Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 783
May 10, 2016
Bernie Sanders wins West Virginia Democratic primary
Bernie Sanders (Credit: AP/Steve Helber)
White House dreams fading, Bernie Sanders added another state to his tally against Hillary Clinton with a win in West Virginia on Tuesday — a victory that will do little to slow the former secretary of state’s steady march toward the Democratic presidential nomination.
Meanwhile, Republican Donald Trump also won there and in Nebraska, a week after he cleared the field of his remaining rivals. They were not victories likely to heal the party’s wounds, as some GOP leaders continue to hold off offering their endorsement of the party’s presumptive nominee.
The result in the West Virginia Democratic primary underscored the awkward position Clinton and the party’s establishment face as they attempt to turn their focus to the general election. Clinton is just 155 delegates short of the 2,383 she needs to secure the nomination. To win them, she needs just 17 percent of the delegates at stake in the remaining contests.
That means she could lose all the states left to vote by a landslide and still emerge as the nominee, so long as all of her supporters among the party insiders known as superdelegates continue to back her.
Still, Sanders is vowing to fight on. He campaigned in California on Tuesday for the state’s June 7 primary, and his victory in West Virginia highlighted anew Clinton’s struggles to win over white men and independents – weaknesses Trump wants to exploit in the fall campaign.
Among those voting in the state’s Democratic primary, about a third said they would support Trump over either Clinton or Sanders in November. An additional 2 in 10 said they wouldn’t vote for either candidate. But 4 in 10 also said they consider themselves to be independents or Republicans, and not Democrats, according to exit polls.
While Sanders is still attracting thousands to rallies, his campaign has grown harder as Clinton closes in on the nomination. His fundraising has fallen off and so, too, has his advertising, with only about $525,000 in ads planned for California and $63,000 each in West Virginia and Oregon, according to advertising tracker Kantar Media’s CMAG.
That’s a significant decline from the wall-to-wall advertising campaign he ran earlier in the primary, during which his $74 million in ads outspent Clinton by $14 million.
Edward Milam, of Cross Lanes, West Virginia, is a self-described socialist who gave money to the Sanders campaign but his vote Tuesday to Clinton.
“After about six-seven months of debating and watching, I think Hillary has a lot more to offer than Bernie internationally,” the 68-year-old retiree said. “I think she handles herself well. I’ve known about her for 30 years, just like everybody else has. I don’t think there will be any surprises.”
Even as the primaries continue, Clinton has largely shifted her focus to the general election. On Monday, she courted suburban women in Virginia and on Tuesday, in Lexington, Kentucky, she released a proposal to ensure families don’t spend more than 10 percent of their income on child care.
“I don’t care about what he says about me,” she said of Trump in Louisville, Kentucky, on Tuesday night. “But I do resent what he says about other people, other successful women, women who have worked hard, women who have done their part.”
Clinton’s campaign hopes suburban women, turned off by Trump’s bombastic rhetoric, could be a key source of support for her in the fall.
But she’s also trying to stop Sanders from gaining the psychological advantage of a series of wins this month. Her team went up with a $160,000 ad buy in Kentucky on Tuesday, a modest effort aimed at cutting into Sanders’ support before the state’s primary in a week.
Democrats also held a primary election Tuesday in Nebraska, although the party allocated all its delegates to the summer nominating convention in an earlier caucus won by Sanders.
Donald Trump gets two more primary victories in Nebraska and West Virginia
Donald Trump (Credit: AP/Jae C. Hong)
Key Senate Republicans voiced optimism Tuesday about Donald Trump’s presidential prospects in November, the clearest signal yet to the GOP rank and file to unite behind the bombastic billionaire and turn their energy against Democrat Hillary Clinton. But it was uncertain whether the doubters could be quieted.
Trump added two more primaries to his column, taking West Virginia and Nebraska.
“We have a nominee, it looks like he may well be very competitive, and we want to win the White House,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters. He also said, “We know that Hillary Clinton will be four more years of Barack Obama. I think that’s going to in the end be enough to unify Republicans across the country.”
Still, doubt and angst over Trump remained palpable as GOP lawmakers returned from a weeklong recess that saw him effectively clinch the presidential nomination. For some, the question of whether they were backing their party’s standard-bearer – a no-brainer in a normal election year – proved too much to answer.
“We’re not doing any Trump questions today,” an aide to Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois told a crowd of reporters as Kirk, one of the most endangered Senate Republicans, sped into a meeting.
Another Republican who’s up for re-election, Tim Scott of South Carolina, offered his support, but like others managed to sound grudging and backhanded in the process. “I’m supporting the Republican candidate, and it happens to be Donald Trump,” he said.
A third, Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia, deflected questions about whether he would back Trump, saying he’s focused only on securing another six-year Senate term.
“The only thing I can do is get re-elected so we have a Republican majority in the Senate,” Isakson said. “I will support the Republican ticket and I’m endorsing me for my Senate seat.”
The comments reflected ongoing divisions in a party still reeling over Trump’s success in locking up the nomination and pushing his two remaining rivals from the race last week. McConnell and others have decided that the best approach is to get behind Trump. But especially in light of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s surprise decision to withhold his support, unity is elusive for now.
That could start to change Thursday, when Ryan, McConnell and other congressional Republicans meet with Trump, who himself has downplayed the meeting and suggested he can win the election unity or no.
Ryan defended his stance anew Tuesday, insisting that he was just being honest in saying Trump had more work to do to show he could unify the party after alienating numerous voters including women, Hispanics and many conservatives.
“It is going to take more than a week to unify this party,” Ryan said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal broadcast online. “If we just pretend to unify without unifying, then we’ll only be at half-strength, and it won’t be good for us in the fall.”
But some Republicans argued that Ryan himself was making it harder to unify by essentially giving other Republicans cover to refuse to get behind Trump.
“I didn’t really appreciate his comments,” said Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma. “They have to establish a workable relationship, and I think they will, but that’s not a good way to start.”
Yet after a bruising primary season others were not yet ready to move on. GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Trump’s leading opponent before he dropped out last week, made clear he was in no hurry to endorse the mogul and reality TV star who defeated him.
“The voters in the primary seem to have made a choice and we’ll see what happens as the months go forward,” Cruz told conservative talk radio host Glenn Beck.
Cruz went so far as to leave open the possibility of restarting his campaign if he should score a surprise win in Nebraska, while making clear he didn’t anticipate that outcome.
“The reason we suspended the race last week is with Indiana’s loss I didn’t see a viable path to victory. If that changes we will certainly respond accordingly,” Cruz said.
Another of Trump’s vanquished opponents, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, said at the Hudson Institute: “He’s the nominee of the Republican Party, or presumptive nominee via the voters. I respect that and accept it, but that’s not going to change the reservations I have about his campaign or about some of the policies he’s established.”
Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, who heads Senate GOP re-election efforts, said “actually I feel pretty good” about prospects to hang onto control of the Senate.
“It seems to me after every presidential primary there’s a coming together, and I expect that will happen,” Wicker said.
The sad truth: Older women may be invisible in Hollywood, but in porn they are doing fine
(Credit: Elisanth via Shutterstock)
Besides gifting us with the image of a man befouling baked goods, the 1999 film American Pie managed to put something else out into the zeitgeist: MILFs. The acronym, which stands for “mother I’d like to f*ck”—in other words, a hot, no-longer-young woman—was picked up by the porn universe soon after the film’s release, and she’s been on the rise ever since.
“Whether it’s the incredibly talented MILF performers, or the savvy marketing strategy of today’s adult studios, ‘Mother I’d Like to F*ck’ movies are as popular as ever, if not more so,” said Jeff Dillon, vice president of business development for eLine management company, whose clients include GameLink.com. “It’s safe to say the adult industry celebrated Mothers’ Day for more than one reason this year and next.”
A survey put together by the adult video retailer found that men of all ages enjoy porn featuring mature women, but most of them—71 percent—are under 30. “We saw a huge, 400 percent spike in MILF porn sales between 1998 and 2000,” probably due to the popularity of American Pie, Dillon said.
Some of GameLink’s most popular MILF stars include Julia Ann, Lisa Ann, Kendra Lust, Veronica Avluv, Francesca Le, Kelly Madison, Tanya Tate, Brandi Love and Nina Hartley. The AVN Awards, often dubbed the “Oscars of Porn” introduced “Best MILF Release” into its awarded categories back in 2008. GameLink’s Top 5 Bestselling MILF Titles are It’s a Mommy Thing #8, It’s a Family Thing, Mommy Caught Me, Neighborhood Moms Down To F*ck and Brazzer’s Horny Housewives #4.
Porn outlet PornHub found that during holidays like Thanksgiving and Easter, searches for “MILF” or “mom” spike by up to 190 percent.
The MILF boom might help explain another industry trend: the rise of incest scenes. Colin Allerton, director of business development at Adult Empire, once told AlterNet, “The consumer is always looking for that kind of taboo… They may watch something that they would never do themselves, but it being taboo makes it more attractive to them, because it’s not their everyday, normal life.”
The PornHub analytics team recently announced that “stepmom” outranks both “MILF” and “mom” in search volume, followed by “friends mom.” Videos featuring a “stepmom and son” also prove more popular than “stepmom and daughter.”
Check out an infographic detailing the GameLink survey.
[This article first appeared on Alternet]
Pity the poor Republicans: Trapped by Trump between denial, dithering and surrender
Chris Christie, Donald Trump, Paul Ryan (Credit: Reuters/Andrew Kelly/Chris Tilley/Jonathan Ernst/Photo montage by Salon)
Can we spare a thought for the impossible dilemma now facing elected officials of the Republican Party? Not a whole thought, perhaps; maybe three-eighths of one. And very little in the way of compassion: The GOP’s cynical leadership class spent years building the Trumpian monstrosity that now threatens to devour it whole and spit out the bones. If Paul Ryan and Donald Trump are drifting away together into the infinite on a iceberg, like Dr. Frankenstein and his creation at the end of Mary Shelley’s novel, you can’t say it isn’t poetic justice. Especially since Republican policies are causing the polar ice to melt and … I’d better stop there before the metaphor gets even further out of control.
Considered as drama and a little bit as philosophy, however, the Republican predicament is undeniably rich with possibility. In the face of Trumpocalypse (Trumpnarok?) there appear to be three paths open to prominent Republicans. They may ultimately all lead to the same destination — misery, defeat and a diet of thistles — although we can’t know that for sure at this time. Democrats are busy assuring each other that this week’s batch of shocking polls that show Trump running almost even with Hillary Clinton in several crucial states is an aberration. That’s probably true, but count on this: All the Democratic backslapping and high-fiving and “We got this!” is going to give way, long before November, to sleepless nights and bleeding cuticles and chew-marks on the Xanax bottle.
But I digress: There are three paths for Republicans, and whether or not they all end up in the same place they’re all deeply pathetic. Or maybe shallowly pathetic. Which makes for good spectator sport, at least for now. There is the Way of Loneliness, the path of noble rejectionism chosen by the Bush family and Mitt Romney and various others, who have chosen to turn their backs on the fallen world of Trumpishness and walk the cliffs in widow’s weeds, gazing out to sea like Meryl Streep in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman.” (Yeah, I realize that reference dates me badly, first of all, and is hopelessly obscure.)
Not everyone who walks the Way of Loneliness does so for the same reason. Romney and the Presidents Bush can insist that they’re standing on principle all they want, but they’re standing aloof from a party that has specifically ridiculed them and kicked them out, many of whose voters would be delighted to show them the Moon Door. Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who at least until now was a rising star on the GOP’s far right, came out as a Trump-hater months ago and is too much of an ideological purist to take it back. He’s something like a less noxious Ted Cruz, and represents the GOP cadre that still thinks Tea Party politics reflected core libertarian beliefs, and not just rampant racism and incoherent nihilism. That’s a genuinely principled position! We shouldn’t let the fact that it’s wrong on every possible level seven ways to Sunday stop us from congratulating Sasse for his integrity.
Speaking of love that feels so wrong it can only be right, there’s also failed presidential candidate and budding late-night star Lindsey Graham, the Robin Goodfellow of Republican senators. Graham has the remarkable distinction of hating Trump and Cruz with nearly equal fervor, having many times expressed the correct and obvious view that the GOP has no long-term future if it drives away all blacks and Latinos and appeals only to white people who have never ridden on public transit (or used the Uber app). Of course, the Trump moment is precisely about not caring about the Republican future, or anybody’s future — he’s the Sex Pistols of politics! Moreover, Graham is an old-time neocon who hates Trump for one of the latter’s few redeeming characteristics, his notable lack of enthusiasm for endless global war.
One could play Socrates here and wonder why establishment Republicans of Graham’s ilk don’t just jump ship and endorse Hillary Clinton: Sure, they have their areas of disagreement, but when it comes to the big, broad strokes of economic and foreign policy, they have a lot more in common with her than they do with Trump. Except that the answer is obvious: Unless Graham is ready for his retirement gig as a star of stage and screen and the host of legendary Charleston garden parties, he’s got to run for re-election in South Carolina, where Clinton and her husband (for inexplicable reasons) are slightly less popular than Satan or pubic lice.
If you think outcasts like Graham and Sasse and Jeb Bush are sad, well, at least they have their dignity. Or they can pretend they do. Then there is the Way of Waiting and Wishing and Hoping, the path of the wallflower exemplified so perfectly by Paul Ryan. If you think I’m hauling out another vaguely offensive feminine stereotype of the 20th century — well, you’re right. This is the Republican Party we’re talking about! Paul Ryan, a person who is the Speaker of the House of Representatives and third in line for the presidency, is pretty much waiting at the church door with a wilting bouquet in his hands. He wants the roguish, orange-hued hero to show up and sweep him off his feet! He hopes it will happen! But he’s also prepared to dry his tears and walk away if it turns out that true love is just an illusion.
Ryan and John McCain and Mitch McConnell and virtually every commentator and talking head in what might be called the center-right of the Republican Party (that is, the crazy-town, far-right fringe of the real world) look so pathetic they can’t perceive their own pathos. They can’t say yes and they can’t say no; they dither. They pretend to bargain and make demands, without seeming to realize that they have no bargaining power and are in no position to demand anything.
Those who walk the Way of Wishing and Hoping are worse off than the proverbial bride on the church steps, honestly; they’re more like the heroine of the romance novel at her lowest point, when she urges her dangerous lover to lie to her: There is no madwoman in the attic! Tell us you’re a real conservative, Donald, murmur these Republican dreamers. Tell us that in the unlikely event you get elected, you’ll forget all the crazy things you said to all those crazy people and love us instead!
There is no dignity there, Mr. Speaker, not even the Bush-Romney bogus dignity of the jilted. I’m sure Ryan isn’t too worried about Sarah Palin’s vow to end his political career over his Trump-dithering and Trump-doubt: Oh no, the most ridiculous person in the country doesn’t like me! But that signifies how much of the once-solid Republican iceberg has melted away from beneath his feet. And let’s say this for Palin: At least she made a choice and picked a side, while most Republicans were hoping someone else would do it for them, or that a trapdoor would open in the floor so they could disappear.
Consider Chris Christie, universally mocked a few weeks ago as the GOP’s version of Gríma Wormtongue, having chosen the Way of Submission and Surrender, the path of craven toadying to power. Time to stop laughing, I would say. Like the heroine of “50 Shades of Grey,” Christie has discovered that what looks like slavery leads to freedom. He is now the head of Trump’s presidential transition team, a concept both hilarious and terrifying that actually exists in the real world, and is first in line for whatever job he wants in the Trump administration.
If you’d like to argue that Christie has sacrificed everything he supposedly believed in to sign on with Trump, that his political career is now over and that he’s barely even pretending to be the governor of New Jersey — well, yeah. In the wake of Bridgegate and numerous other Garden State scandals afflicting his administration, that was already true. Christie read the writing on the wall and went all-in on a desperate political gamble we can only hope won’t pay off. There is a certain undeniable, evil bravery in that.
If you’re in the mood to contemplate “Twilight Zone” scenarios, try this one out: Trump somehow gets elected, which despite Democratic smugness and complacency (or because of those things) is not inconceivable, and Christie becomes the guy tasked with making sure he runs a somewhat normal government instead of a stupid homegrown Fourth Reich. We may end up feeling eternally grateful that Christie had the courage and foresight to follow the path of spineless mendacity.
Did the New York Times just accidentally tell the truth about the Obama administration?
Ben Rhodes (Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque/Salon)
Historians so inclined will have a blast when their turn comes to dissect the Obama administration and its people. I do not mean the old-line “presidential historians,” story-telling hagiographers such as Stephen Ambrose or the insufferable David McCullough. Obama will have to wait a while for somebody of this set to embalm him to take what place he might among our mythologized tenants of the White House.
Nor do I think we will get much of interest out of those writing of the more immediate past, the journalists who purport to cross over into history. Lou Cannon, Jon Meacham—no. These guys are into painting impastoed pictures of Reagan and George H.W. respectively to make them look as if they were actually as large as the job. This is not what we want.
We want educated judgment—admittedly hard to find when our commanders-in-chief are tucked in between hard covers. We are finishing up eight years of a very complex presidency—a truth one can sign on for regardless of one’s judgment of the man and his two terms. A good historian will need training in semiotics, the science of signifiers, to understand what has occurred during this presidency. To get Obama down right, he or she will have to explore the amazing extent to which spectacle is supposed to supplant political reality, the “narrative” of events called upon to matter more than events.
Prompting these thoughts is a remarkable piece published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine’s May 8 edition. It is a profile, months in the making, of Ben Rhodes, the president’s deputy national security adviser and the man in charge of representing—key term—Obama’s foreign policy. Rhodes is an interesting figure, as I will explain for the sake of those who do not already know this. The whole of this long, weirdly jaunty article is here.
Wade through, and do not let the bag-of-tricks prose distract you. You might be as astonished as I to find the Times lifting the lid so unguardedly on just how our foreign policies are packaged and then sold to us—the Times and other front-rank media being the Fuller Brush men of the story. I sometimes refer to the paper that published this piece as “the government-supervised New York Times.” Doubt it no longer if ever you did: You can read all about it now in said newspaper.
*
Rhodes has had a curious presence since he crept quietly into the news reports a few years ago. He was next to Secretary of State Kerry all through the negotiations with Tehran to limit its nuclear program to peaceful purposes. When the White House suddenly announced that 15 months of secret talks with Havana had produced an agreement to reopen relations, Rhodes turned out to be a key participant in the proceedings. We now learn he is some kind of doppelganger who “has achieved a ‘mind meld’ with President Obama” such that he knows his boss’s thoughts even while the president is not finished thinking them.
Rhodes’s story is even stranger when you start at the beginning. It turns out he was an aspiring writer of fiction—keep this thought at your elbow—who tumbled (with a nudge of nepotism) into Washington’s foreign policy cliques. Rhodes had no background or experience in international relations—a blank slate—but he held a pretty handy pen. So he got into speechwriting, and then into the Obama campaign in 2007, and then into a basement office at the White House after the 2008 election, from which he exerts an almost inconceivable measure of influence. Walter Mitty could not have told a less likely tale.
Rhodes’s full title is deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, and you need to know this to understand just who he is and what his unusual ascent toward the pinnacle of power signifies. While he writes Obama’s speeches and fashions the administration’s spin on any given policy, he also sits at summit tables a few chairs down from Obama and runs on the inside track when Kerry is out executing a policy. David Samuels, who wrote the profile, cites two dozen White House sources when he asserts, “He is the single most influential voice shaping American foreign policy aside from Potus himself.”
Journalists often hype their subject as the most important thing since Saran Wrap, and I suspect Samuels has succumbed to the temptation in writing such things. But there is a lot of it in this piece, suggesting the incaution of the eager freelancer out to make a mark with editors. “On the largest and smallest questions alike,” we read, “the voice in which America speaks to the world is that of Ben Rhodes.” Further down, we read that Rhodes and his colleagues see “some larger restructuring of the American narrative” as “our entire job.” And later we find that the mind-melding Rhodes “used his skills to help execute a radical shift in American foreign policy.”
I do not live in Washington and would rather report the Siberian tundra, but I imagine these assertions are sticking in a lot of craws down there this week. Before taking on the thought of some radical policy shift during the Obama years, however, I need to note something else, something that seems to have thrown some of the Washington press crowd instantly into a dither.
A good part of Samuels’ story is intended to show us just how Rhodes operates—“His days at the White House start with the president’s briefing,” etc.—and the point on which he gets fully granular is how Rhodes and his colleagues “shape the narrative.”
Do they ever.
These guys are social media acrobats. Ned Price, Rhodes’s deputy and chief distributor of the designated spin, is entirely out of the closet as to how he feeds White House correspondents, columnists and others in positions to influence public opinion like a fois gras farmer feeding his geese. He starts with a barrage of Twitter messages and then works the telephone to those he calls variously “our compadres and “force multipliers.” These are journalists and pundits who listen to the line and then—it is absolutely clear in Price’s account—“put this message out as their own.”
Readers of this column will understand, maybe, why a certain sense of vindication overtook me last weekend. When you read routine Washington reports in the Times or any of the other major dailies, you are looking at what the clerks we still call reporters post on government bulletin boards (which we still call newspapers).
Rhodes provides a more structural analysis of the phenom, which I appreciated. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t,” he told Samuels. “They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
Pithy, Ben. And pathetic.
*
Conclusions and questions.
In Ben Rhodes we seem to see the blurring of the line between the substance of policy and the narrative of the policy—its “story.” The flack and spinmaster sitting at the summit table tells us something fundamental about the Obama presidency and why it has been so hard a read in the foreign policy space. This is what I hope the historians do not miss.
I do not doubt that Rhodes and Obama shared the ambition to effect “a radical shift in American foreign policy.” But they have misread the task top to bottom. Their project has been all about style, in a word. This president and his great communicator set out to change the way America does things abroad but not the intentions of what we do. Samantha Power wears trendy sneakers, Samuels says in making the same point, and this is supposed to be enough to give the purposely provoking U.N. ambassador a pass in the Williams-Sonoma set.
There can be no radical shift in American conduct abroad, of course, until goals and purposes are addressed very forthrightly. This means taking on, in explicit fashion, our inherited tropes—our claims to exceptionalism and universalism—as well as the hegemonic ambitions the Pentagon shares with American corporations. It is a question, as noted in a previous column, of techne and telos, two words from ancient Greek. You can change the former—your method, your means—all you like, but it will matter little until you alter your telos, your aims, the ideal you strive for.
There is a telling point to make on this score with regards to Samuels’ piece. “A larger restructuring of the American narrative” is implicitly advanced as Rhodes’s chief distinction. He entertains “a healthy contempt for the American foreign policy establishment,” we read, and this includes Hillary Clinton, Robert M. Gates, the Times and so on. He cares not what anyone thinks of him, can live without cocktail parties and gives it to them all straight no chaser, brave man.
What is the new narrative, then? May we know, please? I address the question to Ben Rhodes, David Samuels and Samuels’ editors at the Times Magazine. All this palaver about a brilliant foreign policy innovator and not one word about his masterstroke innovation, a reimagined frame for American conduct abroad?
The lapse is a symptom of the above-noted problem: style without substance, form without content. We cannot count even the openings to Iran and Cuba as any great departures, given Washington’s behavior since. There is no new narrative, only a new way of telling the old narrative.
Here is the puzzle I was left with when I put the Samuels profile down: Why did the Times assign and run this? Why Samuels, who is more accustomed to covering Britney Spears and rap music—a journalist of styles, let’s say. Maybe it intended to get a puff piece back. But he gave his editors an unsubstantiated thesis on the policy side, and in the matter of how Washington works he managed to say a good bit of what I classify as “the unsayable.” Read the piece: Did the Times not pee on its own sofa?
Why? And why did the paper’s editors want us to know these things now? Samuels has big names such as Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic correspondent and a friend indeed to this administration, scrambling this week to blurt that no, they were not among the ones who took the hook and swallowed the line. (Debatable at the very least, I would say.)
Benjamin R. Rhodes, 38. I have written favorably of him in this column from time to time, chiefly with regard to the Iran accord, which came after many at-the-brink rounds of negotiations. He deserved those compliments. He is plainly a bright man. But he ought not be in the White House, and the White House should not be so preoccupied with telling stories.
Could Google results change an election? “There’s never been a more efficient way to shift swing voters than this”
Kevin Spacey in "House of Cards" (Credit: Netflix)
A story has broken in which former Facebook workers say they manipulated the social media giant’s “trending topics” to keep conservative media outlets and stories that were actually popular on the site out of the high-profile sidebar. As Gizmodo reports:
Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.
This comes after a “House of Cards” episode that discussed PollyHop, a fictional search engine that a rival to President Frank Underwood may be manipulating to tilt support. Because U.S. courts recently ruled that Search Engine Page Results are protected speech, the same way as a publication is, a certain amount of weighing is perfectly legal.
It’s not clear exactly what all of this means, but it suggests that our web surfing, including direct search and browsing “trending” topics, is not disinterested: Tech companies may be pushing us toward a result that company employees are hoping for.
To unravel this a bit, we spoke to Robert Epstein, a San Diego-based psychologist who has done extensive research into human-adjusted search engines and how they shape what we see and what we don’t. We spoke to Epstein, who is a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, from Washington, D.C. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Should it trouble us that there seems to be human alteration of what is supposed to be raw statistical results?
Yes and no. All news services are selective in what they report. What makes this different is that Facebook’s audience is so large, and more and more people are getting their news through Facebook first. That’s very different. That’s as if Fox News was the only network in town.
But on the other hand, no one is claiming that what is happening that what’s happening at Facebook is being directed by management, except for these “insertions,” apparently. So the political bent probably has to do with who they choose to hire.
But we’re not seeing a top-down instance of people at the top trying to shift things politically.
What I’m saying is there’s no hard evidence yet. There were stories last week in which Zuckerberg said he was under pressure to use the influence of Facebook against Trump. The way he worded things, he seemed to be open to that idea. And he seemed to be open to the idea. But there’s nothing illegal about it: We’re talking about a world in which regulation and legislation is very behind.
I do not have a conspiracy bone in my body. But what I’m more concerned about, which is happening before our eyes, are these odd alliances… [I’ve seen] a document between Google and Yahoo, declaring that Yahoo might be drawing its search results, from this point on. And we’ve seen stories showing a détente between Google and Microsoft – that’s pretty scary, too. That’s the possibility that Google’s influence, which is enormous already, could spread to give it something like 100 percent penetration in the United States.
And right now it has roughly how much?
If you look at the Pew survey, which is what I trust the most, it would be 83 percent. It’s already pretty high… Now you have a partial monopoly becoming a full monopoly.
And if you connect this to the kind of research I’ve been doing, and see the kind of influence it gives to one company… It’s quite frightening.
So how much influence do Google search results have on our politics?
We estimate right now that Google search engine will be able to shift between 2.6 and 10.4 million votes. This is just Google, without any parallel activity in other search engines. Shifting votes to Hillary Clinton, and without anyone knowing what’s happening, and without leaving a paper trail.
How does this happen – by re-ordering search results?
It’s not re-ordering: The algorithm can put search results that favor one candidate higher than results that favor another. What I mean by favor, if you click on one of the top results, you connect through a web page that makes one candidate look better than another. If you do that, you easily shift between 20 percent and 80 percent of undecided voters to that candidate.
This translates into a lot of undecided voters. You can’t shift everybody – but you can shift the key people in a close election. There’s never been a more efficient way to shift swing voters than this – what we call SEME, Search Engine Manipulation Effect.
You wrote a piece last month with the headline, “In the future, Big Data will make actual voting obsolete.” Tell us where you were going with this.
I wasn’t predicting that in the future, Google would handle our voting. I was saying that they have our data right this second. They probably run that tabulation multiple times a day. From our emails, from our use of Waze, from more than 60 different platforms, they know how we are gonna vote, who we are gonna vote for.
It sounds like we don’t know what’s happening in detail at these tech companies, but we as a society are susceptible to having our votes manipulated in significant ways.
Yes – we’re highly susceptible. But it goes way beyond that. This is stuff we haven’t published yet. We’ve gone way beyond voting now – we’ve looked at attitudes about fracking, attitudes about homosexuality, about abortion…. And we’re seeing exactly the same kinds of shifts. And that gets to be really, really scary: Whatever executives or rogue employees might be doing at these companies, I don’t even care. The algorithms that they use alone…
They’re not programmed with equal time rules. So for any issue under the sun, the algorithms are putting information into a certain order. We don’t now exactly that rules they’re following. But when they do that, they’re shifting opinions. And not of a small number of people. A massive number of people –
They’re not just shifting votes, but bedrock beliefs.
Beliefs, attitudes, opinions – yeah.
And if the top people at these companies are not keeping track of these things, then we’re living in a completely crazy world. Someone’s got to keep track of these things. And when it comes to politics, there has to be equal time rules built in. Because there’s never been a source of influence like this.
Margins that can be controlled by one online technology… Half of the elections in the United States have been won with margins less than 7.5 percent.
If we’re right – we’ve done experiments with more than 10,000 participants – this is happening, it’s been happening for years. With each passing year, the impact, the influence, is simply getting bigger. If no one is minding this store, then historians will look back and say this is insanity.
And if someone is minding the store, that’s also quite bad – it means the top people at various companies know about these things, and are using them deliberately to further the ends of their companies.
Pure Barre’s tortured purity: The punishing feminine ideal behind tucking, burning and embracing the shake
(Credit: AntGor via Shutterstock)
“Your ankles are showing,” I overhear one instructor say to another on an April Saturday in Los Angeles.
The ankle-barer laughs, all leggings and self-awareness. It’s true.
Her colleague is not the only to notice. At Pure Barre, covered legs are de rigueur. A chalkboard announcing studio rules prohibits legwear cut above the knees. Most “Barrebies” wear their exercise tights—studios sell pricy celeb-favorites like Alo and Beyond Yoga—pulled down over the heel of the foot so what sticks out is the toe of black sticky socks. These socks are akin to hospital wear. They’re $15 a pair, with dotted treds on the bottom and the words Pure Barre on top. I have pairs with turquoise, hot pink, and periwinkle dots.
Founded in 2001 in Michigan where dancer/choreographer/lawyer Carrie Rezabek Dorr taught ballet-inspired Pilates classes, the Pure Barre brand—“it’s more than a workout; it’s a lifestyle”—includes a clothing line, a DVD workout series, and more than 300 studios. For the past seven months, I’ve “embraced the shake” and “tucked” in two time zones, with at least eight instructors. I like the workout—I’m the sort of adult exerciser who’s still overcompensating for years of pallid performance in Phys. Ed., so group fitness always motivates me: I work hard, I show up. Recently, a friend and I passed a yoga studio; I have so many class cards I never use, my friend confessed. Mentally, I high-fived myself and thought, that’s so not me.
But is Pure Barre so me? Though I’m at the studio four or five days a week, I’m not sure. Before class, I bring my equipment—a red tube and a set of dumbbells and a red Pure Barre playground ball—to a spot on the carpet and try not to make eye contact with anyone in the mirror. What is a resting face supposed to do, I wonder. I stretch, I examine my nails, I pick lint off my socks. I look at the rushed job I did shaving: my ankles always show.
***
The more I “lift, tone, and burn” (L.T.B. is written on the chalkboard, along with warnings about bare feet and exposed navels) the more I wonder what effects these workouts are having on my mental health. Pure Barre cultivates sameness, a one-size fits all model of long, lean lady-strength. It’s no coincidence we all wear the same socks.
Pure Barre promotional photos feature women my age, somewhere between twenty- and thirty-something. They’re all white, all tank-topped, all with the same trim body-type: toned but not overtly muscular. A recent Tweet on Employee Appreciation Day shows a cluster of five, smiling white women—even their hair is parted the same direction. The Corporate Team appears to be all white; the faces in the photo collage at the top of the same page are mostly white. The only acceptable bodily variation seems to be a baby bump (a baby from which you must bounce back). The only distinctly non-white face I could find on Pure Barre’s Instagram page was in a post-class shot from a studio in Auburn, VA. (It’s May—I had to scroll back to February to find her.)
Strange—in a Stepford-wives-under-our-noses way—and also damaging. I’m troubled by how that imagery interacts with the brand’s language, or what Harriet Brown, author of “Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight–and What We Can Do about It,” calls the “‘insider’ speak … that creates a sense of community among students/members, but [suggests] that anyone who’s not part of the community is ‘other,’ ‘impure.’”
It turns out, bared ankles and banned midriffs are just the tip of Pure Barre’s purity iceberg, and that iceberg is one big, outmoded stereotype of womanhood. When we lean our red, Pure Barre-emblazoned mats against the mirrored walls and focus on our upper abs, the instructor tells us, “It should feel like you’re being punched in the gut.” (Shaping the female body demands self-abuse.) During warm-ups, we “diamond out” our legs. (Let’s remember our wedding rings, BTBs.) We crunch, “back an inch, up an inch” and then “it’s one squeeze of the thighs, one tuck of the hips.” Sometimes we spend almost half the class in these exaggerated chastity poses. “Our plumbing hates your time of the month as much as you do,” reads a sign hung over the toilet at my current studio. Does the pureness of Pure Barre stem from erasing what’s in-between our legs? Is it inconceivable that someone sporting a tank that says “MY THIGHS ARE HUNGOVER” might have neutral feelings about menstruation?
But no word in the PB lexicon is as codified and in-spoken as “tuck.” Tucking might be the brand’s most pervasive move—and the most implicitly body-shaming. The word “tuck” comes from the Old English tūcian: to punish, ill-treat. In Pure Barre, we tuck it out, from side to side, tuck right, tuck left. Depending on your position, that can involve anything from tucking the hips under (dropping your tailbone is key) to tucking your navel toward your spine, a contraction of the lower abs. The only time we’re not tucking is during final stretch. The goal is to tuck until your abdominal muscles quiver.
If the tuck is Pure Barre’s butter, “embrace the shake” is their bread. “We’re looking for that shake zone,” the instructor says. Like a squad of legginged cheerleaders, we move in formation, kneeling, blank gazes facing the center of the room, our legs a fist’s distance apart, “while we burn out the tops of the thighs.” Sometimes we hinge at the waist, a fist pump frozen in the air. We’re looking for that shake when we stand “on highest tippy toes, heels, knees, thighs glued together,” and pulse down for two and up for two because “shaking is where the change happens.”
I have injured hips—I noted this on the questionnaires I filled out on my first trips to both Pure Barre studios. My hips are tight (“youch,” my physical therapist would say when he strapped himself into a seatbelt contraption to work on them), plagued with tendonosis from overdoing Ballet Beautiful exercises (Butt Series 1 and 2) from 2012 to 2014. Any intensive lower body engagement causes my legs to quiver at hummingbird-speed.
“Great shake right away,” the instructor tells me when we begin seat work. Sometimes we hinge over the barre, softening the standing leg and lifting the other (with a three-quarter bend and a soft foot or hip turned-out and foot flexed). “We’re slenderizing that side seat” or “we’re working our Pure Barre ledge, where the crease of your seat meets the top of your thighs.”
My hips cringe during seat work, so maybe that’s what leads me to start poking holes—“dime-sized holes,” like the “dime-sized circles” I’m supposed to be making with my foot—in the PB dogma. Does anyone else in class hear “dime-sized” and think of the slang (to describe a woman, not a bag of drugs)? Does a dime-sized woman need to cut her movements in half and strive constantly for a narrower seat? Are all seats meant to look the same? Doesn’t each seat have its own character? And are they all supposed to shake the same? Is embracing the shake really the secret to strength? And is strength predicated on the desire to change? Is it impure (or lazy or weak) to want the body I’ve got?
Potentially. Harriet Brown thinks “there’s a fundamental confusion at the heart of programs like this. On the one hand they promote fitness, which is a fine concept. On the other hand there’s nearly always an unspoken (or maybe it’s spoken?) goal of weight loss, visible abs, etc.” Participants are encouraged to be strong, she says, “but not too strong? Strong but not strong enough to challenge certain cultural conventions? Which somehow seems almost worse than more overtly homogenous spaces or practices. At least with foot binding you know where you stand.”
***
In middle school, I was obsessed with The Limited Too. I spent hours picturing how great I would look wearing leggings and one of their sweatshirts. The fabric was sumptuous, the length (butt-covering) just right, the styles (one navy variety with red plaid block letters still comes to mind) perfectly preppy-chic, I told my mother, but really I wanted the name and the social status I hoped it would bestow on me. All the popular girls wore The Limited Too. You could tell by theirs chests.
“Fifty dollars?” my mother balked. “No way.” Then she echoed my dad. “You want to be a walking billboard?”
I do, I thought then, though now I’m more conflicted. I pause when I see, “Thanks for my Pure Barre booty,” on another chalkboard (the studios favor a Pottery Barn-brand of rustique) during Teacher Appreciation Week. There’s something “Invasion of the Bodysnatchers” about the whole enterprise: We will all squeeze a little red ball and march in black stockinged feet. We will all bounce back from baby. We will all aspire to the same ass. Is that community?
Beneath the guise of fitness and self-improvement is Pure Barre’s body negativity. Your side seat is meant to be slenderized. And that may be what’s just so addictive about the brand’s particular strain of antifeminism, which Brown describes as “layered, which is why it’s so difficult to characterize. On the surface there’s nothing more feminist than strong women. But it all depends on your definition of strong. And theirs is quite complicated and not entirely empowering.”
The strong woman can push through that shake (and embrace it). “You came here because you wanted to change your body,” my Pure Barre instructor says in the middle of a grueling set of bridges—and I can’t disagree with her. Even if I’m not one of the women penning glowing PB reviews on blogs or YouTube, I’m part of the group, what Brown terms “a community of people who all want to ‘change their bodies’ … women who are all invested in the notion that the female body is a perpetual project. If you buy in to this idea, you’re one of the group; if not, you’re not.”
Perhaps my growing ambivalence about this project foments my isolation before class begins and I have to confront my own body and the dissatisfaction I still harbor toward it. I have to accept my culpability in this feeling—I have to embrace the shake—the shake of comparison, the shake of wanting to look skinny in my black tights, the shake of obsession, the shake of self-flagellation.
Perpetuating this notion of conditional self-worth is dangerous, of course. It invites the attitude to infect other parts our lives and allows the body to become a site of retribution. In a Dudes Digest article titled “True Life: I Went To Pure Barre and It Was Fucking Miserable,” TheeMattB recounts his grueling experience attending a class. “My [sic] fiancee keeps looking at me and smiling. Borderline laughing. Can’t wait till she’s pushing out our child between her legs. I will be standing over her with a [sic] shit eating grin on my face.”
Sucks for you, the douchebag above seems to say, and sucks for you, says the weak part of me who can’t rid herself of the desire to lift and tuck her way into a new body even as I know I’m setting myself up for failure. When we conflate fitness with self-loathing, Brown observes, “we throw that moral overlay over the entire experience, so we’re … ‘good’ if we ‘get stronger’ and lose weight and ‘bad’ if we don’t. Also, maybe more importantly, it sets up an outside standard for our basic feelings of self-worth and self-efficacy. So instead of being able to follow our own internal cues—whether they’re around hunger or exercise—we assess ourselves according to the program’s criteria. And judge ourselves harshly, usually.”
So despite my lingering hip pain, I keep going to class. I tell myself Pure Barre hasn’t exacerbated the condition. My tendonosis hasn’t worsened, but for the most part my body is the same. I don’t have a transformation story, like the kind on the PB website, where “every tuck tells a story.” I’m ashamed of that. It’s like the fitness gods can tell I haven’t fully subscribed. What I’m not ashamed of, though, is having my eyes open. You can’t help but see the other women working out around you during class. And when I watch them—none of them exactly like me, all older and younger, bodies larger and smaller, and, despite the misleading photos, with skins of many colors—and think about everything unsaid, all the mixed messages and aims we’re trying tuck toward, that’s when, for a second, I feel completely different and strong.
Trump campaign selects nation’s top white nationalist to serve as delegate to GOP convention
Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump points into the crowd while accompanied by his daughter Ivanka (L) and his wife Melania (R) at his 2016 South Carolina presidential primary night victory rally in Spartanburg, South Carolina February 20, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst - RTX27V8Q (Credit: Reuters)
One of the country’s most prominent white nationalists has just been selected as a Donald Trump delegate to the Republican National Convention from California.
William Daniel Johnson, a Los Angeles lawyer and leader of a political party that “exists to represent the political interests of White Americans,” is so excited about Donald Trump’s candidacy and its potential to mainstream white nationalism that he’s spent thousands to aid the wealthy businessman’s campaign and has be rewarded with a vote at the Republican’s nominating convention in Cleveland this July.
“Johnson got the news that he had been selected by Trump in a congratulatory email sent to him by the campaign’s California Delegate Coordinator, Katie Lagomarsino,” reported Mother Jones on Tuesday. Johnson, head of the American Freedom Party, told Mother Jones that although he never used the term “white nationalist” in his application to be a Trump delegate, “he disclosed multiple details about his background and activism.”
Of course, as one of the most notorious white nationalist in America, Johnson has garnered national headlines for his vocal and fervent support for Trump, a candidate who could barely muster a disavowal of former Klu Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke.
In February, Trump vowed to return a $250 donation Johnson made to the campaign. Last month, the white nationalist spent $6,000 on robocalls on behalf of Trump ahead of the Wisconsin primary.
“I want people to hear, to feel comfortable with, the term ‘white nationalist,’” Johnson told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel at the time.
“The white race is dying out in America and Europe because we are afraid to be called ‘racist,'” Johnson said in one robocall to voters in Vermont and Minnesota.
Gene Simmons on Prince: “How pathetic that he killed himself”
Gene Simmons (Credit: Reuters/Alex Gallardo)
In a new interview with Newsweek, Kiss figurehead Gene Simmons reflected on the untimely passings of music icons David Bowie and Prince, respectively, but in very different terms.
“Bowie was the most tragic of all because it was real sickness,” Simmons said, referring to the singer’s year-long battle with terminal liver cancer.
Prince, on the other hand, “His drugs killed him.”
“I think Prince was heads, hands and feet above all the rest of them,” he conceded. “But how pathetic that he killed himself. Don’t kid yourself, that’s what he did. Slowly, I’ll grant you … but that’s what drugs and alcohol is: a slow death.”
Sources close to Prince have indicated that the singer may have suffered from an opioid addiction as a result of treatment for chronic hip pain, according to reports.
Simmons recalled the first time he met Prince, at a club when the singer and multi-instrumentalist was just starting out, and was surprised to meet a “very self-effacing” person — a far cry from his onstage demeanor.
According to Simmons, Prince fell victim to “the cliché of clichés: drugs and alcohol” — a temptation he said he’s never had.
“I’ve never been high or drunk in my life,” Simmons said. “I can almost understand drinking or getting high if it made my schmeckel bigger, or made me smarter, but nothing happens.”
Yet Simmons doesn’t believe Prince’s legacy will be “hurt” by his alleged drug use.
“Your legacy becomes even bigger, you become more iconic, if you die before your time—Marilyn Monroe, Elvis and all that,” he explained. “They capture the youth.”
Read the full interview over at Newsweek.
Rush Limbaugh admits Republicans have been trolled: “Trump is an internet troll”
I’ll skip the obvious joke about a kettle calling the pot black, but come on, Rush Limbaugh remarking on Donald Trump’s trollish ways is certainly his most trollish statement of late.
“Trump is an internet troll,” the right-wing talker said on his radio show Tuesday, explaining to his “Dittohead” listeners, as he so affectionately refers to them, that “American politics is determined by trolls on the internet today.”
“Maybe not determined,” Limbaugh quickly pulled-back a bit, “but internet trolls have a lot of say about what people are thought of.”
“Trump has brought the internet troll to the campaign,” Limbaugh argued, pointing to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s notorious Twitter feed:
Now, there’s a negative connotation to internet trolls, but at the same time, this is becoming mainstream. This kind of speech pattern, the way people speak, this is common on the internet, this is the kind of stuff that people say everyday everywhere on the internet multiple times a day, and nothing happens to them.
Of course, Limbaugh was a troll before internet trolling was even a thing. It’s all very meta.
Listen and laugh while Limbaugh, an expert-level troll, explains to his talk radio listeners how Trump has brought forth the finest internet trolling techniques to the race for the White House, via Media Matters:
