like Lady chooses the “self-confessed chicken thief and obvious sleazeball,” Tramp. It was obviously meant to “program women to adore jerks.” The film’s only partly mocking seriousness about such manifestations of pop cultural ephemera, which include disco itself, are of its very essence, but it comes together with an ability to laugh at its own moral earnestness. Stillman’s delicate balance between rueful regret and comic self-deflation is a triumph of tone that herald his arrival as rare artist of the cinema.</p> | false | 1 | lucky thing whit stillman old friend american spectator makes good movies made bad ones diplomatic necessity yet arise thought first film metropolitan 1990 funny clever charming barcelona 1994 morean ambitious attempt understand meant american among uncomprehending sometimes contemptuous foreigners new film last days disco best yet set early 1980s warm touching funny look back time first young educated generation come maturity social devastation 1960s early 70s tried rather feckless ramshackle way reconstruct social life young adults characters effect children ice storm years college working new york parents left behind suburbs third marriages recreational drugs guidance offer reinvention courtship rituals hypocritical obstacles way untrammeled sexual gratification kids left entirely sure hypocrisies necessary desirable especially girls almost vulnerable older sisters charge prudery cling dear life principles able salvage wreck social order decency college friends alice chloë sevigny charlotte kate beckinsale find working publishing company assistant editors alice shy intellectual conservative manners even sure likes tarttongued amoral charlotte get apartment together holly tara subkoffa socalled railroad apartment rooms line hallway alice charlotte bitterly mocked colleague work dan matt ross fancies radical labor organizer resents fact girls meagre pay publisher supplemented allowances welltodo parents probably marry rich professional husbands circle friends includes jimmy mackenzie astin young advertising executive building career friendship des chris eigeman assistant manager studio 54 type club get sometimes firms clients despite hostility ad men doorman van burr steers sleazy club owner bernie david thornton des developing bad cocaine habit discarding many women sleeps tired telling thinks gay way pity sympathize instead cursing des bernies crooked ways protected harvard pal des dropout called josh matt keeslar working das office compiling case bernie whose arrest moneylaundering drugs comes films climax bernies prejudice ad men theyre nice proves justified jimmy bringing feds club clientsthough neither jimmy bernie knows jimmy thinks hes bringing clients characteristically forgetting irs firms biggest client jimmy thus unwittingly assisting joshs investigation club completing circle problematical friendships loyalties jimmy depends des des depends josh women involved working masculine drama josh says des consider person integrityexcept know relations women yet drama takes place quietly background like womens publishing careers behind sexual dance apparent focus discogoers josh working shut club paradoxical theorist selfdescribed loyal adherent disco movement jocular political language suggests ironic mockery politically engagé 60s generation also serious point behind orphans revolution hard conclude josh spokesman stillmans discomania characters less articulate believers tremendously important group social life ferocious pairing offwhich even young lives learned look great suspicion charlotte particular sees disco form female empowerment surveying crowds men dance floor remarks complete control look lot choices unfortunately prevent making bad choices ferocious pairing begins bowled think tom robert sean leonard interested virginal socially awkward alice turns advice worldlywise charlotte gives instructions seductive alice tries tom instant success learn tom attracted innocence light day repulsed seductive patter picked charlotte including affecting believe scrooge mcduck sexy witheringly tom says limit seriously single night passion results alices infected gonorrhea genital herpes becomes instant casualty sexual revolution first experience lovemaking like disco fragile virtuejust listen despicable tom savors words quaintness tonguenever stood chance crushing force social anomie yet also like disco film upbeat admiring young peopleeven less admirable onesfor made effort live ordered gracious lives might thought possible world josh considered serious nut case sufferer religious mania des tells story joshs breakdown college seems consisted publicly singing lovely hymn whittier begins dear lord father mankindforgive foolish ways yet perhaps even des capable touched last two verses hymn go drop thy still dews quietness till strivings cease take souls strain stress let ordered lives confess beauty thy peace breathe heats desire thy coolness thy balm let sense dumb let flesh retire speak earthquake wind fire still small voice calm josh asks alice think im wacko shakes head yes coyness playfulness gesture kind allusion old idea marriage alice understandable reasons beginning think might even best rate even charlotte doesnt think joshs hymnsinging unusual says often sings amazing grace proceeds sly selfmockery final pairing match two couples obviously best suited start best final paean disco closing club seems herald demise given pause fact lived period thats even able look forward ridicule attach clothes music campy john travolta pose saturday night fever everyone remembers period next wave young people come along wont know disco much much better thatbut heroes believe come back film tremendous riches particularly writing dont mean dialogue wittythough days every thirdrate disaster movie gets comedy writers drop oneliners script like raisins pudding humor much allusive intellectual one guess proportion todays moviegoing audience see joke bernie says care ideas deeply know senior paper ernest hemingway radical dan says girls railroad apartment built tenement families yuppie roommates crowding number rock merriment image poor tenement familieslong since removed suburbs upscale neighborhoodsstarving outside snow one supposes large examples may suggest stillmans subtle comedy character manners quality hardly seen american movies since poor preston sturges breathed last purposes satirical particularly liked bit shy josh warns alice men say wont take answer im like take answer ok says alice dont mean says josh aghast says alice smile delicacy punctures rather charming selfconceit stillmans often applied intellectual style humor one scene example josh takes explicatory scalpel memorably applied graduate barcelona disneys lady tramp film says designed reinforce female urge date bad guys obviously bimbolike lady chooses selfconfessed chicken thief obvious sleazeball tramp obviously meant program women adore jerks films partly mocking seriousness manifestations pop cultural ephemera include disco essence comes together ability laugh moral earnestness stillmans delicate balance rueful regret comic selfdeflation triumph tone herald arrival rare artist cinema | 915 |
<p>SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS (2-10) AT HOUSTON TEXANS (4-8)</p>
<p>GAME SNAPSHOT</p>
<p>KICKOFF: Sunday, 1 p.m. ET, NRG Stadium. TV: FOX, <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Dick-Stockton/" type="external">Dick Stockton</a>, Mark Schlereth, Shannon Spake (field reporter).</p>
<p>SERIES HISTORY: 4th regular-season meeting. 49ers lead series, 2-1. The home team has won all three meetings, including the 49ers’ 34-3 romp in 2013 in the most recent head-to-head. The Texans prevailed the only time the teams have met in Houston: 24-21 in October 2009. The teams have never met in the postseason.</p>
<p>KEYS TO THE GAME: Now that <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Jimmy-Garoppolo/" type="external">Jimmy Garoppolo</a> has a fairly successful first start under his belt (293 passing yards in a win vs. Chicago last week), it’s safe to say the 49ers have the edge at quarterback. When’s the last time they were able to say that?</p>
<p>The Texans are far weaker against the pass than against the run, so the 49ers should come out winging it and trust that Garoppolo will outgun <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Tom-Savage/" type="external">Tom Savage</a>.</p>
<p>Of course, the 49ers would like to score touchdowns instead of five field goals. It would help to get some short drives, which could happen against the turnover-prone Texans. Just two teams have more giveaways than the Texans’ 23.</p>
<p>As the injuries continue to pile up in this unfortunate season, the Texans are just trying to find bodies to fill out their roster. They lost six more players to injuries of varying severity last week.</p>
<p>They also suddenly can’t run the ball. They rushed for just 53 yards against the <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Tennessee-Titans/" type="external">Tennessee Titans</a> after being held to 66 by the <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Baltimore-Ravens/" type="external">Baltimore Ravens</a>. They have surpassed 100 only once in five games after averaging 146 over the previous six.</p>
<p>MATCHUPS TO WATCH:</p>
<p>–49ers QB Jimmy Garoppolo vs. Texans CB Kareem Jackson. There’s a reason Jackson ranks second on the Texans in tackles: The man he’s guarding tends to catch a lot of passes. The Texans have given up the 11th-most passing yards and third-most touchdown passes this season, so Garoppolo has a chance to be even better in his second start than in his first.</p>
<p>–Texans WR <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/DeAndre-Hopkins/" type="external">DeAndre Hopkins</a> vs. 49ers CB Ahkello Witherspoon. No team is more predictable in its passing game than the Texans. But it doesn’t matter because most defenses can’t stop Hopkins, who already has surpassed 1,000 yards with four games remaining. The rookie Witherspoon will be tested like never before this week.</p>
<p>FRIDAY INJURY REPORTS</p>
<p>SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS</p>
<p>–Questionable: T Trenton Brown (shoulder)</p>
<p>HOUSTON TEXANS</p>
<p>–Out: RB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Alfred-Blue/" type="external">Alfred Blue</a> (concussion), T Julien Davenport (shoulder), LB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Jelani-Jenkins/" type="external">Jelani Jenkins</a> (concussion), WR <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Braxton-Miller/" type="external">Braxton Miller</a> (concussion)</p>
<p>–Questionable: G Xavier Su’a-Filo (groin)</p>
<p>PLAYER SPOTLIGHT: 49ers WR/PR Trent Taylor. The rookie had a career day, with six catches for 92 yards, in the Week 13 win over the <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Chicago_Bears/" type="external">Chicago Bears</a>. But now that he’s on the opponent’s radar, it’s going to be interesting to see whether the 49ers can get him the ball as often this week against the Texans. Taylor could find himself being used more often as a decoy to attract linebackers and help Garoppolo do a better job of getting the ball to the 49ers’ tight ends.</p>
<p>FAST FACTS: 49ers QB Jimmy Garoppolo’s 293 passing yards in Week 13 were the most by a QB in his first start with 49ers. He is one of seven active players to win each of his first three career starts. … RB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Carlos-Hyde/" type="external">Carlos Hyde</a> is tied for fourth among NFL RBs with 52 receptions. He had 66 scrimmage yards last week and reached 1,000 for the second consecutive season. … WR <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Marquise-Goodwin/" type="external">Marquise Goodwin</a> had a career-high eight receptions</p>
<p>for 99 yards in Week 13. His 19.3-yard average on catches is the highest in the NFL. … LB Elvis Dumervil has 4.5 sacks in his past five road games. He ranks fourth among active players with 104.5 sacks. … Houston QB Tom Savage set career-highs in passing yards (365), completions (31) and attempts (49) in Week 13. … RB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Lamar-Miller/" type="external">Lamar Miller</a> had 94 scrimmage yards last week. He has 1,298 scrimmage yards and seven TDs in 13 career home games with Houston. … WR DeAndre Hopkins is tied for the NFL lead with nine TD catches. In his past nine games, he has 880 yards and eight TDs. He has caught a TD pass in six straight home games. … DE Jadeveon Clowney has six sacks and 12 tackles for loss in his past six games. … LB Benardrick McKinney notched a sack in Week 13. He also leads the team with 74 tackles. Since entering the league in 2015, he is one of five players with 250 tackles (261) and eight sacks (9). … S Andre Hal forced a fumble in Week 13. He has three interceptions in his past five home games.</p>
<p>PREDICTION: Watch out! The 49ers are hot, with both wins coming in the last three weeks. Jimmy G should be able to get them another one.</p>
<p>OUR PICK: 49ers, 16-10.</p>
<p>— <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Chris-Cluff/" type="external">Chris Cluff</a></p> | false | 1 | san francisco 49ers 210 houston texans 48 game snapshot kickoff sunday 1 pm et nrg stadium tv fox dick stockton mark schlereth shannon spake field reporter series history 4th regularseason meeting 49ers lead series 21 home team three meetings including 49ers 343 romp 2013 recent headtohead texans prevailed time teams met houston 2421 october 2009 teams never met postseason keys game jimmy garoppolo fairly successful first start belt 293 passing yards win vs chicago last week safe say 49ers edge quarterback whens last time able say texans far weaker pass run 49ers come winging trust garoppolo outgun tom savage course 49ers would like score touchdowns instead five field goals would help get short drives could happen turnoverprone texans two teams giveaways texans 23 injuries continue pile unfortunate season texans trying find bodies fill roster lost six players injuries varying severity last week also suddenly cant run ball rushed 53 yards tennessee titans held 66 baltimore ravens surpassed 100 five games averaging 146 previous six matchups watch 49ers qb jimmy garoppolo vs texans cb kareem jackson theres reason jackson ranks second texans tackles man hes guarding tends catch lot passes texans given 11thmost passing yards thirdmost touchdown passes season garoppolo chance even better second start first texans wr deandre hopkins vs 49ers cb ahkello witherspoon team predictable passing game texans doesnt matter defenses cant stop hopkins already surpassed 1000 yards four games remaining rookie witherspoon tested like never week friday injury reports san francisco 49ers questionable trenton brown shoulder houston texans rb alfred blue concussion julien davenport shoulder lb jelani jenkins concussion wr braxton miller concussion questionable g xavier suafilo groin player spotlight 49ers wrpr trent taylor rookie career day six catches 92 yards week 13 win chicago bears hes opponents radar going interesting see whether 49ers get ball often week texans taylor could find used often decoy attract linebackers help garoppolo better job getting ball 49ers tight ends fast facts 49ers qb jimmy garoppolos 293 passing yards week 13 qb first start 49ers one seven active players win first three career starts rb carlos hyde tied fourth among nfl rbs 52 receptions 66 scrimmage yards last week reached 1000 second consecutive season wr marquise goodwin careerhigh eight receptions 99 yards week 13 193yard average catches highest nfl lb elvis dumervil 45 sacks past five road games ranks fourth among active players 1045 sacks houston qb tom savage set careerhighs passing yards 365 completions 31 attempts 49 week 13 rb lamar miller 94 scrimmage yards last week 1298 scrimmage yards seven tds 13 career home games houston wr deandre hopkins tied nfl lead nine td catches past nine games 880 yards eight tds caught td pass six straight home games de jadeveon clowney six sacks 12 tackles loss past six games lb benardrick mckinney notched sack week 13 also leads team 74 tackles since entering league 2015 one five players 250 tackles 261 eight sacks 9 andre hal forced fumble week 13 three interceptions past five home games prediction watch 49ers hot wins coming last three weeks jimmy g able get another one pick 49ers 1610 chris cluff | 517 |
<p />
<p>The new sanctions against Russia announced by Washington and Europe do not make sense as merely economic measures. I would be surprised if Russian oil and military industries were dependent on European capital markets in a meaningful way. Such a dependence would indicate a failure in Russian strategic thinking. The Russian companies should be able to secure adequate financing from Russian Banks or from the Russian government.&#160; If foreign loans are needed, Russia can borrow from China.</p>
<p>If critical Russian industries are dependent on European capital markets, the sanctions will help Russia by forcing an end to this debilitating dependence.&#160; Russia should not be dependent on the West in any way.</p>
<p>The real question is the purpose of the sanctions.&#160; My conclusion is that the purpose of the sanctions is to break up and undermine Europe's economic and political relations with Russia. When international relations are intentionally undermined, war can be the result.&#160; Washington will continue to push sanctions against Russia until Russia shows Europe that there is a heavy cost of serving as Washington's tool.</p>
<p>Russia needs to break up this process of ever more sanctions in order to derail the drive toward war.&#160; In my opinion this is easy for Russia to do.&#160; Russia can tell Europe that since you do not like our oil companies, you must not like our gas company, so we are turning off the gas.&#160; Or Russia can tell Europe, we don't sell natural gas to NATO members. Or Russia can say, we will continue to sell you gas, but you must pay in rubles, not in dollars.&#160; This would have the additional benefit of increasing the demand for rubles in exchange markets, thus making it harder for speculators and the US government to drive down the ruble.</p>
<p>The real danger to Russia is a continuation of its low-key, moderate response to the sanctions. This is a response that encourages more sanctions.&#160; To stop the sanctions, Russia needs to show Europe that the sanctions have serious costs for Europe.</p>
<p>A Russian response to Washington would be to stop selling to the US the Russian rocket engines on which the US satellite program is dependent.&#160; This could leave the US without rockets for its satellites for six years between the period 2016 and 2022.</p>
<p>Possibly the Russian government is worried about losing the earnings from gas and rocket engine sales.&#160; However, Europe cannot do without the gas and would quickly abandon its participation in the sanctions, so no gas revenues would be lost.&#160; The Americans are going to develop their own rocket engine anyhow, so the Russian sales of rocket engines to the US have at most about six more years.&#160; But the US with an impaired satellite program for six years would mean a great relief to the entire world from the American spy program.&#160; It would also make difficult US military aggression against Russia during the period.</p>
<p>Russian President Putin and his government have been very low-key and unprovocative in responding to the sanctions and to the trouble that Washington continues to cause for Russia in Ukraine. The low-key Russian behavior can be understood as a strategy for undermining Washington's use of Europe against Russia by presenting a non-threatening face to Europe.&#160; However, another explanation is the presence inside Russia of a fifth column that represents Washington's interest and constrains the power of the Russian government.</p>
<p>Strelkov describes the American fifth column <a href="http://slavyangrad.org/2014/09/12/we-will-not-allow-for-russia-to-be-ripped-asunder-and-ruined/" type="external">here</a>.</p>
<p>Saker describes the two power groups inside Russia as the Eurasian Sovereignists who stand behind Putin and an independent Russia and the Atlantic Integrationists, <a href="https://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com.br/2014/09/strelkov-from-swimming-with-piranhas-to.html" type="external">the fifth column that works to incorporate Russia in Europe under US hegemony</a> or, failing that, to help Washington break up the Russian Federation into several weaker countries that are too weak to constrain Washington's use of power.</p>
<p>Russia's Atlantic Integrationists share the Brzezinski and Wolfowitz doctrines with Washington.&#160; These doctrines are the basis for US foreign policy.&#160; The doctrines define the goal of US foreign policy in terms of preventing the rise of other countries, such as Russia and China, that could limit Washington's hegemony.</p>
<p>Washington is in a position to exploit the tensions between these two Russian power groups. Washington's fifth column is not best positioned to prevail.&#160; However, Washington can at least count on the struggle causing dissent within the Eurasian Sovereignists over Putin's low-key response to Western provocations.&#160; Some of this dissent can be seen in Strelkov's defense of Russia and more can be seen <a href="http://slavyangrad.org/2014/09/13/the-new-round-of-sanctions-the-pre-war-period/#more-3665" type="external">here</a>.</p>
<p>Russia, thinking the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, opened herself to the West.&#160; Russian governments trusted the West, and as a result of Russia's gullibility, the West was able to purchase numerous allies among the Russian elites. Depending on the alignment of the media, these compromised elites are capable of assassinating Putin and attempting a coup.</p>
<p>One would think that by now Putin's government would recognize the danger and arrest the main elements of the fifth column, followed by trial and execution for treason, in order that Russia can stand united against the Western Threat.&#160; If Putin does not take this step, it means either that Putin does not recognize the extent of the threat or that his government lacks the power to protect Russia from the internal threat.</p>
<p>It is clear that Putin has not achieved any respite for his government from the West's propaganda and economic assault by refusing to defend the Donbass area from Ukrainian attack and by pressuring the Donetsk Republic into a ceasefire when its military forces were on the verge of a major defeat of the disintegrating Ukrainian army.&#160; All Putin has achieved is to open himself to criticism among his supporters for betraying the Russians in eastern and southern Ukraine.</p>
<p>The European politicians and elites are so deeply in Washington's pocket that Putin has little chance of courting Europe with a Russian show of good will. I have never believed that this strategy could work, although I would be pleased if it did.&#160; Only a direct threat to deprive Europe of energy has a chance of producing within Europe a foreign policy independent of Washington.&#160; I do not think Europe can survive a cutoff of the Russian natural gas. Europe would abandon sanctions in order to guarantee the flow of gas.&#160; If Washington's hold on Europe is so powerful that Europe is willing to endure a major disruption of its energy supply as the price of its vassalage, Russia will know to cease its futile attempts at diplomacy and to prepare for war.</p>
<p>If China sits on the sidelines, China will be the next isolated target and will receive the same treatment.</p>
<p>Washington intends to defeat both countries, either through internal dissent or through war.</p>
<p>Nothing said by Obama or any member of his government or any influential voice in Congress has signaled any pullback in Washington's drive for hegemony over the world.</p>
<p>The US economy is now dependent on looting and plunder, and Washington's hegemony is essential to this corrupted form of capitalism.</p> | false | 1 | new sanctions russia announced washington europe make sense merely economic measures would surprised russian oil military industries dependent european capital markets meaningful way dependence would indicate failure russian strategic thinking russian companies able secure adequate financing russian banks russian government160 foreign loans needed russia borrow china critical russian industries dependent european capital markets sanctions help russia forcing end debilitating dependence160 russia dependent west way real question purpose sanctions160 conclusion purpose sanctions break undermine europes economic political relations russia international relations intentionally undermined war result160 washington continue push sanctions russia russia shows europe heavy cost serving washingtons tool russia needs break process ever sanctions order derail drive toward war160 opinion easy russia do160 russia tell europe since like oil companies must like gas company turning gas160 russia tell europe dont sell natural gas nato members russia say continue sell gas must pay rubles dollars160 would additional benefit increasing demand rubles exchange markets thus making harder speculators us government drive ruble real danger russia continuation lowkey moderate response sanctions response encourages sanctions160 stop sanctions russia needs show europe sanctions serious costs europe russian response washington would stop selling us russian rocket engines us satellite program dependent160 could leave us without rockets satellites six years period 2016 2022 possibly russian government worried losing earnings gas rocket engine sales160 however europe without gas would quickly abandon participation sanctions gas revenues would lost160 americans going develop rocket engine anyhow russian sales rocket engines us six years160 us impaired satellite program six years would mean great relief entire world american spy program160 would also make difficult us military aggression russia period russian president putin government lowkey unprovocative responding sanctions trouble washington continues cause russia ukraine lowkey russian behavior understood strategy undermining washingtons use europe russia presenting nonthreatening face europe160 however another explanation presence inside russia fifth column represents washingtons interest constrains power russian government strelkov describes american fifth column saker describes two power groups inside russia eurasian sovereignists stand behind putin independent russia atlantic integrationists fifth column works incorporate russia europe us hegemony failing help washington break russian federation several weaker countries weak constrain washingtons use power russias atlantic integrationists share brzezinski wolfowitz doctrines washington160 doctrines basis us foreign policy160 doctrines define goal us foreign policy terms preventing rise countries russia china could limit washingtons hegemony washington position exploit tensions two russian power groups washingtons fifth column best positioned prevail160 however washington least count struggle causing dissent within eurasian sovereignists putins lowkey response western provocations160 dissent seen strelkovs defense russia seen russia thinking cold war ended collapse soviet union opened west160 russian governments trusted west result russias gullibility west able purchase numerous allies among russian elites depending alignment media compromised elites capable assassinating putin attempting coup one would think putins government would recognize danger arrest main elements fifth column followed trial execution treason order russia stand united western threat160 putin take step means either putin recognize extent threat government lacks power protect russia internal threat clear putin achieved respite government wests propaganda economic assault refusing defend donbass area ukrainian attack pressuring donetsk republic ceasefire military forces verge major defeat disintegrating ukrainian army160 putin achieved open criticism among supporters betraying russians eastern southern ukraine european politicians elites deeply washingtons pocket putin little chance courting europe russian show good never believed strategy could work although would pleased did160 direct threat deprive europe energy chance producing within europe foreign policy independent washington160 think europe survive cutoff russian natural gas europe would abandon sanctions order guarantee flow gas160 washingtons hold europe powerful europe willing endure major disruption energy supply price vassalage russia know cease futile attempts diplomacy prepare war china sits sidelines china next isolated target receive treatment washington intends defeat countries either internal dissent war nothing said obama member government influential voice congress signaled pullback washingtons drive hegemony world us economy dependent looting plunder washingtons hegemony essential corrupted form capitalism | 641 |
<p>The most recent blunt, attacking, generalizing statement seemingly meant to purposefully degrade a good portion of our Libertarian Party members was directed toward our active and past military personnel. &#160;The LP Vice Chairman, Arvin Vohra has been asking people on Facebook about reasons that they or others have signed up for the military.&#160; It seemed like a friendly enough conversation piece, and I even responded to one of his original posts asking that question a few days ago.&#160; I literally said that “some people that I know have mentioned the benefits that the military offers them, for example, education.”&#160; In a society where education costs a lot of money, this can be something that younger people are happy to receive as they spend their time in the military, or after they get out of the military. This is an explanation of an attractive benefit that being in the military offers.&#160; This is NOT a SOLE reason that someone would enlist and risk their lives in an ever tumultuous world with never ending wars.&#160; Instead of taking this information and gathering it with the other answers that he received during his research, and using it to find solutions to make things better, he decided to make another Facebook post saying:</p>
<p>“A common excuse to join the military, despite disagreeing with every single thing that it does: the military pays for college.</p>
<p>Translation: I agreed to kill innocent people because I wanted the money.</p>
<p>That type of decision making is below the lowest threshold of any kind of morality that I know of.”</p>
<p>First, I want to address why this is a manipulative and biased statement. I would expect this to come from the Democrats.&#160; What a loaded statement. The negative connotations of the phrases “a common excuse” and “despite disagreeing with every single thing it does” right away spin this point of view as a negative and attacking slap in the face to those people that fall into the category of having joined the military either in the past or the present.&#160; Not everyone that has ever enlisted disagrees with every single thing that the military does. So let’s stop right there. HE disagrees with every single thing, apparently.&#160; The Libertarian Party platform regarding the military plainly explains that the party is NOT anti-military:</p>
<p>3.1 National Defense</p>
<p>We support the maintenance of a sufficient military to defend the United States against aggression. The United States should both avoid entangling alliances and abandon its attempts to act as policeman for the world. We oppose any form of compulsory national service.——ENCOURAGES MILITARY FOR DEFENSE PURPOSES; ALSO SHOWS INTENT OF THE PARTY TO WITHDRAW FROM OVER INVOLVEMENT IN OTHER COUNTRIES; ALSO ADDRESSES BEING AGAINST THE DRAFT</p>
<p>3.2 Internal Security and Individual Rights</p>
<p>The defense of the country requires that we have adequate intelligence to detect and to counter threats to domestic security. This requirement must not take priority over maintaining the civil liberties of our citizens. The Constitution and Bill of Rights shall not be suspended even during time of war. Intelligence agencies that legitimately seek to preserve the security of the nation must be subject to oversight and transparency. We oppose the government’s use of secret classifications to keep from the public information that it should have, especially that which shows that the government has violated the law.——–ENCOURAGES MILITARY FOR DEFENSE AND A FREEDOM OF INFORMATION TO ADDRESS GOVERNMENT OVERREACH (TRANSPARENCY); GIVES CITIZENS CIVIL LIBERTIES A HIGHER LEVEL OF IMPORTANCE THAN INTELLIGENCE USED TO COUNTER DOMESTIC SECURITY. (UM, HELLO, PATRIOT ACT)</p>
<p>3.3 International Affairs</p>
<p>American foreign policy should seek an America at peace with the world. Our foreign policy should emphasize defense against attack from abroad and enhance the likelihood of peace by avoiding foreign entanglements. We would end the current U.S. government policy of foreign intervention, including military and economic aid. We recognize the right of all people to resist tyranny and defend themselves and their rights. We condemn the use of force, and especially the use of terrorism, against the innocent, regardless of whether such acts are committed by governments or by political or revolutionary groups.—–ENCOURAGES MILITARY FOR DEFENSE AND AVOIDANCE OF FOREIGN ENTANGLEMENTS; CONDEMNS USE OF FORCE AGAINST INNOCENT (PROTECT OF INDIVIDUALS BEING OF UPMOST IMPORTANCE)</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>No where in the Platform does it say that we are completely ANTI-MILITARY.&#160; Libertarians want to have a military that concentrates on a more defensive position, lower offensive position, lower foreign entanglements, and protection of individuals. When some Libertarians that are either currently enlisted in the military or were vets attempted to explain their position and how their enrollment aligned with Libertarian beliefs, they were mocked in his follow up Facebook post later in the evening:</p>
<p>“I thought I would be fighting for freedom, or to defend the constitution.</p>
<p>If you were a soldier in recent history, you probably weren’t. Instead, you were a person who got tricked by propaganda. That doesn’t make you a hero; it makes you someone who got tricked.”</p>
<p>WOW.&#160; So a soldier, with the intention of protecting us and the constitution, was just told they are stupid, tricked, and their time spent away from their personal lives and families was not honorable, but laughable.</p>
<p>“A soldier is like a gun. You don’t blame guns when someone uses a gun for mass shootings; blame only the president, not the soldiers who follow his orders.</p>
<p>A soldier is not a gun. A soldier has thoughts, morals, and judgment. If a gun had human level intelligence and then chose to be part of a school shooting, I would blame the gun along with the wielder. When a soldier chooses to follow an order to bomb a school or hospital, I similarly blame the solider along with the politician ordering him.</p>
<p>I know the military makes a big propaganda show of calling soldiers military property, but the fact is slavery was outlawed by the 13th amendment. You are not an object. You are not a thing. You are a human being, with human abilities, and human responsibilities.”</p>
<p>THIS WHOLE STATEMENT COULDN’T BE MORE LIBERAL BASED ON FEELZ NOR COULD IT BE MORE IGNORANT of how the military actually works. The Commander in Chief, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security all have a hand in actions that the military take.&#160; If you enlist into the military, you agree to follow the bosses orders, as with any job.&#160; In the military especially, there has to be a set chain of command and orders to follow so that there is not chaos, and that everyone is on the same page.&#160; You cannot be in the field, allowing people to make their own personal decisions based on their own thoughts, morals, judgements.&#160; Each person would have a different point of view, and different solutions.&#160; You don’t have time to make split second decisions based on your feelz.&#160; Many of the military superiors that are making the decisions are people that have been in the military for longer, have more experience, and are in the position that they are in due to earning trust based on the history of their actions and behaviors.&#160; The military is structured in a way so as to have a strategic plan of operations from the top down. This is for unity, decisiveness, safety.&#160; If you disobey an order, you can also violate Article 90 of the military code UCMJ , which is a crime. The only time that you can NOT follow orders is if the orders are for you to do something that is ILLEGAL.</p>
<p>Then, he goes on to be a hypocrite:</p>
<p>“Women’s rights happened through ideas and debates, not bombs. The same hold true of minority rights and even democracy. Beating up individuals doesn’t change minds any more than bombing does.”</p>
<p>So, Arvin Vohra, why not educate the American people, the possible enlistees, the military personnel themselves, as to how to detract from the overbearing military that we have by teaching them how to protest or how to vote better?&#160; What are your solutions to offer to these people that A. know we need a military for multiple reasons, B. want to decrease military presence in other countries?&#160; Also, shouldn’t all of these changes be directed at the Commander in Chief?&#160; Since the military members that have enlisted have to obey orders, wouldn’t we start with holding the POTUS accountable for his shenanigans? Or the Department of Defense?&#160; If your solution is well, just don’t sign up for the military (#Resist), you do realize that we have a draft still, right? Not only do we have a draft, we have let things get so bad that we have legalized drafting WOMEN as well? If volunteers aren’t signing up, they will be drafting people.&#160; Do you not see the common denominator here? Cut off the head of the snake, don’t blame the body for being led into dangerous areas.&#160; A good place to start is education, and I see that you are intending on doing some “Counter Recruiting”, as you call it.&#160; While you are doing your “counter recruiting” and slowing down the voluntary enrollment, do you think you can make time to address the following:</p>
<p>If this is too much for you, then why not just find another way to be useful within the Libertarian Party that doesn’t degrade a lot of its members and also keep others from becoming a member?</p>
<p>Signed,</p>
<p>Please stop making this uphill battle worse</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p> | false | 1 | recent blunt attacking generalizing statement seemingly meant purposefully degrade good portion libertarian party members directed toward active past military personnel 160the lp vice chairman arvin vohra asking people facebook reasons others signed military160 seemed like friendly enough conversation piece even responded one original posts asking question days ago160 literally said people know mentioned benefits military offers example education160 society education costs lot money something younger people happy receive spend time military get military explanation attractive benefit military offers160 sole reason someone would enlist risk lives ever tumultuous world never ending wars160 instead taking information gathering answers received research using find solutions make things better decided make another facebook post saying common excuse join military despite disagreeing every single thing military pays college translation agreed kill innocent people wanted money type decision making lowest threshold kind morality know first want address manipulative biased statement would expect come democrats160 loaded statement negative connotations phrases common excuse despite disagreeing every single thing right away spin point view negative attacking slap face people fall category joined military either past present160 everyone ever enlisted disagrees every single thing military lets stop right disagrees every single thing apparently160 libertarian party platform regarding military plainly explains party antimilitary 31 national defense support maintenance sufficient military defend united states aggression united states avoid entangling alliances abandon attempts act policeman world oppose form compulsory national serviceencourages military defense purposes also shows intent party withdraw involvement countries also addresses draft 32 internal security individual rights defense country requires adequate intelligence detect counter threats domestic security requirement must take priority maintaining civil liberties citizens constitution bill rights shall suspended even time war intelligence agencies legitimately seek preserve security nation must subject oversight transparency oppose governments use secret classifications keep public information especially shows government violated lawencourages military defense freedom information address government overreach transparency gives citizens civil liberties higher level importance intelligence used counter domestic security um hello patriot act 33 international affairs american foreign policy seek america peace world foreign policy emphasize defense attack abroad enhance likelihood peace avoiding foreign entanglements would end current us government policy foreign intervention including military economic aid recognize right people resist tyranny defend rights condemn use force especially use terrorism innocent regardless whether acts committed governments political revolutionary groupsencourages military defense avoidance foreign entanglements condemns use force innocent protect individuals upmost importance 160 platform say completely antimilitary160 libertarians want military concentrates defensive position lower offensive position lower foreign entanglements protection individuals libertarians either currently enlisted military vets attempted explain position enrollment aligned libertarian beliefs mocked follow facebook post later evening thought would fighting freedom defend constitution soldier recent history probably werent instead person got tricked propaganda doesnt make hero makes someone got tricked wow160 soldier intention protecting us constitution told stupid tricked time spent away personal lives families honorable laughable soldier like gun dont blame guns someone uses gun mass shootings blame president soldiers follow orders soldier gun soldier thoughts morals judgment gun human level intelligence chose part school shooting would blame gun along wielder soldier chooses follow order bomb school hospital similarly blame solider along politician ordering know military makes big propaganda show calling soldiers military property fact slavery outlawed 13th amendment object thing human human abilities human responsibilities whole statement couldnt liberal based feelz could ignorant military actually works commander chief department defense department homeland security hand actions military take160 enlist military agree follow bosses orders job160 military especially set chain command orders follow chaos everyone page160 field allowing people make personal decisions based thoughts morals judgements160 person would different point view different solutions160 dont time make split second decisions based feelz160 many military superiors making decisions people military longer experience position due earning trust based history actions behaviors160 military structured way strategic plan operations top unity decisiveness safety160 disobey order also violate article 90 military code ucmj crime time follow orders orders something illegal goes hypocrite womens rights happened ideas debates bombs hold true minority rights even democracy beating individuals doesnt change minds bombing arvin vohra educate american people possible enlistees military personnel detract overbearing military teaching protest vote better160 solutions offer people know need military multiple reasons b want decrease military presence countries160 also shouldnt changes directed commander chief160 since military members enlisted obey orders wouldnt start holding potus accountable shenanigans department defense160 solution well dont sign military resist realize draft still right draft let things get bad legalized drafting women well volunteers arent signing drafting people160 see common denominator cut head snake dont blame body led dangerous areas160 good place start education see intending counter recruiting call it160 counter recruiting slowing voluntary enrollment think make time address following much find another way useful within libertarian party doesnt degrade lot members also keep others becoming member signed please stop making uphill battle worse 160 160 | 795 |
<p>By Noah Browning</p>
<p>MARIB, Yemen (Reuters) – At a hospital in the Yemeni city of Marib, demand for artificial limbs from victims of the country’s war is so high that prosthetics are made on site in a special workshop.</p>
<p>A soldier with an artificial arm hitches up his robe to reveal a stump where his leg once was. He is angry that authorities have done little to help him since he was wounded.</p>
<p>“I was at the front and a mortar exploded near me. We fought well, but now I get no salary, no support from the government or anyone. They just left us,” said Hassan Meigan.</p>
<p>More than two years into a war that has already left 10,000 dead, regional power Saudi Arabia is struggling to pull together an effective local military force to defeat the Iranian-aligned Houthi movement that has seized large parts of Yemen.</p>
<p>The dysfunction is a reminder to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that his campaign to counter arch-enemy Iran in the Middle East, including threats against Tehran’s ally Hezbollah, may be hard to implement.</p>
<p>During a rare visit to a large area of Yemeni territory controlled by the pro-Saudi government, journalists saw a patchwork of mutually suspicious army units, whose loyalty to disparate regions and commanders has hindered their war against Houthi fighters.</p>
<p>Some soldiers appeared to be hunkering down in their bases rather than joining the fight. Those who do fight say salaries go unpaid for months. The front lines have barely moved for months.</p>
<p>Saudi Arabia has sought to create a unified military force based in Marib, but these troops have failed to eject the Houthis from the nearby capital Sanaa, where the Saudis see the rebels as a threat to their national security.</p>
<p>With Saudi politics in turmoil after a wave of high-profile arrests and Iranian influence growing, Yemeni officers recognize the importance of an effective army but acknowledge that success still eludes them.</p>
<p>“Empowering the National Army and unifying all weapons and authority under it is our goal. This is what we’re trying to accomplish so we can end the war with a military victory,” Brigadier General Marzooq al-Seyadi, a top Yemeni commander, told Reuters.</p>
<p>“The difficulties until now in achieving this in the face of local and ideological factors have posed problems … but with the aid of the Arab Coalition and the United States, which provides daily advice and support to our side, we will succeed.”</p>
<p>A coalition spokesman, Colonel Turki al-Malki, said in September that the mission was to back Yemen “whether it’s inside the country by supporting the Yemeni National Army or defending the borders and territory of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia”.</p>
<p>Sunni Saudi Arabia has led the mostly Gulf Arab coalition against the Shi’ite Houthis, since they seized the Yemeni capital and fanned out across the country.</p>
<p>But the Houthis’ rump state in Yemen’s Western highlands has weathered thousands of Saudi-led air strikes that have been aided by refueling and intelligence from the United States.</p>
<p>Denying they are a pawn of Iran, the Houthis say they are fighting to fend off a mercenary army in the thrall of the Gulf and the West.</p>
<p>The group launched a missile toward Riyadh’s main airport on Saturday, which Saudi Arabia said was a declaration of war by Tehran.</p>
<p>But after years of fighting that have ravaged the deeply poor country with hunger and disease, even some of Saudi Arabia’s staunchest allies in Yemen say they are angry at being manipulated from abroad.</p>
<p>“We’re fighting as proxies … (Western powers) can end the war in Yemen. They can pressure Iran and Saudi Arabia, solve their issues and their differences,” said Ali Abd-Rabbu al-Qadhi, a lawmaker and tribal leader from Marib.</p>
<p>“It’s Yemeni blood that’s being shed … We’re one society with common roots and one religion, but the international conflict has brought us to where we are,” said al-Qadhi, who wore a holstered pistol over his traditional Yemeni sarong.</p>
<p>ONWARD TO SANAA</p>
<p>Despite the lack of progress on the battlefield, some soldiers on the dusty streets of Marib appeared eager to fight.</p>
<p>“Onward to Sanaa, God willing!” smiled Abdullah al-Sufi, 20, whose khaki fatigues hung loose on his gangly frame.</p>
<p>“We know there are foreign conspiracies on Yemeni soil, there are problems, there are setbacks. But we are fighting for our country and for our homes, that’s the important thing.”</p>
<p>As war started in March 2015, after Saudi Prince Mohammed sent in troops, Yemen’s most powerful units had already sided with Houthi militiamen to rain rockets and tank fire on Marib, which the fledgling new army and allied tribes repelled.</p>
<p>In the most ambitious military adventure in their history, troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates took part in that fight, but were stung by scores of combat deaths.</p>
<p>The Arab forces have largely pulled back to a support role in bases far from the front line.</p>
<p>Now units trained by Saudi Arabia fight in scattered theaters with little obvious coordination, loyal to different parties and local leaders in a society awash with guns and notorious for its fickle politics.</p>
<p>The kingdom supports brigades adhering to Sunni Islam’s puritanical Salafi school in Western Yemen, while also backing the Muslim Brotherhood around Marib and loyalists of exiled President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi in the south.</p>
<p>Additionally, the United Arab Emirates, – the other key Gulf power in the anti-Iran war effort in Yemen – has armed and trained formidable units across southern and eastern Yemen.</p>
<p>To add to the confusion, these fighters despise the Houthis as well as pro-Saudi units in northern Yemen.</p>
<p>YOUNG MARTYRS</p>
<p>Displayed on walls all over Marib, portraits of slain soldiers are captioned with poems praising them as “martyrs” and “lions.”</p>
<p>“My son is sixteen. He said ‘dad, give me a gun, I want to fight.’ He goes to the front now. No father is happy with this, but what can we do? This is a war, this is the situation we’re in,” said one Marib veteran.</p>
<p>Yemen’s government also appears to be living through difficult times.</p>
<p>President Hadi has been in Riyadh since being ejected from his country by the Houthis, and sources said his hosts have banned him from traveling for over a month, citing poor security in Yemen. Officials in his office denied the reports.</p>
<p>But the Saudi response this week to the Houthi ballistic missile – to close all ports, borders and airspace, the majority of which are nominally under Hadi’s control – appeared to deal an unprecedented rebuke to their ally.</p>
<p>Activist Khalid Baqlan expressed the fear of many young people and professionals that the errors of a weak government and foreign powers were hollowing out Yemeni society.</p>
<p>“What we’re seeing is not the building of real state institutions but the empowerment of groups with competing agendas who could fight in the future, benefiting no one,” said Baqlan, from the Saba Youth Council, a civil society group.</p>
<p>“There has to be a political solution, it’s the only way to save the country.”</p>
<p>Yemen’s stalemated war: http://tmsnrt.rs/2zshXBc</p> | false | 1 | noah browning marib yemen reuters hospital yemeni city marib demand artificial limbs victims countrys war high prosthetics made site special workshop soldier artificial arm hitches robe reveal stump leg angry authorities done little help since wounded front mortar exploded near fought well get salary support government anyone left us said hassan meigan two years war already left 10000 dead regional power saudi arabia struggling pull together effective local military force defeat iranianaligned houthi movement seized large parts yemen dysfunction reminder saudi crown prince mohammed bin salman campaign counter archenemy iran middle east including threats tehrans ally hezbollah may hard implement rare visit large area yemeni territory controlled prosaudi government journalists saw patchwork mutually suspicious army units whose loyalty disparate regions commanders hindered war houthi fighters soldiers appeared hunkering bases rather joining fight fight say salaries go unpaid months front lines barely moved months saudi arabia sought create unified military force based marib troops failed eject houthis nearby capital sanaa saudis see rebels threat national security saudi politics turmoil wave highprofile arrests iranian influence growing yemeni officers recognize importance effective army acknowledge success still eludes empowering national army unifying weapons authority goal trying accomplish end war military victory brigadier general marzooq alseyadi top yemeni commander told reuters difficulties achieving face local ideological factors posed problems aid arab coalition united states provides daily advice support side succeed coalition spokesman colonel turki almalki said september mission back yemen whether inside country supporting yemeni national army defending borders territory kingdom saudi arabia sunni saudi arabia led mostly gulf arab coalition shiite houthis since seized yemeni capital fanned across country houthis rump state yemens western highlands weathered thousands saudiled air strikes aided refueling intelligence united states denying pawn iran houthis say fighting fend mercenary army thrall gulf west group launched missile toward riyadhs main airport saturday saudi arabia said declaration war tehran years fighting ravaged deeply poor country hunger disease even saudi arabias staunchest allies yemen say angry manipulated abroad fighting proxies western powers end war yemen pressure iran saudi arabia solve issues differences said ali abdrabbu alqadhi lawmaker tribal leader marib yemeni blood thats shed one society common roots one religion international conflict brought us said alqadhi wore holstered pistol traditional yemeni sarong onward sanaa despite lack progress battlefield soldiers dusty streets marib appeared eager fight onward sanaa god willing smiled abdullah alsufi 20 whose khaki fatigues hung loose gangly frame know foreign conspiracies yemeni soil problems setbacks fighting country homes thats important thing war started march 2015 saudi prince mohammed sent troops yemens powerful units already sided houthi militiamen rain rockets tank fire marib fledgling new army allied tribes repelled ambitious military adventure history troops saudi arabia united arab emirates took part fight stung scores combat deaths arab forces largely pulled back support role bases far front line units trained saudi arabia fight scattered theaters little obvious coordination loyal different parties local leaders society awash guns notorious fickle politics kingdom supports brigades adhering sunni islams puritanical salafi school western yemen also backing muslim brotherhood around marib loyalists exiled president abdrabbu mansour hadi south additionally united arab emirates key gulf power antiiran war effort yemen armed trained formidable units across southern eastern yemen add confusion fighters despise houthis well prosaudi units northern yemen young martyrs displayed walls marib portraits slain soldiers captioned poems praising martyrs lions son sixteen said dad give gun want fight goes front father happy war situation said one marib veteran yemens government also appears living difficult times president hadi riyadh since ejected country houthis sources said hosts banned traveling month citing poor security yemen officials office denied reports saudi response week houthi ballistic missile close ports borders airspace majority nominally hadis control appeared deal unprecedented rebuke ally activist khalid baqlan expressed fear many young people professionals errors weak government foreign powers hollowing yemeni society seeing building real state institutions empowerment groups competing agendas could fight future benefiting one said baqlan saba youth council civil society group political solution way save country yemens stalemated war httptmsnrtrs2zshxbc | 665 |
<p>(The Sports Xchange) – Highlights from National Basketball Association games on Saturday:</p>
<p>Bucks 98, Lakers 90</p>
<p>Rookie Lonzo Ball became the youngest player in NBA history to record a triple-double, finishing with 19 points, 13 assists and 12 rebounds, but it wasn’t enough as the Los Angeles Lakers were dealt a 98-90 loss by the Milwaukee Bucks on Saturday.</p>
<p>Ball, who is 20 years, 15 days old, completed the triple-double by getting his 10th rebound early in the fourth. He had 13 points and 11 assists at the time.</p>
<p>Ball eclipsed the mark set by LeBron James, who was 20 years, 20 days old when he recorded a triple-double Jan. 19, 2005 for the Cleveland Cavaliers.</p>
<p>Giannis Antetokounmpo scored 33 points to lead the Bucks, who also got 16 off the bench from Malcolm Brogdon. Khris Middleton added 13 points while Eric Bledsoe contributed 11 in his home debut for Milwaukee.</p>
<p>Knicks 118, Kings 91</p>
<p>Kristaps Porzingis scored 34 points on 21 shots as New York routed Sacramento.</p>
<p>Porzingis made 11 of 21 shots, including four 3-pointers and grabbed nine rebounds. Courtney Lee added 20 while Enes Kanter posted a double-double of 17 points and 13 rebounds.</p>
<p>Skal Labissiere scored 19 points and Buddy Hield added 17 for the Kings, whose starting lineup totaled 31 points.</p>
<p>Warriors 135, 76ers 114</p>
<p>Kevin Durant scored 29 points as Golden State beat Philadelphia and notched its sixth straight win.</p>
<p>Klay Thompson added 23 points and Stephen Curry contributed 22 as Golden State shot 57.7 percent and made 53.8 percent of its 3-pointers.</p>
<p>J.J. Redick scored 17 points for Philadelphia.</p>
<p>Cavaliers 111, Mavericks 104</p>
<p>Kevin Love recorded his ninth double-double with 29 points and 15 rebounds as Cleveland beat Dallas.</p>
<p>LeBron James and J.R. Smith added 17 points apiece for Cleveland. James also grabbed 10 rebounds.</p>
<p>Harrison Barnes led Dallas with 23 points.</p>
<p>Rockets 111, Grizzlies 96</p>
<p>James Harden scored 38 points as Houston beat Memphis.</p>
<p>Harden made 11 of 25 shots, including six 3-pointers. Eric Gordon also hit six 3-pointers and added 26 points for the Rockets.</p>
<p>Reserve Tyreke Evans led the Grizzlies with 22 points. Marc Gasol added 15 while Mike Conley was held to 12 points.</p>
<p>Pelicans 111, Clippers 103</p>
<p>DeMarcus Cousins totaled 35 points and 15 rebounds as New Orleans beat Los Angeles.</p>
<p>Anthony Davis added 25 and 10 rebounds for the Pelicans, who shot 53.8 percent. E’Twaun Moore added 18 points for New Orleans.</p>
<p>Blake Griffin scored 26 points for the Clippers, who lost for the seventh time in eight games. Austin Rivers added 19 points for Los Angeles.</p>
<p>Wizards 113, Hawks 94</p>
<p>Bradley Beal scored 19 points as Washington cruised by Atlanta.</p>
<p>Markieff Morris and Kelly Oubre Jr. added 18 points for the Wizards. John Wall scored 13 after missing the morning shootaround with an illness.</p>
<p>Taurean Prince led the Hawks with 19 points.</p>
<p>Spurs 133, Bulls 94</p>
<p>Pau Gasol led eight players in double figures as San Antonio shot 60 percent and routed Chicago.</p>
<p>Dejounte Murray added 17 points while Rudy Gay and Brandon Paul contributed 15 points apiece.</p>
<p>Robin Lopez and Bobby Portis scored 17 points apiece for Chicago.</p>
<p>Nuggets 125, Magic 107</p>
<p>Jamal Murray scored a career-high 32 points and Will Barton added 21 as Denver beat Orlando.</p>
<p>Murray made 12 of 21 shots and six 3-pointers as Denver placed six in double figures.</p>
<p>Marreese Speights led Orlando with 19 points.</p>
<p>Suns 118, Timberwolves 110</p>
<p>Devin Booker and T.J. Warren scored 35 points apiece as Phoenix beat Minnesota.</p>
<p>Booker and Warren helped the Suns stop a five-game losing streak by making a combined 28 of 44 shots.</p>
<p>Andrew Wiggins scored 27 points for Minnesota and Jimmy Butler added 25.</p>
<p>Jazz 114, Nets 106</p>
<p>Rookie Donovan Mitchell scored 26 points and Utah beat Brooklyn.</p>
<p>Derrick Favors added 24 points and 12 rebounds while starting at center in place of Rudy Gobert (knee) for Utah. Joe Ingles contributed 17 points while Ricky Rubio totaled 10 points, eight assists, seven rebounds and four steals.</p>
<p>D’Angelo Russell led the Nets with 26 points while Rondae-Hollis Jefferson added 19.</p> | false | 1 | sports xchange highlights national basketball association games saturday bucks 98 lakers 90 rookie lonzo ball became youngest player nba history record tripledouble finishing 19 points 13 assists 12 rebounds wasnt enough los angeles lakers dealt 9890 loss milwaukee bucks saturday ball 20 years 15 days old completed tripledouble getting 10th rebound early fourth 13 points 11 assists time ball eclipsed mark set lebron james 20 years 20 days old recorded tripledouble jan 19 2005 cleveland cavaliers giannis antetokounmpo scored 33 points lead bucks also got 16 bench malcolm brogdon khris middleton added 13 points eric bledsoe contributed 11 home debut milwaukee knicks 118 kings 91 kristaps porzingis scored 34 points 21 shots new york routed sacramento porzingis made 11 21 shots including four 3pointers grabbed nine rebounds courtney lee added 20 enes kanter posted doubledouble 17 points 13 rebounds skal labissiere scored 19 points buddy hield added 17 kings whose starting lineup totaled 31 points warriors 135 76ers 114 kevin durant scored 29 points golden state beat philadelphia notched sixth straight win klay thompson added 23 points stephen curry contributed 22 golden state shot 577 percent made 538 percent 3pointers jj redick scored 17 points philadelphia cavaliers 111 mavericks 104 kevin love recorded ninth doubledouble 29 points 15 rebounds cleveland beat dallas lebron james jr smith added 17 points apiece cleveland james also grabbed 10 rebounds harrison barnes led dallas 23 points rockets 111 grizzlies 96 james harden scored 38 points houston beat memphis harden made 11 25 shots including six 3pointers eric gordon also hit six 3pointers added 26 points rockets reserve tyreke evans led grizzlies 22 points marc gasol added 15 mike conley held 12 points pelicans 111 clippers 103 demarcus cousins totaled 35 points 15 rebounds new orleans beat los angeles anthony davis added 25 10 rebounds pelicans shot 538 percent etwaun moore added 18 points new orleans blake griffin scored 26 points clippers lost seventh time eight games austin rivers added 19 points los angeles wizards 113 hawks 94 bradley beal scored 19 points washington cruised atlanta markieff morris kelly oubre jr added 18 points wizards john wall scored 13 missing morning shootaround illness taurean prince led hawks 19 points spurs 133 bulls 94 pau gasol led eight players double figures san antonio shot 60 percent routed chicago dejounte murray added 17 points rudy gay brandon paul contributed 15 points apiece robin lopez bobby portis scored 17 points apiece chicago nuggets 125 magic 107 jamal murray scored careerhigh 32 points barton added 21 denver beat orlando murray made 12 21 shots six 3pointers denver placed six double figures marreese speights led orlando 19 points suns 118 timberwolves 110 devin booker tj warren scored 35 points apiece phoenix beat minnesota booker warren helped suns stop fivegame losing streak making combined 28 44 shots andrew wiggins scored 27 points minnesota jimmy butler added 25 jazz 114 nets 106 rookie donovan mitchell scored 26 points utah beat brooklyn derrick favors added 24 points 12 rebounds starting center place rudy gobert knee utah joe ingles contributed 17 points ricky rubio totaled 10 points eight assists seven rebounds four steals dangelo russell led nets 26 points rondaehollis jefferson added 19 | 529 |
<p>On December 12, prior to his lecture at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University, EPPC Senior Fellow George Weigel was interviewed by the Italian newspaper, Avvenire. The interview was published in the paper’s December 13 issue under the headline, “Liberta religiosa, la sfida dell’Islam” (Religious Freedom: The Challenge to Islam). It began with the following subhead: “For George Weigel, the biographer of John Paul II and now of Benedict XVI, ‘The Pope’s journey to Turkey was an opportunity for dialogue, but the question of religious freedom is still open.'” A translation of the interview follows:</p>
<p>His last book is simply entitled Benedict XVI, but it has an intriguing subtitle: God’s Choice. Because, according to George Weigel, Ratzinger is truly the right man at the right moment, thanks to his ability to get to the heart of the problem between the West and the “East:” the relationship between faith and reason, from which derive the capacity to distinguish good and evil…In this perspective, the fundamental character of recent papal voyage to Turkey comes into focus, but also the preoccupations of this pontificate.</p>
<p>What were the objectives of this papal trip? The papal pilgrimage to Turkey had, first of all, an ecumenical and pastoral character: it wasn’t so much the case that the Pope was going to visit an Islamic country, but that Peter was going to meet Andrew. The Pope was also posing a challenge to the entire world to build a public culture which respects religious freedom as a basic human right — although Turkey, in fact imposes restrictions on the work of the (Orthodox) Patriarchate of Constantinople. So this trip had, in fact, two related purposes: to strengthen the ties between Rome and Constantinople, by a papal defense of the religious freedom of Patriarch Bartholomew and his people; and to identify the key question which underlies the debate (about Turkey) in Europe today — which is, is Turkey part of the civilizational orbit of Europe or not?</p>
<p>On this point, how do you read Pope Benedict XVI”s views? There are several important ways to measure the question of whether Turkey, as it is today, is part of the civilizational orbit of Europe. The first has to do with human rights: among other things, there’s a real question as to whether there has been a genuine development in respect for human rights in Turkey. If there were, it would be very important development — it would demonstrate that an Islamic culture can sustain a state that respects religious freedom. When Father Lombardi (the Vatican press spokesman) clarified the Pope’s thinking on this point, he acknowledged the Pope’s willingness to accept progress by Turkey along this road (should such progress take place). Yet there would still remain a certain concern which Joseph Ratzinger had expressed some years ago: that, should Turkey be admitted fully to the European Union, such an accession would demonstrate that the E.U. is, at bottom, a pragmatic economic association, period. That, however, was not the vision of the founding fathers of today’s “Europe:” Adenauer, deGasperi, and Schuman all saw the creation of European institutions as an expression of Europe’s common Christian roots. Should a changed Turkey come into the E.U., that would suggest that a pan-European humanistic culture had evolved, a culture with deep Christian roots, but not uniquely Christian roots. But without significant change in Turkey, Turkey’s accession to the Union would mean that the Union is strictly a business proposition.</p>
<p>Why have you entitled your new book Benedict XVI: God’s Choice? Ratzinger certainly did not want to be pope; when several of his friends and supporters approached him about this possibility, he resisted the idea. But once he accepted “God’s choice” in a spirit of obedience, he was determined to be the kind of pope that he was uniquely fit to be. That is, a master-teacher, a master-catechist, a man who constantly calls the Church to Eucharistic holiness, a man who constantly stresses the relationship of faith and reason. And that is exactly what he’s done.</p>
<p>You have also written about John Paul II: the temptation will be strong to contrast the two men. It’s important to remember that, for the first fifteen years or so of his pontificate, John Paul II was a controversial figure; it was only in the mid-1990s that he became recognized as a kind of universal father-figure. But, in writing about these two men, I also wanted to stress that the Church is not just the pope: the bishops, priests, and all the people of the Church have the responsibility to carry the Church’s message into the world. We’ve got to get beyond the idea that the pope is supposed to solve all the world’s problems. (That’s very much every Catholic’s responsibility — to address the world’s problems with a properly-formed conscience.)</p>
<p>In what sense is Benedict XVI a master-teacher and a master-catechist? The pastoral dimension is the key to his pontificate. When he speaks — whether it’s the weekly audience, the Sunday Angelus, a meeting with children who’ve just made their first Holy Communions, or in an interview on German television — he speaks with a kind of luminous clarity. Anyone open to listening can understand what he’s saying, and that creates the possibility for a decision: what should I do? Then there’s his role on the world stage: this pope has the ability, perhaps unlike anyone else, to identify publicly the major questions on the human agenda. That is precisely what he did at Regensburg, when he said, in brief, that irrational faith can lead to wickedness, just as a loss of faith in reason can.</p>
<p>Which was a criticism of the West… Of course. The way in which we think — or don’t think — about God has everything to do with how we imagine what is right, and how we understand out obligations. This is obvious in radical Islam. But it’s also obvious in the results we can observe in the West’s loss of faith in reason. This was, I should add, the same critique of contemporary western culture that John Paul II advanced in Ecclesia in Europa (The Church in Europe) and Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason).</p>
<p>George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. and holds EPPC’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.</p> | false | 1 | december 12 prior lecture romes pontifical gregorian university eppc senior fellow george weigel interviewed italian newspaper avvenire interview published papers december 13 issue headline liberta religiosa la sfida dellislam religious freedom challenge islam began following subhead george weigel biographer john paul ii benedict xvi popes journey turkey opportunity dialogue question religious freedom still open translation interview follows last book simply entitled benedict xvi intriguing subtitle gods choice according george weigel ratzinger truly right man right moment thanks ability get heart problem west east relationship faith reason derive capacity distinguish good evilin perspective fundamental character recent papal voyage turkey comes focus also preoccupations pontificate objectives papal trip papal pilgrimage turkey first ecumenical pastoral character wasnt much case pope going visit islamic country peter going meet andrew pope also posing challenge entire world build public culture respects religious freedom basic human right although turkey fact imposes restrictions work orthodox patriarchate constantinople trip fact two related purposes strengthen ties rome constantinople papal defense religious freedom patriarch bartholomew people identify key question underlies debate turkey europe today turkey part civilizational orbit europe point read pope benedict xvis views several important ways measure question whether turkey today part civilizational orbit europe first human rights among things theres real question whether genuine development respect human rights turkey would important development would demonstrate islamic culture sustain state respects religious freedom father lombardi vatican press spokesman clarified popes thinking point acknowledged popes willingness accept progress turkey along road progress take place yet would still remain certain concern joseph ratzinger expressed years ago turkey admitted fully european union accession would demonstrate eu bottom pragmatic economic association period however vision founding fathers todays europe adenauer degasperi schuman saw creation european institutions expression europes common christian roots changed turkey come eu would suggest paneuropean humanistic culture evolved culture deep christian roots uniquely christian roots without significant change turkey turkeys accession union would mean union strictly business proposition entitled new book benedict xvi gods choice ratzinger certainly want pope several friends supporters approached possibility resisted idea accepted gods choice spirit obedience determined kind pope uniquely fit masterteacher mastercatechist man constantly calls church eucharistic holiness man constantly stresses relationship faith reason exactly hes done also written john paul ii temptation strong contrast two men important remember first fifteen years pontificate john paul ii controversial figure mid1990s became recognized kind universal fatherfigure writing two men also wanted stress church pope bishops priests people church responsibility carry churchs message world weve got get beyond idea pope supposed solve worlds problems thats much every catholics responsibility address worlds problems properlyformed conscience sense benedict xvi masterteacher mastercatechist pastoral dimension key pontificate speaks whether weekly audience sunday angelus meeting children whove made first holy communions interview german television speaks kind luminous clarity anyone open listening understand hes saying creates possibility decision theres role world stage pope ability perhaps unlike anyone else identify publicly major questions human agenda precisely regensburg said brief irrational faith lead wickedness loss faith reason criticism west course way think dont think god everything imagine right understand obligations obvious radical islam also obvious results observe wests loss faith reason add critique contemporary western culture john paul ii advanced ecclesia europa church europe fides et ratio faith reason george weigel distinguished senior fellow ethics public policy center washington dc holds eppcs william e simon chair catholic studies | 551 |
<p><a href="" type="internal">The Faith Angle Forum</a>&#160;is a semi-annual conference which brings together a select group of 20 nationally respected journalists with 3-5 distinguished scholars on areas of religion, politics &amp; public life.</p>
<p>“Islam: A Primer”</p>
<p>Key West, Florida</p>
<p>Speaker:</p>
<p>Dr. Roy Mottahedeh, Gurney Professor of Islamic History, Harvard University</p>
<p>Respondent:</p>
<p>Jay Tolson, Senior Writer,&#160;U.S. News &amp; World Report</p>
<p>Moderator:</p>
<p>Michael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics &amp; Public Policy Center</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>MICHAEL CROMARTIE:&#160;When I was looking for someone to give us an overview of Islam, people I consulted kept raising Dr. Mottahedeh’s name. Roy Mottahedeh is professor of Islamic history at Harvard University. He is the author of&#160;Loyalty and Leadership in an Early Islamic Society&#160;(1980) and of&#160;The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran&#160;(1985).</p>
<p>DR.&#160;ROY MOTTAHEDEH:&#160;By and large, Muslims view Islam not as a human religion but as the most perfect revelation of God that has come to mankind. All human society needed revelation, and therefore the very first human being, Adam, had to be a prophet because he couldn’t live without the guidance of revelation.</p>
<p>The word “Muslims” in the Koran often means, simply, “believers.” In some cases “Muslims” includes other “people of the Book” — Christians and Jews — as well as followers of the Koran, and sometimes it seems to mean simply followers of the Koran. Most Muslims do not believe in natural law (although the Shiites, who make up maybe 15 per cent of the Muslim population, do). But Muslims do believe that human beings have an inner nature that is religious, and because of this, Muslims through the ages have believed that there&#160;is&#160;salvation outside of Islam (though some would say this is rare). They believe that human beings can discover some of the moral law by examining this inner human nature.</p>
<p>Muslims see themselves as following the ultimate monotheism. Of course, both Islam and Christianity are, in a way, derivatives of Judaism, and they are both ways of universalizing monotheism. But Muslims believe that their monotheism is the more perfect, the ultimate monotheism.</p>
<p>Now, the next thing to understand about Islam is that Muhammad is not Christ. The self-revelation of God in Jesus is a concept that Muslims do not accept. And the Koran is not the Bible; maybe it corresponds to the Torah, but it is definitely not the Bible. Muslims believe that the entirety of the Koran is a perfect, unerring revelation of God. And just as the New Testament relates the things that Jesus said and did, there’s a great deal in Islam about the sayings and doings of Muhammad. These are the famous&#160;Hadith. It is a huge body of material — some tens of thousands of sayings are considered somewhat more authentic than 500,000 other sayings. It allows you to construct almost any kind of Islam you want. And it is somewhat like the New Testament in that it shows the perfect exemplar of the religion.</p>
<p>Another basic fact is that there is no sacramental function in Islam.&#160;Ulama&#160;are the learned people, the religious authorities; they are not priests. Every Muslim can do everything necessary for personal salvation by himself or herself. This is important to understand, because people keep saying, “Why don’t the Muslim clergy speak out for this or that?” Well, they speak out for everything! One man’s clergyman is simply another man’s kosher butcher. To understand Islam one has to set aside the perception of religion that is based on Christianity and look to a different model. Of course, there are some Muslim systems that are slightly more hierarchical than others. One is the system of the “Twelver” Shiites, the kind of clergy the Iranians have. But even they are absolutely incapable of keeping order among and within the clergy. There is great debate over who has the right to determine the meaning of scripture.</p>
<p>The Arabs make up only a minority of Muslims — 200 million out of more than a billion. And, of course, a significant number of Arabs are Christians. But although Arabs constitute less than 20 percent of Muslims, people often claim to be talking about the Muslim world when what they are really describing is the Arab world. That error will hamper any ability to conceptualize what is happening among the Muslims.</p>
<p>Like Judaism and Christianity, Islam honors Abraham as a patriarch of the faith; he is considered an ancestor of the Prophet. There are some questions common to all the Abrahamic faiths. First, does anyone have more authority than anyone else to interpret revelation? Second, are God’s commandments for the construction of the physical and moral world necessary? That is, was God in a sense constrained by logic? Or are these arrangements arbitrary? As logicians would say, is logic inherently logical, or is it in fact something that has been&#160;constructed&#160;to describe things? I think this is a fundamental difficulty of all human thought. And it turns out to be a central theological problem for Islam.</p>
<p>A third problem area is: How much, if at all, has God ceded to humans the responsibility to figure out his moral intentions for the world? Cardinal Ratzinger made this point in saying (and I may not be quoting exactly here): “It is quite within God’s power to concede no control of the moral world to mankind; it is within God’s power to instruct mankind for every action; but we accept that there is a sphere in which he has ceded to man the power to solve problems and puzzles by himself.” Judaism, Islam, and Christianity all wonder where that sphere is. A corollary is that both Judaism and Islam have a certain amount of law in their scripture — there are certainly more commandments in the Old Testament and in the Koran than in the New Testament — but this does not mean that Jews and Muslims believe all actions in this life are religiously determined. It’s simply a matter of looking at scripture to find out how to behave.</p>
<p>Christianity emphasizes the need for God’s grace in order for human beings to be saved. In Islam, righteousness is counted by intent. A famous saying is, “If you intend to do the right act, and it turns into a wrong act, it counts to your credit in God’s acceptance of your deeds.” And there is great individual responsibility to God. At least three times the Koran says, “Let nobody bear the burden of another,” meaning that you yourself have responsibility for your actions and for your salvation. There is an interesting word in Arabic that means to do good or to make something beautiful. A typical verse in the Koran on the subject reads, “Vie with one another, hastening to the way which leads to forgiveness from your Lord, and to a garden whose breadth is the heavens and the earth, prepared for the pious, those who spend in charity in times of both ease and adversity and who restrain their anger and pardon other human beings. God loves those who do what is beautiful [or, what is good].”</p>
<p>Now we come to my real discipline, which is not the theology of Islam but its history. A whole series of things had happened within the Islamic world by A.D.1000, the middle of the period in which I have specialized. Muhammad died in 632. By 1000 it is clear that the experiment of a single Muslim ruler — the caliph — has failed. And a class of religious experts — the&#160;ulama —&#160;has divided itself (though not to everybody’s satisfaction) into certain discrete schools of law. In their development of a kind of scholastic learning, the&#160;ulama&#160;represent the unity of Islam. The high scholastic tradition that existed among the&#160;ulama&#160;in the Middle Ages was centrifugal; people wrote referencing one another’s works. A famous book written refuting philosophy as it developed in the area of Baghdad was called&#160;The Collapse of the Philosophers. Then in the next century the Spanish philosopher Averroes, who was a great medieval thinker and quite influential on European scholasticism, wrote an attack on that book, calling his&#160;The Collapse of the Collapse. It is a world in which at that high scholastic level there is continuous conversation.</p>
<p>In what way are Muslims a united community otherwise? Mainly in ritual observation. Now, there is some variation in that area as well. But the prayer is fairly uniform, as is the practice of the pilgrimage. However, as for the Koran and what it means for life: nobody is quite sure. And therefore, in a sense, the Muslim world today is only one very specific instance of Koranic observance. Now, I feel that Muslims throughout the ages have a great deal of sympathy for one another and are worried about the plight of fellow Muslims. They recognize the community of people who share the same ritual observation. But beyond that, I don’t think the terms “Islamic world” and “Muslim world” are useful units of reference. There are not enough commonalities for that.</p>
<p>Anyway, by the year 1000 the&#160;ulama&#160;represent the unity of Islam. By the end of that century, around 1095, the theological schools called&#160;madrasahs&#160;have been established with huge dormitories, enormous pious endowments, great stipends, abundant supplies of ink and paper, and the like. So the scholastic system developed through patronage for its particular kind of learning.</p>
<p>By the year 1000, it had become clear that law was the queen of the sciences, the most important subject. That doesn’t mean that students in the&#160;madrasahs&#160;didn’t study algebra, astronomy, and other subjects; but always these subjects were given an Islamic wash. In studying Islamic thinkers, it is extremely difficult to distinguish a kind of Islamic patina from something that goes very deep and is really Islamic. The Koran is the first lengthy piece of Arabic prose we have, and it really establishes Arabic. There was only poetry before. Aside from letters and little bits of translation of the Gospels, Arabic prose of any length did not exist before the Koran. As a result, the language of the Koran permeates Arabic in a way that I think the language of the King James Version of the Bible permeated English in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But that is an imperfect parallel, and there is nothing recent in English that gives you any sense of the way a foundational document can permeate a language.</p>
<p>Anyway, many things considered “Islamic” have no real connection with Islam. They appear to be Islamic because that is the baseline on which their language and thought exist.</p>
<p>Although law became the queen of sciences, Islamic law is staggeringly unspecific about public matters. The Ayatollah Khamani, the president of Iran, has written a book about the poverty of Islamic political thought. I do not think that he’s right about political thought as a whole, because a lot of that discussion was carried on outside the&#160;madrasah.&#160;But in&#160;madrasah&#160;circles, it is absolutely true. The lawbooks merely say that the community should have a totally just ruler. They say it in many different ways — the ruler should be kind, he should be merciful, he should be just, he should not be swayed by the people around him. However, they leave out the whole matter of public law.</p>
<p>Khamani, who was a mullah [religious teacher] himself, blames his predecessors for the weakness of Islamic public law. There is no question that they did it by design. They were very clever people. But why? Because they decided it was too hot to handle. By the year 1000 the caliphate had disappeared, and nobody had really decided what Islamic government is. I said earlier that there are specific commands and prohibitions in the Koran. But there are at most five hundred verses of lawmaking — much less than in, for example, Leviticus.</p>
<p>Also by 1000, Sufism had developed. This is a kind of mystical Islam that emphasizes individual spiritual development. Rumi, the best-selling Islamic poet in the United States, is an example of the Sufi tradition. Sufism is an extremely appealing interpretation of Islam, and it became the most important way of spreading the religion throughout Central Asia, India, Indonesia, and elsewhere.</p>
<p>By the year 1000, people had come to realize that they were being ruled by governments that had come to power simply by deposing other regimes. The word&#160;sultan&#160;means “power,” and by the year 1000 “Mr. Power” was beginning to be the name of the ruler. These rulers had imposed themselves on states. The&#160;ulama&#160;tended to say, “Okay, as long as the rulers prevent anarchy, they are acceptable.” There’s a famous line of al-Ghazali, a great scholastic and a great Sufi, who died in 1111: “Better sixty years of oppression than one day of disorder.” So a lot of the&#160;ulama&#160;were incredibly quietistic. But they demanded certain things from the government — mainly patronage for themselves, which they got, and the defense of Islamic society against outside attacks.</p>
<p>In Egypt, the Mamluk dynasty ruled from 1250 to 1517. They were of slave origin; in fact, the whole dynasty was a group of slaves, succeeding one another as sultan. What did they do? Well, they kicked out the last Crusaders, and they defended the Muslims against the invading Mongols. They patronized learned Muslims; for example, they built&#160;madrasahs. As long as they allowed Muslims to do what they needed to do for their own salvation, such as praying and fasting, their regimes were considered more or less acceptable. There was a kind of understanding that the&#160;ulama&#160;would not endorse any specific regimes, but neither would they fight a regime as long as it allowed Muslims to do the things necessary for their own salvation.</p>
<p>Correspondingly, the Muslim learned tradition is concerned with orthopraxis — that is, behaving as a Muslim — as a standard for who is a Muslim. There’s a verse in the Koran that is translated, “Do not say to anyone who offers you peace, ‘You are not a believer.’” Muslims do not call one another “unbelievers.” Only in the direst circumstances would you charge anybody with failing to be a Muslim.</p>
<p>So there was a de facto secular sphere. People think that in Islam, religion and government are one. Yes, on a hypothetical level; people dreamed that it should be that way. But in reality it wasn’t. Almost from the beginning it was not that way.</p>
<p>Now I will try to sketch the ideological genealogy of Osama Bin Laden. In the seventh century, a law school was founded by someone named Ahmad Ibn Hanbal, whose followers are known as the Hanbalis. The founder was very much a literalist in his interpretations of scripture. He wanted to restore Islam to the purity of the faith as it was elucidated during the time of the Prophet and the Prophet’s Companions, those who were close to him during his lifetime. Hanbal’s followers were much more ready than anybody else to call people “unbeliever.” The Hanbalis and their law school, which is still the smallest law school in Islam, started to develop a kind of rigorist Islam that, in the hands of some of its interpreters, rejected, interestingly, even logic.</p>
<p>The middle of the thirteenth century brought the Mongol invasion, and the last caliph, who was only a shadowy figure, was killed. People speak about the Crusades as the great offense of the West, but the Mongols were much worse. They were pagans who conquered at least half of the Muslims around the world in their time. They had strange habits such as not washing because they believed that water was sacred and shouldn’t be put on the human body. This was deeply offensive to Muslims, for whom washing is ritually important. They were altogether terrifying, strange, pagan, anti-Muslim people who suddenly ruled over half of the Muslims.</p>
<p>In the seventeenth century the Ottoman Empire was doing pretty well. But in the eighteenth century it became glaringly obvious that European power and prosperity were far surpassing theirs. Muslim states, though not yet subjected to direct colonialism, knew that they were lagging behind the European states. Two things happened: (1) Muslims developed a longing to discover the secret of European power, and (2) movements that were excessively concerned with purity arose.</p>
<p>In the mid-eighteenth century, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab founded a rigorous, anti-Sufi system that came to be called Wahhabism. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab was ready to apply the term “unbeliever” to anybody who was not a true monotheist according to his very narrow definition. Most later followers of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab were not so ready to reject other Muslims. But from the rigorist thinkers of the eighteenth century, there was a succession of people leading up to Osama Bin Laden, who expanded the idea that people could be called non-Muslim and said that entire existing governments in Islamic countries could be declared non-Muslim.</p>
<p>Part of this trend had to do with the creation of an educated secular elite that, while intensely religious, doesn’t believe that the&#160;ulama, the traditional scholastics, are the real interpreters of scripture. They say, “To hell with them — we can go to scripture and derive its meaning ourselves. We don’t care about fourteen centuries of exegesis.” Some of them, like the militant Takfir wal Hijra movement, believe in migration to the edge of sinful society, where you purify yourself. They are very similar to the Zealots, and remember what happened to the Zealots after the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 71: they disappeared completely.</p>
<p>Part of my conclusion is, in fact, that this Islamic militancy is a self-defeating movement. It has already lost national boundaries. Its first aim had been to overthrow national governments. For instance, earlier pronouncements by Osama Bin Laden were all about overthrowing the Saudi Arabian government, but later ones rambled all over the world and talked about Hiroshima and the Palestinian situation. In a national context the militants are almost always defeated; in fact, in certain countries, like Egypt, public sentiment has already turned against them. The massacre at the Tomb of Queen Hatshapsut in Luxor in 1997 was a kind of crest of the Islamic wave. Fifty-eight foreign tourists and four Egyptians were brutally slain, and Egyptians were horrified. The Islamic militant wave had crested, and so these Muslim militants went off to the wildest, least controlled country in the world: Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Conclusions: First, the future belongs to the moderates. They do not have their voice now, partly because many of them are stifled by autocratic governments. But they are in the majority. In the long term, at least for the next twenty years, the moderates will be by and large followers of the reformist thinkers of Islam, of whom a significant number are in the Islamic diaspora. Remember how many Muslims are living in nations that are not majority Muslim.</p>
<p>A second conclusion: U.S. action against Iraq or Iran would be really ill advised. I think it would drive many Muslims for whom the Islamic militant wave has crested back into sympathy with the militants. There is a saying to the effect that the liberator — the freedom fighter — moves through the people as the fish swims through the ocean. One of our most important aims is to dry it up that ocean. It had begun to dry up before September 11. We will not help that process by attacking Muslim-majority nations.</p>
<p>My third conclusion is this: I would like to see a Fulbright plan to provide a better and more rounded education in these countries. A lot of young Muslims go through engineering school but don’t learn about how you argue about history, about subjects that by their very nature are uncertain, like the social sciences. We should sponsor and help schools, not the American University in Cairo or Beirut but schools in the vernacular languages — Arabic, Pushtu, Urdu, whatever. This would not only create the human capital that is essential for the development of these countries, but would also indigenize a certain way of conducting debate. It would give these people more understanding of their interlocutors in the West. Such a plan would also make the civil society — particularly the NGOs that exist in these countries — more powerful, in that the people who lead them would not seem to be all Western-educated people like Saadeedin Ibrahim, who after coming back from the University of Indiana had a long, distinguished career as a sociologist in Egypt. Then he was thrown in prison. The Egyptian intellectuals are not so sympathetic to somebody who is completely financed and educated by outsiders.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE:&#160;Thank you, Roy. Jay Tolson, a former editor of&#160;The Wilson Quarterly&#160;and a biographer of Walker Percy, is a senior writer at&#160;U.S. News &amp; World Report. He has written several stories on Islam and has read widely in the literature. Jay will give a brief response to Roy Mottahedeh’s remarks before we get into a general discussion.</p>
<p>JAY TOLSON:&#160;I’d like to start with another person’s story. An anthropologist named Dale Eikelman, who has spent a lot of time in Islamic places such as Morocco and Oman, tells about going to a small oasis town in Oman. This was more than twenty years ago — let’s say 1980. At that time the town was in transition. It was getting schools. It was starting to have a more developed hydroelectric system, which allowed it to expand its agricultural areas. Government buildings were spreading beyond the old perimeter marked by watchtowers. But it was still very much a traditional town defined by religious practices: the five daily prayers and the men’s weekly prayer gathering at the mosque. When Dale Eikelman didn’t get up in the morning for the first prayer, one of the village leaders came in and poked him with a gun because it was considered impolite to touch somebody directly. “Are you coming to prayers?” he asked. “No, I can’t,” said Eikelman. “I don’t pray that way.” People in the village had almost no idea of what a Christian was.</p>
<p>About ten years later Dale Eikelman came back to the same town. More kids in the village were educated. The people had television and other forms of contact with the wider world. The nephew of the village sheik came up to Eikelman and said, “The people of the village are ignorant of Islam, and they behave like animals. Sure, they pray and fast, but they can’t understand why Muslims must explain their beliefs.” Eikelman was astonished by this comment. He started looking around and seeing other changes in the village. People used to get most of their information about the wider world from the sheik, who would get the gossip and have weekly gatherings with the village elders to tell them what was going on. Now people were getting their information directly from television and other news sources. They were starting to see TV reports of events in Israel and other parts of the world.</p>
<p>Eikelman saw this as part of a wider phenomenon within the Islamic world that he has called a “reformation.” Admittedly it’s a tricky term, he said, because it suggests parallels with the sixteenth-century Christian Reformation, and there might be more differences than similarities between the two. But what is similar about these two reformations is the driving material fact of a revolution in communications and an increase in literacy. In Oman in 1975-76, twenty-two students graduated from high school. In 1987-88, well over thirteen thousand students graduated from high school, and by 1995-96, there were sixty thousand secondary-school graduates in the country. Thirty-five hundred were attending universities that had opened in Oman in 1986. This was a tremendous jump in education. That increase and the new sources of communication with the outside world were breaking down the old lines of authority, including religious authority, and enabling young Muslims to start learning about Islam on their own.</p>
<p>Now, I think Dale Eikelman joins Roy Mottahedeh in his optimism about what this will ultimately mean. Eikelman points to a number of quite influential writers, thinkers, and public figures. One example is Syria’s Muhammad Shahrur, whose&#160;The Book and the Koran: A Contemporary Reading&#160;appeared in the 1990s and sold tens of thousands of copies, not just in Syria but throughout the Middle East. He points to people like Sadiq Jalal al-‘Azm, another liberal who has debated conservative clerics. Some of them are in their home countries; others have had to leave. I think they represent the hopeful side of this possible reformation.</p>
<p>The other side, the dangerous side, is that this reformation enables more and more readers to pick up scary little books with titles like&#160;The Terror of the Grave&#160;or&#160;What Follows Death. These Islamic books give lurid descriptions of the kind of end that awaits you if you don’t follow a very rigid religious discipline. This presentation of an extremely puritanical Islam, either through literature or through videocassettes — and Bin Laden is an acknowledged genius of the cassette medium who has produced some amazing pieces that play throughout the Middle East — is circulating widely. Why? It is because of huge amounts of financial backing from Saudi Arabia, the biggest sponsor of this form of puritanical Islam.</p>
<p>What is going on in Saudi Arabia is a complicated story, but roughly speaking, it’s a kind of deal. The royal family, which from its conception has been tied up with Wahhabism, essentially buys off an aggressive, virulent religious community that sponsors things like the Muslim World League. The League is a highly influential Islamic equivalent of the United States Information Agency that tries to influence publishing houses and broadcasters throughout the Middle East.</p>
<p>Ten years ago I commissioned an article about influences for diversity within Islam. In a response to that piece, Martin Kramer, an Israeli scholar of Islam, said something like this: “Yes, all that is wonderful. Yes, you can point to Indonesia and to the Pakistanis and to these other varieties of Islam. But they are on the decline.” As was pointed out earlier, only about two hundred million of the billion or more members of the Islamic world are Arabs. But the Arab Muslims, and particularly the Wahhabi Muslims, have the microphone, and they are projecting their vision of Islam on more and more of the Islamic world. So more than ever before there is an ideal of homogeneity of Islamic practice and belief throughout the Islamic world, an ideal that has reached into the United States and Western Europe. This is a remarkably well-orchestrated, well-funded campaign. Now, I hope that you are right to be optimistic, Professor Mottahedeh, but it does seem to me that the wealthiest and best orchestrated element of radical, militant Islam is still in the ascendancy. I don’t think the elimination of Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda would spell the end of that development. This is a much broader movement than Bin Laden himself.</p>
<p>Roy Mottahedeh made the point that one of the movements that the Wahhabists are most determined to crush is Sufism. Sufism has been one of the great forces within the world of Islam, particularly in Central Asia, but an amazing number of Western scholars have almost marginalized it. Knowingly or not, they have bought the Wahhabi line that Sufis are not true Muslims, that they are guilty of&#160;bid’ah, of introducing practices and beliefs not present in early and true Islam. The Muslim World League will not hesitate to tell you that Sufis are incorrect believers. In the Koran the Prophet quotes the divine saying that there will be hundreds of versions of the faith, and in the end only God will determine which is true. It is a violation of the law itself for someone to say that you are or are not a correct believer. An incorrect believer is outside the faith. And someone outside the faith is vulnerable to any kind of attack, since a believer is within his rights to kill a non-believer. This is a great advantage if extremist Muslims want to carry out a campaign against other Muslims whom they consider heretics.</p>
<p>I don’t mean to say that I see nothing but darkness; I tend to think the moderates will eventually prevail. But I think we have to overcome a certain starry eyed view about how wonderful all religions are. There are some very evil strains within religions. This extremist strain in Islam is tremendously powerful. It has had a major influence on debates about many things in the Middle East, including Israel. I think we need to think about how extremist Islam has aggravated the tensions between Palestinians and Israelis. Anti-Israeli passion has been fostered throughout the Middle East by regimes well aware that this is the only way to siphon off discontent against their failed regimes. I think we in America are a bit naïve in accepting the explanation that the repression of Palestinians is the primary cause of those tensions.</p>
<p>MR. CROMARTIE:&#160;Thank you, Jay. Now everyone else is invited to join the conversation.</p>
<p>E. J. DIONNE, The Washington Post:&#160;I have so many questions; let me throw out a couple, Professor Mottahedeh. First, some of us were talking earlier about a strange thing that has developed: Ottoman nostalgia. We’re now looking back on the Ottoman Empire as a time of great pluralism and toleration. Is this a correct perception? A second question: How did the Arab world move so quickly from secular Arab nationalism or Arab socialism — or perhaps in Saddam’s case, Arab national socialism — to the dominance of Islamic ideologies? This has occurred over a very short period of time, probably less than fifty years.</p>
<p>DR. MOTTAHEDEH:&#160;Nostalgia about the Ottomans: yes, it’s unhistorical. Mark Cohen, a former student of mine who is now a professor at Princeton, wrote a fine book called&#160;Judaism Under Crescent and Cross.&#160;Jews were much more at home in Muslim-majority lands than in Christian-majority lands in the medieval and early modern periods. In the seventeenth century Sephardic Jews from Spain fled to Istanbul for refuge. But the toleration began breaking down, and in the nineteenth century Western liberalism moved to a point where it accepted Christians and Jews on an equal footing to a degree unmatched in the Islamic world. Still, you have to realize how gradual that was.</p>
<p>I think that part of the explanation for the speed with which Islamic ideology has come to the fore is what Jay was talking about: the education of the masses. I’m sure that in the Algerian war of independence, the average Algerian was fighting for Islamic territory against occupation by an alien power, a Christian power — namely, France. But that’s not what the leaders felt. As these people became educated, they entered the political process — and their default identity was Muslim, not Algerian, say, or Egyptian. That default identity came colossally to the fore as these people began to enter politics.</p>
<p>KENNETH WOODWARD, Newsweek:&#160;I want to mention two things I hope you will elaborate on and then ask a question. First, the question of reformation and the analogy to the Protestant Reformation:</p>
<p>I have real problems with that. Second, the idea of jihad. I recall reading about a Muslim country in Africa in which the religious authorities found the government insufficiently Muslim and therefore declared jihad against it. It seems to me that this term means war, whether it’s internal against your own people or external; it is much more vigorous than some have made it out to be.</p>
<p>My question is this. I was struck by your emphasis on law as the queen of the sciences. I am not at all optimistic about the possibilities of a moderate Islam any time soon. It seems to me that a moderate Islam can take hold only where there is an institution to support it: namely, independent schools of law, where moderation can become enshrined through deliberation by people who are respected. It seems to me that none of the legal scholars are respected by the people, because they are government appointees and as such suspect because the governments are suspect. Do you think this is a precondition for the development of any kind of moderate Islam?</p>
<p>DR. MOTTAHEDEH:&#160;Among Sunni Muslims, there is the idea that questions of law that are up in the air are decided by consensus. When smoking was introduced from the new world, there was terrific debate: was it analogous to drinking and therefore forbidden? The smokers became so numerous in the early seventeenth century that the leading sheik of the Ottoman Empire said: The majority of people now accept smoking as being different from drinking; it’s decided by consensus. Are there voices calling for a moderate understanding of the law that are respected today? Yes, absolutely. For example, Abd al-Karim Soroush of Iran achieved considerable recognition there. Two of his books have sold more than 100,000 each. Altogether, his book sales have exceeded half a million. He’s not a marginal figure.</p>
<p>FRANKLIN FOER, The New Republic:&#160;This matter of reformation seems like the key question. I know Robin Wright, John Esposito, and others have popularized the idea that Islam is in the midst of some sort of reformation, that it has a school of thinkers who believe in Islamic civil society, in some form of democracy.</p>
<p>But Martin Kramer seems to say in his book, Look, when you examine their writings a lot of these guys are Islamists. They’re not fundamentally liberal people.</p>
<p>DR. MOTTAHEDEH:&#160;I’m not sure that Marty Kramer can read Persian, so he’s dependent on translation. Most of these Islamic reformers are talking about something that we recognize in European government, a religion recognized by the state; they are not calling for the application of Islamic law to everybody. And in fact, Kamal Abul Magd, who was just appointed by the Arab League to promote dialogue, actually drafted a sample Islamic constitution. This constitution should be translated into English; it’s widely respected by the Muslim Brothers in Egypt. The kind of government it calls for is one that you would not feel uncomfortable with in Western Europe.</p>
<p>MR. WOODWARD:&#160;You mentioned something about consensus of the community. Well, where is the community? Is it a town? A village? The nation?</p>
<p>MR. TOLSON:&#160;Is it the&#160;ulama?</p>
<p>DR. MOTTAHEDEH:&#160;What I am trying to say is that there is&#160;no&#160;authoritative voice because of the lack of clergy. The most respected of the&#160;ulama&#160;in Syria, Sheik Wahbah az-Zuhayli, wrote a book on jihad — this was back in the 1980s — that says plainly: “In modern times we all live in the world of treaty, not in the world of war and Islam.” At the end of this very long and complex book he concludes: “What does jihad mean in the modern world? Jihad means the struggle against the distortion of Islam.” So it is jihad by word, by proselytizing. The majority of the&#160;ulama&#160;are of that opinion. And where do the common people stand on that issue? All over the place.</p>
<p>DAVID SHRIBMAN, The Boston Globe:&#160;Our own history takes two hundred and twenty-five years to unfold. The history of Islam goes back twenty centuries. I guess my question is, In the twentieth century span of Islamic history, how important a figure is Osama Bin Laden? Is he an original and important voice (which I think many of us can agree George W. Bush is not)? Is he a voice of enduring significance? Is he a Ronald Reagan type, or is he merely a clever but irritating figure like Newt Gingrich?</p>
<p>DR. MOTTAHEDEH:&#160;He’s not original. It’s interesting: Bin Laden’s Arabic is eloquent, but it is also archaizing. For instance, he uses a word for military encampment that has not been used in ordinary Arabic speech since maybe the eighth or early ninth century. You might say he is romantically medieval modern. He talks about the people and the government, which is an equation that doesn’t exist in premodern political discourse. But at the same time he’s not original.</p>
<p>JUDITH SHULEVITZ:&#160;You stopped your lecture basically at the nineteenth century. I’m particularly interested in the twentieth-century roots of Osama Bin Laden. Would you take us briefly through the Muslim Brothers and other such groups and show us how they have influenced Bin Laden? It seems a long way from Wahhabi to Osama.</p>
<p>DR. MOTTAHEDEH:&#160;I think the three essential twentieth-century figures are Abul Ala Maududi, who lived under the British raj and ended up in Pakistan; Sayyid Qutb; and Ayatollah Khomeini. They were not necessarily the brightest, but they had the most influence.</p>
<p>Qutb is quite an amazing character. He was an exchange student to the United States who became an essayist. He wrote a huge commentary on the Koran, an exciting document written with great enthusiasm. One of the things he took from Maududi, who is slightly older, is that in the verses in the Koran that are about judging — it says that anyone who judges unjustly shall have the most awful punishment — the verb in Arabic can mean also “to rule.” And so he transferred the meaning of these verses to rulers. When he came back from the United States he joined the Muslim Brothers, who were playing footsie with King Farouk. Then Nasser came to power. As you know, the Muslim Brothers tried to assassinate Nasser, and a lot of them were thrown in prison. Qutb was in prison for ten years and was made to watch other people being brutally tortured by the Egyptian secret police. And he himself was also tortured. He came out determined to form a cell among the Muslim Brothers of people who were going to do harm to the government. He died in 1966.</p>
<p>Maududi in India is a much deeper thinker than Qutb, and he says, Let’s face it: Islamic law says there has to be a caliphate, so we’re going to create a new caliphate. The Muslim people must form a universal Muslim nation. It must have a caliph, and the caliph should be elected. That’s quite an amazing aspect of the whole thing. Maududi is not for armed struggle. Historically, Islam is not as theocratic as people think.</p>
<p>Then, Ayatollah Khomeini. From the Shiite point of view, no jihad can be declared except by the imam, the spiritual leader of the community. The Shiites believe that the so-called Hidden Imam occulted himself in the ninth century and will reappear only at the end of time, like the return of Jesus. Khomeini just dumps the entire Shiite tradition and says that the most learned jurist is the stand-in for any ruler until the return of the Imam.</p>
<p>MR. TOLSON:&#160;I think it would help us if you said a few words about&#160;shari’a&#160;and about the fact that the modern Islamists offer an extremely rigid notion of the law. This is truly the most romantic and utopian aspect of their thinking, that you can go back and extract from a literal but always selective reading of the Koran all the principles you need to create and run a just society. The tradition within Shiism is that, in fact, the law is open to further discussion and can still be applied to different situations, but that interpretation itself closed around A.D. 1000. A lot of the modernists say that this restricted body of laws that constitute&#160;shari’a&#160;is sufficient to create an ideal society.</p>
<p>DR. MOTTAHEDEH:&#160;Shari’a&#160;really means “the path.” It is the perfect path for human conduct as understood in the mind of God. Turning that into a political platform is the fantasy of the modern Islamists. They start saying that&#160;shari’a&#160;covers everything and is very clear and immutable.</p>
<p>One party in Egypt used to say, “Our constitution is the Koran.” Excuse me? What could that possibly mean? Our&#160;scripture&#160;is the Koran! It’s not a constitution! The constitution is a way of deciding differences.</p>
<p>DAN MORGAN, The Washington Post:&#160;Going back to the question of reformation: Would a better word be “awakening”? That seems to be a broader term that can apply to a whole range of issues, not just religious ones. There was a wonderful piece in the&#160;New York Times&#160;magazine about a street in Peshawar. These are the people who work twelve hours a day for $1.25 an hour. There’s deep economic oppression in their lives, and no hope. The only place where they feel they have a voice is the mosque. Would you address that in terms of a less optimistic scenario than Jay was suggesting?</p>
<p>DR. MOTTAHEDEH:&#160;Yes, recent developments do constitute an awakening. What I said before I really believe. The Islamist movements have been the introduction to politics for enormous numbers of people. They might have been in village politics before, but they expected the landlord and the local prayer leader to speak on their behalf in the larger world. These representatives spoke for them to more powerful people, who spoke to the central government. Now these people are drawn into the political process more directly, or at least they want to be. Let me say parenthetically that I think the sentiment for popular sovereignty in most Islamic countries — maybe not Saudi Arabia — is very strong, but sentiment for individual liberties is not developed.</p>
<p>A lot of the Islamist voices actually act upon the obligation of charity to the poor, organization, education, and so on. And it’s no surprise that the guys who have the books to distribute and the organization to do these things for the people get the inside track. The big question is, how can you move beyond a very simplistic idea like “the Koran is our constitution” and bring these people into a process that includes popular sovereignty?</p>
<p>PAUL RICHTER, The Los Angeles Times:&#160;The economic side is one we haven’t talked about.</p>
<p>DR. MOTTAHEDEH:&#160;The economic side is part of the appeal of the Islamists. They get help to disaster victims. When there was an earthquake in Cairo, the Islamists got there first! This was noticed by everyone. They are better organized.</p>
<p>DAVID BROOKS, The Weekly Standard:&#160;You said that in the eighteenth century, acknowledgment of European political and economic superiority generated this bifurcated reaction, with some people seeking secrets of success, others seeking purity of religion. Are you implying that this is still a central dynamic in Islamic reaction? Also, is there a difference in that dynamic between Arab Muslims and non-Arab Muslims? It seems stronger in Arab Muslims.</p>
<p>DR. MOTTAHEDEH:&#160;One of the factors working to the detriment of the Arab people is the conflict between pan-Arabism and national identity. I think building inside the national unit really is the way ahead at this point. Pan-Arabism has created immense amounts of sentiment with almost nothing to show for it. I just don’t think it has proven its worth. Other Muslim-majority societies do have a form of democracy; there are elections that sometimes bring surprising people to power. Egyptians have no consciousness of their pre-Islamic past, but Iran has never lost that consciousness. The people kept their language. For all its Islamic rhetoric, Iran has turned into a very nationalistic operation.</p>
<p>Iran is a case of a country that went right into its Islamist experience and did so by its own choice.</p>
<p>But the leaders discovered that they didn’t have any idea what an Islamist government is. The Iranian constitution is basically the constitution of the Fifth Republic with a lot of passionate Islamic language and various references to the sovereignty belonging either to the people or to God — it contradicts itself about that. It gives certain powers of veto to the clerics, which of course is what all the struggle is about now. But it’s actually not a bad constitution. It just shows that in the face of reality, when you start establishing your own Islamic society, you realize that there is no Islamic law to cover many basic aspects.</p>
<p>At the beginning, Khomeini had been dead-against the enfranchisement of women. In 1964, when the&#160;Shah enfranchised women, Khomeini was famously against it. But he didn’t dare disenfranchise women when he came to power, because, for one thing, women were an important part of his movement. They were an extremely important part of the millions of people who came on the street. And secondly, even some women who are members of his own family wanted to run for parliament!</p>
<p>Khomeini adopted what is a minority point of view among Sunnis, that Islam was against birth control, and the population zoomed up much faster than Iranians ever expected. The minute Khomeini died, the mullahs got together and said, “Oh, we looked at scripture carefully, and it’s quite clear that Islam is in favor of birth control.” Similarly, they first said, “We’re going to adopt the classical tax system of the jurists of the ninth century.” But within months after the foundation of the Islamic Republic, they went back to the tax system that existed under the Shah. The other one was unworkable. This Islamist experiment need not end in a radical, pre-modern society. I believe that of all the societies in the Middle East, Iran will be the one where in the long run the overwhelming mass of people believe in democracy.</p>
<p>MR. BROOKS:&#160;How strongly are the Islamists driven by resentment that the West, including Israel, is much more powerful?</p>
<p>DR. MOTTAHEDEH:&#160;It’s often said that there’s resentment of Israel for being richer. I don’t see that. But they do resent Israel for being more powerful. First of all, I want to say that the second intifada has caused a resurgence of resentment among all Muslims. Practically every major Muslim singer has made a song about the boy who was caught on TV being killed by Israeli gunfire. Through media coverage the second intifada has had an incredible emotional impact. It has contributed to Osama Bin Laden’s success. As for power: a lot of people realize that having a scientific establishment that contributes research and progress to a society is not a matter of just buying the machines; you must create your own technocrats.</p>
<p>MR. FOER:&#160;I was wondering if you could talk about Muslim anti-Semitism. It’s striking that in the course of just a hundred years, maybe less, Muslim societies went from being markedly tolerant toward Jews to being markedly intolerant toward them. In Christianity, from the start, anti-Semitism was prevalent because the religion was defined in opposition to Judaism. Did anything similar to that exist within Islam?</p>
<p>DR. MOTTAHEDEH:&#160;In classical Islamic law there are three absolute differences of status: Muslim and non-Muslim, male and female, and — in former times — free and slave. The law recognizes those absolute differences; it doesn’t deprive any of these groups of the protection of the law, but it does uphold those distinctions. For instance, twice as many female witnesses as male witnesses are required for some common kinds of court proceedings. And the same applies to non-Muslims. The Jews in some places were hated more than the Christians. In French North Africa more than in eastern Arab lands, I think there were people who despised the Jews. The Nazis encouraged this sentiment, of course, and claimed that they were the true allies of the Arabs.</p>
<p>MR. FOER:&#160;So would it be fair to say that the virulent twentieth century anti-Semitism that you see in a lot of Arab countries is essentially a Western import?</p>
<p>DR. MOTTAHEDEH:&#160;Oh yes! It’s been documented as such.</p>
<p>PAUL WEST, The Baltimore Sun:&#160;I wonder if you could add to your primer a brief chapter on the afterlife and martyrdom and the extent to which those concepts are or are not central. One thing that made me think about that was the comment made earlier that the swift U.S.-led operation in Afghanistan was having an impact on public opinion in the Arab street. I think I’m quoting Professor Huntington correctly — he said, “Nobody wants to get on the bandwagon of a loser.”</p>
<p>DR. MOTTAHEDEH:&#160;First of all, the Arab street is not quite so easy to gauge. About twenty minutes after the September 11 attack, CNN called me up and asked, “How are the Muslim masses reacting?” From my study in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I have no way of knowing that!</p>
<p>About the afterlife: yes, Muslims believe in the afterlife. The Koran speaks about it. But I think the connection between this and the suicide attacks has been greatly exaggerated. It’s true that fighting in jihad is supposed to erase the possibility of being “killed” in any ordinary sense. Unlike any other Muslim, who has to be washed ceremonially before being buried, the soldier is buried in the clothes he wore when he was killed. The idea is that at the resurrection he stands before God with these clothes to prove his sacrifice. But that’s a different thing from suicide attacks. An interesting thing is that most of the suicide bombers have been concerned almost exclusively with their own political community. There was an interview with would be suicide attackers in which they were asked if they would do this for any cause outside of Palestine, and most of them said, “No.”</p>
<p>Suicide is forbidden in Islam very strongly, so there has been a dispute among the&#160;ulama. The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia way back in April [2001] said that suicide bombing is wrong. Nevertheless, Osama Bin Laden develops the theory that we have reached the stage in which not only are the majority of Muslims not really Muslims, but true Muslims are in hand-to-hand combat with all of them. The Koran says that if somebody is assailing you, you have a right to fight back, and Bin Laden said that this is the condition of every true Muslim today.</p>
<p>DUNCAN MOON, NPR:&#160;Isn’t this something that will continue to grow as long as there is a growing group of young, angry, displaced men?</p>
<p>DR. MOTTAHEDEH:&#160;There is a difference between the Palestinian case and others. I am not talking about the Palestinian case. With, say, Egyptians in Saudi Arabia, I think that these young men are more recruits for the Islamist vision of bringing about a just society by creating Islamic government in their own country than they are fodder for some kind of militancy. Muslim Brothers, in my opinion, would settle for being part of the political system. It’s a great mistake that we allow the Egyptian government to keep excluding them. They do get elected to parliament by making alliances with other parties. I don’t think — and this is from a fair amount of discussion with Muslim Brothers — don’t think they believe they should immediately take over and create a monolithic Islamic state. They would like to change the laws to&#160;shari’a, but they are trying to back away from the violent stuff. Of course, there are always fringe people.</p>
<p>JEFFREY GOLDBERG, The New Yorker:&#160;Is the Islamic division between the Dar al-Harb and the Dar al-Islam, the House of War and the House of Islam, still considered relevant? If you listen to different clerics, those who lean on the moderate side say, This is an archaic notion; we don’t see the world so black and white. But obviously there are still many who do see it like that.</p>
<p>DR. MOTTAHEDEH:&#160;The concept, in my view — and I think a lot of scholars would agree with me — of Islam or the sword was almost completely directed at the pagan government in Arabia. And then this amazing thing called the Islamic conquest, or Arab conquest, happened. The conquest really deepened Islam. It also really deepened the jihad concept and the idea that victory in war was a good way to spread Islam. There are anti-jihad voices, but jihad nevertheless remains in the law. In some law schools in the classic period, only defensive jihad is praised. But offensive jihad is praised in a fair number of sources — no whitewashing it.</p>
<p>The Arabs suffered their first major defeats in A.D. 720-30, and there began to be an attempt to stabilize the borders and have trade back and forth. So the lawyers began to codify the idea that, yes, there is the abode of Islam and the abode of war, but there is also the abode of treaty, because they wanted treaties with the nations with whom they traded. This idea means something aggressive for militant Muslims. For liberal Muslims, the abode of Islam means, at most, the Muslim-majority countries in contrast to non-Muslim-majority countries.</p>
<p>MR. GOLDBERG:&#160;Let’s say Islamists somehow managed to take over Egypt or Algeria. Would they revert to that “Islam or the sword” approach? Six or eight months ago the Mufti of Jerusalem, who’s sponsored by the Palestinian Authority, gave a sermon in which he talked about the tragedy of Andalucia, which Bin Laden talks about also. These guys seem to want to get back what Islam had centuries ago. I’m wondering how deeply felt those ideas are.</p>
<p>DR. MOTTAHEDEH:&#160;The loss of Andalucia in the fifteenth century is felt by Osama Bin Laden and a few other romantics. The average Muslim is not worried about it. Iran is a pure Islamist experiment, and Iran is now knocking at the door of the international community, begging to come in.</p>
<p>HILLEL FRADKIN, Ethics &amp; Public Policy Center:&#160;In Muslim populations around the world, on the one hand there seems to be a kind of opening for people away from traditional life and away from having to rely on the authorities for their information. But this also means they have access to the extremely abstract ideas and fantasies of the radical Muslims. I want to try to contrast that with the healthy, pre-modern condition of Islam, where there was a sensible, moderate view. The various legal schools had their authority within their proper sphere. They might speak about governmental matters, but if they were allowed to regulate ordinary life they didn’t really intrude themselves into the political system. That deal broke down. Can a similar deal be constructed?</p>
<p>DR. MOTTAHEDEH:&#160;We need the Islamic New Deal!</p>
<p>MR. FRADKIN:&#160;It is now the situation as you described it: the lack of any functional politics fuels the Wahhabists. How could that healthy moderation be reconstructed?</p>
<p>DR. MOTTAHEDEH:&#160;By allowing real public debate. If the United States will try to make greater freedom of expression a part of what comes out of this war, it will let off a lot of steam and promote vigorous debate. Muslims in non-Muslim societies realize that if they want to be treated well in those societies, then non-Muslims have to be treated well in Muslim societies. Some of these members of the Muslim disapora have written books about such matters, and their books should be circulated. Real discussion will do more towards creating a healthy moderation than anything else. I really believe that. It would eventually lead, I think, not exactly to the high wall between religion and politics that we have in America, but to something more like the post-Lockean idea of tolerance in England, with an established church.</p>
<p>MR. TOLSON:&#160;I think there is one thing that America can and should do, particularly through some of our radio networks and Voice of America. We should give the mike to some of these alternative voices in Islam, to some of these Sufis, to traditional jurists who can talk about the juristic traditions, to people who can discuss the accomplishments of the Ottoman Empire, when there were real compromises worked out between public law and&#160;shari’a. I think we should encourage indigenous forms of that kind of discussion.</p>
<p>MR. FRADKIN:&#160;But we’d probably have to take the initiative on that, because many of those governments would be hostile to dissidents. Nina Easton: Some say that the key to pluralism in the Arab-Muslim world is increasing the involvement of women. Would you reflect on what Islam says about women? There is so much contradictory information on this, generally depending on the political agenda of whoever is doing the analyzing.</p>
<p>DR. MOTTAHEDEH:&#160;There is no question that traditionally Muslim males are the first-class citizens, and that women, non-Muslims, and slaves are second-class citizens, to different degrees in different areas. In some Muslim societies women were enfranchised in the 1930s, earlier than in several European countries. Women want to play a role in politics, and they are doing so. One Egyptian woman who is a friend of mine has been in parliament and is the leader of her party. In Iran, there are more educated women than men. Women make up over half of the university population.</p>
<p>Women play an enormous role in the legislature. There are theorists who have embraced the full feminist argument, though this has not affected the masses.</p>
<p>I think there is hope for young women in the Islamic world who have heard about feminism and will demand things. But for a lot of the common people, a breakdown of family structure is the thing they are most worried about, and they believe that changing the status of women would cause that. It is unquestionably one of those areas in which the Muslim world is dragging behind. Change is occurring, but very slowly.</p> | false | 1 | faith angle forum160is semiannual conference brings together select group 20 nationally respected journalists 35 distinguished scholars areas religion politics amp public life islam primer key west florida speaker dr roy mottahedeh gurney professor islamic history harvard university respondent jay tolson senior writer160us news amp world report moderator michael cromartie vice president ethics amp public policy center 160 michael cromartie160when looking someone give us overview islam people consulted kept raising dr mottahedehs name roy mottahedeh professor islamic history harvard university author of160loyalty leadership early islamic society1601980 of160the mantle prophet religion politics iran1601985 dr160roy mottahedeh160by large muslims view islam human religion perfect revelation god come mankind human society needed revelation therefore first human adam prophet couldnt live without guidance revelation word muslims koran often means simply believers cases muslims includes people book christians jews well followers koran sometimes seems mean simply followers koran muslims believe natural law although shiites make maybe 15 per cent muslim population muslims believe human beings inner nature religious muslims ages believed there160is160salvation outside islam though would say rare believe human beings discover moral law examining inner human nature muslims see following ultimate monotheism course islam christianity way derivatives judaism ways universalizing monotheism muslims believe monotheism perfect ultimate monotheism next thing understand islam muhammad christ selfrevelation god jesus concept muslims accept koran bible maybe corresponds torah definitely bible muslims believe entirety koran perfect unerring revelation god new testament relates things jesus said theres great deal islam sayings doings muhammad famous160hadith huge body material tens thousands sayings considered somewhat authentic 500000 sayings allows construct almost kind islam want somewhat like new testament shows perfect exemplar religion another basic fact sacramental function islam160ulama160are learned people religious authorities priests every muslim everything necessary personal salvation important understand people keep saying dont muslim clergy speak well speak everything one mans clergyman simply another mans kosher butcher understand islam one set aside perception religion based christianity look different model course muslim systems slightly hierarchical others one system twelver shiites kind clergy iranians even absolutely incapable keeping order among within clergy great debate right determine meaning scripture arabs make minority muslims 200 million billion course significant number arabs christians although arabs constitute less 20 percent muslims people often claim talking muslim world really describing arab world error hamper ability conceptualize happening among muslims like judaism christianity islam honors abraham patriarch faith considered ancestor prophet questions common abrahamic faiths first anyone authority anyone else interpret revelation second gods commandments construction physical moral world necessary god sense constrained logic arrangements arbitrary logicians would say logic inherently logical fact something been160constructed160to describe things think fundamental difficulty human thought turns central theological problem islam third problem area much god ceded humans responsibility figure moral intentions world cardinal ratzinger made point saying may quoting exactly quite within gods power concede control moral world mankind within gods power instruct mankind every action accept sphere ceded man power solve problems puzzles judaism islam christianity wonder sphere corollary judaism islam certain amount law scripture certainly commandments old testament koran new testament mean jews muslims believe actions life religiously determined simply matter looking scripture find behave christianity emphasizes need gods grace order human beings saved islam righteousness counted intent famous saying intend right act turns wrong act counts credit gods acceptance deeds great individual responsibility god least three times koran says let nobody bear burden another meaning responsibility actions salvation interesting word arabic means good make something beautiful typical verse koran subject reads vie one another hastening way leads forgiveness lord garden whose breadth heavens earth prepared pious spend charity times ease adversity restrain anger pardon human beings god loves beautiful good come real discipline theology islam history whole series things happened within islamic world ad1000 middle period specialized muhammad died 632 1000 clear experiment single muslim ruler caliph failed class religious experts the160ulama 160has divided though everybodys satisfaction certain discrete schools law development kind scholastic learning the160ulama160represent unity islam high scholastic tradition existed among the160ulama160in middle ages centrifugal people wrote referencing one anothers works famous book written refuting philosophy developed area baghdad called160the collapse philosophers next century spanish philosopher averroes great medieval thinker quite influential european scholasticism wrote attack book calling his160the collapse collapse world high scholastic level continuous conversation way muslims united community otherwise mainly ritual observation variation area well prayer fairly uniform practice pilgrimage however koran means life nobody quite sure therefore sense muslim world today one specific instance koranic observance feel muslims throughout ages great deal sympathy one another worried plight fellow muslims recognize community people share ritual observation beyond dont think terms islamic world muslim world useful units reference enough commonalities anyway year 1000 the160ulama160represent unity islam end century around 1095 theological schools called160madrasahs160have established huge dormitories enormous pious endowments great stipends abundant supplies ink paper like scholastic system developed patronage particular kind learning year 1000 become clear law queen sciences important subject doesnt mean students the160madrasahs160didnt study algebra astronomy subjects always subjects given islamic wash studying islamic thinkers extremely difficult distinguish kind islamic patina something goes deep really islamic koran first lengthy piece arabic prose really establishes arabic poetry aside letters little bits translation gospels arabic prose length exist koran result language koran permeates arabic way think language king james version bible permeated english seventeenth eighteenth centuries imperfect parallel nothing recent english gives sense way foundational document permeate language anyway many things considered islamic real connection islam appear islamic baseline language thought exist although law became queen sciences islamic law staggeringly unspecific public matters ayatollah khamani president iran written book poverty islamic political thought think hes right political thought whole lot discussion carried outside the160madrasah160but in160madrasah160circles absolutely true lawbooks merely say community totally ruler say many different ways ruler kind merciful swayed people around however leave whole matter public law khamani mullah religious teacher blames predecessors weakness islamic public law question design clever people decided hot handle year 1000 caliphate disappeared nobody really decided islamic government said earlier specific commands prohibitions koran five hundred verses lawmaking much less example leviticus also 1000 sufism developed kind mystical islam emphasizes individual spiritual development rumi bestselling islamic poet united states example sufi tradition sufism extremely appealing interpretation islam became important way spreading religion throughout central asia india indonesia elsewhere year 1000 people come realize ruled governments come power simply deposing regimes word160sultan160means power year 1000 mr power beginning name ruler rulers imposed states the160ulama160tended say okay long rulers prevent anarchy acceptable theres famous line alghazali great scholastic great sufi died 1111 better sixty years oppression one day disorder lot the160ulama160were incredibly quietistic demanded certain things government mainly patronage got defense islamic society outside attacks egypt mamluk dynasty ruled 1250 1517 slave origin fact whole dynasty group slaves succeeding one another sultan well kicked last crusaders defended muslims invading mongols patronized learned muslims example built160madrasahs long allowed muslims needed salvation praying fasting regimes considered less acceptable kind understanding the160ulama160would endorse specific regimes neither would fight regime long allowed muslims things necessary salvation correspondingly muslim learned tradition concerned orthopraxis behaving muslim standard muslim theres verse koran translated say anyone offers peace believer muslims call one another unbelievers direst circumstances would charge anybody failing muslim de facto secular sphere people think islam religion government one yes hypothetical level people dreamed way reality wasnt almost beginning way try sketch ideological genealogy osama bin laden seventh century law school founded someone named ahmad ibn hanbal whose followers known hanbalis founder much literalist interpretations scripture wanted restore islam purity faith elucidated time prophet prophets companions close lifetime hanbals followers much ready anybody else call people unbeliever hanbalis law school still smallest law school islam started develop kind rigorist islam hands interpreters rejected interestingly even logic middle thirteenth century brought mongol invasion last caliph shadowy figure killed people speak crusades great offense west mongols much worse pagans conquered least half muslims around world time strange habits washing believed water sacred shouldnt put human body deeply offensive muslims washing ritually important altogether terrifying strange pagan antimuslim people suddenly ruled half muslims seventeenth century ottoman empire pretty well eighteenth century became glaringly obvious european power prosperity far surpassing muslim states though yet subjected direct colonialism knew lagging behind european states two things happened 1 muslims developed longing discover secret european power 2 movements excessively concerned purity arose mideighteenth century ibn abd alwahhab founded rigorous antisufi system came called wahhabism ibn abd alwahhab ready apply term unbeliever anybody true monotheist according narrow definition later followers ibn abd alwahhab ready reject muslims rigorist thinkers eighteenth century succession people leading osama bin laden expanded idea people could called nonmuslim said entire existing governments islamic countries could declared nonmuslim part trend creation educated secular elite intensely religious doesnt believe the160ulama traditional scholastics real interpreters scripture say hell go scripture derive meaning dont care fourteen centuries exegesis like militant takfir wal hijra movement believe migration edge sinful society purify similar zealots remember happened zealots destruction temple ad 71 disappeared completely part conclusion fact islamic militancy selfdefeating movement already lost national boundaries first aim overthrow national governments instance earlier pronouncements osama bin laden overthrowing saudi arabian government later ones rambled world talked hiroshima palestinian situation national context militants almost always defeated fact certain countries like egypt public sentiment already turned massacre tomb queen hatshapsut luxor 1997 kind crest islamic wave fiftyeight foreign tourists four egyptians brutally slain egyptians horrified islamic militant wave crested muslim militants went wildest least controlled country world afghanistan conclusions first future belongs moderates voice partly many stifled autocratic governments majority long term least next twenty years moderates large followers reformist thinkers islam significant number islamic diaspora remember many muslims living nations majority muslim second conclusion us action iraq iran would really ill advised think would drive many muslims islamic militant wave crested back sympathy militants saying effect liberator freedom fighter moves people fish swims ocean one important aims dry ocean begun dry september 11 help process attacking muslimmajority nations third conclusion would like see fulbright plan provide better rounded education countries lot young muslims go engineering school dont learn argue history subjects nature uncertain like social sciences sponsor help schools american university cairo beirut schools vernacular languages arabic pushtu urdu whatever would create human capital essential development countries would also indigenize certain way conducting debate would give people understanding interlocutors west plan would also make civil society particularly ngos exist countries powerful people lead would seem westerneducated people like saadeedin ibrahim coming back university indiana long distinguished career sociologist egypt thrown prison egyptian intellectuals sympathetic somebody completely financed educated outsiders mr cromartie160thank roy jay tolson former editor of160the wilson quarterly160and biographer walker percy senior writer at160us news amp world report written several stories islam read widely literature jay give brief response roy mottahedehs remarks get general discussion jay tolson160id like start another persons story anthropologist named dale eikelman spent lot time islamic places morocco oman tells going small oasis town oman twenty years ago lets say 1980 time town transition getting schools starting developed hydroelectric system allowed expand agricultural areas government buildings spreading beyond old perimeter marked watchtowers still much traditional town defined religious practices five daily prayers mens weekly prayer gathering mosque dale eikelman didnt get morning first prayer one village leaders came poked gun considered impolite touch somebody directly coming prayers asked cant said eikelman dont pray way people village almost idea christian ten years later dale eikelman came back town kids village educated people television forms contact wider world nephew village sheik came eikelman said people village ignorant islam behave like animals sure pray fast cant understand muslims must explain beliefs eikelman astonished comment started looking around seeing changes village people used get information wider world sheik would get gossip weekly gatherings village elders tell going people getting information directly television news sources starting see tv reports events israel parts world eikelman saw part wider phenomenon within islamic world called reformation admittedly tricky term said suggests parallels sixteenthcentury christian reformation might differences similarities two similar two reformations driving material fact revolution communications increase literacy oman 197576 twentytwo students graduated high school 198788 well thirteen thousand students graduated high school 199596 sixty thousand secondaryschool graduates country thirtyfive hundred attending universities opened oman 1986 tremendous jump education increase new sources communication outside world breaking old lines authority including religious authority enabling young muslims start learning islam think dale eikelman joins roy mottahedeh optimism ultimately mean eikelman points number quite influential writers thinkers public figures one example syrias muhammad shahrur whose160the book koran contemporary reading160appeared 1990s sold tens thousands copies syria throughout middle east points people like sadiq jalal alazm another liberal debated conservative clerics home countries others leave think represent hopeful side possible reformation side dangerous side reformation enables readers pick scary little books titles like160the terror grave160or160what follows death islamic books give lurid descriptions kind end awaits dont follow rigid religious discipline presentation extremely puritanical islam either literature videocassettes bin laden acknowledged genius cassette medium produced amazing pieces play throughout middle east circulating widely huge amounts financial backing saudi arabia biggest sponsor form puritanical islam going saudi arabia complicated story roughly speaking kind deal royal family conception tied wahhabism essentially buys aggressive virulent religious community sponsors things like muslim world league league highly influential islamic equivalent united states information agency tries influence publishing houses broadcasters throughout middle east ten years ago commissioned article influences diversity within islam response piece martin kramer israeli scholar islam said something like yes wonderful yes point indonesia pakistanis varieties islam decline pointed earlier two hundred million billion members islamic world arabs arab muslims particularly wahhabi muslims microphone projecting vision islam islamic world ever ideal homogeneity islamic practice belief throughout islamic world ideal reached united states western europe remarkably wellorchestrated wellfunded campaign hope right optimistic professor mottahedeh seem wealthiest best orchestrated element radical militant islam still ascendancy dont think elimination osama bin laden al qaeda would spell end development much broader movement bin laden roy mottahedeh made point one movements wahhabists determined crush sufism sufism one great forces within world islam particularly central asia amazing number western scholars almost marginalized knowingly bought wahhabi line sufis true muslims guilty of160bidah introducing practices beliefs present early true islam muslim world league hesitate tell sufis incorrect believers koran prophet quotes divine saying hundreds versions faith end god determine true violation law someone say correct believer incorrect believer outside faith someone outside faith vulnerable kind attack since believer within rights kill nonbeliever great advantage extremist muslims want carry campaign muslims consider heretics dont mean say see nothing darkness tend think moderates eventually prevail think overcome certain starry eyed view wonderful religions evil strains within religions extremist strain islam tremendously powerful major influence debates many things middle east including israel think need think extremist islam aggravated tensions palestinians israelis antiisraeli passion fostered throughout middle east regimes well aware way siphon discontent failed regimes think america bit naïve accepting explanation repression palestinians primary cause tensions mr cromartie160thank jay everyone else invited join conversation e j dionne washington post160i many questions let throw couple professor mottahedeh first us talking earlier strange thing developed ottoman nostalgia looking back ottoman empire time great pluralism toleration correct perception second question arab world move quickly secular arab nationalism arab socialism perhaps saddams case arab national socialism dominance islamic ideologies occurred short period time probably less fifty years dr mottahedeh160nostalgia ottomans yes unhistorical mark cohen former student mine professor princeton wrote fine book called160judaism crescent cross160jews much home muslimmajority lands christianmajority lands medieval early modern periods seventeenth century sephardic jews spain fled istanbul refuge toleration began breaking nineteenth century western liberalism moved point accepted christians jews equal footing degree unmatched islamic world still realize gradual think part explanation speed islamic ideology come fore jay talking education masses im sure algerian war independence average algerian fighting islamic territory occupation alien power christian power namely france thats leaders felt people became educated entered political process default identity muslim algerian say egyptian default identity came colossally fore people began enter politics kenneth woodward newsweek160i want mention two things hope elaborate ask question first question reformation analogy protestant reformation real problems second idea jihad recall reading muslim country africa religious authorities found government insufficiently muslim therefore declared jihad seems term means war whether internal people external much vigorous made question struck emphasis law queen sciences optimistic possibilities moderate islam time soon seems moderate islam take hold institution support namely independent schools law moderation become enshrined deliberation people respected seems none legal scholars respected people government appointees suspect governments suspect think precondition development kind moderate islam dr mottahedeh160among sunni muslims idea questions law air decided consensus smoking introduced new world terrific debate analogous drinking therefore forbidden smokers became numerous early seventeenth century leading sheik ottoman empire said majority people accept smoking different drinking decided consensus voices calling moderate understanding law respected today yes absolutely example abd alkarim soroush iran achieved considerable recognition two books sold 100000 altogether book sales exceeded half million hes marginal figure franklin foer new republic160this matter reformation seems like key question know robin wright john esposito others popularized idea islam midst sort reformation school thinkers believe islamic civil society form democracy martin kramer seems say book look examine writings lot guys islamists theyre fundamentally liberal people dr mottahedeh160im sure marty kramer read persian hes dependent translation islamic reformers talking something recognize european government religion recognized state calling application islamic law everybody fact kamal abul magd appointed arab league promote dialogue actually drafted sample islamic constitution constitution translated english widely respected muslim brothers egypt kind government calls one would feel uncomfortable western europe mr woodward160you mentioned something consensus community well community town village nation mr tolson160is the160ulama dr mottahedeh160what trying say is160no160authoritative voice lack clergy respected the160ulama160in syria sheik wahbah azzuhayli wrote book jihad back 1980s says plainly modern times live world treaty world war islam end long complex book concludes jihad mean modern world jihad means struggle distortion islam jihad word proselytizing majority the160ulama160are opinion common people stand issue place david shribman boston globe160our history takes two hundred twentyfive years unfold history islam goes back twenty centuries guess question twentieth century span islamic history important figure osama bin laden original important voice think many us agree george w bush voice enduring significance ronald reagan type merely clever irritating figure like newt gingrich dr mottahedeh160hes original interesting bin ladens arabic eloquent also archaizing instance uses word military encampment used ordinary arabic speech since maybe eighth early ninth century might say romantically medieval modern talks people government equation doesnt exist premodern political discourse time hes original judith shulevitz160you stopped lecture basically nineteenth century im particularly interested twentiethcentury roots osama bin laden would take us briefly muslim brothers groups show us influenced bin laden seems long way wahhabi osama dr mottahedeh160i think three essential twentiethcentury figures abul ala maududi lived british raj ended pakistan sayyid qutb ayatollah khomeini necessarily brightest influence qutb quite amazing character exchange student united states became essayist wrote huge commentary koran exciting document written great enthusiasm one things took maududi slightly older verses koran judging says anyone judges unjustly shall awful punishment verb arabic mean also rule transferred meaning verses rulers came back united states joined muslim brothers playing footsie king farouk nasser came power know muslim brothers tried assassinate nasser lot thrown prison qutb prison ten years made watch people brutally tortured egyptian secret police also tortured came determined form cell among muslim brothers people going harm government died 1966 maududi india much deeper thinker qutb says lets face islamic law says caliphate going create new caliphate muslim people must form universal muslim nation must caliph caliph elected thats quite amazing aspect whole thing maududi armed struggle historically islam theocratic people think ayatollah khomeini shiite point view jihad declared except imam spiritual leader community shiites believe socalled hidden imam occulted ninth century reappear end time like return jesus khomeini dumps entire shiite tradition says learned jurist standin ruler return imam mr tolson160i think would help us said words about160sharia160and fact modern islamists offer extremely rigid notion law truly romantic utopian aspect thinking go back extract literal always selective reading koran principles need create run society tradition within shiism fact law open discussion still applied different situations interpretation closed around ad 1000 lot modernists say restricted body laws constitute160sharia160is sufficient create ideal society dr mottahedeh160sharia160really means path perfect path human conduct understood mind god turning political platform fantasy modern islamists start saying that160sharia160covers everything clear immutable one party egypt used say constitution koran excuse could possibly mean our160scripture160is koran constitution constitution way deciding differences dan morgan washington post160going back question reformation would better word awakening seems broader term apply whole range issues religious ones wonderful piece the160new york times160magazine street peshawar people work twelve hours day 125 hour theres deep economic oppression lives hope place feel voice mosque would address terms less optimistic scenario jay suggesting dr mottahedeh160yes recent developments constitute awakening said really believe islamist movements introduction politics enormous numbers people might village politics expected landlord local prayer leader speak behalf larger world representatives spoke powerful people spoke central government people drawn political process directly least want let say parenthetically think sentiment popular sovereignty islamic countries maybe saudi arabia strong sentiment individual liberties developed lot islamist voices actually act upon obligation charity poor organization education surprise guys books distribute organization things people get inside track big question move beyond simplistic idea like koran constitution bring people process includes popular sovereignty paul richter los angeles times160the economic side one havent talked dr mottahedeh160the economic side part appeal islamists get help disaster victims earthquake cairo islamists got first noticed everyone better organized david brooks weekly standard160you said eighteenth century acknowledgment european political economic superiority generated bifurcated reaction people seeking secrets success others seeking purity religion implying still central dynamic islamic reaction also difference dynamic arab muslims nonarab muslims seems stronger arab muslims dr mottahedeh160one factors working detriment arab people conflict panarabism national identity think building inside national unit really way ahead point panarabism created immense amounts sentiment almost nothing show dont think proven worth muslimmajority societies form democracy elections sometimes bring surprising people power egyptians consciousness preislamic past iran never lost consciousness people kept language islamic rhetoric iran turned nationalistic operation iran case country went right islamist experience choice leaders discovered didnt idea islamist government iranian constitution basically constitution fifth republic lot passionate islamic language various references sovereignty belonging either people god contradicts gives certain powers veto clerics course struggle actually bad constitution shows face reality start establishing islamic society realize islamic law cover many basic aspects beginning khomeini deadagainst enfranchisement women 1964 the160shah enfranchised women khomeini famously didnt dare disenfranchise women came power one thing women important part movement extremely important part millions people came street secondly even women members family wanted run parliament khomeini adopted minority point view among sunnis islam birth control population zoomed much faster iranians ever expected minute khomeini died mullahs got together said oh looked scripture carefully quite clear islam favor birth control similarly first said going adopt classical tax system jurists ninth century within months foundation islamic republic went back tax system existed shah one unworkable islamist experiment need end radical premodern society believe societies middle east iran one long run overwhelming mass people believe democracy mr brooks160how strongly islamists driven resentment west including israel much powerful dr mottahedeh160its often said theres resentment israel richer dont see resent israel powerful first want say second intifada caused resurgence resentment among muslims practically every major muslim singer made song boy caught tv killed israeli gunfire media coverage second intifada incredible emotional impact contributed osama bin ladens success power lot people realize scientific establishment contributes research progress society matter buying machines must create technocrats mr foer160i wondering could talk muslim antisemitism striking course hundred years maybe less muslim societies went markedly tolerant toward jews markedly intolerant toward christianity start antisemitism prevalent religion defined opposition judaism anything similar exist within islam dr mottahedeh160in classical islamic law three absolute differences status muslim nonmuslim male female former times free slave law recognizes absolute differences doesnt deprive groups protection law uphold distinctions instance twice many female witnesses male witnesses required common kinds court proceedings applies nonmuslims jews places hated christians french north africa eastern arab lands think people despised jews nazis encouraged sentiment course claimed true allies arabs mr foer160so would fair say virulent twentieth century antisemitism see lot arab countries essentially western import dr mottahedeh160oh yes documented paul west baltimore sun160i wonder could add primer brief chapter afterlife martyrdom extent concepts central one thing made think comment made earlier swift usled operation afghanistan impact public opinion arab street think im quoting professor huntington correctly said nobody wants get bandwagon loser dr mottahedeh160first arab street quite easy gauge twenty minutes september 11 attack cnn called asked muslim masses reacting study cambridge massachusetts way knowing afterlife yes muslims believe afterlife koran speaks think connection suicide attacks greatly exaggerated true fighting jihad supposed erase possibility killed ordinary sense unlike muslim washed ceremonially buried soldier buried clothes wore killed idea resurrection stands god clothes prove sacrifice thats different thing suicide attacks interesting thing suicide bombers concerned almost exclusively political community interview would suicide attackers asked would cause outside palestine said suicide forbidden islam strongly dispute among the160ulama grand mufti saudi arabia way back april 2001 said suicide bombing wrong nevertheless osama bin laden develops theory reached stage majority muslims really muslims true muslims handtohand combat koran says somebody assailing right fight back bin laden said condition every true muslim today duncan moon npr160isnt something continue grow long growing group young angry displaced men dr mottahedeh160there difference palestinian case others talking palestinian case say egyptians saudi arabia think young men recruits islamist vision bringing society creating islamic government country fodder kind militancy muslim brothers opinion would settle part political system great mistake allow egyptian government keep excluding get elected parliament making alliances parties dont think fair amount discussion muslim brothers dont think believe immediately take create monolithic islamic state would like change laws to160sharia trying back away violent stuff course always fringe people jeffrey goldberg new yorker160is islamic division dar alharb dar alislam house war house islam still considered relevant listen different clerics lean moderate side say archaic notion dont see world black white obviously still many see like dr mottahedeh160the concept view think lot scholars would agree islam sword almost completely directed pagan government arabia amazing thing called islamic conquest arab conquest happened conquest really deepened islam also really deepened jihad concept idea victory war good way spread islam antijihad voices jihad nevertheless remains law law schools classic period defensive jihad praised offensive jihad praised fair number sources whitewashing arabs suffered first major defeats ad 72030 began attempt stabilize borders trade back forth lawyers began codify idea yes abode islam abode war also abode treaty wanted treaties nations traded idea means something aggressive militant muslims liberal muslims abode islam means muslimmajority countries contrast nonmuslimmajority countries mr goldberg160lets say islamists somehow managed take egypt algeria would revert islam sword approach six eight months ago mufti jerusalem whos sponsored palestinian authority gave sermon talked tragedy andalucia bin laden talks also guys seem want get back islam centuries ago im wondering deeply felt ideas dr mottahedeh160the loss andalucia fifteenth century felt osama bin laden romantics average muslim worried iran pure islamist experiment iran knocking door international community begging come hillel fradkin ethics amp public policy center160in muslim populations around world one hand seems kind opening people away traditional life away rely authorities information also means access extremely abstract ideas fantasies radical muslims want try contrast healthy premodern condition islam sensible moderate view various legal schools authority within proper sphere might speak governmental matters allowed regulate ordinary life didnt really intrude political system deal broke similar deal constructed dr mottahedeh160we need islamic new deal mr fradkin160it situation described lack functional politics fuels wahhabists could healthy moderation reconstructed dr mottahedeh160by allowing real public debate united states try make greater freedom expression part comes war let lot steam promote vigorous debate muslims nonmuslim societies realize want treated well societies nonmuslims treated well muslim societies members muslim disapora written books matters books circulated real discussion towards creating healthy moderation anything else really believe would eventually lead think exactly high wall religion politics america something like postlockean idea tolerance england established church mr tolson160i think one thing america particularly radio networks voice america give mike alternative voices islam sufis traditional jurists talk juristic traditions people discuss accomplishments ottoman empire real compromises worked public law and160sharia think encourage indigenous forms kind discussion mr fradkin160but wed probably take initiative many governments would hostile dissidents nina easton say key pluralism arabmuslim world increasing involvement women would reflect islam says women much contradictory information generally depending political agenda whoever analyzing dr mottahedeh160there question traditionally muslim males firstclass citizens women nonmuslims slaves secondclass citizens different degrees different areas muslim societies women enfranchised 1930s earlier several european countries women want play role politics one egyptian woman friend mine parliament leader party iran educated women men women make half university population women play enormous role legislature theorists embraced full feminist argument though affected masses think hope young women islamic world heard feminism demand things lot common people breakdown family structure thing worried believe changing status women would cause unquestionably one areas muslim world dragging behind change occurring slowly | 4,852 |
<p>By Norihiko Shirouzu</p>
<p>BEIJING (Reuters) – After a decade of development, often through buying or benchmarking foreign technology and know-how, Chinese automakers are looking with greater ambition at selling their cars in major Western markets.</p>
<p>Improvements in car design, technology and marketing at firms including Geely (HK:), GAC Motor and Great Wall Motor (SS:) have brought them a bigger share in their home market, the world’s largest, and give them a better chance of survival in competitive markets in Europe and the United States.</p>
<p>Once distant dreams of staking a claim in Western strongholds may now be edging nearer.</p>
<p>“We have in the Western world an outrageous arrogance. We think we’re ahead. It’s going to change,” says Alain Visser, Senior Vice President of Lynk &amp; Co, a new brand set up by Geely.</p>
<p>“China is passing you at a speed that in our arrogance we don’t even see,” Visser told Reuters earlier this month.</p>
<p>Hangzhou-based Geely, which owns Volvo Cars and Lotus and makes London black cabs, has its sights set on selling cars in Europe in 2019 and the United States a year later. The Lynk &amp; Co brand, set up in Sweden with Volvo, will spearhead its attack.</p>
<p>Geely plans only to sell ‘green’ cars – conventional hybrid, plug-in hybrid and all-electric models – in those markets, and would primarily sell through directly-owned stores and online rather than through traditional dealer franchises. It could also offer cars for rent via a subscription model similar to Netflix (O:) and Spotify.</p>
<p>GAC Motor, whose parent Guangzhou Automobile Group (SS:) partners Honda Motor (T:), Toyota Motor (T:) and Fiat Chrysler (MI:) in China, may beat Geely to the U.S. market, eyeing entry by end-2019. But unlike Lynk &amp; Co, GAC is more likely to sell through a traditional distribution network of franchised retail stores there.</p>
<p>It’s taken Chinese automakers years to get this far, and, to be sure, there will be significant road bumps.</p>
<p>“A key obstacle in markets like the United States is a consumer bias against Chinese-made goods,” said Jeff Cai, a Beijing-based senior director at JD Power &amp; Associates. “Our research found most U.S. consumers think China is a third-world country that builds low-quality products.”</p>
<p>There’s also the thorny issue of China’s trade surplus with the United States – an imbalance high on U.S. President Donald Trump’s radar. Cars shipped in from China would likely increase that surplus.</p>
<p>SELLING DIRECT, ONLINE</p>
<p>Geely’s Lynk &amp; Co aims to open its own flagship store in Berlin in the second half of 2019, and a similar outlet in San Francisco in 2020.</p>
<p>In some U.S. states, which don’t allow direct selling, Lynk &amp; Co plans a subscription-based sales model, renting cars to consumers on contracts as short as a month. Those deals will include insurance, warranty and other benefits.</p>
<p>Visser says Lynk wants to test this unconventional retail model because it reckons around a quarter of revenue is lost through the traditional distribution business in dealer margins and discounting. He expects to recoup more than half those ‘losses’ by selling direct.</p>
<p>Some of those savings will be passed on to customers by selling Lynk &amp; Co cars at a more affordable price, Visser said, adding Lynk &amp; Co aims to sell&#160;250,000 vehicles a year across Europe and the United States – though he gave no firm timescale for that.</p>
<p>In the United States, selling direct could put Lynk &amp; Co on a collision course with the politically powerful National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA), the lobby group for franchise dealer operators.</p>
<p>While Visser says NADA has “unbelievable power”, he believes&#160;dealers will eventually come around to Lynk &amp; Co’s retail model as it would likely be franchise dealers who get to service Lynk &amp; Co cars, carrying out repairs and regular maintenance – and that’s where dealers make most money.</p>
<p>NO TRUMPCHI FOR U.S.</p>
<p>For its part, GAC Motor is looking at the possibility of building out its overseas presence from the U.S. northeast, two people close to the company said.</p>
<p>That region, including Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine and New York, is seen as being more open to foreign cars and to the sport-utility vehicles (SUV) that GAC Motor plans to sell, they said.</p>
<p>The company said it has not yet decided a U.S. entry point, but would more likely opt to build a sales network with franchise dealers or join an existing dealer group.</p>
<p>GAC Motor – which says it has developed rather than acquired its technologies – said it was conducting market research to determine the brand’s positioning and identify products for its U.S. business.</p>
<p>Its first U.S. offering is likely to be an SUV sold in China as the&#160;Trumpchi GS8. Given the political sensitivities, the model will be renamed for the U.S. market.</p>
<p>“We respect culture in the U.S. and understand there’s no precedence to use the current president’s name as a brand name,” the company said through a spokeswoman.</p> | false | 1 | norihiko shirouzu beijing reuters decade development often buying benchmarking foreign technology knowhow chinese automakers looking greater ambition selling cars major western markets improvements car design technology marketing firms including geely hk gac motor great wall motor ss brought bigger share home market worlds largest give better chance survival competitive markets europe united states distant dreams staking claim western strongholds may edging nearer western world outrageous arrogance think ahead going change says alain visser senior vice president lynk amp co new brand set geely china passing speed arrogance dont even see visser told reuters earlier month hangzhoubased geely owns volvo cars lotus makes london black cabs sights set selling cars europe 2019 united states year later lynk amp co brand set sweden volvo spearhead attack geely plans sell green cars conventional hybrid plugin hybrid allelectric models markets would primarily sell directlyowned stores online rather traditional dealer franchises could also offer cars rent via subscription model similar netflix spotify gac motor whose parent guangzhou automobile group ss partners honda motor toyota motor fiat chrysler mi china may beat geely us market eyeing entry end2019 unlike lynk amp co gac likely sell traditional distribution network franchised retail stores taken chinese automakers years get far sure significant road bumps key obstacle markets like united states consumer bias chinesemade goods said jeff cai beijingbased senior director jd power amp associates research found us consumers think china thirdworld country builds lowquality products theres also thorny issue chinas trade surplus united states imbalance high us president donald trumps radar cars shipped china would likely increase surplus selling direct online geelys lynk amp co aims open flagship store berlin second half 2019 similar outlet san francisco 2020 us states dont allow direct selling lynk amp co plans subscriptionbased sales model renting cars consumers contracts short month deals include insurance warranty benefits visser says lynk wants test unconventional retail model reckons around quarter revenue lost traditional distribution business dealer margins discounting expects recoup half losses selling direct savings passed customers selling lynk amp co cars affordable price visser said adding lynk amp co aims sell160250000 vehicles year across europe united states though gave firm timescale united states selling direct could put lynk amp co collision course politically powerful national automobile dealers association nada lobby group franchise dealer operators visser says nada unbelievable power believes160dealers eventually come around lynk amp cos retail model would likely franchise dealers get service lynk amp co cars carrying repairs regular maintenance thats dealers make money trumpchi us part gac motor looking possibility building overseas presence us northeast two people close company said region including massachusetts connecticut maine new york seen open foreign cars sportutility vehicles suv gac motor plans sell said company said yet decided us entry point would likely opt build sales network franchise dealers join existing dealer group gac motor says developed rather acquired technologies said conducting market research determine brands positioning identify products us business first us offering likely suv sold china the160trumpchi gs8 given political sensitivities model renamed us market respect culture us understand theres precedence use current presidents name brand name company said spokeswoman | 515 |
<p>WASHINGTON — Transgender students on Wednesday lost federal protections that allowed them to use school bathrooms and locker rooms matching their gender identities, as the Trump administration stepped into a long-simmering national debate.</p>
<p>The administration came down on the side of states’ rights, lifting Obama-era federal guidelines that had been characterized by Republicans as an example of overreach.</p>
<p>Without the Obama directive, it will be up to states and school districts to interpret federal anti-discrimination law and determine whether students should have access to restrooms in accordance with their expressed gender identity and not just their biological sex.</p>
<p>“This is an issue best solved at the state and local level,” Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said. “Schools, communities and families can find — and in many cases have found — solutions that protect all students.”</p>
<p>In a letter to the nation’s schools, the Justice and Education departments said the earlier guidance “has given rise to significant litigation regarding school restrooms and locker rooms.”</p>
<p>The agencies withdrew the guidance to “in order to further and more completely consider the legal issues involved.”</p>
<p>Anti-bullying safeguards would not be affected by the change, according to the letter. “All schools must ensure that all students, including LGBT students, are able to learn and thrive in a safe environment,” it said.</p>
<p>It was not clear what immediate impact the change would have on schools, as a federal judge in Texas put a temporary hold on the Obama guidance soon after it was issued — after 13 states sued.</p>
<p>Even without that hold, the guidance carried no force of law. But transgender rights advocates say it was useful and necessary to protect students from discrimination. Opponents argued it was federal overreach and violated the safety and privacy of other students.</p>
<p>The White House said “returning power to the states paves the way for an open and inclusive process to take place at the local level with input from parents, students, teachers and administrators.”</p>
<p>The reversal is a setback for transgender rights groups, which had been urging Trump to keep the guidelines in place. Advocates say federal law will still prohibit discrimination against students based on their gender or sexual orientation.</p>
<p>Still, they say lifting the Obama directive puts children in harm’s way.</p>
<p>“Reversing this guidance tells trans kids that it’s OK with the Trump administration and the Department of Education for them to be abused and harassed at school for being trans,” said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.</p>
<p>Activists protested the move Wednesday outside the White House. “Respect existence or expect resistance,” read one placard.</p>
<p>Conservatives hailed the change, saying the Obama directives were illegal and violated the rights of fixed-gender students, especially girls who did not feel safe changing clothes or using restrooms next to anatomical males.</p>
<p>“Our daughters should never be forced to share private, intimate spaces with male classmates, even if those young men are struggling with these issues,” said Vicki Wilson, a member of Students and Parents for Privacy. “It violates their right to privacy and harms their dignity.”</p>
<p>White House spokesman Sean Spicer denied media reports that DeVos, who has been criticized for her stance on LGBT issues, had opposed the change but was overruled by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Spicer said any disagreement was merely over wording and timing.</p>
<p>“There is no daylight between anybody,” Spicer said, adding that DeVos was “100 percent” on board with the decision.</p>
<p>The Obama administration’s guidance was based on its determination that Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education, also applies to gender identity.</p>
<p>The guidance did not sufficiently explain its interpretation of that law, Sessions said in a statement.</p>
<p>“Congress, state legislatures and local governments are in a position to adopt appropriate policies or laws addressing this issue,” he said.</p>
<p>Legal experts said the change in position could impact pending court cases involving the federal sex discrimination law, including a case to be heard by the Supreme Court in March involving Gavin Grimm, a transgender teen who was denied bathroom access in Virginia.</p>
<p>The justices could decide not to hear the case and direct lower courts to decide that issue.</p>
<p>In a phone interview with the AP, Grimm said of the Trump action: “It’s not positive. It has the possibility of hurting transgender students and transgender people. We’re going to keep fighting like we have been and keep fighting for the right thing.”</p>
<p>A patchwork of state laws could continue to emerge as a result of the change. Fifteen states have explicit protections for transgender students in their state laws, and many individual school districts in other states have adopted policies that cover such students on the basis of their gender identity, said Sarah Warbelow, legal director of the Human Rights Campaign. Just one state, North Carolina, has enacted a law restricting access to bathrooms in government-owned buildings to the sex that appears on a person’s birth certificate. Lawmakers in more than 10 states are considering similar legislation, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.</p>
<p>RELATED</p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Federal judge blocks North Carolina transgender bathroom law</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Feds say public schools must allow transgender students access to restrooms</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Trump opposes laws regulating bathrooms for transgender people</a></p>
<p><a href="" type="internal">Transgender bathroom ruling not affecting Clark County School District for now</a></p>
<p /> | false | 1 | washington transgender students wednesday lost federal protections allowed use school bathrooms locker rooms matching gender identities trump administration stepped longsimmering national debate administration came side states rights lifting obamaera federal guidelines characterized republicans example overreach without obama directive states school districts interpret federal antidiscrimination law determine whether students access restrooms accordance expressed gender identity biological sex issue best solved state local level education secretary betsy devos said schools communities families find many cases found solutions protect students letter nations schools justice education departments said earlier guidance given rise significant litigation regarding school restrooms locker rooms agencies withdrew guidance order completely consider legal issues involved antibullying safeguards would affected change according letter schools must ensure students including lgbt students able learn thrive safe environment said clear immediate impact change would schools federal judge texas put temporary hold obama guidance soon issued 13 states sued even without hold guidance carried force law transgender rights advocates say useful necessary protect students discrimination opponents argued federal overreach violated safety privacy students white house said returning power states paves way open inclusive process take place local level input parents students teachers administrators reversal setback transgender rights groups urging trump keep guidelines place advocates say federal law still prohibit discrimination students based gender sexual orientation still say lifting obama directive puts children harms way reversing guidance tells trans kids ok trump administration department education abused harassed school trans said american federation teachers president randi weingarten activists protested move wednesday outside white house respect existence expect resistance read one placard conservatives hailed change saying obama directives illegal violated rights fixedgender students especially girls feel safe changing clothes using restrooms next anatomical males daughters never forced share private intimate spaces male classmates even young men struggling issues said vicki wilson member students parents privacy violates right privacy harms dignity white house spokesman sean spicer denied media reports devos criticized stance lgbt issues opposed change overruled attorney general jeff sessions spicer said disagreement merely wording timing daylight anybody spicer said adding devos 100 percent board decision obama administrations guidance based determination title ix federal law prohibiting sex discrimination education also applies gender identity guidance sufficiently explain interpretation law sessions said statement congress state legislatures local governments position adopt appropriate policies laws addressing issue said legal experts said change position could impact pending court cases involving federal sex discrimination law including case heard supreme court march involving gavin grimm transgender teen denied bathroom access virginia justices could decide hear case direct lower courts decide issue phone interview ap grimm said trump action positive possibility hurting transgender students transgender people going keep fighting like keep fighting right thing patchwork state laws could continue emerge result change fifteen states explicit protections transgender students state laws many individual school districts states adopted policies cover students basis gender identity said sarah warbelow legal director human rights campaign one state north carolina enacted law restricting access bathrooms governmentowned buildings sex appears persons birth certificate lawmakers 10 states considering similar legislation according national conference state legislatures related federal judge blocks north carolina transgender bathroom law feds say public schools must allow transgender students access restrooms trump opposes laws regulating bathrooms transgender people transgender bathroom ruling affecting clark county school district | 534 |
<p>President Donald Trump is spoiling for a fight with Congress over funding a border wall with Mexico, but he’ll have a hard time waging that battle because of a looming deadline to avert a U.S. debt default.</p>
<p>Some of the president’s advisers consider a tough stand on border wall funding crucial to Trump’s credibility and even political survival, two White House officials said. Before his departure last week as Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, urged the president to go through with a government shutdown if necessary to force congress into providing money for the wall, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss strategy.</p>
<p>As allies in corporate America and the Republican establishment pull away from Trump and he declines in national polls, the president is increasingly dependent on a core following for whom his campaign vow of a border wall remains a visceral issue. The wall drama plays out as his decision to pour more troops and resources into Afghanistan risks disappointing supporters drawn by his pledges to cut U.S. military involvement abroad.</p>
<p>Failure to make progress on the border wall — or at least go to the mat on the issue — may fracture what has been a solid political base for the president, added a Republican consultant who closely follows that group of voters. Those loyal supporters haven’t shown signs of wavering amid the political backlash over Trump’s remarks on the violence in Virginia, but they need to see results on his promise of change if they are to stick with him, according to consultant, who also spoke on condition of anonymity.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-24/how-trump-s-wall-could-shut-the-government-down-quicktake-q-a" type="external">Q&amp;A: How Trump’s Wall Could Shut Down the Government</a></p>
<p>At a rally in Phoenix on Tuesday, Trump drew the line in the sand Bannon had urged.</p>
<p>“If we have to close down our government, we’re building that wall,” Trump pledged. “One way or the other, we’re going to get that wall.”</p>
<p>In public, Trump has stopped repeating his vow to make Mexico pay for the wall — which Republican lawmakers have estimated would require $12 billion to $15 billion — though his aides insist that’s still the president’s intention. The House included $1.6 billion to start construction of a section of wall in a package of spending bills for the next fiscal year that passed in the House in July, but the Senate hasn’t acted on it yet.</p>
<p>‪Asked Thursday if Trump would sign a spending measure that doesn’t include wall funding, press secretary Sarah Sanders was firm: “He won on talking about building the wall and he’s going to make sure that it gets done.”</p>
<p>Yet Sanders also repeated assurances that Trump is determined to avert a U.S. default, saying of the legal debt limit the U.S. is about to hit that the president is “still committed to making sure it gets raised.”</p>
<p>Getting Crowded</p>
<p>The dilemma for Trump is that in a crowded legislative calendar Congress needs to pass a spending measure to keep the government open after Sept. 30 at the same time it’s facing a deadline to raise the nation’s debt limit. While Republican leaders have yet to reveal a plan for how they’ll proceed, a likely scenario is to package the two measures together to get them to the president’s desk.</p>
<p>If the two issues are combined, that would compound the economic consequences of a stand-off. While federal government shutdowns have often provoked anger from voters, the U.S. has experienced a number of them with little long-term damage. But the country hasn’t ever defaulted on its debt, a step that could rattle financial markets and damage the U.S. reputation for creditworthiness</p>
<p>Trump fulminated against Republican congressional leaders over the debt-limit “mess” in a Twitter posting Thursday morning, saying they ignored advice he gave to include the debt-ceiling increase in a popular veterans bill. The tweet spurred a spike in investor concern that Congress and the White House may not act in time.</p>
<p>After his tweets, the rate on Treasury bills maturing Oct. 12 jumped by as much as 5 basis points, the largest intraday move since March.</p>
<p>Rates on those bills — which mature around the time the Treasury would be expected to run out of money unless there’s a debt limit increase — began rising Wednesday, one day after Trump threatened to shut down the government over getting money for the wall.</p>
<p>Back in July, House Speaker Paul Ryan and other GOP leaders did discuss using a veterans bill as a vehicle to raise the debt ceiling.&#160;But conservatives in the House are demanding that steep spending cuts accompany any debt bill.&#160;Lawmakers are still trying to figure out whether there is a debt bill that can pass with only Republican votes in the House, or whether they will need to move a bill with bipartisan support that doesn’t contain any spending cuts.</p>
<p>Democrats are almost uniformly opposed to paying for the border wall and their leaders are putting the onus for raising the government’s borrowing authority on Republicans, who control the White House and both chambers of Congress.</p>
<p>“Republicans need to stop the chaos and sort themselves out in a hurry,” House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement Thursday.</p>
<p>Ryan, who answered questions Thursday from employees at Boeing Co. in Everett, Washington, said the debt ceiling will be raised.</p>
<p>“I’m not worried that it isn’t going to get done because it’s going to get done,” he said.</p>
<p>Like Ryan, Republican Representative Charlie Dent said lawmakers also don’t want a government shutdown in October. Dent, who’s from the swing state of Pennsylvania, said bringing the government to a halt over $1.6 billion in wall money would be a “fool’s errand” and “political malpractice.”</p> | false | 1 | president donald trump spoiling fight congress funding border wall mexico hell hard time waging battle looming deadline avert us debt default presidents advisers consider tough stand border wall funding crucial trumps credibility even political survival two white house officials said departure last week trumps chief strategist stephen bannon urged president go government shutdown necessary force congress providing money wall said officials spoke condition anonymity discuss strategy allies corporate america republican establishment pull away trump declines national polls president increasingly dependent core following campaign vow border wall remains visceral issue wall drama plays decision pour troops resources afghanistan risks disappointing supporters drawn pledges cut us military involvement abroad failure make progress border wall least go mat issue may fracture solid political base president added republican consultant closely follows group voters loyal supporters havent shown signs wavering amid political backlash trumps remarks violence virginia need see results promise change stick according consultant also spoke condition anonymity qampa trumps wall could shut government rally phoenix tuesday trump drew line sand bannon urged close government building wall trump pledged one way going get wall public trump stopped repeating vow make mexico pay wall republican lawmakers estimated would require 12 billion 15 billion though aides insist thats still presidents intention house included 16 billion start construction section wall package spending bills next fiscal year passed house july senate hasnt acted yet asked thursday trump would sign spending measure doesnt include wall funding press secretary sarah sanders firm talking building wall hes going make sure gets done yet sanders also repeated assurances trump determined avert us default saying legal debt limit us hit president still committed making sure gets raised getting crowded dilemma trump crowded legislative calendar congress needs pass spending measure keep government open sept 30 time facing deadline raise nations debt limit republican leaders yet reveal plan theyll proceed likely scenario package two measures together get presidents desk two issues combined would compound economic consequences standoff federal government shutdowns often provoked anger voters us experienced number little longterm damage country hasnt ever defaulted debt step could rattle financial markets damage us reputation creditworthiness trump fulminated republican congressional leaders debtlimit mess twitter posting thursday morning saying ignored advice gave include debtceiling increase popular veterans bill tweet spurred spike investor concern congress white house may act time tweets rate treasury bills maturing oct 12 jumped much 5 basis points largest intraday move since march rates bills mature around time treasury would expected run money unless theres debt limit increase began rising wednesday one day trump threatened shut government getting money wall back july house speaker paul ryan gop leaders discuss using veterans bill vehicle raise debt ceiling160but conservatives house demanding steep spending cuts accompany debt bill160lawmakers still trying figure whether debt bill pass republican votes house whether need move bill bipartisan support doesnt contain spending cuts democrats almost uniformly opposed paying border wall leaders putting onus raising governments borrowing authority republicans control white house chambers congress republicans need stop chaos sort hurry house democratic leader nancy pelosi said statement thursday ryan answered questions thursday employees boeing co everett washington said debt ceiling raised im worried isnt going get done going get done said like ryan republican representative charlie dent said lawmakers also dont want government shutdown october dent whos swing state pennsylvania said bringing government halt 16 billion wall money would fools errand political malpractice | 559 |
<p>Welcome</p>
<p>The Four Seasons Hotel, Washington, D.C.</p>
<p>June 3, 2015</p>
<p>Speaker: Yuval Levin, Ethics and Public Policy Center and&#160;National Affairs</p>
<p>Yuval Levin</p>
<p>Yuval Levin:&#160; Good morning everybody.&#160; Thank you for coming.</p>
<p>Welcome to the 2015 Bradley Symposium.&#160; We are very glad you could be here.&#160; I’m Yuval Levin.&#160; I’m a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the Editor of National Affairs Magazine.</p>
<p>EPPC and National Affairs are very pleased to be once again co-hosting the Bradley Symposium this year together with the Bradley Foundation.&#160; For more than a decade now the Symposium has accompanied each year’s Bradley Prizes ceremony and has given us a chance to reflect on an important set of questions facing the country, to step back and consider some element of our public life with some more perspective and distance than the rush of events will usually allow for.&#160; And that, of course, is exactly our goal this morning.</p>
<p>A few quick words of thanks before we get started.&#160; First of all naturally to the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation which supports so many important projects aimed at advancing American ideals and strengthening our country and its traditions and its institutions.&#160; We are very honored to have with us this morning some of the foundation’s board members as well as the foundation staff members and many thanks to all of you. &#160;We are especially grateful to Dan Schmidt and to Terri Famer of Bradley for their guidance and their help in setting up this event and setting us off in the right direction.</p>
<p>Finally I want to thank Sylvia Travaglione and Emily Zydiak, Josh Britton and Julia Vaughn at EPPC and really everybody at EPPC who did the work to put this event together and did so brilliantly as usual.&#160; Many thanks especially to Sylvia and to everyone who worked with her to make this possible.</p>
<p>Our subject today flows naturally from the Bradley Foundation’s long-standing interest in strengthening and reinforcing the institutions of America’s free society.&#160; The institutions necessary for forming citizens, for building a thriving free economy, for providing opportunities to the most disadvantaged people in our country, for keeping America strong.</p>
<p>We are going to be looking today at one American institution that is crucial to meeting all of those goals, the university.&#160; It’s an institution that is at once increasingly important and increasingly troubled and increasingly changing all at the same time.&#160; In a sense American higher education has always suffered some from the fact that we expect so many different things from it.</p>
<p>Is the purpose of the university the formation of a competent civilized elite or of a mass middle class society?&#160; Is it skills training or moral formation?&#160; Is it teaching or is it research?</p>
<p>These are older questions than we might be inclined to think.&#160; And they are not necessarily uniquely American questions, of course.&#160; John Henry Newman took up many of the same problems in a series of lectures in 1858 that he called “The Idea of the University” in the process of setting up a Catholic university in Ireland.&#160; And to read those essays now is to see that not all that much is new under the sun.</p>
<p>Not much, but some things nonetheless, because the world has changed in our time in ways that puts some unique pressures on the university: economic pressures and cultural pressures, intellectual pressures.&#160; They are pressures that increasingly compel us to answer yes to all of the questions I’ve just suggested and with more and more urgency.</p>
<p>Yes, the purpose of the university is to give people skills to find their place in an economy that demands more and more skills all the time.</p>
<p>Yes, its purpose is to make sure that American has the cream of the global crop of engineers and scientists and medical researchers.</p>
<p>Yes, its purpose is to secure upward mobility and a middle class life for as many people as possible in America.</p>
<p>Yes, its purpose is to combat cultural entropy and to deliver the gift of liberal learning to another generation.</p>
<p>To expect one set of institutions to do all of that is to expect a lot.&#160; And given how much we expect of it, American higher education really does achieve a lot.&#160; We could point to different corners of the American university world as success stories in each of these different areas.&#160; And it is an extraordinary thing, and yet American higher education as a whole seems not to strike most people as a big success story right now.</p>
<p>It offers the promise of opportunity for millions but it is also in some respects a kind of bottle neck in the way of opportunity as costs rise faster than incomes and leave millions of young people with heavy debts just as they are trying to start out in life.</p>
<p>It is home to some shining examples of liberal education yet on the whole it seems to be suffocating liberal education for a variety of reasons and instead to be incubating political correctness or faddishness or close-mindedness that views the western tradition too often as a burden to be overcome or as a luxury that we can’t afford.</p>
<p>It is at the forefront of innovation, certainly, but it is also sternly resistant to change, defending its prerogatives from competition and from new entrants in ways that exacerbate all of its problems.&#160; These problems have been compounding in recent years and it is increasingly clear that change is afoot in American higher education.&#160; Technology will bring that change.&#160; Economic pressures will bring that change.&#160; The dissatisfaction of many students and parents will bring that change.</p>
<p>But change can be a good thing or a bad thing.&#160; And understanding the difference requires some reflection and some thought on the situation of American higher education, on the possibilities for its future.</p>
<p>That is our goal today: to think about where higher education is headed in America and where it ought to be headed.&#160; And we couldn’t have asked for a better panel of knowledgeable, thoughtful people to help us think about these questions together.</p>
<p>Let me tell you a little bit about each of them and then we will hear from each of them and open things up for a discussion, including for your questions.</p>
<p>Our first speaker today, Mitch Daniels, needs no introduction and certainly in this kind of audience.&#160; He is the President of Purdue University in Indiana, one of the country’s great universities, which he has run since 2013.&#160; Before that of course he was the very successful Governor of Indiana.&#160; He served as Director of the Office of Management and Budget at the White House, as a senior congressional staffer, as a think tank president, as a corporate executive and much else; lots of different kinds of perches that would give him an extraordinary perspective on the country’s strengths and challenges.&#160; So he’ll have a lot to tell us about the future of the university in America.</p>
<p>Second we will hear from Andrew Kelly about the economics of higher education.&#160; Andrew is a Resident Scholar and Director of the Center on Higher Education Reform at the American Enterprise Institute and is really one of the country’s premier scholars of higher ed policy.&#160; His work has appeared in the American Journal of Education, Education Next, Education Policy — you get the idea — and also in a lot more general outlets, including in National Affairs.&#160; He is also the editor of numerous books.&#160; And Education Week in its Policy Notebook has named him one of the next generation of leaders in education policy.&#160; Andrew has a Ph.D. in Political Science from Berkeley but we are going to really try not to hold that against him.</p>
<p>Laughter</p>
<p>Third we will hear from Alex Tabarrok, the Bartley J. Madden Chair in economics at the Mercatus Center and Professor of Economics at George Mason University.&#160; His published work has ranged from Studies in Law and Economics to Voting Theory to Health Economics and lots more.&#160; He is the author and editor of a number of books including The Voluntary City, Entrepreneurial Economics&#160;as well as a superb introductory economic textbook series.&#160; And he is one of the bloggers at one of the very popular Marginal Revolution Blog.&#160; And together with his colleague there and at George Mason, Tyler Cowen, he is the co-founder of the online educational platform Marginal Revolution University.&#160; So he is an actual practitioner in the online education world.&#160; And he’ll tell us some of what he has learned in that experience and speak more generally about the role of technology in transforming American higher education.</p>
<p>Finally we will hear from Peter Lawler, the Dana Professor of Government at Berry College in Georgia and one of America’s leading scholars of political philosophy.&#160; He is also Executive Editor of the quarterly General Perspectives on Political Science and has among other things been, this is my favorite part of his biography, been chair of the literature section of the American Political Science Association.&#160; And we are going to try not to hold that against him.&#160; He is the author of an extraordinary profusion of books including recently Allergic to Crazy: Politics, Education and Culture Rightly Understood, and his textbook American Political Rhetoric,&#160;now in its sixth edition, is widely used in college courses.&#160; Peter is a practitioner and a champion of liberal education and we will hear from him about the state of liberal education and its prospects in America.</p>
<p>We are enormously privileged and grateful to have these four as our guides this morning.</p>
<p>So let’s just hear from each of them in that order.&#160; And then we can open things up for a conversation both among them and among all of us and see what we learn.</p> | false | 1 | welcome four seasons hotel washington dc june 3 2015 speaker yuval levin ethics public policy center and160national affairs yuval levin yuval levin160 good morning everybody160 thank coming welcome 2015 bradley symposium160 glad could here160 im yuval levin160 im fellow ethics public policy center editor national affairs magazine eppc national affairs pleased cohosting bradley symposium year together bradley foundation160 decade symposium accompanied years bradley prizes ceremony given us chance reflect important set questions facing country step back consider element public life perspective distance rush events usually allow for160 course exactly goal morning quick words thanks get started160 first naturally lynde harry bradley foundation supports many important projects aimed advancing american ideals strengthening country traditions institutions160 honored us morning foundations board members well foundation staff members many thanks 160we especially grateful dan schmidt terri famer bradley guidance help setting event setting us right direction finally want thank sylvia travaglione emily zydiak josh britton julia vaughn eppc really everybody eppc work put event together brilliantly usual160 many thanks especially sylvia everyone worked make possible subject today flows naturally bradley foundations longstanding interest strengthening reinforcing institutions americas free society160 institutions necessary forming citizens building thriving free economy providing opportunities disadvantaged people country keeping america strong going looking today one american institution crucial meeting goals university160 institution increasingly important increasingly troubled increasingly changing time160 sense american higher education always suffered fact expect many different things purpose university formation competent civilized elite mass middle class society160 skills training moral formation160 teaching research older questions might inclined think160 necessarily uniquely american questions course160 john henry newman took many problems series lectures 1858 called idea university process setting catholic university ireland160 read essays see much new sun much things nonetheless world changed time ways puts unique pressures university economic pressures cultural pressures intellectual pressures160 pressures increasingly compel us answer yes questions ive suggested urgency yes purpose university give people skills find place economy demands skills time yes purpose make sure american cream global crop engineers scientists medical researchers yes purpose secure upward mobility middle class life many people possible america yes purpose combat cultural entropy deliver gift liberal learning another generation expect one set institutions expect lot160 given much expect american higher education really achieve lot160 could point different corners american university world success stories different areas160 extraordinary thing yet american higher education whole seems strike people big success story right offers promise opportunity millions also respects kind bottle neck way opportunity costs rise faster incomes leave millions young people heavy debts trying start life home shining examples liberal education yet whole seems suffocating liberal education variety reasons instead incubating political correctness faddishness closemindedness views western tradition often burden overcome luxury cant afford forefront innovation certainly also sternly resistant change defending prerogatives competition new entrants ways exacerbate problems160 problems compounding recent years increasingly clear change afoot american higher education160 technology bring change160 economic pressures bring change160 dissatisfaction many students parents bring change change good thing bad thing160 understanding difference requires reflection thought situation american higher education possibilities future goal today think higher education headed america ought headed160 couldnt asked better panel knowledgeable thoughtful people help us think questions together let tell little bit hear open things discussion including questions first speaker today mitch daniels needs introduction certainly kind audience160 president purdue university indiana one countrys great universities run since 2013160 course successful governor indiana160 served director office management budget white house senior congressional staffer think tank president corporate executive much else lots different kinds perches would give extraordinary perspective countrys strengths challenges160 hell lot tell us future university america second hear andrew kelly economics higher education160 andrew resident scholar director center higher education reform american enterprise institute really one countrys premier scholars higher ed policy160 work appeared american journal education education next education policy get idea also lot general outlets including national affairs160 also editor numerous books160 education week policy notebook named one next generation leaders education policy160 andrew phd political science berkeley going really try hold laughter third hear alex tabarrok bartley j madden chair economics mercatus center professor economics george mason university160 published work ranged studies law economics voting theory health economics lots more160 author editor number books including voluntary city entrepreneurial economics160as well superb introductory economic textbook series160 one bloggers one popular marginal revolution blog160 together colleague george mason tyler cowen cofounder online educational platform marginal revolution university160 actual practitioner online education world160 hell tell us learned experience speak generally role technology transforming american higher education finally hear peter lawler dana professor government berry college georgia one americas leading scholars political philosophy160 also executive editor quarterly general perspectives political science among things favorite part biography chair literature section american political science association160 going try hold him160 author extraordinary profusion books including recently allergic crazy politics education culture rightly understood textbook american political rhetoric160now sixth edition widely used college courses160 peter practitioner champion liberal education hear state liberal education prospects america enormously privileged grateful four guides morning lets hear order160 open things conversation among among us see learn | 832 |
<p>WASHINGTON — While Washington insiders await the first face-to-face meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the first stop of the president’s second overseas trip may carry more significance.</p>
<p>James Carafano, a foreign policy graybeard at the Heritage Foundation think tank, says the stretch in Poland will be “the most substantive part of the trip.”</p>
<p>Carafano sees the Warsaw stop, beginning Wednesday, as a sign of America’s commitment to NATO ahead of the G-20 meeting and the Friday session with Putin in Hamburg, Germany. But it’s also a sign that Washington cares about capitals other than Berlin, Paris and Brussels, he said.</p>
<p>It is something of a departure for a U.S. president to visit a central European country before the United Kingdom, France or Germany. The choice of Warsaw, however, was deliberate.</p>
<p>Itinerary with a message</p>
<p>Poland is one of the few NATO member nations that spend more than 2 percent of their GDP on defense. When Trump addressed a NATO summit in Brussels in May, he complained that 23 of 28 NATO nations do not pay their “fair share.”</p>
<p>Poland also has been a staunch military ally that has sent troops into combat in Afghanistan and Iraq.</p>
<p>After holding a news conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda on Thursday, Trump will address the Polish people in Krasinski Square, near the memorial to the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, which ended after 63 days with the death of as many as 200,000 Polish citizens and Germany’s destruction of Warsaw.</p>
<p>Trump “will praise Polish courage throughout history’s darkest hour and celebrate Poland’s emergence as a European power,” national security adviser H.R. McMaster told reporters last week. “And he will call on all nations to take inspiration from the spirit of the Poles as we confront today’s challenges.”</p>
<p>McMaster also said Trump “will reiterate both America’s commitment to NATO’s common defense and his expectation that all countries share responsibilities and burdens for that defense.”</p>
<p>In Brussels, Trump failed to articulate his support of Article 5, NATO’s charter provision requiring all member nations to consider an attack against one to be an attack against all. He later did so during a joint Rose Garden appearance last month with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis.</p>
<p>On Thursday night, Air Force One heads to Hamburg for the two-day G-20 summit and what is likely to be a frostier reception for the president.</p>
<p>On his first foreign trip, Trump not only challenged NATO but also rejected global warming language at the Group of Seven summit in Italy, a precursor to his decision to exit the Paris climate change agreement.</p>
<p>Merkel: Don’t expect ‘easy talks’</p>
<p>His anti-internationalist attitudes chafed German Chancellor Angela Merkel so thoroughly that she later said at a Munich rally that the days when Europe could count on others “are over to a certain extent” and that “Europeans must really take our fate into our own hands.”</p>
<p>Last week, Merkel told Germany’s parliament, “We cannot expect any easy talks in Hamburg.” She also pledged “to send a clear signal for free markets and against isolationism.”</p>
<p>Ellen Tauscher, a former Obama State Department undersecretary and ex-congresswoman from California, said Germany’s importance to the U.S. means the president needs to work on improving his relationship with Merkel.</p>
<p>“I don’t think this is in the nasty-breakup category, but this is not something that looks like it’s going well,” she said.</p>
<p>Her advice to Trump: “If your personality gets in the way, then you’re not effective.”</p>
<p>While Trump-Merkel interactions will be closely watched, the big moment for body-language analysis will occur Friday, when Trump and Putin lock eyes for the first time. The two have spoken on the phone, Trump has said, but have never met in person.</p>
<p>Trump should be on his guard when he meets the former KGB operative. In June 2001, when President George W. Bush met Putin, Bush famously said he looked “the man in the eye” and found him to be “straightforward and trustworthy,” adding that he “was able to get a sense of his soul.”</p>
<p>Those words were thrown at Bush for years as Putin consolidated his power, to the peril of the Russian people and the Russian mass media.</p>
<p>Democrats and some Republicans have been pushing for Trump to confront Putin about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and warn him there will be serious consequences if Russia repeats the exercise in 2020.</p>
<p>“If you don’t bring it up, you’re playing into (the Russians’) hands, which I think is a mistake,” Tauscher said.</p>
<p>‘No specific agenda’</p>
<p>Carafano does not think Trump needs to confront Russia for inserting itself into the election. By going to Poland first, he said, Trump has sent a message to Russia “about what side he’s on.”</p>
<p>The terms of the meeting are not yet defined.</p>
<p>“There’s no specific agenda,” McMaster said at the briefing. “It’s really going to be whatever the president wants to talk about.”</p>
<p>Trump has signaled that he also wants to use the G-20 summit to engage with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean President Moon Jae-in in a group effort to curb North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs. North Korea said Tuesday that it had successfully launched an ICBM that could hit Alaska.</p>
<p>In April, Trump hosted a weekend summit at Mar-a-Lago for Xi, after which he declared relations with China to be “outstanding.” But with no progress toward his goal of a denuclearized Korean peninsula, Trump has moved from dangling carrots to shaking sticks.</p>
<p>Last week, the administration approved the sale of more than $1 billion in arms to Taiwan, sanctioned a Chinese bank it said had business dealings with North Korea and sent a naval destroyer near the South China Sea.</p>
<p>At a Rose Garden appearance with Moon, Trump announced, “The era of strategic patience with the North Korean regime has failed.”</p>
<p>Tauscher said Trump was wrong to treat North Korea as a “business outsourcing situation,” referring to his efforts to get the Chinese to persuade Pyongyang to renounce its nuclear ambitions.</p>
<p>“The truth of the matter is four successive administrations have tried to cajole China to do the work of everyone else in curtailing the North Korean father and then the son,” she said.</p>
<p>Contact Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal. com or at 202-662-7391. Follow <a href="http://www.twitter.com/DebraJSaunders" type="external">@DebraJSaunders</a> on Twitter.</p> | false | 1 | washington washington insiders await first facetoface meeting president donald trump russian president vladimir putin first stop presidents second overseas trip may carry significance james carafano foreign policy graybeard heritage foundation think tank says stretch poland substantive part trip carafano sees warsaw stop beginning wednesday sign americas commitment nato ahead g20 meeting friday session putin hamburg germany also sign washington cares capitals berlin paris brussels said something departure us president visit central european country united kingdom france germany choice warsaw however deliberate itinerary message poland one nato member nations spend 2 percent gdp defense trump addressed nato summit brussels may complained 23 28 nato nations pay fair share poland also staunch military ally sent troops combat afghanistan iraq holding news conference polish president andrzej duda thursday trump address polish people krasinski square near memorial 1944 warsaw uprising ended 63 days death many 200000 polish citizens germanys destruction warsaw trump praise polish courage throughout historys darkest hour celebrate polands emergence european power national security adviser hr mcmaster told reporters last week call nations take inspiration spirit poles confront todays challenges mcmaster also said trump reiterate americas commitment natos common defense expectation countries share responsibilities burdens defense brussels trump failed articulate support article 5 natos charter provision requiring member nations consider attack one attack later joint rose garden appearance last month romanian president klaus iohannis thursday night air force one heads hamburg twoday g20 summit likely frostier reception president first foreign trip trump challenged nato also rejected global warming language group seven summit italy precursor decision exit paris climate change agreement merkel dont expect easy talks antiinternationalist attitudes chafed german chancellor angela merkel thoroughly later said munich rally days europe could count others certain extent europeans must really take fate hands last week merkel told germanys parliament expect easy talks hamburg also pledged send clear signal free markets isolationism ellen tauscher former obama state department undersecretary excongresswoman california said germanys importance us means president needs work improving relationship merkel dont think nastybreakup category something looks like going well said advice trump personality gets way youre effective trumpmerkel interactions closely watched big moment bodylanguage analysis occur friday trump putin lock eyes first time two spoken phone trump said never met person trump guard meets former kgb operative june 2001 president george w bush met putin bush famously said looked man eye found straightforward trustworthy adding able get sense soul words thrown bush years putin consolidated power peril russian people russian mass media democrats republicans pushing trump confront putin russias interference 2016 election warn serious consequences russia repeats exercise 2020 dont bring youre playing russians hands think mistake tauscher said specific agenda carafano think trump needs confront russia inserting election going poland first said trump sent message russia side hes terms meeting yet defined theres specific agenda mcmaster said briefing really going whatever president wants talk trump signaled also wants use g20 summit engage chinese president xi jinping japanese prime minister shinzo abe south korean president moon jaein group effort curb north koreas nuclear ballistic missile programs north korea said tuesday successfully launched icbm could hit alaska april trump hosted weekend summit maralago xi declared relations china outstanding progress toward goal denuclearized korean peninsula trump moved dangling carrots shaking sticks last week administration approved sale 1 billion arms taiwan sanctioned chinese bank said business dealings north korea sent naval destroyer near south china sea rose garden appearance moon trump announced era strategic patience north korean regime failed tauscher said trump wrong treat north korea business outsourcing situation referring efforts get chinese persuade pyongyang renounce nuclear ambitions truth matter four successive administrations tried cajole china work everyone else curtailing north korean father son said contact debra j saunders dsaundersreviewjournal com 2026627391 follow debrajsaunders twitter | 618 |
<p>It’s sad to see a talented filmmaker like Steven Soderbergh descend to the quasi-propaganda and pure schlock of Erin Brockovich. Julia Roberts plays the eponymous Erin, a nasty, unpleasant foul-mouthed harridan meant to be both attractive and admirable to us because, I guess, she is Julia Roberts and doing feisty. Be feisty, Julia. And Julia is feisty in the role of a twice-divorced single mother turned personal injury paralegal who hits the legal jackpot. And Julia doing feisty has created its own jackpot, giving the picture a $28.2 million opening-weekend gross—a fact which (not for the first time) I must confess leaves me baffled and depressed in the same way that Bill Clinton’s two election victories and Al Gore’s current strength in the polls leave me baffled and depressed. How is it possible for so many people to be fooled by these patent phonies?</p>
<p>The film begins with Erin losing her own personal injury lawsuit against a doctor whose car hit hers because she cannot contain her outburst in court against the “a****** who hit me.” Then, when she loses, she engages in a similarly unlovely outburst against her lawyer, Ed Masry (Albert Finney). Ed must be some kind of masochist, however, or else one of those baffling millions who apparently find Julia Roberts doing feisty irresistible. He subsequently offers her a job in his struggling law office, in spite her complete lack of training or experience and in spite of her more or less constant nastiness to him and his staff. “I’m smart, I’m hard-working, I’ll do anything and I’m not leaving here without a job,” she says to him. “Don’t make me beg.” It also doesn’t hurt that the camera focuses lovingly throughout on Julia’s unaccustomed, Wonderbra-enhanced cleavage.</p>
<p>And she is able to make use of same, as well as her feistiness, once she is hired—as Ed finds out when he asks her about how she is going to obtain some sensitive evidence.”What makes you think you can just walk in there and find what you need?”</p>
<p>“They’re called boobs, Ed,” she says, feistily.</p>
<p>She is also meant to endear herself to us and to Ed by such hilarious one-liners at the expense of the latter’s plump secretary as: “I’m not talking to you, bitch” or “Bite my ass, Krispy Kreeme.” When Ed briefly attempts to fire her but offers to help her find another job, she tries out her own unique combination of passive-aggression and aggressive aggression: “You’re just trying not to feel guilty about firing someone with three kids to feed. F*** if I’m going to help you.” Of course she is soon hired back, even though Ed doesn’t know as yet that she has been laying the groundwork for a class-action lawsuit for hundreds of millions of dollars against Pacific Gas and Electric that will be the making of both of their fortunes.</p>
<p>The actual courtroom drama of the movie is perfunctory to non-existent. P. G. and E. is as guilty as giant utility companies being sued by charmingly feisty lawyers in the movies always are. “This is like David and Whatsisname,” says awestruck Erin.</p>
<p>“This is like David and Whatsisname’s whole f****** family,” replies Ed.</p>
<p>For Goliath, it seems, has been poisoning the groundwater around one of its plants with hexavalent chromium and causing all kinds of health problems for 600-odd local residents and employees, all of whom come to look upon a curiously unfeisty Erin as a friend as well as an advocate. For with them she has quite the bedside manner—which turns out to be a good thing for her because it means she has become indispensable to Ed and the litigation partners he has taken on, whom she also insults and verbally abuses. The actual lawsuit—or rather the movie lawsuit—is so open-and-shut that Soderbergh wastes little time on it. He’s much more interested in providing Julia with more opportunities for being feisty outside the courtroom.</p>
<p>Feisty and sensitive. For the propagandistic side of the film comes not only with its pretty routine attack on the giant corporation and its championing of the plaintiff’s bar but also in its championing of working mothers. Erin’s three adorable moppets are looked after by her boyfriend, a sensitive New Age biker called George—who is played by Aaron Eckhart in what may be an attempt to live down his own past as a cinematic a******. Now he’s just a cinematic moron, given to saying things like “You’re a very special lady” and “It was really intense” to mark him out as the post-feminist equivalent of the legendary brainless doll of a housewife. Aaron the simpleton tries to persuade Erin that her long hours spent collecting evidence against P.G. and E. might be bad for her kids, but she in effect tells him not to worry his pretty little head about it.</p>
<p>“I’m doing more for my kids now than when I was living with my parents,” she tells him—and certainly more than when she was trying to “bend myself around some man.” Also she’s making lots of money, and lawyer-values—the values of those for whom well-being is directly translatable into dollars and cents—permeate the movie. At one point George attempts to leave her (don’t worry; he’s too stupid to survive on his own), and, immediately after he rides off on his motorcycle, she is presented with a car and a bonus of $5000. To her kids she says, “This is our lucky day.”</p>
<p>True, the kids don’t seem altogether as happy about it as they might be, nor about the long hours Erin puts in trying to nail P. G. and E. But their complaints too get short shrift: “I’m doing this for us,” she tells them. “Don’t you want momma to be good at her job?” Of course they do, the little darlings. At one point, Erin’s son picks up one of the files her mother has been studying and notices that it concerns the medical history of a little girl of about his own age. Erin explains that that is why he and his sisters have not been seeing much of her. She has been helping this poor little girl—helping, her, in fact, to become a millionaire. “Why can’t her own mom help her?” asks the child naïvely.</p>
<p>“Because her mom’s real sick too.”</p>
<p>And naturally the kid leaves the room with a big smile on his face, all his doubts cleared up. That smile is the phoniest thing in this supremely phony film. But at least it’s got Julia Roberts, with breasts, in revealing clothes being feisty. What more do you want?</p> | false | 1 | sad see talented filmmaker like steven soderbergh descend quasipropaganda pure schlock erin brockovich julia roberts plays eponymous erin nasty unpleasant foulmouthed harridan meant attractive admirable us guess julia roberts feisty feisty julia julia feisty role twicedivorced single mother turned personal injury paralegal hits legal jackpot julia feisty created jackpot giving picture 282 million openingweekend grossa fact first time must confess leaves baffled depressed way bill clintons two election victories al gores current strength polls leave baffled depressed possible many people fooled patent phonies film begins erin losing personal injury lawsuit doctor whose car hit contain outburst court hit loses engages similarly unlovely outburst lawyer ed masry albert finney ed must kind masochist however else one baffling millions apparently find julia roberts feisty irresistible subsequently offers job struggling law office spite complete lack training experience spite less constant nastiness staff im smart im hardworking ill anything im leaving without job says dont make beg also doesnt hurt camera focuses lovingly throughout julias unaccustomed wonderbraenhanced cleavage able make use well feistiness hiredas ed finds asks going obtain sensitive evidencewhat makes think walk find need theyre called boobs ed says feistily also meant endear us ed hilarious oneliners expense latters plump secretary im talking bitch bite ass krispy kreeme ed briefly attempts fire offers help find another job tries unique combination passiveaggression aggressive aggression youre trying feel guilty firing someone three kids feed f im going help course soon hired back even though ed doesnt know yet laying groundwork classaction lawsuit hundreds millions dollars pacific gas electric making fortunes actual courtroom drama movie perfunctory nonexistent p g e guilty giant utility companies sued charmingly feisty lawyers movies always like david whatsisname says awestruck erin like david whatsisnames whole f family replies ed goliath seems poisoning groundwater around one plants hexavalent chromium causing kinds health problems 600odd local residents employees come look upon curiously unfeisty erin friend well advocate quite bedside mannerwhich turns good thing means become indispensable ed litigation partners taken also insults verbally abuses actual lawsuitor rather movie lawsuitis openandshut soderbergh wastes little time hes much interested providing julia opportunities feisty outside courtroom feisty sensitive propagandistic side film comes pretty routine attack giant corporation championing plaintiffs bar also championing working mothers erins three adorable moppets looked boyfriend sensitive new age biker called georgewho played aaron eckhart may attempt live past cinematic hes cinematic moron given saying things like youre special lady really intense mark postfeminist equivalent legendary brainless doll housewife aaron simpleton tries persuade erin long hours spent collecting evidence pg e might bad kids effect tells worry pretty little head im kids living parents tells himand certainly trying bend around man also shes making lots money lawyervaluesthe values wellbeing directly translatable dollars centspermeate movie one point george attempts leave dont worry hes stupid survive immediately rides motorcycle presented car bonus 5000 kids says lucky day true kids dont seem altogether happy might long hours erin puts trying nail p g e complaints get short shrift im us tells dont want momma good job course little darlings one point erins son picks one files mother studying notices concerns medical history little girl age erin explains sisters seeing much helping poor little girlhelping fact become millionaire cant mom help asks child naïvely moms real sick naturally kid leaves room big smile face doubts cleared smile phoniest thing supremely phony film least got julia roberts breasts revealing clothes feisty want | 566 |
<p>SAN DIEGO — Hector Sanchez spent nine years in the <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/San-Francisco-Giants/" type="external">San Francisco Giants</a>‘ system, including parts of five seasons with the parent club as the catching backup to perennial All-Star <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Buster_Posey/" type="external">Buster Posey</a>.</p>
<p>“I owe the Giants a lot,” the 27-year-old said Sunday.</p>
<p>Well, he has a strange way of showing it.</p>
<p>Sanchez rocketed a three-run homer off <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Jeff_Samardzija/" type="external">Jeff Samardzija</a> in the bottom of the first inning Sunday to propel the Padres to a 7-1 victory over the Giants in the rubber match of a three-game series at Petco Park.</p>
<p>The 421-foot rocket to right on a one-ball changeup came 12 1/2 hours after Sanchez broke up a 3-3 tie with a two-run, walk-off homer in the bottom of the ninth inning. That blast landed on the third balcony of the Western Metal Supply Co. building.</p>
<p>“It’s kind of fun,” Sanchez said of his back-to-back decisive blasts. “I like the opportunity. I’m just trying to do my best.”</p>
<p>His best comes out against his former team. Since he departed the Bay Area, Sanchez is 8-for-16 against the Giants with four homers and 11 RBIs. Three of his five homers this season have come against San Francisco — the first of which tied a game the Padres eventually won, and the last two qualifying as game-winners.</p>
<p>Sanchez, who started the past two games because Austin Hedges was woozy after taking a foul tip off the mask Friday night, is 4-for-11 with three homers and eight RBIs against the Giants this season. Against anyone else, he is 5-for-35 with two homers and five RBIs.</p>
<p>When asked what he liked about Sanchez’s at-bats the last two games against the Giants, Padres manager <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Andy_Green/" type="external">Andy Green</a> replied: “Home runs.”</p>
<p>Sanchez was far from the Padres’ only standout Sunday as they ran their record to 14-5 against San Francisco after losing the first nine meetings with the Giants to start the 2016 season.</p>
<p>Cory Spangenberg also hit a three-run homer in the third inning off Samardzija (4-11). The Giants right-hander was ahead 0-and-2 in the count after Spangenberg fouled off the previous pitch on a safety squeeze. Spangenberg then drove a fastball 410 feet, easily clearing the fence in straightaway center.</p>
<p>“This has got to stop,” Giants manager <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Bruce-Bochy/" type="external">Bruce Bochy</a> said of opposing teams’ success on 0-and-2 pitches. “I don’t know if I need to pitch out every time on 0-and-2 or what. This is happening too many times.</p>
<p>“They’re trying to get one run in and get away with getting a three-run homer after that failed. It seems like the more we make it an issue, the more mistakes we make. We’ve talked about it. We’ve done fines. I’m sure it is a pitch he’d like to have back.”</p>
<p>Samardzija said of his 0-and-2 mistake, “I watched Spangenberg chase a bunch of balls up in the series, so I was going for the strikeout there just because you know, one out, you can try to go for the double play. But I thought if I can get the strikeout there … that’s a frustrating pitch. … Get it up another six inches and it’s an out.”</p>
<p>Samardzija finished strong. After Spangenberg’s homer, he retired 10 of the last 11 Padres he faced, but the score was already 7-1. He wound up charged with seven runs on nine hits and no walks in six innings. Samardzija struck out eight.</p>
<p>Padres starter <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Trevor_Cahill/" type="external">Trevor Cahill</a> (4-3) held the Giants to one run on eight hits and a walk over 6 2/3 innings. He also fanned eight.</p>
<p>“My stuff stayed the same throughout the game,” Cahill said. “My last pitch was as good as my first pitch. Getting the four-run lead in the first was huge. And they were aggressive, I didn’t have many deep counts.”</p>
<p>The Padres scored four in the first against Samardzija, who entered the game with a 2.04 career ERA at Petco Park.</p>
<p>With one out, Samardzija hit Carlos Asuaje with a pitch. <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Wil-Myers/" type="external">Wil Myers</a> followed with a single, ending a 2-for-14 slump. Sanchez then drove the second pitch he saw from Samardzija into the right field seats. After Samardzija struck out Jabari Blash, Spangenberg tripled to right-center and scored on <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Erick_Aybar/" type="external">Erick Aybar</a>‘s single into the right field corner.</p>
<p>The Giants pulled to within 4-1 when Posey and <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Brandon-Crawford/" type="external">Brandon Crawford</a> opened the top of the second with back-to-back doubles. However, Cahill avoided further damage in the inning by striking out <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Nick_Hundley/" type="external">Nick Hundley</a> and <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Joe-Panik/" type="external">Joe Panik</a> before retiring Samardzija on a comebacker.</p>
<p>Myers and Sanchez opened the Padres’ third with back-to-back singles. After Samardzija again struck out Blash, Spangenberg connected on his sixth homer of the season to make it 7-1.</p>
<p>NOTES: Giants 1B <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Brandon-Belt/" type="external">Brandon Belt</a> was a late scratch from the lineup due to a sprained left wrist. Belt injured the wrist Saturday night on a checked swing. He is listed as day-to-day. Buster Posey moved to first base Sunday, and Nick Hundley caught. … Padres C Austin Hedges missed a second consecutive game after taking a foul tip on the face of his mask Friday night. Padres manager Andy Green said team doctors described the injury as “sub-concussive” and said he expects Hedges to be back in the lineup Monday as San Diego opens a three-game series in Colorado. … The Giants return home to face the <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Cleveland-Indians/" type="external">Cleveland Indians</a> on Monday.</p> | false | 1 | san diego hector sanchez spent nine years san francisco giants system including parts five seasons parent club catching backup perennial allstar buster posey owe giants lot 27yearold said sunday well strange way showing sanchez rocketed threerun homer jeff samardzija bottom first inning sunday propel padres 71 victory giants rubber match threegame series petco park 421foot rocket right oneball changeup came 12 12 hours sanchez broke 33 tie tworun walkoff homer bottom ninth inning blast landed third balcony western metal supply co building kind fun sanchez said backtoback decisive blasts like opportunity im trying best best comes former team since departed bay area sanchez 8for16 giants four homers 11 rbis three five homers season come san francisco first tied game padres eventually last two qualifying gamewinners sanchez started past two games austin hedges woozy taking foul tip mask friday night 4for11 three homers eight rbis giants season anyone else 5for35 two homers five rbis asked liked sanchezs atbats last two games giants padres manager andy green replied home runs sanchez far padres standout sunday ran record 145 san francisco losing first nine meetings giants start 2016 season cory spangenberg also hit threerun homer third inning samardzija 411 giants righthander ahead 0and2 count spangenberg fouled previous pitch safety squeeze spangenberg drove fastball 410 feet easily clearing fence straightaway center got stop giants manager bruce bochy said opposing teams success 0and2 pitches dont know need pitch every time 0and2 happening many times theyre trying get one run get away getting threerun homer failed seems like make issue mistakes make weve talked weve done fines im sure pitch hed like back samardzija said 0and2 mistake watched spangenberg chase bunch balls series going strikeout know one try go double play thought get strikeout thats frustrating pitch get another six inches samardzija finished strong spangenbergs homer retired 10 last 11 padres faced score already 71 wound charged seven runs nine hits walks six innings samardzija struck eight padres starter trevor cahill 43 held giants one run eight hits walk 6 23 innings also fanned eight stuff stayed throughout game cahill said last pitch good first pitch getting fourrun lead first huge aggressive didnt many deep counts padres scored four first samardzija entered game 204 career era petco park one samardzija hit carlos asuaje pitch wil myers followed single ending 2for14 slump sanchez drove second pitch saw samardzija right field seats samardzija struck jabari blash spangenberg tripled rightcenter scored erick aybars single right field corner giants pulled within 41 posey brandon crawford opened top second backtoback doubles however cahill avoided damage inning striking nick hundley joe panik retiring samardzija comebacker myers sanchez opened padres third backtoback singles samardzija struck blash spangenberg connected sixth homer season make 71 notes giants 1b brandon belt late scratch lineup due sprained left wrist belt injured wrist saturday night checked swing listed daytoday buster posey moved first base sunday nick hundley caught padres c austin hedges missed second consecutive game taking foul tip face mask friday night padres manager andy green said team doctors described injury subconcussive said expects hedges back lineup monday san diego opens threegame series colorado giants return home face cleveland indians monday | 524 |
<p>By Ernest Scheyder and Ron Bousso</p>
<p>HOUSTON/LONDON (Reuters) – Two decades ago, BP set out to transcend oil, adopting a sunburst logo to convey its plans to pour $8 billion over a decade into renewable technologies, even promising to power its gas stations with the sun.</p>
<p>That transformation – marketed as “Beyond Petroleum” – led to manufacturing solar panels in Australia, Spain and the United States and erecting wind farms in the United States and the Netherlands.</p>
<p>Today, BP (L:) might be more aptly branded “Back to Petroleum” after exiting or scaling back its renewable energy investments. Lower-cost Chinese components upended its solar panel business, which the firm shed in 2011. A year later, BP tried to sell its U.S. wind power business but couldn’t get a buyer.</p>
<p>“We made very big bets in the past,” BP Chief Executive Bob Dudley told Reuters in an interview. “A lot of those didn’t work. We’re not sure yet what will be commercially acceptable.”</p>
<p>The costly lesson of the biggest foray yet by an oil major into renewable energy was not lost on rival firms.</p>
<p>Even as governments and environmentalists forecast a peak in oil demand within a generation – and China and India say they may eventually ban gasoline and diesel vehicles – leaders of the world’s biggest oil firms are not buying the argument that their traditional business faces any imminent threat.</p>
<p>A Reuters analysis of clean energy investments and forecasts by oil majors, along with exclusive interviews with top oil executives, reveal mostly token investments in alternative energy. Today, renewable power projects get about 3 percent of $100 billion in combined annual spending by the five biggest oil firms, according to energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie.</p>
<p>BP, Chevron (N:), Exxon Mobil (N:), Royal Dutch Shell (L:) and Total (PA:) are instead milking their drilling and processing assets to finance investor payouts now and bolster balance sheets for the future. They believe they can enter new energy sectors later by acquiring companies or technologies if and when others prove them profitable.</p>
<p>“There is no sign of peak demand right now,” said Chevron CEO John Watson, an economist by training, who is retiring in early 2018. “For the next 10 or 20 years, we expect to see oil demand growth.”</p>
<p>For a graphic showing BP’s fossil fuel and renewable energy forecasts, see: http://tmsnrt.rs/2h4vGHd</p>
<p>The International Energy Agency forecasts a 10 percent rise in oil demand through 2040, reflecting the consensus among oil firms. The earliest estimate for peak oil demand from any oil company is late next decade, by Shell CEO Ben van Beurden.</p>
<p>History shows energy transitions – from wood to coal to oil – take a long time. Coal’s contribution to world energy consumption peaked recently at 28 percent and remains above the share from , though just below oil’s one-third.</p>
<p>Profit, if any, from the majors’ decades-long interest in renewable energy ventures is unclear. None of the largest oil companies disclose earnings from their solar, wind or biofuels ventures.</p>
<p>Investors such as Alasdair McKinnon, portfolio manager at Scottish Investment Trust, believe oil will sustain shareholders far into the future.</p>
<p>“There isn’t a viable alternative to fossil fuels on the horizon,” he said. “We’re not buying into the long-term demand destruction for oil.”</p>
<p>The confidence in oil’s future relies largely on rising consumption from emerging economies. Exxon forecasts that transportation will require 25 percent more fuel by 2040, propelled by growth in Asia. Chevron’s analysis of the India and Nigeria markets, meanwhile, concludes that infrastructure needed for electric cars is unlikely to be built.</p>
<p>Cars account for about a fifth of oil consumption, BP estimates. So if electric vehicles do eventually capture mass markets, oil firms would still expect growing demand from the air, rail and trucking industries.</p>
<p>Natural gas – now a smaller business than oil for most majors – can grow to nearly a quarter of all energy used by displacing coal in power generation and through expanded uses in chemicals, these companies forecast. Natural gas can also fuel the power needed for electric cars.</p>
<p>Although Shell forecasts peak oil demand coming earlier than its rivals, it is preparing for that prospect mostly with massive natural gas investments. The firm last year spent $54 billion acquiring BG Group, which derives half its production from gas. Chevron, Exxon and Shell recently have spent billions of dollars on new liquefied natural gas projects across the globe.</p>
<p>Exxon declined to comment for this article.</p>
<p>SHORT-SIGHTED STRATEGY?</p>
<p>Critics of oil majors’ cautious renewable strategy – including some big investors – say the firms are being short-sighted in their trust that change will come slow, or that one fossil fuel will gradually replace another. Just as cheap natural gas is supplanting coal, even cheaper wind or solar eventually will displace gas, they argue.</p>
<p>South Australia is soon to become a proving ground for a project could pave the way for renewable power to supplant fossil fuels for peak electricity – a combined wind farm and grid-scale battery storage facility, by electric-car maker Tesla Inc (O:) and operator Windlab Ltd.</p>
<p>Fossil fuel companies need to quickly reorient themselves to the low returns of the solar and wind industries, said Jules Kortenhorst, a former Shell executive who runs the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit energy research organization.</p>
<p>“You cannot flip a switch on a Monday morning from being one to another,” he said. “Paychecks in the oil and gas industry are based on fundamentally believing that the world cannot see economic growth without fossil fuels.”</p>
<p>To achieve the same share of the renewables market that the largest publicly-traded oil companies now hold in oil and gas would require an investment of about $350 billion over the next 18 years, estimates consultancy Wood Mackenzie. Such spending would cut into the generous dividends that oil firms’ shareholders have come to expect.</p>
<p>“We think it will be a real challenge for these companies to change their business model,” said Nathan Fabian, director of policy at Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), a United Nations-backed group.</p>
<p>PRI has guidelines calling for investment analysis that weighs environmental, social and governance issues. Its principles have been adopted by investors with $70 trillion in assets under management.</p>
<p>SMALL SCALE RENEWABLES INVESTMENTS</p>
<p>Oil companies have made relatively modest investments a wide range of renewable technologies. Chevron has a smattering of mostly small wind and solar ventures; Shell invests in sugar-cane ethanol in South America, wind farms in the United States and electric-car charging stations in Europe; and BP still owns the U.S. wind farms it once tried to sell.</p>
<p>John Browne – who as BP’s CEO two decades ago helped launch the early investments in renewables – said he still believes the renewable power will grow.</p>
<p>“It will take time,” he said in an interview with Reuters last month. “And they have time.”</p>
<p>Shell pledged to invest up to $1 billion a year by 2020 in what it calls “new energies.”</p>
<p>Total said this year it would spend $500 million annually on developing alternatives. But soon after that announcement, it unveiled its $7.5 billion acquisition of Maersk Oil, part of a plan to pump more crude from Norway’s North Sea.</p>
<p>Total CEO Patrick Pouyanne in October explained the focus on economics at an October oil conference in London.</p>
<p>“When you ask our customers what their priority is, either in developed economies or in emerging countries, price comes first,” he said. A hasty shift to renewables, he said, “could bring great economic and social damage to our 6 billion customers.”</p>
<p>Exxon Mobil is backing research into biofuels, joining with gene modification firm Synthetic Genomics to coax algae to produce more lipids, an oil substitute. It hasn’t detailed its investment but said the effort remains far from commercialization. By comparison, Exxon this year spent $5.6 billion on U.S. shale oil assets.</p>
<p>BATTERY-POWERED CARS, PLANES</p>
<p>Some of the oil industry’s largest customers are planning a shift to renewable alternatives, especially in transportation, which accounts for about a quarter of annual energy consumption.</p>
<p>Ford Motor Co (N:) earlier this fall disclosed it would aim, by 2030, to derive a third of its sales from battery-powered cars and another third from gas-electric hybrids.</p>
<p>A startup backed by Boeing Co (N:) and JetBlue Airways Corp (O:) recently announced plans for a small hybrid jet by 2022, using batteries from Tesla and battery supplier Panasonic Corp (T:).</p>
<p>Yet oil firms continue to forecast aggressive growth in liquid fuels. Exxon predicts 90 percent of the transportation industry will rely on petroleum through 2040.</p>
<p>BP projects the world’s auto fleet doubling to 1.8 billion vehicles by 2035, with only 75 million of those powered by electricity.</p>
<p>“We’ll see if (electric cars) can be delivered in a way that doesn’t require large subsidies” from governments, Chevron’s Watson told Reuters. “That’s what we’re seeing now.”</p> | false | 1 | ernest scheyder ron bousso houstonlondon reuters two decades ago bp set transcend oil adopting sunburst logo convey plans pour 8 billion decade renewable technologies even promising power gas stations sun transformation marketed beyond petroleum led manufacturing solar panels australia spain united states erecting wind farms united states netherlands today bp l might aptly branded back petroleum exiting scaling back renewable energy investments lowercost chinese components upended solar panel business firm shed 2011 year later bp tried sell us wind power business couldnt get buyer made big bets past bp chief executive bob dudley told reuters interview lot didnt work sure yet commercially acceptable costly lesson biggest foray yet oil major renewable energy lost rival firms even governments environmentalists forecast peak oil demand within generation china india say may eventually ban gasoline diesel vehicles leaders worlds biggest oil firms buying argument traditional business faces imminent threat reuters analysis clean energy investments forecasts oil majors along exclusive interviews top oil executives reveal mostly token investments alternative energy today renewable power projects get 3 percent 100 billion combined annual spending five biggest oil firms according energy consultancy wood mackenzie bp chevron n exxon mobil n royal dutch shell l total pa instead milking drilling processing assets finance investor payouts bolster balance sheets future believe enter new energy sectors later acquiring companies technologies others prove profitable sign peak demand right said chevron ceo john watson economist training retiring early 2018 next 10 20 years expect see oil demand growth graphic showing bps fossil fuel renewable energy forecasts see httptmsnrtrs2h4vghd international energy agency forecasts 10 percent rise oil demand 2040 reflecting consensus among oil firms earliest estimate peak oil demand oil company late next decade shell ceo ben van beurden history shows energy transitions wood coal oil take long time coals contribution world energy consumption peaked recently 28 percent remains share though oils onethird profit majors decadeslong interest renewable energy ventures unclear none largest oil companies disclose earnings solar wind biofuels ventures investors alasdair mckinnon portfolio manager scottish investment trust believe oil sustain shareholders far future isnt viable alternative fossil fuels horizon said buying longterm demand destruction oil confidence oils future relies largely rising consumption emerging economies exxon forecasts transportation require 25 percent fuel 2040 propelled growth asia chevrons analysis india nigeria markets meanwhile concludes infrastructure needed electric cars unlikely built cars account fifth oil consumption bp estimates electric vehicles eventually capture mass markets oil firms would still expect growing demand air rail trucking industries natural gas smaller business oil majors grow nearly quarter energy used displacing coal power generation expanded uses chemicals companies forecast natural gas also fuel power needed electric cars although shell forecasts peak oil demand coming earlier rivals preparing prospect mostly massive natural gas investments firm last year spent 54 billion acquiring bg group derives half production gas chevron exxon shell recently spent billions dollars new liquefied natural gas projects across globe exxon declined comment article shortsighted strategy critics oil majors cautious renewable strategy including big investors say firms shortsighted trust change come slow one fossil fuel gradually replace another cheap natural gas supplanting coal even cheaper wind solar eventually displace gas argue south australia soon become proving ground project could pave way renewable power supplant fossil fuels peak electricity combined wind farm gridscale battery storage facility electriccar maker tesla inc operator windlab ltd fossil fuel companies need quickly reorient low returns solar wind industries said jules kortenhorst former shell executive runs rocky mountain institute nonprofit energy research organization flip switch monday morning one another said paychecks oil gas industry based fundamentally believing world see economic growth without fossil fuels achieve share renewables market largest publiclytraded oil companies hold oil gas would require investment 350 billion next 18 years estimates consultancy wood mackenzie spending would cut generous dividends oil firms shareholders come expect think real challenge companies change business model said nathan fabian director policy principles responsible investment pri united nationsbacked group pri guidelines calling investment analysis weighs environmental social governance issues principles adopted investors 70 trillion assets management small scale renewables investments oil companies made relatively modest investments wide range renewable technologies chevron smattering mostly small wind solar ventures shell invests sugarcane ethanol south america wind farms united states electriccar charging stations europe bp still owns us wind farms tried sell john browne bps ceo two decades ago helped launch early investments renewables said still believes renewable power grow take time said interview reuters last month time shell pledged invest 1 billion year 2020 calls new energies total said year would spend 500 million annually developing alternatives soon announcement unveiled 75 billion acquisition maersk oil part plan pump crude norways north sea total ceo patrick pouyanne october explained focus economics october oil conference london ask customers priority either developed economies emerging countries price comes first said hasty shift renewables said could bring great economic social damage 6 billion customers exxon mobil backing research biofuels joining gene modification firm synthetic genomics coax algae produce lipids oil substitute hasnt detailed investment said effort remains far commercialization comparison exxon year spent 56 billion us shale oil assets batterypowered cars planes oil industrys largest customers planning shift renewable alternatives especially transportation accounts quarter annual energy consumption ford motor co n earlier fall disclosed would aim 2030 derive third sales batterypowered cars another third gaselectric hybrids startup backed boeing co n jetblue airways corp recently announced plans small hybrid jet 2022 using batteries tesla battery supplier panasonic corp yet oil firms continue forecast aggressive growth liquid fuels exxon predicts 90 percent transportation industry rely petroleum 2040 bp projects worlds auto fleet doubling 18 billion vehicles 2035 75 million powered electricity well see electric cars delivered way doesnt require large subsidies governments chevrons watson told reuters thats seeing | 952 |
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<p>Why did the United Nations choose men alleged to have supervised death squads to head peacekeeping forces in Darfur and Mali? The activities of Lieutenant General Patrick Nyamvumba and Major General Jean Bosco Kazura in eastern Rwanda shed light on what their victorious army did during the 1994 genocide and for years to come.</p>
<p>BRUSSELS – Joseph Matata, a Rwandan farmer who became a human rights activist, was in Belgium in April 1994 when the genocide began.&#160; But his children and ethnic Tutsi wife were at home in Murambi, a village on Rwanda’s eastern border. At dawn on April 12, a militia of Hutu extremists known as the Interahamwe arrived at their house looking for blood. The attackers quickly forced the family outdoors and sliced his wife’s back with a machete. They then went after Matata’s 12-year-old daughter, cutting her neck and face. The girl fell to the ground and lapsed into a coma. A Hutu neighbor named John intervened as the militia started beating three other children with clubs. When the attackers thought they’d killed two Tutsis, they decided to move on.</p>
<p>With the help of a local gendarme who knew the family, John managed to get Matata’s wife and daughter to the nearest hospital, while his remaining children found refuge with another neighbor who kept them safe by paying off marauding bands of killers.</p>
<p>A week later, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA)—a Tutsi rebel army that routed Hutu extremists and seized power—swept into Murambi and brought Matata’s wife and daughter to a more equipped hospital in neighboring Gahini, a village in the commune of Rukara, on the shores of Lake Muhazi.</p>
<p>“For that, I have to thank the RPF,” Matata said dryly at a restaurant in central Brussels, referring to the Rwandan Patriotic Front, (RPF) the political wing of the RPA and current ruling party of Rwanda.</p>
<p>When the RPF formed an emergency coalition government in late July at the end of the genocide, flights resumed to the country and Matata was finally able to get home. He headed straight to Gahini to pick up his wife and daughter, who had temporarily moved into a house near the hospital that had nursed them back to health.</p>
<p>It was then that Matata heard a litany of other horrors that had occurred in Gahini and in villages throughout the prefectures of Kibungo and Byumba. Civilians began to tell him stories about systematic killings of Hutus perpetrated by the RPA, the victorious army that had supposedly halted the genocide.</p>
<p>“I was grateful to the RPF for helping my family but I couldn’t ignore what I was hearing,” Matata said, unable to finish the same glass of Leffe beer over our three-hour encounter.&#160; “As someone who believed in human rights I felt obliged to investigate the allegations.”</p>
<p>In the 1970s and early 1980s, Matata—a voluble yet linguistically precise man—worked at the National Bank of Rwanda in Kigali and became critical of the former Hutu regime and one-party rule of President Juvenal Habyarimana. He later moved to Murambi and opened an agricultural business. In November 1990, when the RPA first invaded northern Rwanda from Uganda, he was accused of aiding the RPF, a charge he denied, and was briefly thrown in jail. By 1991, he became a founding member of ARDHO, the Rwandan Association for the Defense of Human Rights, and would later head CLIIR, the Brussels-based Centre to Fight Impunity and Injustice in Rwanda, where he’s become a tireless chronicler of the complex, unrepentantly violent history of Rwanda.</p>
<p>The 58-year-old Rwandan of mixed ethnicity stages weekly protests outside the Rwandan embassy in Brussels and issues missives condemning disappearances and arrests in his homeland, incidents largely ignored by organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. He has become, among Belgium’s curious sanctum of Rwandan exiles, a lawful Zorro-like figure and a one-man support network for Hutus and Tutsis behind bars or in flight.</p>
<p>Matata did not last long in Rwanda under the Rwandan Patriotic Front, whose power was just beginning to flourish amid the ruins of war in July 1994. Within days of his return from Belgium to Rwanda, he interviewed dozens of villagers in Gahini and other sectors, many who would later disappear. He also visited 10 mass graves in the towns of Muhazi, Kayonza and Kabarondo. Some of the bodies of Hutus in those graves were later burned or brought to mass graves containing Tutsis killed by the Interahamwe before the RPA arrived.</p>
<p>A witness that assisted him with the probe was one of Matata’s former employees on a farm he owned in Murambi. This man, a Tutsi, had the ghastly job of transporting corpses for the RPA in a fougonnette—a kind of African taxi minibus—to mass graves.</p>
<p>“This man worked for the RPA. He had to carry corpses in a vehicle the RPA had seized. The work was done quickly,” Matata said.</p>
<p>“He was traumatized. Sometimes the victims loaded into the taxi weren’t even dead. They would still be moaning and crying.”</p>
<p>The employee in question—whom Matata described as a sensitive person—eventually had problems with the RPF and was forced to flee the country.</p>
<p>In Matata’s initial investigation, witnesses described how the RPA combed the hillside. “The RPA hunted people down like they would rabbit or other prey. The soldiers did clean-up operations in the hills. They went from house to house, shooting people.” Sometimes they used grenades, he said.</p>
<p>Some people hid in banana groves or escaped to the adjacent forest, the Akagera National Park.</p>
<p>“Quite a few victims would see the soldiers coming and throw themselves into the lake and drown.”</p>
<p>The RPA also used another method—one of entrapment—to kill larger groups of people.</p>
<p>“They asked people to gather in certain areas, in schools and markets. Those who showed up at these meetings were given cooking equipment, clothes and food. These people were told to spread the word about other meetings. When larger groups of people showed up the RPA used grenades or guns to kill them.”</p>
<p>Matata contends the RPA called Hutus to meetings and slaughtered them in other areas of the country as well. “The massacres were intensive and massive.”</p>
<p>Matata was unable to complete a full investigation in Kibungo—with names and numbers of victims—because his life was threatened on several occasions. Within weeks he returned to Kigali and was forced in early 1995 to leave Rwanda for good. Nevertheless, his truncated work was eventually bolstered by the findings of a man named Robert Gersony.</p>
<p>Gersony, a consultant with extensive experience in African war zones, was hired by the United Nations to conduct a survey on the feasibility of Rwandan refugees returning to their homes after the genocide. Like many who descended on Rwanda in the aftermath of genocide, Gersony and his team were initially sympathetic to the RPF, and were granted access to 91 sites in more than 40 communes around the country. They conducted interviews with 200 individuals and held another 100 small group discussions.</p>
<p>But what they found was disturbing enough to throw the United Nations into complete disarray, findings that necessitated nothing sort of a paradigm shift in international agency thought.</p>
<p>In September 1994, Gersony’s team discovered RPA soldiers appeared to have carried out genocide against Hutu civilians.</p>
<p>A US State Department cable dealing with Gersony’s findings was sent to then US Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, and US embassies in the region. The cable, dated September 1994, read: “(Hutu) refugees were called for meetings on peace and security. Once gathered, the RPA would move in and carry out the killing. In addition to group killings, house-to-house searches were conducted; individuals hiding out in the swamps were hunted; returnees as well as the sick, the elderly, the young and males between 18-40 years old were victims. So many civilians were killed that burial of bodies is a problem. In some villages, the team estimated that 10,000 or more a month have killed since April.”</p>
<p>Another cable sent by the UN peace monitoring mission, UNAMIR, quoted Gersony using stronger language to describe the crimes committed by the RPA against Hutus.</p>
<p>“Gersony put forward evidence of what he described as calculated, pre-planned, systematic atrocities and genocide against Hutus by the RPA whose methodology and scale, he concluded, (30,000 massacres) could only have been part of a plan implemented as a policy from the highest echelons of the government. In his view, these were not individual cases of revenge and summary trials but a pre-planned, systematic genocide against the Hutus. Gersony staked his 25-year reputation on his conclusions which he recognized were diametrically opposite to the assumptions made, so far, by the UN and the international community.”</p>
<p>The authenticity of the UNAMIR cable has been confirmed by two individuals: an ICTR lawyer and a person who took part in discussions of Gersony’s findings.</p>
<p>The cable, indexed and used as evidence at the UN International Criminal Court for Rwanda (ICTR), was written by UNAMIR official Shaharyar Khan and was sent to UN peacekeeping chief at the time, Kofi Annan. Khan went on to say that he did not believe the killings were part of a “pre-ordained, systematic massacre ordered from the top” but admitted that the UN was now “engaged in a damage limitation exercise.”</p>
<p>The United Nations and the United States chose political subterfuge. Gersony’s field notes were ultimately buried in a concerted effort to protect the post genocide government led by Paul Kagame.&#160; No further investigations were ever pursued, and those suspected of being behind the slaughter of innocents were never questioned.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Before he left Rwanda, Matata tried to ascertain who was responsible for the slaughter, at least on a local level. In due course, he discovered that authority emanated from a lieutenant colonel that would later go on to lead the world’s biggest UN peacekeeping operation.</p>
<p>“That commander was Patrick Nyamvumba,” Matata said ruefully. “The soldiers who massacred civilians were under his responsibility.”</p>
<p>Today, Lt General Nyamvumba is a highly respected figure on the international military stage, and currently Rwanda’s chief of defense staff.&#160; In 2009, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon appointed him commander of the UN/African Union hybrid Mission in Darfur (UNAMID), a post he held until June this year, when Ban praised the general for his “dedication and invaluable service” provided over four years.</p>
<p>Rwanda has four battalions deployed in UNAMID, the world’s largest and arguably most important peacekeeping mission at an estimated 22,000 international troops. The country’s crucial contribution to peacekeeping in an unstable but politically important region such as Sudan has provided Kigali with prestige in the hallowed halls of the United Nations, according to analysts. Indeed, in October 2012, Rwanda secured a rotating seat on the UN Security Council—and is generally accustomed to receiving cover against allegations of serious breaches in humanitarian law at home and in neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo.</p>
<p>So how did Lt General Nyamvumba rise to the highest echelons of Rwanda’s prodigious military? And more importantly how was he chosen as a chief peacekeeper by the United Nations, a global body whose enshrining principles are based on international law and security? And how did Nyamvumba’s comrade-in-arms, General Jean Bosco Kazura, come to secure his role in June as force commander of the UN’s newly created peacekeeping force in Mali, MINUSMA? Just who is Kazura, and how did this Tutsi officer originally from Burundi rise to prominence within the RPA?</p>
<p>Over the last several months, a dozen former RPA soldiers and officers in Africa, Europe, and North America have quietly agreed to share their knowledge of what these men did two decades ago along a swathe of Rwandan territory that stretched from the border of Uganda to that of Tanzania. And another young man—a Tutsi genocide survivor who was a teenager at the time—has related chilling memories of Nyamvumba and some of his men operating in an area on the western rim of the Lake Victoria basin, a seemingly primeval paradise of red rutted paths, papyrus reeds, and bourbon coffee trees that belies its history as a killing ground.</p>
<p>Kamanzi, the witness in question, has a luminous face and a reluctantly determined demeanor. In late April 1994, because he knew some of the young Tutsi soldiers based in Gahini, he was entrusted with collecting livestock on abandoned properties seized by the RPA. He remembers Nyamvumba as a pleasant man who walked with a limp. “He presented well. He was calm and often smiling. He was the ground commander. But soldiers were definitely comfortable around him.”</p>
<p>Nyamvumba, whom Kamanzi called “the Colonel”, often stayed in the most beautiful house in Gahini overlooking Lake Muhazi—the first dwelling on the left on a road leading to the top of the hill. The witness went to Nyamvumba’s residence several times when he was there.&#160; It was customary for young women to be milling around; one well-known girl became Nyamvumba’s girlfriend.</p>
<p>Kamanzi regularly accompanied soldiers when they ransacked buildings, grabbing merchandise, food and money. “It was wartime. We were trying to get by,” he explained.</p>
<p>But it was during operations, going house-to-house and into the fields—the teenager saw firsthand what the soldiers’ actual objectives were. Over a period of two months, from late April onward, Kamanzi accompanied soldiers on their missions at least two or three times a week. The soldiers referred to the work as “screening” or “cleaning out the enemy.””</p>
<p>“I saw soldiers kill people. Sometimes I stayed back in the vehicle because I really did not want to see what was happening,” he said. “I was frightened to see someone killed in front of me.”</p>
<p>The soldiers, many of them barely out of their teens, called the unarmed Hutus Interahamwe.</p>
<p>“But what is sad is that these were villagers,” he explained. “They weren’t Interahamwe. Many of them were working in the fields. Sometimes the parents had fled and children were left at home alone. Unfortunately the soldiers killed the children.”</p>
<p>Kamanzi remembers one traumatic incident early on, in a village near the Akagera park.</p>
<p>“We went into a house. No one was there except a little girl about five years old. The soldiers asked her where her parents were. She told them they had gone into the fields. A few of us headed back to our vehicle but one soldier stayed behind. After a few seconds I heard a gunshot.”</p>
<p>“The soldier shot her dead. He later told me she was the daughter of an Interahamwe. He didn’t even think that she was just a little girl.”</p>
<p>“At that point I wondered: did these people come to save us?”</p>
<p>Colonel Nyamvumba rarely accompanied soldiers during operations. But there was one incident, Kamanzi recalled, where they’d received word that Hutus in a particular village might be armed. On that day, the ground commander, his escorts and a team of soldiers went in separate vehicles to the location, eventually surrounding a property there. Kamanzi went along too. Nyamvumba gave orders in Swahili, a language the teenager did not understand, and he and Nyamvumba stayed behind a few meters while soldiers fired shots for an extended period of time. Like in every mission he was privy to, there was no combat; soldiers just proceeded to kill.</p>
<p>Former soldiers and officers explained that before April 1994, Nyamvumba had been a middle ranking officer with very little if any command experience; he was above all the chief instructor of the RPA’s training wing, which shifted from the Gatunda township near the Ugandan border to Gabiro at the edge of the Akagera Park after the genocide was unleashed. The battalion that was created under his direction to euphemistically “screen”, “mop up”, or “comb” the hillsides of Hutu civilians was considered highly clandestine. Oscar operated in areas already cleared of insurgents, in the rear of the RPA’s 157th mobile force led by the notorious Fred Ibingira, now a Lt. General, and the 7th brigade under William Bagire.</p>
<p>Sources interviewed for this story said Nyamvumba supervised this battalion, which consisted of several companies of young soldiers drawn principally from RPA’s High Command—consisting of Kagame’s escorts—and soldiers from the training wing. &#160;Nyamvumba received direct instructions from Kagame, according to senior officers familiar with the operations.</p>
<p>The operations were conceived, planned and coordinated by Kagame and the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI), along with intelligence staff from High Command and the training wing, officers alleged.</p>
<p>The intelligence officer that worked directly for Kagame was Silas Udahemuka, who helped coordinate operations. Udahehumka was assisted by three other Kagame escorts: Innocent Gasana, Jackson Mugisha, and Charles Matungo.</p>
<p>At the time, DMI was headed by Kayumba Nyamwasa, long considered second to Kagame in Rwanda’s military hierarchy. General Nyamwasa fell out with his boss in 2010, fled to South Africa and survived an assassination attempt by suspected Rwandan agents. He declined to be interviewed for this article.</p>
<p>Another central figure from DMI that helped execute was Jackson Rwahama. He advised, inspected, and attended secret meetings, officers explained. “Rwahama was a senior killer from the Ugandan army, had worked in intelligence for Idi Amin,” one officer said, referring to Uganda’s ruthless dictator during the 1970s whose regime was marked by egregious human rights abuses and political repression.</p>
<p>“Rwahama helped coordinate the killings. Remember Nyamvumba was young at the time and had little experience. They asked themselves ‘how are we going to kill a lot of people in a short period of time before anyone knows about it?’ Rwahama was the best person to plan this,” the officer confided.</p>
<p>Officers and soldiers confirmed that in addition to working alongside DMI in a scheme to clear Hutus from these prefectures, Nyamvumba had at least three deputy commanders overseeing death squads. They were John Birasa, Emmanuel Butera, and Jean Bosco Kazura.</p>
<p>By all accounts, Kazura was an intellectual with a passion for soccer and little battle experience apart from briefly serving in a battalion known as Delta Mobile. Originally from Burundi, he spoke fluent French, English and Kinyarwanda, was commissioned in 1992 and joined RPA High Command, where he became a translator for Kagame, regularly listening to Radio France Internationale and greeting important visitors that came to see Kagame and RPF chairman Alex Kanyarengwe at Arusha House at the RPF’s military base, Mulindi, before the genocide.</p>
<p>But as soon as former Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down by a surface-to-air missile on April 6th 1994, Kazura was catapulted into new, deadlier terrain.</p>
<p>Immediately after the assassination—which would ignite the genocide and spark a killing frenzy predominantly against Tutsi civilians—Nyamvumba left the Karama training wing near the Ugandan border, along with intelligence staff and several nominees of the main rank and file there. The intelligence staff that went with Nyamvumba were Dan Munyuza, Rwakabi Kakira and Kalemara alias Kiboko. Leaving his official job as chief instructor, Nyamvumba and his men ‘started to sweep’ from Gatunda and on to Ngarama, where they would make a temporary base.</p>
<p>According to testimony, some of the first operations began along the eastern border of the demilitarized zone, where the RPA had an upper hand in the pre-genocide war of invasion. The RPF had lured Hutu peasants in this area, with promises of salt, sugar, medicine and other basic necessities. These were some of the first people to be caught and killed in the RPA’s snare.</p>
<p>By the end of April, the training wing – ostensibly run by Nyamvumba—was relocated to Gabiro, at the edge of Akagera, a park originally spanning 2,500 square kilometers comprised of swamp, savannah and mountains.</p>
<p>His Oscar battalion—as it eventually would be called—grew in small numbers to an estimated 800 soldiers as the genocide wore on, with new waves of Tutsi passouts from within Rwanda and surrounding countries. The force would eventually be sent across the prefectures of Byumba and Kibungo; localities targeted included Muvumba, Ngarama, Gituza, Bwisige, Muhura, Murambi then on to Kibungo.</p>
<p>Kazura, at the time in High Command and known to be close to Kagame, became deputy commander of these operations, initially in Byumba. Then, sources say, Kazura’s and Nyaumvumba’s men advanced toward Kibungo town, to Kanyonza, Kabarondo and Rukira.</p>
<p>“The soldiers did this job deliberately,” said David, a former RPA officer.</p>
<p>David is a loquacious, middle-aged Rwandan Tutsi living in exile. When he’s not talking about Rwanda, his manner shifts easily between jovial and ironic. Surprisingly, like so many Rwandans who’ve endured the horror of genocide, his face betrays little of the emotional scars that lie underneath. But his expressions change quickly. When he speaks of the crimes that unfolded around him in eastern Rwanda, his mouth contorts and his brow twists in trenches.</p>
<p>“The soldiers were digging mass graves. They had the manpower to dig, to burn,” David said. “There were some serial killers, people who were trained just to kill, to exterminate. Others were there to see and get rid of the dead.”</p>
<p>The RPA would kill small groups of Hutus on the spot, he explained. But with larger groups, attempts to separate them were made. Many were brought by trucks to killing grounds in Akagera and were later shot or stabbed. Some were starved for days then killed with hammers and hoes.</p>
<p>One of the main killing centers was Nasho next to a lake of the same name, on the park’s southern flank. The commanders moved around, depending on the magnitude of operations.</p>
<p>“Kazura was at times in Nasho overseeing those killings. Sometimes John Birasa was there with Nyamvumba, who was working under Kagame’s orders,” David pointed out. “This was something they were trying to do in secret, not to alert other troops in the main fighting battalions.”</p>
<p>One of the first killing spots was at Gabiro at the House of Habyarimana—a guest lodge of more than 200 rooms that had once been the home of Rwanda’s king—used by the RPF for screening, identifying and eliminating Hutus, as soon as the genocide started.</p>
<p>Other known killing grounds were located between 5 and 10 kilometers from Gabiro deeper in the park, and at Rwata, some 30 kilometers from Gabiro toward the Akagera River.</p>
<p>“From Gabiro, Hutus could not escape; they were surrounded by soldiers. They were thrown into mass graves dug with bulldozers. Then soldiers started shooting at them,” an intelligence officer that received daily reports of the operations said.</p>
<p>“Lt Colonel Nyamvumba was from Gabiro and was the commander of that operation,” he confirmed.</p>
<p>This officer estimates that thousands of people died in this manner. He said anywhere between 100 to 200 people were put onto lorries, and between 5 and 10 trucks went through Gabiro deeper into the park daily—at night—for months.</p>
<p>Gabiro had the logistics: bulldozers for digging, stocks of diesel and petrol to burn corpses, and acid to dissolve the victims’ remains. The ashes were then mixed with soil or placed into lakes in the park, according to sources.</p>
<p>By June, at the height of the genocide, Kazura was in Rwamagana in Kibungo, east of the capital. A soldier in High Command said Kazura was an operational commander of about 100 soldiers that hunted down civilians, killed them and dumped them in a pit in neighboring Rutonde.</p>
<p>“Kazura was personally involved in carrying out and commanding and overseeing those operations of hunting down and rounding up civilians, bringing them to a detention house and taking them to the killing site,” said the soldier, who was present during the murders.</p>
<p>In one incident, Hutu women and children that had taken refuge in a Catholic church in Rwamagana were taken to Rutonde, where they massacred and thrown into a pit with Tutsi victims that had been killed by Interahamwe earlier in the genocide, he noted.</p>
<p>Other people, including men, were captured in neighboring areas and eventually detained at a petrol station, before being killed and buried in the pit.</p>
<p>“Women’s arms were tied behind their backs with their pagnes (wraparound garments) and men were tied with their shirts. They were taken to a detention center at the petrol station in Rwamagana. In the evening they were killed at the station or were taken to the pit and killed there,” the soldier described.</p>
<p>The soldier estimated that at least 600 people were killed in this manner in Rwamagana alone, and more than 2000 in total from outlying areas.</p>
<p>Another soldier said by early July, Kazura was moving around, coming to Rwamagana several times a week with his white Land Cruiser. He stayed at the Dereva Hotel, a kind of guesthouse where he had access to girlfriends and alcohol. It was known that Kazura had “special forces” at his disposal.</p>
<p>The soldier, a quiet, self-assured man named Damas, confirmed that Rwamagana had become a microcosm of detention and killing throughout the genocide. Damas was on site in July when soldiers at the gendarmerie killed an estimated 200 Hutu men with guns and small hoes. Many of the Hutus had their arms and hands tied behind their backs. Some of them were already dead from being shot while they were rounded up in their home areas.</p>
<p>Damas has vivid memories of the slaughter, which took place under the cover of night in a tent sent up in the compound of the Rwamagana gendarmerie barracks.</p>
<p>“No one could say no when it was happening or that it had to stop,” he said. “On a personal level, it was shocking, but we were in a killing situation.”</p>
<p>The victims were later loaded onto three Mercedes trucks and brought to the Akagera Park. “After it was over, one soldier said aloud: ‘Not all of these bastards are killers. We didn’t have to kill all of them!’ The soldier was then struck in the head with a hoe and brought to a hospital.”</p>
<p>Damas said Kazura was not present during the slaughter that night, and that forces carrying out the killings were part of the regular army under a major named Gahigana.</p>
<p>Sources said that as the genocide wound down, both Kazura and Nyamvumba were known to have overseen the transport of Hutu refugees back into Rwanda from camps in Tanzania where they had fled. In one instance, an officer witnessed Kazura directing operations in which an estimated 120 woman and children were promised food, supplies, and a peaceful return home. They were put on trucks at Benako, a town on the Tanzania border, and brought to Rwanteru, Rwanda, where they were killed, according to the officer.</p>
<p>“I was there when they were collected in trucks. Most of them were ladies and children. The men were very few,” the officer explained. “These people were killed under the command of Kazura. They were killed with hoes in Rwanteru.”</p>
<p>Many refugees that escaped to Tanzania at the time later refused to go back home. Some survivors of those attacks gave testimony for this article. One refugee said RPA soldiers arrived in his village in the commune Gituza on April 9th. “It was early in the morning.&#160; The entire population started to run as soon as they saw RPF troops. I saw wounded people trying to get away. I made the decision to flee with my family.”</p>
<p>The refugee, his wife and three sons ran south along the Kayonza-Kagitunda road to Mirambi then onto Rukara, finally settling at a place called the Karambi Trading Centre where many other displaced Hutus had sought refuge. But the location was quickly overtaken by RPA troops. At that point his life would change forever.</p>
<p>“On April 19th, we were surrounded. The RPF told us they’d bring us back home. The next day, two lines of soldiers arrived. They escorted us to a bean garden behind the trading centre and started to fire on us.”</p>
<p>The refugee said the shooting lasted between 5 and 10 minutes before the soldiers began reloading ammunition. As his three young sons and wife lay in a pool of blood, the refugee ran for his life to the park, wounded in the forehead, buttocks, and stomach.</p>
<p>“In the end, I was not able to bury my family,” he lamented.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>In conjunction with sweeping operations aimed at exterminating Hutus in the northern communes of Byumba, death squads run by DMI were pounding neighboring localities such as Giti and Rutare.</p>
<p>A confidential, 55-page document from the ICTR outlines a macabre and highly organized operation in these two areas, where a contingent of 100 DMI troops led by Jackson Rwahama rounded up countless Hutus before slaughtering them with grenades, guns or hoes, between April 17 and 25.</p>
<p>A witness who worked for DMI at the time said the operations conducted in Rutare and Giti were held on the heels of meetings with Kayumba Nyamwasa, then DMI chief.</p>
<p>The witness said soldiers initially undertook patrols throughout Rutare, where they arrested entire Hutu families, stole their belongings before “eliminating them with hoes, known as agafuni.”</p>
<p>The killings were directly supervised by Sgt. Tharcisse Idahemuka, according to the witness, who was present at the time.</p>
<p>Hutu intellectuals were particularly targeted. “Eliminating the maximum number of Hutu intellectuals was a priority because these people posed an immediate and future threat of exposing the truth regarding RPF activities. And the death of these intellectuals would weaken the potential for political parties in the short or long term,” the witness said.</p>
<p>In another incident described by the witness, Colonel Rwahama and Jack Nziza, then a major, intercepted Hutu civilians on their way to a displacement camp. The two men oversaw patrols that led the Hutus to a series of houses on a nearby hill surrounded by a banana plantation and a forest.</p>
<p>With Kalashnikov-wielding soldiers standing guard outside, DMI troops unleashed grenades inside the houses, killing between 300 and 400 people, according to the witness, who expressed remorse for his role in the violence.</p>
<p>“It was horrible to see. &#160;Corpses were completely calcified. There were no survivors.”</p>
<p>The witness said the orders to carry out these grisly operations came from Nyamwasa. Individuals with roles in the operation were also named, and included Jean-Jacques Mupenzi, Habass Musonera, and Joseph Zabamwita.</p>
<p>Within days, the DMI contingent would move on to Giti, where soldiers proceeded to round up prisoners—mostly men—and slaughter them in the house of a former mayor.&#160; The witness remembered the victims’ skulls being smashed by hoes and ‘brain matter all over the floor.’</p>
<p>DMI would continue to kill waves of displaced Hutus streaming into Giti from other areas, separating them from Tutsi families who were given the grim task of digging graves and were nicknamed Tiger Force. A corporal named Emmnauel Nkuranga was in charge of eliminating Hutu prisoners, according to the witness.</p>
<p>He also stated the RPF held meetings in neighboring communes to persuade people hiding in the bush to go home, where they were eventually murdered, and that young Hutu men whose families had been opposed to the Habyarimana regime joined RPA ranks but were later killed. Truckloads of Hutus rounded up on military trucks also passed through Giti on their way to Gabiro, where they would ‘simply be eliminated.’</p>
<p>At the time, Gabiro was still nominally run by Nyamvumba, who would return to the barracks to check on waves of new recruits. The military barracks was 36-square-kilometres and like other areas in Akagera, was off-limits to UNAMIR and NGOs, ostensibly because Kagame’s army needed to remove anti-personnel mines in the area.</p>
<p>Several officers and soldiers contend that immediately after the genocide and in the years that followed, Nyamvumba and Kazura worked alongside DMI supervising the screening of Hutu men rounded up at night or recruited from all over Rwanda, in particular from Gitarama, Kibuye, Gikongoro, Cyangugu, Gisenyi, and Ruhengeri, to be eliminated at Akagera and in Nyungwe forest in southwestern Rwanda.</p>
<p>“Nyamvumba was chief coordinator of those operations because after all he had already done it. He was critical,” said an officer.</p>
<p>Another officer who worked in intelligence had a slightly nuanced view: “Right after the genocide, Nyamvumba wasn’t the one looking for those recruits,” he said, noting that brigades led by notoriously violent commanders such as Ibingira killed or rounded up Hutu civilians post genocide.</p>
<p>“But these people were eliminated from the training wing, which Nyamvumba was in charge of, so yes he shared responsibility for what was taking place,” the officer added.</p>
<p>A soldier at Camp Garde Presidentielle (GP) in Kigali witnessed Kazura’s participation in these operations in 1995, as well.</p>
<p>“Kazura was involved in taking people in lorries from Kigali to Gabiro. Those people were young Hutu men that were lured into military training from all over the country then taken to Kigali, to Camp GP,” he said, adding: “Kazura was personally involved in transporting the recruits.”</p>
<p>“And then those men were taken to Gabiro where they were killed and burned near the training wing, at a place called New Camp, near the house of the former king of Rwanda.”</p>
<p>Some of these young men died on their way to Gabiro, which by then had earned its reputation as a bona fide death factory, not unlike the Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau yet much smaller and without the labor.</p>
<p>“Many were taken in containers in trucks and died en route. They died of suffocation,” he explained.</p>
<p>In 1996, the Tutsi soldier in question was in Gabiro for training where Hutus were still being brought to the barracks, and witnessed Kazura, Nyamvumba and key members of DMI on site.</p>
<p>“Kazura, Nyamvumba, Jack Nziza and Nyamwasa were personally involved in killing and supervising the burning of bodies,” the soldier said grimly.</p>
<p>This testimony is strengthened, to some degree, by an ICTR official who requested anonymity but disclosed that Kagame’s and Nyamwasa’s hands have been “covered in blood” for decades.</p>
<p>In an interview, the official said the ICTR Office of the Prosecutor had enough evidence to indict Kagame, Nyamwasa, Nyamvumba and others ‘several times over” but was unwilling to do so because of political interference within the office itself, and by the United States, a staunch ally of the Rwandan president.</p>
<p>The ICTR official said witnesses brought forward evidence against Nyamvumba for his role in killings in the east, and against Kazura with respect to his role in transporting and eliminating Hutu recruits.</p>
<p>The ICTR, whose mandate has been to try genocide suspects for crimes committed in 1994, is winding down operations. Yet it has not prosecuted a single member of Kagame’s regime.</p>
<p>Despite ICTR evidence of alleged activities of Kazura and Nyamvumba, the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) confirmed unequivocally that it had indeed screened Kazura before choosing him as UN force commander in Mali this year.</p>
<p>“The United Nations applied the human rights screening policy in the appointment of General Kazura to the position of Force Commander for the United Nations Integrated Mission in Mali,” Kieran Dwyer, DPKO chief of public affairs, said in a statement.</p>
<p>Officials refused to discuss how DPKO specifically screened Kazura or Nyamvumba for their jobs as chief peacekeepers. Requests this month to interview Kazura—and Nyamvumba in 2012—were not facilitated by the UN.</p>
<p>Yet Dwyer admitted this new information would be taken seriously.</p>
<p>“The material provided contains new information. The United Nations takes this information seriously, and will thoroughly assess the information in accordance with the human rights screening policy,” the UN official went on to say.</p>
<p>In 2008, the United Nations was drawn into a human rights debacle after deciding to renew the mandate of another Rwandan General, Emmanuel Karake Karenzi, who was deputy commander of UNAMID, despite a Spanish indictment against him for war crimes committed against Hutus in the 1990s.</p>
<p>In February 2008, Spanish magistrate Fernando Andreu Merelles issued an indictment against 40 Rwandan officials, including Karake and Nyamwasa, for crimes committed against Hutus during and after the genocide.</p>
<p>Nyamvumba himself was cited in the 2008 indictment as having played a role in massacres against Hutu civilians in Murambi, Kizimbo and Kigali Rural, although no indictment was actually issued against him, because more evidence was needed.</p>
<p>“A witness said Nyamvumba was heavily involved in the operations of massacres in these three areas,” confirmed Jordi Palou-Loverdos, a lawyer representing victims in Spain’s special court for serious crimes.</p>
<p>Another witness, also a top RPA lieutenant, provided evidence against Nyamvumba to the magistrate, he pointed out, adding that investigations were continuing in the case.</p>
<p>“The Spanish court is continuing to gather complementary evidence of international crimes committed in Rwanda and in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The research is ongoing,” Palou-Loverdos said.</p>
<p>Kagame himself—who is lauded for defeating Hutu extremists responsible for killing more than half a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus during the genocide—enjoys immunity from prosecution because the Spanish court does not have jurisdiction to indict a head of state.</p>
<p>But Spain has sufficient evidence implicating the Rwandan president in having a command role in large-scale massacres of Hutu civilians in the Rwandan towns of Byumba and Kibeho, in the murder of Rwandan bishops, Spanish missionaries and Spanish aid workers, and in the slaughter of Rwandan and Congolese Hutu refugees in the DRC in the 1990s, according to Palou-Loverdos.</p>
<p>“In most of these cases, we know very positively from key former RPF soldiers that there was a radio call directly from Mr. Kagame to his subordinate commanders to do the work,” the lawyer said.</p>
<p>“The witnesses have testified that there were strict instructions that these decisions could only be taken by Mr. Kagame,” Palou-Loverdos added.</p>
<p>Despite Matata’s own investigation into RPA killings in Kibungo in 1994, he was not surprised that the UN caved into Kagame’s wishes to appoint Nyamvumba in 2009 as UNAMID chief.</p>
<p>“I barely reacted when the decision was announced,” Matata said. “But I admit that it is disheartening to see the RPF’s army in a peacekeeping force. How do killers ensure peace? These soldiers are implicated in crimes in Rwanda and the Congo, but the UN refuses to listen.”</p>
<p>“We just can’t seem to get the message across.”</p>
<p>For Damas, the issue runs deeper. “We make the Rwandan government powerful because we don’t speak out.”</p>
<p>The Tutsi soldier—who lost most of his family to Hutu extremists during the genocide—said he’s ashamed to call himself Rwandan. And yet he is adamant about one thing: “I want people to know about these hidden crimes. The ball is in our court to tell the truth and say what we know.”</p>
<p>“We need a better future for our country; we have to tell our children what really happened.”</p> | false | 1 | download report pdf united nations choose men alleged supervised death squads head peacekeeping forces darfur mali activities lieutenant general patrick nyamvumba major general jean bosco kazura eastern rwanda shed light victorious army 1994 genocide years come brussels joseph matata rwandan farmer became human rights activist belgium april 1994 genocide began160 children ethnic tutsi wife home murambi village rwandas eastern border dawn april 12 militia hutu extremists known interahamwe arrived house looking blood attackers quickly forced family outdoors sliced wifes back machete went matatas 12yearold daughter cutting neck face girl fell ground lapsed coma hutu neighbor named john intervened militia started beating three children clubs attackers thought theyd killed two tutsis decided move help local gendarme knew family john managed get matatas wife daughter nearest hospital remaining children found refuge another neighbor kept safe paying marauding bands killers week later rwandan patriotic army rpaa tutsi rebel army routed hutu extremists seized powerswept murambi brought matatas wife daughter equipped hospital neighboring gahini village commune rukara shores lake muhazi thank rpf matata said dryly restaurant central brussels referring rwandan patriotic front rpf political wing rpa current ruling party rwanda rpf formed emergency coalition government late july end genocide flights resumed country matata finally able get home headed straight gahini pick wife daughter temporarily moved house near hospital nursed back health matata heard litany horrors occurred gahini villages throughout prefectures kibungo byumba civilians began tell stories systematic killings hutus perpetrated rpa victorious army supposedly halted genocide grateful rpf helping family couldnt ignore hearing matata said unable finish glass leffe beer threehour encounter160 someone believed human rights felt obliged investigate allegations 1970s early 1980s matataa voluble yet linguistically precise manworked national bank rwanda kigali became critical former hutu regime oneparty rule president juvenal habyarimana later moved murambi opened agricultural business november 1990 rpa first invaded northern rwanda uganda accused aiding rpf charge denied briefly thrown jail 1991 became founding member ardho rwandan association defense human rights would later head cliir brusselsbased centre fight impunity injustice rwanda hes become tireless chronicler complex unrepentantly violent history rwanda 58yearold rwandan mixed ethnicity stages weekly protests outside rwandan embassy brussels issues missives condemning disappearances arrests homeland incidents largely ignored organizations human rights watch amnesty international become among belgiums curious sanctum rwandan exiles lawful zorrolike figure oneman support network hutus tutsis behind bars flight matata last long rwanda rwandan patriotic front whose power beginning flourish amid ruins war july 1994 within days return belgium rwanda interviewed dozens villagers gahini sectors many would later disappear also visited 10 mass graves towns muhazi kayonza kabarondo bodies hutus graves later burned brought mass graves containing tutsis killed interahamwe rpa arrived witness assisted probe one matatas former employees farm owned murambi man tutsi ghastly job transporting corpses rpa fougonnettea kind african taxi minibusto mass graves man worked rpa carry corpses vehicle rpa seized work done quickly matata said traumatized sometimes victims loaded taxi werent even dead would still moaning crying employee questionwhom matata described sensitive personeventually problems rpf forced flee country matatas initial investigation witnesses described rpa combed hillside rpa hunted people like would rabbit prey soldiers cleanup operations hills went house house shooting people sometimes used grenades said people hid banana groves escaped adjacent forest akagera national park quite victims would see soldiers coming throw lake drown rpa also used another methodone entrapmentto kill larger groups people asked people gather certain areas schools markets showed meetings given cooking equipment clothes food people told spread word meetings larger groups people showed rpa used grenades guns kill matata contends rpa called hutus meetings slaughtered areas country well massacres intensive massive matata unable complete full investigation kibungowith names numbers victimsbecause life threatened several occasions within weeks returned kigali forced early 1995 leave rwanda good nevertheless truncated work eventually bolstered findings man named robert gersony gersony consultant extensive experience african war zones hired united nations conduct survey feasibility rwandan refugees returning homes genocide like many descended rwanda aftermath genocide gersony team initially sympathetic rpf granted access 91 sites 40 communes around country conducted interviews 200 individuals held another 100 small group discussions found disturbing enough throw united nations complete disarray findings necessitated nothing sort paradigm shift international agency thought september 1994 gersonys team discovered rpa soldiers appeared carried genocide hutu civilians us state department cable dealing gersonys findings sent us ambassador united nations madeleine albright us embassies region cable dated september 1994 read hutu refugees called meetings peace security gathered rpa would move carry killing addition group killings housetohouse searches conducted individuals hiding swamps hunted returnees well sick elderly young males 1840 years old victims many civilians killed burial bodies problem villages team estimated 10000 month killed since april another cable sent un peace monitoring mission unamir quoted gersony using stronger language describe crimes committed rpa hutus gersony put forward evidence described calculated preplanned systematic atrocities genocide hutus rpa whose methodology scale concluded 30000 massacres could part plan implemented policy highest echelons government view individual cases revenge summary trials preplanned systematic genocide hutus gersony staked 25year reputation conclusions recognized diametrically opposite assumptions made far un international community authenticity unamir cable confirmed two individuals ictr lawyer person took part discussions gersonys findings cable indexed used evidence un international criminal court rwanda ictr written unamir official shaharyar khan sent un peacekeeping chief time kofi annan khan went say believe killings part preordained systematic massacre ordered top admitted un engaged damage limitation exercise united nations united states chose political subterfuge gersonys field notes ultimately buried concerted effort protect post genocide government led paul kagame160 investigations ever pursued suspected behind slaughter innocents never questioned left rwanda matata tried ascertain responsible slaughter least local level due course discovered authority emanated lieutenant colonel would later go lead worlds biggest un peacekeeping operation commander patrick nyamvumba matata said ruefully soldiers massacred civilians responsibility today lt general nyamvumba highly respected figure international military stage currently rwandas chief defense staff160 2009 un secretary general ban kimoon appointed commander unafrican union hybrid mission darfur unamid post held june year ban praised general dedication invaluable service provided four years rwanda four battalions deployed unamid worlds largest arguably important peacekeeping mission estimated 22000 international troops countrys crucial contribution peacekeeping unstable politically important region sudan provided kigali prestige hallowed halls united nations according analysts indeed october 2012 rwanda secured rotating seat un security counciland generally accustomed receiving cover allegations serious breaches humanitarian law home neighboring democratic republic congo lt general nyamvumba rise highest echelons rwandas prodigious military importantly chosen chief peacekeeper united nations global body whose enshrining principles based international law security nyamvumbas comradeinarms general jean bosco kazura come secure role june force commander uns newly created peacekeeping force mali minusma kazura tutsi officer originally burundi rise prominence within rpa last several months dozen former rpa soldiers officers africa europe north america quietly agreed share knowledge men two decades ago along swathe rwandan territory stretched border uganda tanzania another young mana tutsi genocide survivor teenager timehas related chilling memories nyamvumba men operating area western rim lake victoria basin seemingly primeval paradise red rutted paths papyrus reeds bourbon coffee trees belies history killing ground kamanzi witness question luminous face reluctantly determined demeanor late april 1994 knew young tutsi soldiers based gahini entrusted collecting livestock abandoned properties seized rpa remembers nyamvumba pleasant man walked limp presented well calm often smiling ground commander soldiers definitely comfortable around nyamvumba kamanzi called colonel often stayed beautiful house gahini overlooking lake muhazithe first dwelling left road leading top hill witness went nyamvumbas residence several times there160 customary young women milling around one wellknown girl became nyamvumbas girlfriend kamanzi regularly accompanied soldiers ransacked buildings grabbing merchandise food money wartime trying get explained operations going housetohouse fieldsthe teenager saw firsthand soldiers actual objectives period two months late april onward kamanzi accompanied soldiers missions least two three times week soldiers referred work screening cleaning enemy saw soldiers kill people sometimes stayed back vehicle really want see happening said frightened see someone killed front soldiers many barely teens called unarmed hutus interahamwe sad villagers explained werent interahamwe many working fields sometimes parents fled children left home alone unfortunately soldiers killed children kamanzi remembers one traumatic incident early village near akagera park went house one except little girl five years old soldiers asked parents told gone fields us headed back vehicle one soldier stayed behind seconds heard gunshot soldier shot dead later told daughter interahamwe didnt even think little girl point wondered people come save us colonel nyamvumba rarely accompanied soldiers operations one incident kamanzi recalled theyd received word hutus particular village might armed day ground commander escorts team soldiers went separate vehicles location eventually surrounding property kamanzi went along nyamvumba gave orders swahili language teenager understand nyamvumba stayed behind meters soldiers fired shots extended period time like every mission privy combat soldiers proceeded kill former soldiers officers explained april 1994 nyamvumba middle ranking officer little command experience chief instructor rpas training wing shifted gatunda township near ugandan border gabiro edge akagera park genocide unleashed battalion created direction euphemistically screen mop comb hillsides hutu civilians considered highly clandestine oscar operated areas already cleared insurgents rear rpas 157th mobile force led notorious fred ibingira lt general 7th brigade william bagire sources interviewed story said nyamvumba supervised battalion consisted several companies young soldiers drawn principally rpas high commandconsisting kagames escortsand soldiers training wing 160nyamvumba received direct instructions kagame according senior officers familiar operations operations conceived planned coordinated kagame directorate military intelligence dmi along intelligence staff high command training wing officers alleged intelligence officer worked directly kagame silas udahemuka helped coordinate operations udahehumka assisted three kagame escorts innocent gasana jackson mugisha charles matungo time dmi headed kayumba nyamwasa long considered second kagame rwandas military hierarchy general nyamwasa fell boss 2010 fled south africa survived assassination attempt suspected rwandan agents declined interviewed article another central figure dmi helped execute jackson rwahama advised inspected attended secret meetings officers explained rwahama senior killer ugandan army worked intelligence idi amin one officer said referring ugandas ruthless dictator 1970s whose regime marked egregious human rights abuses political repression rwahama helped coordinate killings remember nyamvumba young time little experience asked going kill lot people short period time anyone knows rwahama best person plan officer confided officers soldiers confirmed addition working alongside dmi scheme clear hutus prefectures nyamvumba least three deputy commanders overseeing death squads john birasa emmanuel butera jean bosco kazura accounts kazura intellectual passion soccer little battle experience apart briefly serving battalion known delta mobile originally burundi spoke fluent french english kinyarwanda commissioned 1992 joined rpa high command became translator kagame regularly listening radio france internationale greeting important visitors came see kagame rpf chairman alex kanyarengwe arusha house rpfs military base mulindi genocide soon former hutu president juvenal habyarimanas plane shot surfacetoair missile april 6th 1994 kazura catapulted new deadlier terrain immediately assassinationwhich would ignite genocide spark killing frenzy predominantly tutsi civiliansnyamvumba left karama training wing near ugandan border along intelligence staff several nominees main rank file intelligence staff went nyamvumba dan munyuza rwakabi kakira kalemara alias kiboko leaving official job chief instructor nyamvumba men started sweep gatunda ngarama would make temporary base according testimony first operations began along eastern border demilitarized zone rpa upper hand pregenocide war invasion rpf lured hutu peasants area promises salt sugar medicine basic necessities first people caught killed rpas snare end april training wing ostensibly run nyamvumbawas relocated gabiro edge akagera park originally spanning 2500 square kilometers comprised swamp savannah mountains oscar battalionas eventually would calledgrew small numbers estimated 800 soldiers genocide wore new waves tutsi passouts within rwanda surrounding countries force would eventually sent across prefectures byumba kibungo localities targeted included muvumba ngarama gituza bwisige muhura murambi kibungo kazura time high command known close kagame became deputy commander operations initially byumba sources say kazuras nyaumvumbas men advanced toward kibungo town kanyonza kabarondo rukira soldiers job deliberately said david former rpa officer david loquacious middleaged rwandan tutsi living exile hes talking rwanda manner shifts easily jovial ironic surprisingly like many rwandans whove endured horror genocide face betrays little emotional scars lie underneath expressions change quickly speaks crimes unfolded around eastern rwanda mouth contorts brow twists trenches soldiers digging mass graves manpower dig burn david said serial killers people trained kill exterminate others see get rid dead rpa would kill small groups hutus spot explained larger groups attempts separate made many brought trucks killing grounds akagera later shot stabbed starved days killed hammers hoes one main killing centers nasho next lake name parks southern flank commanders moved around depending magnitude operations kazura times nasho overseeing killings sometimes john birasa nyamvumba working kagames orders david pointed something trying secret alert troops main fighting battalions one first killing spots gabiro house habyarimanaa guest lodge 200 rooms home rwandas kingused rpf screening identifying eliminating hutus soon genocide started known killing grounds located 5 10 kilometers gabiro deeper park rwata 30 kilometers gabiro toward akagera river gabiro hutus could escape surrounded soldiers thrown mass graves dug bulldozers soldiers started shooting intelligence officer received daily reports operations said lt colonel nyamvumba gabiro commander operation confirmed officer estimates thousands people died manner said anywhere 100 200 people put onto lorries 5 10 trucks went gabiro deeper park dailyat nightfor months gabiro logistics bulldozers digging stocks diesel petrol burn corpses acid dissolve victims remains ashes mixed soil placed lakes park according sources june height genocide kazura rwamagana kibungo east capital soldier high command said kazura operational commander 100 soldiers hunted civilians killed dumped pit neighboring rutonde kazura personally involved carrying commanding overseeing operations hunting rounding civilians bringing detention house taking killing site said soldier present murders one incident hutu women children taken refuge catholic church rwamagana taken rutonde massacred thrown pit tutsi victims killed interahamwe earlier genocide noted people including men captured neighboring areas eventually detained petrol station killed buried pit womens arms tied behind backs pagnes wraparound garments men tied shirts taken detention center petrol station rwamagana evening killed station taken pit killed soldier described soldier estimated least 600 people killed manner rwamagana alone 2000 total outlying areas another soldier said early july kazura moving around coming rwamagana several times week white land cruiser stayed dereva hotel kind guesthouse access girlfriends alcohol known kazura special forces disposal soldier quiet selfassured man named damas confirmed rwamagana become microcosm detention killing throughout genocide damas site july soldiers gendarmerie killed estimated 200 hutu men guns small hoes many hutus arms hands tied behind backs already dead shot rounded home areas damas vivid memories slaughter took place cover night tent sent compound rwamagana gendarmerie barracks one could say happening stop said personal level shocking killing situation victims later loaded onto three mercedes trucks brought akagera park one soldier said aloud bastards killers didnt kill soldier struck head hoe brought hospital damas said kazura present slaughter night forces carrying killings part regular army major named gahigana sources said genocide wound kazura nyamvumba known overseen transport hutu refugees back rwanda camps tanzania fled one instance officer witnessed kazura directing operations estimated 120 woman children promised food supplies peaceful return home put trucks benako town tanzania border brought rwanteru rwanda killed according officer collected trucks ladies children men officer explained people killed command kazura killed hoes rwanteru many refugees escaped tanzania time later refused go back home survivors attacks gave testimony article one refugee said rpa soldiers arrived village commune gituza april 9th early morning160 entire population started run soon saw rpf troops saw wounded people trying get away made decision flee family refugee wife three sons ran south along kayonzakagitunda road mirambi onto rukara finally settling place called karambi trading centre many displaced hutus sought refuge location quickly overtaken rpa troops point life would change forever april 19th surrounded rpf told us theyd bring us back home next day two lines soldiers arrived escorted us bean garden behind trading centre started fire us refugee said shooting lasted 5 10 minutes soldiers began reloading ammunition three young sons wife lay pool blood refugee ran life park wounded forehead buttocks stomach end able bury family lamented conjunction sweeping operations aimed exterminating hutus northern communes byumba death squads run dmi pounding neighboring localities giti rutare confidential 55page document ictr outlines macabre highly organized operation two areas contingent 100 dmi troops led jackson rwahama rounded countless hutus slaughtering grenades guns hoes april 17 25 witness worked dmi time said operations conducted rutare giti held heels meetings kayumba nyamwasa dmi chief witness said soldiers initially undertook patrols throughout rutare arrested entire hutu families stole belongings eliminating hoes known agafuni killings directly supervised sgt tharcisse idahemuka according witness present time hutu intellectuals particularly targeted eliminating maximum number hutu intellectuals priority people posed immediate future threat exposing truth regarding rpf activities death intellectuals would weaken potential political parties short long term witness said another incident described witness colonel rwahama jack nziza major intercepted hutu civilians way displacement camp two men oversaw patrols led hutus series houses nearby hill surrounded banana plantation forest kalashnikovwielding soldiers standing guard outside dmi troops unleashed grenades inside houses killing 300 400 people according witness expressed remorse role violence horrible see 160corpses completely calcified survivors witness said orders carry grisly operations came nyamwasa individuals roles operation also named included jeanjacques mupenzi habass musonera joseph zabamwita within days dmi contingent would move giti soldiers proceeded round prisonersmostly menand slaughter house former mayor160 witness remembered victims skulls smashed hoes brain matter floor dmi would continue kill waves displaced hutus streaming giti areas separating tutsi families given grim task digging graves nicknamed tiger force corporal named emmnauel nkuranga charge eliminating hutu prisoners according witness also stated rpf held meetings neighboring communes persuade people hiding bush go home eventually murdered young hutu men whose families opposed habyarimana regime joined rpa ranks later killed truckloads hutus rounded military trucks also passed giti way gabiro would simply eliminated time gabiro still nominally run nyamvumba would return barracks check waves new recruits military barracks 36squarekilometres like areas akagera offlimits unamir ngos ostensibly kagames army needed remove antipersonnel mines area several officers soldiers contend immediately genocide years followed nyamvumba kazura worked alongside dmi supervising screening hutu men rounded night recruited rwanda particular gitarama kibuye gikongoro cyangugu gisenyi ruhengeri eliminated akagera nyungwe forest southwestern rwanda nyamvumba chief coordinator operations already done critical said officer another officer worked intelligence slightly nuanced view right genocide nyamvumba wasnt one looking recruits said noting brigades led notoriously violent commanders ibingira killed rounded hutu civilians post genocide people eliminated training wing nyamvumba charge yes shared responsibility taking place officer added soldier camp garde presidentielle gp kigali witnessed kazuras participation operations 1995 well kazura involved taking people lorries kigali gabiro people young hutu men lured military training country taken kigali camp gp said adding kazura personally involved transporting recruits men taken gabiro killed burned near training wing place called new camp near house former king rwanda young men died way gabiro earned reputation bona fide death factory unlike nazi extermination camp auschwitzbirkenau yet much smaller without labor many taken containers trucks died en route died suffocation explained 1996 tutsi soldier question gabiro training hutus still brought barracks witnessed kazura nyamvumba key members dmi site kazura nyamvumba jack nziza nyamwasa personally involved killing supervising burning bodies soldier said grimly testimony strengthened degree ictr official requested anonymity disclosed kagames nyamwasas hands covered blood decades interview official said ictr office prosecutor enough evidence indict kagame nyamwasa nyamvumba others several times unwilling political interference within office united states staunch ally rwandan president ictr official said witnesses brought forward evidence nyamvumba role killings east kazura respect role transporting eliminating hutu recruits ictr whose mandate try genocide suspects crimes committed 1994 winding operations yet prosecuted single member kagames regime despite ictr evidence alleged activities kazura nyamvumba united nations department peacekeeping operations dpko confirmed unequivocally indeed screened kazura choosing un force commander mali year united nations applied human rights screening policy appointment general kazura position force commander united nations integrated mission mali kieran dwyer dpko chief public affairs said statement officials refused discuss dpko specifically screened kazura nyamvumba jobs chief peacekeepers requests month interview kazuraand nyamvumba 2012were facilitated un yet dwyer admitted new information would taken seriously material provided contains new information united nations takes information seriously thoroughly assess information accordance human rights screening policy un official went say 2008 united nations drawn human rights debacle deciding renew mandate another rwandan general emmanuel karake karenzi deputy commander unamid despite spanish indictment war crimes committed hutus 1990s february 2008 spanish magistrate fernando andreu merelles issued indictment 40 rwandan officials including karake nyamwasa crimes committed hutus genocide nyamvumba cited 2008 indictment played role massacres hutu civilians murambi kizimbo kigali rural although indictment actually issued evidence needed witness said nyamvumba heavily involved operations massacres three areas confirmed jordi palouloverdos lawyer representing victims spains special court serious crimes another witness also top rpa lieutenant provided evidence nyamvumba magistrate pointed adding investigations continuing case spanish court continuing gather complementary evidence international crimes committed rwanda democratic republic congo research ongoing palouloverdos said kagame himselfwho lauded defeating hutu extremists responsible killing half million tutsis moderate hutus genocideenjoys immunity prosecution spanish court jurisdiction indict head state spain sufficient evidence implicating rwandan president command role largescale massacres hutu civilians rwandan towns byumba kibeho murder rwandan bishops spanish missionaries spanish aid workers slaughter rwandan congolese hutu refugees drc 1990s according palouloverdos cases know positively key former rpf soldiers radio call directly mr kagame subordinate commanders work lawyer said witnesses testified strict instructions decisions could taken mr kagame palouloverdos added despite matatas investigation rpa killings kibungo 1994 surprised un caved kagames wishes appoint nyamvumba 2009 unamid chief barely reacted decision announced matata said admit disheartening see rpfs army peacekeeping force killers ensure peace soldiers implicated crimes rwanda congo un refuses listen cant seem get message across damas issue runs deeper make rwandan government powerful dont speak tutsi soldierwho lost family hutu extremists genocidesaid hes ashamed call rwandan yet adamant one thing want people know hidden crimes ball court tell truth say know need better future country tell children really happened | 3,638 |
<p>Two years after the US made the historic step to re-open its embassy in Cuba, Washington says a new closure is “under evaluation” – the latest move in a fragile relationship which has seen claims of “health attacks” on US diplomats.</p>
<p>“We have it under evaluation,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/transcript-u-s-secretary-of-state-rex-tillerson-on-face-the-nation-sept-17-2017/" type="external">said</a>&#160;on Sunday on CBS’ Face the Nation regarding the possible closure of the embassy in Havana.&#160;“It’s a very serious issue with respect to the harm that certain individuals have suffered. We’ve brought some of those people home. It’s under review.”</p>
<p>Read more</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/usa/403355-us-health-attacks-cuba/" type="external" /></p>
<p>The&#160;“harm”&#160;Tillerson was referring to surrounds the mysterious cases of 21 Americans – diplomats and their families – who have reported bizarre health symptoms after being stationed in Havana.</p>
<p>It was not long ago that the US was without any diplomats in Cuba, with both countries closing their embassies in 1961, shortly after the US imposed an economic embargo on Cuba following Fidel Castro’s overthrow of the US-backed regime in Havana and establishment of a socialist state.</p>
<p>In 2014, decades of tense relations and accusations from both sides gave way to Havana and Washington announcing that they would restore full economic ties, following 18 months of closed-door talks brokered by Pope Francis. Then-US President Barack Obama stated in July of the next year that there was “enormous enthusiasm” over the new approach towards Cuba.</p>
<p>“This is a historic step forward in our efforts to normalize relations with the Cuban government and people,” Barack Obama said at the time. And it was indeed a significant move, one which was followed by the re-opening of both countries’ embassies in 2015.</p>
<p>Obama made another historic step in March 2016, when he visited Havana in what was the first trip to Cuba by a sitting US president since Calvin Coolidge toured the country in 1928.</p>
<p>Just months later, the US resumed commercial passenger flights to Cuba, with the first plane – a Jetblue flight from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida – landing in Santa Clara on August 31, 2016.</p>
<p>The mood, however, has changed since Obama’s predecessor, Donald Trump, was elected to office. In June 2017, Trump announced that his administration would be reinstating some restrictions on trade and travel which were eased by Obama, calling it a “terrible and misguided deal.”</p>
<p>That threat began almost immediately after Trump was elected, and while Obama was still in the White House. “If Cuba is unwilling to make a better deal for the Cuban people, the Cuban/American people and the U.S. as a whole, I will terminate deal,” Trump tweeted on November 28, 2016.</p>
<p>If Cuba is unwilling to make a better deal for the Cuban people, the Cuban/American people and the U.S. as a whole, I will terminate deal.</p>
<p>— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/803237535178772481" type="external">28 ноября 2016 г.</a></p>
<p>The tweet came just days after Fidel Castro passed away at the age of 90. Trump reacted to his passing by calling him a “brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades.”</p>
<p>Cuba fired back, saying: “The United States is not in a position to give us lessons” on human rights.</p>
<p>Now, it appears the thawing of relations that came with the embassy re-openings may be short-lived, after 21 Americans – diplomats and their families – reported bizarre and unexplained symptoms while being stationed in Havana.</p>
<p>The symptoms, previously referred to as “health attacks” by Tillerson, range from permanent hearing loss to concussions, nausea, headaches, and ringing in the ears. Some of the victims also struggle with concentration and recalling specific words, according to AP.</p>
<p>Read more</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/usa/403515-cuba-senators-tillerson-expel-embassy/" type="external" /></p>
<p>Multiple people reported feeling vibrations or hearing loud sounds, sometimes only in certain parts of rooms. Others did not feel or hear anything at the time, but still reported symptoms. But the “health attacks,” which the US government is now vaguely referring to as “incidents,” remain a mystery to US intelligence services, the medical community, and sound experts.</p>
<p>Although the symptoms initially pointed to sonic devices being used on the victims, experts have concluded that no single device could lead to the combination of symptoms, and searches for devices in the homes of US diplomats have been fruitless.</p>
<p>The lack of evidence that Havana is behind the “incidents” did not stop Washington from <a href="https://www.rt.com/usa/399123-cuba-state-department-incidents/" type="external">expelling</a> two Cuban diplomats earlier this month, with State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert saying that Americans were brought home as a result of the incidents, leading the US to “ask two Cubans to leave the United States.”&#160;</p>
<p>Still, some lawmakers are pushing for more of a response, with five Republican senators writing to Tillerson on Friday, urging the US to close the embassy and kick all Cuban diplomats out of the country.</p>
<p>“Cuba’s neglect of its duty to protect our diplomats and their families cannot go unchallenged,” said the lawmakers, who were led by Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas. Cuban-American politician and former presidential candidate Marco Rubio (R-FL) also signed the letter.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/usa/403730-us-embassy-closure-cuba/Delete%20READ%20MORE%20More%20mystery%20surrounds%20'health%20attacks'%20on%20US%20diplomats%20in%20Cuba%20/usa/403355-us-health-attacks-cuba/" type="external">READ MORE:&#160;US expels 2 Cuban diplomats over mysterious ‘physical symptoms’ reported by US personnel</a></p>
<p>Although the future remains uncertain regarding US-Cuba relations, a Republican majority in the US Congress seems to at least indicate that the trade embargo will continue, as conservative lawmakers have previously blocked bills which would loosen it.</p>
<p>Cubans are focused not only on Washington’s political maneuvers, but also on their own domestic political situation, gearing up for an election as Raul Castro prepares to leave office in February 2018.</p> | false | 1 | two years us made historic step reopen embassy cuba washington says new closure evaluation latest move fragile relationship seen claims health attacks us diplomats evaluation secretary state rex tillerson said160on sunday cbs face nation regarding possible closure embassy havana160its serious issue respect harm certain individuals suffered weve brought people home review read the160harm160tillerson referring surrounds mysterious cases 21 americans diplomats families reported bizarre health symptoms stationed havana long ago us without diplomats cuba countries closing embassies 1961 shortly us imposed economic embargo cuba following fidel castros overthrow usbacked regime havana establishment socialist state 2014 decades tense relations accusations sides gave way havana washington announcing would restore full economic ties following 18 months closeddoor talks brokered pope francis thenus president barack obama stated july next year enormous enthusiasm new approach towards cuba historic step forward efforts normalize relations cuban government people barack obama said time indeed significant move one followed reopening countries embassies 2015 obama made another historic step march 2016 visited havana first trip cuba sitting us president since calvin coolidge toured country 1928 months later us resumed commercial passenger flights cuba first plane jetblue flight ft lauderdale florida landing santa clara august 31 2016 mood however changed since obamas predecessor donald trump elected office june 2017 trump announced administration would reinstating restrictions trade travel eased obama calling terrible misguided deal threat began almost immediately trump elected obama still white house cuba unwilling make better deal cuban people cubanamerican people us whole terminate deal trump tweeted november 28 2016 cuba unwilling make better deal cuban people cubanamerican people us whole terminate deal donald j trump realdonaldtrump 28 ноября 2016 г tweet came days fidel castro passed away age 90 trump reacted passing calling brutal dictator oppressed people nearly six decades cuba fired back saying united states position give us lessons human rights appears thawing relations came embassy reopenings may shortlived 21 americans diplomats families reported bizarre unexplained symptoms stationed havana symptoms previously referred health attacks tillerson range permanent hearing loss concussions nausea headaches ringing ears victims also struggle concentration recalling specific words according ap read multiple people reported feeling vibrations hearing loud sounds sometimes certain parts rooms others feel hear anything time still reported symptoms health attacks us government vaguely referring incidents remain mystery us intelligence services medical community sound experts although symptoms initially pointed sonic devices used victims experts concluded single device could lead combination symptoms searches devices homes us diplomats fruitless lack evidence havana behind incidents stop washington expelling two cuban diplomats earlier month state department spokeswoman heather nauert saying americans brought home result incidents leading us ask two cubans leave united states160 still lawmakers pushing response five republican senators writing tillerson friday urging us close embassy kick cuban diplomats country cubas neglect duty protect diplomats families go unchallenged said lawmakers led senator tom cotton arkansas cubanamerican politician former presidential candidate marco rubio rfl also signed letter read more160us expels 2 cuban diplomats mysterious physical symptoms reported us personnel although future remains uncertain regarding uscuba relations republican majority us congress seems least indicate trade embargo continue conservative lawmakers previously blocked bills would loosen cubans focused washingtons political maneuvers also domestic political situation gearing election raul castro prepares leave office february 2018 | 533 |
<p>Let's hope Michael Flynn as Trump's National Security Adviser will remember his proper criticisms of the Obama administration's foreign policy.</p>
<p>Michael Flynn, expected to advise Donald Trump on counterproductive killing operations misleading labeled “national security,” is generally depicted as a lawless <a href="http://click.actionnetwork.org/mpss/c/3wA/ni0YAA/t.22e/y5jY4GpdQkawvbqRQJpIJA/h0/3iaThca61p2tcSwqPS1jRvE4plnih0J3mXs6ZORGupHzzmBSYyRkb4YHuW5sEMKfqI1etMPXYsOn2VRn4qZdyCqC-2B26SQuQYbWCN8dFEgLif4Axse2lfO1rgaw8k2KXwUD8DZRQT-2BIZvXEYeVgIZsigFA71d9V0gU3C1vcICRDFcppnNUwXjsxfrvP5MfTOhkbYR05QkdlagiKHolhvLlm60WIvF4hDaiFbpqRtu2q0EU-2FKOJxrOME-2FNiTxsDkHdGOElOjkHY0F1THOyYt98PrCrbI0uUAMbGf2POfT-2BcUzKm04SUtDMunIYHxXNvyFFTORLiUagCPEUpshACMs1lBRUc9afNBL4cH08RH4uDc5bq-2Bd67ApndxhRp0v-2B1TdXg9vihjifmYlK5bbma5caO9B7MCHcIDli3ADYO5ZsZuTlsk1WapiFmt3oGeluZT7efbK8-2F3mC2jEO-2BnoKDY-2FBfJEAL2jGMQewddJy7hZkR0bNNqFZLTdKsRWohswvpklo" type="external">torturer and assassin</a>. But, whether for partisan reasons or otherwise, he’s a lawless torturer and assassin who has blurted out some truths he shouldn’t be allowed to forget.</p>
<p>For <a href="http://click.actionnetwork.org/mpss/c/3wA/ni0YAA/t.22e/y5jY4GpdQkawvbqRQJpIJA/h1/3iaThca61p2tcSwqPS1jRgO3cWtQ05CjFObv0xxzksMstYWe3o1G9gMHNIbx1EbQFE5QX3MdkWfMvHkKQOyoPlIRU9S8x6dB1OX-2BrGzO95IJxfM88qctfInhwdpk6OlWl-2BSoEA33iesr2jfdQmyaYHzv7OolailRfn82eHQCu7X9cj8EPipbE3PCcfmB0TI9OsYaxvsxN5-2BL6VZ24ucvFbK-2BOXXpA0q86jILtL1i-2FfgVkQdrfinqx1J838mRjj-2BsY7M8V28vlODZdY0MeUSxbriiBHe91g0aDqFKuFhWzKdbjfZ8PaSrRBn13v53rq4yjpc2pbc28Y6kBNcFEKMIPbZanQQp7L5jiHtCLC7HqlgABtJbMgaziLNGwkFRPGhhckMtQyEgYSsCVOwCxAsEAw-3D-3D" type="external">example</a>:</p>
<p>“Lt. Gen. Flynn, who since leaving the DIA has become an outspoken critic of the Obama administration, charges that the White House relies heavily on drone strikes for reasons of expediency, rather than effectiveness. ‘We’ve tended to say, drop another bomb via a drone and put out a headline that “we killed Abu Bag of Doughnuts” and it makes us all feel good for 24 hours,’ Flynn said. ‘And you know what? It doesn’t matter. It just made them a martyr, it just created a new reason to fight us even harder.'”</p>
<p>Or even <a href="http://click.actionnetwork.org/mpss/c/3wA/ni0YAA/t.22e/y5jY4GpdQkawvbqRQJpIJA/h2/asQMWSoR9wcJLLJcgLDrN1xGLecF5bXWA2NYepouj9KMcN1FhIudavj7YRbvEy-2Bt7CbqS791jzX7TpxqKWqLX4bbQ2G-2BtTNFP-2BBDm0cOHLFO8kbRaGich2gIMwT2GhA3SfmdwlbjO9oz43jS-2FmveZ4f-2BQaLBkPw4UIcEilh4qWlCDjP-2BbNuS8-2Bu3tAoHk7QgPjXKzq1OlNf50NehkyvUPph-2FVg-2Bj1-2FSDjh24LfFH0S-2FldzxB36GlNO8pUVHmYbsaFXojcf31E-2BPjmG7NK-2F9coUmb0keTwYlLqA90nNs7GzoiLqjiiFqvpFdGlIhiZOgo1AvsdAYqa381UNDOTEjyAhgZhbIKlpoeH560iUsRWyIPVdnfYb5542gR9JktgCaVQznJyD1fZ4i47Fn1rqMO0rdtopnFhfqNwzaZzd2XbXAjo5nPq9057wfLuwieX30FwPBw0pjLCInfuKqLdywKbg-3D-3D" type="external">more clearly</a>:</p>
<p>“When you drop a bomb from a drone… you are going to cause more damage than you are going to cause good. The more weapons we give, the more bombs we drop, that just… fuels the conflict.”</p>
<p>Will Flynn then advise Trump to cease dropping bombs from drones? Or will he go ahead and advise drone murders, knowing full well that this is counterproductive from the point of view of anyone other than war profiteers?</p>
<p>From the same report:</p>
<p>“Asked . . . if drone strikes tend to create more terrorists than they kill, Flynn . . . replied: ‘I don’t disagree with that,’ adding: ‘I think as an overarching strategy, it is a failed strategy.'”</p>
<p>So Trump’s almost inevitable string of drone murders will be conducted under the guidance of a man who knows they produce terrorism rather than reducing it, that they endanger the United States rather than protecting it. In that assessment, he agrees with the vast majority of Americans who <a href="http://click.actionnetwork.org/mpss/c/3wA/ni0YAA/t.22e/y5jY4GpdQkawvbqRQJpIJA/h3/oOrf4U-2FQJ-2Bbavx96gfibBrahsqbNFK-2F2KSu7kXTGpwHr4NrS2QJlZqwo17ivq1vQCwn04a52wHV6-2FWH-2FBn9dvlQ73hDIHFc6HCmA5o40QCY2V9WB58FqgitgkUENi2ukF6rQhOb5kjcxalOvUeCsG4m7Akbo1eP0FUqD9VEb-2FZKor0AGkPnMXSsX8a-2FJANrAd133nR99awcVTfjF1ayiBupb1FIFANq0HHSBO1nYt15DFDxhPb31uiryPjpyIJgd03FOjmo9eTJtl6Kw5b9lM1wMT0BhPv1p7RGTsH7pVIR7k0vgQfuIpteGbYkj96UVub-2FyroAI-2F9rmoQp7rQdvVMPPN5RAoldhbWCxxXj-2B-2F-2FsCeqTSH-2BX5D4RTfvHrPO7s" type="external">believe</a> that the wars of the past 15 years have made the United States less safe, which is the view of numerous other <a href="http://click.actionnetwork.org/mpss/c/3wA/ni0YAA/t.22e/y5jY4GpdQkawvbqRQJpIJA/h4/OCyNDn9i98-2BOopV0K0WrPvclYIGmJqIjMuch2GB4aAIkVfW1WPtAAcWp1IMkr9lZFM8MN4VREn1VgpwzrpRKGsnWN-2Bsw-2FETQ0HNTLysRl8tsSQoTSmiOTbR-2B2BBQpAm2q8SfFYsM18G61yyNcsz-2FQ9KZKUmqWNAgbnCJBqx-2FDrtEyW4rgFzFoHbBlo-2BlJinGrnHx-2Fhdb9BmZSgLe2lp5GWEZKdXMCjLN-2BgyOJT-2BaFXDknBhqz-2BnZXrfgN2LhJEloft-2F3Ii39rQ000j75XhB3dTQEBsRxQ2jlDFh6RkVrgvfol7uij2IwRTe6VRYWsXWbn1JvNapurTzgDcWvEp-2BYi7uViIZrjYmDo9pIMV-2FPCw-2FKlYhPp82r73zuT3kAf1B4" type="external">experts</a> as well.</p>
<p>Flynn, too, expanded his comments from drones to the wars as a whole:</p>
<p>“What we have is this continued investment in conflict. The more weapons we give, the more bombs we drop, that just… fuels the conflict. Some of that has to be done but I am looking for the other solutions.”</p>
<p>Flynn also, like Trump, accurately cites the criminal 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq as critical to the creation of ISIS:</p>
<p>“Commenting on the rise of ISIL in Iraq, Flynn acknowledged the role played by the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. ‘We definitely put fuel on a fire,’ he told Hasan. ‘Absolutely… there is no doubt, history will not be kind to the decisions that were made certainly in 2003. Going into Iraq, definitely… it was a strategic mistake.”</p>
<p>So there will be no advice to make similar strategic mistakes that are highly profitable to the weapons industry?</p>
<p>Flynn, despite perhaps being a leading advocate of lawless imprisonment and torture, also admits to the counterproductive nature of those crimes:</p>
<p>“The former lieutenant general denied any involvement in the litany of abuses carried out by JSOC interrogators at Camp Nama in Iraq, as revealed by the <a href="http://click.actionnetwork.org/mpss/c/3wA/ni0YAA/t.22e/y5jY4GpdQkawvbqRQJpIJA/h5/o3hKGjP2lyKkChtzXOzYGS3BSXTxwbNvOdTxDED1mrMd-2B1w-2BOyioM-2FNNiIqcfzS2-2FZRqvFpON8YlePHIaaDAfXSsXtvVVtJYIYG8ZtcOm-2FEZmxNI5mP-2B-2BU-2BBDs65zpCFHX-2Byy0mziEjFisdlM0LM4M4swRtH3MOotT0O6F4owKxWXPL66YQLEoCjQMJwPP8AOgAedpwhCCGi4PzI5urQVIPvPkwS3dI5cbvwIsxvpSmy5CL5e4mv7K3zD7NdvNbH10d2LynSuCOmMXbfpL25jLZYirkPqz1q-2FXKmmKAL6TzfFozaWd-2FvUr95C1pJjE42IbSCM7pHAvCrDJk8TEa8htxDMLNLWyBCccbcsLHk84UCXqeB70pa6B5e3q0yBT09MJ1mRrJTA-2FfDmVD5zsuvr8dVXbsj4-2BZmnYfSHPhWck8YtbchegXjI4mDlX2tLjnG6XnDOVBYTgEBG6RJv94pFQ-3D-3D" type="external">New York Times</a> and <a href="http://click.actionnetwork.org/mpss/c/3wA/ni0YAA/t.22e/y5jY4GpdQkawvbqRQJpIJA/h6/wKRiGQBS23rzwpw0A-2BPEFoiNZMoFbdeexPCF113UU5nYmvPg-2Fn8HbodM8ILGjxWJs-2B0lCPdlQfsCtKMm4XNXeDji-2ByM2j87MW7alJGypeATitxtMfR2RAbDgFXBP-2FV9FDzbQEyuhD62ugbBvuVUkqff8WW09Ha-2FlF4AnpA3MTEdRMiUYfv-2FXbj-2F16D912cvLB4r-2Fib5og6-2FK-2BIZAPX0cNkt47gaaprclPGbL8XMcuCqQn-2B5zgHcpDq2PHiJwN1MteXtxGpztZ9ez4Y96K7bnXOLCH-2B94jssvTGsMkMzNDmiudRowstYSAEqsBjX-2FHKCX3gknlh3kUHTi2XdrJJglMuZkTejaDpzeXviQYRAbY9BWnGCfe-2FFNdvb0q4bk-2FZYsn2-2BYT-2BV-2B8icc4PDnIdgTqXK5kEhpbAHPTTunIpos-2BzOo4YUfN4DKPtvCdYDZjpKEad30XTB4j5d9ltzIxUOUfg-3D-3D" type="external">Human Rights Watch</a>, but admitted the US prison system in Iraq in the post-war period ‘absolutely’ helped radicalise Iraqis who later joined Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and its successor organisation, ISIL.”</p>
<p>Recently the International Criminal Court teased the world with the news that it might possible consider indicting US and other war criminals for their actions in Afghanistan. One might expect all-out resistance to such a proposal from Trump and his gang of hyper-nationalist war mongers, except that . . .</p>
<p>“Flynn also called for greater accountability for US soldiers involved in abuses against Iraqi detainees: ‘You know I hope that as more and more information comes out that people are held accountable… History is not going to look kind on those actions… and we will be held, we should be held, accountable for many, many years to come.'”</p>
<p>Let’s not let Flynn forget any of these words. On Syria he has blurted out some similar facts to those Trump has also articulated:</p>
<p>“Publicly commenting for the first time on a previously-classified August 2012 <a href="http://click.actionnetwork.org/mpss/c/3wA/ni0YAA/t.22e/y5jY4GpdQkawvbqRQJpIJA/h7/9fWA1WYfIDm3WR5VGSBOn1-2FbUXtdOfhy5dsr6LNvIapuQjPz0gfHl94hJHRegwnN0pxQnT9EgKF7QvIst2dECs70goUSEb3zrX2blq2-2F5JVJQnQ76XxncKI3nfQ-2BvUxzRiTwrsT-2F1i4Sk416fvgEeibuEdUKPh5bl7j7FEvTax5-2B-2FPUaAPmdP1tyLqW21Z1oM-2BZpD2yfcklAOtqh1gEyXQJDQGvdU8UykrYOTYaYVITH-2Fk81CZ9Me7cpJSSXenzDuJ7pvnzYFBm2TC0b45g7XUoNU4EzvokMO6xkMj3rv3udgWPNJgYh-2BhQuUnyPmt74cBOlJOzE419wTqgLhc5JcV-2FQOp73zC6gN9FGOAmyyfK42jbgAjG-2B5r5r1lvc6973-2FpjJlqB9b7T8QZbXLOLgLVe8Os8QFOsreqBjcbjs8Q-2FRBPzMdZw1WMF3Cu1OQMThN8fm0YJnFmo78VGHKxwWuK9nAZ9srbOmrBgv2j5HQwzKilyh0onZ7ObA4Os0t8VQO4435J6zkGB7sh0i1LJxHw-3D-3D" type="external">Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) m</a> <a href="http://click.actionnetwork.org/mpss/c/3wA/ni0YAA/t.22e/y5jY4GpdQkawvbqRQJpIJA/h8/9fWA1WYfIDm3WR5VGSBOn1-2FbUXtdOfhy5dsr6LNvIapuQjPz0gfHl94hJHRegwnN0pxQnT9EgKF7QvIst2dECs70goUSEb3zrX2blq2-2F5JVJQnQ76XxncKI3nfQ-2BvUxzRiTwrsT-2F1i4Sk416fvgEeibuEdUKPh5bl7j7FEvTax5-2B-2FPUaAPmdP1tyLqW21Z1o0dkzA5CIK9EUu7UshmE3tl97D2tScGzexB8MnNPGfOUuMGCjGiIgNQ4MniI54Z0KXT8gFpVsxizB8jduKq-2Bqt9L5fL6YesvOrGHy6AuEdnI87VO7i60LT6Jzc5xkg-2FPvohqaLho3glaFBbwCqXaoJeNeoq5WQKPhgDnVexeqTY5i-2BEt3Vo5-2FGlMhb1gNyawUzseCIWqP25mGiLAfCqdfLjJfEZwXOnKN-2FVMlhrhdr7wanK1z9b4q8yLMgpffyb8MXhFy4-2BRqtQ9TScrQpiN-2BQCQR8UQet3JHesWGdVU8j5-2F6wbZrzIqXUiY5aM5SLbP7IErio5nhG-2Fqg5K78GFXSpw-3D-3D" type="external">emo</a>, which had predicted ‘the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in Eastern Syria (…) this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want’ and confirmed that ‘the Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and [Al Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria,’ the former DIA chief told Head to Head that ‘the [Obama] Administration’ didn’t ‘listen’ to these warnings issued by his agency’s analysts. ‘I don’t know if they turned a blind eye,’ he said. ‘I think it was a decision, I think it was a willful decision.'”</p>
<p>Let that sink in. Flynn is taking credit for having predicted that backing fighters in Syria could lead to something like ISIS. And he’s suggesting that Obama received this information and chose to ignore it.</p>
<p>Now, here’s a question: What impact will “bombing the hell” out of people have? What good will “killing their families” do? Spreading nukes around? “Stealing their oil”? Making lists of and banning Muslims? Is it Flynn’s turn to willfully ignore key facts and common sense in order to “advise” against his better judgment a new president who prefers to be advised to do what he was going to do anyway?</p>
<p>Or can Flynn be convinced to apply lessons learned at huge human cost to similar situations going forward even with a president of a different party, race, and IQ?</p>
<p>This article was originally published at <a href="http://davidswanson.org/node/5355" type="external">DavidSwanson.org</a>.</p> | false | 1 | lets hope michael flynn trumps national security adviser remember proper criticisms obama administrations foreign policy michael flynn expected advise donald trump counterproductive killing operations misleading labeled national security generally depicted lawless torturer assassin whether partisan reasons otherwise hes lawless torturer assassin blurted truths shouldnt allowed forget example lt gen flynn since leaving dia become outspoken critic obama administration charges white house relies heavily drone strikes reasons expediency rather effectiveness weve tended say drop another bomb via drone put headline killed abu bag doughnuts makes us feel good 24 hours flynn said know doesnt matter made martyr created new reason fight us even harder even clearly drop bomb drone going cause damage going cause good weapons give bombs drop fuels conflict flynn advise trump cease dropping bombs drones go ahead advise drone murders knowing full well counterproductive point view anyone war profiteers report asked drone strikes tend create terrorists kill flynn replied dont disagree adding think overarching strategy failed strategy trumps almost inevitable string drone murders conducted guidance man knows produce terrorism rather reducing endanger united states rather protecting assessment agrees vast majority americans believe wars past 15 years made united states less safe view numerous experts well flynn expanded comments drones wars whole continued investment conflict weapons give bombs drop fuels conflict done looking solutions flynn also like trump accurately cites criminal 2003 us invasion iraq critical creation isis commenting rise isil iraq flynn acknowledged role played us invasion occupation iraq definitely put fuel fire told hasan absolutely doubt history kind decisions made certainly 2003 going iraq definitely strategic mistake advice make similar strategic mistakes highly profitable weapons industry flynn despite perhaps leading advocate lawless imprisonment torture also admits counterproductive nature crimes former lieutenant general denied involvement litany abuses carried jsoc interrogators camp nama iraq revealed new york times human rights watch admitted us prison system iraq postwar period absolutely helped radicalise iraqis later joined al qaeda iraq aqi successor organisation isil recently international criminal court teased world news might possible consider indicting us war criminals actions afghanistan one might expect allout resistance proposal trump gang hypernationalist war mongers except flynn also called greater accountability us soldiers involved abuses iraqi detainees know hope information comes people held accountable history going look kind actions held held accountable many many years come lets let flynn forget words syria blurted similar facts trump also articulated publicly commenting first time previouslyclassified august 2012 defense intelligence agency dia emo predicted possibility establishing declared undeclared salafist principality eastern syria exactly supporting powers opposition want confirmed salafists muslim brotherhood al qaeda iraq major forces driving insurgency syria former dia chief told head head obama administration didnt listen warnings issued agencys analysts dont know turned blind eye said think decision think willful decision let sink flynn taking credit predicted backing fighters syria could lead something like isis hes suggesting obama received information chose ignore heres question impact bombing hell people good killing families spreading nukes around stealing oil making lists banning muslims flynns turn willfully ignore key facts common sense order advise better judgment new president prefers advised going anyway flynn convinced apply lessons learned huge human cost similar situations going forward even president different party race iq article originally published davidswansonorg | 534 |
<p>Rome, March 1 — The elderly Carmelite who concelebrated the 9 a.m. Mass at the Church of S. Maria in Traspontina this morning was doing fine until he got to that part of the second Eucharistic Prayer where the commemoration of the pope is made. Then he paused, verbally thrashed a bit, and finally said “tutti i nostri vescovi [all our bishops]” before moving on.</p>
<p>It was a reminder that the Sede Vacante, the period when the Chair of Peter is empty, strikes home with particular force in Rome — and not just because it creates a bonanza for stamp and coin collectors, who scramble to obtain Vatican postage and Vatican coins with that rare “Sede Vacante” mark on them. Everywhere else in the wide world of Catholicism, the Church prays, every day, “for . . . our pope and . . . our bishop” at the Eucharist, its central act of worship. But here in the Urbs, the city blessed by the blood of the two great apostles (as a slogan emblazoned on a tower of the North American College proclaims), there is no “our bishop.” The pope is the bishop of Rome. And when he dies, or renounces the Chair (as Pope Benedict XVI did at 8 p.m. Rome time last night), the Church of Rome is singularly bereft. Kinshasa and Cracow and Ho Chi Minh City and Lincoln, Neb., still have their local bishops; Rome is uniquely orphaned. For the Universal Pastor of the Church is its local bishop, and when the Chair is empty, Rome is empty. And you can feel it.</p>
<p>That same swirl of emotions was evident in Rome on February 22, the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter in the liturgical calendar. How does one celebrate that feast eleven days after the successor of Peter has announced that, in conscience and after long prayer, he is going to renounce the Chair? How, under these circumstances, were preachers to interpret the Bible readings at Mass that day: from Peter himself, instructing the elders of the Church in what amounts to the first papal encyclical, to shepherd the flock of God, and from the Matthean account of Christ’s giving the power of the keys to Peter after his confession of faith?</p>
<p>There is not the slightest doubt that Pope Benedict XVI had the right to renounce the Chair, which is clear in canon law. There should not be the slightest doubt that he did so for the reason he gave on February 11: that, after long prayer and a deep examination of conscience, he had reached the conclusion that, as he could not give the Church the service it deserved because of what he described as his waning physical and mental capacities, he should renounce the Chair and retire to a private life of prayer in intercession for the entire Church. Reckless Italian media speculations that Benedict abdicated under pressure from others, or that he just couldn’t take it anymore, should be treated with the contempt they deserve. If the world ought to have learned anything about Joseph Ratzinger in the past eight years, it is that he is a man of conviction and conscience. And his conscientious decision ought to be honored as just that: a conscientious decision that was an act of self-abnegation, not of willfulness or self-assertion or, conversely, cowardice.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, by doing what has never been done before — none of the analogies to previous renunciations of the papacy really work, as they all involved various pressures and craziness — the pope who embodied the solidity and endurance of Catholic tradition for tens of millions has shaken the Church as it has not been shaken in a long time: perhaps since May 13, 1981, when John Paul II was shot in his front yard, St. Peter’s Square. Roman theologians and scholars whom I respect believe that something has been broken in the existential relationship that many Catholics have long had with the papacy. I think that’s a premature judgment; but it may be prove to be prophetic. Much will depend on Benedict’s successor and the decisions he makes about both his predecessor and his own longevity.</p>
<p>Benedict XVI’s advisers have not made that successor’s already-daunting task any easier by convincing the outgoing pope that he should be known as “Benedict XVI, pope emeritus”or “Roman pontiff emeritus” and that he will continue to wear the white cassock, albeit without the mozzetta, that white half-cape. So to underscore the obvious that has been made a bit obscure by what seem to me ill-advised decisions, it must be stated, on this first day of the Sede Vacante, that there is no bishop of Rome, no Roman pontiff, no pope: today, and until the College of Cardinals elects the next holder of that office. And then there will not be “two popes.” There is only one pope, one bishop of Rome, one Roman pontiff, one holder of the power of the keys, one source of authority in the Church. Period.</p>
<p>“Benedict XVI, pope emeritus” will, I am sure, do everything in his power to drive this point home. I very much doubt that we will see him for a very long time; we may never see him in public again. He is too much a churchman, too much a respecter of the prerogatives of the man who will succeed him under extremely difficult circumstances (that he, Benedict, in some sense, created) to do anything but stay off the stage. It is to be hoped that those with whom he takes counsel in the future grasp this as well as Benedict himself did when he said that he was now retiring from the scene, while remaining in solidarity with the Church in prayer.</p>
<p>Every Sede Vacante has a different emotional texture. In August 1978, many felt relief that the long agony that the papacy had been for Paul VI was now ended. A month later, the entire Church was in a profound state of shock in the Sede Vacante that followed the death of John Paul I, pope for 33 days — and that state of shock, according to one cardinal-elector in the second conclave of 1978, was the psychological condition for the possibility of breaking the Italian hammerlock on the papacy after 455 years. The Sede Vacante of 2005 was tinged with sadness, but the grief was accompanied by a sense of spiritual ennoblement: John Paul II had invited the world into his suffering and death, giving the world an experience of the mystery of suffering transformed by faith; and those who had accepted that invitation felt spiritually strengthened by it.</p>
<p>This situation is none of the above. The emptiness that many feel today — the emptiness that that aged Carmelite priest at S. Maria in Traspontina could not quite figure out what to do with this morning — is of a qualitatively different character. The Chair is empty, but without the spiritual and emotional catharsis of a papal funeral. The Chair is empty by renunciation, and the Church is sailing into uncharted waters without a helmsman and with a crew of senior officers that includes several public embarrassments. That, I suspect, is what many are feeling throughout the Church worldwide.</p>
<p>But if they are, in fact, feeling that way, they are missing the great last lesson taught by Benedict XVI on February 11, the day he made the shocking annoucement of his resignation, and that he reiterated on his last two days in office, at his final general audience and at his February 28 meeting with the College of Cardinals. Joseph Ratzinger has lived a Christocentric life for eight decades, and he maintained that focus on Christ to the end. He reminded the stunned cardinals listening to his intention on February 11 that it was Christ who ruled the Church, and would continue to rule the Church. He repeated the same message over the past two weeks. Those who care for the Church and about the Church should take it to heart, and take heart from it. Christ is the helmsman, although it may be difficult to discern the divine hand on the helm from time to time. But it is there. We have his word for it.</p>
<p>And now? What the Church manifestly needs is another pope who is transparent to the Christ living within him, who energizes others in the Church by the force of his faith and conviction, and who can, by who he is (as well as by what he says), in vite others into a life-transforming and enriching friendship with Jesus Christ. That man can, and must, choose someone to clean up the Roman mess for him. He, the new pope, needs to get about the preaching of the gospel and the strengthening of the brethren, the work to which the Lord called Peter.</p>
<p>George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. and holds EPPC’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.</p> | false | 1 | rome march 1 elderly carmelite concelebrated 9 mass church maria traspontina morning fine got part second eucharistic prayer commemoration pope made paused verbally thrashed bit finally said tutti nostri vescovi bishops moving reminder sede vacante period chair peter empty strikes home particular force rome creates bonanza stamp coin collectors scramble obtain vatican postage vatican coins rare sede vacante mark everywhere else wide world catholicism church prays every day pope bishop eucharist central act worship urbs city blessed blood two great apostles slogan emblazoned tower north american college proclaims bishop pope bishop rome dies renounces chair pope benedict xvi 8 pm rome time last night church rome singularly bereft kinshasa cracow ho chi minh city lincoln neb still local bishops rome uniquely orphaned universal pastor church local bishop chair empty rome empty feel swirl emotions evident rome february 22 feast chair st peter liturgical calendar one celebrate feast eleven days successor peter announced conscience long prayer going renounce chair circumstances preachers interpret bible readings mass day peter instructing elders church amounts first papal encyclical shepherd flock god matthean account christs giving power keys peter confession faith slightest doubt pope benedict xvi right renounce chair clear canon law slightest doubt reason gave february 11 long prayer deep examination conscience reached conclusion could give church service deserved described waning physical mental capacities renounce chair retire private life prayer intercession entire church reckless italian media speculations benedict abdicated pressure others couldnt take anymore treated contempt deserve world ought learned anything joseph ratzinger past eight years man conviction conscience conscientious decision ought honored conscientious decision act selfabnegation willfulness selfassertion conversely cowardice nonetheless never done none analogies previous renunciations papacy really work involved various pressures craziness pope embodied solidity endurance catholic tradition tens millions shaken church shaken long time perhaps since may 13 1981 john paul ii shot front yard st peters square roman theologians scholars respect believe something broken existential relationship many catholics long papacy think thats premature judgment may prove prophetic much depend benedicts successor decisions makes predecessor longevity benedict xvis advisers made successors alreadydaunting task easier convincing outgoing pope known benedict xvi pope emeritusor roman pontiff emeritus continue wear white cassock albeit without mozzetta white halfcape underscore obvious made bit obscure seem illadvised decisions must stated first day sede vacante bishop rome roman pontiff pope today college cardinals elects next holder office two popes one pope one bishop rome one roman pontiff one holder power keys one source authority church period benedict xvi pope emeritus sure everything power drive point home much doubt see long time may never see public much churchman much respecter prerogatives man succeed extremely difficult circumstances benedict sense created anything stay stage hoped takes counsel future grasp well benedict said retiring scene remaining solidarity church prayer every sede vacante different emotional texture august 1978 many felt relief long agony papacy paul vi ended month later entire church profound state shock sede vacante followed death john paul pope 33 days state shock according one cardinalelector second conclave 1978 psychological condition possibility breaking italian hammerlock papacy 455 years sede vacante 2005 tinged sadness grief accompanied sense spiritual ennoblement john paul ii invited world suffering death giving world experience mystery suffering transformed faith accepted invitation felt spiritually strengthened situation none emptiness many feel today emptiness aged carmelite priest maria traspontina could quite figure morning qualitatively different character chair empty without spiritual emotional catharsis papal funeral chair empty renunciation church sailing uncharted waters without helmsman crew senior officers includes several public embarrassments suspect many feeling throughout church worldwide fact feeling way missing great last lesson taught benedict xvi february 11 day made shocking annoucement resignation reiterated last two days office final general audience february 28 meeting college cardinals joseph ratzinger lived christocentric life eight decades maintained focus christ end reminded stunned cardinals listening intention february 11 christ ruled church would continue rule church repeated message past two weeks care church church take heart take heart christ helmsman although may difficult discern divine hand helm time time word church manifestly needs another pope transparent christ living within energizes others church force faith conviction well says vite others lifetransforming enriching friendship jesus christ man must choose someone clean roman mess new pope needs get preaching gospel strengthening brethren work lord called peter george weigel distinguished senior fellow ethics public policy center washington dc holds eppcs william e simon chair catholic studies | 726 |
<p />
<p>At West Point Obama told us, to the applause of West Point cadets, that “American exceptionalism” is a doctrine that justifies whatever Washington does.&#160; If Washington&#160;violates domestic and international law by torturing “detainees” or violates the Nuremberg standard by invading countries that have undertaken no hostile action against the US or its allies,&#160;“exceptionalism” is the priest’s blessing that absolves Washington’s sins against law and international norms. Washington’s crimes are transformed into Washington’s affirmation of the rule of law.&#160; Here is Obama in his own words:</p>
<p>“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being. But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions.”</p>
<p>Actions indeed. In the 21st century “American exceptionalism” has destroyed seven countries in whole or in part. Millions of people are dead, maimed, and displaced, and all of this criminal destruction is evidence of Washington’s reaffirmation of international norms and the rule of law. Destruction and murder are merely collateral damage from Washington’s affirmation of international norms.</p>
<p>“American exceptionalism” also&#160; means that US presidents can lie through their teeth and misrepresent those they choose to demonize.&#160; Listen to Obama’s misrepresentations of the Putin and Assad governments:</p>
<p>“Russia’s aggression towards former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe . . . In Ukraine, Russia’s recent actions recall the days when Soviet tanks rolled into Eastern Europe.”&#160; Obama misrepresents Assad as “a dictator who bombs and starves his own people.”</p>
<p>Did any of the cadets in Obama’s West Point audience wonder why, if Assad is a brutal dictator who bombs and starves his own people, the Syrian people are supporting Assad instead of the American-backed “liberation forces,” the combination of imported jihadists and al Qaeda fighters who object to Assad’s government because it is secular? The US military is taught to respect its civilian commander-in-chief, but if West Point cadets actually do obtain an education, it is remarkable that Obama’s audience did not break out in laughter.</p>
<p>The reference to Soviet tanks rolling into Europe is a reference to the Hungarian (1956) and&#160; Czech (1968) “revolutions” when the Hungarian and Czech communist leaders attempted to assert independence from Moscow.&#160; It is doubtful that Washington’s response to countries attempting to exit NATO would be any different.&#160; A few months ago Washington responded to political talk in Germany and England about leaving the EU by informing both governments that it was not in Washington’s interest for them to depart from the European Union.</p>
<p>Obama used the image of Soviet tanks in order to color Russia with the Soviet Threat, to mischaracterize Russia’s response to the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia, and to misrepresent Crimea’s vote in favor of reunification with Russia as “Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea.”&#160; These lies are still a mainstay in the US media and in Washington’s official propaganda.</p>
<p>Obama’s speech is probably the most disingenuous ever given by a Western politician. We could have fun for hours with all the crimes that Washington commits but buries in rhetoric directed at others.&#160; Perhaps my favorite is Obama evoking a world in which “individuals aren’t slaughtered because of political belief.”&#160; I am sure Obama was thinking of this just world when he murdered without due process of law four American citizens “outside of areas of active hostilities.”</p>
<p>Another favorite is the way Obama flushed the US Constitution of its meaning. Obama said, with reference to bringing the Guantanamo prisoners to the US, that “American values and legal traditions don’t permit the indefinite detention of people beyond our borders.” No, Obama, the US Constitution prevents the indefinite detention of US citizens by the US government anywhere on earth, especially within our borders.</p>
<p>By detaining and by murdering US citizens without due process of law, Obama has violated his oath of office and should be impeached.&#160; It was only a short time ago that President Bill Clinton was impeached by the US House of Representatives (the Senate saved him from conviction) for lying about his sexual affair with a White House intern.&#160; How times change. Today a president who violates his oath of office to protect the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic gets a free ride.&#160; The Constitution has lost its power to protect citizens from the arbitrary power of government. The US is the Constitution.&#160; Without the Constitution the US ceases to exist, and the country becomes a tyranny, both at home and abroad.Today the US is a tyranny cloaked in the garb of “freedom and democracy.”</p>
<p>Instead of laughing our way through Obama’s ridiculous speech to what apparently was a dumbed-down West Point graduating class, lets pay attention to Obama’s bottom line: “America must always lead on the world stage. . . . The military is, and always will be, the backbone of that leadership.”</p>
<p>In other words, Washington doesn’t use diplomacy.&#160; Washington uses coercion. The favorite threat is: “Do as you are told or we will bomb you into the Stone Age.” Obama’s speech is a justification of Washington’s criminal actions on the grounds that Washington acts for the exceptional Americans whose exceptionalism places them and, thereby, their government above law and international norms. In this way of thinking, only the failure to prevail constitutes failure.</p>
<p>Americans are the new ubermensch, the new master race. Inferior humans can be bombed, invaded, and sanctioned. Obama’s West Point speech asserts American superiority over all others and Washington’s determination to continue this superiority by preventing the rise of other powers.&#160; This arrogant hubris was not enough for the Washington Post editorial board. The newspaper’s editorial damned Obama for binding US power and limiting its use to “a narrow set of core interest,” such as direct threats to America.</p>
<p>The American “liberal media” object that Obama’s claim of exceptionalism is not broad enough for Washington’s purposes.&#160; Obama’s address, the Washington Post wrote, bound “US power” and “offered scant comfort” to those militarists who want to overthrow Syria, Iran, Russia, and China.</p>
<p>The world should take note that the most militarily aggressive American president in history is considered a wimp by the neoconized American media.&#160; The media drives wars, and the American media, firmly allied with the military/security complex, is driving the world to the final war.</p> | false | 1 | west point obama told us applause west point cadets american exceptionalism doctrine justifies whatever washington does160 washington160violates domestic international law torturing detainees violates nuremberg standard invading countries undertaken hostile action us allies160exceptionalism priests blessing absolves washingtons sins law international norms washingtons crimes transformed washingtons affirmation rule law160 obama words believe american exceptionalism every fiber makes us exceptional ability flout international norms rule law willingness affirm actions actions indeed 21st century american exceptionalism destroyed seven countries whole part millions people dead maimed displaced criminal destruction evidence washingtons reaffirmation international norms rule law destruction murder merely collateral damage washingtons affirmation international norms american exceptionalism also160 means us presidents lie teeth misrepresent choose demonize160 listen obamas misrepresentations putin assad governments russias aggression towards former soviet states unnerves capitals europe ukraine russias recent actions recall days soviet tanks rolled eastern europe160 obama misrepresents assad dictator bombs starves people cadets obamas west point audience wonder assad brutal dictator bombs starves people syrian people supporting assad instead americanbacked liberation forces combination imported jihadists al qaeda fighters object assads government secular us military taught respect civilian commanderinchief west point cadets actually obtain education remarkable obamas audience break laughter reference soviet tanks rolling europe reference hungarian 1956 and160 czech 1968 revolutions hungarian czech communist leaders attempted assert independence moscow160 doubtful washingtons response countries attempting exit nato would different160 months ago washington responded political talk germany england leaving eu informing governments washingtons interest depart european union obama used image soviet tanks order color russia soviet threat mischaracterize russias response georgian invasion south ossetia misrepresent crimeas vote favor reunification russia russias invasion annexation crimea160 lies still mainstay us media washingtons official propaganda obamas speech probably disingenuous ever given western politician could fun hours crimes washington commits buries rhetoric directed others160 perhaps favorite obama evoking world individuals arent slaughtered political belief160 sure obama thinking world murdered without due process law four american citizens outside areas active hostilities another favorite way obama flushed us constitution meaning obama said reference bringing guantanamo prisoners us american values legal traditions dont permit indefinite detention people beyond borders obama us constitution prevents indefinite detention us citizens us government anywhere earth especially within borders detaining murdering us citizens without due process law obama violated oath office impeached160 short time ago president bill clinton impeached us house representatives senate saved conviction lying sexual affair white house intern160 times change today president violates oath office protect constitution enemies foreign domestic gets free ride160 constitution lost power protect citizens arbitrary power government us constitution160 without constitution us ceases exist country becomes tyranny home abroadtoday us tyranny cloaked garb freedom democracy instead laughing way obamas ridiculous speech apparently dumbeddown west point graduating class lets pay attention obamas bottom line america must always lead world stage military always backbone leadership words washington doesnt use diplomacy160 washington uses coercion favorite threat told bomb stone age obamas speech justification washingtons criminal actions grounds washington acts exceptional americans whose exceptionalism places thereby government law international norms way thinking failure prevail constitutes failure americans new ubermensch new master race inferior humans bombed invaded sanctioned obamas west point speech asserts american superiority others washingtons determination continue superiority preventing rise powers160 arrogant hubris enough washington post editorial board newspapers editorial damned obama binding us power limiting use narrow set core interest direct threats america american liberal media object obamas claim exceptionalism broad enough washingtons purposes160 obamas address washington post wrote bound us power offered scant comfort militarists want overthrow syria iran russia china world take note militarily aggressive american president history considered wimp neoconized american media160 media drives wars american media firmly allied militarysecurity complex driving world final war | 601 |
<p />
<p>Some commentators and politicians are describing it as mission creep – a slide into deeper military involvement in Libya, going beyond the original goal, and inviting unpredictable consequences. In simple terms, it is the decision by Britain, France and Italy to send military officers to organize the flagging rebel campaign against Muammar Gaddafi’s forces. These “advisers” are being deployed mainly in the rebel stronghold, the eastern port city of Benghazi, to train and counsel the anti-Gaddafi forces, who have thus far failed to make much headway against the Libyan army and have been beaten back in several places. Defense experts acknowledge that there will be more military personnel to protect these “advisers.”</p>
<p>How does a humanitarian operation turn into “mission creep?” A brief look at events in little more than a month provides an answer. Resolution 1973 approved by the United Nations Security Council on March 17, 2011 authorized “all necessary measures … to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas … while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory.” But any process of employing “all necessary measures” should begin with peaceful attempts. Otherwise, only military force has been employed. Indeed, the African Union put forward a plan including these steps: an immediate ceasefire; unhindered delivery of humanitarian aid; the protection of foreign nationals; a dialogue between the government and rebels on a political settlement; and the suspension of NATO air raids. Furthermore, Turkey, a NATO member, had already begun to mediate between the two sides in Libya. But the West and the rebels insist that Gaddafi must go first.</p>
<p>Since the US-led bombing of Libya started immediately after Resolution 1973, critics would be forgiven for concluding that the Security Council and Secretary General Ban Ki-moon have become tools of Prime Minister Cameron of Britain and President Sarkozy of France, with President Obama apparently dragging his feet. Ban Ki-moon, looking for another term as UN Secretary General, is culpable in what amounts to a Western attempt to invoke a seemingly justifiable humanitarian principle when, in reality, the intention and preparation for a military assault were already in place. Any hope of a peaceful outcome stood no chance. Had the Obama administration, particularly his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, acted a little more decisively in friendly countries, Bahrain and Yemen, when the rulers there brutally suppressed civilian protesters, the Western powers would have enjoyed the benefit of credibility. Gaddafi may well have seen a determined and consistent humanitarian policy on the part of the West.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, Britain and France have preferred military intervention all along. Cameron and Sarkozy are weak and unpopular men struggling with strong currents of domestic opposition to a range of economic and social policies of their governments. Every beleaguered leader knows that a crisis abroad helps to shore up support at home. What other reason could there be behind such zeal for another military adventure in Libya after the disastrous wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan in the last decade?</p>
<p>In a boastful exclusive on April 20, 2011, the British newspaper Independent reported the deployment in Libya of “one of the most battle-hardened commanders in the British Army, with extensive experience in combat in Afghanistan.” The Defense Ministry’s message was, “here comes Britain’s own Rambo, fresh from Helmand.” But those who have closely followed British military units in Basra in Iraq and Helmand in Afghanistan know that their achievements have been far from glorious. And the American military took over in both places. In the event of British, French or Italian casualties in the Libyan civil war, further escalation and deployment of troops is a real possibility.</p>
<p>Even members of Prime Minister Cameron’s own Conservative Party in Parliament are doubtful about the way the Libyan operation is evolving. The House of Commons backed Security Council Resolution 1973. But John Baron, a Conservative, is among a number of parliamentarians now strongly critical of the British Prime Minister, who wrote an article with President Obama and President Sarkozy, asserting that “Gaddafi must go, and go for good.” Recalling that Parliament had “only given its backing for a no-fly zone to protect civilians,” several MPs have accused the government of seeking “illegal” regime change in Libya.</p>
<p>Western claims that “Gaddafi is killing his own people” need an honest examination in a wider context. War is a crime whenever and wherever civilians and peaceful protesters are killed or suppressed. When Gaddafi’s troops kill civilians, it is a crime. Equally, when in Bahrain the ruling family’s foreign mercenaries and Saudi forces who have recently moved in kill peaceful protesters demanding their basic rights, those troops are committing a crime.</p>
<p>Violence against civilians in mosques and hospitals, denying treatment to the wounded, and threatening doctors are among the worst of offenses. So is the violence against demonstrators by Yemeni government forces; killings by American drone attacks and death squads in Pakistan and Afghanistan; and the dreadful civilian casualties among the besieged Palestinian population in Israel’s war on Gaza. Above all, the United States kills people, including its own, based on flawed justice, hunch, suspicion or whim. Unleashing brutal and blind terror is as much in the nature of civilized governments as it is of outlaw regimes.</p> | false | 1 | commentators politicians describing mission creep slide deeper military involvement libya going beyond original goal inviting unpredictable consequences simple terms decision britain france italy send military officers organize flagging rebel campaign muammar gaddafis forces advisers deployed mainly rebel stronghold eastern port city benghazi train counsel antigaddafi forces thus far failed make much headway libyan army beaten back several places defense experts acknowledge military personnel protect advisers humanitarian operation turn mission creep brief look events little month provides answer resolution 1973 approved united nations security council march 17 2011 authorized necessary measures protect civilians civilianpopulated areas excluding foreign occupation force form part libyan territory process employing necessary measures begin peaceful attempts otherwise military force employed indeed african union put forward plan including steps immediate ceasefire unhindered delivery humanitarian aid protection foreign nationals dialogue government rebels political settlement suspension nato air raids furthermore turkey nato member already begun mediate two sides libya west rebels insist gaddafi must go first since usled bombing libya started immediately resolution 1973 critics would forgiven concluding security council secretary general ban kimoon become tools prime minister cameron britain president sarkozy france president obama apparently dragging feet ban kimoon looking another term un secretary general culpable amounts western attempt invoke seemingly justifiable humanitarian principle reality intention preparation military assault already place hope peaceful outcome stood chance obama administration particularly secretary state hillary clinton acted little decisively friendly countries bahrain yemen rulers brutally suppressed civilian protesters western powers would enjoyed benefit credibility gaddafi may well seen determined consistent humanitarian policy part west unfortunately britain france preferred military intervention along cameron sarkozy weak unpopular men struggling strong currents domestic opposition range economic social policies governments every beleaguered leader knows crisis abroad helps shore support home reason could behind zeal another military adventure libya disastrous wars iraq afghanistan pakistan last decade boastful exclusive april 20 2011 british newspaper independent reported deployment libya one battlehardened commanders british army extensive experience combat afghanistan defense ministrys message comes britains rambo fresh helmand closely followed british military units basra iraq helmand afghanistan know achievements far glorious american military took places event british french italian casualties libyan civil war escalation deployment troops real possibility even members prime minister camerons conservative party parliament doubtful way libyan operation evolving house commons backed security council resolution 1973 john baron conservative among number parliamentarians strongly critical british prime minister wrote article president obama president sarkozy asserting gaddafi must go go good recalling parliament given backing nofly zone protect civilians several mps accused government seeking illegal regime change libya western claims gaddafi killing people need honest examination wider context war crime whenever wherever civilians peaceful protesters killed suppressed gaddafis troops kill civilians crime equally bahrain ruling familys foreign mercenaries saudi forces recently moved kill peaceful protesters demanding basic rights troops committing crime violence civilians mosques hospitals denying treatment wounded threatening doctors among worst offenses violence demonstrators yemeni government forces killings american drone attacks death squads pakistan afghanistan dreadful civilian casualties among besieged palestinian population israels war gaza united states kills people including based flawed justice hunch suspicion whim unleashing brutal blind terror much nature civilized governments outlaw regimes | 516 |
<p>Media hysteria over alleged Russian collusion continues, even as President Donald Trump’s short-lived national security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about speaking with Russian officials to advance Israeli interests.</p>
<p>On Friday, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators twice during an interview with the FBI in January, according to a signed <a href="https://www.justice.gov/file/1015126/download" type="external">Statement of Offense</a>.</p>
<p>An <a href="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4317992/11-30-17-Flynn-Information.pdf" type="external">indictment</a> released by the office of special prosecutor Robert Mueller says that Flynn spoke with Sergey Kislyak, then-Russian Ambassador to the United States, twice in December, when Trump was president-elect.</p>
<p>According to the court documents, Flynn contacted Kislyak on December 19, 2016, the day after former President Barack Obama signed an <a href="https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/Documents/cyber2_eo.pdf" type="external">executive order</a> imposing sanctions against Russia as punishment for alleged Russian “meddling” in the 2016 US presidential elections.</p>
<p>Read more</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/news/411858-flynn-request-putin-russia/" type="external" /></p>
<p>While various talking heads have claimed that Flynn was working to undermine Obama’s sanctions, the documents only show Flynn asked Russia to “refrain from escalating the situation in response to sanctions that the United States had imposed against Russia.”</p>
<p>Shortly after, Russian President Vladimir Putin <a href="https://www.rt.com/news/372256-putin-diplomats-expulsion-rejects/" type="external">announced</a> that Moscow would not expel any US diplomats, but rather invite them to the Kremlin for holiday celebrations.</p>
<p>On Friday, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California), the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that Flynn’s guilty plea was “a stunning revelation” that showed the former national security advisor violated the Logan Act</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2009-title18/html/USCODE-2009-title18-partI-chap45-sec953.htm" type="external">Logan Act</a> of 1979 calls for the prosecution of any US person who “directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States.”</p>
<p>“This shows a Trump associate negotiating with the Russians against US policy and interests before Donald Trump took office and after it was announced that Russia had interfered in our election,” Feinstein said in a <a href="https://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?id=D839FF78-A3D0-4B4A-830E-DF9FE47E3F25" type="external">statement</a>.</p>
<p />
<p>(1/2) Michael Flynn’s guilty plea is about more than just lying to the FBI. This shows a Trump associate negotiating with the Russians against U.S. policy and interests before Donald Trump took office and after it was announced that Russia had interfered in our election.</p>
<p>— Sen Dianne Feinstein (@SenFeinstein) <a href="https://twitter.com/SenFeinstein/status/936634008343113729?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" type="external">December 1, 2017</a></p>
<p />
<p>Only two people have ever been indicted under the Logan Act, and no one has ever been prosecuted. If convicted, Flynn could face up to three years in federal prison.</p>
<p>While Flynn’s plea does not show any direct evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to influence the election, it does show that they might have colluded with an entirely different foreign government to undermine the foreign policy of a sitting president.</p>
<p>On December 22, 2016, Flynn contacted Kislyak to ask if Russia would delay or defeat a UN Security Council vote criticizing Israeli settlements. UN <a href="http://www.un.org/webcast/pdfs/SRES2334-2016.pdf" type="external">Resolution 2334</a> demanded that Israel “immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem” and said that the settlements established by Israel have “no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law.”</p>
<p>In December, a senior Israeli official told <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/22/politics/un-vote-israel-settlements/index.html" type="external">CNN</a> that his country reached out to the Trump campaign after it failed to persuade the Obama administration to veto the resolution.</p>
<p>The officials said that Israel “implored the White House not to go ahead and told them that if they did, we would have no choice but to reach out to President-elect Trump.”</p>
<p>The day after the resolution was submitted, the Justice Department said that “a very senior member of the Presidential Transition Team” directed Flynn to contact “several foreign governments, including Russia,” in order to “learn where each government stood on the resolution and to influence those governments to delay the vote or defeat the resolution.”</p>
<p>The resolution was <a href="https://www.un.org/press/en/2016/sc12657.doc.htm" type="external">adopted</a> on December 23 after Obama instructed his ambassador to the United Nations to abstain from the vote and all other countries on the Security Council, including Russia backed the resolution.</p>
<p>Flynn did contact Russians, just as he did as instructed to contact all foreign ambassadors and foreign ministers on the UN Security Council to ask them to change their vote until Obama was out of office.</p>
<p>Read more</p>
<p><a href="https://www.rt.com/usa/411687-flynn-plea-mueller-analysis/" type="external" /></p>
<p>On Friday, a Trump transition official told <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/aramroston/it-was-kushner-who-told-flynn-to-make-calls-about-israel-un?utm_term=.xggan16GO#.gpMB4Pk3d" type="external">Buzzfeed</a> that Jared Kushner, Trump’s senior advisor and son-in-law, was the one who ordered Flynn to make the calls.</p>
<p>“Jared called Flynn and told him you need to get on the phone to every member of the Security Council and tell them to delay the vote,” the official told Buzzfeed.</p>
<p>Flynn also contacted the US missions of Uruguay and Malaysia, while Kushner contacted the British ambassador to the United States in the hours before the vote, two diplomats familiar with the conversations told <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-un/flynn-kushner-targeted-several-states-in-failed-u-n-lobbying-diplomats-idUSKBN1DW015" type="external">Reuters</a>.</p>
<p>Kushner reportedly told Flynn that “this was a top priority for the president.”</p>
<p>However, <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/jared-kushner-disclosure-form-west-bank-settlements-israel-white-house-729290" type="external">Newsweek</a> reported Saturday that Kushner failed to disclose his role as co-director of the Charles and Seryl Kushner Foundation between 2006 and 2015, during which time it funded an illegal Israeli settlement. This could have been seen as a conflict of interest in his appointment as the Trump advisor tasked with bringing peace to the Middle East.</p>
<p>On Sunday, Kushner conducted an interview with Haim Saban, a prominent Clinton Foundation donor, who thanked him for “taking steps to try and get the United Nation Security Council to not go along with what ended up being an abstention by the US against a 50-year-old tradition.”</p>
<p>“To be honest with you, as far as I know there’s nothing illegal there,” Saban said. “But I think that this crowd and myself want to thank you for making that effort, so thank you very much.”</p>
<p>On cable news, Russiagate garners ratings, but there has been scant coverage of Israel’s influence peddling that led Flynn to contact Kislyak.</p>
<p>On Monday night, Chris Matthews closed his monologue on MSNBC’s Hardball asking why the Trump administration would direct Flynn “to tell the Russian ambassador what he wanted done in regard to US sanctions, what he wanted Russia to do in regards to Israel?”</p>
<p>“Russia, Russia, Russia. It’s been the pattern of the year,” Matthews said in his next breath.</p>
<p />
<p>Again, the obvious intended beneficiary of the Kushner-directed calls made by Flynn to Russia (and every other UN Security Council member) was Israel, not Russia. And, at least in this case, Kushner was “colluding” with Netanyahu, not Putin: <a href="https://t.co/RwGrtZMsZT" type="external">https://t.co/RwGrtZMsZT</a></p>
<p>— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) <a href="https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/937387433460629504?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" type="external">December 3, 2017</a></p>
<p />
<p>Other news outlets slammed the Trump administration for having ties with Russia, but barely mentioned that Flynn was lobbying on behalf of Israel.</p>
<p>MSNBC hosts Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes each went over the plea and said that it showed Trump’s collusion with Russia, but neither made any substantive comments on the lobbying for Israel.</p>
<p>NBC did not mention Israel in their <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/michael-flynn-former-national-security-adviser-plead-guilty-mueller-probe-n825551" type="external">report</a> until the 18th paragraph of their story, and only spent two short paragraphs on the subject. The New York Times did not mention Israel until the 23rd paragraph of their <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/us/politics/michael-flynn-guilty-russia-investigation.html" type="external">report</a>, only spending two short paragraphs on it.</p>
<p>To their credit, the Times did say that Mueller’s investigators have learned that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked the Trump transition team to lobby other countries on the resolution.</p>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/12/01/five-reasons-michael-flynns-guilty-plea-such-big-deal/913009001/" type="external">report</a> entitled, “Five reasons Michael Flynn’s guilty plea is such a big deal,” USA Today only mentions Israel once, in passing. CNN takes the same tact in a <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/01/politics/mike-flynn-indictment-analysis/index.html" type="external">report</a>, titled, “Michael Flynn’s guilty plea is an absolutely massive problem for Donald Trump.”</p>
<p>[embedded content]</p> | false | 1 | media hysteria alleged russian collusion continues even president donald trumps shortlived national security adviser gen michael flynn pleaded guilty lying fbi speaking russian officials advance israeli interests friday flynn pleaded guilty lying federal investigators twice interview fbi january according signed statement offense indictment released office special prosecutor robert mueller says flynn spoke sergey kislyak thenrussian ambassador united states twice december trump presidentelect according court documents flynn contacted kislyak december 19 2016 day former president barack obama signed executive order imposing sanctions russia punishment alleged russian meddling 2016 us presidential elections read various talking heads claimed flynn working undermine obamas sanctions documents show flynn asked russia refrain escalating situation response sanctions united states imposed russia shortly russian president vladimir putin announced moscow would expel us diplomats rather invite kremlin holiday celebrations friday senator dianne feinstein dcalifornia ranking member senate judiciary committee said flynns guilty plea stunning revelation showed former national security advisor violated logan act logan act 1979 calls prosecution us person directly indirectly commences carries correspondence intercourse foreign government officer agent thereof relation disputes controversies united states defeat measures united states shows trump associate negotiating russians us policy interests donald trump took office announced russia interfered election feinstein said statement 12 michael flynns guilty plea lying fbi shows trump associate negotiating russians us policy interests donald trump took office announced russia interfered election sen dianne feinstein senfeinstein december 1 2017 two people ever indicted logan act one ever prosecuted convicted flynn could face three years federal prison flynns plea show direct evidence trump campaign colluded russia influence election show might colluded entirely different foreign government undermine foreign policy sitting president december 22 2016 flynn contacted kislyak ask russia would delay defeat un security council vote criticizing israeli settlements un resolution 2334 demanded israel immediately completely cease settlement activities occupied palestinian territory including east jerusalem said settlements established israel legal validity constitutes flagrant violation international law december senior israeli official told cnn country reached trump campaign failed persuade obama administration veto resolution officials said israel implored white house go ahead told would choice reach presidentelect trump day resolution submitted justice department said senior member presidential transition team directed flynn contact several foreign governments including russia order learn government stood resolution influence governments delay vote defeat resolution resolution adopted december 23 obama instructed ambassador united nations abstain vote countries security council including russia backed resolution flynn contact russians instructed contact foreign ambassadors foreign ministers un security council ask change vote obama office read friday trump transition official told buzzfeed jared kushner trumps senior advisor soninlaw one ordered flynn make calls jared called flynn told need get phone every member security council tell delay vote official told buzzfeed flynn also contacted us missions uruguay malaysia kushner contacted british ambassador united states hours vote two diplomats familiar conversations told reuters kushner reportedly told flynn top priority president however newsweek reported saturday kushner failed disclose role codirector charles seryl kushner foundation 2006 2015 time funded illegal israeli settlement could seen conflict interest appointment trump advisor tasked bringing peace middle east sunday kushner conducted interview haim saban prominent clinton foundation donor thanked taking steps try get united nation security council go along ended abstention us 50yearold tradition honest far know theres nothing illegal saban said think crowd want thank making effort thank much cable news russiagate garners ratings scant coverage israels influence peddling led flynn contact kislyak monday night chris matthews closed monologue msnbcs hardball asking trump administration would direct flynn tell russian ambassador wanted done regard us sanctions wanted russia regards israel russia russia russia pattern year matthews said next breath obvious intended beneficiary kushnerdirected calls made flynn russia every un security council member israel russia least case kushner colluding netanyahu putin httpstcorwgrtzmszt glenn greenwald ggreenwald december 3 2017 news outlets slammed trump administration ties russia barely mentioned flynn lobbying behalf israel msnbc hosts rachel maddow chris hayes went plea said showed trumps collusion russia neither made substantive comments lobbying israel nbc mention israel report 18th paragraph story spent two short paragraphs subject new york times mention israel 23rd paragraph report spending two short paragraphs credit times say muellers investigators learned israeli prime minister benjamin netanyahu asked trump transition team lobby countries resolution report entitled five reasons michael flynns guilty plea big deal usa today mentions israel passing cnn takes tact report titled michael flynns guilty plea absolutely massive problem donald trump embedded content | 729 |
<p>ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — By the end of the third quarter Sunday, it was clear the <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Denver_Broncos/" type="external">Denver Broncos</a> had done something that no one had done to the <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Dallas-Cowboys/" type="external">Dallas Cowboys</a> since they drafted <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Ezekiel-Elliott/" type="external">Ezekiel Elliott</a> in 2016: They had made him and the Cowboys’ running game a complete non-factor.</p>
<p>Frustration set in, to the point where Elliott simply stood in place after Broncos cornerback <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Chris_Harris/" type="external">Chris Harris</a> Jr. intercepted <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Dak-Prescott/" type="external">Dak Prescott</a>‘s pass after the game got out of hand. Elliott was on his way to a career-low eight yards on nine carries — 43 yards below his previous career-low figure, which came in his first pro game.</p>
<p>Prescott wound up throwing the football 50 times, and by the end of the Broncos’ 42-17 win over Dallas, the Cowboys had run pass plays on 79 percent of their snaps.</p>
<p>That was hardly what they wanted considering that they came into Sunday 0-4 in Prescott’s starts when they pass at least 60 percent of the time and undefeated when they run on at least 40 percent of their snaps.</p>
<p>Everyone wants to take away the Cowboys’ ground game. Thanks to a stout defensive line and attacking linebackers that the Cowboys’ offensive line could barely budge, the Broncos did it.</p>
<p>“We loaded the box,” Harris said. “We had everyone in there that we could possibly put in there. When we do that, that’s what we expect from them. We don’t expect them to give up an inch of (yardage). They were great for us, and we didn’t allow them to get third-and-threes or third-and-fours. That’s huge.”</p>
<p>The Broncos could do that because they have a pair of All-Pro cornerbacks. Harris and Aqib Talib were able to cover <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Cole-Beasley/" type="external">Cole Beasley</a> and <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Dez_Bryant/" type="external">Dez Bryant</a> in man-to-man coverage, freeing the safeties and linebackers to attack the run and the heart of Dallas’ offensive line.</p>
<p>Thus, it’s doubtful that other teams can fully replicate what the Broncos did. But once again, Denver’s defense showed its capability of defusing an elite unit, just like it tore apart <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Aaron_Rodgers/" type="external">Aaron Rodgers</a> and Green Bay’s passing game midway through the 2015 season and then-league MVP <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Cam_Newton/" type="external">Cam Newton</a> and Carolina’s multifaceted offense in Super Bowl 50.</p>
<p>In those games, like Sunday against Dallas, the Broncos were underdogs. They spent the week hearing about the dominance of their foe. Then they went out and tore apart a unit thought to be the league’s best at its craft.</p>
<p>“Zeke (Elliott) said it to the media, he said, ‘We run four plays and you’ve got to stop them,'” said Broncos defensive end <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Derek-Wolfe/" type="external">Derek Wolfe</a>. “And we said, ‘OK, challenge accepted,’ and we won.”</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>There are three key areas in which the Broncos can improve after two games.</p>
<p>The first is in pass protection, particularly at right tackle. While starter <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Menelik-Watson/" type="external">Menelik Watson</a> has been a road grader as a run blocker, he has allowed six sacks, including one to Dallas’ <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/DeMarcus-Lawrence/" type="external">DeMarcus Lawrence</a> that resulted in a fumble that led to a Dallas touchdown.</p>
<p>“Our pass protection is not there yet,” Broncos head coach <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Vance-Joseph/" type="external">Vance Joseph</a> said. “We’re still working some kinks out there.”</p>
<p>The second is in finishing off opponents. The Broncos let the Chargers back into their Week 1 game, as a 24-7 lead quickly evaporated into a tight 24-21 game thanks to a pair of giveaways.</p>
<p>The Broncos were never truly threatened by the Cowboys, but Dallas did sustain multiple drives in the fourth quarter.</p>
<p>“Finishing games is obviously coaching better and playing better,” Joseph said. “It’s tough to finish games when you’re ahead because if you’re too conservative, you allow teams to get back in the game. If you’re too aggressive, you may turn the ball over. We have to develop a mentality where in the third and fourth quarter, if we’re up, which is a good thing, we have to focus.”</p>
<p>The third is connected to the first two — it’s giveaways. Four of the five touchdowns allowed by the Broncos this year came after turnovers set their opponents up inside Denver territory.</p>
<p>“It’s been four turnovers, four touchdowns,” Joseph said. “We have to fix that issue on both sides of the ball.”</p>
<p>—</p>
<p>A few times in recent weeks, Broncos players have mentioned how quarterback <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Trevor-Siemian/" type="external">Trevor Siemian</a>‘s demeanor and presence reminds them of <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Peyton_Manning/" type="external">Peyton Manning</a>.</p>
<p>But sometimes, that translates to the field. Early in the third quarter, with the Broncos facing third-and-6, Siemian made a pre-snap change, going to a shotgun handoff to <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/C.J._Anderson/" type="external">C.J. Anderson</a>.</p>
<p>Anderson galloped nine yards, the Broncos moved the chains, and they were off and running on what would become a 15-play, 75-yard drive that effectively broke the will of the Cowboys, putting them behind three scores, where they would stay for the rest of the game.</p>
<p>“The third-and-6 run check was something that (Manning) would have done,” Anderson said. “He’s definitely understanding the game a lot more.”</p>
<p>Siemian has six touchdown passes in two games, tied for the second-most in Broncos history in the first two weeks of the season behind Manning, who had nine scoring tosses in the first two games of his record-breaking 2013 season.</p>
<p>Sieman’s 106.9 rating is the eighth-best for a Broncos quarterback through two games, and the best for a Denver passer to start a season since Manning in 2014.</p>
<p>“If he plays that solid for us, we’ll be hard to beat down the stretch,” Broncos head coach Vance Joseph said.</p>
<p>NOTES: WR Bennie Fowler will be in the league-mandated post-concussion protocol after his head hit the ground hard as he tried to make a reception in the end zone during the second quarter. Fowler tried to walk back to the Broncos’ sideline, but collided with a Broncos official while in an apparent daze from the concussion. … LT <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Garett-Bolles/" type="external">Garett Bolles</a> suffered a bone bruise in his leg and what was reported to be a high ankle sprain in the third quarter Sunday. He is expected to miss multiple weeks, but that forecast is far better than what was initially feared after he left Sunday’s game on a cart. … OLB <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Von-Miller/" type="external">Von Miller</a> finished Sunday’s game with two sacks after going without a sack in five consecutive games dating to last year. … RB Devontae Booker’s status remains up in the air as he completes his recovery from a fractured wrist suffered in March. Booker “has to get in football shape” before he returns, Broncos head coach Vance Joseph said. … DE Zach Kerr did not play against the Cowboys as he continues to recover from a knee bruise suffered Aug. 26 against the Packers. With Kerr out, Kyle Peko was activated. … DE Jared Crick was placed on injured reserve last Friday after undergoing disk surgery. Crick had been sidelined since Aug. 14 because of back spasms, practicing occasionally in the weeks that followed. A potential return later this season has not been ruled out. … RB C.J. Anderson ranks second in the NFL with 199 rushing yards heading into Monday night’s game. He is the first Broncos running back to rush for at least 180 yards in the first two weeks of the season since <a href="https://www.upi.com/topic/Travis_Henry/" type="external">Travis Henry</a> in 2007. … QB Trevor Siemian ranks sixth in the league going into Monday night with a 106.9 passer rating. Siemian has 450 yards on 39-of-60 passing with six touchdowns and two interceptions.</p> | false | 1 | englewood colo end third quarter sunday clear denver broncos done something one done dallas cowboys since drafted ezekiel elliott 2016 made cowboys running game complete nonfactor frustration set point elliott simply stood place broncos cornerback chris harris jr intercepted dak prescotts pass game got hand elliott way careerlow eight yards nine carries 43 yards previous careerlow figure came first pro game prescott wound throwing football 50 times end broncos 4217 win dallas cowboys run pass plays 79 percent snaps hardly wanted considering came sunday 04 prescotts starts pass least 60 percent time undefeated run least 40 percent snaps everyone wants take away cowboys ground game thanks stout defensive line attacking linebackers cowboys offensive line could barely budge broncos loaded box harris said everyone could possibly put thats expect dont expect give inch yardage great us didnt allow get thirdandthrees thirdandfours thats huge broncos could pair allpro cornerbacks harris aqib talib able cover cole beasley dez bryant mantoman coverage freeing safeties linebackers attack run heart dallas offensive line thus doubtful teams fully replicate broncos denvers defense showed capability defusing elite unit like tore apart aaron rodgers green bays passing game midway 2015 season thenleague mvp cam newton carolinas multifaceted offense super bowl 50 games like sunday dallas broncos underdogs spent week hearing dominance foe went tore apart unit thought leagues best craft zeke elliott said media said run four plays youve got stop said broncos defensive end derek wolfe said ok challenge accepted three key areas broncos improve two games first pass protection particularly right tackle starter menelik watson road grader run blocker allowed six sacks including one dallas demarcus lawrence resulted fumble led dallas touchdown pass protection yet broncos head coach vance joseph said still working kinks second finishing opponents broncos let chargers back week 1 game 247 lead quickly evaporated tight 2421 game thanks pair giveaways broncos never truly threatened cowboys dallas sustain multiple drives fourth quarter finishing games obviously coaching better playing better joseph said tough finish games youre ahead youre conservative allow teams get back game youre aggressive may turn ball develop mentality third fourth quarter good thing focus third connected first two giveaways four five touchdowns allowed broncos year came turnovers set opponents inside denver territory four turnovers four touchdowns joseph said fix issue sides ball times recent weeks broncos players mentioned quarterback trevor siemians demeanor presence reminds peyton manning sometimes translates field early third quarter broncos facing thirdand6 siemian made presnap change going shotgun handoff cj anderson anderson galloped nine yards broncos moved chains running would become 15play 75yard drive effectively broke cowboys putting behind three scores would stay rest game thirdand6 run check something manning would done anderson said hes definitely understanding game lot siemian six touchdown passes two games tied secondmost broncos history first two weeks season behind manning nine scoring tosses first two games recordbreaking 2013 season siemans 1069 rating eighthbest broncos quarterback two games best denver passer start season since manning 2014 plays solid us well hard beat stretch broncos head coach vance joseph said notes wr bennie fowler leaguemandated postconcussion protocol head hit ground hard tried make reception end zone second quarter fowler tried walk back broncos sideline collided broncos official apparent daze concussion lt garett bolles suffered bone bruise leg reported high ankle sprain third quarter sunday expected miss multiple weeks forecast far better initially feared left sundays game cart olb von miller finished sundays game two sacks going without sack five consecutive games dating last year rb devontae bookers status remains air completes recovery fractured wrist suffered march booker get football shape returns broncos head coach vance joseph said de zach kerr play cowboys continues recover knee bruise suffered aug 26 packers kerr kyle peko activated de jared crick placed injured reserve last friday undergoing disk surgery crick sidelined since aug 14 back spasms practicing occasionally weeks followed potential return later season ruled rb cj anderson ranks second nfl 199 rushing yards heading monday nights game first broncos running back rush least 180 yards first two weeks season since travis henry 2007 qb trevor siemian ranks sixth league going monday night 1069 passer rating siemian 450 yards 39of60 passing six touchdowns two interceptions | 695 |
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