Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 762
June 1, 2016
Days ahead of primary, Sanders has a plan for Puerto Rico
WASHINGTON (AP) — Three days before Puerto Rico’s primary, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is digging in on his opposition to a House deal to rescue the U.S. territory from $70 billion in debt.
Sanders said Thursday that he will introduce his own legislation to help the island. His bill would allow the Federal Reserve to give the territory emergency loans and provide broad bankruptcy protections, unlike legislation approved by a House committee last week that would create a control board to oversee limited debt restructuring. Sanders’ bill would also boost Medicaid and Medicare payments to the island and designate $10.8 billion to rebuild the territory’s crumbling infrastructure.
The Vermont senator has said the existing House bill would make “a terrible situation even worse” and that it serves Wall Street bondholders over ordinary Puerto Ricans. The compromise bill is backed by House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California and the Obama administration. Puerto Rican officials are split.
“We have got to make it clear to these vulture funds that they cannot have it all,” Sanders said in a statement. “The solution to Puerto Rico’s debt crisis is not more austerity. The solution is more economic development, more jobs and less poverty.”
Sanders is trailing Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the presidential primaries and Clinton has outperformed Sanders among Latino voters. Both are competing in the June 5 Puerto Rican primary.
In a statement after the House bill was introduced, Clinton said she has serious concerns about the power of the control board but believes the legislation should move forward, or “too many Puerto Ricans will continue to suffer.”
The seven-member control board in the House bill would be comprised primarily of members chosen by congressional Republicans, with some also chosen by congressional Democrats and the White House. Sanders’ legislation would create a seven-member “public corporation” that would mostly consist of representatives chosen by the legislature and governor of Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rico, which has struggled to overcome a lengthy recession, has missed several payments to creditors and faces a $2 billion installment, the largest yet, on July 1. The economic crisis has forced businesses to close, driven up the employment rate and sparked an exodus of hundreds of thousands of people to the U.S. mainland.
Sanders’ opposition could cause problems in the Senate, where one lawmaker can slow a bill’s progress. Senators have said they are waiting to see what happens in the House before they consider a bill to rescue the territory, so it could be weeks or months before the chamber takes up the issue. Sanders has been largely absent from Senate proceedings during his lengthy primary campaign.
This is how fascism takes hold: The media is turning Donald Trump into just another candidate
Donald Trump, Jimmy Kimmel (Credit: Jimmy Kimmel Live)
There is no sense in mincing words, even at the risk of sounding alarmist: Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy. Andrew Sullivan, in his much-discussed essay in New York Magazine, said as much, calling Trump “an extinction-level event.”
Robert Kagan, writing in The Washington Post, concurred. His piece was titled: “This Is How Fascism Comes to America.”
And those are neoconservatives. Others who are normally temperate and cautious also have weighed in with the same idea.
Americans are usually sanguine about such things. We feel the country somehow survives, no matter how dire the threat. But what Trump portends is something this country has never before faced, never, and even if he is defeated, he already has managed to change the nature of our political discourse, perhaps even our politics themselves. This country will take a long time getting back to normal, if ever, because now we know there not only is something dark and hideous lurking in the American heart, but that it also can take over the system.
Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy.
Whether or not we can save ourselves from ourselves, anyone looking to the media as a potential bulwark is likely to be disappointed. Though the print media especially have been critical of Trump’s temperament, if fairly oblivious to the windy pronouncements he calls policies, and though pundits, even some on the right, have blasted Trump continuously and warned of the consequences of a Trump presidency, both the media and politics share a long-standing tendency that sooner or later kicks in: Anyone who, or any institution that, exercises power always gets normalized. It doesn’t make any difference where that power comes from. It doesn’t make any difference how reprehensible the expression of that power may be. It doesn’t make any difference even if the power threatens the very basis of a nation.
Those with power always get normalized.
We have seen this in action with the Republican Party, which has perpetrated one idiocy after another over the years without much blowback from the press because the party is one of the two hubs of power in America. So when they deny climate change or shut down the government or attack the Affordable Care Act without producing any alternative or repress the voting rights of poor and minority citizens, or, as congressional Republicans did earlier this week, slash funding requested by the National Institutes of Health to confront the Zika emergency, it is treated in the mainstream media as business as usual, one set of policy preferences against another, rather than an assault on the safety and health of American citizens, not to mention their sanity.
But the Republican Party, heinous as it may be, is a huge institution with a long history and a certified place in the American establishment. Donald Trump, on the other hand, is an individual with a history of clownishness. Abnormality has been his normality — his way of grabbing attention, of distinguishing himself from the bland horde of suits who competed against him, and of making money. In this election, he has depended on not being normalized, and when he seemed like the longest of long shots for the GOP nomination, the MSM accommodated him. He was always the outlier.
Now that Trump is the presumptive nominee, the press and the candidate’s own henchmen have predicted the famous “pivot” to normal, the idea being that the Republican rank-and-file were so far gone that Trump’s inadequacy, his proud ignorance, his bullying, his incivility were actually advantages in the primaries, but that these same qualities won’t play anywhere near as well with the general electorate.
That idea, however, is actually self-fulfilling, not necessarily by Trump but by the media. Of course, Trump was embraced by the lunatic right-wing media — Fox News, Breitbart, the radio gasbags. That wasn’t normalizing. That was just the alliance of one abnormality with another. Normalizing is what The Washington Post did in the piece I referenced last week on Trump’s sons, in which Trump was depicted as an absent but caring father.
Normalizing is what The Today Show did when it interviewed the entire Trump clan.
Normalizing is what Jimmy Kimmel did in inviting Trump on his program as if the candidate were just another entertainer shilling a movie or TV show or CD, even as Kimel was grilling him over his stance on transgender bathrooms.
Normalizing is what Megyn Kelly did on the Fox network, not on Fox News, to turn Trump into a lovable curmudgeon. Normalizing is what People magazine did with articles on Melania and Ivanka, who told the magazine her father was not a “groper.”
Can the smiling Trump cover be far behind?
Still, given the typically craven behavior of our media, the MSM pivot hasn’t been as thorough as one might have expected, because, I suspect, the Internet, with its vast anti-Trump sentiment, has brought some pressure on the MSM by highlighting Trump’s lies, his provocations to violence, his secrecy, his disregard for any common decency, his insults, his flip-flopping.
But the single biggest source of news in this country is still the evening network news broadcasts, and they have resisted that pressure. They have been treating Trump not as a demagogue, or as the strangest and most dangerous individual ever to be nominated by a major American party, but as just another candidate. When they reported the violence this week outside the Trump rallies at Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Anaheim, California, they didn’t discuss how Trump had provoked this activity with his pronouncements, or how unusual this is in American political campaigns. It was reported as another day on the campaign trail.
[Network news has] been treating Trump not as a demagogue, or as the strangest and most dangerous individual ever to be nominated by a major American party, but as just another candidate.
I don’t doubt — perhaps because I want desperately to believe it — that there are network news presidents wringing their hands and pulling out their hair over how to cover Trump, and searching their souls about whether to abet him by giving him this normalizing treatment or to call him out for what he is: the single greatest danger to American democracy in our lifetime.
This is their existential moment, as well as ours. Normalizing Trump is almost certainly the only way he can be elected because it gives voters the license to cast their ballots for him and for their blackest impulses. I wonder if these executives are asking themselves what they would have done had they been running the media in Weimar Germany when Hitler was on the rise.
I realize that Hitler comparisons are the cheapest political currency, not to mention that they are almost always misguided and wrong. Comparing anyone to Hitler immediately empties the argument. But if Trump isn’t Hitler — for one thing, Hitler was, unfortunately, programmatic; Trump is not — this may nevertheless be America’s Hitler moment as well as its existential one, the moment when Trump is either ostracized or normalized.
Frankly, the media impulse to normalize is almost an irresistible reflex — the media default. Without looking to the similarities between Hitler’s rise and Trump’s, we can look to the way the German media enabled Hitler once he had established power. Although most German newspapers held particular political positions and championed particular parties, the establishment press was beleaguered at the time of Hitler’s rise by the concomitant rise of what became known as the “boulevard press” — what we would call the tabloid press, high-circulation papers that were less interested in ideology or party than in entertainment and excitement.
Hitler certainly benefited from this ecological change in the media, just as Trump has benefited from a similar proclivity in ours, especially cable news. Hitler, too, was a renegade – a political outcast who, like Trump, appealed to a disaffected group nostalgic for nationalism, frustrated by political inertia and fuming over the cultural liberalization of Weimar the way American conservatives fume over our nation’s liberalization.
But a recent book, Hitler at Home, by Despina Stratigakos, professor of architecture at the University of Buffalo, chronicles how, once Hitler became chancellor, the Nazis manipulated the press into portraying the once-marginalized maniac as just another celebrity, who, behind the tough public persona, was a dog-loving, child-embracing homebody. “It was dangerous,” Stratigakos says, “because it made him likable.”
Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt, in her pathbreaking book, Beyond Belief, tells a similar story of how the international press normalized Hitler after he came to power and ignored his excesses. Many American press accounts exculpated Hitler for the early episodes of Nazi violence and attributed it to “overenthusiastic and poorly disciplined followers.” Editorialized one Ohio paper, “Chancellor Hitler, personally, is committed to a policy of moderation.” The Los Angeles Times agreed, opining that once he “becomes more used to his job” – the pivot – he would become less “theatrical.”
Remember: This was Adolf Hitler. In Germany. How do you think the American press will treat Trump if he closes in on the presidency?
But even if Trump were to lose, the bigger problem with the MSM normalizing him is that they are also normalizing the values he purveys — the anger and violence, the racism, sexism, nativism, misogyny, the ignorance and the hatred of the democratic process. Throughout modern history, these were generally, and rightfully, considered shameful. Major candidates dared not declaim them. But power can extirpate the shame. That is exactly what happened in Germany, where there was, as in many segments of America, a predisposition to the worst instincts of humanity.
The print media at least are already flummoxed not only whether to continue attacking Trump, but also whether to call out his supporters for their antipathy to American tolerance. If anyone wielding power is normalized, large segments of the population from whom that power emanates are always normalized, too. But a media that refuses to condemn these values — and the people who espouse them — is a media that has forfeited its decency as well as its role in a democracy.
This is obviously not a typical election. Trump is obviously not a typical candidate. And, as Andrew Sullivan wrote, the election already has revealed the “fragility of our way of life and the threat late-stage democracy is beginning to pose to itself.” The decent and sane among us want to think a Trump presidency won’t happen. We think that even if it does, something, somewhere, will circumscribe the threat. We can be sanguine. We can let the media normalize Trump and think of him as another presidential contender. We can do that. But that is how fascism takes hold — not because it strong-arms its way to power, but because it seems like a political option, and not the end of politics as we know it.
May 31, 2016
Israel frees Jewish extremist from 10-month detention
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel on Wednesday freed a Jewish extremist detained 10 months ago amid a security crackdown on extremists following an arson attack in which a Palestinian toddler was burned to death.
Meir Ettinger was arrested last year, shortly after the deadly arson of a West Bank home that killed three people, including the toddler. He was detained without trial or charge, under a measure called administrative detention, which Israel typically uses on Palestinians suspected of militant activity.
A number of extremists were arrested in the sweep, with one man and a minor eventually charged for the West Bank arson.
The Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, declined to say why Ettinger was being released. In an email, it said he was banned from entering the West Bank for a year and barred from contacting certain radical activists for six months, among other conditions for his release.
The 24-year-old Ettinger is the grandson of U.S.-born Rabbi Meir Kahane, Israel’s most notorious Jewish extremist, whose ultranationalist party was banned from Israel’s parliament for its racist views in 1988. He was killed by an Arab gunman in New York in 1990.
Ettinger has been accused of heading an extremist movement seeking to bring about religious “redemption” through attacks on Christian sites and Palestinian property. Sima Cohav, a lawyer for Ettinger, denied the allegations, saying Ettinger was “not involved in anything.”
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This story has been corrected to show that Ettinger is not a settler.
27 years on, Chinese moms of Tiananmen victims vow to fight
BEIJING (AP) — Mothers of some of those killed in the bloody crackdown on China’s 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy movement are condemning the Chinese government for failing to account for their children’s deaths and vowing to continue pushing for the truth ahead of this weekend’s 27th anniversary of the events.
Signed by 131 mothers and published by the advocacy group Human Rights in China, the letter said victims’ families continue to suffer from harassment and intimidation by Chinese security services for pursuing their quest for justice for their loved ones.
“For 27 years, the police have been the ones who have dealt with us. For 27 years … we, the victims’ families, are eavesdropped and surveilled upon by the police,” the letter said. “The police use contemptible means, such as making up stories, fabricating facts, issuing threats, etc., against us.”
While such treatment “undoubtedly desecrates the souls of those who perished,” the mothers, who along with their families and supporters have become known as the Tiananmen Mothers group over the years, said they were convinced their campaign will eventually produce a full and objective reckoning of the events.
The letter condemns the Chinese government for its apathy, accusing Beijing of ignoring pleas by family members and wiping out public memories of the movement and the bloody crackdown on the night of June 3-4, 1989, in which hundreds, possibly thousands were killed.
The government says it was correct to send in troops and tanks to quell it, saying it was a violent uprising against Communist Party rule, and has rejected all calls for an investigation or even to permit discussion of the events. Most of the main student protest leaders who fled aboard after the crackdown are still forbidden from returning home.
The letter was partially prompted by tightening security following the death of Jiang Peikun, husband of Ding Zilin, one of the most prominent Tiananmen mothers, said Yin Min, a fellow Tiananmen mother and signee of the letter.
“It feels that there’s no end in sight. We are all at ages where death can happen any day, and we’d like to see the truth revealed and justice upheld while we are still alive,” said Yin, whose 19-year-old son, Ye Weihang, was killed in the crackdown.
“We believe we have the obligation and the right to tell the public how we have lived those 27 years and to urge the government to take action,” Yin said over the phone.
Ding, whose 17-year-old son Jiang Jielian died in the crackdown, declined to be interviewed when reached by phone on Wednesday. As the face of the group, she has been subject to the most stringent restrictions.
Each year’s anniversary brings a tightening of such measures, with family members confined to their homes or forced to leave Beijing. Ignored by China’s entirely state-controlled media, they are forbidden from publicly commemorating the deaths of their loved ones.
Despite that, the letter continued to express faith that justice will eventually come.
“We use our immense maternal love to declare publicly to future generations: do not succumb to brute force, confront all evil forces with courage, and justice will prevail,” the letter read.
Amtrak train hits truck in Colorado; no passengers hurt
GLENWOOD SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — Crews have contained a fuel spill that was caused when an Amtrak train with 191 passengers hit a pickup in western Colorado.
Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari says the westbound California Zephyr train, which runs between Chicago to San Francisco, hit the truck at a crossing just west of Glenwood Springs on Tuesday afternoon. None of the passengers was injured, and the driver of the truck had climbed out of his vehicle by the time emergency crews arrived. He was treated for minor injuries.
Glenwood Springs Fire Chief Gary Tillotson tells the Post Independent (http://goo.gl/GfNMfL ) a 500-gallon fuel tank on the lead locomotive was ruptured. The fuel was contained to the rail bed and had not spilled into the nearby Colorado River.
Some passengers walked away from the train and tried to arrange other transportation.
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Information from: Post Independent, http://www.postindependent.com/
Kayak completes solo voyage from Australia to New Zealand
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Stuart Cleary set out in late 2014 to paddle solo from Australia to New Zealand. But in the end, it was his homemade kayak that completed the journey on its own.
Just hours into the trip, Cleary’s kayak started taking on water, and he was forced to abandon the vessel before being rescued at sea. Eighteen months later, the kayak has washed up on a New Zealand beach close to where Cleary had intended to make landfall.
Nathan Marshall says he was taking his dogs for a run on Muriwai Beach on Wednesday when he found the barnacle-encrusted kayak. He was hesitant to look inside, worried he’d find a body.
Cleary says he’ll travel to New Zealand to take a look. This time, however, he’ll be taking a plane.
North Korea’s media praise Trump talk about US troops
TOKYO (AP) — Donald Trump appears to be finding some friends in North Korea.
The presumptive U.S. Republican presidential nominee has been getting good press this week in the North’s carefully controlled media, first in an opinion piece that praised him as “wise” and full of foresight and then Wednesday in the official mouthpiece of the ruling Worker’s Party itself.
Both articles noted how his suggestions he would be willing to meet leader Kim Jong Un and wants to rethink and possibly withdraw U.S. troops from South Korea have created a “Trump Shock” in Seoul.
The state-run DPRK Today in Pyongyang started off the Trump praise on Tuesday by juxtaposing the “wise” Trump with what it called “dull Hillary” — describing leading Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton by only her first name.
In the lengthy column, Trump is described as a “wise politician and presidential candidate with foresight” for his comments about the U.S. potentially withdrawing its troops from South Korea if Seoul doesn’t bear the costs. It also noted his public willingness to directly talk with the North Korean leadership if he becomes president.
Clinton, the column said, is “dull” for promising to pursue an “Iran-type model” to solve nuclear issues with the North.
Trump told The New York Times in March that South Korea and Japan should pay much more for the U.S. troops based in their countries — about 28,000 in South Korea and around 50,000 in Japan. In a more recent interview with the Reuters news agency, Trump said he was willing to meet with Kim.
“I would speak to him, I would have no problem speaking to him,” he said.
The removal of U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula and direct talks with a U.S. president dovetail nicely with objectives Pyongyang has held for years — though undoubtedly for different reasons than the American real estate magnate.
The North wants the U.S. troops to leave because it sees them as a direct threat to the regime’s security and has long wanted talks with Washington, ostensibly toward a peace treaty to end the 1950-53 Korean War, that would boost its international status and acknowledge that North Korea is a nuclear state.
“There are many ‘positive aspects’ to take away from Trump’s ‘inflammatory campaign promises,'” the writer says in the DPRK Today column, pointing out Trump’s indications that Seoul should pay “100 percent” of the cost for the American troops stationed in the South and, if not, Washington should pull them out.
“Yes, go away, now!” it says. “Who knew that the ‘Yankee Go Home’ slogan we shouted so enthusiastically could come true so easily like this? The day that the ‘Yankee Go Home’ slogan becomes reality would be the day of unification.”
The Korean War that solidified the division of North and South Korea ended in an armistice, not a full peace treaty.
The DPRK Today website is considered to be a propaganda outlet aimed at readers outside the North, though its position within the government is not clear.
While not as colorful or overtly supportive as the DPRK Today column, the ruling party’s official Rodong Sinmun editorial said the emergence of Trump is causing anxiety in South Korea because of his comments about the potential U.S. troop withdrawal.
It said the South Korean government should stop living as a servant of foreign forces and come back to the side of the Korean nation, but didn’t comment directly on Trump as a candidate.
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AP writer Kim Tong-hyung in Seoul contributed to this report. Talmadge is the AP’s Pyongyang bureau chief. Follow him on Instagram at @erictalmadge
How the AP-NORC poll on long-term care was conducted
The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll on long-term care was conducted from February 18 through April 9 by NORC at the University of Chicago, with funding from the SCAN Foundation.
It is based on landline and cellular telephone interviews with a nationally representative random sample of 1,698 adults age 40 or older, including 403 California residents age 40 and over. Interviews included 1,117 respondents on landline telephones and 581 on cellphones.
Digits in the phone numbers dialed were generated randomly to reach households with unlisted and listed landline and cellphone numbers.
Interviews were conducted in both English and Spanish.
As is done routinely in surveys, results were weighted, or adjusted, to ensure that responses accurately reflect the population’s makeup by factors such as age, sex, education, race and landline or cell phone use.
No more than 1 time in 20 should chance variations in the sample cause the results to vary by more than plus or minus 3.4 percentage points from the answers that would be obtained if all adults in the U.S. were polled. For the California results, the margin of error is plus or minus 5.5 percentage points.
There are other sources of potential error in polls, including the wording and order of questions.
The questions and results are available at http://www.longtermcarepoll.org
Parents criticize officials after lead found at 2 schools
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Parents leveled harsh criticism at officials over high amounts of lead found in water sources at two Portland schools, while Schools Superintendent Carole Smith promised an independent investigation into how it occurred.
Dozens of parents spoke and asked questions of a panel Tuesday night that included Smith, other district representatives, and water officials from Oregon Health Authority, Portland Water Bureau and Multnomah County. The meeting was held to address concerns that tests done in March found elevated levels of lead in 14 of 92 water sources at Creston K-8 School and the Rose City Park School.
More than 100 parents attended, and shouting ensued at times when some didn’t feel school officials answered the questions to their liking. Officials were criticized for a lack of communication and failure to follow through on previous signs that there were problems.
“I have a third grader who’s been drinking from the fountain with the highest lead level all year, and last year and the year before was drinking from one of the other ones, so for three years of his 9 year old life has been drinking this water,” parent Judy Burke said.
Parent Mike Southern called for Smith’s resignation to half-hearted applause from others at the meeting.
“The fact that we have an aging stock of buildings and these buildings have shown in the past to have toxic levels of lead, and the current administration did not address this, is evidence enough that we are operating in a dysfunctional system,” Southern said. “And that system is led by Carole Smith. I am tired of the broken promises, the mismanagement and the endless dog and pony show of meeting after meeting that pretends to address the public need.”
Smith said earlier in the evening she was made aware of the issue late last week and subsequently informed the board, reiterating an apology she gave Friday in a statement. “This is not our protocol, this is not acceptable, and we’re taking a number of immediate actions, she said.
Two district employees could be placed on administrative leave as a result of the investigation, she added. Some of the other actions to be taken include creating a new website to communicate about the testing and fixes and creating a ‘healthy water task force’ to come up with a new water testing strategy for the future.
The district said it will provide bottled drinking water for all district students and staff through the end of the school year, until schools can be tested this summer, which happens every 15 years. The district placed bags over water fountains at all schools on Friday, Smith said.
She said she can’t predict the cost of testing the system, saying the district may have to use reserve funds if it tops the $450,000 budget for the project.
The lack of lead testing in Oregon schools’ water systems — concerns for which were largely brought to the forefront by the Flint, Michigan, water crisis — prompted Gov. Kate Brown in April to call for a statewide review of existing school processes. She directed the Oregon Health Authority, which carries out Environmental Protection Agency water regulations at the state level, and the Oregon Department of Education to also make recommendations for improvement.
“Schools are not included when water systems test for lead as required by EPA, meaning that a water system may be deemed to have safe lead levels overall, while water quality at schools remains unknown,” Brown said in an April statement.
Earlier this year, a Flint-inspired nationwide review by the USA Today Network found that more than 2,000 water systems fell short of EPA rules for lead, ranking Oregon at No. 18.
It also found EPA has handed out 180 citations to officials nationwide for failing to immediately tell the public — as was the case at the two Portland schools — when high lead levels are discovered.
Rain pummels France, Seine River overflows Paris embankments
PARIS (AP) — The Seine River has overflowed embankments in Paris as floods hit or threaten cities and towns around France.
Paris City Hall closed roads along the shore of the Seine from the southwest edge of the city to the neighborhood around the Eiffel Tower as the water level has risen 4.3 meters (14 feet 1 inches) higher than usual.
City authorities are warning residents and visitors to be vigilant Wednesday around the river banks, and said high river levels are expected to last through Friday.
Heavy rain has caused delays at the French Open, forced the evacuation of two prisons and prompted thousands of rescue operations from the Belgian border south to Burgundy.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve urged people to exercise the “greatest caution.”
No casualties have been reported.
