1. How to wiretap Trump Tower.
2. Economist Dorothy Rice passes away (NYT). And The Economist on feminist economics.
3. Underrated explanations for understanding the rise of Trump (NYT):
Historians will long ponder the factors behind Mr. Trump’s unlikely rise to the presidency. Most analyses cite his advocacy for the economically disaffected, his rejection or embrace of one form of identity politics or another, or his preternatural ability to connect with “Middle America.”
But another factor deserves attention: a bipartisan approach to national security focused on terrorism that has distorted America’s understanding of its interests.
4. The real story of Japan’s Bond Girl (NYT).
5. Atlantic Business on The Complacent Class: “[The Complacent Class] provides an open invitation for the reader to think deeply.” And Arnold Kling reviews Complacent Class: ” There is a lot to the book. You should read it. Even though it is getting a lot of coverage, don’t just assume that you can pick up its contents by osmosis. But prepare to disagree with him at times.” And a review by Dalibor Rohac.
0 comments?
Bonus trivia: the Google doodle features the Komono dragon. I got 5/5 on the test.
Eh, its all nytimes articles. Most people here aren’t going to bother wasting time reading those links. We used to come to marginal revolution for the novelty and wide ranging articles to which TC would link and discuss. But now that his audience has grown more liberal, he is trying to increase his influence within beltway circles by peddling their BS. It’s inevitable, and I don’t blame him, but it makes this place less interesting.
Bonus trivia: did you know the NY Times got a surge in paid subscriptions when Trump issued his infamous Friday afternoon immigration ban?
Yep. Trump bashes the Times, gets them more money. Obama goes after the gun makers (or tries to), same thing happens.
Perhaps you can link us to some high quality information and analysis that is missing from the smogasbord?
My five second reads of these links (to save you time):
#1) no mention that Flynn, Trumps’ now resigned security advisor, in fact had his entire conversation recorded without a court order. Just sayin’
#2) New idea: with all these dead economists, Todd Buchholz could do a new book (inside baseball joke)
#3) Economists coming up with ‘explanations’ reminds me of back filling any arbitrary series of points (events) with a Nth order polynomial. Any series of points (even a random series) can be ‘explained’ by such a backward looking polynomial, but the equation (or explanation) cannot predict the future. Matlab even has a build in module to do just this.
#4) Sad, like a chess player who doesn’t like being a chess star (think Paul Morphy). She did not like being a sex star. But she did bank on her fame by marrying a TV executive. Bonus trivia: porn star Paula Shy (Google Image her, she’s the long-haired Asian) is really hot and a nice model. I hope she can cross over into mainstream someday. What a smile! And she maintains that killer smile while performing.
#5) Sorry but I’ve got too much to read, I’ll try and pick up TC’s latest book ‘by osmosis’, like I did T. Picketty’s (worked then).
#6) Some humans sleep 2 hours, but not sum humans (high IQ people, people, think math!) since it shrinks the brain. But elephants are different from humans (my insight). I sleep 6-8 hours, but I can go to sleep at 3 AM, unlike most of you, and wake at 11. The 1%. Bonus trivia: cows and horses sleep standing up, and it’s said you can push over a standing sleeping bovine onto a supine position.
Bonu$ trivia: this Friday will be a big down day on the US stock market. Bet on it (and profit, my prophecy). Don’t ask me how I know, I do.
Serious question, how does oversight of wiretaps work when the target is a foreign agent (e.g., Russia’s ambassador) and he is talking to Americans (e.g., Flynn, Sessions, etc.)? Do they need to get FISA permission to listen in? Also, I’m sure Trump’s or his aide’s conversations with any Russians were all wiretapped. Some former Obama staffers have been trying to be careful to say basically that if that did happen, it wasn’t because Obama ordered it.
My understanding is FISA allows you to monitor phone calls from foreign sources. So if you’re watching a phone number that calls Trump Tower, the tap is not on Trump Tower per se.
1. The FISA court never turns down surveillance requests:
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/fisa-court-nsa-spying-opinion-reject-request
Trump knows he’s screwed. He’s trying to merely cast doubt on the source of an eventual revelation.
You guys have been saying he’s screwed since before the election. Put up or shut up.
Give it time. The FBI has launched three probes since the summer. It took more than two years for Nixon to go down because of Watergate and we’re only six months into questions about Trump.
Doesn’t every president start with a fresh slate?
#3 – interesting quote and article.
However, are the American people wrong about the importance of terrorism, or do they just disagree with the author and like-minded elites?
The question “What are America’s interests?” vis-a-vis terrorism or anything else is a matter of opinion. It involves some combination of preferences and an attempt to predict the future consequences of policy. Obama’s statement “more Americans die each year falling in the bathtub than from terrorism” was a factual statement, but lying behind this is a set of assumptions about how we should weigh the importance of terrorism–and not everyone agrees with those assumptions.
I’m one of the people that thinks terrorism should be emphasized less. But that doesn’t mean people who disagree about this are mistaken.
A more honest national conversation about terrorism would be better for our security, and healthier for our politics.
While it is far from the only explanation, organizing foreign policy around international terrorism has resuscitated strains of American political thought — isolationism, xenophobia and even bigotry, particularly against Muslims — that had long been dormant, or at least disreputable, giving national security cover and lifting them from the shadows to the mainstream.
Way to facilitate that conversation, guys. Accusations of bigotry are almost always the best way to open people’s minds.
Sure, because no Americans are bigoted, especially against Muslims. They just said some strains of political thought have been resuscitated. Are you claiming that’s not the case?
But why claim bigotry when simple exercising more caution explains everything better?
Again, for many it’s about caution, but for many others it’s pure bigotry.
Really? It’s just that people really hate Muslims and not that they worry about terrorism? Are there any other groups people might be biased against and do you foresee restrictions on them? Atheists experience more bias than Muslims for example. Maybe we will see travel bans on majority atheist countries in Europe? People are super biased against Roma, maybe restrictions on them? By the way why would people be so biased against Muslims?
Not only have they been resuscitated, they’ve gone mainstream, they say. The implication is that anyone (or at least most people) who dissents from, say, Obama Administration anti-terror policy must be some kind of bigot. If that’s the case, which I don’t believe, what kind of dialogue is possible? With that attitude any such “dialogue” is going to degenerate into a couple Obama apparatchiks lecturing the rest of us on their moral superiority (already evident in the oped, really), which might make them feel good but isn’t going to do anything to curb the growth of the National Security state.
Speaking of it in terms of the general reality of its existence is completely different from going around calling someone a bigot any time they disagree with someone from a group that has different visibly discernable characteristics.
Like the brainwashing victim (and potential thug) I saw at McDonald’s yesterday, who would start crying out “racist” to anyone who had basically anything to say to him.
“Obama’s statement “more Americans die each year falling in the bathtub than from terrorism” was a factual statement, but lying behind this is a set of assumptions about how we should weigh the importance of terrorism–and not everyone agrees with those assumptions.”
OK so during the Obama years there were hundreds of drone strikes with thousands dead. Were Navy Seals sent to kill the CEO of a bathtub company that refused to incorporate slip resistant designs into their tubs? Somehow I doubt you could make much of a case that the Obama years were years of intense bathtub slip focus and lax terrorist focus.
Which leads to a problem with this ‘assumptions behind the (true) statement’ argument. To me the assumption seems to be:
“Terrorists by definition lack serious military power, their power comes not so much from any one attack or even group of attacks but by the fact that the media and public opinion will play up any successful attack making everyone feel at risk. Asserting terrorist deaths are akin to bathtub deaths is countering one of the strategies terrorists use. To pretend that a successful terrorist attack is akin to Pearl Harbor, then, is essentially propaganda on the enemy’s behalf.”
Of course Trump supporters would rather assert the assumption is that terrorism wasn’t taken seriously. But what use is that reading unless you are pushing for a radically enhanced and different focus on terrorism? What have we got in its place? Diddling around with airport security rules in ways that generate flashy media but almost certainly do nothing to prevent terrorism and a strike in Yeman. In other words more of the same, at best or at worst we have more of the same minus the previous administration’s professionalism.
“Somehow I doubt you could make much of a case that the Obama years were years of intense bathtub slip focus and lax terrorist focus.”
Heh. Fair point. I see Obama as ideologically wanting to de-emphasize terrorism, yet feeling forced by political and geopolitical realities to do otherwise.
No my point was that de-emphasizing terrorism is part of fighting terrorism. If you are going to equate even a single shooting to Pearl Harbour then you are making it easy for terrorists to score victories.
I got that, I just interpret Obama differently. Sorry if my comment wasn’t clear.
Changing the subject somewhat, many of the measures purported to counter terrorism have very little prospect at being effective at stopping serious operators, and in the meantime will catch millions of innocent people doing things like talking about risks of terrorism and jihad, CIA roles in the origins of some major terrorist organizations (especially known through the mujahadeen and what came from it after), and other such things.
It has more of an effect to chill speech on what is even going on than to find any useful information.
Do you think Al Qaeda goes around calling each other Al Qaeda in their communications?
I want to read Tyrone’s review of The Complacent Class.
I haven’t read the book yet but based on Tyler’s interviews I’m looking forward to gems like:
“We used to use Windows 3.1 and write in DOS commands but now we just point and click – in my view, that is complacency – a clear sign of a lack of dynamism in America.”
I think it was John Updike who said in the early 90s that the computer had made writing too easy Brzilian writer Lui Frnando Verissimo made the same point.
What’s the Straussian reading of The Complacent Class? Nobody really likes diversity or dynamism, despite protestations to the contrary?
That is the straight up reading!
Pardon me, I haven’t read any of it yet.
Please, no spoilers!
Diversity is a word in search of a definition.
I keep thinking it means a diversity of thought, but everywhere you look it seems to mean a shade of skin color.
And the first interpretation is being suffocated by the second.
It’s not that.
It’s because of our self selectoin into certain circles that we meet these people.
Yes, then we are around more similar people. But it may not be because we do not (or would not) LIKE meeting or interacting with those different people, it’s that they simply do not exist in our circles.
For example, in any economics program, you are unlikely to meet many musicians or artists no matter how much you might like to rub shoulders with some. “Convenience” might not be the right word, but certainly you are more likely to affiliate more with people who are near to you and in similar circles than those who are far from you and in different cirlces.
Aspects about dating sites suggest this view is not a huge part of the story. But contrary to what you suggest, my understanding is that a lot of this is simply that you end up in circles with certain people, and that there tends to be more compatibility in what you want.
Not that you don’t like those other people. Not necessarily, anyways. I speak for myself, of course.
3. Short summary: Islamic terrorism on US soil is no big deal; Trump is evil for exploiting it.
Another terrible “analysis” by Democratic bureaucrats. Reading it made me cringe.
Math phobia can be treated.
The democrats are in gender studies and unemployment lines not topography.
That’s OK. I don’t think you need more than grade 6 to solve this one.
I was mainly just bored. Not really full of sound or fury, but still a lot of words signifying nothing.
1. The short answer is that Americans elected a Birther, and they should not be surprised when the Birther re-emerges.
Sadly, the required response involves some cruelty. The Birther must be isolated, his credibility must (justifiably) be questioned at every turn, until he quits and goes home.
Note that this is now the best game for the GOP. When he quits they recover their self-respect, and their chances for the mid-term elections. They might even have a shot at “values.”
“and their chances for the mid-term elections. ”
Can you tell us again how Hillary will win in a landslide?
Reference? I know of no reputable source predicting a landslide. I remember dangerous odds in the final days. 538’s 70:30 for instance were very dangerous odds.
But to return on point, we are reminded that Trump satisfies some shrinking “core” group of voters, but a shrinking core does not win mid-terms.
“Reference? I know of no reputable source predicting a landslide.”
I remember you did, I don’t care enough to find proof.
“But to return on point, we are reminded that Trump satisfies some shrinking “core” group of voters, but a shrinking core does not win mid-terms.”
Yes it can, see 2014 and 2010. It’s the Obama coalition, Blacks, Hispanics, sexual deviants, and stoner millennials, who can’t be bothered to show up for midterms. Combine that with gerrymandering, and you have no chance.
Re. Clinton v Trump: There were specific date ranges when the odds were comfortable to me. Say mid-August or mid-October, but not because of this “landslide” nonsense, but because 85:15 is a comfortable bet.
Re. “Blacks, Hispanics, sexual deviants, and stoner millennials,” I am counting on a regression toward the mean on social responsibility. Basically Trump is shooting the “deplorable” brand all to tell. No one is going to trust a self-styled deplorable, especially by 2020.
@anon: you’d be surprised. Almost half of the country thinks in a way you still haven’t been able to come to grips with. I doubt any Trump voters regret their vote today.
“No one is going to trust a self-styled deplorable, especially by 2020.”
Trump is wacky-toboaccy to be sure, but I think you’re missing the real story on trust. The bureaucrats are revealed to be more NKVD-like commisseriats than apolitical administrators, the traditional media is finished as credible messengers, judges like the 9th circuit are political hacks, and the Dems are run by radical ideologues (Perez vs Ellison!?!).
The collapse of trust is systemic. One one hand, it’s great because many of these groups didn’t deserve the trust they had and it’s being laid bare. But the reordering is going to be chaotic at a time when the US faces significant real-world problems.
No sir. Steady men, conscious of their own oaths to the Constitution, are being called “NKVD-like commisseriats.”
Don’t take the wrong side in that.
Why would anyone regret their vote at this stage? Most people are not crazy. Guys like anon clog up comment sections with lunacy, but they are a tiny minority. Normal people look at what’s going and shrug or laugh. It’s adults acting like children.
@anon: not sure what side you think I’m on (if that was addressed to me) but my point is those thinking that the voters who brought you Trump are going to suddenly vote against him and his party in 2018 are mistaken. And in fact since only the most political people even bother to vote in midterms that’s doubly the case.
I was replying to, quoting, chip.
Re. your point, it is possible that “supporters” still believe while supporters dwindle. Same with “Republicans.” Poor performance will reduce party identification.
I look forward to March polls.
And easier explanation for 2018 is merely that the population tends to go against the president in midterms. The only recent exception is 2002, when the Rs were able to effectively exploit 9/11. This is the election where a Max Cleland, the Georgia Democratic Senator who was a severely disabled war veteran, was called unpatriotic.
Cleland was slammed in TV advertisements for some of his votes in Congress. He wasn’t called unpatriotic.
While we’re at it, Cleland was disabled by an accident on base, not in combat.
Wow, stay classy Art. Dude’s not really worthy of respect for being injured on duty, because it was an accident. A new low for you.
There were many reputable sources setting 99-1 odds or greater
The wings of both parties are to blame. The Dems have been co-opted by their most shrieking partisans of political correctness, and the GOP didn’t have enough glue to hold together their dominant camps (business, religion, NRA and Nascar ordinary types, small business-quasi libertarians), against the onslaught of Trump discovering that the NRA beer drinking Nascar watching former union members etc crowd were an electoral resource waiting to be tapped.
I wonder which party will react best to the anomaly that is Trump, and lay the foundation for the next 8+ years? You say the GOP can react by turning on Trump. I say no way, it is too early. Even an electorate, far more fickle than a party, doesn’t turn on a party until the next mid term elections.
The Trump supports I know are one of two types: reluctant Trumpists who just hope he grows up, but they are willing to give him a chance to govern (as they see the Elizabeth Warrens etc as opportunistic whiners who would whine come-what-may). And die hard Trumpists who read Trump’s tweets and believe everything he says. No cracks in the support yet.
Compare what they say to what Dems said about Clinton: “We know what he’s like” (hound dog, blue dawg southern Dem who will slap back and slit throats and sleep with your wife / loud mouth quasi shady Noo Yawk businessman who likes hot models and barking orders without a lot of reflection).
“Tell us something we don’t know.”
Speaking of Elizabeth Warren… The current Dem leadership, of which she is typical, are those who, if Trump said: “let there be Trans bathrooms for every red headed left handed step child in America!” would carp “but what about the right handed ones?”
The Democrats did a good job of keeping their trolls and nuts far from power. That includes keeping a Socialist off their ticket. Obama and the Clintons are measurably more centrist than Trump, obviously. And yet people try for symmetry. As if Hillary must have been left of Sanders, because Trump, because it fits the narrative.
My read on Warren is that she plays firebrand, and should have sense to stay away from the Presidential race. Certainly it would confirm your dark scenario if they picked her, but I say no.
It will be someone young, fit, charismatic, but otherwise boring.
As long as you think that “socialist” if farther-from-center than “PC”, you will not understand a thing about American politics, anon.
As a rationalist, PC was always hard for me to believe as a real issue. None of the big important votes, on stimulus, on healthcare, on jobs programs, were about what was PC. So I was always blindsided when people didn’t want to talk about jobs, wanted to talk about someone who said something.
And that led IMO to a bunch of sloppy thinking and non-answers on real problems. Like the jobs front. Like sending people back down the coal mines, because wind and solar are .. too Democrat.
“Like sending people back down the coal mines, because wind and solar are .. too Democrat.”
Was this really a serious effort on your part?
“In May [2016], President-elect Donald Trump stood on the stage at the Charleston Civic Center in West Virginia, put on a miners helmet and pretended to shovel coal.”
“If I win we’re going to bring those miners back,” Trump said at the rally. “…These ridiculous rules and regulations that make it impossible for you to compete … we’re going to take that all off the table, folks.”
To contrast:
“Trump’s energy plan doesn’t mention solar, an industry that just added 51,000 jobs”
So in summary, read more, esp outside your bubble.
Claiming police issues in the black community stems from a problem with white people – just white people, period – isn’t keeping nutty ideas away from the Democratic party, it’s reinforcing them (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-white-people-police_us_57800f6be4b0c590f7e967f7).
That is not what she is saying. Although Hillary is hardly credible on the subject, the gist of the linked piece is that white people need to listen to what black people are saying with an open mind.
Well, it would seem an unacceptable to favor red headed left handed step childs over right handed ones. In fact, I think it is illegal.
“the onslaught of Trump discovering that the NRA beer drinking Nascar watching former union members etc crowd were an electoral resource waiting to be tapped.”
This was not a new discovery. Even the wise TV taking heads have been saying for decades that the key to success is for the Republican and Democratic parties to appeal to the so-called “Reagan Democrats”.
Probably not by genius, but that’s what Trump did. Yay.
Who are the shriekers you’re talking about?
Sure there are some online, but you seem to be talking about something orchestrated by major planning within the party of something, or that the party has in some general sense been “co-opted”.
I am not aware of observations which substantiate such a perspective.
“their chances for the mid-term elections.”
20 months away. An eternity in politics. 20 months before 2016, Trump was a no chance joke candidate and Jeb was the likely nominee..
Talk to us in a year and we see how Trump impacts GOP chances. Maybe.
Agree that it’s hard to predict so far out. But I think it’s safe to say that a lot of debate moderators will be asking things like “the leader of your party said Obama tapped his phones. Do you agree or disagree?”
Of course, by then Trump will have made dozens more idiotic comments.
The fortunes of Trump and the rest of Republicans will turn on their perceived record, not Trump’s wacky statements.
Trump’s questionable pronouncements might hurt him a bit (but they haven’t been fatal so far, and that’s unlikely to change). They won’t hurt anyone else, because they will be perceived as the idiosyncracies of one man. They might even help other candidates seem reasonable by comparison. And the relentless focus on Trump, especially when it seems “off topic”, tends to discredit the media and help Republicans.
Note: I say all this as someone who wishes the truth actually mattered to most voters.
Bingo, dan1111
At a minimum, voters should come to realize that if they don’t have a President who tweets off the handle, they don’t have to apologize for that kind of “messaging.”
But really it is deeper than that. If you follow the news you know Trump went rogue this weekend, leaving behind really all of his inner circle. The Whitehouse’s own non-endorsement endorsement of Trump’s claim shows a split at the very inside. The 3 or 4 people closest to the President can’t keep him on message or even away from the crazy shit. So the best they can do is paper it over with a “no further comment.”
Well, that doesn’t work as the story continues to burn today.
But anon, it works just fine as only political junkies like us even know there’s a “story” “burning”.
For 95% of the electorate (and 99% of the electorate that doesn’t even bother to vote in midterms), it’s all one thing: Trump is a nutjob who tweets random bullshit. His people know this and handle it accordingly. It will have no effect on people’s votes. Those who are appalled by Trump (like you and I) can’t get any more so. Those who like Trump love this stuff. No one is saying ‘gee that last crazy tweet is the last straw, I’m voting Dem in 2018’.
A strange turn of events, but one uniqueness of these times is that no one has popped in, in the last 50 minutes, to say “no, Trump is ok.”
That says to me that he is WIle E. Coyote. Off the cliff, standing on air.
No, anon, you miss the point. Trump is more than ok to many folks, and not ok to some of his supporters. But you thinking they owe you a post is part of your narcissism.
You don’t think many of the posters here like OJ and Heorogar and Art Deco and the like think Trump is ok? Of course they do.
He’s gotten way farther than he should have, I don’t know why you think one more tweet will suddenly make it all go away.
Don’t go to narcissism. Not everyone has that motivation. Many want a better world.
Ask why there is no argument for Trump and a better world.
There’s a million arguments that are pro-Trump, claiming he will make the world (really the US) better. I don’t agree with most of them but I see them out there. Your narci…..oh wait can’t use that word. Your giant-size blinders and bubble dwelling prevent you from seeing the other side’s case.
Again, for the zillionth time, Trump is awful. But a great many people don’t agree. They’re not our best, many are racists and idiots. And some of them, presumably, are good people. You need to chill out.
I keep making these invitations for something actually pro-Trump. Maybe you should wait a bit to see what shows up.
(What is more common though is a lot of anti-this and anti-that masquerading as pro-something. That is not the same thing.)
3. “And while every lethal “jihadist” attack in the United States since 9/11 has been conducted by a citizen or permanent resident, elected officials continue to stress the threat posed by those who come from abroad.”
And when the terrorists aren’t citizens or permanent residents(as on 9/11), they say “they aren’t immigrants, they’re just visitors on tourist-visas!”
Don’t “permanent resident” come from abroad?
Yes, they came from abroad. I believe the distinction being made is that permanent residents aren’t here on temporary visas and are “Americans” but not American Citizens. I could be wrong, though.
Theywere Saudis. You don’t really want to ban your beloved Saudis, do you?
Don’t forget that all 17 of them came across the border from Canada (for which reason various border security demands were made), except for the 17 that did not.
2. “HAD he lived to see it, Alfred Marshall, a 19th-century giant of economics, probably would not have celebrated International Women’s Day, which takes place on March 8th. “If you compete with us, we shan’t marry you,””
No comment.
“A recent paper*, for instance, claimed that eliminating gender discrimination in Saudi Arabia could bring its GDP per person almost level with America’s.”
Presumably by doubling the amount of oil in the ground. LOL.
Also, someone deserves to be fired for that website design.
I’d be willing to consider Trumps claim of being wiretapped if he gave some kind of evidence. I don’t even need solid proof, just a reason why he believes what he does. Is it just that he thinks it’s the kind of thing evil Obama would do?
Right. Sure you will.
You will effortlessly slide from “There is no evidence” to “There is no good evidence” to “There is no compelling evidence” to “There is no proof” to “There is no ironclad proof” and then finally to “Well, no laws were broken and this happens all the time and it’s no big deal and no doubt he deserved it anyway and Oh My God did you see what he tweeted yesterday????”
I’m not saying I would believe him. It’s just impossible for me to evaluate his claims if he is not giving any explanation for them.
Trump is the boy who cried wolf. I’m still waiting for evidence Cruz’s father was involved in the JFK assasination.
Trump recycled a screwball Enquirer story which said that R B Cruz was in the company of Oswald at some unspecified time in the days prior to 22 November 1963. That’s an insinuation, not a precise accusation.
LOL at Art’s continued humorlessness.
Doesn’t this very link say that indeed he was surveilled, they just don’t call it a wire tap?
Where? Comey says no. If you squint at it really hard you can claim that surveillance not on him, not ordered by Obama, is the same as surveillance on him ordered by Obama .. but that’s squinting too hard for me.
Let’s back up. This is a birther and a vaxxer. This is a guy with a proven inability to choose reputable sources. This is a guy with a proven preference for paranoid conspiracy.
Don’t squint, read it straight on.
They weren’t surveiling Trump – they were surveiling the people Trump was calling. *ahem*
Everything the Russian ambassador to the United States of America says is being recorded, to the maximum extent possible. First, by the Russians, who are utterly unconcerned about FISA or the Constitution. Second, by the Americans who consider the Russian ambassador an adversary whose job description also includes espionage in service of furthering Russian goals. Third, by every other country that can pull it off.
This is really getting silly.
“According to news reports, the FBI last summer went to the FISA court — which approves clandestine spying efforts — asking for warrants to monitor four members of Trump’s team suspected of having improper exchanges with Russian officials. After being rebuffed, officials reportedly narrowed their request and got approval in October to monitor a computer server in Trump Tower to establish whether there were ties to Russian banks.”
Not on him, not by Obama and absolutely not the Nixon/Watergate claim.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/322668-nixons-watergate-lawyer-blasts-trumps-wiretapping-claims
Stuff that would lead you to direct him towards a mental health diagnostician?
3. Absent the Iraq War, Americans would have eventually realized how few Muslim extremists there are, but the War made it appear that there are millions of extremists out to kill Americans even though the War was primarily a sectarian conflict between Sunni Muslims (Saddam Hussein’s sect but the minority in Iraq) and Shiite Muslims. Add the Syrian civil war, which is also primarily sectarian, and the drumbeat of war against Shiite Iran by those sympathetic to Sunni Muslims (especially Saudi Arabia and its supporters in America), and it appears the entire region is out to kill Americans. The 9/11 terrorists were all Sunni Muslims (mostly from Saudi Arabia), but many of the neocons in the Bush administration were promoting war with Shiite Iran in response to the 9/11 terrorist attack. The bulk of Americans, being uninformed about such matters, don’t know the difference between Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims, and don’t care to learn. All they know is that the region is aflame with violence, and they don’t want that violence brought to America. It’s a truism that fear more often than not derives from ignorance; and there’s lots of ignorance in America.
” the War made it appear that there are millions of extremists out to kill Americans even though the War was primarily a sectarian conflict between Sunni Muslims (Saddam Hussein’s sect but the minority in Iraq) and Shiite Muslims. Add the Syrian civil war, which is also primarily sectarian”
We have nothing to fear from the Nazis, it’s just Germans vs. Poles at this point!
Damn straight. FDR was a monster for getting us involved in WWII.
FDR didn’t act alone– he was helped by British meddling in American elections.
His election was hacked by the British with fake news so we’d enter the war.
As my kids say Joe, owe me a coke. If you’re from the south, I’ll have a pepsi coke please.
Nonsense. If anything we should have gotten involved sooner. Sometimes, the enemy of our enemy is an even bigger enemy, and Hitler was the enemy of everyone who was not German. He had to be stopped.
When ISIS builds a war ship that can make it more than 5km out to sea before being sunk, start sounding the alarms that we only have 20 or 30 years to figure out what to do before they are a threat (under the assumption of zero technical progress on the part of the US during that time).
Of course, a couple dozen Sunni extremists who high jack several commercial airliners and fly them into buildings is equivalent to the Luftwaffe.
Well, the Luftwaffe never bombed an American city.
The Boston Marathon bombing got more press on its own than the sum of terrorist events which killed Muslims in Muslim majority countries, amounting to thousands of events and many more thousands of deaths.
The is understandable for various reasons of psychology, etc. But Americans are particularly effective at not giving a shit when things are literally 1000 times worse somewhere else, and still complaining at how bad you have it while heaping crap on those who have got it 1000 times worse.
It is not very becoming.
But, it is true that 911 was a very different thing.
#4: very interesting story. I admire people like her, people not carried by inertia. The easy thing was to stay in the movie path and become just another forgettable starlet. However, she chose something else.
How bizarre. Trump makes some accusation, and everyone rushes to say how it’s totally FALSE, NO evidence whatsoever, the president is a buffoon trashing the country. Then farther down in the article we learn that actually he was basically correct but his description was just hyperbolic?
Is this actually intentional on the part of Trump to make people look like idiots? No one can resist the siren song of pointing out how Trump is “totally wrong!” it seems so by saying something exaggerated he guarantees massive coverage that makes the media look terrible?
Trump likes to fish – he throws some bait out there and maybe it works or not. If not the cost was zero to him. I saw on TV the Democrats were “defending” themselves against the charge. So, psychologically, people see the words Democrat and defending or defensive – pure mind games.
As the fat lady said, congratulations to the speechwriters, but tell me what Trump tweets the next morning. That is what he really believes.
This past weekends’ news cycle was the world waking up to that.
Angry, stupid, paranoid, conspiracy believing, tweeting Trump is the actual President of the United States.
Echoed by today’s sloppy, false, and very lazy Guantanamo tweet.
This is your President, and tragically mine as well.
No, he wasn’t “basically correct.”
Well, wouldn’t “The executive branch was spying on me during the election” have been an accurate statement?
Are secret agents “the executive branch”?
The article notes that it may have happend without authorization of the former president. Considering the multiplicity of concerns about Russian connections, I don’t think Obama would have much difficulty explaining himself even if he did. Especially considering how careful he was to ensure that invetigative things done in the run-up to the election were not disclosed until after the election so as to not influence it. (Quite the opposite of the FBI director, for example.)
Trump also called Obama sick and compared him to Nixon/Watergate. Is that basically correct?
Yep. Obama managed to get the IRS and the Criminal division of the Department of Justice to do his bidding, something Richard Nixon could not manage. Got away with it too. And demonstrated that partisan Democrats are utterly untrustworthy moral frauds in the process.
The projection is strong with this one.
A politicised IRS road-blocked Tea Party groups in the run up to an election. Judges have subsequently affirmed that this happened.
It’s an explosive story for which the media refused to light a fuse. Now, in the least, we know that the DOJ sought a FISA wiretap of Trump in the run up to another election.
The same DOJ whose head met secretly with Bill while Hilary was being investigated.
No projection required. There’s serious government malfeance occurring.
Chip, there was a slightly higher number of identifiably right wing groups investigated in comparison to the number of idnetifiably left wing groups (US usage of “left” and “right”, considering that the American left remains to the right of centre in comparator countries.)
2. Re: the Economist article.
1. Feminist economics can make a name for itself. It doesn’t need permission or The Economist to browbeat economists. Start by writing more blogs that people like.
2. How many times will the ECON 101 canard about GDP measurement be repeated? Womens’ home work isn’t counted for the same reason that my mowing the lawn isn’t: the household is the unit of analysis in macroeconomics. Relationships within the household lie outside the domain of macroeconomics. If I mow my lawn every day in summer instead of once a week does that raise GDP for anybody outside my household?
It would if you paid somebody else to mow the lawn. It’s productive labor; either you do it and avoid the cost of paying someone or you pay someone.
By how much does GDP change if you hire somebody from outside of your home to mow your lawn?
If you get your exercise by mowing your yard it does not show up in GDP.
But if you hire someone to mow your lawn so you can go to the gym the lawn mowing and the gym membership are included in GDP. Around here almost everyone pays for lawn care.
You would presumably use around seven times more gasoline. That shows up in GDP.
While I support a lot of stuff to make it easier for women to get in the workforce, stay in the workforce and advance in the workforce, this sort of issue is likely to cause false positives and exaggerate the economic benefit of women’s contributions in the work force.
It makes it difficult to speak with certainty about benefits of things like public support for child care provisions.
5. The WSJ has the best review. In it, the reviewer says everyone, liberals, conservatives, and libertarians, will find something to like in Cowen’s book. I enjoy trying to decode what Cowen writes (on this blog, in his book, in his column), even though I’m more of a Strunk and White kind of guy. Of course, the code reminds me of Straussianism, the east coast Straussians vs. the west coast Straussians and all that nonsense. They wish to change America and make it into something that few Americans would support, so code it must be. Not unlike the Republicans’ “freedom agenda”. “Freedom for whom?”, one might ask. I asked in another thread this morning whether history is simply a Monty Hall problem or if there is only one path to history. If the latter (and we are like the passengers on the Titanic along for the inevitable), Cowen et al. can abandon the code and tell us what they really mean without fear of failing the revolution.
#1. Hmmmmm. So if the only way Trump could have been surveilled is if foreign intelligence agents that were being surveilled were calling Trump Tower, isn’t Trump basically admitting that he was in contact with foreign intelligence agents?
Not just foreign intelligence agents – one can safely assume that every single member of the Russian Embassy in DC has everything they say recorded to the maximum extent possible. See comment above for the list of who that includes – Russians, Americans, etc..
It should be added, I have always assumed that every single phone call I have ever made from Germany to the U.S. has also been recorded – if not by the U.S. itself, then by the Canadians, the UK, etc. acting on behalf of the U.S.
Why are people now so shocked, years after Snowden made it impossible to deny what is going on?
I won’t bother getting into details concerning the results of having a phone conversation with a GMU professor more than 15 years ago in the U.S. that included the words ‘uranium hexaflouride,’ but if your phone service seems flaky for days afterward, find a local phone crew doing line/relay work, and have them helpfully access the system to find out what is going on – such crews, at least in the past, do not have the scripted answers that one is provided when calling the phone company.
What’s the statute of limitations on a banned handle? Curious when/if you can go back to being the prior prior.
3. Finer/Malley snipe about efforts to “engineer a particular American identity,” apparently not realizing that America had a particular identity prior to the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, a piece of legislation deliberately designed to “engineer” changes to that pre-1965 identity.
They’re peeved that Trump proposes that people like them should not do the engineering.
Its been all downhill for American identity since the demise of the Articles.
More like since 1492, white man.
More like since the Bering Strait land bridge opened, newbie.
Pfft, way before even that.
America’s identity has never been race-based. America fought a civil war specifically because white people DIDN’T think that only white people could be Americans. Albeit some holdouts in the South continued to think that white dominance was part of their “way of life”, but they lost. America settled the question of whether America was based on racial identity a long time ago.
3. Underrated explanations for understanding the rise of Trump (NYT):
We just have to hear from bureaucratic microbes formerly in the employ of John Kerry, author of the Iran deal.
#6 was interesting. Good link.
1) Obama didn’t order the wiretap of Rosen, either. He didn’t order the AP to be bugged. He didn’t order anyone to arrest that poor dunce who made the movie criticizing Islam after Benghazi. He didn’t order the IRS to slow-walk approvals for the Tea Party. He didn’t do any of those things because he didn’t have to do any of those things.
Obama only waves his arms and says “will no one rid of me of these troublesome Republicans?” and their natural enemies in the gov’t bureaucracy just do the things they wanted to do anyway.
Trump is exactly what Obama deserves.
I’m not sure what Obama “deserves”, and not sure how much he cares as he walks away from the job, but do the rest of us deserve Trump too?
@hazel meade,
That’s disingenuous. Problems in the black community regarding police can’t be boiled down to white people in general not listening with an open mind. It’s white conservatives (the kind of white people Hillary has especially in mind) who are most keen on pointing out that the best way to save more black lives – you know, as if they matter – is to reduce the black homicide rate. That’d be an odd thing if the problem were not being open-minded enough to care about black people. (I suppose it would though if the entire point of correcting this deficiency in listening to black people is to acknowledge your complicity in their communities’ disproportionate run-ins with police.)
Relatedly, the calls for more aggressive policing in the 90s that Clinton is being bashed for now came overwhelmingly from the black community itself.
Of course the flipside to the listening charge – the talking charge – was made by another Dem just after Hillary’s telling comments: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/01/24/dnc_chair_candidate_my_job_is_to_tell_white_people_when_to_shut_their_mouths.html
Identity politics is toxic and divisive, but Dems seem unable to shake it. It’s like they’re being refereed by their most SJW members, alienating the white working class – still the bulk of the working class – in the process.
It’s white conservatives (the kind of white people Hillary has especially in mind) who are most keen on pointing out that the best way to save more black lives – you know, as if they matter – is to reduce the black homicide rate.
Ahh yes, let’s let white conservatives lecture black people on what the most important problems in their community are. Talk about listening with an open mind!
Most people who talk about the black homicide rate use it as a lead-in to broad tarnishment as violent and criminal types.
If you want to talk about reducing “black on black killing”, how about get rid of the turf that leads to the potential for violence between gangs, by legalizing drugs while limiting access to them?
IIRC from Ghettoside, the LAPD had a lot fewer homicide detectives per homicide in South Central LA than in paler-skinned parts of the city. It’s come to something when the only people in town who don’t know who the murderer is are the police investigating it – and no one in their right mind would tell them.
The low point was the woman whose son was murdered in the middle of the street – and asked her neighbours not to tell the cops anything because she didn’t want anyone else to be killed for nothing, and didn’t expect the police to catch her sons killer even if people told them who he was. And you can’t really blame her, as her was the third or fourth relative she had had murdered, and the police had not caught the killer of any of them.
I was wondering how much the low-sleep elephants slept during the day, but clicking through I see that the headline is actually:
These elephants sleep only 2 hours a day, and scientists have no clue how they do it
Thomas Edison was famous for not sleeping, but he actually napped quite a bit. The elephants don’t do that, either.
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