George Packer's Blog, page 163

Why Obama Is Still Trying to Pass the T.P.P.

In a speech before the New York Economic Club last week, Donald J. Trump offered up his economic plan for the future. Unsurprisingly, one of the foundations of his plan was ripping up “terrible” trade agreements and, especially, a vow to “keep America out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Big Question About Donald Trump’s Rise in the Polls
Morning Cartoon: Friday, September 16th
Afternoon Cartoon: Thursday, September 15th

Tim Kaine, America’s Dad, Makes His Pitch to Millennials

Faced with polls showing that many young voters intend to cast their ballots for the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson or the Green candidate Jill Stein, or for no one at all, the Hillary Clinton campaign has sent Chelsea Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren to Ohio. On Thursday, the Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee, Tim Kaine, arrived in New Hampshire to see what he could do about the problem. First up was a panel discussion with a group of young professionals, in Portsmouth. As props, Kaine had brought copies of Clinton’s campaign book (“Fifteenth on the New York Times best-seller list!” he said) and Donald Trump’s, which is titled “Crippled America.” Kaine considered the Clinton book’s cover, with a photograph of Clinton and Kaine raising their arms in a victory pose. “We’re both smiling,” he pointed out. Trump, he said, had contrived to look both condescending and sour in his, “sitting in a penthouse, looking like he’s sucking on six lemons.” Kaine said he had a fundamentally different view of Americans than the billionaire: “We are an optimistic, can-do, patriotic, problem-solving people.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Morning Cartoon: Saturday, September 17th
Why Trump’s Maternity-Leave Plan Won’t Work
The Big Question About Donald Trump’s Rise in the Polls

Why Trump’s Maternity-Leave Plan Won’t Work

Earlier this week, Donald J. Trump, a man who once said that pregnancy is “an inconvenience for a business,” announced in Aston, Pennsylvania, that those in leadership should “put themselves in the shoes of . . . the mom struggling to afford child care.” In Nixon-and-China fashion, Trump seemed to nudge the Republican Party past its deepest fears by establishing paid maternity leave as something the government should guarantee and actually pay for.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Big Question About Donald Trump’s Rise in the Polls
Emotional Obama Tearfully Thanks Trump for Granting Him Citizenship
Morning Cartoon: Friday, September 16th

Deutsche Bank’s Real-Time Stress Test

Deutsche Bank, already branded the world’s riskiest bank by the International Monetary Fund, is in more trouble than anybody thought. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg reported that the U.S. Justice Department wants to fine Deutsche Bank fourteen billion dollars for its role in underwriting and issuing risky residential-mortgage-backed securities (or R.M.B.S.) from 2005 to 2007. Fourteen billion sounds like a lot of money to me. It also sounds like plenty to Deutsche Bank, which was expecting a fine of between two and three billion.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Overselling the Settlement
William Finnegan on Sheriff Joe Arpaio
Jeffrey Toobin: Hiding Jay Bybee

The Big Question About Donald Trump’s Rise in the Polls

Of all the opinion polls that have come out in the past few days, one in particular caught my eye. It was carried out in Michigan for the Detroit Free Press and WXYZ-TV, a Detroit station, and it showed that, in the past month, Hillary Clinton’s lead over Donald Trump in the Great Lakes State has narrowed from ten points to four points in a head-to-head matchup. “The race is tightening a lot in Michigan,” Bernie Porn, the pollster who carried out the statewide telephone survey, told the Free Press. “It may be a function of the timing of the survey and her health questions, [but] there has been a shift toward Trump. Whether it’s going to be a permanent shift is yet to be determined.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why Trump’s Maternity-Leave Plan Won’t Work
Emotional Obama Tearfully Thanks Trump for Granting Him Citizenship
Morning Cartoon: Friday, September 16th

Donald Trump’s Potemkin Physical with Dr. Oz

I recently moved to the San Francisco Bay Area from Cambridge, to work on a book project. I hadn’t realized how much my life would change; everyone here seems to exercise all the time, and to eat nothing but fruit and fibre and lean protein. And they go to bed on the same day they wake up. It’s intimidating. So I decided to turn to the one man who could help me shape up and fit in: America’s doctor, Mehmet Oz.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why Trump’s Maternity-Leave Plan Won’t Work
The Big Question About Donald Trump’s Rise in the Polls
Emotional Obama Tearfully Thanks Trump for Granting Him Citizenship

Even Peace May Not Save Syria

With startling candor, the director of the C.I.A., John Brennan, last week questioned a longstanding premise of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. “I don’t know whether or not Syria and Iraq can be put back together again,” he told the CTC Sentinel, which is published by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. “There’s been so much bloodletting, so much destruction, so many continued, seething tensions and sectarian divisions. I question whether we will see, in my lifetime, the creation of a central government in both of those countries that’s going to have the ability to govern fairly.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Morning Cartoon: Thursday, September 8th
Does Anyone in Syria Fear International Law?
Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the Voice of ISIS, Is Dead

Trump and the Truth: The Interest-Rate Flip-Flop

This essay is part of a series The New Yorker will be running through the election titled “Trump and the Truth.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Does Donald Trump Pay Any Income Taxes at All?
Mike Pence and the Meaning of “Deplorable”
Getting Hillary Clinton to Talk About Her Health

The Most Pleasing Campaign of 2016

Theo Epstein, the president of baseball operations for the Chicago Cubs, was running behind. “I just need a few minutes,” he said. “Have you eaten?” The still boyish former wunderkind, now forty-two, had one more matter to tend to before turning to our scheduled chat, so he deposited me in the staff cafeteria of the Under Armour Performance Center, the team’s new spring-training complex, in Mesa, Arizona. As he was leaving, he waved over an earnest, clean-cut young man to keep me company. “Meet Sean,” he said, patting the kid on the shoulder. “He’s our defensive specialist.”

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Related:
Late and Later
Morning Cartoon: Tuesday, September 6th
The Women Succeeding in a Men’s Professional Baseball League

A Big Tobacco Moment for the Sugar Industry

In May, 1994, a large FedEx box arrived at the office of Dr. Stanton Glantz, a public-health expert at the University of California, San Francisco, who specialized in tobacco research. Inside the box were four thousand pages of internal memoranda and correspondence dating back to the nineteen-fifties from the files of Brown & Williamson, which was then the third-largest tobacco company in the United States. The documents, which became known as the Cigarette Papers, showed that research funded by Brown & Williamson and the tobacco industry had demonstrated the addictive qualities of nicotine and the health hazards of smoking years before these things became public knowledge, and that tobacco companies had nonetheless embarked on a public campaign to deny what they knew to be true, from their own research, and to cast doubt on the dangers of cigarettes.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Will the “Tobacco Strategy” Work Against Big Oil?
The Corporate-Friendly World of the T.P.P.
What Your Tweets Say About You