Daily Archives: March 11, 2017

New York Times

Ouster of South Korean President Could Return Liberals to Power New York Times Now, after being out of power for almost 10 years, the South Korean liberal opposition is on the verge of retaking the presidency with the historic court ruling on Friday that ousted its conservative enemy, President Park Geun-hye, who had been ... and more »

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Ouster of South Korean President Could Return Liberals to Power - New York Times

Poll position: Labor leader Mark McGowan was in line for a resounding win early on.

Labor is headed to victory in Western Australia and is on track to endpremier Colin Barnett's eight and half year term aftera controversial preference deal with Pauline Hanson's One Nation appears unlikely to salvage a third term for the Liberals.

As counting continues in WA, polling conducted by Channel 9 on Saturday predicted a 12 percentage point swing to Labor, which would deliver it more than the 10 additional seats it needs to claim victory.

The Galaxy exit poll put Labor ahead on a 54.5 per cent to 45.5 per cent two-party preferred basis.

The exit poll put Labor's primary vote at 41 per cent and the Liberal primary vote at 33 per cent. One Nation came in at just 6 per cent.

Retiring Liberal MP, Kim Hames, a former deputy leader, said the exit poll showed "pretty scary numbers".

He hit out at the Liberals preference deal with One Nation, saying he felt the reaction from Liberal voters who were upset and decided not to vote for the party.

The Liberals agreed to preferenceOne Nation ahead of its alliance partner, the WA Nationals, in the upper house in exchange for One Nation to preference the Liberals before Labor in the lower house.

Dr Hames said the preference dealwas "not a good move".

"I think that is a big lesson for everybody," Mr Hames said on Channel 9.

It comes after two opinion polls published on Saturday put Labor ahead 54 per cent to 46 per cent on a two party preferred basis. If uniform, it would deliver Labor 14 seats, more than the 10 it needs to seal victory.

Polls close at 6pm WST/ 9pm AEST.

Labor leader Mark McGowan, 49, is the state's longest serving opposition leader to contest the premiership in 40 years and has promised to slash the public service, including culling top earning bureaucrats by 20 per cent.

He has also promised to set up a commission of inquiry into the Barnett government's spending, tear up contracts for the Perth Freight Link and attempt to redirect $1.2 billion in Federal funding for the project to his public transport initiative Metronet.

Mr Barnett, the state's second longest serving Liberal premier, will be credited for one of the biggest transformations of Perth and regional towns in the state's history.

He entered his campaign for a third term fighting a strong mood for change with the economy spluttering amid a post-mining boom slump.

WA has the highest unemployment rate in the country and jobs and job security was a key issue for voters, particularly in outer metropolitan suburbs.

The election has Federal ramifications, with prime minister Malcolm Turnbull trailing 45-55 in the national polls and NSW and Tasmania likely to be left as the only remaining states the Liberals govern.

The WA election was closely watched as a possible test case for the conservative politics and how to manage the rise of populist protectionist political movements occurring around the globe.

It also represented the first test of the strength of a resurgent Pauline Hanson's One Nation party and is the first election in Australia since Donald Trump was elected US president in November.

But One Nation were struck with controversy first a backlash from its supporters and some candidates over its preference swap arrangement with the Liberals and then a horror final week campaigning in WA.

Senator Hanson was dogged by her apparent support for parents to refuse to vaccinate their children, upset Queensland supporters over comments she would increase WA's GST income at the expense of her home state, was threatened with legal action by former staff while searing frustration over the party's preference deal with the Liberal hit a crescendo on Friday when its most high profile recruit, Margaret Dodd, quit.

Ms Dodd accused Senator Hanson of running a dictatorship and not caring about the people of WA but only here "personal power".

A Newspoll published on Saturday in The Australian showed the party's support had sunk from 13 per cent to 8 per cent in the space of six weeks.

The blame game for the Liberals loss begun even before polls opened on Saturday with senior Liberal figures upset about how Mr Barnett tackled the One Nation preference deal (while he said he supported it, it made him feel "uncomfortable").

There is the obvious ruing over whether a change of leadership should have happened. Mr Barnett was mired in leadership speculation for most of last year and by September defeated a tilt for his leadership by former transport minister Dean Nalder.

Others are upset the Liberals did not take the sale of the state's electricity distribution network Western Power to the 2013 election, when the party thumped Labor that struggled in the face of former prime minister Julia Gillard's carbon tax and mining tax.

While Federal politics hurt Labor in 2013, it was the reverse in 2017.

Mr Turnbull's first visit to WA in six months, and his first during the election campaign, was a disaster as he made a blunder over WA's GST take.

To rub salt in to the Liberal wounds, social media was abuzz on Saturday with photos of Mr Turnbull enjoying pints of beer at a pub in Sydney's Woolloomooloo with journalist from the satirical Betoota Advocate while opposition leader Bill Shorten joined Mr McGowan on the hustings, tucking in to a "democracy sausage" (in the correct fashion).

The Liberals also came under fire on Saturday for sending text messages to voters, reminiscent of Labor's 'Mediscare' texts during the Federal election.

Some voters received a text messages from a sender called 'LaborRisk' that read: "

"FACT: Household bills will go up under a Labor government. Mark McGowan is not worth the risk."

Mr Barnett has said he would retire to the backbench if the Liberals lost. However, he is strongly tipped to resign altogether. Mr Barnett had planned to resign from politics in 2008 before the party plucked him for the leadership to replace Troy Buswell. He went on to beat the Labor government destroyed by its links to former premier Brian Burke.

Mr McGowan, 49, has positioned himself as afresh, youthful alternativeto Mr Barnett.

The Labor leader, a former navy lawyer, lives in the working-class suburb of Rockingham about an hour south of Perth with his wife Sarah and their three school-age children.

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WA election: Labor headed for victory as Liberal knives out over One Nation deal - The Australian Financial Review

This is the ninth article in a series that reviews news coverage of the 2016 general election, explores how Donald Trump won and why his chances were underrated by most of the American media.

Last summer, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in what bettors, financial markets and the London-based media regarded as a colossal upset. Reporters and pundits were quick to blame the polls for the unexpected result. But the polls had been fine, more or less: In the closing days of the Brexit campaign, theyd shown an almost-even race, and Leaves narrow victory (by a margin just under 4 percentage points) was about as consistent with them as it was with anything else. The failure was not so much with the polls but with the people who were analyzing them.

The U.S. presidential election, as Ive argued, was something of a similar case. No, the polls didnt show a toss-up, as they had in Brexit. But the reporting was much more certain of Clintons chances than it should have been based on the polls. Much of The New York Timess coverage, for instance, implied that Clintons odds were close to 100 percent. In an article on Oct. 17 more than three weeks before Election Day they portrayed the race as being effectively over, the only question being whether Clinton should seek a landslide or instead assist down-ballot Democrats:

Hillary Clintons campaign is planning its most ambitious push yet into traditionally right-leaning states, a new offensive aimed at extending her growing advantage over Donald J. Trump while bolstering down-ballot candidates in what party leaders increasingly suggest could be a sweeping victory for Democrats at every level. []

The maneuvering speaks to the unexpected tension facing Mrs. Clinton as she hurtles toward what aides increasingly believe will be a decisive victory a pleasant problem, for certain, but one that has nonetheless scrambled the campaigns strategy weeks before Election Day: Should Mrs. Clinton maximize her own margin, aiming to flip as many red states as possible to run up an electoral landslide, or prioritize the partys congressional fortunes, redirecting funds and energy down the ballot?

This is not to say the election was a toss-up in mid-October, which was one of the high-water marks of the campaign for Clinton. But while a Trump win was unlikely, it should hardly have been unthinkable. And yet the Times, famous for its to be sure equivocations, wasnt even contemplating the possibility of a Trump victory.

Its hard to reread this coverage without recalling Sean Trendes essay on unthinkability bias, which he wrote in the wake of the Brexit vote. Just as was the case in the U.S. presidential election, voting on the referendum had split strongly along class, education and regional lines, with voters outside of London and without advanced degrees being much more likely to vote to leave the EU. The reporters covering the Brexit campaign, on the other hand, were disproportionately well-educated and principally based in London. They tended to read ambiguous signs anything from polls to the musings of taxi drivers as portending a Remain win, and many of them never really processed the idea that Britain could vote to leave the EU until it actually happened.

So did journalists in Washington and London make the apocryphal Pauline Kael mistake, refusing to believe that Trump or Brexit could win because nobody they knew was voting for them? Thats not quite what Trende was arguing. Instead, its that political experts arent a very diverse group and tend to place a lot of faith in the opinions of other experts and other members of the political establishment. Once a consensus view is established, it tends to reinforce itself until and unless theres very compelling evidence for the contrary position. Social media, especially Twitter, can amplify the groupthink further. It can be an echo chamber.

I recently reread James Surowieckis book The Wisdom of Crowds which, despite its name, spends as much time contemplating the shortcomings of such wisdom as it does celebrating its successes. Surowiecki argues that crowds usually make good predictions when they satisfy these four conditions:

Political journalism scores highly on the fourth condition, aggregation. While Surowiecki usually has something like a financial or betting market in mind when he refers to aggregation, the broader idea is that theres some way for individuals to exchange their opinions instead of keeping them to themselves. And my gosh, do political journalists have a lot of ways to share their opinions with one another, whether through their columns, at major events such as the political conventions or, especially, through Twitter.

But those other three conditions? Political journalism fails miserably along those dimensions.

Diversity of opinion? For starters, American newsrooms are not very diverse along racial or gender lines, and its not clear the situation is improving much. And in a country where educational attainment is an increasingly important predictor of cultural and political behavior, some 92 percent of journalists have college degrees. A degree didnt used to be a de facto prerequisite for a reporting job; just 70 percent of journalists had college degrees in 1982 and only 58 percent did in 1971.

The political diversity of journalists is not very strong, either. As of 2013, only 7 percent of them identified as Republicans (although only 28 percent called themselves Democrats with the majority saying they were independents). And although its not a perfect approximation in most newsrooms, the people who issue endorsements are not the same as the ones who do reporting theres reason to think that the industry was particularly out of sync with Trump. Of the major newspapers that endorsed either Clinton or Trump, only 3 percent (2 of 59) endorsed Trump. By comparison, 46 percent of newspapers to endorse either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney endorsed Romney in 2012. Furthermore, as the media has become less representative of right-of-center views and as conservatives have rebelled against the political establishment theres been an increasing and perhaps self-reinforcing cleavage between conservative news and opinion outlets such as Breitbart and the rest of the media.

Although its harder to measure, Id also argue that theres a lack of diversity when it comes to skill sets and methods of thinking in political journalism. Publications such as Buzzfeed or (the now defunct) Gawker.com get a lot of shade from traditional journalists when they do things that challenge conventional journalistic paradigms. But a lot of traditional journalistic practices are done by rote or out of habit, such as routinely granting anonymity to staffers to discuss campaign strategy even when there isnt much journalistic merit in it. Meanwhile, speaking from personal experience, Ive found the reception of data journalists by traditional journalists to be unfriendly, although there have been exceptions.

Independence? This is just as much of a problem. Crowds can be wise when people do a lot of thinking for themselves before coming together to exchange their views. But since at least the days of The Boys on the Bus, political journalism has suffered from a pack mentality. Events such as conventions and debates literally gather thousands of journalists together in the same room; attend one of these events, and you can almost smell the conventional wisdom being manufactured in real time. (Consider how a consensus formed that Romney won the first debate in 2012 when it had barely even started, for instance.) Social media Twitter in particular can amplify these information cascades, with a single tweet receiving hundreds of thousands of impressions and shaping the way entire issues are framed. As a result, it can be largely arbitrary which storylines gain traction and which ones dont. What seems like a multiplicity of perspectives might just be one or two, duplicated many times over.

Decentralization? Surowiecki writes about the benefit of local knowledge, but the political news industry has become increasingly consolidated in Washington and New York as local newspapers have suffered from a decade-long contraction. That doesnt necessarily mean local reporters in Wisconsin or Michigan or Ohio should have picked up Trumpian vibrations on the ground in contradiction to the polls. But as weve argued, national reporters often flew into these states with pre-baked narratives for instance, that they were decreasingly representative of contemporary America and fit the facts to suit them, neglecting their importance to the Electoral College. A more geographically decentralized reporting pool might have asked more questions about why Clinton wasnt campaigning in Wisconsin, for instance, or why it wasnt more of a problem for her that she was struggling in polls of traditional bellwethers such as Ohio and Iowa. If local newspapers had been healthier economically, they might also have commissioned more high-quality state polls; the lack of good polling was a problem in Michigan and Wisconsin especially.

There was once a notion that whatever challenges the internet created for journalisms business model, it might at least lead readers to a more geographically and philosophically diverse array of perspectives. But its not clear thats happening, either. Instead, based on data from the news aggregation site Memeorandum, the top news sources (such as the Times, The Washington Post and Politico) have earned progressively more influence over the past decade:

The share of total exposure for the top five news sources climbed from roughly 25 percent a decade ago to around 35 percent last year, and has spiked to above 40 percent so far in 2017. While not a perfect measure, this is one sign the digital age hasnt necessarily democratized the news media. Instead, the most notable difference in Memeorandum sources between 2007 and 2017 is the decline of independent blogs; many of the most popular ones from the late aughts either folded or (like FiveThirtyEight) were bought by larger news organizations. Thus, blogs and local newspapers two of the better checks on Northeast Corridor conventional wisdom run amok have both had less of a say in the conversation.

All things considered, then, the conditions of political journalism are poor for crowd wisdom and ripe for groupthink. So what to do about it, then?

Initiatives to increase decentralization would help, although they wont necessarily be easy. Increased subscription revenues at newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post is an encouraging sign for journalism, but a revival of local and regional newspapers or a more sustainable business model for independent blogs would do more to reduce groupthink in the industry.

Likewise, improving diversity is liable to be a challenge, especially because the sort of diversity that Surowiecki is concerned with will require making improvements on multiple fronts (demographic diversity, political diversity, diversity of skill sets). Still, the research Surowiecki cites is emphatic that there are diminishing returns to having too many of the same types of people in small groups or organizations. Teams that consist entirely of high-IQ people may underperform groups that contain a mix of high-IQ and medium-IQ participants, for example, because the high-IQ people are likely to have redundant strengths and similar blind spots.

That leaves independence. In some ways the best hope for a short-term fix might come from an attitudinal adjustment: Journalists should recalibrate themselves to be more skeptical of the consensus of their peers. Thats because a position that seems to have deep backing from the evidence may really just be a reflection from the echo chamber. You should be looking toward how much evidence there is for a particular position as opposed to how many people hold that position: Having 20 independent pieces of evidence that mostly point in the same direction might indeed reflect a powerful consensus, while having 20 like-minded people citing the same warmed-over evidence is much less powerful. Obviously this can be taken too far and in most fields, its foolish (and annoying) to constantly doubt the market or consensus view. But in a case like politics where the conventional wisdom can congeal so quickly and yet has so often been wrong a certain amount of contrarianism can go a long way.

Continued here:

There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble - FiveThirtyEight

Middlebury College students turn their backs to Charles Murray during his lecture on March 2, 2017. Photo: Lisa Rathke/AP

Heres the latest in the assault on liberal democracy. It happened more than a week ago, but I cannot get it out of my consciousness. A group of conservative students at Middlebury College in Vermont invited the highly controversial author Charles Murray to speak on campus about his latest book, Coming Apart. His talk was shut down by organized chanting in its original venue, and disrupted when it was shifted to a nearby room and livestreamed. When Murray and his faculty interlocutor, Allison Stanger, then left to go to their car, they were surrounded by a mob, which tried to stop them leaving the campus. Someone in the melee grabbed Stanger by the hair and twisted her neck so badly she had to go to the emergency room (she is still suffering from a concussion). After they escaped, their dinner at a local restaurant was crashed by the same mob, and they had to go out of town to eat.

None of this is very surprising, given the current atmosphere on most American campuses. And protests against Murray are completely legitimate. The book he co-authored with Harvard professor Richard Herrnstein more than 20 years ago, The Bell Curve, included a chapter on empirical data showing variations in the largely overlapping bell curves of IQ scores between racial groups. Their provocation was to assign these differences to both the environment and genetics. The genetic aspect could be and was exploited by racists and bigots.

I dont think that chapter was necessary for the books arguments, but I do believe in the right of good-faith scholars to publish data as well as the right of others to object, critique, and debunk. If the protesters at Middlebury had protested and disrupted the event for a period of time, and then let it continue, Id be highly sympathetic, even though race and IQ were not the subject of Murrays talk. If theyd challenged the data or the arguments of the book, Id be delighted. But this, alas, is not what they did. (I should add up-front that I am friends with both Murray and Stanger having edited a symposium on The Bell Curve in The New Republic over two decades ago, and having known Allison since we were both grad students in government at Harvard.)

But what grabbed me was the deeply disturbing 40-minute video of the event, posted on YouTube. It brings the incident to life in a way words cannot. At around the 19-minute mark, the students explained why they shut down the talk, and it helped clarify for me what exactly the meaning of intersectionality is.

Intersectionality is the latest academic craze sweeping the American academy. On the surface, its a recent neo-Marxist theory that argues that social oppression does not simply apply to single categories of identity such as race, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc. but to all of them in an interlocking system of hierarchy and power. At least, thats my best attempt to define it briefly. But watching that video helps show how an otherwise challenging social theory can often operate in practice.

It is operating, in Orwells words, as a smelly little orthodoxy, and it manifests itself, it seems to me, almost as a religion. It posits a classic orthodoxy through which all of human experience is explained and through which all speech must be filtered. Its version of original sin is the power of some identity groups over others. To overcome this sin, you need first to confess, i.e., check your privilege, and subsequently live your life and order your thoughts in a way that keeps this sin at bay. The sin goes so deep into your psyche, especially if you are white or male or straight, that a profound conversion is required.

Like the Puritanism once familiar in New England, intersectionality controls language and the very terms of discourse. It enforces manners. It has an idea of virtue and is obsessed with upholding it. The saints are the most oppressed who nonetheless resist. The sinners are categorized in various ascending categories of demographic damnation, like something out of Dante. The only thing this religion lacks, of course, is salvation. Life is simply an interlocking drama of oppression and power and resistance, ending only in death. Its Marx without the final total liberation.

It operates as a religion in one other critical dimension: If you happen to see the world in a different way, if youre a liberal or libertarian or even, gasp, a conservative, if you believe that a university is a place where any idea, however loathsome, can be debated and refuted, you are not just wrong, you are immoral. If you think that arguments and ideas can have a life independent of white supremacy, you are complicit in evil. And you are not just complicit, your heresy is a direct threat to others, and therefore needs to be extinguished. You cant reason with heresy. You have to ban it. It will contaminate others souls, and wound them irreparably.

And what I saw on the video struck me most as a form of religious ritual a secular exorcism, if you will that reaches a frenzied, disturbing catharsis. When Murray starts to speak, the students stand and ritually turn their backs on him in silence. The heretic must not be looked at, let alone engaged. Then they recite a common liturgy in unison from sheets of paper. Heres how they begin: This is not respectful discourse, or a debate about free speech. These are not ideas that can be fairly debated, it is not representative of the other side to give a platform to such dangerous ideologies. There is not a potential for an equal exchange of ideas. They never specify which of Murrays ideas they are referring to. Nor do they explain why a lecture on a recent book about social inequality cannot be a respectful discourse. The speaker is open to questions and there is a faculty member onstage to engage him afterward. She came prepared with tough questions forwarded from specialists in the field. And yet: We cannot engage fully with Charles Murray, while he is known for readily quoting himself. Because of that, we see this talk as hate speech. They know this before a single word of the speech has been spoken.

Then this: Science has always been used to legitimize racism, sexism, classism, transphobia, ableism, and homophobia, all veiled as rational and fact, and supported by the government and state. In this world today, there is little that is true fact. This, it seems to me, gets to the heart of the question not that the students shut down a speech, but why they did. I do not doubt their good intentions. But, in a strange echo of the Trumpian right, they are insisting on the superiority of their orthodoxy to facts. They are hostile, like all fundamentalists, to science, because it might counter doctrine. And they shut down the event because intersectionality rejects the entire idea of free debate, science, or truth independent of white male power. At the end of this part of the ceremony, an individual therefore shouts: Who is the enemy? And the congregation responds: White supremacy!

They then expel the heretic in a unified chant: Hey hey, ho ho! Charles Murray has got to go. Then: Racist, Sexist, Anti-gay. Charles Murray, Go away! Murrays old work on IQ demonstrates no meaningful difference between men and women, and Murray has long supported marriage equality. He passionately opposes eugenics. Hes a libertarian. But none of that matters. Intersectionality, remember? If youre deemed a sinner on one count, you are a sinner on them all. If you think that race may be both a social construction and related to genetics, your claim to science is just another form of oppression. It is indeed hate speech. At a later moment, the students start clapping in unison, and you can feel the hysteria rising, as the chants grow louder. Your message is hatred. We will not tolerate it! The final climactic chant is Shut it down! Shut it down! It feels like something out of The Crucible. Most of the students have never read a word of Murrays and many professors who supported the shutdown admitted as much. But the intersectional zeal is so great he must be banished even to the point of physical violence.

This matters, it seems to me, because reason and empirical debate are essential to the functioning of a liberal democracy. We need a common discourse to deliberate. We need facts independent of anyones ideology or political side, if we are to survive as a free and democratic society. Trump has surely shown us this. And if a university cannot allow these facts and arguments to be freely engaged, then nowhere is safe. Universities are the sanctuary cities of reason. If reason must be subordinate to ideology even there, our experiment in self-government is over.

Liberal democracy is suffering from a concussion as surely as Allison is.

Meanwhile, of course, President Trump continues his assault on the very same independent truth in this case, significantly more frightening given his position as the most powerful individual on the planet. He too has a contempt for any facts that do not fit his own ideology or self-image. Thats why the lies he repeats are not just moments of self-interested dishonesty. They are designed to erode the very notion of an empirical reality, independent of his own ideology and power. They are an attack on reason itself. A fact-driven media has to be discredited as fake news if it challenges Trumps agenda. Equally, a bureaucracy designed impartially to implement legislation has to be delegitimized, if its fact-based neutrality challenges Trumps worldview. And so the administrative state, in Steve Bannons words, has to be deconstructed.

Likewise, a health-care bill must be passed through committee before an independent CBO can empirically score it. The overwhelming conclusion of climate scientists that carbon is warming the Earth irreversibly is simply denied by the new head of the EPA. The judiciary can have no legitimate, independent stance if it too counters the presidents interests. A judge who opposes Trump is a so-called judge. Equally, intelligence-gathering can have no validity if it undermines Trumps interests. It suddenly becomes intelligence. It can be ignored. Worse, the intelligence agencies are maligned as inherently political, rather than empirical. Last week, Trump went even further, claiming, with no evidence, that the Justice Department colluded in a criminal wiretap with the previous president to target Trumps candidacy in the last election. Maybe this was designed merely as a distraction from the accumulating lies of his campaign surrogates about their contacts with Russian officials. Maybe it was another temper tantrum from a man with no ability to constrain his emotions by reason. But I tend to think Peter Beinarts take is closer to the mark. Trump was delegitimizing the Justice Department so that he can reject the conclusion of any investigation of his campaigns ties to Russia as politically rigged:

They are all corrupt. They are all agents of the opposition, part of the massive conspiracy to deny Trump his rightful triumph. And thus, the independent standards by which they judge his actions are a sham. There are no independent standards. There is only the truth that comes from Trump himself.

This is the vortex we are being led into by the most reckless, feckless, and malevolent president in this countrys history. It is a vortex where reality itself must subordinate itself to one political side; where facts are always instruments of power and nothing else; where our entire Constitution, designed to balance power against power to give truth and reason a chance, is being deliberately corroded from within. Its been seven weeks. And the damage done to our way of life is already deep, and deepening.

Watch Paul Ryans Adams Apple When Hes Asked Why His Health Plan Cuts Taxes for the Rich

Allison Williams and Samuel L. Jackson on Getting Excited While Filming Sex Scenes: Damned If You Do, Damned If You Dont

Julia Louis-Dreyfus Goes on a Real Face Journey Watching Her Sons Basketball Game

Thats the year it was meant to explode, because Obama wont be here, the president explained to the House GOP leadership.

Then-president-elect Donald Trump had asked the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York to stay on in November.

GOP Representative Justin Amash of Michigan tweeted an apology to his constituents.

Steve Bannons old site (correctly) notes that the House GOPs Obamacare replacement would hurt Trumps base and endanger his party in 2018.

And then force you to mitigate your genetic liabilities, or else accept higher premiums on your health insurance.

As GOP leaders try to whip the AHCA through the House unchanged, Trump is negotiating with conservatives in a way that could destroy Senate support.

Executive-branch employees are supposed to keep quiet on jobs numbers for an hour after their release.

Trump claims he didnt know that Flynn had lobbied for Turkey when he hired him. But his transition team was informed of that before Inauguration Day.

The action star is said to be keen on a Senate run so he can needle Trump, but hell first have to win back Californians.

Another report that hints at the the marginalization of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

A simple question explains the logic of the GOPs hatred for universal health insurance.

Which is to say, pretty much in line with what was happening under Obama.

Its pretty clear the economy was not Clintons problem.

Its the latest academic craze, and in practice it veers far from principles of liberal democracy.

Hes avoided questions from reporters, and wont take any members of the press on his trip to Asia.

Its still unclear what the barrier will look like, and even Republicans are questioning how it will be paid for.

Her ouster following a corruption scandal could have a major impact on how Asia and the U.S. handle North Korea.

Tom Cotton tells CNN that Paul Ryans bill would not solve the problems of our health-care system and would make things probably worse.

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Liberal Democracy Is Suffering From a Concussion - New York Magazine

AMSTERDAM Xandra Lammers lives on an island in Amsterdam, the back door of her modern and spacious four-bedroom house opening onto a graceful canal where ducks, swans and canoes glide by.

The translation business she and her husband run from their home is thriving. The neighborhood is booming, with luxury homes going up as fast as workers can build them, a quietly efficient tramway to speed residents to work in the world-renowned city center, and parks, bike paths, art galleries, beaches and cafes all within a short amble.

By outward appearances, Lammers is living the Dutch dream. But in the 60-year-olds telling, she has been dropped into the middle of a nightmare, one in which Western civilization is under assault from the Muslim immigrants who have become her neighbors.

The influx has been too much. The borders should close, said Lammers, soft-spoken with pale blue eyes and brown hair that frames a deceptively serene-looking face. If this continues, our culture will cease to exist.

(Video: Anna-Maria Magnusson / Full Story Media for The Washington Post)

To Europes powers that be, the threat looks dramatically different but no less grave: If enough voters agree with Lammers and support the far right in elections here on Wednesday andacross the continent later this year, then its modern Europe itself defined by cooperation, openness and multicultural pluralism that could come crashing down.

[As Europe braces for the Trump era, a showdown looms over values ]

The stakes have risen sharply as Europeans anti-establishment anger has swelled. In interviews across the Netherlands in recent days, far-right voters expressed stridently nationalist, anti-immigrant views that were long considered fringe but that have now entered the Dutch mainstream.

Voters young and old, rich and poor, urban and rural said they would back the Geert Wilders-led Freedom Party no longer the preserve of the left-behinds which promises to solve the countrys problems by shutting borders, closing mosques and helping to dismantle the European Union.

Theyve found a very powerful narrative, said Koen Damhuis, a researcher at the European University Institute who studies the far right. By creating a master conflict of the national versus the foreign, theyre able to attract support from all elements of society.

Along the way, Europes old assurances have been swept aside. The far right may exist, the continents political establishment has long told itself, but a virtuous brew of growing economic prosperity, increased cross-border integration and rising education levels would blunt its appeal. Most important all, the pungent memory of the nationalist right's last turn in power would keep it from ever gaining control in Europe again.

But in 2017, every one of those assumptions is being challenged perhaps even exploded.

After the transatlantic jolts ofBrexit and Donald Trump last year, continental Europe is bracing for a possible string of paradigm-rattling firsts in its postwar history.

[In working-class Britain, populist wave threatens to smash traditional order]

In France,far-right leader Marine Le Pen has a credible shot at a triumph in spring presidential elections. In Germany,an anti-immigrant party appears poised to win seats in the national parliament this fall. And here in the Netherlands, a man convicted only months ago of hate speech could wind up on top when votes are counted in next weeks national elections.

At first glance, the Netherlands a small nation of 17million that has long punched above its weight on the global stage through seafaring exploration and trade seems an unlikely setting for a populist revolt.

Unlike in France, where the economy continues to stagger nearly a decade on from the global financial crisis, the indicators in the Netherlands are broadly positive: falling unemployment, healthy growth and relatively low inequality. By most measures, the Dutch are some of the happiest people on Earth.

And unlike Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the countrys borders to a historic influx of refugees in 2015, the Netherlands has been relatively insulated from mass immigration. Compared with its neighbors, the Dutch took significantly fewer asylum seekers during the refugee crisis, and much of the countrys nonnative population settled in the Netherlands decades ago.

Those differences make it all the more surprising that the far rights message resonates here and hint at just how difficult it could be to halt the global populist wave.

For much of the past two years, Wilderss Freedom Party has led the polls, though it has recently dropped into a virtual tie with the ruling center right.

Because of the deeply fragmented nature of Dutch politics there will be 28 parties on the ballot Wednesday the Freedom Party could come out on top with just 20percent of the vote. Even if it does, it is considered extremely unlikely that Wilders would end up governing, because other parties have spurned him.

But he has already had an outsize influence, forcing rival politicians including the prime minister, Mark Rutte, to shift their policies and rhetoric in his direction.

To many Wilders supporters, the overall picture of a growing economy with a comparatively small number of recent immigrants is beside the point. Their reasons for backing the platinum-haired politician who refers to Moroccans as scum and advocates a total ban on Muslim immigration run much deeper.

The main issue is identity, said Joost Niemller, a journalist and author who has written extensively on Wilders and is sympathetic to his cause. People feel theyre losing their Dutch identity and Dutch society. The neighborhoods are changing. Immigrants are coming in. And they cant say anything about it because theyll be called racist. So they feel helpless. Because they feel helpless, they get angry.

And today, that anger can be found far beyond the poorer, less-educated, working-class areas where Wilders and his party first gained substantial support.

I hear it on the tennis court and at the golf club. People dont want immigrants, said Geert Tomlow, a former Freedom Party candidate who fell out with Wilders but still sympathizes with many of his positions. One-third of Holland is angry. Were angry. We dont want all these changes.

That is true even in places where little seems to have changed.

Teunis Den Hertog, a 34-year-old small-business owner, lives in a pastoral town that he said is virtually untouched by immigration. Ive heard theres a Turkish man who lives here but just outside the town, thankfully, he said.

Nonetheless, Den Hertog said he wants the government to close the country to new arrivals and reestablish compulsory border checks for the first time in decades.

You can see a vehicle coming with a lot of men with dark skin and pick them out, said Den Hertog, who grew up poor and one of nine children but now earns enough to afford a comfortable, suburban-style house for his family of four. Otherwise, its just too dangerous.

Den Hertog said he typically avoids the countrys diverse, cosmopolitan cities. But Wilders supporters exist there, too, as Lammers the Amsterdam island resident can attest.

[Is it too late for the Wests center left?]

University-educated, financially successful and raised in the culturally progressive firmament of the Netherlands biggest city, Lammers had long staked her ground on the left. Her father was a regional mayor from the Labour Party, and she identified as a supporter well into adulthood.

I was very politically correct, she said. I believed in the social experiment.

It was a move up the social ladder that precipitated her shift across the political spectrum.

In 2005, she and her husband bought their home in the Amsterdam neighborhood of IJburg, an innovative development built on a cluster of artificial islands.

Like many who moved to the neighborhood, Lammers and her husband did so because the area offered bigger houses at lower prices than could be found in the crammed city center. And at first, it was everything they had hoped.

It had a village feeling. Everyone knew each other. They put a temporary supermarket in a tent, she recalled. It was cozy.

But then came a surprise. Families of Moroccan and Turkish origin started moving in, part of a social program to dedicate 30percent of the developments housing to people on low incomes, the disabled or the elderly.

Suddenly, she said, white Dutch residents had to share their streets, gardens and elevators with Muslim women wearing headscarves and men sporting beards. Crime, noise and litter soon intruded on her urban idyll, she said.

The newcomers generally spoke Dutch, and many seemed to work. But she faulted them for not integrating, the evidence of which she said could be found in their traditional dress and attendance at a modest, storefront mosque.

She suggested they try church instead, though Lammers said she does not attend. (Sometimes on Sunday I watch American church on the television, Lammers said. Theyre very opposed to Islam. I like that.)

If the newcomers have hurt her neighborhoods desirability, its not apparent in the home prices, which have sharply risen. Nor is it visible on the streets, which are clean, tidy and, on a mild late winters day, filled with children of various ethnic backgrounds happily riding scooters and bikes. But Lammers remains bitter.

You think youre going to live in a well-to-do neighborhood, she said. But you end up living in a so-called black neighborhood because of the socialist ideology.

Among the beneficiaries of that ideology is one of Lammerss friends, Ronald Meulendijks, a 44-year-old who has been living on full-time medical disability since he was 29.

The government pays him the equivalent of $1,000 a month and provides him with a steep discount on a light-filled, three-bedroom apartment in the heart of IJburg benefits he said he deserves as a native-born Dutchman with a long pedigree.

My whole family of seven generations paid taxes, he said.

Muslim immigrants and their children, by contrast, are undeserving, he said.

When I see all the refugees getting everything for free, I get very angry. I want to throw something at the television, said Meulendijks, who dotes on his pair of chow-chow rescue dogs and serves visitors to his art-filled apartment copious tea and strawberry pie. A government has to treat its own people correctly before accepting new ones. First, you must take care of your own.

And if the government fails, Meulendijks has dark visions of whats to come.

I think Holland will need a civil war, he said, between the people who dont belong here and the real people.

To drive home the point, Meulendijks has decorated his panoramic windows with five large posters bearing the face of Wilders and his partys campaign slogan: The Netherlands is ours again.

A pronounced nick in the glass the result of a carefully aimed rock suggests not everyone in the neighborhood agrees with Meulendijkss clash-of-civilizations worldview.

Neighbors said they did not recognize the grim vision of IJburg that Lammers and Meulendijks described.

Which country you come from or which religion you have, it doesnt matter here, said Iris Scheppingen, 41, a resident for the past decade who is raising three children in IJburg. The children all play together.

At a nearby halal pizza restaurant one of the neighborhoods few businesses that explicitly cater to Muslim customers the owner said the area was safe and quiet. He said he had never noticed a cultural clash.

Nice people here, said 49-year-old Farhad Salimi as his staff of young kitchen workers slung pies and sprinkled toppings. Everyone comes here for pizza. Immigrants. Dutch people. Everybody. We dont have problems.

The world, however, was a different story.

A refugee from Iran who moved to the Netherlands nearly 30 years ago, Salimi said he had seen what religious zealotry and the politics of exclusion did to his native land.

Now, the gray-haired Salimi fears, it is happening across the West, even in the peaceful and prosperous country that had so enthusiastically welcomed him.

The politicians are exploiting divisions, turning people against one another for their own gain, he said. Extremism is rising. Where will it end?

Everywhere, he said solemnly, is messed up.

Karla Adam in London contributed to this report.

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Anti-immigrant anger threatens to remake the liberal Netherlands - Washington Post

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Posted: Mar 11, 2017 12:01 AM

It has been many years since late night television comedy was enjoyable. Its heyday was during the Johnny Carson era when Americans were entertained by a host with tremendous skill. Carson was a true talent who combined great humor with impeccable timing. The Tonight Show featured the best guests and a host who knew how to hold an audience. Carson did not have to stoop to crude humor and he did not alienate Republicans or Democrats, for he made fun of politicians from both parties in equal doses. Johnny Carson was not known as a liberal or a conservative, only the best late night comedy host of all-time.

When Jay Leno replaced Carson there was a tremendous uproar from fans of David Letterman; however, the choice was the right one. Leno provided audiences with good-natured humor and he delivered excellent ratings, winning the battle against Letterman for most of his 22 years on the air. While Letterman turned off many viewers with his liberal slant, Leno was quite similar to Carson, fairly making fun of both Republicans and Democrats.

Today, there are no more late night comics in the mold of Leno or Carson. The entire line-up of current late night comedians is solidly liberal.

In the last month, the new ratings king of late night comedy is Stephen Colbert, who is on a hot streak after non-stop Donald Trump bashing for the past few months. This is bringing in younger viewers, while sacrificing older and more conservative viewers.

The only difference between Colbert and the other liberal hosts such as Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel is the intensity of his attacks against Trump. In fact, in a recent segment, Colbert compared Trump to the cannibalistic character from Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter.

Comedians never did this type of outrageous mockery during the Obama years. In fact, most comedians fawned over Barack Obama and gave him an eight-year pass, even though there was plenty of material they could have used. Now that a Republican is in the Oval Office again, it is a comic open season on the presidency.

Unfortunately, comedians are not limiting their vile attacks to Trump. For example, so-called comedian Samantha Bee, host of the TBS show Full Frontal, targeted young attendees of the Conservative Political Action Conference on a recent show. In one segment, her correspondent mocked the Nazi haircuts of several of the young men participating in the conference.

The problem for Bee was that one of the victims of her mean-spirited insult was Kyle Coddington, a young man battling stage IV brain cancer. When Coddingtons sister defended her brother online, Bee apologized and made an online donation of $1,000 to an account raising funds for his cancer treatment.

Clearly a small donation and belated apology was the least that Bee could do after such a vicious attack on an unsuspecting and courageous young man. He should have been praised for attending the conference while battling cancer, not ridiculed. While Bee apologized to Coddington, she did not express any regrets for insulting the other young men who were lampooned.

In effect, her shows reporter called a bunch of young people attending a conservative conference Nazis. Their crime was to sport a closely cropped haircut, a style that has also been worn by plenty of liberal celebrities such as actor Brad Pitt and singer Macklemore.

Bees Nazi comedy is typical of what is constantly offered by untalented leftist comedians. They often use terms such as Nazi, or Fascist when referring to conservatives and they love comparing Donald Trump to Adolph Hitler or other monsters such as Hannibal Lecter. These insults only drive away millions of Americans who might otherwise watch their programs. Why would any conservative watch a program that is going to incessantly trash their President and their political movement?

It is no surprise that audiences for these late-night comedy shows today is much smaller than it was just five years ago, and less than half the audience size that watched Johnny Carson a generation ago. In Carsons last year, an average of 6.5 million viewers watched his program nightly, while an average of just 3 million people watch Colberts lame show today.

If the late-night hosts continue with this type of comedy, they will be preaching to an ever-smaller choir of liberals. Too bad liberals also operate all the other television networks. If one of these networks had any common sense, it would offer counter programming.

How about a conservative on late night television? Unquestionably, such a comedian, or even a fair one like Carson or Leno, would draw great ratings. Sadly, these network executives are more committed to their liberalism than drawing viewers or making money.

Continue reading here:

The Vast Wasteland Of Liberal Late Night Comedy - Jeff Crouere - Townhall

Spoof British political pundit Jonathan Pie, whose rant against Hillary Clintonwent viral just after the election, has done it again.

Pie, a fictional political TV reporter who is the creation of English comedian Tom Walker, is left-wing but he isnt exactly afraid to call out liberals when he thinks they deserve it.

His latest dispatch is one such occasion. Entitled The Fear of Language, Pies video takes students to task for being afraid of debate, wanting to take down statues of colonialists and putting trigger warnings on novels they dont like.

The video has been watched over 100,000 times on YouTube and got 1.9 million views on Facebook.

Pie begins his video polemic mocking the bizarre attempts made by regional authorities in Salford, the northern city where he is filming his video, to ban swearing before launching into a diatribe about liberals attitude to free speech.

Pie asks: Why are people so afraid of language?What baffles me is this fashion for stifling language and opinion comes from the left. Liberals. Students.

Students saying, You cant do this, you cant do thatall this youthful energy concentrating on stopping debates rather than winning them. No wonder being right-wing is the new RocknRoll on uni campuses. Thats how you rebel these days.

On a roll, Pie adds: Youve got students calling for statues of dead men to be torn to the ground because they were colonialists. Im not being funny but who wasnt?! Its not an honor to have a statue in your image or a building in your name 100 years after your death. Youre dead!

Its no longer an honor- its a reminder. Theyre reminders of how we got to where we are. Our history is being erased- by students. Some of them history students! Its revisionist. Its f***ing Orwellian. All for fear of causing offense.

Literature. If youre offended by To Kill a Mockingbird because it uses language of its time that is no longer acceptable, if you cant make that distinction, then youre a f***ing idiot and you have no appreciation of context and you have no place doing a f***ing literature degree.

And yet certain Unis- theyre putting trigger warnings on these novels because they may cause offense.

How many times do you hear that? This was edited, censored, banned because it may cause offense. Im sorry but no-one has a right not to be offended because offense- its entirely subjective.

Right on!

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Fictional TV Satirist Jonathan Pie Goes Viral Attacking Liberal Students' 'Orwellian' Tactics - Heat Street

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That was the conclusion of Nate Silver, purveyor of fivethirtyeight.com and perhaps Americas leading political numbers cruncher.

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Journalists should recalibrate themselves to be more skeptical of the consensus of their peers, Silver wrote in the last of his nine-part series The Real Story of 2016, which appeared Friday.

Silver said journalists rejected information that could have led them to conclude the Hillary Clinton campaign was not the slam dunk they perceived it to be. He said they got convinced by national polls that Clinton was further ahead than she was and ignored tightening polls in even those states, such as Ohio and Iowa, that had proven to be bellwethers in the past.

He called for an attitudinal adjustment in the short term and more effort to get outside the bubble going forward:

You should be looking toward how much evidence there is for a particular position as opposed to how many people hold that position: Having 20 independent pieces of evidence that mostly point in the same direction might indeed reflect a powerful consensus, while having 20 like-minded people citing the same warmed-over evidence is much less powerful. Obviously this can be taken too far and in most fields, its foolish (and annoying) to constantly doubt the market or consensus view. But in a case like politics where the conventional wisdom can congeal so quickly and yet has so often been wrong a certain amount of contrarianism can go a long way. [italics in original]

Sounding another familiar theme, Silver compared the coverage of Brexit to that of the presidential race. Like Brexit, he said, The reporting was much more certain of Clintons chances than it should have been based on the polls.

He pointed to an Oct. 17 story in The New York Times which portrayed the race as basically over. The only question was whether Clinton should run up the score in the Electoral College or help down-ballot candidates.

He also pointed back to June, when Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics wrote a piece warning:

Commentary on the 2016 election has broken down somewhat because both the online right and on line left opposed the Trump candidacy. Because of this, we analysts find ourselves in something of an echo chamber, which makes us more susceptible to bad arguments, and more likely to overlook good ones that point in an intellectually uncomfortable direction.

Trendes piece said in the early days of blogging, people saw the Internet as self-correcting. Bad arguments would be trumped by better arguments, moving all closer to the truth. When there are no arguments being made on one side, it becomes easier to assume the other side is right.

In the Brexit vote, Trende wrote, commentators acknowledged the race was close but they never entertained the idea it might prevail. The idea, they believed, was simply too bold, too extreme, too intemperate a massive outbreak of unthinkability bias, he wrote.

Any challenge to the inevitability of Brexit being defeated was met with In referenda, undecided voters tend to break for the status quo.

But, as was the case with Trump, it wasnt clear what side the status quo was on. Some saw Brexit as a way to keep the UK as it always had been. In the United States, this sentiment was embodied in four words: Make America Great Again.

Trende recalled a time in early fall when Clinton was up 12 points in an ABC News/Washington Post poll. Writers focused on this poll but overlooked that Clinton led by just five an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken at the same time or that Clinton led in Florida by just 3.4 points, Ohio by 2.7, and Pennsylvania by 0.5.

Silver said both the Brexit and presidential votes split along class, education, and regional lines, and the Northeast Corridor press, which dominated the national discussion, did not because it could not pay attention to signals its narrative may have been missing the mark.

He talked about James Surowieckis book The Wisdom of Crowds, and the four conditions Surowiecki says have to be present for analysts to make good predictions.

They must have diversity of opinion their own private information. They must be able to form opinions independent of those around them. They must have the ability to specialize and draw on local knowledge. And they must have a way to turn those private judgments into a collective decision.

The media of 2016 had only the fourth of those, Silver argued. They could share opinions, but the only information they were getting was from others in their echo chamber. They did not or could not form independent opinions, and they had no local knowledge to draw on.

The less-educated formed the bulk of the Trump coalition, and many were reflexively if not dogmatically conservative. Meanwhile reporters increasingly are highly educated. Today, 92 percent of journalists have college degrees. Thats up from 70 percent in 1982 and 58 percent in 1971, Silver said. And just seven percent identify as Republicans.

This insularity caused some themes to rise in coverage and others to disappear, and it shaped the way issues were framed, Silver said. With so much validating opinion in circulation, reporters got sloppy and granted anonymity to too many sources and were unwilling to engage with data journalists.

Events such as conventions and debates literally gather thousands of journalists together in the same room, he wrote. Attend one of these events, and you can almost smell the conventional wisdom being manufactured in real time.

It was conventional all right. But it wasnt wisdom.

Originally posted here:

Nate Silver: 'There Really Was a Liberal Media Bubble' - Breitbart News